nick_charles
Headphoneus Supremus
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- Feb 26, 2008
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The SNR on the Ref-8 is 116dB and 121dB on the Ref-7, so I don't see how the Ref-8 could be more accurate.
It might have a flatter frequency response, but since they do not publish this we can never know, also as far as I can tell the SNR is just for the chip not for the overall system so that may not be as helpful
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True, but there's no way to measure timbre accuracy of the dac, and has no relationship with SNR specifications.
FR would do this but that is not supplied , I would be surprised if it were anything other than flat to ~ 20K though
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No offense Ipod but that SNR spec is meaningless in regards to SQ, do you listen much above 100dB?
It is true that a SNR above 96db is largely moot but it is a measure of accuracy, added noise is not part of the signal, if we consider high fidelity to be about accuracy rather than something we like the sound of, even if we cannot tell the difference you can say that one is objectively better than the other but see FR also
If you do I hope a hearing aide is in your short term budget. Let me put it this way Audiogd has more parts cost invested in the Ref8 than any other of their DAC's, and the comparision shootouts show preference to the 8 over the 7.
Is it by any chance newer and thus more hyped ?
The Ref8 is the only DAC from Audio-gd without an opamp shown in the analog stage (its the only 100% descrete.) In China the number 8 is the luckiest most regarded number. If these don't add up to make it the flagship I think you should at least buy one and form your own opinion
and Blind Faith were the world's best supergroup
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regal said:Please describe you favorite flavor of ice cream to someone who hasn't tasted it. Launguage is finite, it has limits and boundaries, especially with regard to human perception.
Indeed, this is I think the whole problem with the audiophile thingy, non verifiable descriptions that are of limited use to anyone who is not doing the description. But the problem I think is more in psychology than semantics. Someone thinks that an accurate sound is a preferable sound, they buy an item, they like the sound and so they describe the sound as accurate, the next person thinks that a warm sound is preferable they buy the same item like the sound and so describe it is warm. We have no objective scale for warmth or naturalness, but we do have measures of accuracy i.e what deviates least from the input signal, noise, distortion and FR are all measures we can more or less compare directly.
Then we come to the second and far worse psychological problem, how do we know we can actually reliably tell two things apart, well if the differences are gross like mono vs stereo no problem , if the differences are big like 10% distortion vs 0.005% very likely, once the differences get smaller it gets harder, but even if the differences are big such as 96db vs 102db we start running into the limits of human perception. Two good quality DACs will have vanishingly low noise, distortion, channel imbalances, jitter and FR deviations beyond audibility (excepting Wadias of course) - so what are the differences we are supposedly hearing ?