Well John Westlake will be disappointed to find out he hasn’t learned anything in the last 25 years. Your comment actually made me guffaw.
Unless one is part of a cult dedicated to chasing the noughts after the decimal point in their distortion figures, I'd say the latter.
In your opinion, of course.
Which part of audio reproduction, recording, mastering, digital to analog conversion, signal amplification, electric signal to sound wave conversion or sound wave interaction in the room? Please be specific.
By comparing input vs output. How would you listen to the component itself, i.e. DAC, cable or amp?
This is basic stuff in audio electronics. I'll bet he has learned. If you are in a business of selling certain product, would you publicly state info that diminishes the marketability of that product?
You must not have learned marketing 101.
As soon as the sound has become a varying voltage it can be compared through all the stages for fidelity, until it arrives at the speaker terminals, but that isn't the topic of this thread.
Thought experiment to illustrate what I mean by doing the wrong measurement:
Suppose you have two DACs with equal noise floor, equal distortion at -60 dBFS and 0 dBFS, equal frequency response and so on, but one has 3 dB headroom for intersample overshoots while the other has none. The signal of post #24 will then sound very different through these DACs, while all the standard performance measurements give the same result.
Of course when you know why they sound different, you can easily come up with a measurement that gives different results, measuring the spectrum of the output signal using the test signal of post #24 for example. That's not so easy when all you know is that they sound different, but not why.
On the other hand, suppose you have two DACs that behave very similarly, also regarding headroom, but one has 0.001 % distortion and the other 0.0000001 %. You can then measure a difference in distortion, but I don't believe for one second that anyone can hear it.
So all in all, although I would be the last person to claim that measurements are useless or that uncontrolled listening tests are reliable, differences between measurements don't prove that the DACs sound different and absence of differences between measurements don't prove that the DACs sound the same.
Suppose you have two DACs with equal noise floor, equal distortion at -60 dBFS and 0 dBFS, equal frequency response and so on, but one has 3 dB headroom for intersample overshoots while the other has none. The signal of post #24 will then sound very different through these DACs, while all the standard performance measurements give the same result.
Of course when you know why they sound different, you can easily come up with a measurement that gives different results, measuring the spectrum of the output signal using the test signal of post #24 for example. That's not so easy when all you know is that they sound different, but not why.
On the other hand, suppose you have two DACs that behave very similarly, also regarding headroom, but one has 0.001 % distortion and the other 0.0000001 %. You can then measure a difference in distortion, but I don't believe for one second that anyone can hear it.
So all in all, although I would be the last person to claim that measurements are useless or that uncontrolled listening tests are reliable, differences between measurements don't prove that the DACs sound different and absence of differences between measurements don't prove that the DACs sound the same.
Did it occur to you that a nonlinearity causing .001% harmonic distortion causes much more IMD with 20 or 30 frequencies all present at once in actual music?
The distortion happens to be quite easily audible if you listen to human voices singing group harmonies. That is, you can only know if you have a better dac such as the other one you mention at .0000001 distortion so that you have a way of knowing the sound of the IMD really isn't on the recording and thus isn't supposed to be there on your .001% distortion dac.
On the other hand if you are listening to recordings of single fixed level 1kHz tones, then I would agree with you
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Did it occur to you that a nonlinearity causing .001% harmonic distortion causes much more IMD with 20 or 30 frequencies all present at once in actual music?
The distortion happens to be quite easily audible if you listen to human voices singing group harmonies. That is, you can only know if you have a better dac such as the other one you mention at .0000001 distortion so that you have a way of knowing the sound of the IMD really isn't on the recording and thus isn't supposed to be there on your .001% distortion dac.
On the other hand if you are listening to recordings of single fixed level 1kHz tones, then I would agree with you
I expected a response like this from you, but you can of course add any number of zeros you like to both numbers without changing the essence of my reasoning. For what it's worth, I don't believe for a second that you can hear it on group harmonies either, not even through hypothetical < 0.001 % distortion loudspeakers or headphones.
You probably wouldn't believe I could sort single opamp unity gain buffers designed by PMA in order of distortion by ear either. Only difference was the type of opamp each time, 5532, TL072, etc. It was very hard at the time I did it, but I did do it and PMA gave me credit for it. To be fair, I did leave one at the bottom of the list unsorted because my ears were ringing from being right up next the speaker with the volume turned up.
Now it should be easier since my reproduction system has much less distortion now.
Now it should be easier since my reproduction system has much less distortion now.
There you are
If you mean fidelity to the original sound, that's fantasy land, me thinkst, and long time gone.....
But it sounds different. The limiting factor turned out to be the noise and distortion in my 20-year old Bryston 4B power amp. That sounds like electronics distortion, not speaker distortion, so it actually was a masking factor I had to deal with.
All bar the first are production. What you keep banging on about is reproduction to no apparent end. And if you simply want to duplicate, we've got machines for that.
At the extreme we have AP and R&S.
How would you listen to the component itself, i.e. DAC, cable or amp?
I wouldn't listen at that point. Like any other black box in electronics you have a procedure for testing the functionality of said box. You decide the parameters of interest and test accordingly. Audio isn't magical it is just something else to which electronics can be applied. It is no different to any other aspect of electronics where a number of approaches will produce the desired result. And a continuity tester for the cable.
Take it the closest approach to the original sound doesn't work for you.There you are
Such a bizarre result would make me wonder where the error was, in the test itself or in the unity gain buffer design. It's the same as when you get a very weird result out of a measurement: first you try to figure out what went wrong, if you can't find anything, you slowly start to believe it.
It should be also noted as Mark conveniently forgets that one file was replicated and he marked two identical files at different places in the list. It also used an extreme AB switching protocol that does warrant consideration by others as a tool in the box, but is so far removed from the reality of listening that personally I view the files as indistinguishable by normal means.
Mark's protocol is also about as far removed from the subjectivist group that includes JC and most hifi reviewers as it is possible to get
Mark's protocol is also about as far removed from the subjectivist group that includes JC and most hifi reviewers as it is possible to get
Irrelevant response noted.
To him, that's a proof for his argument on DACs.but is so far removed from the reality of listening that personally I view the files as indistinguishable by normal means.
Mark's protocol is also about as far removed from the subjectivist group that includes JC and most hifi reviewers as it is possible to get
It also used an extreme AB switching protocol that does warrant consideration by others as a tool in the box, but is so far removed from the reality of listening that personally I view the files as indistinguishable by normal means.
Mark's protocol is also about as far removed from the subjectivist group that includes JC and most hifi reviewers as it is possible to get
Except for the really bad op-amps like LM324 and such, the distortion of a single op-amp buffer should be far below audibility. That is, if Mark did hear a difference, that's very remarkable no matter what protocol was used - assuming everything was double blind and there were no serious methodological errors.
That makes sense: most DACs have at least one op-amp in the signal path and it is not always the same type, so if you can hear a difference between op-amp types, you probably can hear a difference between DACs.
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