It needs more information, it's a classic test 1k sampled at 192K will exercise only 192 codes 997 is a prime and exercises more codes of both the DAC and A/D. You add 64k as the FFT size yet another variable. If this is a loop-through you don't know where the problem is exactly.
Absolutely. And we miss all the impact of the basses on our body. That is a part of the natural listening experience.
Not to forget that the space localisation is no more in front of you, but in your head 🙂
Headphones brings a very 'intellectual', or 'abstract', flawed way to listen to music.
If some enjoy them better than their speakers, or find them more defined, time to change something in his listening room ?
No, didn't know that's where they hang out.
EDIT: Seems likely I may have looked at it way back when, and then forgotten about it. Looking at it now, there are so many people wanting so many things I would guess getting attention to an issue might be rather difficult. If they received hundreds of requests for some change, that might be different.
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"Nothing new"....mhm....true as good ol´ syn08 is trying again the playbook of eristics.
Putting all critic in the same badge as if none of it had any merits.
Nice try, dishonest but who is counting....
Critic was needed as not only the authors draw wideranging conclusions but other people as well; the most extreme I remember was someone who believed/wrote, that :
Nice try again in rewriting history, but the interesting part (somehow omitted in the description above 😉 ) was that the authors - after some back and forth - consulted external statistic experts and finally bravely conceded that the critic was justified and their conclusions from the experiment a bit too wideranging/optimistic.
It's not that hard to imagine which parts of the story were missing in the "links provided upon request" .....
"Gross misrepresentation", yep nails it.
Beside the fun; is it really so hard to understand that an experiment has to be objective, valid and reliable to justify drawing further conclusions from the (experimental) results?
I've said numerous times (means written quite frequently in every discussion about this topic) that the author's hypothesis (i.e. no audible difference between cd-quality and "hi-res") might be correct, but that you can't use the experimental results as corrobation due to the flaws of said experimental approach.
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Another thought came to me about this sharpness question. With some DACs, this 'sharpness' seems to have reached to a point that begin to be, may-be, in excess.
To take a photographic comparison, at what point of apparent sharpness you begin to look at the photography (Audiophile ?) instead of looking at the subject this photo was supposed to show, forgetting the media (our systems) ?
Yep, Syn08 has a penchant for such misrepresentation - see his strawman argument with me John Curl's Blowtorch preamplifier part III
With speakers, you add your room reflections, room modes (standing waves), reverberation time, possible echoes to the recorded sound. You hear original concert hall acoustics + your room. Original "travel in space of the sound waves" is already captured in the recording. Of course imaging and space information through headphones is unnatural - L/R ping-pong, missing head comb filter effect, however at least you do not add reflections, standing waves, reverberation and echoes of your listening room that are genuine and valid just for your room.
As far records are involved, I don't know where is "real life". It is a piece of theatre or a movie.
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People often assumed the ultra detail (sharpness) they heard with digital audio was just the result of the superior resolution & lower noise floor. When they couldn't really stand to listen for long to the same music they found relaxing through their analogue system, it was still considered one of the downsides of digital audio - we are just not used to this level of detail - the fault is our hearing..
However this was rather the issue on 10 - 30 years old digital systems. Such problem is very rare with nowadays good performance DACs and in fact I do not recall to have a similar issue in last years, though some 15 years ago it was quite usual. Last and not least, I have to say that my speakers and amplifiers have changed quite a lot in past 15 years, so maybe both digital + analog paths improvements have made a difference. I may say that I do not prefer amplifiers with "masking effect" (I do not want to put names here) and they do not sound "pleasing" to me, but rather boring.
Interesting one. I'll try it out on my QA401 - you can force the test f and not let it optimize.
Yes, we do not want to listen in an anechoic chamber and need some reasonable room reverberation time and decay. However, it is not easy to keep acoustical space symmetry to get perfect and frequency independent imaging and also directivity pattern of the speaker plays the game in the mentioned above. For this reason, anyone of us has unique acoustical listening conditions.
But sharpness still shouldn't be an issue? Just something that might require getting used to over time until it is no longer a distraction
The sharpness issue is a kind of low level distortion, IMHO. It wasn't on the master tape and it shouldn't be encoded on the CD if a top mastering lab used the best ADC available (such as with Bob Ludwig's work). If a very well implemented Sabre dac is fed a CD rip that has been converted to DSD512 by HQplayer, it can to sound detailed but not artificially or excessively sharpened (as you refer to the perceptual effect). Some kinds of very low level distortion in dacs don't sound at all like electric guitar distortion or like old solid state amp clipping. Perceptually, it can simply sound overly sharp. That the sharpness effect is due to distortion can be shown by the fact that the effect can be nearly all the way attenuated while maintaining relaxed, yet detailed sound. That is why I reject the claim that $200 or $500 dacs that measure pretty well sound as good as any dac can ever sound, they don't. What THD number tells you detail is retained, but over-sharpness is almost completely absent? None, IMHO. We don't measure that, so far as I can tell. Just like we don't measure reverb tail or room ambiance reproduction accuracy. It is a dynamic effect, not captured in static ENOB testing, or by THD measurement. Same with the 'sharpness' effect. Doesn't mean we couldn't figure out how to measure it, we probably could. Just like we could probably do lots of things we don't do.
Sadly if you like things in the universal catalogue they have just admitted to losing a lot of their master tapes in a fire 11 years ago!
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