Perhaps a better analogy is that some of us like added sugar in their coffee/tea - but we don't necessarily like additional sugar in all our drinks.
Even with Jimi Hendrix, I would at some point get tired of everything sounding like Jimi Hendrix playing through a Marshall stack
I'm worst tha you : I will say some bad sugar merchants want you eat a 20 g sugar colored with a tear of coffe
But hey the sugar is pure, so white like the industrial salt
... It should make your black coffee whiter !Oap sugar vs black cofee Hypex.... bah both have taste...so are colored !
Damned, this afternoon, I change my two speakers for two bottle of Volvic Water... in plastic! burk it's coloring the water !
So are you saying my (personal) opinion is wrong?
One can claim that an opinion is wrong.
It's interesting and even productive.
To criticize the way someone amuses him self, is insulting.
Come on, you now what I mean.
We don't really disagree.
Sure - was just taking a cheap crap shot at the eternal subjectivist "are you saying that what I hear / think is wrong?" argument.
Hahaha, I will choose the 2005 Mississipi Niagara or maybe the Château La Pompe !
ALthough japoneses can't be beaten with - 5000 pure water extracted from the deep ocean.... they sell in supermarket (but always in bad plastic bottles for most of the brands)
The advantage of two bottle of water instead the speaker is they really dissapear ! You don't see it anymore as if it was whiskey bottles !
(PS : but as some think water has a memory, so I'm not sure what is drinken anymore with all those fisches making incredible things in the ocean ! )
ALthough japoneses can't be beaten with - 5000 pure water extracted from the deep ocean.... they sell in supermarket (but always in bad plastic bottles for most of the brands)
The advantage of two bottle of water instead the speaker is they really dissapear ! You don't see it anymore as if it was whiskey bottles !
(PS : but as some think water has a memory, so I'm not sure what is drinken anymore with all those fisches making incredible things in the ocean ! )
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So if you like to make a change in your system you pay 300€? And if that doesn't work another 300?
Isn't it cheaper to change opamps?
Nord offers the standard hypex buffer in an amp with better price than the nc400 package from hypex. If you want to play, you can buy the nord buffer and change opamps. You buy the flexibility. IF you want it. I think Nords are better deal than nc400. And with more alternatives
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I've found that the NC400 has given me the chance to make something.. by virtue of it's click-together nature!
It's an entry into DIY for me, a chance to make something I actually want rather than make something I don't want (e.g. a substandard but easy to construct amp) in order just to learn to make something I might want 10 years down the line. Life's short.
What is so special about this thread that it must be kept going at all costs? DO you have emotional attachment to it?
Let it go, allow it to grow and die organically.
NC500 as a board that isn't available to anyone doesn't seem to fit here. Even if I wanted one, I'd have to buy an already built amp. A thread about modifying a commercial amp should have it's own thread else how will anyone find it hidden away in a thread about something else?
What's all this talk of DACs becoming obscelete? My CDs are all still 44.1/16 and I've not been hearing DACs getting that much better year on year.. They may sound different but not better.
Only thing I have noticed is that a £200 DAC can sound as good as one that was £4k 10 years before AND play higher res and have modern inputs like USB.
I know it's a hobby and so a lot of this changing is for fun but I think people are probably fooling themselves to think they are necesarily improving things.
I kind of thought that DIY was about stepping OFF the consumerism merry-go-round?
Only thing I have noticed is that a £200 DAC can sound as good as one that was £4k 10 years before AND play higher res and have modern inputs like USB.
I know it's a hobby and so a lot of this changing is for fun but I think people are probably fooling themselves to think they are necesarily improving things.
I kind of thought that DIY was about stepping OFF the consumerism merry-go-round?
I think that is precisely the point. DACs haven't gotten significantly better, they just spout a gazillion useless formats (quad-rate DSD or 384/24 PCM anyone?). The real change is that they have become very affordable, and pretty much commodity products.
A 10-year-old DAC can still be great, as long as you don't need it to do the latest useless-format-of-the-month (seems MQA is the latest), but very decent DACs are now so cheap it doesn't really matter.
As we talk about versatility upon a neutral hardware, is there a programmable way to setup the "Q" factor of such amp ?
I explain myself : for my taste some amps are too damped with a bad decay of the notes, not like if the amp lacks of energy but the opposite (to ilustrate). Fo instance some may find the NC400 too damped and maybe it's also the origin of the beloved wodoo of these expensive buffer (and I really don't know why an oap and a riduculous simple buffer board should cost the same price than a Soekris DAC... just for the reflexion of some people who mix DIY and DIYM...where the M is money). If myself I wanted to color on a nice way I wil use input tube if I had to spend 300 euros for a complete input buffer or simply don't buy Hypex but a transitors Class A amps as a Hiraga which is stable also on complex loads and low impedance speaker curves !
sort of programmable damping factor like an attenuation volume plot ? Possible by playing with adding an amont of resistiv (artificial) load or impedance curve for instance ? Just a two cents, as I have not the technical background...
I explain myself : for my taste some amps are too damped with a bad decay of the notes, not like if the amp lacks of energy but the opposite (to ilustrate). Fo instance some may find the NC400 too damped and maybe it's also the origin of the beloved wodoo of these expensive buffer (and I really don't know why an oap and a riduculous simple buffer board should cost the same price than a Soekris DAC... just for the reflexion of some people who mix DIY and DIYM...where the M is money). If myself I wanted to color on a nice way I wil use input tube if I had to spend 300 euros for a complete input buffer or simply don't buy Hypex but a transitors Class A amps as a Hiraga which is stable also on complex loads and low impedance speaker curves !
sort of programmable damping factor like an attenuation volume plot ? Possible by playing with adding an amont of resistiv (artificial) load or impedance curve for instance ? Just a two cents, as I have not the technical background...
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I agree with the latter but I do want DSD256 and 352.4/24
I want the high PCMs so we can finally use filters that don't ruin impulse response at the A/D conversion end (and to a lesser extent, D/A). Oversampling was supposed to be a clever work around to the brickwall anti-alias filters but oddly now that tech has improved such that the work around is no longer needed we have many telling us that the high rates are pointless because we have oversampling! Feels like some kind of Catch 22 irony going on there.. I guess people don't like change and quickly get used to the status quo.
Same to an extent with DSD but with different format problems/solutions.
Always good to have a couple of different approaches to formats with similar data rates.
Sadly consumers don't really want it so for me it's more about working towards making my own field and musical recordings in the high rates and having ability to play back with consumer gear too.
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Not "programmable" as in adjustable without changing any hardware, but just insert a resistor in series with the speaker output.
I think "impulse response" is one of those fluffy things that people use to justify all kinds of silliness. But in any case, once you have done the A/D conversion, you can easily process the material to produce a good result within the constraints of Nyquist-Shannon.
No, the reason we don't need high sample rates is the way the human ear works.
Im not sure that applies to ncore - someone may help out my understanding.
As I basically understand it, the output impedance of the nc400 is very low and also the feedback circuit includes the speaker's impedance as part of it too.
With the Ncore's clever feedback implementation, damping factor must effectively be automaticly adjusting if not by definition (not specifically changing damping factor numerically) but by effect i.e. the result is the same as if it did.
Am I right anyone?
Which people? If you mean pro-industry convertor manufacturers then they're not so fluffy about it.
You CAN process the material to produce a good result.. but the only way to process the audio properly to compensate for the anti-alias filter used is to know exactly the characteristics of the filter used in the A/D process. As you can imagine, every manufacturer will use different filtering techniques and slopes and will be unique. So you'd need to know precisely what filter it was to compensate for it..
.. and that is exactly what MQA aims to do. The algo on the encoding side tries to work out the specific A/D convertor used (how they do this is proprietary Meridian tech), look up the characteristics in a large compiled database and then use compensating DSP as part of the MQA encoding process.
And exactly what you just proposed.. but definately not easy.
It is certainly true to say that oversampling was a technique devised in order to push the cut-off higher for the anti-alias filters in A/D conversion. They had to do that because the convertors themselves could not run at high enough native sample rates to allow them to do it otherwise. Now that we DO have that tech, we can simply use those higher sample rates from the outset and get away with non-nyquist filter slopes without it effecting the audio band and eliminate ringing from the filter too.
High sample rate use is nothing to do with playing higher frequencies or any of the usual crap consumers go on about. It's about anti-alias filter ringing and impulse response of the filtered input signal.
At the consumer side of things and D/A conversion - what is the point in changing format to something like 44.1/16 when the tech is there to play it straight as the masterfile? It's a completely unnecessary step. Let everyone get 352.8 capable dacs and just give them the masterfile. And again, the low pass filter for the D/A can be a non-nyquist reconstruction filter, be much more shallow and therefore introduce much less ringing whilst still not effecting the proper reconstruction in the audio band.
Anyway I'm guessing that's off topic for this thread
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