In a unicorn moment on another audio forum some time two members with opposing views decided to work together on a methodically planned ABX test between DACs. They went to great lengths to be transparent and made a great example of 'both sides' working together. The result was differences were detected and by a significant percentage. The skeptic admitted he did not expect that but stood by his methodology.
Guess what - no one cared. By the next day forum members were back arguing over their points of view and minutiae.
It's not hard to do any of this. People just don't want to. The tribalism is the point.
Sounds believable. You're saying that the experiment actually found significant differences? It's a shame that it's not more widely known. I get that once you admit there's a difference, people start thinking oh this cable material might matter and that wood grain direction might matter. But I'm not against speculation and I understand that it opens a can of worms. If we're careful we can still make some progress. Like soren's project
Last edited:
@wushuliu any idea how ESD might've fried my dam1021? The isolated side is powered by an external floating power supply (not connected to ground in the wall socket), it shares ground with the USB connection, and the USB connection powers the Amanero. The USB shield is grounded at the upstream device and not brought into the DAC box (I made special care to lift the shield pin on the Amanero USB connector). The clean side is powered by a separate floating power supply.
Wouldn't matter. It would all get picked apart anyway and dismissed/lauded depending on beliefs.
as for ESD, I noticed you said:
"I mean static discharge shuts off my monitor's HDMI connection on a regular basis - I don't even have to touch the PC, just a discharge inside the room will disable the connection for a few seconds."
If the environment can have that much charge, anything is possible in regards to the DAM. I do recall very early on I had some issues with my 1021 so I shut it off for a day. Next day, worked fine...
Well it's just winter and synthetic fibers....
Just tried it again after being powered off for maybe 12h. Looks like the problem has metastasized. It now thinks that my PCM source is actually DSD64 and produces static noise instead of clipping (with a little bit of music mixed in).
Last edited:
Even though I lack the equipment, decent listening room, or even time and patience, I think I see your point pretty clearly. I am in a similar situation (of believing/not believing SQ issues)…
Even though there’s lab-equipment capable of measuring subatomar nuances, I still tend to think a human ear (with its brain, and eyes, etc) coming along hears things not measurable. probably they just don’t exist but are of psychological nature. And I could be and probably am plain wrong.
Still, the 1021 is very tempting. My brain wants to have it in my hands (as with so many other toys floating around here at diya)…
Anyway, i appreciate your opinion/answer!
Even though there’s lab-equipment capable of measuring subatomar nuances, I still tend to think a human ear (with its brain, and eyes, etc) coming along hears things not measurable. probably they just don’t exist but are of psychological nature. And I could be and probably am plain wrong.
Still, the 1021 is very tempting. My brain wants to have it in my hands (as with so many other toys floating around here at diya)…
Anyway, i appreciate your opinion/answer!
Still not properly locking on to the I2S signal or properly accepting S/PDIF signal after being powered off for a while. Will keep it powered off for now, but could also use some other advice. @soekris does the behavior I described symptomatic of a fried chip in the isolated section? If I didn't make a mistake in my wiring, a lot of people could potentially suffer from the same problem.
Ho guys, still having issues in upgrading to the new 1.23 firmware for my rev6 dam1021. As I already wrote, I first installed the new firmware, then I heard a loud hiss. Someone of you suggested to downgrade to the 1.21 and to newly upgrade to the 1.23. I did it, but nothing to do, the hiss was still there. So I definitely downgraded to 1.21, gaining again the correct use of the DAC. Having a more careful read on Soeren's website, I noticed these words: "when all is downloaded you also need to update the uC with new firmware, but only if you downloaded a new version:
# update"
Could someone of you (even Soeren) clear them to me? All I did to upgrade was to open the download session on Teraterm and send the file, then exit. Nothing more. Should have I done something else?
Thanks to everyone,
Gaetano.
# update"
Could someone of you (even Soeren) clear them to me? All I did to upgrade was to open the download session on Teraterm and send the file, then exit. Nothing more. Should have I done something else?
Thanks to everyone,
Gaetano.
It might. When you transfered the 1.23 skr file, it might've replaced the filters with the 1.23 versions which, I think, are incompatible with 1.21. When you "downgraded" to 1.21 without typing in "update", you swapped the filters back, thus "regaining the correct use of the DAC" as you described.
But it's faster for you to just properly upgrade to 1.23 and see for yourself, than to speculate for an hour on the internet...
Another quick thought on my experience with DACs and the dam1021 in particular: I became interested in Soren's project because the R2R technology is transparent - it's so basic that we understand every single part of the digital process perfectly. (The buffer stage could still matter, as do capacitors in the signal path. But those are relatively minor/not core parts of the DAC.) We know that the jitter and resistor errors (among other potential sources of error like shift register delay mismatch etc) would likely only result in harmonic distortion and other things that we could measure with some level of confidence. And we know that the level of those distortions in the dam1021 is not even close to levels audible to the human ear. So by that alone, delta-sigma DACs have already lost their entire competitive advantage which is the numbers. Now, the leap I made years ago when I was introduced to the scene was to assume that there is a perceptible difference between DACs, because I didn't think that so many people could be fooled into hearing a difference that doesn't actually exist, not knowing how tricky human perception is. But if it were true that there is a perceptible difference between D-S and R2R DACs, we would be able to conclude with good confidence that R2R DACs are better because we've basically eliminated all possibility that something is creating audible distortions in an R2R architecture, whereas D-S DACs are black boxes.
I'm not a philosopher, but I think there is something epistemically interesting here. By proactively seeking out and disproving potential sources of perceptible distortions, such as THD which people have conclusively found to be impossible to make out in music if it's below 1%, and by virtue of the transparency of the R2R architecture, I think we have a strong claim that the R2R DAC is simply better than D-S. The D-S folks, on the other hand, don't even have the option of eliminating the possibility that their DAC is without distortion, unless they can prove that THD and other metrics conclusively capture ALL aspects of audible differences. Maybe they can, I don't know, but based on what I know it seems really hard to do scientifically. Plus, if it were true, onboard PC audio is pretty much all that anyone will ever need. The R2R architecture doesn't have to prove such a big claim because its operation is more or less transparent. What we see is what we get. It's pretty easy to prove that any part of the R2R operation is producing audible distortions, but based on the evidence, they can't be.
Not really top-notch writing but I think it gets the idea across. Basically, by being transparent and easy to fault, and by rejecting all possible sources of audible distortions in the core components of the DAC through hard experimental evidence, we have a strong claim that whatever the dam1021 claims to reproduce, i.e. music, it does so perfectly as far as humans can tell. D-S, on the other hand, has good looking numbers that people can feel good about, but is fundamentally unable to make a similar claim to audio fidelity. They can try to find new metrics (like the ones used to prove that high levels of negative feedback is audibly bad) and patch the holes as best they can, but it won't matter because if we have strong reasons to believe that there is actually a difference between the dam1021 and D-S DACs, dam1021 would easily win without even proving that it "sounds better" - because it can't "sound worse" logically speaking. Obviously, all of this means nothing if, instead, we can't find any audible difference between any two DACs.
The most interesting idea here, IMO, is how incrementally proving positives in a black box system can be tempting (better looking numbers, anyone?) but is fundamentally inferior to a transparent system that can more readily disprove negatives in virtue of its transparency - provided that we can really prove all the negatives, which in this case I think isn't too far-fetched. For example, Soren has said that improving the power supply and vref is pointless in rev.7, I'm sure he has scientific reasons for it.
I'm not a philosopher, but I think there is something epistemically interesting here. By proactively seeking out and disproving potential sources of perceptible distortions, such as THD which people have conclusively found to be impossible to make out in music if it's below 1%, and by virtue of the transparency of the R2R architecture, I think we have a strong claim that the R2R DAC is simply better than D-S. The D-S folks, on the other hand, don't even have the option of eliminating the possibility that their DAC is without distortion, unless they can prove that THD and other metrics conclusively capture ALL aspects of audible differences. Maybe they can, I don't know, but based on what I know it seems really hard to do scientifically. Plus, if it were true, onboard PC audio is pretty much all that anyone will ever need. The R2R architecture doesn't have to prove such a big claim because its operation is more or less transparent. What we see is what we get. It's pretty easy to prove that any part of the R2R operation is producing audible distortions, but based on the evidence, they can't be.
Not really top-notch writing but I think it gets the idea across. Basically, by being transparent and easy to fault, and by rejecting all possible sources of audible distortions in the core components of the DAC through hard experimental evidence, we have a strong claim that whatever the dam1021 claims to reproduce, i.e. music, it does so perfectly as far as humans can tell. D-S, on the other hand, has good looking numbers that people can feel good about, but is fundamentally unable to make a similar claim to audio fidelity. They can try to find new metrics (like the ones used to prove that high levels of negative feedback is audibly bad) and patch the holes as best they can, but it won't matter because if we have strong reasons to believe that there is actually a difference between the dam1021 and D-S DACs, dam1021 would easily win without even proving that it "sounds better" - because it can't "sound worse" logically speaking. Obviously, all of this means nothing if, instead, we can't find any audible difference between any two DACs.
The most interesting idea here, IMO, is how incrementally proving positives in a black box system can be tempting (better looking numbers, anyone?) but is fundamentally inferior to a transparent system that can more readily disprove negatives in virtue of its transparency - provided that we can really prove all the negatives, which in this case I think isn't too far-fetched. For example, Soren has said that improving the power supply and vref is pointless in rev.7, I'm sure he has scientific reasons for it.
Last edited:
Was reading up on some of my old comments that got moved to a separate thread lol. Guess he changed his mind about "no major hardware changes to older products".
Not trying to vilify Soren, but he definitely could've added bitclock tracking feature to dam1021 to use in dual-mono and other multichannel setup. I don't think he lied about the fact that dam1021 could never be truly synchronous. But I do think bitclock tracking on dam1021 is possible with existing hardware, and it would cut channel delay in a dual-mono setup by a factor of 16, making it completely inaudible. Soren was just lazy... But he's right in the sense that clock drift and other issues make it pointless to try to get theoretically perfect results in a dual-mono setup, so there isn't a strong reason to spend time developing a feature that only serves to direct attention to other (theoretical) flaws of a dual-mono dam1021 setup - better to just remember that the theoretical flaws won't impact the actual quality of music reproduction as far as human hearing is concerned. That said, if I were to do it all over again, I wouldn't go for dual-mono anymore. It wouldn't hurt, but it'd be a waste of money.
I just tell it like it is.
Couldn't sleep so I powered up the dam1021 again. The problem evolved yet again! It's still unable to play any music or make any sound at all in S/PDIF mode, but the I2S mode started recognizing PCM as PCM again, and I think it's also locking and unlocking properly now. I guess I'll wait a few more days and see how this goes. @soekris Please give some input when you get the chance...
Lol I've been here for years I know how to "update" a FW. Pretty sure I typed "update" and the firmware correctly displays as 1.23. I don't think we have to upload filters manually when we do a full update, right? Soren doesn't even list the 1.23 filters on his website. Maybe it's the same as 1.24. Either way, I don't think it needs a manual upload.
Did you power cycle after the upgrade and only after that load in the filters?
I didn’t load in the filters, but I did power cycle after upgrade. If you read my earlier posts, it should be obvious that my dam1021 is physically damaged (recoverable or not) because it stopped working after the ESD and before I even tried to upgrade its firmware.