[bigshot]

The problem is that people who hear differences are doing sighted, non-level matched, non-direct switched comparisons with a single sample of each, and they are thinking their results will be the same if they do a proper blind test. And then they come here and argue with us vociferously claiming they have no bias, when their vociferousness and refusal to just do a damn ABX just verifies that they are biased.

We had someone in the past that claimed that he heard an improvement with the Mojo. He was intellectually honest with himself, so he took our advice to set up a decent blind test. I don't have to tell you what he found out. So far, he is the only one of the people arguing differences I've seen who has made the effort to do a proper test. Everyone else just argues some more and never gets around to proving it.

I've tested multiple DACs myself... from an Oppo HA-1 with a Sabre chip all the way down to a $40 Walmart DVD player, and I have yet to find one that sounds different. There may be one out there that does sound different, but if it does, it isn't performing to spec.

Again, I honestly don't understand why we spend so much time arguing about things that are self-evident and already proven conclusively. However, I do like that we've gone from "Even my wife hears a difference!" to "Even my girlfriend hears a difference!"

 

[MrHaelscheir]

I had "rejoiced" that I got a MOTU M2 for headphone distortion measurements whereby I could now A/B with my Fiio K9 Pro ESS's DAC, but they "unfortunately" both use ESS DACs. Anyways, on a cursory listen with decent volume matching, there are no audible worthwhile differences, and they measure identically even with my acoustic in-ear measurements.

 

[bigshot]

I agree that when we record the sound of real instruments it cant possibly be with 100% fidelity, there has to be some difference for sure.

The sound of real instruments is completely irrelevant to what we're discussing here. We are talking about whether a signal passed from an ADC to a DAC sounds different than the signal coming out the other end. Digital audio is designed from the ground up to answer that question with a big fat "No".

 

[RotundCatto]

The problem is that people who hear differences are doing sighted, non-level matched, non-direct switched comparisons with a single sample of each, and they are thinking their results will be the same if they do a proper blind test. And then they come here and argue with us vociferously claiming they have no bias, when their vociferousness and refusal to just do a damn ABX just verifies that they are biased.

We had someone in the past that claimed that he heard an improvement with the Mojo. He was intellectually honest with himself, so he took our advice to set up a decent blind test. I don't have to tell you what he found out. So far, he is the only one of the people arguing differences I've seen who has made the effort to do a proper test. Everyone else just argues some more and never gets around to proving it.

I've tested multiple DACs myself... from an Oppo HA-1 with a Sabre chip all the way down to a $40 Walmart DVD player, and I have yet to find one that sounds different. There may be one out there that does sound different, but if it does, it isn't performing to spec.

Again, I honestly don't understand why we spend so much time arguing about things that are self-evident and already proven conclusively. However, I do like that we've gone from "Even my wife hears a difference!" to "Even my girlfriend hears a difference!"

I wrote in a post long ago that some might not hear the difference because they are using a noisy digital source, all my impressions of mojo and e30 were with a douk audio u2 pro with its optical out. I also use a emi filter inline with my PC power supply. So whatever proper blind listening test you 2 are gonna do, make sure it has a DDC and a clean source. I dont know what makes you 2 think your digital music player( which I assume is some laptop or PC) is cleaner than mine.... The sound quality from my mojo also reduces a lot when I connect it via usb to PC or my smartphone so that douk DDC definitely helped make the differences between DACs more transparent.

 

[RotundCatto]

The sound of real instruments is completely irrelevant to what we're discussing here. We are talking about whether a signal passed from an ADC to a DAC sounds different than the signal coming out the other end. Digital audio is designed from the ground up to answer that question with a big fat "No".

 

[RotundCatto]

The sound of real instruments is completely irrelevant to what we're discussing here. We are talking about whether a signal passed from an ADC to a DAC sounds different than the signal coming out the other end. Digital audio is designed from the ground up to answer that question with a big fat "No".

Have you ever heard a real instrument in your life? if you did maybe you will realize how unnatural these topping DACs and Amps sound. But I dont think you are interested in understanding audio "science". whatever makes you sleep better.

 

[RotundCatto]

anyways I dont wanna continue this anymore because ultimately we will not reach a conclusion till we conduct blind listening test with big sample size, and I assure you my standards of blind listening tests are much higher than yours. its just that I dont pretend to be a know it all, my disbelief in those sinad values simply stems from the fact that logarithmic sine waves dont sound anything like real music hence we cant use it to gauge an DAC's ability to play real music. Maybe someday there will be a way to measure this distortion for real music waves as well but till that day comes I am gonna trust my ears...not blindly though. I will definitely do blind listening tests every time I get new gear.

 

[MrHaelscheir]

@RotundCatto

I have yet to hear a single mite of noise through either the MOTU M2 or FiiO K9 Pro ESS that wasn't from the recording.

I can tell you that I am presently set to have attended 39 if not 40 different live classical music concerts (well, one was jazz; Hiromi is a legend) this year and happen to have five concerts over four days in a row lined up for next week, mind will be attending one tomorrow. As for transparency and fidelity, as you would have seen in the middle of this thread, I went through great lengths to EQ my Meze Elite to match my measured free-field response with binaural head-tracking. As for the string quartet I attended last night, I had the decent feeling that things were getting close, its being a matter of finding that perfect recording if it exists, and that there are still some limitations in the kind of forward imaging binaural renderers can present from one's HRTF data. Anyways, I am of the stance of striving to reach the point of being able to use gear to evaluate recordings rather than using recordings to evaluate gear.

Just out of curiosity, are you familiar with speaker sound and imaging?

 

[bigshot]

Have you ever heard a real instrument in your life? if you did maybe you will realize how unnatural these topping DACs and Amps sound. But I dont think you are interested in understanding audio "science". whatever makes you sleep better.

You aren't listening. A DAC doesn't convert the sound of a real instrument. All it does is convert a digital signal into an analog one, and it does that transparently, with fidelity that is perfect for human ears. A MICROPHONE is what converts the sound of a musical instrument into a signal. If you want to get closer to the sound of a real instrument, you're looking at the wrong thing if you look at DACs and amps. You should be looking at microphones.

But all of this is still irrelevant, because the function of commercial audio recording isn't to capture the sound of an instrument exactly as it sounds... It's to create an optimized sound to suit the music, using a wide range of adjustments, like equalization, reverb, compression, miking technique, room ambience and sound mixing.

Your argumentativeness makes me lump you in with all of the rest of the audiophools who come to this forum to troll us by pretending to be more scientific than us.

 

[bigshot]

anyways I dont wanna continue this anymore because ultimately we will not reach a conclusion till we conduct blind listening test with big sample size, and I assure you my standards of blind listening tests are much higher than yours.

Your standards are all the way on the bottom of the chart! You didn't even do level matching to come up with your conclusions!

Please, take your own advice and don't continue this any more. Our time is valuable.

 

[bigshot]

@RotundCattoI can tell you that I am presently set to have attended 39 if not 40 different live classical music concerts this year and happen to have five concerts over four days in a row lined up for next week, mind will be attending one tomorrow.

I've attended even more than that, including full scale operas, and I've never heard a classical concert that sounds exactly like my system. My system sounds better because the sound of the recording has been carefully balanced and my listening position is absolutely optimal.

 

[MrHaelscheir]

Indeed, even in live settings, I can criticize the hall acoustics (or the seat) or accept that there were things I preferred in recordings. E.g. Have you ever attended a piano concerto where the piano wasn't often horridly drowned out? Or being displeased to find that even reasonably close to the front, something about the hall or the Steinway Model D's directivity curve causes its bass and midrange to fail to project. Else cases of badly done sound reinforcement with the electric guitar being way too loud, or the bass guitar suffering greatly for clarity and (possibly intentional) distortion.

 

[gregorio]

you measurement chasers are talking way out of your scientific depth …

Oh dear, here we go again, some deluded audiophile using hypocrisy as the basis for an argument. Namely, we’re supposedly out of our “scientific depth”, while you demonstrate a lack of understanding of even the absolute basics! The first absolute basic is that digital audio is a measurement (or more precisely a series of measurements), so you’re accusing us of being “chasers” of digital audio, how’s that a bad thing? It’s certainly a lot better than chasing BS or just inventing BS yourself and then posting a bunch of nonsense based on ignorance! For example:

the reason why something like a REW cant measure music is because our ears act as " harmonic analyzers" and unlike a REW which can only analyze one or 2 or 10 sine waves at a time, real life sounds are made of countably infinite sine waves.

Firstly, our ears are relatively limited, non-linear harmonic analysers, while REW is a frequency analyser and it will only measure ”one, 2 or 10 sine waves at a time“ if the signal you give it only contains “one, 2 or 10 sine waves”. If the signal contains far more, then REW will measure far more. Clearly you don’t know what REW does or what it can measure, despite posted screenshots demonstrating measurements of far more than just 10 sine waves/frequency bands.
Secondly, of course real life sounds cannot be and are not made of infinite sine waves. If this nonsense assertion were true, real sounds would require an infinite amount of acoustic energy and break the laws of physics/science!

The SCIENCE behind it can explained as an incoming sound can be represented as a sum of certain sine waves( you can also split a complex music wave into a lot of individual sine waves via a mathematical operation called a fourier transform) , then the corresponding points on the basilar membrane will vibrate and that will be translated into a stimulus sent to the brain along with all phase distortions and stuff.

Classic, you put the word “SCIENCE” in caps and bold and then completely misrepresent it and contradict yourself. Firstly, sure, sound waves can be split into it’s constituent sine waves/frequencies “via a mathematical operation called a Fourier transform”, but according to you, this isn’t actually possible because real sounds contain “infinite sine waves” and would therefore take an infinite amount of time to calculate this “mathematical operation”. Secondly, given the topic of this thread, please explain how a simple wire/cable is performing this mathematical operation (Fourier transform)? And lastly, if a real sound contains infinite sine waves and there are “corresponding points on the basilar membrane”, the basilar membrane would have an infinite number of “corresponding points”, which would require an infinitely large basilar membrane. I’ve certainly met “big headed” audiophiles but I think I’d remember if I’d met one with a head infinitely bigger than the entire universe! Human beings have approximately 3,500 cilia in the basilar membrane (arranged in bundles) which certainly is not an infinite number and is obviously also significantly fewer “corresponding points” than the roughly 20,000 sine waves/frequencies which encompass human hearing.

Both the mojo and E30 were also fed by their optical input so I am certain there is no jitter or noise from the PC getting injected either.

Great, so you have a system that breaks the laws of physics. Thanks for letting us know, it must be very enjoyable (when listening in a different universe)!

You speak of other blind testing being done but I doubt anyone else have done blind test with as much rigour and electrically clean conditions as I have.

That’s just funny, as I don’t know anyone else who has done a blind test with as LIITLE rigour as you have. Certainly there are no scientific blind tests with as little rigour for many decades because science has mandated level matching to within at least 0.1dB since the 1950’s. Are you really claiming science has not done any blind tests in the last 70 odd years or just that you have no idea what ”science” or “rigour” mean?

music is far far more complex than what a crappy REW can ever hope to capture

Err, REW doesn’t capture music, it analyses frequency content. Don’t you even know the difference between a frequency analyser and a digital audio recorder?

we currently dont have the technology to record and analyze music waves with sufficient temporal resolution.

BS! First of all, there’s no such thing as “music waves”, there are analogue waveforms, digital representations of them and acoustic sound waves (that may or may not be interpreted by the human brain as music). Don’t you even know the fundamental basics of psychoacoustics? Secondly, what is a “sufficient temporal resolution” of sound/music for human hearing and what is the temporal resolution of recording technology? If you cannot correctly answer BOTH of these questions then your assertion is just BS you’ve made-up! Is BS you’ve just made-up “YOUR scientific depth”?

maybe you can read up some more actual books and find out.

Ah, perfect hypocrisy, why don’t you read some actual book and find out? You can start with the previous questions and find out the temporal resolution of human hearing and of digital audio. Although maybe try introductory beginner books on ear anatomy, physics, psychoacoustics and basic science/scientific rigour as well!

I could do with a good laugh though, so please recommend a book where I can find out about audiophiles with infinitely big heads, sound waves comprised of an infinite number of sine waves and how rigorous science can only be performed by you and your girlfriend! lol

I won’t bother with the rest of your post, it’s just more of the same BS, which is contradicted by the facts/science (and even basic common sense) and then you claim scientific rigour/depth/validity?! That level of ridiculousness is not uncommon with many ill informed/ignorant audiophiles but why on earth would you try that in a science discussion forum, are you really that deluded?

G

Edit: Removed specific references to “countable infinity” in light of @sander99 post #165.

 

[gregorio]

Reflects what nearly the entire world would agree with, except for a few people sad they can't afford good audio gear so they pretend everything sounds the same and stick their fingers even deeper in their ears to avoid hearing anything different (pun very much intended).

That doesn’t make any sense, why are you calling yourself “sad people that can’t afford good audio gear” and why would “nearly the entire world agree” with such apparently “sad people”, especially as what they are “reflecting“ is such nonsense that is contradicted by the facts/science?

Me and many thousands like me are completely accustomed to audio gear/listening environments costing at a minimum several hundred thousand dollars and up to the tens of millions. You probably can’t afford (and/or don’t have) even the cheap end of this scale, let alone the really good end, so by your own definition you must be one of those “sad people”, although there aren’t “a few” of them because the vast majority of people cannot afford or do not have million dollar plus listening environments/audio gear.

G

 

[sander99]

Secondly, ”countably infinite”, you’re joking, don’t you know what “infinite” means? By definition, infinity cannot be countable. Tell you what, why don’t you start counting to infinity and when you get there, then post again and tell us all about your “scientific depth”!

It is very rare but now I have to correct you on a mistake. Countably infinite is a thing. It is a well defined concept in mathematics. A set is countably infinite if there exists a bijective function from the set of natural numbers to that set. And strangely enough, there also exists sets that are larger than countably infinite, like the set of real numbers. Very interesting subject by the way.

https://mathworld.wolfram.com/CountablyInfinite.html