[sajunky]

NO. There are more factors to consider. Topping A90 is an mining example.

 

[bifcake]

There wouldn’t be a fidelity market if we could live with iPhones, dongles and air buds alone. Every component makes a difference in my comparison, the only time my jury was out was on linear power conditioners and high end audio rj ethernet cables, but that’s just me.
yes Virginia there are differences and the rabbit holes are many and deep

Hi end ethernet cables?? Muahahahhahahahah Are you serious? They came up with that snake oil?

 

[CTR640]

All I can say: spend the money within your budget on a dac and try it. If it sounds good to you, then keep it and never look back.
There is no reason to rob banks to get the uber expensive ones. It also depends on your usage, preferences and requirements.

 

[Whazzzup]

Hi end ethernet cables?? Muahahahhahahahah Are you serious? They came up with that snake oil?

If you read my post yes i found ethernet audio cables and linear power conditioners of no effect. oh power cables look cool don't know if it matters either, I got one that looks like it could power up an aircraft carrier...But maybe you tried and feel different? The rest virginia, yes it does matter.

 

[bifcake]

If you read my post yes i found ethernet audio cables and linear power conditioners of no effect. oh power cables look cool don't know if it matters either, I got one that looks like it could power up an aircraft carrier...But maybe you tried and feel different? The rest virginia, yes it does matter.

Yeah, I know. I was surprised that they came up with the uber Ethernet cable. Then again, I shouldn't be surprised. Those snake oil salesmen will always come up with the next flavor of the snake oil.

 

[Marutks]

 

[Simplicitation]

Anyone want to persuade an objectivist?

I opened this thread thinking that it would be an exercise in refuting illogical arguments. When I saw something I didn't know much about -- @]eep mentioning "phase and temporal integrity" -- I thought, "well, surely the testers quantify that and have various benchmarks of transparency, right?" Turns out, no, they don't.

I first went to see what other objectivists have to say about it. The largest English-language audio gear measurement site describes their DAC tests in a goodly amount of detail. But, the test description is factually wrong on its face when it comes to the J-test for jitter and logically inconsistent when it comes to testing phase. (The J-test includes two square waves, the second of which appears to be confused for a test for jitter and the actual evidence of jitter is never discussed. Phase, as I understand it being possibly relevant to DACs, is relevant to multi-tone testing, which is dismissed with the faulty logic of: if it occurs with one tone, it will occur with many, therefore if it does not occur with one it will not occur with many.) This was not convincing.

So I expanded my search, leading me to Stereophile, which recently posted an opinion admitting that its articles lean heavily toward the "truthy", where then Editor-in-Chief John Atkinson has a rather good (and much better) article on jitter testing. I learned more -- how to interpret results from the J-test -- but not enough.

Regarding jitter -- or temporal integrity, if that's a broader concept -- my question is: how much is audible? Unlike noise, where something is there when it shouldn't be, jitter causes intentional sounds to change. It strikes me intuitively (which is to say: naively and likely completely wrong, but still ... sometimes correct) that errors which change an expected sound are likely far more perceptible then the unexpected presence of a random noise or unintended harmonic. I haven't spent more than a few hours digging into this, but I haven't found any attempts to test the significance of jitter in the audible domain, which is how review sites would detect and evaluate it. Even NwAvGuy, the masked hero of aural objectivism, appears to treat the amplitude of jitter-induced noise as if it were the same as random noise, but without any explicit justification that I found.

I haven't seen any testing for phase response or phase noise in audio DACs -- audio amplifiers and transducers, yes; higher-frequency DACs, yes; but not audio DACs. Nor have I encountered any arguments, much less any that are convincing, that either audio DACs cannot alter phase or that any such alterations would necessarily be inaudible, two propositions that would be dispositive but which both strike me, again intuitively/naively, as wrong.

Moreover, learning about R2R DAC non-linearity interests me very much. That would be like lifting the shadows in a photograph: perhaps not technically accurate but definitely an aesthetic choice that would gain much approval in many contexts. It might be possible to write a digital filter to do this or at least a close approximation of it, but I am not aware of any that do, and so in the meantime they, uniquely and distinctly, can make some music more enjoyable, which really is the point of this hobby (in contrast to reproduction-oriented engineering). That's pretty awesome, up there with tubes in the "desirable distortion" category. If such a device costs $50 and is otherwise transparent, that would be quite useful with the right recordings, like a pair of sunglasses on a bright day.

Therefore, with as much as I've learned -- only a little -- I am convinced that whether a good $10 DAC vs a good $10,000 DAC makes an audible difference is an open question. I'm still an objectivist -- I believe that any meaningful differences can be measured. I just don't see those measurements being performed and perhaps they haven't even been defined.

But I'm not yet at the point where I can agree that a good fancy DAC is superior to a cheap DAC that measures the same way, even with the current (limited) measurement methods. And I'm not in a position to buy a bunch of good or even mediocre DACs to find the two that demonstrate the proposition. So: what might convince me? Are there measurements you've seen that correlate with your subjective experiences of how DACs sound different? Or, are there a pair of affordable DACs that I might be able to obtain and listen to, which by objective standards ought to sound the same but which don't? Or, from the objectivist side, evidence that jitter errors are perceived the same way as random or harmonic noise, and/or that phase issues are inherently negligible (such that objective reviews do not need to measure it) with DACs?

Thanks for your patience, folks. If nothing else, this has been an interesting diversion for me.

 

[ThanatosVI]

Anyone want to persuade an objectivist?

I opened this thread thinking that it would be an exercise in refuting illogical arguments. When I saw something I didn't know much about -- @]eep mentioning "phase and temporal integrity" -- I thought, "well, surely the testers quantify that and have various benchmarks of transparency, right?" Turns out, no, they don't.

I first went to see what other objectivists have to say about it. The largest English-language audio gear measurement site describes their DAC tests in a goodly amount of detail. But, the test description is factually wrong on its face when it comes to the J-test for jitter and logically inconsistent when it comes to testing phase. (The J-test includes two square waves, the second of which appears to be confused for a test for jitter and the actual evidence of jitter is never discussed. Phase, as I understand it being possibly relevant to DACs, is relevant to multi-tone testing, which is dismissed with the faulty logic of: if it occurs with one tone, it will occur with many, therefore if it does not occur with one it will not occur with many.) This was not convincing.

So I expanded my search, leading me to Stereophile, which recently posted an opinion admitting that its articles lean heavily toward the "truthy", where then Editor-in-Chief John Atkinson has a rather good (and much better) article on jitter testing. I learned more -- how to interpret results from the J-test -- but not enough.

Regarding jitter -- or temporal integrity, if that's a broader concept -- my question is: how much is audible? Unlike noise, where something is there when it shouldn't be, jitter causes intentional sounds to change. It strikes me intuitively (which is to say: naively and likely completely wrong, but still ... sometimes correct) that errors which change an expected sound are likely far more perceptible then the unexpected presence of a random noise or unintended harmonic. I haven't spent more than a few hours digging into this, but I haven't found any attempts to test the significance of jitter in the audible domain, which is how review sites would detect and evaluate it. Even NwAvGuy, the masked hero of aural objectivism, appears to treat the amplitude of jitter-induced noise as if it were the same as random noise, but without any explicit justification that I found.

I haven't seen any testing for phase response or phase noise in audio DACs -- audio amplifiers and transducers, yes; higher-frequency DACs, yes; but not audio DACs. Nor have I encountered any arguments, much less any that are convincing, that either audio DACs cannot alter phase or that any such alterations would necessarily be inaudible, two propositions that would be dispositive but which both strike me, again intuitively/naively, as wrong.

Moreover, learning about R2R DAC non-linearity interests me very much. That would be like lifting the shadows in a photograph: perhaps not technically accurate but definitely an aesthetic choice that would gain much approval in many contexts. It might be possible to write a digital filter to do this or at least a close approximation of it, but I am not aware of any that do, and so in the meantime they, uniquely and distinctly, can make some music more enjoyable, which really is the point of this hobby (in contrast to reproduction-oriented engineering). That's pretty awesome, up there with tubes in the "desirable distortion" category. If such a device costs $50 and is otherwise transparent, that would be quite useful with the right recordings, like a pair of sunglasses on a bright day.

Therefore, with as much as I've learned -- only a little -- I am convinced that whether a good $10 DAC vs a good $10,000 DAC makes an audible difference is an open question. I'm still an objectivist -- I believe that any meaningful differences can be measured. I just don't see those measurements being performed and perhaps they haven't even been defined.

But I'm not yet at the point where I can agree that a good fancy DAC is superior to a cheap DAC that measures the same way, even with the current (limited) measurement methods. And I'm not in a position to buy a bunch of good or even mediocre DACs to find the two that demonstrate the proposition. So: what might convince me? Are there measurements you've seen that correlate with your subjective experiences of how DACs sound different? Or, are there a pair of affordable DACs that I might be able to obtain and listen to, which by objective standards ought to sound the same but which don't? Or, from the objectivist side, evidence that jitter errors are perceived the same way as random or harmonic noise, and/or that phase issues are inherently negligible (such that objective reviews do not need to measure it) with DACs?

Thanks for your patience, folks. If nothing else, this has been an interesting diversion for me.

Kudos for this post.
My limited input to the topic is.
If "sound quality" for DACs is measureable nobody knows how to do it, which metrics are actually important etc.

The current measurement approaches can only do a "negative test", e.g. if something would measure horribly and have audible distortion.
However basically all DACs that are sold nowadays measure fine, all without any audible distortion.
Yet they sound different and sometimes in unexpected ways, e.g. a Schiit modi measures better than a Yggdrasil.

So for now, listening Tests are the only valuable Information we have to compare DACs, until someone Figures out what needs to be measured and how to do it.

 

[Deolum]

Gotta love those arbitrary percentages, each of my power cables is a 3% increase in overall Sound quality...

It actually always surprises me how much powercables change.

 

[ThanatosVI]

It actually always surprises me how much powercables change.

I was surprised as well

 

[manueljenkin]

Anyone want to persuade an objectivist?

I opened this thread thinking that it would be an exercise in refuting illogical arguments. When I saw something I didn't know much about -- @]eep mentioning "phase and temporal integrity" -- I thought, "well, surely the testers quantify that and have various benchmarks of transparency, right?" Turns out, no, they don't.

I first went to see what other objectivists have to say about it. The largest English-language audio gear measurement site describes their DAC tests in a goodly amount of detail. But, the test description is factually wrong on its face when it comes to the J-test for jitter and logically inconsistent when it comes to testing phase. (The J-test includes two square waves, the second of which appears to be confused for a test for jitter and the actual evidence of jitter is never discussed. Phase, as I understand it being possibly relevant to DACs, is relevant to multi-tone testing, which is dismissed with the faulty logic of: if it occurs with one tone, it will occur with many, therefore if it does not occur with one it will not occur with many.) This was not convincing.

So I expanded my search, leading me to Stereophile, which recently posted an opinion admitting that its articles lean heavily toward the "truthy", where then Editor-in-Chief John Atkinson has a rather good (and much better) article on jitter testing. I learned more -- how to interpret results from the J-test -- but not enough.

Regarding jitter -- or temporal integrity, if that's a broader concept -- my question is: how much is audible? Unlike noise, where something is there when it shouldn't be, jitter causes intentional sounds to change. It strikes me intuitively (which is to say: naively and likely completely wrong, but still ... sometimes correct) that errors which change an expected sound are likely far more perceptible then the unexpected presence of a random noise or unintended harmonic. I haven't spent more than a few hours digging into this, but I haven't found any attempts to test the significance of jitter in the audible domain, which is how review sites would detect and evaluate it. Even NwAvGuy, the masked hero of aural objectivism, appears to treat the amplitude of jitter-induced noise as if it were the same as random noise, but without any explicit justification that I found.

I haven't seen any testing for phase response or phase noise in audio DACs -- audio amplifiers and transducers, yes; higher-frequency DACs, yes; but not audio DACs. Nor have I encountered any arguments, much less any that are convincing, that either audio DACs cannot alter phase or that any such alterations would necessarily be inaudible, two propositions that would be dispositive but which both strike me, again intuitively/naively, as wrong.

Moreover, learning about R2R DAC non-linearity interests me very much. That would be like lifting the shadows in a photograph: perhaps not technically accurate but definitely an aesthetic choice that would gain much approval in many contexts. It might be possible to write a digital filter to do this or at least a close approximation of it, but I am not aware of any that do, and so in the meantime they, uniquely and distinctly, can make some music more enjoyable, which really is the point of this hobby (in contrast to reproduction-oriented engineering). That's pretty awesome, up there with tubes in the "desirable distortion" category. If such a device costs $50 and is otherwise transparent, that would be quite useful with the right recordings, like a pair of sunglasses on a bright day.

Therefore, with as much as I've learned -- only a little -- I am convinced that whether a good $10 DAC vs a good $10,000 DAC makes an audible difference is an open question. I'm still an objectivist -- I believe that any meaningful differences can be measured. I just don't see those measurements being performed and perhaps they haven't even been defined.

But I'm not yet at the point where I can agree that a good fancy DAC is superior to a cheap DAC that measures the same way, even with the current (limited) measurement methods. And I'm not in a position to buy a bunch of good or even mediocre DACs to find the two that demonstrate the proposition. So: what might convince me? Are there measurements you've seen that correlate with your subjective experiences of how DACs sound different? Or, are there a pair of affordable DACs that I might be able to obtain and listen to, which by objective standards ought to sound the same but which don't? Or, from the objectivist side, evidence that jitter errors are perceived the same way as random or harmonic noise, and/or that phase issues are inherently negligible (such that objective reviews do not need to measure it) with DACs?

Thanks for your patience, folks. If nothing else, this has been an interesting diversion for me.

Do you want to try something free that alters sound quality and gives clue to why cables matter? All you need is your existing dac, with a good uac class driver. Have a look at my write up.

https://www.head-fi.org/threads/my-experience-with-different-music-players.923248/page-5

post#62 in page 5, post #81 page 6, post 102 page 7, post #135 page 9 and post #143 page 10 contain the list of options. I'll recommend to start with Playpcmwin since it's hard to mess up this player. Let me know what you think.

 

[]eep]

why do you assume all dacs are paired up to computers? They don't. Computers (pc's) trail decades after Cd-players and dac's/adc's. I had a cd-player using the same r2r chips i still use 10 years before i bought my first DX386-40 that made no sound other than fan noise and bleeps.

I've done the whole stretch from there to high res flac. Now i send DSD over usb whenever i can get a hold of it and that sounds even a little bit better than 24/96. I found the difference between 24/96 and higher marginal, just as 24bits rather useless (unless you use digital volume control). So to reduce filesize i often resample to 16/96 and still get better sound than redbook.

I am not current since I have no pc anymore but Foobar over an external usb converter totally blew away any cd (my cd-player then was definitely not cheap). So much that i stopped using cd. I never encountered any problems with Foobar. If the driver just sends the raw data over usb, i don't see how sound will differ much (unless you don't use handshake/parity or don't have enough speed/buffer).

So i still use those old Philips TDA1543 and it is still able to decode 24/96 and does it very well. They are old stock and do not cost much, just feed them well and they'll give many a modern high end dac a run for their money. As long as you don't follow the old white papers or feed with the old oversampling chips.

To wrap up, maybe I'm not aware of newer players doing some oversampling magic, that might be helpful if you want to go the delta sigma route. In my book non oversampling, non filtered R2R is more natural sounding and thus more musical. I drink my single malt straight up.

 

[Marutks]

Do you want to try something free that alters sound quality and gives clue to why cables matter?

I compared wtfplay with audirvana. Both running on a MacbookPro. I played few tracks from They sound the same ( using D90 -> ECP T4 ).
And how is this related to cables? I bought Audioquest Forest USB cables. Plugged them into D90 and RME ADI 2. It didnt change sound at all. Also it didn't fix my Audrivana problem. It still can't play DSD 256 files without occasional sound dropouts. I tried both D90 and RME ADI 2 and two different Macbooks. Colibri plays DSD 256 just fine so it must be some software defect in Audirvana.

 

[manueljenkin]

why do you assume all dacs are paired up to computers? They don't. Computers (pc's) trail decades after Cd-players and dac's/adc's. I had a cd-player using the same r2r chips i still use 10 years before i bought my first DX386-40 that made no sound other than fan noise and bleeps.

I've done the whole stretch from there to high res flac. Now i send DSD over usb whenever i can get a hold of it and that sounds even a little bit better than 24/96. I found the difference between 24/96 and higher marginal, just as 24bits rather useless (unless you use digital volume control). So to reduce filesize i often resample to 16/96 and still get better sound than redbook.

I am not current since I have no pc anymore but Foobar over an external usb converter totally blew away any cd (my cd-player then was definitely not cheap). So much that i stopped using cd. I never encountered any problems with Foobar. If the driver just sends the raw data over usb, i don't see how sound will differ much (unless you don't use handshake/parity or don't have enough speed/buffer).

So i still use those old Philips TDA1543 and it is still able to decode 24/96 and does it very well. They are old stock and do not cost much, just feed them well and they'll give many a modern high end dac a run for their money. As long as you don't follow the old white papers or feed with the old oversampling chips.

To wrap up, maybe I'm not aware of newer players doing some oversampling magic, that might be helpful if you want to go the delta sigma route. In my book non oversampling, non filtered R2R is more natural sounding and thus more musical. I drink my single malt straight up.

NOS and digital low pass (and the whole domain of noise shaping etc) are interesting areas. Without getting into details, may I know what dacs you're trying to mention. I am interested in building the dddac (uses pcm1794, I'm aiming for 4 deck one, transformer coupled output). And the software differences I mentioned above are ignoring the custom oversampling. They were entirely relating to the noise coming out of the usb line (different cpu and electronics access patterns cause different noise). More expensive dacs will benefit less since they can have some rigorous isolation in their usb interface. I don't have much experiences with cd players so I can't correlate much there, but the sq differences between these music players are audible to me.

I compared wtfplay with audirvana. Both running on a MacbookPro. I played few tracks from They sound the same ( using D90 -> ECP T4 ).
And how is this related to cables? I bought Audioquest Forest USB cables. Plugged them into D90 and RME ADI 2. It didnt change sound at all. Also it didn't fix my Audrivana problem. It still can't play DSD 256 files without occasional sound dropouts. I tried both D90 and RME ADI 2 and two different Macbooks. Colibri plays DSD 256 just fine so it must be some software defect in Audirvana.

Regarding the dropouts, can you check the latency with something like dpc latency checker? I think they should be doing fine.

Regarding cables, if you could hear a change between the different softwares, it is because of noise pattern differences across the usb lines caused due to differences in cpu and storage access patterns. If this can change the sound, so can cables which are also a source of noise (just the flow of high frequency data pulses generates noise), and differences in geometry, shielding etc can cause changes.

Your experience is interesting to note for me because another friend of mine who also has rme adi2 hears differences similar to I hear but both of us are comparing players inside windows. Mac is known to be better, and the choices you mentioned being gold standards there. I guess that explains why you don't hear much difference. Nice choice of music btw, but if you're interested can you try with few more music (preferably non synthetic but it doesn't matter a lot). The op was asking for someone to show him why dac differences matter and assuming his dac is sub 300$ (I don't see such posts from people who own more capable dacs) I thought this might be an easy way to show him some differences for free.

If I can confirm he had an akm or burr brown dac that supports high sample rates, I could have asked him to try the demo version of hqplayer and it's modulators.

 

[]eep]

i am not making a certain model, I mostly rigorously modify stuff. With the TDA1543 it is pretty simple to make a dac. And without any filtering it sounds just great. It measures awful when you use high frequency close to 0dB tones, but those do not occur in music. Nor do block tones. With music it sounds musical, natural, balanced and clean.