John Curl's Blowtorch preamplifier part III

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Maybe undithered truncated 8-bit sound file would sound most "dynamic" to some. I remember the first 8-bit parallel PC DACs driven from LPT1 port 😀. I made one for my son, decades ago, how happy he was! 😀

SW, even I can hear it in Max's files.

He may be adding some "natural" dither by putting a noisy component into the chain. The noise level is quite high and it may be masking those harsh transitions in his 16-bit undithered files.
 
What Max/Dan is doing to the audio can at best make rather poor recordings sound better, much like Aural Exciter can do.
Take a closer listen to lateral and depth positional accuracy and you will find better 'focus', an Aural Exciter does quite the opposite.

A lack of dither on the original track in this case appears to be due to choice of source material. Too late to add dither now, since truncation has already occurred.
Yes, hence my questions of Pavel, what the hell is dithering whilst upscaling, and/or why the hell would you add dither which is noise (in this case undefined) to an existing recording ???. Adding noise just adds noise, the original 16bit recording can't magically gain 'more information' by upscaling FFS.

Dan needs to find another source file to work with or listeners will have to accept the original recording as it is.
Yes. It all boils down to noise floor and Philips/Sony would have you believe -96dB NF is more than adequate and it is when recordings are gain structured correctly. The only way to hear quantisation noise during fades is to crank the gain by 60dB or more over normal operating levels, at normal operating levels this fade quantisation noise is essentially inaudible in normal domestic environment.

Mark, I will find some native 24bit recordings and repeat the process, and in this case there should be no quantisation 'identifiers'.

Pavel, you need to inform us of which bits of the recordings and your system gain settings used while you performed the Foobar ABX test.......if you were 'cheating' to prove your point about fade out quantisation noise identification just say so, it certainly seems that this is the case.

Dan.

He may be adding some "natural" dither by putting a noisy component into the chain. The noise level is quite high and it may be masking those harsh transitions in his 16-bit undithered files.
I did state at the outset that the USB SC is relatively noisy, RMAA summary given and DAW channel meters confirm this. I will find 24bit source files and repeat experiment.

Clearly you don't understand, a properly dithered 16 bit recording never has silence as an endless string of zeros as PMA's plot showed. If your 16 bit files were recorded without dither they can never be fixed all the very low level information is lost or distorted.
Finally, yes. There is no way to upscale a 16bit file without adding information, and Pavel is calling me stupid because my conversion methods do not add information.

I suspect Jello would prefer it that way.
What Would Jello Do?
 
I don't know about that, but I have met folks that can hear the artifacts without turning down the volume. You mentioned something about reducing the volume of the original file, doing this without dither would degrade the fidelity even more.
I mentioned attenuation by 50% ideally, when in 24bit DAW this should not cause damage but does bring the effective noise floor up, sure.

I have the shirt 🙂
Nice.
 
I mentioned attenuation by 50% ideally, when in 24bit DAW this should not cause damage but does bring the effective noise floor up, sure.

Then it would be hard to explain the 16bit LSB's still being visible in the data. At 24bits (16bits padded with 8 zeros) even a simple right shift would create levels in between. If you divide by two in 16bit mode and then just make it a 24bit result this will further damage the file.
 
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Maybe undithered truncated 8-bit sound file would sound most "dynamic" to some. I remember the first 8-bit parallel PC DACs driven from LPT1 port 😀. I made one for my son, decades ago, how happy he was! 😀

SW, even I can hear it in Max's files.

I made an 8 bit AD DA card for an Apple II in 1982, thereabouts. It sounded hilareously bad, even with the tightest machine language programming, there just wasn't the speed. Or the memory. A 10 MB hard drive was professional equipment at that time. But...a fun project, and I could record a couple of spoken words, and play them back intelligibly. Sort of.
 
Interesting, did you make the cone yourself? You may like this thread
OmniDirectional - work in progress

Yes they were lathe turned from 100+ year old locust logs (had been downed for 100yrs) 10” diameter on a 45’. One up top, put one under the downfiring sub (realize now it didn’t do much) and even put one behind the drivers inide the sealed 1 cf box’s to reduce back bounce. They sounded good but would have been much better if I knew then as much as I know now!

Maybe I’ll revisit that design someday.

On a side note regarding the comments from the gallery about liking 8bit crappy sound. just a disclaimer..........if I’m comparing sounds of certain files it’s just that, a comparison of those files....when I say it’s ‘dynamic’ i’m not saying it’s the end all in dynamics but that it is the more dynamic of the two. Just wanted to make that clear. 😎

Dan, how about explaining these false dynamics a little further?

As someone who has studied and recorded a lot of bluegrass fiddle (basically the same style) I can tell you that 01 sounds the most realistic of those recordings. If you ever heard that style up close and personal it’d be easier to understand........it has many odd (compared to classical violin) things going on.
 
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Am I the only one who is shocked ("electrocuted" even?) by changing word usage? What's most surprising to me is how people drop the previous usage of a word and pick up its current usage, seemingly forgetting there was a previous usage, or acting like the previous usage never existed. Or perhaps these people are so young they never knew the earlier meaning.

Maybe it's just me, when first I see a new word usage I just find it annoying that the person is using the word wrong. I recall as a child in the 1960s, hearing someone call a battery-powered hand-held radio a "transistor" and being annoyed, thinking "no, transistors are the parts inside it that make it operate, it's not the name, it's a transistor RADIO!" Only later as an adult did I read that people back then used the word transistor as a colloquial name for the thing.

CDs (the "original" digital consumer music format) is only from the 1980s (and I recall the 1970s hifi magazine articles "won't music reproduction be wonderful when we get digital"), but after downloads became popular (I suppose with iTunes), the word "digital" in reference to music began to ONLY apply to downloaded files, and NOT to CDs. I suppose it being a physical format, people see it as something other than digital, but I don't know what. Dunno where to get a new stylus for my CD player...

Posts from a recent thread:
...My suggestion is to follow the same approach and build your library from CDs, as opposed to waiting until titles are available in digital format.

...Many CD's are as 'cheap as chips' second hand, probably less than you would pay for a digital copy ...
 
Dan, how about explaining these false dynamics a little further?
Sure, when I say false dynamics I mean dynamic emphasises that don't belong. This is usually transient in nature and is momentary coming together of resonances, harmonics and phases that causes unnatural 'peaking' in loudness and timbre. Natural sounds like bird sounds are really good at showing this up in playback systems with glaring amplitude 'peaks' that don't really show up in sinewave sweeps.

As someone who has studied and recorded a lot of bluegrass fiddle (basically the same style) I can tell you that 01 sounds the most realistic of those recordings. If you ever heard that style up close and personal it’d be easier to understand........it has many odd (compared to classical violin) things going on.
Ok, I grew up hearing a Jacobus Stainer Lion Head Violin 1669 that has a big clear and mellow/fat tone, quite unlike most other violins and certainly different to fiddles. (The YT sound is higher than my mother's example but has similar 'purity'). The 'edgy/barky' sound of the fiddle in the 78 recording sounds slightly 'wrong' to my internal reference, and I haven't heard a fiddle up close like you have so my ears are not expecting it. Shellac recordings tend to emphasise this mids 'peakiness' and according to my experiments this is somewhat shellac formulation dependent, vinyl is similarly formulation dependent and imparts a tone according to maker and year/era. Do you have any recordings you can Dropbox for an educational listen ?.

Dan.

Edit: Wikipedia
 
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Ok I get it...... like a overshoot on a leading edge transient?

Edgy and barky is a perfect description of how that style sounds!

My collection of bluegrass recordings I made are all on cd in storage (we’re building a new house....almost done!) and I don’t have a way to load them to files right now even if I could find them......but I’m sure I can find a decent YT facsimile.

I promise I’ll get some of my recordings on here eventually!
 
It is hard to get a word in, edgewise, here, these recent years. I still make new and improved designs. It is just that my input would mostly be ignored and even worse, ridiculed by those who know less about audio design than I do.
I am sure plenty of us would like to hear more of what you have been developing, so just go ahead and say it.
No, unfortunately not much. That’s pretty much it. P.S. Oooops... I believe Bybee Quantum Purifiers were not mentioned. What a loss for the posterity.
So rude and insulting as is so usual from you, go ahead please tell us all about your landmark designs, the audio gear you have designed and what market penetration it has achieved. Your amplifier design that you so proudly chronicle has fatal problems like -
It was unanimous that this amp is the most unforgiven piece of equipment that was ever heard. Everything, the slightest noise in the recording, background foot stomps during live performances, everything that was (probably) not intended to be listened at is there in the speakers. If this is good or bad, it is questionable. Two of the subjects characterized this behaviour as "tiresome", "distracting", "aggressive", the other two subjects mentioned "extremely detailed", "precise" and "very involving".
Bruno Putzeys describes exactly this sound as common and all wrong, long term unlistenable and POS. See here for all the glowing gushing descriptions one expects to see in advertising, exactly the nonsense you accuse others of. I am sure we would like to hear of your pioneering efforts, please go ahead and enlighten us, don't be shy.

Dan.

Ok I get it...... like a overshoot on a leading edge transient?
Yeah, you got it. This 'detail' sounds impressive to many in the Hi-Fi store but when home soon wears thin especially when listening to recordings that are 'edgy' in the first case. This becomes tinnitus/ear bleeding inducing and causes one's hearing to 'shut down'.....I suspect many enthusiast here suffer this issue, and is one reason I eschew lead and lead/silver containing solder joints, especially in speakers and drivers.

I promise I’ll get some of my recordings on here eventually!
Cool, I look forward to that.

Dan.
 
go ahead please tell us all about your landmark designs, the audio gear you have designed and what market penetration it has achieved.

So your metric for success in audio design is "the market penetration". Great metric for a goop sales person, but I'm afraid we don't play in the same league.

Regarding quoting from my web site, I'm tired explaining how those audition impressions were collected and how much I rely on them. I just did it in this thread, a week ago: https://www.diyaudio.com/forums/the...wtorch-preamplifier-iii-2588.html#post5859631
 
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So your metric for success in audio design is "the market penetration". Great metric for a goop sales person, but I'm afraid we don't play in the same league.
So just what league do you play in, tell us more about what audio products you have designed that are in peoples homes. Like I said don't be shy, I'm genuinely interested as I am sure many others are.
Regarding quoting from my web site, I'm tired explaining how those audition impressions were collected and how much I rely on them. I just did it in this thread a couple of weeks ago.
Oh I missed that, got any post # so I can take a look ?.
 
So just what league do you play in, tell us more about what audio products you have designed that are in peoples homes.
Like I said don't be shy, I'm genuinely interested as I am sure many others are.
Oh I missed that, got any post # so I can take a look ?.

Are you on goop or something? The link was clear.

I'm playing in the DIY audio engineering league, therefore I'm an amateur here, without any plan or intention to penetrate peoples home, other than hopefully by disseminating some knowledge and common sense, rather than bullshitting them with Quantum Purifiers, magic goop, audio grade cables, Shakti pebbles, CD green markers, myrtle block risers, and the kind. I'll leave the latter in your trustful hands, please don't expect from me anything but a good dose of kicks in a shadowy place, when the BS meter pegs on red.
 
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