Look at my moniker. I am not a wolf. I am a jackal. I did not know that until one of “you” said “we” were all jackals. I looked me up in Wikipedia. I am monogamous and stick too my family, I do not form packs. I am really rather impressive, I had no idea. I know nothing about engineering or science. I don’t even know how the light switch works.
I do wonder, however, if no one knows what causes gravity, how they know gravity accelerates. There is a theory that gravitons cause gravity but we can’t find them and they don’t weigh anything. Oh how convenient, And then there is another theory called “string theory” that proposes strings cause gravity. I suppose like marionettes. How creative is that? What causes gravity? Oh, it’s a bunch of strings attached to everything. Wow. Genius. So you can see what I think of science.
not knowing what causes an effect, or why something causes a certain effect, doesn't mean we can't ever predict the effect itself with some degree of accuracy and do fine in life. in fact that's how we do most things.
my favorite example of this is the "magical" case of using 3 polarized filters(super famous case) with the first and third at 90° from each other and the middle one at anything but 90° from either filters. I know form both the theory and my own experience that 2 polarized filters at 90° from one another will let no light pass through. I even think I understand why at this point.
but with the 3 filters, some light does pass through. that blows my mind and I do not understand why even now after many years. BUT! I do know how to calculate how much light will go through ^_^. I've known that from back when I was at my photography school. so I effectively have all I need to handle real life conditions.
and that's why it's my favorite example, everything I think I know about light tells me that the result should still be zero light out. the model I have in my head wants it to be so. I can't figure out what is going on, but I can predict how much light will come out depending on the orientation of the second filter.
gravity isn't different. we learn to predict where a basket ball will fall depending on its initial trajectory, and that even without understanding what causes gravitational forces, or any aerodynamic.
compelling meme statement, how can I claim it's false if I wasn't there at the time(the logical brother of "how can you talk about that device if you didn't listen to it?").
I don't have the answer for what is gravity either, but one of the problems(at least it was for me) with visualizing gravity as anything that could make sense, was that I was told as a kid that mass was the amount of little balls in the object. and that's BS! but I was told about it only much later in life. once I dropped the model of some static object that somehow magically projects some force out of nothing and onto something else, gravity while still a huge mystery in my life, became a little more palatable. my vision of things right now is that everything is moving, it doesn't even matter much to me if everything is made of waves, particles, or gremlins and micro pineapple pizzas. everything has or maybe is energy(if only from being in movement, having a temperature that's not absolute zero, etc) we can look at it however we like, there are stuff moving, therefore there is energy. and stuff in movement can affect other stuff, that is a fact for me. I already accept the existence of phenomenons like induction or kinetic energy from something hitting something else(despite learning that probably nothing actually touched at a small enough scale, so that too is a "force at a distance" kind of virgin alchemist crap). but we can test those stuff and see the very clear effect, like with gravity. so I can imagine similar types of reactions to movement, and gravity is just another manifestation of some force caused by something moving and transferring energy into trying to make something else move(or get hot when hitting the ground very fast^_^).
I don't have a clue if that's better or closer to reality than thinking about magic that makes people stick to the ground, in the end it's just a mental model. it also doesn't really change how I would calculate the speed of a falling object at a given moment in time. in fact for that I could still use newton laws and come pretty close to the exact value.
string theory is a similar desire to make up a model that could perhaps help unify what we already know, make it all easier to imagine, and why not, help us learn new stuff. as it happens sometimes with models so cool that they correctly predict stuff we didn't even know would happen. string theory apparently had issues from day one(that I don't necessarily understand TBH, those stuff are for uber math geeks). but you can't blame scientists for having dumb ideas and wanting to test them against the real world to see how dumb they are. that's most of the fun of doing science.
personally I like the idea of more dimensions than what we are aware of. it's a cheap trick that doesn't really help for much of anything, but it's a really nice mental patch where unexplained behaviors and unknown sources of energy(or lack of energy that should be there) could perhaps be explained by the very simple and obvious fact that we just don't have the right sensors to detect anything in those dimensions. MAGIC!
otherwise I spend most of my days thinking "****ing magnets, how do they work?" like anybody else.
As far as whether there is a measurable scientific difference that’s audible between R2R/multibit vs. Delta-Sigma? I say yeah right, when pigs fly. No one has ever provided any evidence of it, other than the equivalent of claims of seeing Bigfoot. Wonder why that is. Beyond that it’s not really worth discussing. That should have been taken care of in about four posts.
as it happens that's possible. in part because the R2R designs can more often be found on DAC designed by old guns who ironically haven't completely accepted digital audio despite them building DACs. so you'd end up with DACs that don't have a filter for band limiting, no oversampling, and whatever other great idea that would perhaps be great if only it didn't part in some ways from the necessary conditions of Nyquist's theorem.
those aspects are what I would consider bad designs, but as several DACs were made like that, perhaps we should count them as some of the R2R DACs instead of just broken DACs sold anyway? IDK. among the impacts that can measure pretty high and possibly become audible, we have ludicrous amounts of aliasing, or high frequency roll off. several such DACs can surely be audible in a blind test, so long as you're not too old. most R2R DACs will have a mix of moderate roll off and aliasing, that I would expect to remain inaudible in most cases.
the other impact of R2R is the typical non linearity due to the difficulty of making n resistors with exactly the same resistance value. I don't really know about audibility, because the type and amount of non linearity is going to result in different distortions. the best way to know if it's audible is still probably to have a listening test for each DAC.
again, many DACs will have fairly low linearity issues so maybe we should count that as a defect if it's important enough to be audible?
there is a real need to define R2R DACs in a specific way, so that all the weirdo designs do or don't end up counted as representative of R2R. and same thing for the DACs that do oversample and have some portion of digital filter and what not. they're not the historic or exotic R2R, but they still may use a resistor ladder for the bits, and are likely to be very good DACs.
we might have to consider the same question of defining what counts as a proper delta sigma reference. some stuff measure pretty bad(for a DAC!!!!!), some don't have the voltages or grounding design advised by the chip manufacturer. if that turns out not to be transparent, do we blame delta sigma design or do we call those DACs defective?
I said something similar for cables, but I, and several others here, have a few standards we'll probably stick to when purchasing a DAC. starting by trying stuff that provide extensive specs. and being quite suspicious of gears that just happen to "forget" a typical measurement. or maybe not buying a R2R DAC in the first place(me!!). and I have friends on the other side, who aren't complete delta sigma haters, but will probably purchase almost anything else. that will make it less likely to come across the biggest possible differences between gears.
and of course also having standards when it come to testing gears will mean that we will not forget to check for loudness differences before claiming to hear a difference. and we won't let ourselves fall for the biases of a sighted test. that too is sure to result in people like myself naturally being exposed to fewer cases with big perceived differences.
