90 ANDROID ADVISOR • ISSUE 88BUYING GUIDE
athigherfrequenciesplayedatlower
volume–werelost.In LedZeppelin’s
StairwaytoHeaven,theprocessing
muteddetailsin thefantasticacoustic
guitartrack– characteristicssuchas
fingersslidingon the guitar neck, and
thereverbthathangsoverheadwere
diminishedin themix,lesseningthe
beautifuldepthofthesoundscape.
In classicjazztrackslikeSoWhat,
fromMilesDavis,I noticedsmalldetails
aroundthe finger work on the upright
basswerelesspresent,andthehigh
transientsfromthehornsanddrummer’s
hi-hat brushes were slightly compressed.
On the flip side, vocal tracks were far
more present in the mix, not so much
as to enable a depth separation from
the instrumentation, but more like
a mix of EQ boosting and stronger
compression. Disabling DSEE Extreme
brought back most of the fine details
in instrumentation, as well some of the
dynamic range, but it sat the vocals
back down into the mix. Compared to
DSEE HX on the XM3, DSEE Extreme
on the XM4 felt like the signal was
being normalized for more even
instrumentation, while simultaneously
emphasizing the vocal tracks.
This heavy-handed processing
was revealed even more with heavily
compressed tracks from albums like
Metallica’s infamous Death Magnetic.Inthese scenarios, the vocals again
took centre stage, while the mid- to
low-end was pulled back along with
cleanhighsignals.Thefullmixwas
morecompressed and normalized
than with DSEE Extreme disabled, and
it didn’tdoanyfavourstoaggressive
musiclike metal.
Sony’s documentation states that
DSEE Extreme “upscales compressed
digital music files” and “dynamically
recognizes instrumentation, musical
genres” with the goal of trying to
“resort the high-range sound lost in
compression”. So, my next thought
was to listen to tracks that were poorly
recordedandmixedtoseeif that’s
wherethe processing truly shines. I
loaded up some older punk recordings,
such as In My Eyes, by Minor Threat,
and set YouTube Music to its lowest
bandwidth consumption/lowest audio
quality setting.
I immediately detected most of the
same compression tendencies. While
I did notice a bit of smoothing of the
lower bit depth with DSEE Extreme
enabled in these instances, which
provided a cleaner mix with less noise,
it wasn’t enough for me to overlook the
rest of the processing taking place.
After all my critical listening tests, my
assumption is that DSEE Extreme acts
as a more subtle and accurate normalize