Well, I can give you a part that has fractional ohm resistance, that is widely acknowledged to affect sound - It's called a ferrite bead. Don't know if at all related to a Bybee, but shows that mere low ohmage is no guarantee of sonic neutrality.
Btw, I have no doubt that Sy would perform his audio mixdown duties to his perception of the current art. What about a 20 -30 year old in 1990 who has had his head flooded with Red Book 'perfect sound forever' for 10 years - that would strongly influence him to consider dither of peripheral significance and any advanced noise shaping version of dither as pure snake oil.
Ruh-Roh!
And so now we have a generation of crap sounding CDs in part thanks to high powered advertising executives and people pounding their chests and saying that perfectly optimized single generation red book 'is good enuf for them'.
Btw, I have no doubt that Sy would perform his audio mixdown duties to his perception of the current art. What about a 20 -30 year old in 1990 who has had his head flooded with Red Book 'perfect sound forever' for 10 years - that would strongly influence him to consider dither of peripheral significance and any advanced noise shaping version of dither as pure snake oil.
Ruh-Roh!
And so now we have a generation of crap sounding CDs in part thanks to high powered advertising executives and people pounding their chests and saying that perfectly optimized single generation red book 'is good enuf for them'.
Last edited:
Red Book isn't the problem- Loudness War is. Trivially easy to measure and the measurement correlates perfectly with the terrible sound. Miking techniques don't help- modern singers seem to demand that the capsule be less than a millimeter from the mouth. You can just about hear the tonsils flapping.
It's always fun to go back and read Gordon Holt's rants from the 1960s about the horrible sonics of commercial records. Sturgeon's Rule holds, regardless of medium or era.
It's always fun to go back and read Gordon Holt's rants from the 1960s about the horrible sonics of commercial records. Sturgeon's Rule holds, regardless of medium or era.
A ferrite bead has no resistance. And it will affect sound, positively, if it solves a RFI issue.
A few minutes with an R&S network analyzer showed that it didn't even have the impedance of a wire through a ferrite bead. Ah well, I guess the electrons were too stubborn to consent to the claimed daemonic sorting.
What they are is a simple nonsense device that does nothing other than lighten the owner of a few bills. Would be a real shame if his "secret" is never found out after he passes on and all, how will audio survive such a catastrophe? 😉
I'm sure the product will continue to be manufactured by unnamed sources or the secret will be revealed and delivered to all the great universities of the world where scientists will pour over it in an attempt to understand it. However, SY will be left out in the cold and he will never see the true secret, per the requirements in JB's last will and testament.
Sy - true on loudness wars - I once bought a DVD-A with most of the top songs of a favorite group of mine dating mostly from the later analog master days, only to wish that I could break whatever one-dB compressor the mixdown engineer used to compress the already limited dynamic range down to almost nothing over his head.
vacuphile - Sorry, I was thinking of pcb mounted ferrite beads - not the wire wrap through/around type. The latter would add no resistance to the circuit, as you said.
Anybody who believes the A/D/A process has not been generally worse than the associated digital recording standard (excepting compressed) deserves to be laughed at.
vacuphile - Sorry, I was thinking of pcb mounted ferrite beads - not the wire wrap through/around type. The latter would add no resistance to the circuit, as you said.
Anybody who believes the A/D/A process has not been generally worse than the associated digital recording standard (excepting compressed) deserves to be laughed at.
Last edited:
I was surprised how much better my first DVD player sounded than my supposed audiophile CD player when playing the same CD, and once again, how much better my first hi-def audio player sounded than the DVD player with the same CD. Not that any of them sounded nearly as good as with high definition audio. I suspect a lot of this had to do with player jitter. After this, I just got off the CD is perfect bandwagon.
Last edited:
Was that shown to be an audible problem?
Other major issues: Badly deteriorated analog master tapes- time is not kind to magnetic media. Early CDs were often mastered by engineers who were unfamiliar with how digital worked and banged the meters into the red. They figured that one out pretty quickly, fortunately! What took a bit longer was the realization that EQ used to compensate the poor HF response of analog systems came through loud, clear, and harsh. Mastering is often different between two different media versions (e.g., CD vs SACD) for marketing reasons, confounding claims of sonic superiority of one format vs another.
And so on and on. Which of course has zero to do with 16/44 vs other formats. Not that logic and evidence will stop wild claims, of course...😀
Yes, have got, but only relatively recently - haven't listened to it at 11 yet! First time round, this is real head scratchin' stuff ... 😉
Another favourite along these lines is Zoolook, by Jarre ...
Dynamics to scare the amplifier are to be found in the soundtrack of Moulin Rouge - select the wrong volume setting based on a snippet you hear, and the amp will collapse to the ground, quivering and shaking, at some point ...
I was just saying that the deficiencies of the A/D and D/A processes used generally added more distortion than the digital storage standard itself did.
A CD player with 5ns jitter, for instance, deteriorates resolution at 20khz to 11 bits maximum, and studies have shown that jitter has to be held within a few hundred picoseconds to maintain an effective 16 bit resolution on CD's (‘‘The maximum permissible size and detection threshold of time jitter on digital audio,’’ J. Acoust. Soc. Jpn. (J), 59, 241–249 (2003)).
Jitter artifacts from the recording and mixdown process that are present on a CD are permanent and nonreducible and will only be added to by that of the playback system.
Basic real world quantization error usually runs significantly short of 16 bit on most CDs. Expect 12 - 15 bit best case for most.
There are also the digital artifacts of the too low brick wall cutoff function to contend with in redbook audio, as well as the envelope distortion which runs about 1% at 7% of the sampling rate, or about 3 khz for CD, or about 5% at 16khz.
Last edited:
Let it ride, John. They're getting off by showing their "professional" side, leering at something they're not interested in trying to understand better. They need their dose of daily fun, like the Dutch dude does in spades ...
- Status
- Not open for further replies.