I'm not defending anything. Just correcting the inaccuracies in your posts.
I was into power cords 20 years ago. I even made a DIY one (madness, no safety rating or anything). They do not help. You can have an obsolutely horrible mains signal and the power supply in your DAC or amp will smooth it.
But thank you for bringing up power cords as it truly highlights how easy it is for anyone to fall into these psychological traps.
Please watch this, I think it will help:
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Clipping on intersample overs is a unique case. I'm not interested in that here. I am interested in intersample overs but I don't think they are what is affecting people's view on DACs sounding different. There are people here saying changing caps etc and power cords is changing the sound of their DACs. It's madness.
Its been done. There are things called Thresholds, which are estimates of an average value for a population of humans. IOW, not everyone hears exactly the same way or with same acuity. If we assume the there is some type of bell curve distribution of ability to hear distortion then a threshold is an estimate of the center of that curve. There are various hearing thresholds. Pick up a book on the subject of psychoacoustics if you want to dive into the details.
Does that matter? I've had various sound systems over the years. I'm wondering if you're one of those people who think you need a very expensive system to hear differences?
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It's extremely difficult to do in a way where everyone is happy with the procedure. If it wasn't it would have been done many times already. Part of the reason imo is there really are no differences a lot of the time so people tend to make up excuses as to why the double blind test isn't fair.
It can be madness, but sometimes it isn't. There are reasons caps can sound different. For one thing electrolytic caps can produce 1/f noise due to leakage currents. There may also be frequency and voltage dependency for ESR. For people who don't know about such physical effects, there is often a tendency to jump to a conclusion that the listener is imaging some difference that isn't real. Jumping to conclusions is another type of psychological error people can make.
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Today I notice RF to be around everywhere and it varies in time. I fight it with simple methods but do not always succeed. Mains is covered though.
When my Internet router recently became unreliable I got a new one with pretty recent wireless protocols. I can hear in my chain that its wireless transmitter is enabled or disabled 🙂
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People may make up excuses, but sometimes blind tests are unfair. The reasons why are well known, and the issues can be mitigated by knowledgeable sensory scientists. However, amateurs often don't know much about proper sensory testing.
@Logon, you brought to this thread a lot of bickering. You leach on any semantics in any way open to twisted interpretation, while any reasonable person would understand what was claimed.
It was like that with “That signal tells everything about the "sound" of the device „ (you didn't note that bohrok2610 has put quotes around word sound, and that this translates as „ DAC output signal contains absolutely all information that can be related to sound”.
Now you made up that I claimed that „cables do not affect signal” while I said that there will be no (audible) influence on sound and this is not presumption but knowledge from practice.
I see your note about „people that just learned to use measuring instrument” as hefty derision. Those people learned a lot more and their opinion and conclusions come from understanding what measurements actually mean.
Anyway, it is actually arrogant from you to imply that someone is presumptuous, have tunnel vision on the matter, and is arrogant as a cherry on the top. What a great invitation to a successful discussion.
Have a warm welcome to my absolute ignore list. 🙂
It was like that with “That signal tells everything about the "sound" of the device „ (you didn't note that bohrok2610 has put quotes around word sound, and that this translates as „ DAC output signal contains absolutely all information that can be related to sound”.
Now you made up that I claimed that „cables do not affect signal” while I said that there will be no (audible) influence on sound and this is not presumption but knowledge from practice.
I see your note about „people that just learned to use measuring instrument” as hefty derision. Those people learned a lot more and their opinion and conclusions come from understanding what measurements actually mean.
Anyway, it is actually arrogant from you to imply that someone is presumptuous, have tunnel vision on the matter, and is arrogant as a cherry on the top. What a great invitation to a successful discussion.
Have a warm welcome to my absolute ignore list. 🙂
The question in the thread title is: 'can DACs sound different if they both measure well?' The question in the poll is similar, but with if replaced with of.
There is nothing about capacitors or power cords in either question. If you want to know whether people believe that changing power cords can change the sound of a DAC without changing the results of the usual performance measurements, you should have asked that instead.
If you want to know whether people can think they hear differences without actually hearing any, that's yet another question. One I would answer with yes, by the way.
If you want to know whether people believe that the large differences that some people think they hear between DACs are due to some technical difference that doesn't show up in the usual measurements, that is another question again.
So, on one place you argue that the poor phase response of loudspeakers is likely to make phase noise inaudible (which shows you have no idea what phase noise means), at another place you question whether it makes any difference what sound system you use. Some loudspeakers have near-perfect phase response and when you listen through headphones, the room is also out of the equation.
I would argue if a DAC is clipping intersample overs it doesn't measure well for intersample overs. So now that we've taken care of that obsession...
...There are clearly people who do believe changing caps and adding power supplies etc help improve the sound. people in this thread have said so, and some DACs even come with power supply upgrades. So this is entirely relevant as some people are saying they can hear the difference these things make.
The power suppy of the output stage powers analog stuff. Of course differences in its quality can be noticed. Inject garbage into clean supply lines and check what happens.
An audio magazine here said: “a device is as good as its power supply”. There is truth in that.
Just try a DAC with its SMPS wall wart and then with a cheap linear PSU. Simple test, quick results. Less debate and time than this thread takes.
An audio magazine here said: “a device is as good as its power supply”. There is truth in that.
Just try a DAC with its SMPS wall wart and then with a cheap linear PSU. Simple test, quick results. Less debate and time than this thread takes.
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That's the other problem with this thread: no one knows what the hell 'measures well' means. Does it mean good results on standard measurements like SINAD and noise floor, are unusual tests like intersample overshoot tests to be included, or tests on pre-echoes? Very few DACs pass intersample overshoot tests, by the way.
What you see or interpret is just in the mutual "non-empathy" that characterizes our "conversations", it is not the first time and perhaps it will be the last, but in my opinion the true object of your response lies first of all in this, and you know what I mean.
But the personalisms end here, at least for me: just a palpable and mutual "non-empathy" and that's it.
However, what I also see is that you often try to bring your answers to a personal level with me with inappropriate and frontal judgments that even if they gain someone's sympathy do not push you on the side of being right and they certainly don't gain my sympathy.
Anyway, just as you have done in the past with me, I too sometimes feel like replying to your posts with which I do not agree at all.
My vision of the world is relative to how little we know as human race / mankind and how much we still have to discover, so I was not referring to you personally about the learned use of a measurement instrument, but it was a metaphor that descrbe my personal vision of a part of the world, if you felt involved it is all and only your stuff and ego, I guess.
(If you want) Please also know that, due to personal cultural background, since my scientific world pertains to Medicine and the (correct) use of drugs, I do not like absolute and categorical statements.
Just so you know, in no scientific research published in JAMA or The Lancet (just to give an example of medical journals of a certain prestige and with a high impact factor) would any researcher ever dream of stating: "This drug cures this symptom", or "This symptom is caused by this risk exposure factor".
In the cultural background I come from, the use of the the conditional form of "seem" verb is a strict rule and it is always and only used, to demonstrate that one cannot be certain of what is stated today, and that what we will know tomorrow could completely reshuffle the cards.
For the reasons mentioned above, and to avoid making oneself ridiculous in front of the scientific world, no researcher states such a thing in that way, but always and only uses the conditional form of "seem" verb.
"This drug would seem to cure this symptom, or this symptom would seem to be caused by this exposure factor".
For the reasons mentioned above, I'm led to reply when I read categorical statements on scientific topics.
No researcher would risk appearing incorrect in front of other researchers by making categorical statements.
Because science is evolving and we must be humble about the unknown.
Nothing of personal.
You sure have a talent to seem unsympathetic combined with a seemingly too large ego when saying personal things not meant personally. That is what it seems to be anyway. Nothing personal of course.
Tombo56 shares actual things to build in a quite pleasant way. He supports his designs and accepts errors he made. His PCB designs are world famous and never rectangular. He gives away the gerbers so we can benefit and build devices. That is contributing and deserves something better than a condescending tone.
Tombo56 shares actual things to build in a quite pleasant way. He supports his designs and accepts errors he made. His PCB designs are world famous and never rectangular. He gives away the gerbers so we can benefit and build devices. That is contributing and deserves something better than a condescending tone.
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