I suppose it is about the exchange starting ~here https://www.diyaudio.com/forums/digital-line-level/314935-es9038q2m-board-645.html#post6488917 (please correct me if I am wrong). If so, this exchange is yet another perfect example of what I just said above. Uncontrolled subjective opinions promoted to the rank of facts, followed by self victimizing when challenged.
I'll let others decide who insulted who in that exchange and its current follow-up and what you found "wanting"
.No, you are incorrect, again. You obviously don't register or acknowledge your own mistakes at all.
You stated in post 6432:
"Not the case for linear regulators, there is no performance metric that would justify burning extra power in a dummy load."
That was another unwise and incorrect sweeping statement that had not been fully researched to confirm whether it was correct, but was issued as if with authority and wisdom so as to undermine MarkW's preceding post. Bit of an own goal really, but you carried on regardless and oblivious, concentrating on undermining other people instead. Again no apology, just straight back onto the attack, this time I was going to be the target as I had had the courage and knowledge to correct you. You could not allow that to go unpunished.
I pointed out that you were wrong in post 6436 and in your response, post 6438, as usual you showed no humility. That was what I found "wanting". You are very fast to criticise others and unable to see your own failings.
It is very clear to everyone who has been insulting and cannot seem to stop doing it. For someone in their early 60's you are indeed remarkably childish and petty.
Some humility is needed. You are fooling nobody.
John
You stated in post 6432:
"Not the case for linear regulators, there is no performance metric that would justify burning extra power in a dummy load."
That was another unwise and incorrect sweeping statement that had not been fully researched to confirm whether it was correct, but was issued as if with authority and wisdom so as to undermine MarkW's preceding post. Bit of an own goal really, but you carried on regardless and oblivious, concentrating on undermining other people instead. Again no apology, just straight back onto the attack, this time I was going to be the target as I had had the courage and knowledge to correct you. You could not allow that to go unpunished.
I pointed out that you were wrong in post 6436 and in your response, post 6438, as usual you showed no humility. That was what I found "wanting". You are very fast to criticise others and unable to see your own failings.
It is very clear to everyone who has been insulting and cannot seem to stop doing it. For someone in their early 60's you are indeed remarkably childish and petty.
Some humility is needed. You are fooling nobody.
John
And yet you appear to champion DBT. That being the case you are no less guilty of audio exceptionalism than those you accuse, the notion being that in the case of audio a ritual of some type can somehow raise mere mortals to the status of test gear and that their word on the issue is definitive.
For the record, here's the whole exchange.
And it ended there. Now, please quote the exact point:
- Where I insulted you. You can use the "insult" definition in the Oxford or Merriam-Webster dictionaries.
- Why was my statement "that had not been fully researched to confirm whether it was correct" unwise and incorrect. You seem to invoke above the negative proof concept, which is a known logical fallacy.
- Where was my understanding "wanting".
- Why would "humility" be required in #6438, quoted above. I even acknowledged "some truth" in your statement, although totally unrelated to the topic under discussion.
- "For someone in their early 60's you are indeed remarkably childish and petty." Is this what you call an insult? Did I make anywhere comments regarding your age and character?
- And because you seem to miss the topic in this exchange, please provide evidence that loading a linear regulator with a dummy load may improve the sound, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. You have above a reasonable explanation regarding the alleged origin of this (yet another) audio fetish.
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In this thread there is a recommended board with a promising DAC chip (ES9038Q2M) but a miserable power supply (one poor AMS1117-3.3 powering everything except the Atmel Microcontroller and the O/A) and a similarly cheap (one dual PDIP O/A) for the output. Don't lose focus on the fact that all the ES9038Q2M supplies on this board are powered by one AMS1117-3.3. I pay about 1.52 cents each for those when I order parts online for hobby experiments.
Both the power supply and the output section grossly ignore the manufacturer's recommendations and are far below the recommended application notes.
I interpret the intended focus is to take a dirt cheap implementation of a promising chip and improve it so that it starts to get close to the actual capability of the ES9038Q2M.
I think it has little to do with "uncontrolled subjective opinions".
Dirt cheap power supply (AMS1117-3.3) and output section will quite factually degrade the ES9038Q2M performance. If I had the equipment and staff ESS has I am pretty sure the degradation from the implementation could be measured, documented and recreated by others using the same equipment and methods. If someone were to ask ESS to make a board with the ES9038Q2M, one AMS1117-3.3 and one NE5532 (and then measure and publish the results) I expect that they would refuse and say that it was completely absurd.
Also when someone copies and pastes (exactly) what the manufacturer datasheet says about a pin along with a link to the datasheet and page references it has absolutely nothing to do with "uncontrolled subjective opinions" or any such rubbish.
Is it too much to ask to get back to working on the ES9038Q2M this thread is about? Is it too much to ask those who wish to be abusive to simply please stop posting on diyAudio?
Both the power supply and the output section grossly ignore the manufacturer's recommendations and are far below the recommended application notes.
I interpret the intended focus is to take a dirt cheap implementation of a promising chip and improve it so that it starts to get close to the actual capability of the ES9038Q2M.
I think it has little to do with "uncontrolled subjective opinions".
Dirt cheap power supply (AMS1117-3.3) and output section will quite factually degrade the ES9038Q2M performance. If I had the equipment and staff ESS has I am pretty sure the degradation from the implementation could be measured, documented and recreated by others using the same equipment and methods. If someone were to ask ESS to make a board with the ES9038Q2M, one AMS1117-3.3 and one NE5532 (and then measure and publish the results) I expect that they would refuse and say that it was completely absurd.
Also when someone copies and pastes (exactly) what the manufacturer datasheet says about a pin along with a link to the datasheet and page references it has absolutely nothing to do with "uncontrolled subjective opinions" or any such rubbish.
Is it too much to ask to get back to working on the ES9038Q2M this thread is about? Is it too much to ask those who wish to be abusive to simply please stop posting on diyAudio?
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I'm afraid you would need think more about the DBT utility in audio. In it's simplest form, it is used to confirm (or even deny, if extended), with certain probabilities, that a subjective claim has any support in the physical reality, or it's simply a creation of the claimant brain.
In more complex DBT test plans, it is used to investigate if there is any support in the physical reality of a hypothesis like "A sounds better than B".
I'm afraid there is no other way to test the validity of any hypothesis that involves human sensory experiences. No DBT would be suggested here if the claimants would avoid sweeping generalizations and keep the claims personal. Nobody has the right of telling the next person what they do (or ought to) hear, at least without being, sooner or later, challenged.
You would of course note that DBT has a clear role in developments where subjective human sensory experiences are involved. Another case is when the huge number of variables would make any other testing method method impractical. In this case, the Central Limit Theorem is one of the mathematical foundations of DBT.
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No objections here, I would only humbly ask: how would you evaluate the distance to "the actual capability of the ES9038Q2M", all along the improvement work you are about to start with this crappy board?
First off I was perhaps spoiled by the AK4396 board that I bought earlier. (It seemed to start out much less crappy.) I was not expecting this one to start out sounding like it needed this much help. I suppose in hindsight I should have examined the photos and questioned the design more. However until I have at least implemented decent supplies and output section I will remain optimistic. Worst case I go back to the AK4396 which I am quite happy with. (If I were to just rely on the potential performance claimed on paper the ES9038Q2M should be a clear winner...)
Evaluation is difficult since I don't have the equipment, staff, money or time of ESS. I have tried to use an SB0490 to make measurements. That did reveal problems on the AK4396 (60 Hz power ripple in the output) and I was able to fix it. That also did reveal problems on a CS4398 board (significant distortion) but that board was beyond fixing. (I was able to push the distortion down by improving the power supply and grounding but only so far.)
I next built a 60 dB LNA to help measure and then improve power supplies. In the last two weeks I have experimented with a Zoom R24 multitrack audio recorder (for home recording studios) to improve my measurement capability. Also I have a Creative Professional (EMU 1820) on an ancient Vista machine which has a pretty good ADC and surrounding circuitry. Between the EMU, Zoom, SB0490 and Realtek they all are 24 bits and 96 or 192kHz. But they are all substantially different each yielding a different problem or weakness in my noise measurements. The SB0490, for example, has power line harmonics and several high frequency spurs. The Realtek has zero or almost zero power line harmonics but many more and higher high frequency spurs. The specifications of each (resolution, rate, SNR, DNR) say that all of them are "super great". All way past CD specs.
However I can not expect to be able to measure the true capability of the ES9038Q2M.
So then I can try to put a measured amount of reliance on datasheets, application notes, best practices and advice of others. (To augment what I can measure. But remember, this is a hobby. I don't expect to have the equipment or rigor of a profession. I am not heading a national program to land on Mars.)
I do listen to the various DACs and I have found the only meaningful method I have in my hobby "workshop" is to simultaneously run the input into two DACs and the outputs into one of my better amps and "ping-pong" back and forth between the two. (With everything else, including my ears, speakers, room, etc, as constant as possible.)
With the "ping-pong" I can play a track and portions of a track over and over and listen for the differences. Maybe one interesting example would be a cymbal with a slowly decaying clear, shimmering response. Another interesting example would be with double tracked vocals or guitar where the second track is lower in volume. I have noticed with my poorer equipment it can be harder to distinguish the two while with my best equipment I can distinguish the two tracks. Another interesting example would be when there are again double tracked vocals or an instrument where they are positioned (panned) differently in the mix. Can they be distinguished?
If I can't distinguish the two tracks with poor equipment but I can with good equipment is that really subjective? If the slowly decaying clear, shimmering response of a cymbal sounds terrible with poor equipment and sounds great with good equipment... ...is that "subjective"? Could someone with a good ADC and computer programming digitize the output, subtract the other signals (maybe a strong bass line and maybe heavily distorted power chords) and then display the distorted cymbal waveform? Perhaps a clever person could if they generated the other parts (to be subtracted) with the right relationship and number of harmonics and similarly synthesized the cymbal so that there would be a way to separate them again in the distorted output. (By frequency component? If the synthesized test signals of the various parts don't overlap in frequencies or harmonics?)
Right now I am using a modified QUAD405-2 for some of my listening/comparison at levels pretty much in the Class A region.
I have had many pleasant experiences when I have recreated the "best recommended" modifications that were recreated and endorsed by a number of experimenters.
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^^^
Following the chip developer recommendation is fair game, although I would avoid them when they collide with engineering best practices, as we know them (and a notorious example is the unbuffered passive reconstruction filter at the AK4499 evaluation board output, which is a technical abomination from whatever perspective one may look from).
The board you got is exactly what you payed for; I wonder if there is a sweet spot between the original board quality (design plus implementation, BTW, I don't believe a high performance ADC or DAC (more or less audio) can be successfully implemented on a 2 layer board) and the time/effort/cost of bringing the board up to a reference performance.
Myself, I would not bother hacking such an ES9038 board, I'd rather collect information and design my own (which is what I'm currently doing, but from an instrumentation application perspective). Could be a simpler, quicker and even cheaper way to performance, more educative, and certainly as much fun. But then, everybody is free to choose his own challenges, good luck!
Following the chip developer recommendation is fair game, although I would avoid them when they collide with engineering best practices, as we know them (and a notorious example is the unbuffered passive reconstruction filter at the AK4499 evaluation board output, which is a technical abomination from whatever perspective one may look from).
The board you got is exactly what you payed for; I wonder if there is a sweet spot between the original board quality (design plus implementation, BTW, I don't believe a high performance ADC or DAC (more or less audio) can be successfully implemented on a 2 layer board) and the time/effort/cost of bringing the board up to a reference performance.
Myself, I would not bother hacking such an ES9038 board, I'd rather collect information and design my own (which is what I'm currently doing, but from an instrumentation application perspective). Could be a simpler, quicker and even cheaper way to performance, more educative, and certainly as much fun. But then, everybody is free to choose his own challenges, good luck!
To get any meaningful result, the comparison has to be done level matched, listen with ears only (not knowing which unit is being used) and switching between devices has to be done within a few seconds in order to preserve aural memory to effective level. If you haven't done that, I would suggest you try it. If doing so is too much work, read about others who have done that with DACs.
Are you still here? I thought you promissed to find more appropriate auditorium matching your level of competence. Personally for me your insults are irrelevant, but spreading one-sided final-truth pretending statements may confuse many readers no less than strong opinion originating from personal listening preferences.
For instance your statement above is not exactly correct, because for many LDO output impedance goes down upon increased current. In this case dummy load is not just a snake oil and contribution to the global warming
I think that is correct.
I do not disagree.
I think this is very important. Before resorting to quick "ping-pong" switching between two sources (which do need to be level matched) I noticed that sometimes I would prefer a certain amplifier or DAC and then weeks later have a different impression. My conclusion after lots of experimenting was that my ears were changing. Two easy examples of what can change your ears are allergies and playing a musical instrument (such as electric guitar or bass guitar). If you have a loud musical instrument try it. Listen to your favorite music and equipment. Then practice the musical instrument for an hour or two. Then listen to your favorite music and equipment. Bet it doesn't sound the same. For example, if you practice electric bass guitar for an hour I bet the bass in your music sounds much less and different on the second listening session.
I use a combination of measurements and listening. On paper a DAC might be capable of extreme performance. However it appears to be very easy to mess it up in the implementation. Also I go back to my SB0490, EMU 1820, Zoom R24 and REALTEK example. All the specs on paper are "super great" and well past CD. But they don't sound the same. I don't know how much is due to power supplies, op-amps, drivers, filters, jitter, etc. But they don't sound the same. Also none are on the level of AK4396 or ES9038Q2M. However the EMU 1820 and R24 are respectable. ...But the EMU 1820 does not even sound like the 1820m which has mastering grade or studio grade converters.
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For those interested in conducting serious listening tests, a couple of recommendations (by way of Jakob2):
https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Percept...heory,+Method+and+Application-p-9780470869239
https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Sensory...nsory+Evaluation,+2nd+Edition-p-9781118733530
https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Percept...heory,+Method+and+Application-p-9780470869239
https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Sensory...nsory+Evaluation,+2nd+Edition-p-9781118733530
What in the world is all this junk coming out of this ES9038Q2M board at 200Hz and 15.6kHz and in general 2kHz to 20kHz? Only 67 dB and 71 dB below???
No wonder this sounds so terrible
No wonder this sounds so terrible
Attachments
I did not remotely realize how terrible this board was before I bought it. My impression was that it was a good "recommended" board that could be made great. Instead it appears to start out as pure junk.
Hopefully my measurements will serve as a warning to others so that they know what they are getting into.
This board makes my AK4396 (half the price) and LJM CS4398 look like super stars.
I don't have them to measure but I am pretty sure my Dolby HX Pro tape decks in the 80's sounded better with metal tapes.
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What in the world is all this junk coming out of this ES9038Q2M board at 200Hz and 15.6kHz and in general 2kHz to 20kHz? Only 67 dB and 71 dB below???
No wonder this sounds so terrible
I have never understood the urge to buy cheap chinese stuff and then tweak them to death. If what you measure is real there is no reasonable way to turn this into something that even closely resembles datasheet performance.
The problem is that you almost never know before buying them. I have several very nice amplifiers (including an LJM QUAD405-2 clone). The LJM QUAD405-2 is definitely worth the money I paid. Otherwise I would likely never listen to or own a that type of amplifier. There is nice KSA-50 clone that sounds great, after I fixed the cold solder joints and zero gain on one channel. (Sure they all test good before shipping... It obviously was never powered up, ever.)
The AK4396 board I have is also very nice and worth it.
The problem is distinguishing the good ones from the junk before buying them. This board has sold quantity 151 on the eBay listing with all good reviews. I can't understand how so many people can be so extremely deaf. If 150 buyers out of 151 say that this sounds good then I don't put any credence at all into accusations of golden ears.
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