[griff500]

I agree that ASR is not in the business of disparaging expensive products - he hardly ever reviews any high end products (if any)

When he does review something expensive he never recommends it, regardless of performance. Maybe once? Perhaps it would have been different if his background was Apple rather than Microsoft.

 

[griff500]

Isn't it interesting that ASR gets excoriated here for supposedly banishing all dissenters with alarming alacrity, yet you would do the same to me, a person who is simply interested in conducting a reasonable dialog? It appears that no one here is particularly interested in reasonable dialog, which would be consistent with my theory that this thread is primarily a marketing instrument for the product and its various accessories.

But you don't get banned by a moderator for it here. There's no issue with reasonable dialogue, but perhaps 'reasonable dialogue' is too often simply thread-crapping? I've no interest personally in hearing the 'if Amir can't measure it then it doesn't exist', 'where's the white papers', 'I won't even listen to it until I see evidence', etc, etc, comments. If I wanted those sorts of discussions I'd go to the science section of the forum.

And it isn't 'supposedly banishing'... it's a fact.

 

[BassicScience]

When he does review something expensive he never recommends it, regardless of performance. Maybe once? Perhaps it would have been different if his background was Apple rather than Microsoft.

The Mola Mola Tambaqui DAC shows again that just because a DAC is designed from ground up, it need not perform poorly. It is actually the opposite with it performing at the top of the class with respect to distortion and noise.

Since I am not the one paying for it for you to purchase it, it is not my issue to worry about the cost. As such, I am happy to recommend the Mola Mola Tambaqui DAC based on its measured performance and functionality.

‐‐-----------

There is no getting around the high cost of the headphone though. I grilled the company left and right on why this headphone costs so much and whether the cost could come down. My wish and hope is that it does come down in price to make it more affordable to more people. For now, not only is this some you should buy if you can afford it, but if you are an audio company and want to know what best in class, "correct" sound reproduction is like, you need to buy this headphone. You will finally have a true reference for quality and tonality.

It is my pleasure to give the highest praise and recommendation I possibly can to Dan Clark Stealth Headphones.

 

[griff500]

The Mola Mola Tambaqui DAC shows again that just because a DAC is designed from ground up, it need not perform poorly. It is actually the opposite with it performing at the top of the class with respect to distortion and noise.

Since I am not the one paying for it for you to purchase it, it is not my issue to worry about the cost. As such, I am happy to recommend the Mola Mola Tambaqui DAC based on its measured performance and functionality.

‐‐-----------

There is no getting around the high cost of the headphone though. I grilled the company left and right on why this headphone costs so much and whether the cost could come down. My wish and hope is that it does come down in price to make it more affordable to more people. For now, not only is this some you should buy if you can afford it, but if you are an audio company and want to know what best in class, "correct" sound reproduction is like, you need to buy this headphone. You will finally have a true reference for quality and tonality.

It is my pleasure to give the highest praise and recommendation I possibly can to Dan Clark Stealth Headphones.

Well done, you found one more than I guessed at...

The Mola Mola one was always rather odd - he says it is not for him to worry about cost as he's not the one paying for it, yet in most other reviews of something expensive he makes a comment about this. Mola Mola seems to be the exception rather than the rule.

 

[BassicScience]

But you don't get banned by a moderator for it here. There's no issue with reasonable dialogue, but perhaps 'reasonable dialogue' is too often simply thread-crapping? I've no interest personally in hearing the 'if Amir can't measure it then it doesn't exist', 'where's the white papers', 'I won't even listen to it until I see evidence', etc, etc, comments. If I wanted those sorts of discussions I'd go to the science section of the forum.

And it isn't 'supposedly banishing'... it's a fact.

What's the difference effectively? People here are trying to score "anti-ASR" points by pointing out that posters get banned over there for what ASR mods consider trolling. Meanwhile, several people here want me to exit the thread because they apparently disagree with my POV. The fact that they lack the power to enforce that doesn't make them any less hypocritical.

Believe it or not, I'm willing to entertain technical arguments that the M Scaler is likely to make an audible difference in at least some system contexts. ASR's review did not conclusively convince me otherwise. But so far all I'm seeing here is a lot of random ASR bashing, and that ain't gonna cut it.

 

[BassicScience]

Well done, you found one more than I guessed at...

The Mola Mola one was always rather odd - he says it is not for him to worry about cost as he's not the one paying for it, yet in most other reviews of something expensive he makes a comment about this. Mola Mola seems to be the exception rather than the rule.

Those two were off the top of my head. I imagine there are at least several others, but I have no interest in searching for them.

 

[griff500]

several people here want me to exit the thread because they apparently disagree with my POV

That might not be the reason. Nonetheless, you are expressing your opinion without being banned from doing so. You ask what the difference is and there it is. There's a world of difference between being asked to leave (or saying you will and then not doing so) and being kicked out and prevented from commenting.

People are 'bashing' ASR because of the nature of the rather flawed review, the clear personal bias against RW, the nature of the comments and the nature of the moderation there.

 

[GoldenSound]

It's a two-way problem and neither side is helping the issue.

Those on ASR etc won't hesitate to ridicule someone for even an objective concern like questioning the testing methodology used. And god help you if you make a subjective claim without backing it up with a peer-reviewed study to confirm it.
(And dissenting opinions are banned all too frequently)

But on here plenty of people are also quick to ridicule anyone for trying to bring in anything objective, even in some cases disregarding something BECAUSE it measures well, and whilst you might not be banned, it effectively doesn't matter if you're pushed out of any discussion regardless.

There's very little room for middleground discussion unfortunately. And I personally am not sure what the solution might be. The root cause seems to be that everyone is immediately lumped into a 'camp', and rather than discussing the merits of whatever point was made, it always devolves into a discussion about ASR/Head-Fi/SBAF or various interpretations of objectivity/subjectivity and the original point is left behind in the argument

 

[griff500]

It's a two-way problem and neither side is helping the issue.

Those on ASR etc won't hesitate to ridicule someone for even an objective concern like questioning the testing methodology used. And god help you if you make a subjective claim without backing it up with a peer-reviewed study to confirm it.
(And dissenting opinions are banned all too frequently)

But on here plenty of people are also quick to ridicule anyone for trying to bring in anything objective, even in some cases disregarding something BECAUSE it measures well, and whilst you might not be banned, it effectively doesn't matter if you're pushed out of any discussion regardless.

There's very little room for middleground discussion unfortunately. And I personally am not sure what the solution might be. The root cause seems to be that everyone is immediately lumped into a 'camp', and rather than discussing the merits of whatever point was made, it always devolves into a discussion about ASR/Head-Fi/SBAF or various interpretations of objectivity/subjectivity and the original point is left behind in the argument

Nobody producing these products will ever invest in the type of studies that one side demands - it's simply never going to happen because it's not financially viable or worthwhile to do so for the market involved.

I'm not sure what objective criteria can be brought into a discussion about the M-Scaler. One side seems to believe that a specific set of measurements are the definitive answer to whether or not it does something and the other think that perhaps there's more going on than that. The funny thing about it is that it's those purporting to support a scientific approach that have the closed minds and belief that all that needs to be known is known and fully understood.

 

[GoldenSound]

Nobody producing these products will ever invest in the type of studies that one side demands - it's simply never going to happen because it's not financially viable or worthwhile to do so for the market involved.

I'm not sure what objective criteria can be brought into a discussion about the M-Scaler. One side seems to believe that a specific set of measurements are the definitive answer to whether or not it does something and the other think that perhaps there's more going on than that. The funny thing about it is that it's those purporting to support a scientific approach that have the closed minds and belief that all that needs to be known is known and fully understood.

I agree. It's asking for the impossible, there simply isn't enough financial incentive to do large and expensive studies on the countless subjective aspects we experience or even the audibility thresholds (or preference trends) of various objective aspects.

This does mean though that manufacturers are able to make claims about the audible effects of their products without evidence, but also has unfortunately meant that a lot of people use the lack of evidence as proof that there is no audible effect at all, which is not scientific or objective at all. Lack of proof is not proof, in EITHER direction.

In terms of the MScaler, the thing is, it's easy to definitively prove exactly what it's doing. It's a very high performance sinc reconstruction filter with a windowing function optimised for transient response. Meaning it will provide extremely good time-domain accuracy and immensely sharp stop-band attenuation.
These things are what the marketing claims, and these have been demonstrated. It's not 'snake oil' as it is demonstrably doing EXACTLY what it says on the tin.

The issue is then whether those changes are audible or not, but to my knowledge there has been 0 study done on preference or even audibility of reconstruction filters. (If I'm wrong please correct me as I'd like to read this)
Though there is some study on the closely-related issue of whether high native sample rate recordings are audibly distinguishable from redbook, and the indication is they are to at least some listeners and therefore reconstruction filters should be too.

So whilst some might claim that the differences are inaudible, that is at the end of the day, just an unsubstantiated assumption. And in fact it's much more sensible to assume the MScaler does make a difference given as the little evidence we DO have is in its favour.

 

[BassicScience]

It's a two-way problem and neither side is helping the issue.

Those on ASR etc won't hesitate to ridicule someone for even an objective concern like questioning the testing methodology used. And god help you if you make a subjective claim without backing it up with a peer-reviewed study to confirm it.
(And dissenting opinions are banned all too frequently)

If you read the ASR M Scaler review thread, you'd see that several members there raised various questions and issues related to the testing methodology. Some of these actually caused Amir to iterate on certain aspects of the testing. In other cases, he at least engaged in a reasonable (to my mind) discussion of his methods. I and others did find his results with the Topping DAC rather unexplainable, but he claimed not to have time to revisit them. It's unclear whether Chord intends the M Scaler to be used/usable with non-Chord DACs, so perhaps it's ultimately immaterial.

Where people get into trouble over there is when they try to question the overall legitimacy and relevance of measurements, science, etc. when they obviously have no credentials to do anything of the sort. They are usually told to desist, and if they do not, a ban is the usual result. I actually support that policy lest most every review thread quickly devolve into chaos. YMMV.

All that said, I think Amir can sometimes comport himself in a very imperious manner. I didn't follow the entire arc of your interaction with him, but I felt you were quite measured and reasonable and usually came off looking the better. Ditto for Resolve when he got into it with Amir about the DCA Stealth.

But we digress...

 

[Rob Watts]

Q for Rob. I have now added a m scaler and a tt2 to my setup. wow. what a difference. I wish I'd done it sooner. ditched CDs a few years ago and sold my Naim cds2. bought the first Hugo then the Hugo2 and now my probably final upgrade.

I have a farad super 3 15V powering my m scaler, can I move this to my TT2 and use a 12V farad super 3 on the m scaler or is that not advisable?

If it is possible without invalidating warranty would there be a performance hit or would it sound just as good as a 15V one?

So using any PSU apart from the supplied units will invalidate Chord's warranty. Chord got fed up with repairing units that had failed due to the wrong or unsuitable PSU being used.

As to TT2 being improved - if you disconnect the supplied power to TT2 you can listen for 10 seconds as it uses the super-cap supply. I heard no difference in my set-up, so using a linear supply will either sound no different or sound worse, as the key to the PSU is RF filtering in the 100k to 10GHz band - and audiophile linear supplies have no filtering at all over this band. SMPS on the other hand do, as they need to meet extensive EMC and regulatory testing - so RF filters on the OP side and mains input side is a must in order to meet EMC requirements.

The same applies to the M scaler in that the key PSU requirement (for sound quality) is isolation in the 100MHz to 10GHz region - and all linear supplies are much worse than the chosen SMPS coming with the M scaler.

I am confused - isn't FFT measuring the response of the digital circuit in response to an impulse response - i.e., transient response? I honest have no clue what "transient response" Rob was talking about in the digital domain.

I did participate in a group demo of MScaler with TT and the reaction ranged from obvious improvement, to different but meh, to no difference, to obvious degradation. In other words, just like everything in this hobby, it's YMMV.

I don't talk about transient response (implying frequency response which in a linear system would be identical from impulses or swept sine waves) but transient timing reconstruction, and this is different. What I am trying to do is to reconstruct transients from sampled data points so that when the continuos waveform coming out of the DAC the transients are recovered perfectly in time. What actually happens in a real interpolation filter is that transients are not reproduced perfectly - they are a little too late or a little to early, being modulated by the program material. And it's this change in transient timing that has audible consequences.

If the concern is high frequency reproduction, then a continuous sweep (chirp signal) would tell you everything you need to know - does ASR provide the result of a continuous sweep?

Btw, Emm Labs dac upsamples to 44.8Mhz and only needs a simple LPF to get perfect analog signal.....lol

That won't tell you anything about the timing of transients being accurately reproduced.

...The funny thing about it is that it's those purporting to support a scientific approach that have the closed minds and belief that all that needs to be known is known and fully understood.

That's the problem. If you never do objective listening tests, you won't understand the problem, and see no issues. And when someone says I listened and could hear something that is not explained by conventional audio engineering, then they turn round and say it's impossible to hear such a thing.

And guess what - people that listen will never convince people that don't listen.

 

[GuiltyRocker]

What's the difference effectively? People here are trying to score "anti-ASR" points by pointing out that posters get banned over there for what ASR mods consider trolling. Meanwhile, several people here want me to exit the thread because they apparently disagree with my POV. The fact that they lack the power to enforce that doesn't make them any less hypocritical.

Believe it or not, I'm willing to entertain technical arguments that the M Scaler is likely to make an audible difference in at least some system contexts. ASR's review did not conclusively convince me otherwise. But so far all I'm seeing here is a lot of random ASR bashing, and that ain't gonna cut it.

Kudos to you sir for not immediately judging just based on the measurements, hopefully in the future you can hear it in your system and judge it for yourself, I'm open to dialogue.

 

[GuiltyRocker]

I agree. It's asking for the impossible, there simply isn't enough financial incentive to do large and expensive studies on the countless subjective aspects we experience or even the audibility thresholds (or preference trends) of various objective aspects.

This does mean though that manufacturers are able to make claims about the audible effects of their products without evidence, but also has unfortunately meant that a lot of people use the lack of evidence as proof that there is no audible effect at all, which is not scientific or objective at all. Lack of proof is not proof, in EITHER direction.

In terms of the MScaler, the thing is, it's easy to definitively prove exactly what it's doing. It's a very high performance sinc reconstruction filter with a windowing function optimised for transient response. Meaning it will provide extremely good time-domain accuracy and immensely sharp stop-band attenuation.
These things are what the marketing claims, and these have been demonstrated. It's not 'snake oil' as it is demonstrably doing EXACTLY what it says on the tin.

The issue is then whether those changes are audible or not, but to my knowledge there has been 0 study done on preference or even audibility of reconstruction filters. (If I'm wrong please correct me as I'd like to read this)
Though there is some study on the closely-related issue of whether high native sample rate recordings are audibly distinguishable from redbook, and the indication is they are to at least some listeners and therefore reconstruction filters should be too.

So whilst some might claim that the differences are inaudible, that is at the end of the day, just an unsubstantiated assumption. And in fact it's much more sensible to assume the MScaler does make a difference given as the little evidence we DO have is in its favour.

You have experience with the M Scaler, what did you hear by adding the M Scaler in your system? By the way, I really enjoyed your video on questioning measurements, learned a great deal from it thanks.

 

[GoldenSound]

You have experience with the M Scaler, what did you hear by adding the M Scaler in your system? By the way, I really enjoyed your video on questioning measurements, learned a great deal from it thanks.

I really like the MScaler and think it's a great product, one which I honestly wish there were more competitors to.

My personal experience has been that in terms of sound quality, PGGB has been the best, followed closely by HQPlayer, followed closely by the MScaler, with all three quite far ahead of basic stuff like Roon/Audirvana SoX oversampling.

BUT, the issue is that in terms of convenience it's kinda the opposite. MScaler you can just slot into any system and away you go.
HQPlayer is pretty easy if you have roon, but requires a compatible endpoint and needs some setup. (And without Roon the UI isn't great)
PGGB cannot output files live and you have to output the upsampled WAV file itself (usually around a gigabyte each) and then play that in your player of choice, meaning you need a TON of storage and to do the processing in advance.

Personally, I use PGGB for the tracks I listen to a lot, then HQP for everything else. I prefer the HQP sound quality to the convenience of MScaler but totally get why others would go the other way. Also there's rumours of MScaler 2 coming out soonish and that could quite well be better than HQP so we'll have to see.