Anybody who heard a drum, LIVE, at few meters distance knows it can't be reproduced with the actually hifi technology. Unless you have some sort of mechanic drum!
For all electronic boxes, we can precisely describe and measure what is going on.
An electronic signal is fully defined by dV/dt. We can measure both with great precision.
If nothing has changed in the shape of the signal from beginning to end with the box in between; if what comes out is exactly what goes in; if input-/-output can be nulled to a perfect zero, what could we possibly be missing?
You need to believe in a completely new and hitherto unknown dimension to state what you did. In spite of the fact that such dimension would interact with our ear drums, and thus with the physical world as we know it, no trace of this dimension has ever been found by verifiable observation, nor by technical measurement. It is not considered by theory.
This is why I called your line of reasoning 'magical thinking' before.
a drum of course not, but a saxophone, we are getting much closer then 10%-20%.
The main bottleneck is pretty obvious: it's the transducers.
We're asking them to reproduce a wide variety of sounds while the real sounds are produced with dedicated tools (to make the said sounds)... And that applies both ways: captation transducers (microphones) and emissive transducers (drivers). That double conversion, alone, kills our chances to get anything near perfection, no matter what.
We're asking them to reproduce a wide variety of sounds while the real sounds are produced with dedicated tools (to make the said sounds)... And that applies both ways: captation transducers (microphones) and emissive transducers (drivers). That double conversion, alone, kills our chances to get anything near perfection, no matter what.
The only realistic way to test HIGH-FIDELITY in a scientific manner, would be to start with easy, basic, sound illusions in blind testing. Then we move to a more difficult/complicated sound.
The most neutral participants would be... animals. And i'm not even kidding. You build a test that aim to provoke XYZ reaction (obviously sincere and free of any audiophile bias!) then you test few different components. Silly ? Maybe. But remember: the goal is to produce an audio illusion so perfect it's not distinguishable from the real sound source (and i'm not talking studio source but real life nature source).
The most neutral participants would be... animals. And i'm not even kidding. You build a test that aim to provoke XYZ reaction (obviously sincere and free of any audiophile bias!) then you test few different components. Silly ? Maybe. But remember: the goal is to produce an audio illusion so perfect it's not distinguishable from the real sound source (and i'm not talking studio source but real life nature source).
When did I tell others such thing? Can you please quote it?
Do you even know what I was talking about?
It may surprise some people to learn that the basic audio measures such as frequency response and distortion were not dreamt up by some evil engineers bent on destroying sound, but were the result of lots of experimental tests on what real people heard - including, in some cases, tests comparing a live performance (behind a curtain) with a reproduction of that performance.planet10 said:
I think 80-90% might be a better estimate. These days, when comparing hi-fi (not FX boxes), the differences are getting harder to spot. If they were easy to hear then even the 'stress' of a proper test would not render them inaudible.
Just a quick post to demonstrate people just do not know what they are talking about when they spout that kind of theoretical engineering day-dreams.
Tell us, vacuphile, what about putting TWO signals in? Just because one signal works, doesn't mean all pairs of signals will work. Likewise, systems change and recover in ways that, again, aren't predictable from your naive one-signal test. Or how in your philosophy do your address female choirs with instantaneous treble peaks off the end of the scale? Or do you just look the other way?
Having said that, I too am in the measure-it side of the debate. But I am not convinced we have all the measurements. Maybe close.
Ben
Those are your personal opinion.People often refer to stuff they don't understand as silly.
Hifi is a loose term, read your own articles.
It does not really have an accepted definition as such, it just became a common word to distinguish between older lowfi recordings or lowfi equipment such phonographs and telephone or AM radio.
At its core hifi means truthful reproduction of music at home, but there are so many variables (the room itself for one).
A live recording is different to a studio album.
Studio albums were recorded to sound good on studio monitor speakers! which may have been flawed, or just sounded right in that environment.
Also being faithful to original presumes there is an original! Say a 'Pink Floyd' album has no original.
Even live recordings are at the mercy of microphone placements, recording equipment and the engineer who later edited and equalised it at his studio.
So what if we make a recording and not edit or equalise it?
fine , but how many commercial recordings follow that doctrine?
A 'hifi system' must work as a whole.
It seems some are arguing if two equipments measure the same, they will sound the same, I say 'not necessarily so' -
measurements are a first step towards hifi, long term listening tests are the final.
Just because a $50 DAC has 'diminishingly low distortion' does not mean it will sound good (to the person buying it),
nor does a $50000 DAC with diamond embedded circuit board and cosmic-ray sealed clock generator sound any better.
Hifi simply means reproduction of music (not electrical signals) at home which is of high quality,
but this 'high quality' is a vague area, where many links in the chain must work together to produce it.
Hifi does not even apply to home cinema with its artificial sound effects, dialogue requirements, so forth.
Ooooh that's a good one!
so all this 24/96, 24/192, DSD were all in vain.
After all 16/44.1 had more frequency bandwidth, dynamic range, S/N ratio that human ears were capable of hearing, and don't get me going on distortion values of common 90's CD players.
with properly designed DACs of today, the measurement gear we use to test them is running out of steam! meaning DACs are measuring as good as the test gear we use on them (almost) - yet better sounding DACs are appearing all the time.
Once again, measurements are necessary and a must, final listening tests are vital.
I for one never claimed measurements are useless, and shouldn't be done, I am all for measurements, good design and manufacturing techniques, but it must sound good at the end, or all bets are off.
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Blind? Where are the papers? And i suspect at the time magnitudes orders of magnitude larger than we typically see now. The tech has come a ways in the last 100 years.
FR seems one of the obvious ones.
Distortion too, but how does it need to be measured & expressed? THD doesn't work.
HD we are measuring now with sine waves really needs to be displayed as a 3 dimensional manifold in 4-space, with axis of Fin, Fout, Fin level, Fout level. Given our current display tech, an animated 3D graph (collapsed to 2D) with a slider for the 4th dimension. And blind tests to figure out what the range of thresholds are.
What happens with a more complex excitation, and how does the DUT respond for various overload conditions?
dave
Ben,
I appreciate your interest in these matters and hope this will spur you into doing some further learning.
How do you know if they are better sounding or same when played at matched volume?
bah, all this thread should be clearer if members wtitted their actual main devices on the baseline signature as some rare members did!
We could see their choice : commercial,DIY, tweaked...none !
There is a lot of rethoric, which is fun, but the beginners or first time diyer-readers are certainly a little lost...
I'm sure you cab have decent music with not so much money today (between 100 to 200 euros/USD). You can go further if you want to cross each bigger step with more money !
I believe the Squeeze Box project was very cool ! What a pitty they gave up it !
We could see their choice : commercial,DIY, tweaked...none !
There is a lot of rethoric, which is fun, but the beginners or first time diyer-readers are certainly a little lost...
I'm sure you cab have decent music with not so much money today (between 100 to 200 euros/USD). You can go further if you want to cross each bigger step with more money !
I believe the Squeeze Box project was very cool ! What a pitty they gave up it !
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"better sounding DAC's" ??
At some point , they are equally pleasing.
My two , (Wolfson WM8766G and PCM 1792A)
sound the same.
The source material is more important. 24/96 "vinyl" rips sound as horrendous
as when I actually owned vinyl. The "vinyl flacs" - you can hear whatever
defects the original album had , I would rather have the tape turned
to digital. I can deal with a little hiss.
24/96 SACD right (from the sites) does sound
better than a CD converted to FLAC.
I have heard (and have) both non-ripped 16/44khz and 24/96khz files ...
as well as downsampling the 96's to 44khz - I can't hear the difference.
Bypassing windows with ASIO actually was the only factor that even
allowed me to become aware of the two above factors.
I just totally said "bye-bye" to the MP3. Processing 1K studio albums
(below) , the actual studio mastering determines the SQ.
The almighty MP3 really trades in a lot of stereo separation for the lower
bitrate.
Then , get that bit-perfect to the DAC in as few steps as possible -
(Flac_out.DLL -->ASIut.DLL-->ASIO driver/DAC).
Then there are the FLAC compression "myth's" ... what B$ !!! Uncompressed
Vs. 67% lossless compression - no difference .... the FLAC plugin
creates the original CDA/WAV anyhow ????
Some newer non-remastered native digital material just (could NOT) be
faithfully reproduced on any analog media. NO way !
So, you would get a compressed "vintage sound". Rush -moving pictures ...
I had in both vinyl and CD and now on SACD ... no comparison
CD/SACD will "slam you down" with "scary" transients. My 100W vinyl
system in the late 70's could not put you on the edge of the chair
like digital can.
Old ELP "lucky man" or the first Boston LP .... all the same as I remembered it -
except it won't degrade in time.
PS- even my former CD collection could not do (below) - auto !
Convenience !
OS
At some point , they are equally pleasing.
My two , (Wolfson WM8766G and PCM 1792A)
sound the same.
The source material is more important. 24/96 "vinyl" rips sound as horrendous
as when I actually owned vinyl. The "vinyl flacs" - you can hear whatever
defects the original album had , I would rather have the tape turned
to digital. I can deal with a little hiss.
24/96 SACD right (from the sites) does sound
better than a CD converted to FLAC.
I have heard (and have) both non-ripped 16/44khz and 24/96khz files ...
as well as downsampling the 96's to 44khz - I can't hear the difference.
Bypassing windows with ASIO actually was the only factor that even
allowed me to become aware of the two above factors.
I just totally said "bye-bye" to the MP3. Processing 1K studio albums
(below) , the actual studio mastering determines the SQ.
The almighty MP3 really trades in a lot of stereo separation for the lower
bitrate.
Then , get that bit-perfect to the DAC in as few steps as possible -
(Flac_out.DLL -->ASI
ut.DLL-->ASIO driver/DAC).Then there are the FLAC compression "myth's" ... what B$ !!! Uncompressed
Vs. 67% lossless compression - no difference .... the FLAC plugin
creates the original CDA/WAV anyhow ????
Some newer non-remastered native digital material just (could NOT) be
faithfully reproduced on any analog media. NO way !
So, you would get a compressed "vintage sound". Rush -moving pictures ...
I had in both vinyl and CD and now on SACD ... no comparison
CD/SACD will "slam you down" with "scary" transients. My 100W vinyl
system in the late 70's could not put you on the edge of the chair
like digital can.
Old ELP "lucky man" or the first Boston LP .... all the same as I remembered it -
except it won't degrade in time.
PS- even my former CD collection could not do (below) - auto !
Convenience !
OS
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