SY, that IS a very popular belief, no matter how wrong.
I went to see a friend who is a serviceman. He's there with a man, pleasant enough but sad. I asked what was the amtter, and he said h had built the Elektor magazine medium power amplifier (2x50/95W into 8/4 Ohms) exactly as the project was published and the sound he got was way below his expectations. So what did you expect, I asked. Well he said, the text makes me expect a real High End sound, and he got a bit better than average. I told him, you were wrong to expect that much, it's a nice project but it could never be High End, it doesn't cost enough. He of course felt it was costly at a total price of around $400. So what did you think, that thousands go into the casework alone, I asked. He admitted he did.
It's a problem of perception. People by default use double standards, one for them and another for everybody else, and are usually shocked to find that it doesn't quite work out like that in real life. This is especially true of the DIY crowd, they think because they can spčder, that all barriers owards dirt cheap audio are down.
Once or twice I ever made a claim that I would be happy paying a hi-fi based on blind listening only.
You can register into your memory the "average" sound of expensive gears, mid-priced gears and low-priced ones.
Regarding CORRELATION, of course, everybody knows the answer (it is not 0, nor 1)
And allows you to build a system to your preference, but it may be wildly innacurate and your experience are no use to the rest of us.
Too simple. How can you divorce if not married. Fail on all fronts as a way of explaining your preference mechanisms.
So where does the cost go in some of these amps, dacs (especially) etc that cost 10s of thousand of pounds? I have seen the inside of some ridiculously priced DACs and cant work out what they have spent the money on....
Midrange prices a few thousand I can live with, but when you see prices like £25,000 for a bit of kit one wonders.
Midrange prices a few thousand I can live with, but when you see prices like £25,000 for a bit of kit one wonders.
Ok.
Ime one of the hidden biggies/gotchas in that list is the intrinsic circuit noise...not the level per se, but more so the spectrum of that noise, and dynamic modulations of that intrinsic noise.
Add to that, modulation of excess noise caused by the circuit intrinsic noise, further modulated by the source programme and the source programme noise......this all very quickly becomes a dynamic logarithmic multiple loop recursive intermodulation sorry mess.
To be fair, if the circuit intrinsic noise is low/very low then these collateral effects are minimised.
Our ears are happy to ignore constant noise/hiss, but the modulated noise and imd products stick out like the dogs proverbials.
This is what largely distinguishes very good gear from lesser gear.
Industry standard tests do not attempt to discriminate this dynamic noise behaviour.
Dan.
These references are not for small differences at or below the threshold of hearing we are discussing Jakob. Further, when you cannot measure anything different between the DUT's and claims are still being made, that demands controlled testing to prove it. That's all I am saying.
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Maybe yours are. I don't like it a bit and one of the design goals of my circuits is to keep it low enough not to be audible.
Really? Or are you torturing the definition of "industry standard tests"?
If I spend a year building something, I do need to be paid for it, even if the final cost of parts is 10 pounds!
Now why spend that amount of time on a one or two off piece is a different question.
Of course the projects I work on cost quite a bit more.
And this (level of) audibility is different from person to person, no?
YOUR hearing limit.
I think it is not only about audibility, but how severe something can affect someone's brain, which is for sure different from person to person.
Think about what Frank has mentioned regarding finding fault in a "mission-critical" situation, or the worst-case situation. First point, is that the fault may be exposed in situation/environment which is different than when it is measured. Second point, the saying that goes "We tend to accept a system that is not extra-ordinarily good but show no faults, than a system that is extra-ordinary but has a fault".
Human reaction to a "fault" is different. Something that is a "fault" to someone doesn't necessarily a fault to other people.
Common prejudice and generalization is that because a capacitor is expensive then it should be good. But no, you should know that many people trust their ears such that they know when they prefer cheap capacitor over expensive one. My speaker cable, I will bet that mine is much less expensive than yours (my expensive ones are unused because too big thus not flexible).
I mean that it is easily ignored.
Generally circuit/system constant noise is inaudible, but the dynamic consequences are not always inaudible.
This more particularly applies to typical mid-fi gear...listen closely and the excess noise riding on the signal is apparent.
I mean the standard THD, IMD, FR, DR test measurements.
See my next post.
Dan.
Many that spend vast amounts for product (not just audio) are buying into a lifestyle experience rather than basing their choice on purely rational criteria. Why would anyone buy a Rolex for example, its a financial liability, has costly maintenance and service costs and performs less well at its primary purpose of being a time keeper than a £10 digital. However it has a certain appeal to those who value other aspects of the experience.
When it comes to audio many of us have the advantage of knowing a bit about the subject. There is good example of how manufacturers cash in on 'prestige ownership experiences' currently running on the forum where a manufacterer has charged 1000 u.s.d. for upgrading output transistors and replacement of a half dozen caps.
The price of product is determined ultimately by what people will pay.
Do you mean noise modulation? Yes, absolutely, it's a standard feature on test sets. It's an issue with some ADC/DAC setups, but I can't say that I've ever seen it in a box of gain.
No but I would have thought signal integrity at the design and layout stage would!
It does vary, but the lower limit is fairly well established. Electronics can go well below that limit linearly if well designed. 0dB SPL is considered the limit at the most sensitive frequency. If the electronic hash is 20dB below that then even those of extreme acuity will not hear it. This ignores masking and any audibility of distortion as distortion so is an extreme bar that I am sure a psychoacoutics expert would laugh at, but it's the bar I have set for myself. my pleasure and my biases for the electronics in my system. Speakers are another matter and have gross errors that can easily be measured.
You Lose, my speaker cable was a free sample 20 years ago.
Different in your case..... How many Stadium kits do you sell
I aim for 1/2 per year. More is just too much work, getting old and lazy.
The current argument could go on forever and we would get nowhere but back to where this all begins. I would say that there does seem to be a consensus among many that it takes good measurement abilities to originally develop a circuit and then listening tests to confirm the quality of the sound that circuit produces. So many fight over the smallest factors, the noise floor at -120db and argue about the esoteric differences between two similar capacitors but I see so little discussion of speakers anywhere in any of these discussions. That is where the real magic is, I don't care how much you spend on the electronics, that is the least of the problem in audio reproduction, it is the speakers that seem to be to much for most to understand.
Here we speak of 0.1 to 1% distortion levels in electronics and seem to ignore the much greater variation in speakers where even the raw frame FR curves show +/- 2 to 5db of variation across the band, this is magnitudes greater of a problem that I see in even the cheapest of well designed electronics. That does not even bring into the equation of phase anomalies in most speakers and crossover topologies.
I think you are all working backwards to improving the sound of a system, it is the speakers silly!
Here we speak of 0.1 to 1% distortion levels in electronics and seem to ignore the much greater variation in speakers where even the raw frame FR curves show +/- 2 to 5db of variation across the band, this is magnitudes greater of a problem that I see in even the cheapest of well designed electronics. That does not even bring into the equation of phase anomalies in most speakers and crossover topologies.
I think you are all working backwards to improving the sound of a system, it is the speakers silly!
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