[Head Injury]

Quote:

The contention was that all SS amps sound the same.

 
Do you read posts, or do you just pretend to?

 

[khaos974]

Frequency response is usually flat from 20 Hz to beyond 20 kHz, distortion doesn't matter if it's 0.0001% or 0.001% because headphones will dominate this with 0.01% min.

You know what? I really really want that pair of headphones that only has 0.01% distortion . Are you sure you didn't get the orders of magnitude wrong? Most headphones distort at more than 1% for the 2 first octaves.

 

[Mad Max]

 
Quote:

Do you use the same set of coloration for all source material?

I don't use EQ at all, nor am I talking about EQ.
 

 

[Grahame]

Quote:

 

There's plenty of colored-sounding gear and plenty of people who love that.  They do not hide in little caves or anything that you can't find them posting their opinions throughout the internet.
You can have a clean, mildly inaccurate amp thanks to all the various circuit designs and so many flavors of capacitors out there to color up the sound the way you want.  A lot of people find a little coloration to make equipment's sound more "musical" and pleasant to their ears.
In fact, isn't the more neutral equipment the minority in the market?

 
Quote:

 

I don't use EQ at all, nor am I talking about EQ.
 

 
So you're saying that individual people have individual preferences?  
 
WARNING: BAD FOOD ANALOGY AHEAD
 
Some people like to season their food with salt. Some people like to season their food with pepper.  The Chef might prefer that you taste his food the way he intended. 
 

If the desire is for "colored" sound , why not start with a clean amp, and add exactly the right amount of "color". Better yet, do it in software, then you have much better control of the 
color you are injecting, and you can store presets of your favorite colors much cheaper and easier, than having to resort to different physical implementations of the desired "color".
 
This is not a new idea. In fact you may have heard it used in some of your source material. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re-amp
 
Guitarists have been doing this for a while, as well. e.g. http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/news/industry_news/top_5_guitar_amp_modeling_software_products.html
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

[Mad Max]

 
Quote:

So you're saying that individual people have individual preferences?  
 
WARNING: BAD FOOD ANALOGY AHEAD
 
Some people like to season their food with salt. Some people like to season their food with pepper.  The Chef might prefer that you taste his food the way he intended. 

If the desire is for "colored" sound , why not start with a clean amp, and add exactly the right amount of "color". Better yet, do it in software, then you have much better control of the 
color you are injecting, and you can store presets of your favorite colors much cheaper and easier, than having to resort to different physical implementations of the desired "color".
 
This is not a new idea. In fact you may have heard it used in some of your source material. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re-amp
 
Guitarists have been doing this for a while, as well. e.g. http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/news/industry_news/top_5_guitar_amp_modeling_software_products.html

I agree with you on the part that is in bold.  That's what I occasionally do, but I prefer switching headphones or rolling opamps and caps than bothering with software gimmicks.  Yuck.
 
Individual people have individual preferences?  That's what they express throughout this forum and others, so my guess is... very, very likely. 

I was only answering bigshots' question asking why anyone would want a colored-sounding piece of equipment.  I think it is a silly question, considering how many more prefer inaccuracy over accuracy both here and outside of head-fi.

 

[Shike]

Quote:

You know what? I really really want that pair of headphones that only has 0.01% distortion . Are you sure you didn't get the orders of magnitude wrong? Most headphones distort at more than 1% for the 2 first octaves.

Using Ryumatsuba's site and Headroom the highest THD I've seen is 1% on most headphones.  Also, let's not forget THD is frequency dependent when it comes to audibility in music.  I've always found Axiom's test fairly interesting: http://www.axiomaudio.com/distortion.html

 

[khaos974]

Using Ryumatsuba's site and Headroom the highest THD I've seen is 1% on most headphones.  Also, let's not forget THD is frequency dependent when it comes to audibility in music.  I've always found Axiom's test fairly interesting: http://www.axiomaudio.com/distortion.html

Hum? You just have to look at Tyll's site's measurements to see that most headphones have between 1% and 10% distortion in the 2 first octaves. By the way, I never said anything about the audibility of the distortion, I only spoke about the accuracy of the claim,

 

[Willakan]

@upstateguy
As I've been keeping up a constant flow of reponses so far, might as well keep going.
The Carver Challenge effectively consisted of Mr. Carver 'breaking' his solid state amp to make it sound like an "audiophile" tube amp. This does not meet the additional criteria of my statement about amps (which you insist on reducing to "All SS amps sound the same" - please stop doing that.) Your argument is hence based on a fundamental misrepresentation of the opposing position - hey, a straw man! Hoping it's not deliberate.

 

[xnor]

Quote:

You know what? I really really want that pair of headphones that only has 0.01% distortion . Are you sure you didn't get the orders of magnitude wrong? Most headphones distort at more than 1% for the 2 first octaves.

Well I tried to be very careful with that statement and some headphones are spec'd with those numbers. Typically this means that under ideal conditions a single 1 kHz sine wave can be reproduced with very little distortion. Of course if you do a sweep or play a high and low frequency sine wave you'll get distortion that is magnitudes higher than what I wrote. Real music is even more complex and I guess 1% THD in the lower octaves is not uncommon.
 
Quote:

In fact, isn't the more neutral equipment the minority in the market?

I'm not so sure. It certainly is the case if you limit market to those fancy amps and dacs that are discussed on audiophile forums. Also nice sounding hifi speakers are not designed to be neutral, but maybe are still accurate in the sense of low distortion. And what about the pro stuff and consumer electronics that doesn't have or force "sound improvement" features on the customers.
One also has to differentiate between equipment that was intentionally designed to be non-flat, non-neutral, or non-accurate and equipment that cannot be considered neutral etc. due to a number of constraints, such as, price or size if you think of portable devices and so on.
 
 
@USG: To me you seem like a reasonable person and I've noticed that you prefer to quote entire posts so that short quotes don't get divorced from their context. That's what I guess anyway.
So it would appear logical to also treat the statements made in the OP similarly:
"Do all X sound the same?"
 
You've noticed yourself that there are too many variables involved and that the statements are broad generalizations which are meaningless without context.
All of these questions can either be answered with "no", "doesn't make sense", or "the question's too generic".
 

 

[upstateguy]

Quote:

@upstateguy
As I've been keeping up a constant flow of reponses so far, might as well keep going.
The Carver Challenge effectively consisted of Mr. Carver 'breaking' his solid state amp to make it sound like an "audiophile" tube amp. This does not meet the additional criteria of my statement about amps (which you insist on reducing to "All SS amps sound the same" - please stop doing that.) Your argument is hence based on a fundamental misrepresentation of the opposing position - hey, a straw man! Hoping it's not deliberate.

Why are you saying that Carver broke his SS amp to make it sound like a tube amp?  He went on to produce and sell two of these "t" amps which reproduced the sound of two different expensive tube amps.
 
I must be missing something in your statement on SS amps.  Are you trying to say that Carver's amps don't meet the reasonable criteria of being properly designed and working within their power limits?

 
Quote:

I agree with you on the part that is in bold.  That's what I occasionally do, but I prefer switching headphones or rolling opamps and caps than bothering with software gimmicks.  Yuck.
 
Individual people have individual preferences?  That's what they express throughout this forum and others, so my guess is... very, very likely. 

I was only answering bigshots' question asking why anyone would want a colored-sounding piece of equipment.  I think it is a silly question, considering how many more prefer inaccuracy over accuracy both here and outside of head-fi.

Just a question:  To achieve some coloration, why would rolling opamps, caps etc, be preferable to the much more predictible and controllable results of EQing?
 

 
Quote:

Quote:
<snip>  
 
@USG: To me you seem like a reasonable person and I've noticed that you prefer to quote entire posts so that short quotes don't get divorced from their context. That's what I guess anyway.
So it would appear logical to also treat the statements made in the OP similarly:
"Do all X sound the same?"
 
You've noticed yourself that there are too many variables involved and that the statements are broad generalizations which are meaningless without context.
All of these questions can either be answered with "no", "doesn't make sense", or "the question's too generic".
 

I apologize if you feel I have over shortened any of your posts.  I usually just include the part of the post I'm replying to, because the original post, for those interested, is easily accessed by clicking the arrow icon next to the posters name.
 
I'm not sure what you're trying to say but the reason I started this thread was that I have a hard time coming to terms with the all dacs and all amps sound the same concept.  I would even have a hard time with most dacs and most amps sound the same, while I believe that some dacs and some amps can sound pretty much the same.
 
Now take 2 DACs for instance.  Give them different dac chips, different opamps or transistors, different power supplies and different topologies....  and, it is possible, as Carver showed with his amps,  that through clever design they could be made to sound the same, but it seems to me that with such a wide variety of different components, it's more likely that they won't.
 
I am basically a numbers and measurements guy, but my rejection of the "all things sound the same", stems from my own experience with the various pieces of equipment I have or I've had.  Some have sounded relatively the same, like the comparison I did with the Neko dac and my Stello dac, using 2 identical Shuttle computers.  I volume balanced and ended up switching the leads around so much, I lost track of which dac was playing in the tangle of wires.  My feeling was that separately, when I knew which one I was listening to, each DAC had a sound signature of it's own, but when volume balanced, what ever difference I thought I heard were reduced to inconsequential. 
 
There have also been DACs that don't sound the same, such as my DAC-AH and my NorthStar.
 
Then there was the Woo3 Cetron tube, M^3 637/627 comparison.  These two amps have the same sound signature (to my ears) and I'm hard pressed to tell them apart, but my GS-1 doesn't sound like either of them.  It is more analytical sounding.  More resolving might be another way to say it.  In any event, it's not hard to pick it out between the other two.
 
 

 

[Willakan]

It effectively counts as 'breaking' for the purposes of the statement regarding the similarity (or not) of amplifier sounds. For example, raising the output impedance so high as to cause interaction with the transducer, affecting frequency response. This is not good design - but here he was deliberately ignoring the design rules which had given him his original, nicely measuring (presumably) amp to produce a coloured sound.
He started with an amp that had low distortion, flat frequency response and so on and then modified it in such a way that it was no longer what you could call a "well designed" solid state amp - for example, the frequency response was no longer flat. He did this to reproduce the weird frequency response and euphonic distortion of the Stereophile "recommended" amplifier - and then being an intelligent person sold lots of them, as some people prefer the kind of heavily coloured equipment that Stereophile and its ilk endorse.
 
Personally, I wholeheartedly endorse your statement that it is much better to achieve colouration through equalisation and the like.
 
TL;DR: I don't believe that even deliberately coloured SS equipment can ever meet the criteria for being "well designed.", as tweaks must be made to the design to achieve such colouration. That doesn't stop them from sometimes selling well

xnor isn't critiquing Mr. Carver. He knew exactly what he was doing - effectively degrading the performance of his amp to satisfy the criteria that Stereophile perceive make something a "reference"/"high-end"/"musical" piece of equipment - which has precious little to do with accurately producing the original recording.
 
Also, I have been pondering the idea that both the M^3 and the Woo amp could have high amounts of crosstalk, affecting the soundstage. NwAvGuy measured horrible amounts of crosstalk (-40db) on the Mini3 and attributed this to the three-channel topology, shared by the M^3. Again, speculation as I lack independantly made measurements for any of them. Besides, NwAvGuy attributes the crosstalk to the 3-channel design in one place and the Mini3's opamp suffering horribly under high-current conditions (seems more likely) in another.
 
 
 
 

 

[nick_charles]

 
Quote:

 
Also, I have been pondering the idea that both the M^3 and the Woo amp could have high amounts of crosstalk, affecting the soundstage. NwAvGuy measured horrible amounts of crosstalk (-40db) on the Mini3 and attributed this to the three-channel topology, shared by the M^3. Again, speculation as I lack independantly made measurements for any of them.

For my M^3 I was able to test the audibility of the crosstalk by creating a one-channel (Left) sample removing the left side cable from my headphones and listening to the residual channel bleed through to the right channel - seriously however bad it is on paper it was only clearly audible at full volume above the amp noise with nothing in the other channel. At listening volumes it was totally inaudible with nothing in the left channel in 250 ohm headphones. YMMV of course but I would be dubious that it would really make any effect on the soundstage in any meaningful way playing back both channels. As is my wont I went searching for research on crosstalk audibility - there is not much out there and it is pretty old but the consensus from broadcasting bodies such as the IBA is that -30db is as good as you need - Vinyl only sometimes manages this and for bass frequencies it is often below -15db make of that what you will. I'm not losing sleep over it. I'd put it in the category of bad but (probably) irrelevant
 
 

 

[xnor]

Quote:

Originally Posted by upstateguy /img/forum/go_quote.gif
 
I apologize if you feel I have over shortened any of your posts.  I usually just include the part of the post I'm replying to, because the original post, for those interested, is easily accessed by clicking the arrow icon next to the posters name.
 
I'm not sure what you're trying to say but the reason I started this thread was that I have a hard time coming to terms with the all dacs and all amps sound the same concept.  I would even have a hard time with most dacs and most amps sound the same, while I believe that some dacs and some amps can sound pretty much the same.
 
Now take 2 DACs for instance.  Give them different dac chips, different opamps or transistors, different power supplies and different topologies....  and, it is possible, as Carver showed with his amps,  that through clever design they could be made to sound the same, but it seems to me that with such a wide variety of different components, it's more likely that they won't.
 
I am basically a numbers and measurements guy, but my rejection of the "all things sound the same", stems from my own experience with the various pieces of equipment I have or I've had.  Some have sounded relatively the same, like the comparison I did with the Neko dac and my Stello dac, using 2 identical Shuttle computers.  I volume balanced and ended up switching the leads around so much, I lost track of which dac was playing in the tangle of wires.  My feeling was that separately, when I knew which one I was listening to, each DAC had a sound signature of it's own, but when volume balanced, what ever difference I thought I heard were reduced to inconsequential. 
 
There have also been DACs that don't sound the same, such as my DAC-AH and my NorthStar.
 
Then there was the Woo3 Cetron tube, M^3 637/627 comparison.  These two amps have the same sound signature (to my ears) and I'm hard pressed to tell them apart, but my GS-1 doesn't sound like either of them.  It is more analytical sounding.  More resolving might be another way to say it.  In any event, it's not hard to pick it out between the other two.
 
 

No need to apologize, I think you've just been a bit confused by all those different ideas/replies.
 
To sum up my previous post: All DACs/amps/... do not sound the same. Emphasis on "all".
This, of course, should be obvious.
If you add some context to those statements/claims, the answer looks different.
 
I see no problem with Carver producing and selling those amps that were designed to sound "nice" instead of neutral and accurate. You shouldn't take each word literally, especially quoted ones (like 'breaking').
 
 
Now on to your DACs. You found the Neko and Stello sounded more or less the same when volume balanced, OK. You found the DAC-AH and NorthStar to sound different, the former being a non-oversampling DAC. It has been mentioned before that many non-oversampling DACs measure horribly (post #28). So I don't understand why you're pointing this out here. A mere look at a frequency response measurement could be enough to tell that this DAC will sound different.
 
 
I'm repeating myself here, but when we're talking about "sounds the same" we're talking about equipment that is supposed to be transparent, and not to sound "nice".
 
 
Regarding your amp comparison, how exactly did you proceed in matching the volume?

 

[Prog Rock Man]

What I got out of the Carver Challenge was that to get great sound you do not need to spend shed loads of money.

 

[upstateguy]

Quote:

It effectively counts as 'breaking' for the purposes of the statement regarding the similarity (or not) of amplifier sounds. For example, raising the output impedance so high as to cause interaction with the transducer, affecting frequency response. This is not good design - but here he was deliberately ignoring the design rules which had given him his original, nicely measuring (presumably) amp to produce a coloured sound.
He started with an amp that had low distortion, flat frequency response and so on and then modified it in such a way that it was no longer what you could call a "well designed" solid state amp - for example, the frequency response was no longer flat. He did this to reproduce the weird frequency response and euphonic distortion of the Stereophile "recommended" amplifier - and then being an intelligent person sold lots of them, as some people prefer the kind of heavily coloured equipment that Stereophile and its ilk endorse.
 
Personally, I wholeheartedly endorse your statement that it is much better to achieve colouration through equalisation and the like.
 
TL;DR: I don't believe that even deliberately coloured SS equipment can ever meet the criteria for being "well designed.", as tweaks must be made to the design to achieve such colouration. That doesn't stop them from sometimes selling well

xnor isn't critiquing Mr. Carver. He knew exactly what he was doing - effectively degrading the performance of his amp to satisfy the criteria that Stereophile perceive make something a "reference"/"high-end"/"musical" piece of equipment - which has precious little to do with accurately producing the original recording.
 
Also, I have been pondering the idea that both the M^3 and the Woo amp could have high amounts of crosstalk, affecting the soundstage. NwAvGuy measured horrible amounts of crosstalk (-40db) on the Mini3 and attributed this to the three-channel topology, shared by the M^3. Again, speculation as I lack independantly made measurements for any of them. Besides, NwAvGuy attributes the crosstalk to the 3-channel design in one place and the Mini3's opamp curling up and dying under load (seems more likely) in another.
 
 

 
I really didn't want to bring this up, but it is the Centron tubed Woo3 and the 637/627 M^3 that sound similar.  I also have an 8065 M^3 (which was put together by Rockhopper for low Z headphones) that doesn't sound like the other two or the GS-1.  And I also feel that when I change the 637/627 opamps to 843s the M^3 no longer sounds like the Centron tubed Woo3.
 
 
Quote:

For my M^3 I was able to test the audibility of the crosstalk by creating a one-channel (Left) sample removing the left side cable from my headphones and listening to the residual channel bleed through to the right channel - seriously however bad it is on paper it was only clearly audible at full volume above the amp noise with nothing in the other channel. At listening volumes it was totally inaudible with nothing in the left channel in 250 ohm headphones. YMMV of course but I would be dubious that it would really make any effect on the soundstage in any meaningful way playing back both channels. As is my wont I went searching for research on crosstalk audibility - there is not much out there and it is pretty old but the consensus from broadcasting bodies such as the IBA is that -30db is as good as you need - Vinyl only sometimes manages this and for bass frequencies it is often below -15db make of that what you will. I'm not losing sleep over it. I'd put it in the category of bad but (probably) irrelevant
 
 

Glad you re-posted that info.
 


Quote:

No need to apologize, I think you've just been a bit confused by all those different ideas/replies.
 
To sum up my previous post: All DACs/amps/... do not sound the same. Emphasis on "all".
This, of course, should be obvious.
If you add some context to those statements/claims, the answer looks different.
 
I see no problem with Carver producing and selling those amps that were designed to sound "nice" instead of neutral and accurate. You shouldn't take each word literally, especially quoted ones (like 'breaking').
 
 
Now on to your DACs. You found the Neko and Stello sounded more or less the same when volume balanced, OK. You found the DAC-AH and NorthStar to sound different, the former being a non-oversampling DAC. It has been mentioned before that many non-oversampling DACs measure horribly (post #28). So I don't understand why you're pointing this out here. A mere look at a frequency response measurement could be enough to tell that this DAC will sound different.
 
 
I'm repeating myself here, but when we're talking about "sounds the same" we're talking about equipment that is supposed to be transparent, and not to sound "nice".
 

I think you've just been a bit confused by all those different ideas/replies.
 
I'm not confused, I just disagree.
 
I'm going to come back to this post later.......
 
I'm repeating myself here, but when we're talking about "sounds the same" we're talking about equipment that is supposed to be transparent, and not to sound "nice".
 
I find the statement designed to sound "nice" instead of neutral and accurate curious.  Didn't somebody say that if it sounds good and measures bad, you've measured the wrong thing? 
 
But more later.