You're welcome. For whatever reason he refused to reveal the tracks he was using at the time so others could try them and listen for what differences he believed he heard/focused on. Strange. Perhaps he could now as that was quite a few years ago.
I thought I was having Déjà vu when I first saw you post here ;-). Your predictions on responses can be seen 16 yrs ago as much as today. I suspect he may not respond at all, though others there have.
Ok lets see these measurements 🙂 also the absolute sample rate , who knows we have a 200ppm off xtal by chance ? 🙂
Amir presented no measurements in the AVS thread, only his listening assessment. Just like tcpip has done. Only one poster has acknowledged that.
There is a term used in the recording industry. Someone who hears/notices small details in sound is said to "have ears." It seems you have ears.
In that case I have some news for you. It isn't just about CD players and DACs. Its also about cables and everything else.
If you don't like having "ears" we might be able to help fix that for you. We can give you ABX tests that you will fail, so then you can tell yourself you must have been imagining things. However, I will tell you that the tests are typically quite biased, and they tend toward false negative results (they wrongly conclude you can't hear small details that are real). But if you neglect my warning about that then you may be able convince yourself you can't hear what you really can hear right now.
Otherwise, welcome to the "have ears" club. There is a whole lot to learn about what people can and can't hear and about perceptual science in general. Also a lot to learn about the psychology of views expressed by folks that don't "have ears."
There will also be the experience of fooling yourself into believing you can hear differences which turn out not to be real. Its that humans are very complicated, much more so than CD players are.
Anyway, you will probably find some people like yourself here, as well as some people who are rather unlike you. Feel free to PM me if you want to know more about the state of the science, why dacs can sound different, etc.
Mark
Yes I was being a little sarcastic and referring to my earlier reply to @tcpip where I stated that I had no intentions of replying to his thread on ASR because of the attitudes there (and he is picking up some flack as I expected unfortunately).
To be fair, the non-ASR community also has swung too far into an extreme. I cannot understand how modern solid-state electronics are microphonic and amplifiers require thick metal casings, or how special feet below amplifiers and DACs influence the sound. I remember on this same site (diyaudio.com) I was reading a thread on chipamp (the famous LM3875) design and build, and one constructor said that he used a brass bar across his LM3875, one bolt on either side, to press down the chip to the heatsink and he "did not see any audible difference because of the increased pressure on the chip". I was exasperated at this expectation of audible effects from anything and everything -- a chip's coupling to a heatsink will only have audible effects if the chip is overheating, and this can be avoided whether you're using one bolt or two.
So I feel that the pendulum had swung too far in the subjective direction, and ASR is a corrective reaction. Such reactions often swing too far in the opposite direction.
I tend to say that the place where measurements are not going to help to predict sound are the analog transducers: (a) cassette decks, (b) turntables, (c) speakers. So I was caught by surprise when two expensive DACs sounded different.
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Electrolytic caps can be microphonic in some circuits (e.g. phono preamps). But even then, hearing the affect of that microphony is remote.
Crank up the volume of any preamp and tap any electrolytic in the signal path and you will hear it (usually faintly!).
But in a typical domestic environment, there's nothing to create sufficient vibration at the right frequencies to trigger this affect.
And then of course there's the challenge of hearing a sound buried amongst typical distortion and / or right down in the noise floor while listening to the music.
Over two decades ago i realized, that my both CD-Payers did not play at the same speed.
"where is the clock, whe-ere is the clo-ock" Try to sing it without a tuning fork!Best regards,
Bernd
Had my amplifiers in wooden cabinets for over 10 years.... All 4 of them. Never had an issue, and no one can hear the difference in comparison to any amplifier, when we test it. If any, my amplifier is usually more powerful and has a better grip on difficult speaker loads.
It's interesting that you mention electrolytics. This is what I found in my FA252 FusionAmp. I hope the photos are clear.
All the electrolytic caps I could see anywhere all had this soft, clay-type substance packed between adjacent pairs. The substance hasn't hardened, so it's not Araldite, it's more like putty. I've not seen this in other circuits elsewhere.
It suddenly makes me want to put all my passive crossovers of all my speakers in separate chambers where the rear wave of the drivers can't directly hit them.
Since your original post was about a listening experience, objective/subjective is a false dichotomy. Audio-perception is subjective. The AES and other engineering sites have thousands of subjective Audio-perception experiences/tests. The dichotomy is "controls" vs "none". Most conflate "subjective" with zero controls. Your and Amirs listening had some controls, but the lack of others is what was objected to, such as fixed volume matching between the sources. You can change the volume during the test, but relative to each other, the sources should be the same. Ditto for actual blinding, which doesn't require a blindfold ;-). In a "blind" listening test, ironically, all you have is the previously mentioned "ears". So what some refer to as having "ears", is actually having "eyes", knowledge of, lack of knowledge of controls, etc, etc.
This might be interesting if you took a spectrum analyzer (etc) and identified exactly why these equipment sound differently. Expensive brand name manufacturers do screw up regularly and ignore big problems while they focus on impressive specs and/or pseudo-science. Similarly, there are several very expensive automobiles that I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot-pole, because in their effort to impress us, they fail to grasp some important practical design issues, and they are a money pit for those unfortunate enough to own one. The best engineers are not the ones selling the most expensive products.
In any case, playing music directly from CD seems foolish today. If you want a DAC, use a DAC. Take the mechanical problems out of the equation. Digital media is quantized in time as well as amplitude.
In any case, playing music directly from CD seems foolish today. If you want a DAC, use a DAC. Take the mechanical problems out of the equation. Digital media is quantized in time as well as amplitude.
Testing whether the CD players hard clip on music would be a good first step, see post #17 and the test files attached to this post https://www.diyaudio.com/community/...t-intersample-over-issues.419223/post-7828287
Since you seem to feel that you understand the concept and purpose of "controls," could you please explain what the end purpose of controls is supposed to be? And how do you know if something constitutes being a control or not? Thx.
Can you please explain what audible differences should be expected to show up clearly on a spectrum analyzer and what audible differences might not show up so clearly? Threshold of audibility of group delay?
Maybe you could also clarify what exactly you meant by "(etc)" in the above quote? Some device other than a spectrum analyzer? If so, what equipment would you suggest I need to buy?
I'll measure frequency response of the players to the limits of my measuring equipment, but I don't expect to find any deviation from flat response between 20Hz and 19KHz at least, after which filter differences will take over.
Using a spectrum analyser on the actual signal which is coming out when music is playing is very hard to interpret, I feel. It'll be much better to compare the two waveforms using a tool like Deltawave, I'm guessing.
Yes, let's see whether we can get anywhere by doing the usual analyses and measurements. That's the whole problem I started with -- can we correlate the clearly heard differences with anything in any measurements?
This remark is neither here nor there as far as my original question and observations are concerned.
I didn't understand what this means. Out of the box, the two players have output amplitude so close to each other than I feel that they are equally loud. I have switched players dozens of times and not touched the volume control. This means that the gain difference, if it exists, is less than 2dB. If my hearing is really coarse, we can still conclude that they are within 3dB of each other. After that, if one player is sounding sharper and more "etched" than the other, and this persists even when the other player's volume is clearly a couple of dB softer and also persists when it's a couple of dB louder, then the perceived difference is impervious to level mismatches which are far bigger than the ones we face with level-based misreadings.
Two signals should be gain-matched if I am forced to do a listening comparison where I am not allowed to change the gain. But if I am allowed to change the gain by huge degrees like +/-2dB or 3dB, and I still see the differences between the signals, then it's clear that the subjective perception is not gain-difference-induced.