AES Headphone Technology Conference: Spatial Audio | InnerFidelity
Might raise a chuckle. Sounds like a fascinating conference and full of heresy for some. Interesting to see what comes out of it in terms of products in a few years time.
Might raise a chuckle. Sounds like a fascinating conference and full of heresy for some. Interesting to see what comes out of it in terms of products in a few years time.
I talked to the principle designer at Benchmark when I wanted to know why all my CD's sounded so compressed or lacking sufficient dynamic range. As I recall.... (?)....
It boiled down to these things which could make a difference -- jitter and analog differences. I might add --- and the power supplies. Maybe filtering changes as well.
A DAC2 redesign included the volume/level control and how it was implemented in DAC2.
I also got the one without the HPA included.
THx-RNMarsh
It boiled down to these things which could make a difference -- jitter and analog differences. I might add --- and the power supplies. Maybe filtering changes as well.
A DAC2 redesign included the volume/level control and how it was implemented in DAC2.
I also got the one without the HPA included.
THx-RNMarsh
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yes. you are correct wrt the definition... I was not. but I agree with your comment.
I was also considering trying out one like this, since it supports SPDIF and opto...
192K24BIT AK4118 AK4490 Xmos OPA2134 USB Decoder DAC Coaxial Fibers Power Supply | eBay
But it remains to be seen if it actually sounds any good in practice.
The SMSL M8 has a similar if not identical chipset and frankly does not sound good with 44.1 input.
Given a break where I have some time I'll run some basic tests on it to see if it is performing to spec at minimum...
Now I think we should all keep this in mind: IF you were back 15 years ago and having this same conversation, people would be saying or taking positions that are just about the same as today (in this case about DACs). But, who among you would gladly use a 15 year old DAC today (even if given it)? How about a 10 year old DAC?
Yet the same sort of things were said THEN about their being "transparent" and having outstanding specs... yes?
_-_-
Yes, it is subtle. But a positive step forward IMO. And my compressed sound was still there.
Except, NOW the sound isnt compressed any more with the change to the new speaker/amps.
Who would have thunk?
THx-RNMarsh
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How about measurements for the first 250 ms? Interestingly, it appears that people who claimed to hear a difference did in fact hear something that was measurable. But two problems: (1) what people perceived psycho-acoustically was not a good clue as to what in the equipment performance was causing them to notice some difference, and (2) it apparently was not obvious to people who measure equipment performance to correctly see the need to measure what happens in the first 250 as something possibly important to know about for how listeners may want to use the product.
More generally, it seems not unlikely there are other things similar to this that have not yet been discovered or the effects of which are not well understood. My guess would be that over time we will learn more about how to measure some of the other stuff that some people report hearing. Not everything of course, some of it is surely imagined.
But already we have people here who report being able to hear difference between DACs with very good specs. I don't think they are all crazy. For people who don't hear a difference, its human nature for it to be hard to believe something you can't see or hear for yourself. On the other hand, also because of human nature, its easy to jump to a conclusion that other people are imagining things. All the more so if we are overconfident that science has already discovered all the answers and there is nothing more to learn.
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I just got this AK4497 DAC Decoder Board Excluding AK4497 Chip and Xmos U8 Daughter Card | eBay and AKM is sending me the AK4497's for it. I needed a test DAC on my bench with both USB and SPDIF inputs plus sample rate indications. I should have it running shortly after I get the chips I hope.
The analog sections on all of these are data sheet copies and do have real limitations. I will be changing to an LC filter that works much better (no HF at the opamp input) soon.
The SMSL M8 is an ESS device with a very different chipset. Similar but not the same. The ESS also measures very well. However getting it operating well is not easy. Oppo had to get ESS to redesign the DAC board to get it up to spec. The ESS really needs superlative RF design plus a lot that is not on the datasheet.
For reasons I do not understand I do not like the sound from the ESS DAC's I have used, but that was sighted. . .
Markw4 --- Makes a lot of sense to me. The transients of snare and stick action (clickity clack) and cymbals on this tune is amazingly clear and dynamic now....
Shake Your Hips (Live) by Peter Green Splinter Group
I should check how fast/quick and clean its impulse response is with a very good microphone system.
-RNM
Shake Your Hips (Live) by Peter Green Splinter Group
I should check how fast/quick and clean its impulse response is with a very good microphone system.
-RNM
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Tantalizing. . first 250 mS of what? The data stream starting? A sample rate change? Sound after all zeros/digital silence? A transient? I'm ready to look carefully for whatever.
There have also been claims that conventional testing hides things through averaging etc. All interesting to explore but searching for something where there is nothing can be really hard.
Actually, it is kind of both ways. Is is subtle and you need to care to learn to hear it, in the beginning. But once learned, it can be very hard to ignore.
Maybe a visual analogy would help some. Very young children learn to recognize subtle differences in people faces that distinguish one person from another. They are not born with the ability. But they only learn to recognize the subtle differences in faces for races of people they are around at a very early stage of life. This is why some people will say that people of other races all tend to look alike. The subtleties seem insignificant, or like there is nothing even there to notice. And if you tried to describe someone's face to, say, a police sketch artist or something like that, you would be able to describe more details if the person was of a race you grew up with.
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The first 250mS of the clock settling time when the digital source is switched. Clock settling can cause brief pitch shifts that are perceived as differences in input source brightness.
If someone says one source sounds brighter than the other and you wanted to check that with a measurement, you might think of looking at harmonic distortion, or maybe frequency response. You might not think of measuring clock settling time, and thus you might not correctly measure what is causing the listener to report hearing some difference. In that case, you might conclude that the listener was just imaging something with no physical cause arising from the equipment. If so, you would be wrong (not you personally, but whoever it might be in a given situation). But, you might feel highly confident you are right anyway. Part of human nature, that.
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Because it causes jitter by modulating the switching threshold. However pretty simple to deal with. The low frequency jitter claimed to be significant is orders of magnitude lower than any wow or flutter in an analog system. But no complaints about wow with analog stuff. Maybe we should add wow to digital to mask the "bad" stuff? Capture the wow and flutter of different tape recorders to get the analog back in digital?
That would make sense in an SPDIF world with changing data sources. USB async DAC's should be pretty immune since the clocks are fixed and the system is locked to them. However A/B'ing USB DACs really means stopping or rebooting the host processor.
Simple fix- add 250 mS of digital silence to the beginning of any tracks used for comparison testing?
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