Recent content by KMann

The technology is equally applicable to planar magnetic headphones too, all our headphones achieve good bass with a very good seal, SLAM helps equalize this pressure not only boosting the low end but also instantly making them sound more open and improves clarity and resolution too by reducing...

As promised, we have published more on SLAM here: https://www.audeze.com/blogs/technology-and-innovation/introducing-slam-breakthrough-technology-for-more-lifelike-bass-and-detail

Interesting read, thanks.

Yes, personal preference plays a significant role here - and so does the playback chain. Objectively less accurate options can still be preferred, sometimes because they mask flaws, and other times because they emphasize certain characteristics. It’s the same reason why some people prefer tube...

FWIW, I’ve always felt that the ‘liveliness’ and wider presentation are colorations caused by out-of-band images. I’m not particularly sensitive to the liveliness aspect - it’s more anecdotal, based on what others have reported - but on a 2-channel setup, the change in perceived width has been...

Calling SLAM a spacer is an oversimplification and somewhat insulting to the R&D team who worked hard on a multi-objective constrained optimization problem. These are precisely calculated channels arrived through mathematical modeling, simulation and further tuned through measurements, and is...

The CRBN EQ done by Bob Katz had a slight bass boost and a slight boost for the treble. If you were happy with the EQ, you will likely prefer CRBN2 without EQ as CRBN2 has improved bass and sounds more refined in the treble. Bob Katz has indicated that he does not want/feel the need to EQ CRBN2...

Thanks for walking me through your perspective and explaining the reasoning behind your preference. With R2R DACs, increasing the sampling rate pushes out-of-band images further away, which reduces reconstruction artifacts and timing errors - subjectively improving depth perception. However, the...

Thanks for clarifying. From your post, you were not looking for audible noise (as was originally suggest) but you noticed improvements in depth between 16 - 19bits. While I understand your preference is for Gaussian dither and 8x for dynamics, is it not true that you mentioned earlier that you...

Was this just dither or with noise shaping? With dither alone, DAC non-linearity will become an additional variable.

I was referring to live music, as in someone singing or playing a guitar and listening to a live performance not playback via digital/vinyl. To say neural pathways are discrete is over-simplification. Sure, sigmoid functions have been used to model activations of artificial neural networks...

Without getting into an argument of what one is supposed to hear and not hear, which many have beaten to death on multiple forums and threads, there is a difference between the smallest signal one can hear and being sensitive to the discrete levels available in the reproduced signal, these are...

Decorrelation is not the same as removing quantization noise. It prevents the quantization noise from being modulated by the music signal, but it does not eliminate the quantization error itself. Unless you apply noise shaping, dither is not a substitute for bit-depth. Dither is effective when...

What exactly is meant by "standard (optimal) filters," and why should any other filter be considered suboptimal? ADCs and DACs must operate within certain hardware constraints, and the filters they use are often the best available given those limitations. However, it’s neither fair nor...

Dither helps decorrelate quantization error, but does nothing to improve low level signal accuracy, the signal accuracy is still a function of bit-depth unless you are talking about noise shaping + dither. Here too you are referring to noise shaping and not just dither, a 1-bit signal cannot be...