which reproduces the best music?: Multibit converters, PDM, or MASH
allow me to preface this thread by saying that i am sooo unknowledgabe about this topic. but I had a conversation w/a friend and his perspective was that the pioneer and new Kenwood HU's are superior to Alpine b/c of their`high bit converters. now i noticed that the MASH converters are 3.5 bits and that my alpine (if i'm not mistaken) is also a 3.5 bit converter (is it MASH). i have always appreciated the sq of alpine units and their high s/n. further, i have read that there are all sorts of inefficiencies and inadequacies of multibit converters (linearity, gain error, slew-rate distortion, and zero-crossing distortion), hence the production of MASH and PDM. and that the accuracy of the converter, not the quantity, matters most. i also read the most significant factor is the accuracy in the MSB bit. whatever IT is.
So, if high bit conveters with all of these error and distortion types introduce obvious harmonic distortion and group delay, how are they superior? and if not, which type provides superior signal stability, imaging, and staging?
I haven't heard enough of the high-bit stereos to tell which sounds best. With this in mind, the only way to really tell is to actually listen to all of them.
If I did have to come to a conclusion, I would say that more bits doesn't necessarily equal better sound(which is probably what you're implying). I would guess that if you pay more, you will receive better error correction whatever the amount of bits is.