Sound Quality Vs. Measurements

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Capacitors for example have quite a lot of somewhat detailed theory to support why they sound different, so even the most vivid disbelievers have a conceptualization which they need to deal with, in some way.

Media players and Asio, I've never personally seen a detailed theory from A to Z, usually just "it sounds different", that qualifies it as mystical, perplexification or pseudo-science.

Imho.

Although I could come up with some vague theory.
 
Bless you Dejan. And you are not ? In fact just the fact we write here is proof. Mr Wayne pretends to be not so. We have caught him out time and time again. Those facts that pour out prove it.
...

Actually, I don't think I've lived in Britain long enough (just 3 years, however in my most formative period of life, 14-17) to have earned the right to be eccentric. :D

Although, I must say, the very word "eccentric" has been much misused and given a sort of nutty connotation. This is not so. Originally, I think it meant someone who thought outside the box, perhaps a little more so.

I am not chained into any form of set as carved in stone thinking. I do have my views, and I will support them until someone proves to my satisafction that this is not so. Faced with facts, I will modify my views. And I see no shame in admitting I was wrong.

Did I ever fire you for being so bent towards 2N3055? I think its time has passed long ago, but I would never call it useless. To me, it will be as good as you can make it come on song. Presonally, I'd go for more recent and much more powerful Motorola MJ21193/21194, but that's my choice and most here would think me nostalgic for even mentioning them. Or, at best, might agree they are still very useful in the pro sector, where ruggedness and reliability share the No.1 position on the spec list.

Besides, I also have my great love, BD 249/250 C. To me, they are the alsmost perfect audio power devices, with very short Ton, Tstore, and Toff times, and their only weak spot is that they are limited to about say 40V. Their RMS handling current is 25A, peak currents 40A (50A if by SGS). They seem to be almost tailor made for how the German audio industry worked while it was truly German, and the best integrated amp Grundig ever made, the 5000 V, used these devices. And that one was not easy to beat, it's still on my shopping list.
 
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An initially poor quality recording will sound good if nothing in the replay chain exacerbates any of the negative qualities inherent in the recording to any further degree - what happens then is that you can hear past all the recording "problems" and focus in on the music, your mind filters out the ugliness, you only "hear" the performance. This is not a theory; I fell off the proverbial chair when I first heard it happen, and it's something I've always used as a measuring stick since.

Complex music is always going to cause more grief, higher stress on the system, can it retain its composure? If the worst of the worst passes through with flying colours, then everything works ...

Frank, please explain to me, a certified dummy, how you repair wild phase shifts and response anomalies in a poor recording.

My experience tells me that the better the repaly chain, the better you hear such anomalies. You may not be able to identify them as such, but you will be able to hear that something is wrong with the sound, that it's muffled or perhaps screechy.

I am not saying it cannot be done, but I am saying that if you fiddle around with the sound, you are no longer listening to what it originally was. You might as well say that tone controls are essential for good sound, whereas I believe tone controls should serve principally as a way to compensate for speaker placement in a room and that therefore they don't really need a range of more than say +/- 6 dB.

I will agree that a muffled sound of a complex musical piece may well be limited by the insides of a CD player - where and how will depend on a specfic model. If it initially sounded muffled, and you then went on to a better made CD player it might sound better, even perhaps much better. You may be able to improve the existing model by using say much faster op amps, but the degree of improvement is questionable and will vary quite a bit - been there, done that.

But in many cases, a poor recording will go on being that no matter what you use.
 
ASIO? Pretty bloody obvious, 2 seconds at Wikipedia ...

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Direct route = less processing = less interference generated ... this is falling off a log stuff ...

Sounds to me like the "Real Time" DACs. Those with 8 paralleled DACs, which use no oversampling and do not have digital brick wall filters.

I own one, an Aussie job I am happy with. It does sound more natural than many a CD player, but even so, a bad recording stays a bad recording, perhaps only a bit less so.
 
ASIO? Pretty bloody obvious, 2 seconds at Wikipedia ...



Direct route = less processing = less interference generated ... this is falling off a log stuff ...

Hmmm digital processing of audio not exactly taxing anyway, ASIO limits latency, as to the rest I doubt processing a bit of digital audio data would cause a PC to break into a sweat or generate more interference than is normally present...the data will be the same either way when it reaches the sound card or DAC, as to noise levels I doubt there would be much difference between either way.....
 
If you select the lowest latency possible in ASIO you will hear clear clicks and crackles, it's trial and error to find the latency setting where there is no clicking. Asio4All has a "always resample to 48 kHz" setting, which I can't hear the difference when ticked or not.

Jriver has I think it was called "river" and "beach" mode, my understanding is that beach means buffering to RAM first, but I'm not sure
 
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Did I ever fire you for being so bent towards 2N3055?

You wouldn't dare. :D
These were inside of one of your favorites
:)
George
 

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Frank, please explain to me, a certified dummy, how you repair wild phase shifts and response anomalies in a poor recording.
Dummy? I don't think so, you're a pretty sharp cookie, Dejan, :D - that said, anomalies will certainly exist in "poor" recordings, and they won't disappear objectively - but, subjectively they will. The key point is whether, as you say, "you will be able to hear that something is wrong with the sound" - and doing the right things to the system makes that "something is wrong" quality evaporate, it longer sounds "muffled" or "screechy". What seems to be happening is that the brain does a nice DSP job on the music, all by its lonesome - you no longer notice the anomalies, your mind bypasses the flaws.

Yes, the poor recording remains poor, but that's not what you hear - I'll describe the Gene Pitney CD "monstrosity": in a bizarre attempt to reduce tape hiss or something, the "engineer" used some crude on/off gated treble reduction processing - when the average volume drops below a certain level savage frequency attentuation is switched on with full force, and then it's switched off just as abruptly when the volume rises back above that point. The effect resembles grotesque volume pumping, I was amazed when I first heard it - impossible to hear past, I thought! But, I was wrong - I have had, on a number of occasions, the system of the moment working sufficiently well that this weird "distortion" just doesn't seem to matter - it's still there if you choose to focus on it happening, but it doesn't interfere with appreciating, and enjoying, the musical flow of the track.
 
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How would a transparent system (ie a piece of wire with gain) mask rather than accentuate the quality of a recording:confused:
Now I find when I listen to bad recordings on smaller non optimised replay systems they can sound OKish when played on a more revealing system the bad quality of the recording becomes more apparent!
Maybe its my hearing that's defective, I do wonder sometimes, or maybe my system needs more distortion and audiophile coloration to improve these bad recording;)
 
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Only the actual data presented to the DAC is of any concern, how it gets there is not a problem as long as its integrity is sound (pun intended) so whether a 32 bit or a 64 bit based computer send the data it would be the same...

Most probably they have some sound manipulation or EQ in that Android app - read: DSProcessing. In that context word bit length might be of consequence.

jan
 
If you select the lowest latency possible in ASIO you will hear clear clicks and crackles, it's trial and error to find the latency setting where there is no clicking.

Never had this problem with any device I have ever used, and I have used external sound cards to collect data for analysis in Matlab, etc. This USB drops data stuff is mostly a myth.

I have even used ASIO at 24/48K in full duplex to generate stimulus and measure external circuits at the same time. I should note I'm a luddite user and have virtually nothing internet related running in the background or any other USB devices connected.
 
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Most probably they have some sound manipulation or EQ in that Android app - read: DSProcessing. In that context word bit length might be of consequence.

jan

Like for like a 32 or 64 bit based system would not have any effect though, data manipulation is a different story, and if it does sound different you can bet your life on the data at the DAC will be different.
 
How would a transparent system (ie a piece of wire with gain) mask rather than accentuate the quality of a recording:confused:
Now I find when I listen to bad recordings on smaller non optimised replay systems they can sound OKish when played on a more revealing system the bad quality of the recording becomes more apparent!
The truly transparent system is not masking , it's providing more information, so that which is interesting in the recording, being the musical performance, is more distinctive, more clearly defined - people who invest a lot of care in optimising vinyl playback talk of this phenomenon: the better the quality of replay, the less the groove noise is noticed - the record becomes "quieter" because you hear more of, have greater clarity to the musical message; subjectively, the S/N ratio has improved. The mechanical noises of the LP reproduction process are not relevant to the music, and can be pushed easier into the background, subconciously, if the overall quality is there.

I find there are three levels of playback quality: the everyday standard where most music is OK; then the arena of overtly ambitious efforts which accentuate every little negative aspect in recordings, the world of a small number of "good" recordings and all else is below par; and finally the systems which rise above that, like high performance LP replay, which allow strong communication with the musical message, distancing themselves from just being a "hifi system".
 
- people who invest a lot of care in optimising vinyl playback talk of this phenomenon: the better the quality of replay, the less the groove noise is noticed - the record becomes "quieter" because you hear more of, have greater clarity to the musical message; subjectively, the S/N ratio has improved.

Try vinyl with best headphone amplifier (lowest noise and lowest distortion) and best headphones you may afford or borrow. Then tell me if the record becomes "quieter".
 
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