Joe Bloggs
Sponsor: HiByMember of the Trade: EFO Technologies Co, YanYin TechnologyHis Porta Corda walked the Green Mile
... and when all the bellyaching about possible DAC, amp and file format gremlins is said and done, the "reality" is I can still stick a $50 pair of headphones into a $100 DAC/amp and get superior musical performance playing redbook CDs to TOTL rigs costing tens of thousands per part playing DSD512 or whatever, because I bothered to characterize the headphone's frequency response on my ears and my own loudspeaker-to-headphone HRTF and compensated for both using (shock horror) parametric equalizers and cross-channel convolution DSPs :rolleyes:
Yes, my central question is what do we need to know to reproduce music with fidelity. But you are leaving an important concept undefined here. What is the definition of "superior musical performance"?
There are ABX tests for determining whether sufficiently similar stimuli are differentiable at all by the subject, then there are preference tests to determine which of a set of quite different stimuli is subjectively most preferred by the subject. Since no HiFi audio reproduction comes close enough to the real thing to require ABX testing, and since the effect of correcting a pair of headphones' frequency response and HRTF for oneself are anything but subtle compared to "plain" playback, we should be investigating via preference testing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_test
Still it should not be hard to demonstrate that the effect of the effects I mentioned (EQ and HRTF, and a new item, room treatment and correction for loudspeaker systems) on correcting the perceived signal towards ideal stereo playback are disproportionately larger than any "fidelity"-based incremental improvements on garden-variety DACs, amps and even headphones and loudspeakers--because DACs and amps are at the mercy of the distortions introduced by headphones and loudspeakers, loudspeakers are at the mercy of whatever the room does to the sound they make (however perfect) while headphones are simply physically unable to pretend to be loudspeakers. The effects I mentioned directly manipulate the source signal to nullify the bad effects mentioned above, which does more for ultimate fidelity than any misguided attempt to preserve the signal as it is through every stage in the playback chain--if the signal is not customized ("pre-distorted") to the playback system, it will be distorted by the loudspeaker / headphone / room beyond recognition, if you want any semblance to the desired original signal reaching your ears you need to predistort the digital signal beyond recognition to combat the said distortions that will occur down the chain. This is something that 99% of audiophiles don't understand.
![]() |
![]() |
Stay updated on HiBy at their facebook, website or email (icons below).
Stay updated on HiBy at their sponsor profile on Head-Fi.
![]() ![]() ![]() |