Yes sure, I can hear difference between FLAC and MP3 even 320 kbds.
My bad, when I talked about decoding I was just talking about reading the codec (and not about conversion) in the context of what do the core dac board in a pc and what do the dac chip. If one can hear a difference between two lossless, the original : the dac has a problem !
When you talk about compression, do you mean the ratio of compression . I'm all flac level 8 !
The only thing which can worrie me with digital is to loose sector on an old disk ! I don't know if it's possible to link a checksum to further verification ! But I believe just a major problem can be heard.
Some also upsample their reccording and have two Library : the genuine one and the upsampled for the NOS DAC ! I'm not sure even one personn can hear difference between 96 K Hz or 192 ...384, etc ! an other story !
My bad, when I talked about decoding I was just talking about reading the codec (and not about conversion) in the context of what do the core dac board in a pc and what do the dac chip. If one can hear a difference between two lossless, the original : the dac has a problem !
When you talk about compression, do you mean the ratio of compression . I'm all flac level 8 !
The only thing which can worrie me with digital is to loose sector on an old disk ! I don't know if it's possible to link a checksum to further verification ! But I believe just a major problem can be heard.
Some also upsample their reccording and have two Library : the genuine one and the upsampled for the NOS DAC ! I'm not sure even one personn can hear difference between 96 K Hz or 192 ...384, etc ! an other story !
Only by the FTC. For the rest of the world, we do frequency and power swept THD and into different loads.
SY says he was able toblind and that further he was able to identify the compression rate.
Me, i just don't see the point of having anything to do with MP3s.
dave
To be clear, I didn't identify the compression rate, I merely put them in order from lowest to highest. Three of our members were there at the time, Jan Didden, Hugo deGroot, and vacuphile (not sure if his IRL name is public).
I'm a programmer (almost 20 years), so "bit-perfect" is not a hype for me. It is what make a computer possible. It is not as complicated as you seem to think it is.
Of course, reclocking can solve some jitter issues and that there are others that cannot be solved. Clock is about precision and nothing is 100% precise, including your watches.
I don't know who it was- I didn't set the test up, I was just the victi... errr.... subject. Breathy female vocalist singing Danny Boy. I hated it. 😛
I've never heard an AK-based DAC. However, the tda1387 8x DAC Abrax mentioned is to me the "world's best". Not that I've ever heard any of the mega-buck DACs listed in this thread, but I've gone up to the $500ish (USD) level in off the shelf DACs, and the tda1387 (modded) bests them all. It could be just my ears, but there are similar positive comments in the thread, and also in some PMs I've received. It could also be limitations and/or synergy of the rest of my system, or good old DIY bias ("I changed something, so it must be better"). It could also be NOS vs SD.
I'm willing to concede to any of those, but at the end of the day, I simply enjoy music more when it's coming from the tda1387. It's under $200 USD fully modded, so high on value if nothing else.
Yeah, because minimizing non-linearity is a bad thing 🙄.
Perhaps you can give examples of DAC products with vanishingly low THD+N that suffer greatly in other measurable areas.
This is commonly brought up but never explained. What caused the poor sound in the 70s? I seem to see several Stereophile Class A rated products using tons of negative feedback to lower THD to very low levels...
I don't know that its better because I haven't heard the AK4490. But there are a couple of things that would put me off buying that particular example - the external switching supply and the fact that its USB input only.
One needs to take Stereophile with a grain of salt.
You seem to be saying it was high amounts of NFB. Probably. But there is a BIG difference between a mediocre amplifier with lots of NFB used to get a low 1kHz THD number for a spec sheet, and a well designed amplifier with good open-loop performance and then NFB wrapped around it.
I have heard some very good amplifiers with lots of feedback, and some very good ones with little to none. And i could repeat that same sentence with "bad" replaceing "good" and it would be equally true.
Execution is very important, THD is not, and can be quite misleading because it is a collapsed number that hides all the important stuff.
dave
dave
I see, we can only trust some golden ears but not all golden ears. If you're arguing that they performed well only at 1 kHz and poorly at more demanding tests regarding THD like at 20 kHz then I might agree.
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Maybe some people making extraordinary claims might want to list what gets worse while making THD+N better.
You can continue to dance around my questions, that's ok, it just shows that you have no answers.