Rawrbington
1000+ Head-Fier
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- May 12, 2011
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Hey guys it's all good. No point in being hostile towards each other.
You both have valid points.
You both have valid points.
Hey guys it's all good. No point in being hostile towards each other.
You both have valid points.
He hasn't made any points at all actually, other than that wikipedia has a "tube sound" entry.
Then he won't have any problems defending his "claims", will he?
A picture might be more useful than words. Scroll down to the images on http://www.amb.org/audio/gamma2/highlights.html and you can see some different examples of how a high-end DAC might choose to translate a digital signal like an impulse or square wave into an analog signal. As you can probably imagine, the different filters here sound subtly different due to the different tradeoffs they make in terms of pre-ringing versus post-ringing, etc. Note in particular that filter B is in some sense "more distorted" on an absolute basis, but as the accompanying text explains, may sound better due to the characteristics of the distortion.
More pictures are available on https://passlabs.com/articles/cascode-amp-design . The figures here demonstrate how real-world components like transistors respond compared to the theoretical "ideal" amplifier as input voltage scales. The basic idea is that while you'd like to have linear response, that's not what you get; but you can construct more complex circuits which do a better job of reproducing that response over a specific input range than a single component will. Now given that circuit complexity means increased component cost (among many other tradeoffs), you might see why amplifiers at different price points perform differently.
Originally Posted by paara /img/forum/go_quote.gif
And look at the reacreation of a sinusiodal signal:
Wavelenght Proton:
Here are some interesting graphsa about how a DAC can shange sound. If you look closely on som of the graphs youcan se that som of the DAS actually recreates a 11,025hz signal as a aprox. 11k signal thus shifting the actual freaquency of the original signal. (Look at the arcam and HRT dac)
Is the vertical scale in microvolts ? I would guess so, which means the signal level is only about -90 dBFS, so it basically just shows that the DAC is rather noisy.
That is rather poor, but some "audiophile" DACs are indeed objectively worse in some aspects than onboard audio. Most of these graphs look worse than my Xonar D1 recorded with another sound card, and many of the devices are probably not even cheap.
If the DAC is noisy, wouldn't that change the sound? Making it sound worse?
It means that there is likely some (very quiet) background hiss, but is probably not audible while playing actual music that does not have a very wide dynamic range, at least assuming that the level of the noise does not increase much with the signal (sometimes it does).
It is important to quantify such differences, though, and to compare them against known limits of human hearing, to find out how much likely it is that they actually matter.