[bigshot]

But people who are able to engage in rational thought seem to get along fine.

 

[ag8908]

Tell that to the HD800 has too much treble vs. the HD800 is perfect crowd.
 
Going back to DACS, I wonder if ultimately the future of audio science is in DACs, and their ability to use vast processing power to alter and improve the sound. The 600 MIPs of processing power used by the quad core Wolfson DAC is equivalent to 4 late 90s model pentium chips. I don't know what it's doing with that processing power (I think a lot of it is designed to improve voice quality during phone calls) but one would expect all DACs to continue using ever increasing processing power to make things sound better and better. Autotune, the program (essentially a form of a DAC) is another example of how a DAC can make revolutionary changes.
 
Ultimately, due to its lack of high level DAC programming knowledge, the head-fi community will probably be left behind listening to their crude amplifiers, vacuum tubes blah blah.

 

[TwoEars]

  But people who are able to engage in rational thought seem to get along fine.

 
Until they start another world war over inconceivable fundamental differences of perspective.
 
But I get your point...
 
 
More on the subject: I'm willing to believe in anything that sounds markedly better in a blind test.
 
I don't really care if the signal is amplified by fluffy pink bunnies, if I can notice an improvement in sound-stage I'm game.
 
Notice I say "better", not different. There a plenty of things that sounds different but which really aren't "better".

 

[bigshot]

I don't want to burst your bubble, but soundstage is a function of the miking, mixing and mastering, not the equipment you use to play back.

 

[bigshot]

  Tell that to the HD800 has too much treble vs. the HD800 is perfect crowd.

 
Flat response is an objective thing. You can run some test tones and find that out quick.

 

[TwoEars]

  I don't want to burst your bubble, but soundstage is a function of the miking, mixing and mastering, not the equipment you use to play back.

 
Tell that to my HD800's...

 

[bigshot]

Can I have the phone number of your non-objective impressions?

 

[Xenophon]

I have a number of very high quality digital master recordings of  classical vocal performances, recorded in a church.  You can imagine the soundstage on those.  Of course it'll first be a function of recording and mastering, what's not there is not there and can never be reconstituted.  But the way that information is actually rendered and perceived depends very much on the rest of the chain, and the cans.   When I do an A/B between my HE-500 and my HD-800 the difference is huge.  Wether one is better than the other depends primarily on individual taste and there's no arguing let alone better/worse about that.  If I want to listen to an old original recording of chamber music e.g. I won't reach for the Senns because it might deliver a realistic and detailed rendition but the presence of artefacts makes for a very unenjoyable experience.  With some types of music I prefer my HE-500, others my HD-800.  Overall my HE-6 is king.  Objectivity is nice and I do believe that it should be taken to the limit as far as possible in the chain but ultimately the listener decides what he/she enjoys most and there's no better or worse.
 
Imo the easiest way to accomplish that is to eliminate variables as much as possible and make the individual experience primarily a function of headphone choice and/or EQ'ing.    Take for instance the Fostex TH-900.  Very good headphone, no doubt.  But not for me listening to classical music.
 
I'll put on my asbestos suit, send the flames 

 

[ag8908]

  what's not there is not there and can never be reconstituted. 

 
As DACs become more and more powerful, and better programmed, they will add stuff that wasn't there and take away stuff that doesn't need to be there. Autotune is a very primitive example of what we will hopefully see in 10-20 years. That's the future of audio, not your amps and vacuum tubes from the 1930s.

 

[Xenophon]

   
As DACs become more and more powerful, and better programmed, they will add stuff that wasn't there and take away stuff that doesn't need to be there. Autotune is a very primitive example of what we will hopefully see in 10-20 years. That's the future of audio, not your amps and vacuum tubes from the 1930s.

Believe what you want, I don't agree nor do I care.  But while you're cooling your heels waiting for the vapourware tech to arrive, I'll be enjoying my music right now.

 

[ag8908]

  Believe what you want, I don't agree nor do I care.  But while you're cooling your heels waiting for the vapourware tech to arrive, I'll be enjoying my music right now.

 
See it wouldn't be vapourware if the audio community would invest more in this stuff. But yes I do agree that multiple headphones are good to have. I have my HD800 if I want the music to sound like it's coming from a good speaker system and my SRH940s if I want the music to have a synthetic airy and ethereal feel. Those are really the only two sound signatures in which I have any interest. I had an Audeze LCD XC but I didn't know what it was trying to do. It sounded good, but it just didn't have a coherent "if you wear me everything will have an x feel to it" message so it was of no use.

 

[Xenophon]

   
See it wouldn't be vapourware if the audio community would invest more in this stuff. But yes I do agree that multiple headphones are good to have. I have my HD800 if I want the music to sound like it's coming from a good speaker system and my SRH940s if I want the music to have a synthetic airy and ethereal feel. Those are really the only two sound signatures in which I have any interest. I had an Audeze LCD XC but I didn't know what it was trying to do. It sounded good, but it just didn't have a coherent "if you wear me everything will have an x feel to it" message so it was of no use.

At long last something we agree upon.  There's no telling what the future might bring.  Back in the 1980's Kodak and co would never have thought that digital would wipe out their core business, yet here we are (though I still prefer the quality and of a traditional b/w silver gelatin print). But right now in audio we're not there by a long stretch so I'm doing my utmost to get the highest quality available now.  We differ in opinion on how to do that and I do believe there are some strong arguments against your claims but ok...  
 
If/when the day comes that technology is where you think it'll be, all I'll have to do is whip out my card and i'll be in business in no time.

 

[ratinox]

Tell that to my HD800's...

Sorry, dude, but "flat" has a well-defined meaning. That meaning is "level to within 1dB from 20Hz to 20kHz". Any deviation of more than 1dB across the audible frequency range is not flat. HD 800 has a measurable peak in excess of 1 dB at around 6.5 kHz. Therefore it is not flat (neutral).

As DACs become more and more powerful, and better programmed, they will add stuff that wasn't there and take away stuff that doesn't need to be there.

Er. No. Math doesn't work like that. If you take X away then you cannot put X back unless you know what X is in which case X was never really taken away. No amount of computing power or clever programming can change this.

 

[whitedragem]

cause we are sooo wildly off topic; your conception of DACs, something I was afraid was true (that you believed some very cheap chips was the whole audio story), is so far from the truth (you purport science when it suits but ignore it when it doesn't), that hopefully some people are just laughing and moving on, but it is true that some don't know and take your youthful opinion on it...
 
whilst I'd love to take the time to run you through a few things, I will try and keep it super brief, cause, lets face it, you are not here to hear!
 
the sound files you like so much, compressed, unknown bitrate (recall that network bandwidth has them scale back during peak hours, which I don't think they care to tell you when, but lets assume, cause you love being right, that they are lossless compressed (the best possible scenario, short of remastered for recompression))
 
so what sampling rate are they? If they are from out last major digital format, which is where most digitally stored music in the world at present comes from, it would be CDs, so 44khz. Um, not an even multiple into 192khz, so your DACs are using some of their power to, well upscale the sound, with added, umm, 'niceties' (scientific nonmenclature aside).
 
Did you say high level computer code, cause low level code has a better chance of talking directly to the sound chip, but you are right, Apple doesn't, to my knowledge allow hardware access (certainly not to the video card which would give massive performance benefits, so I doubt even less so to the DAC, but I hope for the sake of our Gen Xers that they do) so the chip is being passed audio through some software layer, no doubt has a re clocking ability, (??), but perhaps no way around the software sound mixer.
 
I love that you have faith in a 50c part being the be all and end all of sound.
 
Cause you have it figured and need to school the rest of us on how 600 mips (yes a low power core will do voice pickup and convert to text, how this helps my audio PLAYBACK not so sure)(likely cores clocking up and down do have an affect on the audio, but objectively speaking, you van tell me how great havinga fancy EARLESS computer to interpret and, sorry were you hinting at DSPing (digital signal processing for those who like vinyl and never went digital),.. Oh boy, it is true that crap compressed files sound better with a lil help from their friends. (read more computational power!!)
 
Or the rest of us that like acurate playback of the best recordings we can find of our favorite music, maybe even without a CPU in our playback chain, might need our VR goggles checked and a ticket to the future.
 
cause some do prefer non oversampling DACs off low jitter sources, or turning off upsampling cause we like our cymbals, er not to be turned to electronica samples.
 
hey I loved the sounds from space invades arcade machine, perhaps that was my doorway to not needing dual differential dac designs, or having DACs with five layers of circuit board and multiple power supplies and a pacific macrosonics PMD100, just to output a clean line level signal, to run to a tube preamp etc etc etc.
 
yes the electical benefits of your chosen audio device don't have screens and lights and speakers and all sorts of other nicethings (aerials? my Nokia has 14 of em!) to wreck havoc with the output signal,.. Oh, yes they do. So ignoring the quality of the opamp to generate something listenable, YOUR latest and greatestis audio nirvana.
 
 
No. You have somethng built for people who listen to mp3s and are happy listening to them.
 
I know in my youth how hard someone would have to twist my are to buy a one box preamp/amp which had a tuner, aka a receiver.
 
I'd have prefered the non jack off all trades part.
 
 
 
600mips? Call it Jack. It will even hear you!

 

[ratinox]

so what sampling rate are they? If they are from out last major digital format, which is where most digitally stored music in the world at present comes from, it would be CDs, so 44khz. Um, not an even multiple into 192khz, so your DACs are using some of their power to, well upscale the sound, with added, umm, 'niceties' (scientific nonmenclature aside).

Yep. DACs have been oversampling for... how long have DACs been around? About that long.

For the dissenters:

Go read up on Fletcher-Munson. That's the scientific basis for human audio perception. Go read up on the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem. That's the math behind audio sampling. Combine the two and you get something a little less than 44.1 kHz to cover the 10 octaves of human hearing. The extra headroom is just that: headroom.

If you do the digital to analog conversion properly then the converted signal is identical to the original. What oversampling does is "flatten" the DAC conversion slope. This makes it computationally easier to do the conversion. Specifically, it eases the constraints on anti-aliasing filters. The practical result is that oversampling allows for cheaper DACs that consume less electrical power. Since you can't hear anything above about 20 kHz, which requires a sample rate of ~40 kHz to avoid aliasing, what do you think a 192 kHz file does for you? It does two things. First, it bypasses the oversampling step since it's already effectively oversampled. Second, it wastes storage space since none of the "data" above ~20 kHz is audible.