About google (and facebook Etc). This is a few pages late but I think worth saying. If you value your privacy, Watch the documentary "Terms and Conditions May Apply" (on net flicks ) and then tell met those sites are "free". The things you post will be there forever, and available to anyone who can pay for it.
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Relax.
EMI radiation is usually a humming sound, at least when it's emitted from the transformer.
Power supply, well, if I run my portable amplifier via battery or connected to my noisy 230 V AC, not once have I heard anything I'd call a sound quality difference.
A little noise, yeah.
RFI, same story, you can hear faint radio channels, nothing to do with sound quality.
"esoteric chip level stuff"
"specific D/A converters for these sound differences"
That is where the killer difference is, imv.
The D/A chip and op-amp chips impart what I'd call vivid sound quality differences.
After a while, if you switch the chips back and forth all night, which some us consider "fun", the differences are clear.
I'd put the op-amp chip in first place and D/A chip in close second, after that everything else.
If you look up "Lampizator", someone that has modified dozens of CD players, you'll find he arrives at similar conclusions to these.
There are always variables at play, but these are my 100% honest comments, just sharing my experience with what you refer to as esoteric.
At first, when I was new to high-end I looked exclusively at the transducers and thought whatever about amplifiers.
Any vintage amplifier or stereo receiver will do the trick, connected to a computer sound-card, thought I.
Now, the DAC, amplifier and portable media player are basically the framework of everything to me, as far as the transducer is decently high level and most vital of all transparent.
I consider let's say DAC to DAC differences as fun, I admire them like art, it's not really for the music, that's like the canvas, pretty much!
If someone thinks I've "lost it", they can say that, this is fun and it's real, except I need to prove that esoteric chips like OPA627 are real, that's all.
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Sorry, you can't relax, IME. EMI, PS's are where the real action is in terms of subtle degradation - you don't hear obvious artifacts, but the overall quality is degraded - usually very noticeable in the treble area. Take cymbals, add poor engineering, and you get kitchen saucepans being scratched, as a vague imitation of the real thing.
Most of the effect is to deaden, flatten the sound, takes all the life and sparkle out of the playback - the sort of thing that makes many audiophiles, gasping for relief, run to vinyl ...
.At a high end show about a decade ago they played, on a SOTA setup, a very well regarded, Vivaldi Four Seasons CD which I have played many times on my tweaked gear, - dead, dead, dead, instantly boring, it was pathetic; I was counting down the seconds before they put it out of its misery
.Throwing money, and fancy technology at gear won't improve things unless you really understand where the problems are ...
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At least you're honest, unlike many others, about playing distortion musical chairs - I prefer to reach deep inside each recording, and hear what's in there, in terms of a musical happening - that's what gives me the satisfaction ...
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fas42 said:
When I've heard obvious EMI or RFI, the humming sound or radio sound, the quality didn't seem affected, that's just my very limited experience of it.
I agree with what you're saying about the quality though, we don't hear lesser or higher oversampling in any kind of noise-like sense.
Likewise, most people are not aware of very high lens distortion in a Nikon or Canon lens.
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The Four Seasons is a nice example actually.
My best recording quality is I think Amandine Beyer, but I really don't like her playing style.
I collected it just to hear the various playing styles, Kyung-Wha Chung I like a lot! Even if the recording quality is average.
For music notes and playing style, pretty much any basic earphone is fine.
For listening to fine instrument detail, I'd use my best transducer for violin. Which, I heard in a store and don't own yet!
For listening to DAC and amplifier differences, the playing style and recording quality is not even valid at all.
However the transparency and perhaps chameleon-like nature of the transducer is paramount.
My best recording quality is I think Amandine Beyer, but I really don't like her playing style.
I collected it just to hear the various playing styles, Kyung-Wha Chung I like a lot! Even if the recording quality is average.
For music notes and playing style, pretty much any basic earphone is fine.
For listening to fine instrument detail, I'd use my best transducer for violin. Which, I heard in a store and don't own yet!
For listening to DAC and amplifier differences, the playing style and recording quality is not even valid at all.
However the transparency and perhaps chameleon-like nature of the transducer is paramount.
That's the one by BIS, Drottingham Ensemble - takes quite a bit to kill the quality of that, but the "high end" system I heard did a good job on it ...
Chamber music puts big demands on the reproduction chain, especially if digital - it's "the transparency and perhaps chameleon-like nature" of the system, as a single entity, that makes every chamber recording "work", IME ...
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Sure did. We have a tiny dup house over in our Greensboro office. The big orders we would send your way. I used to have price lists, samples and that sort of thing. Never got to visit the plant, tho. Too bad.
There's no free lunch, no matter how far up the chain you go. I've been foolin' with the Yamaha arranger keyboard, top of the line in its day, where the "tracks", the sounds are sourced from solid state memory - no moving parts, apart from the speaker cones!
Got hold of a 52,000 file MIDI library,
; driving the beast with the "decent", , pure acoustic piano arrangements I've found so far - mighty convincing, could easily fool someone in passing ... but, same old problems - electrical interference, from outside the unit, markedly disturbs the playback quality; very obvious of course with piano sound ...In other words, don't assume that just because you've solved issues arising from mechanical elements that there isn't more to do ...
I find 50, 60, 100 or 120hz EMI hum to be completely benign regarding impact on sound quality
However, high frequency hash either conducted or radiated causes a big problem for natural reproduction.
I will check out her Vivaldi . . . did you hear her Mendelssohn's violin concerto ? Similar story, very well played, recording average.
The Great Violin Concertos - Kyung Wha Chung: Amazon.co.uk: Music
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Sometimes sticking with Windows XP is the most sane option. despite what other people say about how we are being old and crotchety and won't move on with innovation. They will always say that because they are idiots, they have no sense of reality whatsoever and do nothing but live for consumerism. They're nothing but slaves to other peoples marketing. I say to people like that "I'm not the one getting screwed over every few years on forced upgrades to an operating system that never has and will never reach perfection."
The only problem is is that you now have to stockpile spare parts inorder to keep the hardware operating, I own two Pentium 4 Soc 478 systems for example aswell as 2x LGA1155 systems and the latter are already in Rackmount cases, one of the P4 systems will be going into a Rackmount case.
And a lot of great games came out in the 90s and 00s, which just wont run on 7.
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One cause is that the discussion wavers from CD sound of the medium, to CD sound as the (recording) quality of individual releases and back and forth. That precludes any sensible exchange as any report of good CD sound (medium) can be countered with 'I have this CD from xyz and it sounds horrible'. And vice versa.
Jan
A simple case in point: Vista can't be told to send MIDI to a USB port, because Microsoft wasn't interested in continuing to support it - a kludge devised by an exasperated user is required, to do what could be trivially selected in XP ...
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Don't worry it just gets far worse with Windows 8.x.
The only option is not to play.
It is the same with cars, a car from the 1980s or early 90s can last you for 40 years or more.
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Jan,
Your correct in that people keep mixing in program material with the electrical circuit differences when discussing CD players. I have read some of the things that Abraxalito has been doing with different filtering and DAC types and it is just to far into the technical for me to truly understand and that is only concerning the D/A conversion step. There are just so many interactions to understand from each and every stage from power supply isolation, laser optics and all the rest of the circuitry.
I am just glad that I have kept some older PC computers for those occasions when I need to use either old programming or legacy devices. Believe me I looked at virtual machines and everything else I could think of and things just aren't compatible between generations. I did do all the critical updates to XP to bring it up to the latest state possible but in reality I won't really need to have that computer go on line for much at all, the absolute minimum exposure to a hack. And yes I am running security software on it anyway, just not Microsoft security!
Your correct in that people keep mixing in program material with the electrical circuit differences when discussing CD players. I have read some of the things that Abraxalito has been doing with different filtering and DAC types and it is just to far into the technical for me to truly understand and that is only concerning the D/A conversion step. There are just so many interactions to understand from each and every stage from power supply isolation, laser optics and all the rest of the circuitry.
I am just glad that I have kept some older PC computers for those occasions when I need to use either old programming or legacy devices. Believe me I looked at virtual machines and everything else I could think of and things just aren't compatible between generations. I did do all the critical updates to XP to bring it up to the latest state possible but in reality I won't really need to have that computer go on line for much at all, the absolute minimum exposure to a hack. And yes I am running security software on it anyway, just not Microsoft security!
I have two XP desktops and 1 laptop that remain stable. To be honest the absolutely most up to date W7 one they make me use at work is not noticably any faster for my general use. The desktops are so old the back up battery needed replacement.
Scott,
Thanks for mentioning the back up battery, I didn't even think about it! Probably over 10 years old at least on two computers I should check. The only thing I can honestly say I like better about Win7 is how it loads devices and drivers so easily on current products. You still have some problems with some older legacy devices like an old sound card but you can get them to work with some effort. I haven't compared speed with my CAD software but imagine it with newer multi-threading and cores is much faster, I know it is when doing rendering, there is no comparison in those speeds.
Thanks for mentioning the back up battery, I didn't even think about it! Probably over 10 years old at least on two computers I should check. The only thing I can honestly say I like better about Win7 is how it loads devices and drivers so easily on current products. You still have some problems with some older legacy devices like an old sound card but you can get them to work with some effort. I haven't compared speed with my CAD software but imagine it with newer multi-threading and cores is much faster, I know it is when doing rendering, there is no comparison in those speeds.
The machine becomes very unstable without knowing the time and no updates can be installed, luckily I caught it they both needed an entire evening of 150 updates.
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