https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reprod...F8&qid=1470457500&sr=8-1&keywords=floyd+toole
Might be a good start? Less than the purchase price of papers behind paywalls.
Hope that helps.
I'm a big fan of Pareto. Anyhow, yes, but the precision and reliability of even trained listeners is such that audible changes tend to be well within the range of the sensitivity of our frequency response, level, and distortion. The better question is, can we find better edge cases that would highlight something audibly important and, thus, build a set of synthetic tests that can identify it.
It ain't easy nor cheap. A great room helps. All the things I tried and tested and measured over the years brings me to this point. Better late than never, though.
THx-RNMarsh
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I picked my 70 USD Chinese DAC Xmos U8 AK4490 Audio HiFi Top Asynchronous USB Decoding DAC with Headphone | eBay because folks on this site had measured it for use as a tone generator for audio measurements and found it to be having very low THD. I bought one and, little surprise, it even plays music well. So do my EMU0404, my EMU1616m and my Yamaha combitron. I can measure differences between all four, but if any of them has its own audio signature, it has escaped me up till now. None of them produce recognizable audible artifacts.
As to the opamps you mentioned, I never worked with them, but my experience is that opamps with modern specs, ranging from 5532/4's to 4592's, 134's included, have there specific uses because of one thing or another, but if applied well, they are all transparent. With the 5532/4's still being often king of the hill because in real life applications they may measure better than the more recent Uber-opamps.
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If you're being asked questions that are deliberately structured to be dishonest, your best response is no response. If people are too lazy to do a little bit of literature searching, your best response is no response. If people are repetitively asking questions that they've had answers to before, multiple times, your best response is no response.
A public service in the interest of energy conservation.
A public service in the interest of energy conservation.
I think I'm glad I never met one of those, even while working in the US. There was something called "Cheese Whizz" - some sort of aerosol "cheese" iirc that I suspect of being totally plastic, but I guess not inorganic......
Just a heads up, I found this Android freeware - Soundwire and the matching server application - Soundwire Server.
This pair of softwares enables streaming of audio from PC to Android phone (tablet) via your local WiFi network using your standard/favorite PC player software.
It's free, and easy to setup.
Dan.
This pair of softwares enables streaming of audio from PC to Android phone (tablet) via your local WiFi network using your standard/favorite PC player software.
It's free, and easy to setup.
Dan.
Long long ago (to you) I would go into a Disco to tune things up. This would involve replacing styli, adjusting turntable tracking, resetting knobs the DJ found, all told about twenty adjustments. Now while I did this there would be at least a bar tender and sometimes a DJ or manager present. What I would often hear from them was that they did not hear any changes from the individual adjustments but did notice a large improvement from before to after.
Now my last venture had a bunch of golden eared former roadies and studio guys listen to the results. Now in my experience studio guys really note frequency response and roadies tend to like a bass and treble bump. Neither really seem to notice speech intelligibilty. The new techniques I used did not really measure better with a Speech Transmission Index meter, but all perceived a significant increase in clarity compared to the existing parts of the old system. Now I know what tricks I used to improve performance and suspect I know what to measure to see the difference. Some of the changes were observed and measured in the shop. In the shop things like frequency response and distortion were not affected.
So a valid issue is not what needs to be addressed in large scale systems, but when scaled down, when do these issues stop bringing perceptable.
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Of course the problem with that intelligibility is that full range systems are often worse at this. TV is generally good despite no bass and little treble.
No.
That's a projection of what you are thinking.
Useful means nothing about my personal preferences, it's like doing a measurement and you get only noise back = not useful. Doesn't apply, etc.
Lots of wasted keystrokes saying anything other than a direct answer.
SY seems to think that he or others have discussed and come up with the answers/solutions to this sort of question already. I'm unaware of it, so why not point to it?
One fellow has just said that he personally believes that he can detect no sonic difference/sonic signature difference between several modern DACs. I'm ok with this being his personal experience. Any one else brave enough to say??
Apparently he also feels that the 5532/4 are in some cases better than the new crop of ultra low distortion opamps - of course in applications where low Z line driving is not what the 5532 is doing better, do they sound the same??
I've personally not found that opamps "sound the same" in various applications, including I/V conversion and in things like phono preamps... probably elsewhere as well.
Nor have I yet to find two DACs that sound "the same".
I however breathe rarefied air which likely causes self-hypnotic suggestions and a strange sort of delusion...
Well, I thought some of the answers were useful. Even so called noise is information too, often useful.
You also once claimed to be able to tune an RIAA to .1dB with no reference save memory. I also find most well designed DAC's to sound the same, in fact an uncompressed vinyl rip on an Ipod Nano directly into my Sennheisers was hard to tell from my EMU.
Your last set of claims essentially reiterate that audio is beyond any engineering challenge faced by man, just a plain ridiculous stance.
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Smart guy that he seems to be he would surely at first point out that Randi shouldn´t have ranted about "supernatural powers " if now an equilizer is needed.
I totally agree, but "should not" is something different than "does not" .
Of course, but please remember that it was Randi´s assertion that supernatural powers were needed to differentiate between two cables ("good Monster" and any "hi - end") while Fremer insisted that no supernatural powers were involved.
Anyway, that would have been part of the ongoing negotiation, but Randi weaseled out before.
L is quite low and C quite high, but as we know, the frequency response deviation depends on the choice of amplifier and loudspeaker (and of course of the cable length)
Again, all that would have been part of the negotiation, but Randi preferred to weasel out....
Beside that, these stories are good examples why no progress in these discussion has happen. Fremer said he could detect differences between amplifiers and was challenged. He accepted the challenge, did a controlled listenening test and ridiculed. SY with his unsubstantiated claims about Fremer´s amplifier test a couple of years ago in this forum after i had mentioned Fremer´s test, was a pretty good example.
Randi challenged Fremer and again he stood up and accepted the challenge and what happened? Randi weaseled out, but people "heard different" and again he was ridiculed.
And afair Fremer again was part of the controlled listening group tests in the Harmon lab.
Obvously he had no problems to participate in such attempts, but it does not help ...
IOW, you peek and get the expected results....
SCR.....playing at least once the "you peek game"
Not me.
Would never have said anything vaguely like that.
What I think you are confusing is RIAA with a discussion (a long time back) about tuning x-overs?? In that discussion there was the usual "JND" crowd trumpeting that being the minimum audible difference, and what I said (corroborated by others, iirc) is that if you use pink noise (or white noise) you can clearly hear surprisingly subtle changes in level and xover frequency. On the order of 0.1dB, based on the values of resistors being A/B'd for example.
Odd, Scott, that you would draw such an erroneous conclusion.
Actually I've more or less said the opposite, that I would like to find the thresholds by scientific means, the thresholds where things no longer sound "different".
Those thresholds may turn out to vary across a range depending on certain specifics for "populations" of people. That's my conjecture.
By way of being diplomatic about what you (or perhaps others may hear) - a pound of tire pressure makes a great deal of difference to an IROC or INDY race driver. It makes almost no difference at all even to those driving high performance production sports cars on the road, to the "daily driver" it is a parameter that does not exist until the car mishandles or worse. So, you could poll or even test lots and lots of "daily drivers" and they would likely more than 99% say that tire pressure doesn't matter until it is very very "off".
So, Scott, you may simply be unable to detect the "tire pressure" given the "car" you are driving?
Yes, still waiting for a few folks we all know and love from around here to do some of this together.
I do wonder if Mr. Fremer would hold his endorsement of vinyl demagnetization, etc. up to serious scrutiny.
Okay, I believe you. If there is some physical difference, one possible factor might be that you haven't learned to hear as much as your potential might be. For example, if you learn a foreign language, it may take a long time before you learn to recognize accents of people from various regions where the language is spoken. This despite the fact that it is quite obvious to the native language speakers. In the case of native English speakers who try to learn some Asian languages, they may never have learned to hear subtle pitch inflections that convey big differences of meaning in the new language. It may be difficult for them to learn to hear it even with proper training.
Regarding differences in DACs, what there is to hear is not pitch and not so much harmonic or intermodulation distortion. But whatever it is, if you are trying to mix a record, it can send you reaching for EQ to make it sound "better." Page 2 of the Jitter section at Cranesong.com has some sound files with clock jitter distortion exaggerated considerably with the hope that sound engineers can learn to recognize what it sounds like. And indeed, the first recording sound card I had sounded muddy to me, and I tried, with partial success, to make it sound better with EQ. Still didn't sound good though, and so I bought a better one which sounded better, but still not right. In the end I wasted money and time because I was skeptical like you and I didn't listen to the very most experienced and successful mix engineers that, as it turned out, had given me the correct advice in the first place.
Nw with the conversation going on for days my question is how could anyone come up with absolute values as Bear is asking for that would answer the questions absolutely?
It just seems so obvious that there are no absolutes of minimum distortions of all types of confounders unless they were all so low as to be un-measurable. I don't think there are anything but average limits that can be known, how do you take into account any outliers, those golden eared teens who may hear much higher in frequency or perhaps someone who is sensitive to some high frequency resonance? If you make an absolute number with S/N level then you could have a problem with IM distortion or some other factor so to say you can make absolute statements just seems to be silly and non=productive in this kind of discussion.
I know in the past in this thread, how long ago who knows, that lower limits for many types of distortions or factors such as S/N ratio have been given, but these were controlled tests only looking at one factor at a time, how do you determine an absolute limit to all of the know distortion mechanisms at the same time without making them all so low as to be non=measurable, in other words basically no distortion allowed?
To RNM,
Now that you have a clearly in your eyes superior speaker system do you still insist that you have to have extremely high resolution and high bit rate source material, or do now your older CD;s and DVD;s now sound better due to better speakers? Were you not in effect trying to cover up the failings of the earlier speakers rather than that the resolution was really a problem? Was the resolution problem with the ESL panels themselves even if they were what you thought very good sounding at the time?
It just seems so obvious that there are no absolutes of minimum distortions of all types of confounders unless they were all so low as to be un-measurable. I don't think there are anything but average limits that can be known, how do you take into account any outliers, those golden eared teens who may hear much higher in frequency or perhaps someone who is sensitive to some high frequency resonance? If you make an absolute number with S/N level then you could have a problem with IM distortion or some other factor so to say you can make absolute statements just seems to be silly and non=productive in this kind of discussion.
I know in the past in this thread, how long ago who knows, that lower limits for many types of distortions or factors such as S/N ratio have been given, but these were controlled tests only looking at one factor at a time, how do you determine an absolute limit to all of the know distortion mechanisms at the same time without making them all so low as to be non=measurable, in other words basically no distortion allowed?
To RNM,
Now that you have a clearly in your eyes superior speaker system do you still insist that you have to have extremely high resolution and high bit rate source material, or do now your older CD;s and DVD;s now sound better due to better speakers? Were you not in effect trying to cover up the failings of the earlier speakers rather than that the resolution was really a problem? Was the resolution problem with the ESL panels themselves even if they were what you thought very good sounding at the time?
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