It would be hard to believe they dont have a seriouis listen to their own products ..... Ken Ishiwata not listening ???? no....
Aside from the fact that I suspect you would be hard put name the equivalent of Ken Ishiwata at any of the other mass market consumer electronics companies, or that Marantz frequently crosses the fence between mass and specialty market audio with some multi-thousand dollar components in their product line, I very much doubt that Mr. Ishiwata personally evaluates all Marantz products during the design process.
At any rate, and beyond the few Ishiwata signature pieces from Marantz, what would be your explanation for the nearly universally mediocre sound produced by the great majority of mass market HiFi products? We will not have an productive discussion about this subject if we disagree about the current sad state of mass market audio. BTW, I consider the likes of Cambridge or ARCAM to be more specialty market than mass market.
Well, we could start with Thomas Edison and go all the way through to
Ivor Tiefenbrun ... but lets not.
I would be amazed if KI did not listen to a product that he has 'upgraded' and put his name to.
As for "universally mediocre sound produced by the great majority of mass market HiFi products" would seem to be a contradiction in terms. I think the 'masses' have to produce cheap products because the public in truth just aint that bothered (bovered ?) about the quality of sound coming out of their systems.
All is not lost though, I think there is a another section of the market that wants a good sound system but does not want to become a Hi Fi enthusiast, and so go's into Dixons and buys a £750 Denon systen (or whatever) which is clearly going to sound better than a £150 system or indeed his dads equivalent Decca radiogram from the 60's.
Interesting here to find K.I. saying use your ears not measurments to evaluate Hi FI and its sound
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2QPePifDQI
I would be amazed if Ishiwata listened, as part of the design process, to any Marantz product which was not to bear his name. The larger point is that you seem to be attempting to use Ishiwata's occasional participation in the development of a very few Marantz products as some proof that mass marker vendors include serious critical listening as an element of the design process. Such an assertion is not logical based on your Ishshiwata example.
I said mediocre when it might have been more descriptive if I had said, unnecessarily poor sound. Does that better make the point?
As I stated in my first comment of this thread, quite superior sound could be delivered to the mass market for no more cost in bill-of-materials. NOS digital playback is a perfect example. While not all consumers would appreciate the improvement in sound some undoubtedly would. Most people I know have never been exposed to true audiophile music reproduction.
15kHz at -3dB and final stopband rejection of -50dB. "Impressive" - that's why everyone sane minded uses OS. Because you cannot do decent a brickwall filter.
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I dont know, I like Denon's "AL24Processing Plus" results.
The only OS that sounds a little "iffy" is the one in SAA7220... but that is ancient technology.
The only OS that sounds a little "iffy" is the one in SAA7220... but that is ancient technology.
Yes, they must have realised that if 4X OS was a good thing, 256X OS must be that much better. But it was 'Bitstream' not 'DSD' - the latter being by Sony. I believe the first bitstream DAC (was it the SAA7320 ?) had the same digital filter inside as the SAA7220. At least it had the same 20kHz distortion problem.
Ken from Penn, I would agree that KI woudn't listen to products that are not his, why would he ?
As for NOS being a good example of low cost hi fi for the masses I did ask the question earlier in the thread, you may wish to refer to the answers.
Finally, your saying Sony and Phillips audio engineers do not seriously listen to their products ? so its all done on paper, then built, sent out to retailers and nobody had a serious listen ? facinating....
As for NOS being a good example of low cost hi fi for the masses I did ask the question earlier in the thread, you may wish to refer to the answers.
Finally, your saying Sony and Phillips audio engineers do not seriously listen to their products ? so its all done on paper, then built, sent out to retailers and nobody had a serious listen ? facinating....
I suggest that you don't fool yourself into thinking otherwise, about how much of a factor critical listening plays an integral part in the decision process. I'm not talking about whether anyone listens to the damn things after they are designed and built to ensure that, yeah, it does actually walk and bark.
It hasn't escaped my notice that you still haven't provided an explanation as to why mass market audio goods continue to fall so short of what's musically possible for not any greater production cost. It's my contention that the fault for this lay in the design process. What's your contention?
I pretty much agree - mass market audio could sound considerably better for very small increases in production cost. Just the design engineers don't listen, or if they do listen have no clue how to fix the dodgy sound they get. Poor layout I'd offer as the primary reason for lack-lustre sound and good layout really costs no more than poor.
<edit> Having said this, I'm not blaming the engineers. Management could well be setting such tight timescales that there's no time for listening and subsequent tweaking.
<edit> Having said this, I'm not blaming the engineers. Management could well be setting such tight timescales that there's no time for listening and subsequent tweaking.
[QUOTE
It hasn't escaped my notice that you still haven't provided an explanation as to why mass market audio goods continue to fall so short of what's musically possible for not any greater production cost. It's my contention that the fault for this lay in the design process. What's your contention?[/QUOTE]
Ken, I did answer, you ignored it. Mass market audio has improved a lot over the years so clearly somebody is listening and developing, albeit painfully slowly.
The thing is mass market buyers really dont care to much about absolute sound quality, they're not enthusiats like you and I, as long as it goes boom and twang and has some nice lights on it then thats all they want or need, so why would a sound engineer working on mass market products spend a lot of time on sound quality when his brief is probably more to do with cutting costs and increasing profits whilst maintaining whatever sound quality they already had.
It hasn't escaped my notice that you still haven't provided an explanation as to why mass market audio goods continue to fall so short of what's musically possible for not any greater production cost. It's my contention that the fault for this lay in the design process. What's your contention?[/QUOTE]
Ken, I did answer, you ignored it. Mass market audio has improved a lot over the years so clearly somebody is listening and developing, albeit painfully slowly.
The thing is mass market buyers really dont care to much about absolute sound quality, they're not enthusiats like you and I, as long as it goes boom and twang and has some nice lights on it then thats all they want or need, so why would a sound engineer working on mass market products spend a lot of time on sound quality when his brief is probably more to do with cutting costs and increasing profits whilst maintaining whatever sound quality they already had.
Ken, I did answer, you ignored it. Mass market audio has improved a lot over the years so clearly somebody is listening and developing, albeit painfully slowly.
The thing is mass market buyers really dont care to much about absolute sound quality, they're not enthusiats like you and I, as long as it goes boom and twang and has some nice lights on it then thats all they want or need, so why would a sound engineer working on mass market products spend a lot of time on sound quality when his brief is probably more to do with cutting costs and increasing profits whilst maintaining whatever sound quality they already had.[/QUOTE]
No, I don't think I've it all. You are making an assertion about how mass market audio has improved without providing any facts or analysis to support that.
What do engineers being pressured to cut costs have to do with the use of extreme amounts of negative feedback to greatly improve an amplifier's THD specification, for example? While marketing concerns were greatly behind that trend, I think you'll find that most engineers would tell you that a THD directly correlates with improved sound quality, while most critical listeners would you the exact opposite is true. Most engineers are objectivists, both by nature by training. Subjective evaluation is not to be trusted when objective tools such as spectrum analyzers and measurements such as THD exist.
I for one have no idea. Is there a connection?
Are you speaking of engineers in general, or engineers who work (or have worked) in the consumer audio field? As one of the latter, I've met no engineer in the audio field who has told me the above. Mostly they say low distortion is necessary but not sufficient for good sound. Some would say they just deliver good measurements - its up to you if you don't like the sound. Take Doug Self as an example objectivist - he admits that IMD (not THD) is more likely to be correlated with improved sound quality and says so in his book on amplifier design.
By that I meant sensible power supply regulation, sensible decoupling, a decent clock and clock routing. If you are able to reduce the problems that OS is more susceptible to - i.e. jitter, then I think the OS DAC stands a better chance against a very simple to make NOS DAC - because the required analogue filtering required is far easier to implement.
Of course, in an ideal world, where money, equipment, and the ability to reach perfection was no object, then both could sound ideal (the 18th order analogue brickwall filter would have zero group delay, and the 1024x OS digital filter would add zero jitter, perfect interpolation and a single tiny capacitor in series on the output would be ample filtering).
We don't live in an ideal world, so I'm sticking with OS. I can get better results with it.
Do you by any chance have any references where they show that OS is more susceptible to jitter than NOS? I can understand it would be in the presence of noise-shaping, but at present I can't see how OS without NS is any worse-off in respect of jitter.
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