Your kidding now aren't you? The tax payers at large care about about the audibility of DAC artifacts and why they can't get a "good" DAC for $50?
No, you don't have to take my word for anything. I can see the problem you have with that, and I don't blame you.
What I can do is invite visits by skeptics (and it would be fine if they want to bring their own test gear, up to them). Even offered to buy DPH a plane ticket.
By the same token, as much weight as I put in most truly scientific research, I cannot put a lot of the old audibility perceptual testing into the category of reliable scientific research. Some of it could possibly be reasonably accurate, but I have more than sufficient reason on my part to find some of it sorely lacking. My opinion only. Come here for a visit, and you just might leave more in agreement than you may imagine now.
Thanks, but no. This is to protect your feelings and save you some expenses, since you won’t have any way to eliminate my negative, sceptical, close minded, half deaf, bias.
Ironic, one of the followup recommendations was how to treat your LP's with WD40. I don't get to the left coast much anymore or I would gladly take you up on it. I view the DAC fussiness as something on the audiophile spectrum just like Romy the cat and Arthur Salvatore. I can't guarantee much interest if it's not about the music first. Listening for the same high hat stroke at 3:08 over and over is not my thing. FM Einheit OTOH maybe.
BTW did you see the ESS based DAC from China at ~$1100. Is that artifact that they eliminated one of those things you are bothered by?
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It's definitely about the music, but to understand what one is hearing that makes one dac sound better than another sometimes takes some focused attention at first. Then it's more like, "Oh, I see what is making it sound better."
Also, some people complain about listening fatigue with S-D dacs, but they say they don't know why. Closer examination of things like cymbal strikes can be useful for focusing conscious awareness on some of the why behind the compliant.
EDIT: Don't know which ESS dac from China you are referring to. Most of them are not very well made.
Just inviting a few skeptical, yet professional and well informed engineers over for some listening to different dacs, different dac settings and configurations, etc. Interpolation filters, jitter, power supplies, and so on. Things that by the conventional view should be too small to be audible. I might even pick up a dac with specifications so good that it should be impossible to hear any difference between it and some other dacs here. I wouldn't waste my money on one of those unless maybe it was just to show someone why I wouldn't normally buy one.
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Don't be nasty, engine oil and snake oil have something in common, isn't it?
He wasn't. I fully admit that my car feels smoother after an oil change (done by me or garage). I do listen to my engine and can spot gross issues (tappet sounds change if the dipstick is down more than 0.5litre). But I know that I know the oil has been changed so expect it .
Just been serviced and the garage fixed a really noisy vibration which sounded like a loose heat shield somewhere. Turned out to be a bit of foam had expired in the air inlet. As the vibration was between 1600 and 1800 RPM is was very annoying. Now smooth as a diesel again.
I will admit to being a little odd as a car owner. Not many who heel and toe a diesel, but it does work.
.Just been serviced and the garage fixed a really noisy vibration which sounded like a loose heat shield somewhere. Turned out to be a bit of foam had expired in the air inlet. As the vibration was between 1600 and 1800 RPM is was very annoying. Now smooth as a diesel again
.I will admit to being a little odd as a car owner. Not many who heel and toe a diesel, but it does work.
Just inviting a few skeptical, yet professional and well informed engineers over for some listening to different dacs, different dac settings and configurations, etc. Interpolation filters, jitter, power supplies, and so on. Things that by the conventional view should be too small to be audible. I might even pick up a dac with specifications so good that it should be impossible to hear any difference between it and some other dacs here. I wouldn't waste my money on one of those unless maybe it was just to show someone why I wouldn't normally buy one.
Just make sure not to invite any musicians or music lovers
Thing is, at a live concert, I’m certainly not looking out for the high hat stroke at 3:08 or any other specific sound micro-detail.
That does not mean I accept crappy sound, but at the end of the day, it has to move you emotionally and the specific stuff going on at 3:08 doesn’t qualify, so then one is clearly not in it for the music are they?
That does not mean I accept crappy sound, but at the end of the day, it has to move you emotionally and the specific stuff going on at 3:08 doesn’t qualify, so then one is clearly not in it for the music are they?
Scott,
Okay, I see what you are referring to. One with USB goes for US$1,269.00 at the Gustard online store. Looks like the best dac to come out of China yet, and might potentially sound as good or better than Benchmark DAC-3. Maybe. Don't want to buy one to find out, but it looks like they are finally trying to do something along the lines of what Benchmark did first, Crane Song second, and now its Gustard (that I am aware of). My own diy dac efforts have led in a similar direction, mainly I am just much slower at getting things done in my little retirement hobby. I use an external ASRC, external clock management (for division and delay), working on an external interpolation filter. The party I am trying to assist in developing a low cost commercial dac wants to clean up some loose ends compared with my Frankenstein prototype, and maybe make a few improvements. Just don't have the filter done, but I see that other diy people are looking at the new Sharc chips as an alternative to FPGA for that. Probably Sharc is easier to program.
The other dac I was thinking of that measures quite well is one that was probably designed to measure well and sound the best they could do for $200 - $300. Which is to say, it probably won't sound very good. They usually use wall wart power supplies and rather minimal SMPS implementations that leave audible low level switching noise. The noise from cheap SMPS is probably audible because of its similarity to high order HD (ugly and annoying) rather than because it measures very high.
Okay, I see what you are referring to. One with USB goes for US$1,269.00 at the Gustard online store. Looks like the best dac to come out of China yet, and might potentially sound as good or better than Benchmark DAC-3. Maybe. Don't want to buy one to find out, but it looks like they are finally trying to do something along the lines of what Benchmark did first, Crane Song second, and now its Gustard (that I am aware of). My own diy dac efforts have led in a similar direction, mainly I am just much slower at getting things done in my little retirement hobby. I use an external ASRC, external clock management (for division and delay), working on an external interpolation filter. The party I am trying to assist in developing a low cost commercial dac wants to clean up some loose ends compared with my Frankenstein prototype, and maybe make a few improvements. Just don't have the filter done, but I see that other diy people are looking at the new Sharc chips as an alternative to FPGA for that. Probably Sharc is easier to program.
The other dac I was thinking of that measures quite well is one that was probably designed to measure well and sound the best they could do for $200 - $300. Which is to say, it probably won't sound very good. They usually use wall wart power supplies and rather minimal SMPS implementations that leave audible low level switching noise. The noise from cheap SMPS is probably audible because of its similarity to high order HD (ugly and annoying) rather than because it measures very high.
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Having spent several years (a long time ago) doing live sound, it is a very different thing than a quiet listening room in the speaker near field. People are not in a position to be able to hear a lot of the smaller flaws in a live situation, sometimes even pretty gross ones are not audible. Use the same system in a mastering room just to enjoy listening to music and it will sound pretty bad compared to the mastering sound system. Very different situations and circumstances.
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Oh, you probably are hearing it. More likely you just don't know exactly why reproduction sounds the way it does.
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