Does It Really Sound The Same?

[upstateguy]

Quote:

Congratulations are in order. You've proved that some nincompoops can't make a good piece of stereo equipment if their life depended on it. I'm sure your mother would be proud.

Real nice, a personal attack..... 
 
That, and Bob Carver is a nincompoop that can't make a good piece of stereo equipment if his life depended on it.....
 

 

[upstateguy]

Quote:

You still don't understand what Bob Carver did. He proved that solid state components could be hobbled to sound exactly like (poorly performing) tube amps. His intent wasn't to create a different sounding amp. It was to prove that tube amps weren't able to do things that solid state ones couldn't with a few screwed up settings.
 
The irony is that the people who want messed up response curves didn't listen to him. They still buy expensive tube amps.

 
OK,  in its day, the Conrad-Johnson Premier Five was a poorly performing amp.
 

 

[endless402]

Quote:

I could be mistaken, but isn't the optical out of the mac mini known for having horrible jitter??
 

apparently it is really high
hopefully isn't as bad as their airport express, now that thing is terrible
 
 
 
According to Gordon Rankin from wavelength:
 
[size=x-small]S/PDIF streamed output from Mac Book Toslink 1607ps [/size]
[size=x-small]S/PDIF streamed output from Apple Airport express Toslink 2418ps[/size]

 

[bigshot]

Quote:

Originally Posted by upstateguy /img/forum/go_quote.gif
Real nice, a personal attack..... That, and Bob Carver is a nincompoop that can't make a good piece of stereo equipment if his life depended on it.....
 

I know you are intent on claiming "victory", but victory doesn't mean that much when you have to misstate other people's comments to achieve it.

 

[bigshot]

Quote:

apparently it is really high hopefully isn't as bad as their airport express, now that thing is terrible
According to Gordon Rankin from wavelength:
 
[size=x-small]S/PDIF streamed output from Mac Book Toslink 1607ps [/size]
[size=x-small]S/PDIF streamed output from Apple Airport express Toslink 2418ps[/size]

I don't know who Gordon Rankin is, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that he makes firewire DACs for computer media servers. Do I win a prize?
 
For the bonus round, I'm going to guess that even those measurements represent inaudible levels of jitter.

 

[upstateguy]

Quote:

I know you are intent on claiming "victory", but victory doesn't mean that much when you have to misstate other people's comments to achieve it.

 
Pardon me.  We were discussing Carver's amps.  Here's your quote, what did you say?
 
Quote:

Congratulations are in order. You've proved that some nincompoops can't make a good piece of stereo equipment if their life depended on it. I'm sure your mother would be proud.

 

[bigshot]

You may have been discussing Carver, but I was discussing crappy amps that don't meet industry standards.

P.S. I have a Sunfire TS EQ12 in my own system.

 

[endless402]

 
Quote:

I don't know who Gordon Rankin is, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that he makes firewire DACs for computer media servers. Do I win a prize?
 
For the bonus round, I'm going to guess that even those measurements represent inaudible levels of jitter.

 not sure if it's the jitter, airport express just sounds awful
 
 
 
 

 

[bigshot]

No it doesn't. Who is Gordon Rankin? Do I have to google him?

 

[upstateguy]

Quote:

You may have been discussing Carver, but I was discussing crappy amps that don't meet industry standards.

P.S. I have a Sunfire TS EQ12 in my own system.

LOL. OK, if you say so.
 

 

[Willakan]

I bugger off for a day, and I come back to the head-fi equivalent of "Your Mum" jokes. Clearly a correlation between those two pieces of information

upstateguy, I'm unsure of what you wanted the thread to prove. You can purposefully massively degrade the performance of stuff to sound different - that much seems relatively obvious without needing to go into the details - and if that is what you wanted to establish, consider it confirmed as true.

 

[nwavguy]

It's too bad these sorts of discussions so often devolve into personal attacks or otherwise get derailed in ways that seriously degrade the "signal-to-noise-ratio" of the thread to the point where few probably will even bother to read past the first few of the 200+ posts.
 
Is it just inevitable? Or do some people intentionally want to make these discussions unattractive to others?
 
The "sounds the same" discussion is key to much of the money being spent, and wasted, in this industry. It's a hugely important issue for anyone who has limited cash and wants to spend it wisely on the stuff that matters most.
 
It's like kids getting together on the playground to geek out and talk science. But if they start attracting too much interest, the usual bullies come over and either call them names or create a big distraction to break up their discussion. The bullies don't get the science, but instead of minding their own business, they go on the offensive.
 
Those with money to burn, trying to impress others with their gear, or just off the deep end with this hobby, obviously want to believe $1000 cables sound better. And that's fine. They can go spend their money on whatever they like. But, like the bullies in the analogy above, they don't just mind their own business. They actively jump in the middle of objective discussions but rarely make applicable objective contributions. They just insist the earth must be flat because it looks that way from where they're sitting.
 
I received an overwhelmingly positive response to my Subjective vs Objective Debate article. It demonstrated there are plenty of people who want to separate the hype and myth from the objective truth. But it seems difficult to discuss these same topics on most of the audio forums--especially this site (Hydrogenaudio is the notable exception). And that's very unfortunate.

 

[upstateguy]

 
Quote:

It's too bad these sorts of discussions so often devolve into personal attacks or otherwise get derailed in ways that seriously degrade the "signal-to-noise-ratio" of the thread to the point where few probably will even bother to read past the first few of the 200+ posts.
 
Is it just inevitable? Or do some people intentionally want to make these discussions unattractive to others?
 
The "sounds the same" discussion is key to much of the money being spent, and wasted, in this industry. It's a hugely important issue for anyone who has limited cash and wants to spend it wisely on the stuff that matters most.
 
It's like kids getting together on the playground to geek out and talk science. But if they start attracting too much interest, the usual bullies come over and either call them names or create a big distraction to break up their discussion. The bullies don't get the science, but instead of minding their own business, they go on the offensive.
 
Those with money to burn, trying to impress others with their gear, or just off the deep end with this hobby, obviously want to believe $1000 cables sound better. And that's fine. They can go spend their money on whatever they like. But, like the bullies in the analogy above, they don't just mind their own business. They actively jump in the middle of objective discussions but rarely make applicable objective contributions. They just insist the earth must be flat because it looks that way from where they're sitting.
 
I received an overwhelmingly positive response to my Subjective vs Objective Debate article. It demonstrated there are plenty of people who want to separate the hype and myth from the objective truth. But it seems difficult to discuss these same topics on most of the audio forums--especially this site (Hydrogenaudio is the notable exception). And that's very unfortunate.

I'm the OP.
 
Would you like to weigh in on my first post?
 
USG
 

 

[bigshot]

The thing that frustrates me is the inevitable slide from discussing sound to discussing testing methodology. It always ends with mountains being made of molehills.

 

[nwavguy]

 
Quote:

 
I'm the OP.
 
Would you like to weigh in on my first post?
 

 
The short answer to the OP, in my opinion, is you can't over generalize such things. Words like "all" or "always" are usually pretty easy to dispute as it's not hard to come up with exceptions.
 
But if the entire design has been engineered to some reasonable point of diminishing returns, and everything is literally "good enough" (which doesn't mean expensive), then it's very likely in a blind test you won't be able to tell one DAC from a similarly well engineered different DAC.
 
There are many examples that demonstrate this. Meyer & Moran, for example, published a landmark AES study involving over 500 listening trials over a year including members of an audiophile club, recording engineers, and students with especially acute hearing. They played high resolution (DSD) SACDs on a high end system and sometimes, unknown to the listeners, switched an extra 16 bit 44 Khz A/D and 16 bit 44 Khz D/A into the signal path. At any realistic volume setting (to not expose the higher 16 bit noise floor during silent passages) NOBODY COULD TELL THE DIFFERENCE!
 
The above study says a lot. It proves you can put a whole bunch of extra hardware in the signal path, and as I said above, if it's sufficiently well engineered, it doesn't change the sound enough for anyone to detect it's even there let alone what it "sounds" like. The A/D and D/A had nearly everything on your list but nobody could tell when all that was added to the signal path.
 
While those who like their expensive DACs, SACD players, etc. naturally tried to dispute Meyer & Moran. The critics, as is often the case, didn't provide their own study to prove Meyer & Moran wrong (even though they could have easily funded one from all the commercial SACD interests watching their entire market being debunked). They mostly just tried to take pot shots at them and throw rocks. Meyer & Moran even responded to the critics in a follow up AES paper and proved many of their concerns wrong. There are links to all this on my site in the subjective debate article.
 
So can all those things on your list sound the same, even for very different designs using different parts, yes they can if you define "sound the same" as "nobody can hear a difference in a blind test".