[castleofargh]

  Some people will buy into anything, no matter how strange it may sound. Remember the one about putting dull razor blades under a pyramid and they would be sharpened overnight? I wonder what would happen if I put my headphones under a pyramid. Would they become strident, airy or just experience a treble boost? I don't think that idea that might sell on the forums.
 
So what's with this overexcitement with R2R DACs? They're all 16 bit and that limits the resolution and DR to about 96 dBV. Last year people were getting into a twist about 32 bits. Imagine the wattage required to truly harness that and the resulting SPL might level the neighborhood. Good thing there isn't any source material that could rise to the occasion.

I wondered about that myself. we've had years about how fidelity was a sabre DAC(when the other chipsets where doing just fine with the proper implementation IMO). now sabre has a new chipset with specs that make the old one look like crap. but somehow nobody cares, and R2R is "the real sound".
I see 2 rational explanations:
- there was a breach in the time continuum and we're all back in 1980 but a few of us kept our original memories(alien technology being incompatible with pringles or some other typical problem with alien technology including the usual gremlins).
- audio is a fashion show and a joke of a hobby where nobody cares about what's good or practical. only that it's trendy and clearly different from last season's product so that you can shame people who use a 2 years old device.

 

[Argyris]

 
I see 2 rational explanations:
- there was a breach in the time continuum and we're all back in 1980 but a few of us kept our original memories(alien technology being incompatible with pringles or some other typical problem with alien technology including the usual gremlins).
- audio is a fashion show and a joke of a hobby where nobody cares about what's good or practical. only that it's trendy and clearly different from last season's product so that you can shame people who use a 2 years old device.

 
I'm going with option number two, though number one would be kind of cool in its own, videogame plot-esque way.
 
Also, I need to ask: a quick Google search for "R2R" turned up resistor ladders, like the old Covox Speech Thing. Given the reference to the 1980s...surely this isn't what we're talking about here, is it?

 

[GRUMPYOLDGUY]

I'm going with option number two, though number one would be kind of cool in its own, videogame plot-esque way.

Also, I need to ask: a quick Google search for "R2R" turned up resistor ladders, like the old Covox Speech Thing. Given the reference to the 1980s...surely this isn't what we're talking about here, is it?

An R2R DAC uses a bunch of voltage dividers so that each bit contributes a corresponding weighted voltage to the output. Or in other words.... Yes.

 

[gikigill]

Yet to see a single R2R DAC that was markedly better than a decent DS implementation. Skipped a totaldac and the Yggdrasil to stick with my pretty basic existing DS

 

[Ruben123]

Floaty is a good one.  Hopefully they weren't talking about their stool.  

In the last year, we have these mentions:

Floataganza!

Read the 2nd post: http://www.head-fi.org/t/693686/great-bargain-isolation-discovery/30

Makes you wanna try it eh! It sure makes me wondering, how great is their imagination? I mean you can't expect those enormous changes by "isolating" your setup?!

 

[Argyris]

Absurdity is imagination without the temperance of reality.

 

[gregorio]

  Get a chance to listen to analogsurviver's binaural stuff and you might realize he has an excellent understanding of recording and venue acoustics. Sometimes the proof is in the pudding.

 
No, it's not. Anyone with the cash can buy a good quality binaural mic setup, place it in the best seat in the house, press record and get a decent or good binaural recording. Except for knowing which cables to plug in where and the very basics of gain staging, pretty much no understanding (or skill) of recording or venue acoustics is required, let alone an "excellent understanding"! Particularly from the mid '80s onwards (and even well before that in some respects) commercial large ensemble recording took a different tack, the tack of creating as close to an ideal perception of a performance rather than just capturing the actual sound waves from the best seat in the house. Now that does take knowledge and skill!
 
The proof is in the pudding but a rare/strange few seem willing/able to overlook significant faults in a pudding (faults most others would find completely unacceptable) due to some spurious promise of authenticity.
 
G

 

[analogsurviver]

   
No, it's not. Anyone with the cash can buy a good quality binaural mic setup, place it in the best seat in the house, press record and get a decent or good binaural recording. Except for knowing which cables to plug in where and the very basics of gain staging, pretty much no understanding (or skill) of recording or venue acoustics is required, let alone an "excellent understanding"! Particularly from the mid '80s onwards (and even well before that in some respects) commercial large ensemble recording took a different tack, the tack of creating as close to an ideal perception of a performance rather than just capturing the actual sound waves from the best seat in the house. Now that does take knowledge and skill!
 
The proof is in the pudding but a rare/strange few seem willing/able to overlook significant faults in a pudding (faults most others would find completely unacceptable) due to some spurious promise of authenticity.
 
G

Well, that tack of creating as close to an ideal perception of a performance than just capturing the actual sound waves from the best seat in the house involves compromise(s) - more ( usually much more ) than 2 mikes, mixing desk, processing, plugins, etc, etc - which is as perfect recipe for the disaster as one might possibly think of. It will invariably impair the personal decisions how it should sound - by whoever is doing it; at best, it would be a "fake according to ...." and not the reproduction of the real thing.The result is the usual "correct" recording - devoid of true life, fire and passion of a live performance. Depending on how (un)successful the efforts of various commercially available recordings are, I can calmly say none are good enough - mine included, with few exceptions. The closest came IMO Ken Kreisel in his recordings for M&K direct to disk series http://www.kreiselsound.com/timeline.php and in recent times, partially,  2L from Norway - but it takes much more understanding and knowledge than just buying off the shelf equipment  and learning which cable goes to which input/output - plus some fundamental knowledge of gain.
 
I have written more than enough/too much regarding what I consider to be relevant regarding the possible ways of improvement. And will not go further - into any detail. I have revealed way too much already. It takes a fair use of one*s "processor" between the ears - provided the said processor is not brainwashed/brain dead from the results of the modern mainstream education - even after rebooting it several times. 
 
Why on earth would artists whom I have never met or even heard of before be seeking my contact if not for the fact they heard whatever little of DSD master remains on commercially issued CDs that I have recorded - if not for the fact they liked my pudding better than anyone else*s ?

 

[Joe Bloggs]

There's a bajillion artists out there. Your work is bound to tickle at least *some* artists' fancy.

In September this year I was invited to join the largest, most popular team of Android system sound modders out there. Every day hundreds of users pile praise on the dev team. In my two months' membership, I have been continually bewildered by my inability to detect any effect from the current build of the mod, beneficial or otherwise. Finally, at my own expense, I bought a recording kit for the lead developer himself, who agreed to make a recording. Result--same null results, even from his own development smartphone.

Popularity is no guarantee of merit--never mind the fact that, if you were to argue your merit based on popularity, you should first be engineering for the most popular commercial classical recording label out there! For every big name you can name who has come your way, I'm sure others can name 10 bigger names who swear by, say, the chief sound engineer at, say, EMI Classics... or whatever mainstream label whose recordings you were dissing just now...

 

[StanD]

There's a bajillion artists out there. Your work is bound to tickle at least *some* artists' fancy.

In September this year I was invited to join the largest, most popular team of Android system sound modders out there. Every day hundreds of users pile praise on the dev team. In my two months' membership, I have been continually bewildered by my inability to detect any effect from the current build of the mod, beneficial or otherwise. Finally, at my own expense, I bought a recording kit for the lead developer himself, who agreed to make a recording. Result--same null results, even from his own development smartphone.

Popularity is no guarantee of merit--never mind the fact that, if you were to argue your merit based on popularity, you should first be engineering for the most popular commercial classical recording label out there! For every big name you can name who has come your way, I'm sure others can name 10 bigger names who swear by, say, the chief sound engineer at, say, EMI Classics... or whatever mainstream label whose recordings you were dissing just now...

This just goes to show us the power of belief/expectation and how that influences perception. So when as you say, "Every day hundreds of users pile praise," that's almost like mass hysteria but without a threat.

 

[analogsurviver]

There's a bajillion artists out there. Your work is bound to tickle at least *some* artists' fancy.

In September this year I have been invited to join the largest, most popular team of Android system sound modders out there. Every day hundreds of users pile praise on the dev team. In my two months' membership, I have been continually bewildered by my inability to detect any effect from the current build of the mod, beneficial or otherwise. Finally, at my own expense, I bought a recording kit for the lead developer himself, who agreed to make a recording. Result--same null results, even from his own development smartphone.

Popularity is no guarantee of merit--never mind the fact that, if you were to argue your merit based on popularity, you should first be engineering for the most popular commercial classical recording label out there! For every big name you can name who has come your way, I'm sure others can name 10 bigger names who swear by, say, the chief sound engineer at, say, EMI Classics...

I have been selling CDs in retail for more than 10 years - last 5 years exclusively classics. I did - HAD to - listen to them at the time; although there is no tougher torture to endure music heard at home over weekend from the original LP monday morning at job on CD - because the customer wanted to listen to it. 
 
And it is precisely because I got disgusted by then recent recording on major labels - EMI Classics included - that I said ENOUGH , quit the job and started developing an alternative, but more importantly, better way of recording. I am not interested in the run of the mill quality recording as practiced by majors, I am interested in quality recordings for whoever is interested in quality first.
 
Many full moons ago, in the days when vinyl was the only game in town,  Harmonia Mundi France was quite a big leap in front of the majors as far as sheer sound quality is concerned. Fast forward to present day - and they have lowered their once so high standards for sound quality to the level of everybody else.  
 
Go out and get any CD on Harmonia Mundi by Bernarda Fink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernarda_Fink - and then get the second "regular" CD by Vokalna Akademija Ljubljana http://valval.si/en/ ( VAL, 2016 ) - where there are two songs where Bernarda has joined the forces with VAL, one of the very best amateur choirs in the world. She did not choose the VAL to accompany her in concert given at the ceremony of Republic of Austria for presenting her the award for achievements in culture - over many other more known, but not better ensembles - for nothing...
 
And LISTEN. 
 
But not on toys like Android. There is no app in the universe that can free so small portable devices of inherent flaws this small size necessitates. 

 

[Joe Bloggs]

I'd rather evaluate recordings YOU did for the sake of the argument.

 

[Joe Bloggs]

This just goes to show us the power of belief/expectation and how that influences perception. So when as you say, "Every day hundreds of users pile praise," that's almost like mass hysteria but without a threat.

Well it's not so simple. It incorporates dozens of sound effects libraries, including one that is freely available as a standalone app, albeit one that is notoriously difficult to install and get running. The whole mod has gathered more followers and momentum than said standalone app, but said standalone app has turned out to be the only thing that consistently works across devices. So rather than it being literally a whole lot of nothing, you could say this is more like the inverse of the story of the stone soup, with the mysterious rock at the bottom of the pot, held in low regard by some, turning out to be the only nutritious element in the pot a lot of the time. :rolleyes:

The latter app is also the only element of the mod that has an actual user interface that lets you change settings on the fly. The other elements purport to be fixed effects that require reflashing of the ROM to change. So users are flashing one of the many many variants of the mod and reporting differences between all of them, when right now I suspect they're all the same thing--in which case this would be like a mass social gag experiment demonstrating the fallability of echoic memory...

 

[james444]

   
No, it's not. Anyone with the cash can buy a good quality binaural mic setup, place it in the best seat in the house, press record and get a decent or good binaural recording. Except for knowing which cables to plug in where and the very basics of gain staging, pretty much no understanding (or skill) of recording or venue acoustics is required, let alone an "excellent understanding"! Particularly from the mid '80s onwards (and even well before that in some respects) commercial large ensemble recording took a different tack, the tack of creating as close to an ideal perception of a performance rather than just capturing the actual sound waves from the best seat in the house. Now that does take knowledge and skill!
 
The proof is in the pudding but a rare/strange few seem willing/able to overlook significant faults in a pudding (faults most others would find completely unacceptable) due to some spurious promise of authenticity.
 
G

 
Well, what do I know, I'm just on the consumer side of things: a regular (though recently less so) concert goer, who happens to prefer this guy's binaural recordings over most other stuff when it comes to lifelike spatiality.
 
So would you please enlighten me, as to what significant and completely unacceptable faults my rare/strange breed is overlooking? And since we're in the objectivist's board room, would you kindly point out the objective criteria that make your "close to an ideal perception of a performance" more lifelike and spatially accurate than the "sound waves from the best seat in the house"?
 
Always willing to learn from a pro, and should this tasty pudding prove in fact unfit for consumption, then so be it. But so far your arguments have been quite vague and hardly convincing.

 

[Joe Bloggs]

Well, what do I know, I'm just on the consumer side of things: a regular (though recently less so) concert goer, who happens to prefer this guy's binaural recordings over most other stuff when it comes to lifelike spatiality.

So would you please enlighten me, as to what significant and completely unacceptable faults my rare/strange breed is overlooking? And since we're in the objectivist's board room, would you kindly point out the objective criteria that make your "close to an ideal perception of a performance" more lifelike and spatially accurate than the "sound waves from the best seat in the house"?

Always willing to learn from a pro, and should this tasty pudding prove in fact unfit for consumption, then so be it. But so far your arguments have been quite vague and hardly convincing.

Who's this analogsurvivor in real life and what recordings of his are you listening to