Apodization for music rendition with LG V30/40's Digital Filters?

Mar 24, 2020 at 7:44 AM Thread Starter Post #1 of 2

The Third

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The LG V40 is a wonderful audiophile phone that contains what is called a Quad-DAC that enables the users a plethora of Hi-Fi options without ruining sound quality.
One of those options are the digital filters, ranging from Short/Sharp/Slow. Lg's description of these filters is rather vague:

Short produces a more spatial and ambient sound
Sharp produces a more natural sound
Slow produces a cleaner sound

Now let me first share my personal impressions of each filter:
*Now the phone comes with the Short one as default enabled, which also sounds best to my ear.
It has the best soundstage and imaging and doesn't have the peaky highs that Sharp does. It also sounds
the most organic and is very splashy in the mids.
*While Sharp does enhance clarity and perhaps is a bit more analytical, the highs become too sharp with my X00 PH or HD25's and I feel it loses a lot of the imaging that the short filter does have.
*Slow I have not tried so much but I noticed the music becomes drier and a bit more textured but it not necessarily clearer, it actually loses the imaging of the Short filter and it turn it feels less detailed.

However, all these filters when applied to different tracks can result in different results. Some filters work better for certain tracks than for others, but Short generally is my preferred one followed by Sharp.

Now my main question is, what does it actually do to the sound? In this review the author mentions the Short filter is an apodizing filter and assumes the Sharp filter being the neutral one for testing. Now to my ears the sharp one is clearly a lot brighter and has sharper treble. My X00's don't have such sharp highs on other gear such as other phones or portable DAC's that have decent extension.
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...o-measurement-of-lg-g7-thinq-smartphone.4468/

Anyone can enlighten me why the apodization filter of Short actually creates a more detailed and spacious sound to my ears? Is it because it decreases the noise floor while smoothing out the sound and rolling off the highs?
 
Last edited:
Mar 24, 2020 at 11:49 AM Post #2 of 2
These settings define the passband, transition band and transition slope of the low pass filter. Any 'minimum phase' filter will also skew phase response resulting in the low frequencies arriving milliseconds before the higher frequencies. This can be seen in the impulse response and square waves if you care to study further.

Some people find that they change the stage. Personally I find that minimum phase variants allow more attack and more imaging precision while linear phase have better holography and are technically superior because they don't skew phase.

It's all preference my friend. And make very small differences indeed.
 

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