Well that’s the thing......I don’t believe it only belongs to me, as in a figment of my imagination.
It’s happened enough times to ‘know’ there’s something more to it.
OK. I don't think I have ever had that. Had a couple of 'That's unexpected' but nothing from the system. And both of those were intriguing imaging effects that I didn't believe possible. In one there was music coming from what seemed to be 30 feet behind the wall of the room (choral recording). In the other I was hearing musicians 6' to the right and 4' behind the right hand speaker. I bought the speakers as, innacurate though they might be I liked that sort of effect. But As I have aged (sadly not matured yet 😛) I have seperated the hobby of tinkering with the system and the pleasure of listening. I spent too many years being an idiot and only listening to music on the main system.
Sabre dacs are complicated. The data sheets are sparse and locked down under NDA. Power supplies, output stage, register settings, clocking, DSD or PCM, external interpolation filtering, etc., are all things to look at and all have audible effects. At least they do for some listeners. Unfortunately, the NDA makes it hard to discuss some of what might be useful to know. Keeps competitors from coming out with copy dacs, but makes development progress harder for designers. So far, most people seem to initially assume the output stage is what could use improvement. That is, until they try it and find it didn't help as much as they expected.
Yes the soundstage or unexpected (like oh wow that’s cool) is not what I’m getting at.
It’s below consciousness if that makes any sense?
Awesome performance by the master, his confident accidentals really make it rise above merely technically great! I have to say the flutter was driving me a bit mad in places...not that it diminished my enjoyment of Horowitz...it's probably more a reflection of having spent a decade in the cassette replication industry and years of modding and tweaking Naks...as many have said here, once you learn to hear something it is hard to unhear it!
Thanks for the link,
Howie
For what it is worth, I am in the process of preparing for the restoration of three Edison phonographs and a collection of one hundred wax cylinders of music that pre-date the First World War. These are completely mechanical recordings. It will be interesting for me to see how my perspective upon audio perception and emotional engagement with music will change during this project.
But first, I have to restore the phonographs before being able to listen to the music ........ and what incredible delights are in store for me, that is:- live recordings from The Belle Epoch before the age of electricity.
And so I continue to listen to this discussion in deference to my disclaimer that ‘In the Game of Audio, I have no skin other than to be one of the little people who listens to music on a homemade hand built sound system of questionable fidelity ........ so don’t beat me up’.
ToS
The 5% population.
For example, in sighted listening, long time ago when i knew less, I found that TL072 was more musical than many higher performance opamps, but i didn't know how. Only with FoobarABX i could understand how it can be musical. It's the 'timbre', the relative timing between close frequencies.
I can easily setup a 'listening test' (for myself as a way to tune my system) where i dial in the phase and i could hear the difference in certain recording. I choose the sound of a drum stick hitting the 'rim'. There should be HF tail at the end of the LF. This HF tail can be inexist (the sound is cold, fatiguing), short period (sharp) or longer. I used Mark Knoppfler's Brothers In Arms here: YouTube
It makes sense, but I think that is more of a pleasure response tickling the dopamine receptors.
Would be interesting to see what a run through Plangent or similar SW could do for it.
Nice. There is a lot of stuff on playing these back on the web. It is worth considering putting a modern tonearm on one of them if you are feeling really brave then you can really mess around 😀
Great, that's honest
I would put it another way - it's not any specific wow effect that is noticeable but rather something that affects the whole presentation - when one finds that the sound of music that you have listened to many times before just grabs your attention more, is more interesting to listen to, then your system is getting a lot of things right in playback & your auditory system is registering it.
The auditory system is no longer getting (or is getting fewer) confusing cues in the playback sound so it can relax more into a more relaxed enjoyment of the music. My simple & general explanation of this is that we have finite processing pool of energy that is shared among all the brain processes - when one process can do it's job more efficiently & as a result release some energy back into the pool, the higher cognitive processes can be more engaged in enjoying the playback. I know this is a very general explanation but it's how I experience it.
it's a bit like trying to hear a lecture/poetry reading in a very reverberant room - your attempts to make sense of the words effects your ability to absorb the message & have higher level thinking about what's being said
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Probably
Did you not 'discover' this in sighted listening before using FoobarABX to confirm it or how did you discover this with FoobarABX? Is it the fast A/B switching that is the part which revealed it or something else?
To be honest, I am not really all that interested in the phonographs as such, it is the music contained within the wax cylinders that intrigues me, and I shall go to whatever lengths are necessary to extract whatever is there.
So yes, playback using a modern tone arm is a definite maybe. As these are mechanical recordings captured by horn microphones, they should sound pretty darn good played back through my horn speaker sound system. It is a major project though, and I am still sweating the details before I begin. 😱
ToS
Well you have 3 so one can be with horn, one with a mic shoved into the diaphragm outlet and one with a tonearm 😀
I have 9 different DACs at Home. Including Sabres. Some are older ones inside 2 CD players, DAT, Minidisk player, DCX24-96.
Thanks for the compliment, but I never pretended to have any kind of golden ears. More than this, I indicated in this thread my old ears are cutting at 12KHz nowadays. And that, strangely, i enjoyed-it, experiencing a more convincing and natural reproduction without all those treble distortions.
May-be, if something is different between us it should be:
- My long Hours during so many years in recording studios, listening on each an every details of a lot of instruments across a lot of various listening systems in a way you probably never experienced. IE culture.
- The fact that, as the opposite of you, I never "assure" a lot of things in audio. Just sharing my personal listening impressions in mostly an interrogative form.
Guru ? Me ? I'm not even a believer !
About the value of my "subjective impressions", I was paid for them. Go figure. That don't give-me any added insurance about their absolute value. Anyway, I don't pretend nothing. I just asked a question, noticing, *at my great surprise* both things in my home system.
- That my last DACs (2 Sabre and the one (witch is ?) in my (poor) KEF 50LS wireless ) sounded a lot more detailed and sharp than all my previous ones. That, first delighted me and, in the long run, tended to fatigue me.
- That those last DACs were revelling details in my own masters copies that i had never heard such a way in the studio where i did the mixing.
Please, note that I have not a real idea of where is the truth. It is possible that the DACs used at this time in the monitoring system loosed details. While i'm not so sure, as I mixed most of them in an analog desk, and we always compare direct/recorded sound and, once we are sure that there is no issue, we always mix in direct (real time), so no DACs involved. But, memory, feelings ... how to be sure ?
About the importance of the analog devices after the DAC, among other things, you preach a convinced. I used to change the ICs in all my personal gear according to some preferences, and did the same in the studios I had in charge.
And, at the early beginning of digital, I used to demonstrate (first to myself) that they had more impact on the sound than the DAC itself, using 3 dacs for this demonstration. Two different sounding DACs with the same analog output stages, plus one of the two with the original ICs. Note please that analog IC had made such a progress, in the last decades, that, omho, the differences between them tend to be now near anecdotic.
To conclude, I'm not at all an expert in digital design. Just a guy who loves music, who never buy high end 'hype' products because I'm not a fashion victim, they are too expensive and don't bring (or pretend to bring) necessary what i'm looking at, and try to get the most enjoyable system to listen to music in my home, for less added money as possible.
I would like to add that I will consider all your subjective advices and personal listening impressions with attention. But *Never* when they are in the style of "PCM1704 is not missing any detail, I assure you". Because, in this matter, nobody can assure NOTHING. (Who pretend to be a guru ?)
That may very well be part of the response but the cause or trigger is what I’m after.
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