Of course there is the slight issue of defining SOA! I can't afford SOA so for now I'll have to slum it with a TI PCM4222 EVM which for £123 is more than good enough for any testing I want. As I missed Jan's autoranger and the RTX group buys I'll need to do something like the Peter Millet board.
But that will give me the basis of a measurement setup that will do most things I personally need. Basic but usable. And saves me from chasing my own tail. As you know you can keep POOGEing and keep persuading yourself its getting better and better, but with no measurement baseline you don't really know if you are making progress!
Pppppppppppffffffffffhhhhhhhhhhhhhhht
Whatever. The mastering on older albums are the only ones that come close to sounding real. By old I mean pre-80's low end ADC to vinyl. Not all old albums are winners, but you can find sound that isn't so damn plastic sounding, that had serious hair raising tone and such. How are you trying to describe accurate? Either it sounds more real our it does not, and no noise floor figure that is reasonible has any bearing on that... nor minor sub 1% THD. The techniques & choices in the recording are astronmoically more important than the gear alone. I have heard free with sound card microphone albums that sound vastly superior to 1/4 million dollar studio productions.
I have never heard a recording without "flaws" or that could have been done in a different way to appease different tastes.
I think I have enough offspring to have proven thatBill satin sheets are even beter with a partner.... Just saying....
Exactly, Rachmaninoff playing his own piano concertos, Furtwangler in the 30s, Callas in her prime, Jelly Roll, Bix , any amount of stuff in the Smithsonian folkways collection. It's important to listen to it to understand how we got to where we are today musically.
Oh and bonkers composer of the week. Conlon Nancarrow. He specialised in piano works that were unplayable so hand cut player piano rolls.
YouTube only mildly insane
YouTube truly disturbed
Radio 3 on the drive home played the Pineapple rag rearranged by Itzhak Perlman. Another album on my list to buy
YouTube only mildly insane
YouTube truly disturbed
Radio 3 on the drive home played the Pineapple rag rearranged by Itzhak Perlman. Another album on my list to buy
RME ADI2-Pro fs. Very reasonable price given the performance, 4ch DAC + 2ch ADC + digital I/O + a lot of special features not seen anywhere else and some of them dedicated to expert audio measurement duties which was a design goal for the device. There are Nichicon Muse bipolars in the ADC input which are the only coupling caps in the device. It remains to be checked if the input caps are actually blocking a bias voltage, if not they might be shorted out (on my ToDo list).
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I was thinking John Ogdon could probably have played that by sight.......until towards the end....
Are we back to LIKES again. No one can argue about your likes. To each his own. Mine included. But that isnt useful as an argument for something .. I like it and some others like it... so it must be good enough. Not if this forum is about designing High-End hardware for accuracy. You know, the JC thing?
And, if it isnt about an accurate reproduction ... what is the issue in this forum about? Maybe we need a new forum on what people like and dont like. We can argue all day long about that.
THx-RNMarsh
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No Bill, you are wrong!
I once had a teacher who was of the opinion that some folks didn't understand the relationship between intercourse and children. So did you name any kids Linen, Satin or Cotton?On accuracy, if you reference is a piece recorded in a studio with amplified or even direct wired gear, not sure that really can be a reference on accuracy as compared to a concert hall piece of acoustic music. It can however serve as a system comparison piece, with the warning that as you don't have a "standard" you can spot differences but your history and preferences may distort the conclusions.
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That is a very good quality old recording. There are some awful quality ones that are horribly distorted that are not as listenable as the example you give.
Also, one violin is pretty forgiving of what is not too much distortion for it.
Old analog tubes and transformers could at their best sound quite nice. At their worst, not good at all.
Great digital can also sound quite nice although to enjoy some aspects of it remains expensive. (I would like to see the price come down.) Old, cheap digital can sound pretty bad, as much as old bad analog ever did.
So, why make it better at all, ever? You may have felt the same way 20-years ago that you were satisfied with your sound quality then and everybody who disagreed was silly. If so, maybe you were silly. Maybe still.
Understood. There are two basic issues constantly bandied about here, sometimes interchangably:
#1) Assuming the right recording, does the system reproduce sound like the original event?
#2) I made a change to the system does it change the sound?
Regarding #1, in almost all reasonably good systems it is largely a speaker and room acoustics issue.
Regarding #2, If test equipment won't see it, and AB testing obscures it, and no one can hear what is in other's brain, then there is no possible agreement or movement forward and discussions stagnate or degenerate into name calling. The time-honored attitude of "I'm sorry if you hearing sucks so badly you can't hear what I do" which pervades much of the amateur audio sphere is not productive, other than for that persons weak ego. I'm glad that the name calling here is of a higher caliber.
A route forward may be to hear from people who are claiming differences/problems of what they are hearing in standardized descriptive language. This is exactly how line technicians and engineers in an audio plant or studio have to diagnose problems with equipment: an operator or QC person uneducated in circuitry or equipment says they are hearing something wrong and try to describe it to an engineer who is tasked with reinterpreting that into a possible technical problem to address. We educated our operators and QC people to use standard terms to describe sonic flaws, since they had to write reject tickets for technicians to follow when troubleshooting. And even if a clicking due to a capstan bearing was written as: "clikin capsum baron" (true story!) the critical data was delivered. Perhaps that is where we should put effort so those who hear differences can communicate them to those of you who are the brilliant electronic minds, who then can see through the verbiage to a kernel of the problem. Bringing it closer to my current experience, when I work on a problem in a studio or production line, it is usually a recording engineer or DJ who discovers and describes it to me, but it is my job as resident fool/audio engineer to figure out the root cause.
And those of you who have the engineering chops to design and diagnose audio circuits and who also hear differences between components shouldn't feel good about that situation until the cause is determined. That should be the focus, the engineering effort at that point should go into test creation to suss out the difference. It is confusing to hear someone who designed a circuit not know why what they made does what it does.
Perhaps never the twain shall meet? Nevertheless great strides have been made in audio over the last 100 years, 10 years even and it is exciting to hear how great the reproduction of music can be these days...
Another boring $0.02 worth...where's my NEIPA?
Howie
Good input..... a lot for .02 $. In regards to #1.... There are a few places to start if we (some of us extreamists) want accuracy and that is a flat frequency response for one. And the room-speaker pretty much wrecks that for us the way most listen now. So, we can listen instead in the near-field etc. As I recently pointed out. Then there is distortion... not -130 but several percent typically from drivers.
We can work on that also. Just doing those two things alone would move us very far along.
Regarding detectable differences … do the above and then lower levels of ?? could be detectable than they are now.
The only one we can easily all do is listen in the near field with speakers designed for near-field monitoring. …. for those (radical extremists) who want to hear the sound of the performance over the sound of the room.
THx-RNMarsh
We can work on that also. Just doing those two things alone would move us very far along.
Regarding detectable differences … do the above and then lower levels of ?? could be detectable than they are now.
The only one we can easily all do is listen in the near field with speakers designed for near-field monitoring. …. for those (radical extremists) who want to hear the sound of the performance over the sound of the room.
THx-RNMarsh
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Snap...I second that, do all my critical listening using Tannoy dual concentrics in nearfield or IEMs. Are they flat response? Only my hairdresser knows for sure...(old people will get that one...)
GN
Howie
Hi Richard,
It would be better if you could borrow one from a member in the USA. The costs associated with crossing the border are very high. That and I use this instrument almost every single day. It is my main piece of gear for measuring distortion and for seeing what is lurking in the output of some devices.
With it I was able to prove to myself that by modifying the power supply in a preamp, a lot of low level garbage was eradicated. I wasn't prepared to see that a lot of other, non-120 Hz stuff was also removed.
I would love to find out your opinion of the RTX unit. I'm hoping that someone closer can let you test it. If they are close enough, they could even drop it off.
As far as signals below -130 dBV are concerned, we see this by using the averaging function in ARTA. I know you can't trust the absolute level d own this low, but you can compare devices easily and accurately enough. If you get a chance to work with one I think your attitude towards it might change. I can also state that it sounds pretty good.
-Chris
It would be better if you could borrow one from a member in the USA. The costs associated with crossing the border are very high. That and I use this instrument almost every single day. It is my main piece of gear for measuring distortion and for seeing what is lurking in the output of some devices.
With it I was able to prove to myself that by modifying the power supply in a preamp, a lot of low level garbage was eradicated. I wasn't prepared to see that a lot of other, non-120 Hz stuff was also removed.
I would love to find out your opinion of the RTX unit. I'm hoping that someone closer can let you test it. If they are close enough, they could even drop it off.
As far as signals below -130 dBV are concerned, we see this by using the averaging function in ARTA. I know you can't trust the absolute level d own this low, but you can compare devices easily and accurately enough. If you get a chance to work with one I think your attitude towards it might change. I can also state that it sounds pretty good.
-Chris
No Bill, you are wrong!
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I tried for 'Sofa' for the youngest but for some strange reason SWMBO didn't like that
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