Take the click and pop challenge

Can you hear a difference?

  • I could not hear (2) nor (4)

    Votes: 7 50.0%
  • I could hear (2) but not (4)

    Votes: 4 28.6%
  • I could hear (2) and (4)

    Votes: 2 14.3%
  • I could not hear (2) but could hear (4)

    Votes: 1 7.1%

  • Total voters
    14
EdGr, may suggest you call it -40dB FS & -80dB FS in future, instead of 1% and 0.01%.

1% & 0.01% leads people to believe they are listening to a THD test.

I still haven't dug up my headphones.

Beach bums are lazy and the phones are under a pile of diving & boating junk. But I'm diving tomorrow so maybe the headphones will reveal themselves 😊
 
@PMA - That is impressive. The 2KHz sine is 80dB below the peak and 1.6dB above the floor.
Ed
Energy in clicks is low and their repetition frequency is low as well. I think that is the reason why it is possible to detect sine beeps. You need good headphones with good isolation from ambient noise. And good DAC and headphone amp.

I am still wondering what this test has in common with phono preamp topologies, because it started as a result of phono preamps discussion.
 
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@kgrlee - Yes. I wanted to test distortion, but the 2KHz sine is not normal distortion.
Ed
It cannot be called "distortion" as it only confuses laymen audience. Some of them then say they heard 0.01% distortion, which is a plain nonsense. You might say you are testing SFDR, spurious free dynamic range. But not the distortion. Distortion term is commonly used for nonlinear distortion, that may be represented as harmonic distortion, intermodulation distortion, or else, depending on input signal composition.
Nonlinear distortion creates frequencies that were not present in the original signal.

The 2KHz sine is 80dB below the peak and 1.6dB above the floor.
Yes but peaks have 0.1s intervals between them. This is a long time for the ear to recover and be able to detect the interleaved beeps.

Click distance click1.png Y-axis zoomed click2.png

another view - visible beeps click5.png

Overall spectrum, seemingly flat and uniform click3.png

Spectrum of beeps between the clicks, short FFT click4.png
 
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PMA said:
I am still wondering what this test has in common with phono preamp topologies, because it started as a result of phono preamps discussion.
(2) is showing that the "+1 error" is audible (to some people).

(4) is showing that signals at -80dB are audible.

My conclusion is that EQ accuracy and distortion need to be better than what some phono pre-amps have.

PMA said:
Distortion term is commonly used for nonlinear distortion, that may be represented as harmonic distortion, intermodulation distortion, or else, depending on input signal composition. Nonlinear distortion creates frequencies that were not present in the original signal.
I stated in post #1 that the 2KHz sine is a proxy for distortion, but I see how the subtlety could be lost.

BTW, the math that created the waveforms is very simple.
Ed
 
(2) Time 30-60s: EQ +3dB at 200KHz

(2) is showing that the "+1 error" is audible (to some people).
I don't understand what I should/could hear here if I could.
Could you please discribe what is to expect to hear?
?? Can't have anything to do with 200kHz 😳
I can hear (4) even with my built-in netbook speaker, but not (2), which sounds the same as (1) to me.
 
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2025-03-08 14:21:22

File A: test1.wav
SHA1: 9a7849101aa848c5fa037aed8e11f38ed0c3a0c9
File B: test4.wav
SHA1: 077344e1d886d2a88202f1f9eed6483cbb460f1e

Output:
Default : Primary Sound Driver
Crossfading: NO

14:21:22 : Test started.
14:21:48 : Test restarted.
14:21:48 : 01/01
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14:22:01 : 01/02
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14:24:40 : 15/16
14:24:40 : Test finished.

----------
Total: 15/16
p-value: 0.0003 (0.03%)

-- signature --
e9381eb1f5d605ce36081edca63101fc0e5ea6ca
I miss-clicked one 🙂