44,100

44,100 cycles per second must not be enough. That's how many pieces engineers decided to break sound into, when the cd was invented. Sound was sampled 44,100 times per second and a number represents the wave form at each moment in time. Seems like a lot, and since people supposedly can only hear tones up to around 20,000 cycles per second, doubling that seemed safe. Surely that was enough to represent sound - music - completely. Nothing would be missing. Even though the waveform was broken into pieces they would be so small, almost infinitesimally small, that nobody would be able to tell the difference.

But they were wrong. 44,100 is pretty good. But it turns out that it's not just that people can't hear above 20,000 cycles per second. And this is my own conjecture: People are sensitive to more than just the tone itself. They sense how the tone is created. Something in the person can tell if something is continuous, like analog sound - never digitized or "broken into pieces", or the digitized sound we have gotten use to.  

That's why the DirectStream DAC sounds like real music. The software / hardware solution promotes 44,100 and every other sample rate to 10 times the DSD sample rate. In doing so it "fills in the blanks", that is, (I assume, I don't actually know this as fact) it mathematically figures what the intermediate steps would be if the music was sampled at this much higher rate. The resulting set of bits is then used to reconstruct the analog waveform that the music must have had originally. That's why the sound coming out of this DAC is so much more realistic and sounds more like real music. The missing bits are filled in at such a high rate that when the bit representation is converted to analog there's no "jumpiness". The human ear and body (for we do listen with our bodies, too) is satisfied that the sound is real. The engineers of 44,100 had the right idea. They just didn't go far enough. What is amazing is that we can take the cd format and reconstruct to a much higher degree what the original sound must have been.