DSEE: Digital Sound Enhancement Engine

Fedex called the other day and told me that their driver had come by the studio three times trying to deliver a couple of boxes. The customer service representative told me that if I wanted these items, I would have to drive to the Fedex office in Marina del Rey to pick them up or they would be sent back.

Apparently, the deliveries were unsuccessful because over the holidays Fedex uses drivers that are not familiar with the usual routes and they were knocking on the wrong door here at the building. Somehow that was my fault…they weren’t going to bring the packages to me.

So yesterday I picked up two of the new Sony HAP-S1 “HD Audio Player System” units from Fedex. Sony sent these to me to use at the upcoming 2014 International CES show. There will also be a new Vaio laptop, a couple of set of headphones and a video monitor. I’m also planning to bring my trusty Oppo Digital BDP-95, Benchmark DAC2 and 32″ video screen to show off some of my content. It’s going to be a crowded 6-foot draped banquet table in the Bellini room of the Venetian.

As I was unpacking the Sony HAP-S1, I noticed the DSEE logo on the top…along with the DSD logo, an HDD (Hard Disc Drive) logo and WiFI Certified logo. I’ve read about their “Digital Sound Enhancement Engine” previously buy hadn’t yet had a chance to experience it. So I spent a couple of hours yesterday setting up the unit and exploring its features.

According to the Sony-Asia website, DSEE “restores sounds back to original”. Their marketing blurb states:

“Listen to the music like it was meant to be. Degraded sounds of compressed audio is now improved and the high frequency range restored, reproducing natural, high quality sounds as close to the original source as can be.

Digital Sound Enhancement Engine (DSEE) is Sony’s originally developed audio bandwidth enhancement technology. When original music source is compressed with MP3 (or AAC/WMA), high frequency part of music source will be lost. The technology of DSEE enables to restore high frequency part and reproduces high quality sound which is close to the original CD sound source.”

Then there’s an illustration that shows the process:

Figure 1 – Sony’s DSEE processing, which restores high frequency content back to a compressed soundfile.

Even with the awkward wording and grammar, the basic concept behind DSEE is pretty clear. If you rip a compact disc into a compressed format such as MP3 or purchase a compress file from iTunes, the sound is “degraded”. The amount of the loss is dependent on the quality of the compressor, the bandwidth used and the quality of the source. The folks at Sony make the claim that “high frequency part is lost due to compression”. The DSEE process then reproduces “high sound quality close to the original CD sound quality”. They do this by putting back the high frequencies that were lost in the compression process.

It sounds reasonable doesn’t it? Except data compression algorithms do much more than just erode the high frequencies of an original recording…the entire audio band is affected and simply synthesizing a single octave or so back into the file doesn’t bring the fidelity of the original recording back. Data compression schemes like MP3 are called “lossy” because they throw away a substantial amount of musical data. Once it’s gone, it’s gone and DSEE is not going to get it back.

Tomorrow, I’ll explain further what happens when data compression is applied to an uncompressed audio file and show you some spectragrams of the original, MP3 version and the restored DSEE processed file. See you then.