[Jones Bob]

Hey everyone,

Please --  Jason is out of town for a few more days.  This thread is his responsibility.  Therefore -- how about we digress from any discussions of proper corporate tax rates..........

Thanks!

Sez Mike channeling his inner Sister Mary Elephant.

 

[sludgeogre]

Let's take everyone's W2's, stand in a circle, and burn them while we blast music through our headphones. Problem solved! Finally, we can move on!
 
I just sent my Bifrost in to be transformed, as a butterfly would, into the Bimby. I hope that the resultant Bimby is a fiscal conservative and knows that I expect it to soothe my delicate sensibilities whilst I begrudgingly pay my taxes.
 
Edit: I have now made 420 posts and must quit head-fi... or make it to 666... hmmm.... which is more metal...

 

[520RanchBro]

  Let's take everyone's W2's, stand in a circle, and burn them while we blast music through our headphones. Problem solved! Finally, we can move on!
 
I just sent my Bifrost in to be transformed, as a butterfly would, into the Bimby. I hope that the resultant Bimby is a fiscal conservative and knows that I expect it to soothe my delicate sensibilities whilst I begrudgingly pay my taxes.
 
Edit: I have now made 420 posts and must quit head-fi... or make it to 666... hmmm.... which is more metal...

It really depends on what kind of metal. Judging by the name sludgeogre, I'm going to assume you're more stoner/doom than church burning black metal.

 

[spykez]

 

  Let's take everyone's W2's, stand in a circle, and burn them while we blast music through our headphones. Problem solved! Finally, we can move on!
 
I just sent my Bifrost in to be transformed, as a butterfly would, into the Bimby. I hope that the resultant Bimby is a fiscal conservative and knows that I expect it to soothe my delicate sensibilities whilst I begrudgingly pay my taxes.
 
Edit: I have now made 420 posts and must quit head-fi... or make it to 666... hmmm.... which is more metal...

It really depends on what kind of metal. Judging by the name sludgeogre, I'm going to assume you're more stoner/doom than church burning black metal.

 
What about Arabian Power Metal? (00:45 start)
 

 

[Odin412]

I received the May issue of Stereophile today and they have a really nice review of the Ragnarok amplifier, calling it 'the perfect introduction to the joys of quality music reproduction in the home'. Well done, guys!

 

[jimmers]

  I received the May issue of Stereophile today and they have a really nice review of the Ragnarok amplifier, calling it 'the perfect introduction to the joys of quality music reproduction in the home'. Well done, guys!

Yeah, looks like I'll have to get one for my LS50s 

 
 
edit:
HR - "The Schiit Ragnarok plus KEF LS50s is the most enjoyable stereo system I've used in the 21st century."
 
(he must have liked the old times better?) 

 

[cishida]

Schiit Audio Ragnarok
HERB REICHERT

"it’s the first amplifier of my experience that plays earth and sky, mind and body, brown eyes and blue, speakers and headphones, with equal narcotic intensity. It likes every type of music. It’s fully balanced. It’s frolicsome."

Pretty enthusiastic.

 

[jimmers]

Schiit Audio Ragnarok
HERB REICHERT

"it’s the first amplifier of my experience that plays earth and sky, mind and body, brown eyes and blue, speakers and headphones, with equal narcotic intensity. It likes every type of music. It’s fully balanced. It’s frolicsome."

Pretty enthusiastic.

I want some of what he's on 

 

[GearMe]

Go ask Reichert, when he's ten feet tall...

 

[Anavel0]

Go ask Reichert, when he's ten feet tall...

Remember what the dormouse said, "feed your head!"

 

[Matias]

Stereophile's John Atkinson was not so enthusiastic in his technical review of Ragnarok. Never saying anything bad per se, but "raises my eyebrows" for the self adjusting bias thing and ending with "Well, there it is." is somewhat cold from his usual "excellent measured performance and solid engineering" endings.

 

[sublime9]

Regarding subjective vs. objective, I am going to borrow a signature line from a fellow DIY audio member:
 
"if it measures well & sounds good, it is good" : "if it measures badly & sounds bad it is bad" : "if it measures badly & sounds good, it could be improved" : "if it measures well but sounds bad it is bad"
 
 
Thanks Jason for this incredibly helpful blog on starting a business. I have printed out and shown marketing and management several of your comments when they want to machine an enclosure out of solid aluminum. Or aluminium, if you are across the pond.
 
Anxiously await your next chapter, or given the spacing, perhaps a product launch?

 

[Jason Stoddard]

Hey all,
 
I'm back (and finally not too jet-lagged). Apologies for not being able to keep this thread cleaned up, and thanks to Currawong for taking care of it. I'll have a new chapter for you this week!
 
All the best,
Jason

 

[landroni]

 
Objectivist/subjectivist is to me very baffling. Much of my work over the last 20 years involves building systems that respond usefully to human typed or spoken inputs. We use lots of metrics, but there's a big gap between what we can measure and how the systems perform in the field, because of the long-tailed distributions and constant drift of human behavior. Still, measurements are critical in getting us to the right ballpark. I can't imagine that the situation is different for audio gear. Designers need measurements to avoid egregious mistakes, but once the gear is feeding customer ears, many uncontrollable factors take hold, from expectations to listening conditions to shifts source material mix over time to aging of the listener.

I know the discussion has moved on since Jason's inflammatory common-sense and outrageous level-headedness, but this is a point worth highlighting...
 
 
If you take a step back, take a cold shower and pour yourself a hard-liquor treat of your choosing, you may realize that "measurements" are remarkably limited in scope.

 
From the off, the term "measurement" is somewhat of a misnomer in the context and has a halo effect of suggesting that it's really easy to "measure" things: ye know, like take a ruler and, well, measure things. (Jason rightly points out that "Getting consistent measurements isn’t as easy as you might think." in his Measurements chapter, yet another outrageously balanced and considered piece of prose. How dare he!)
While I did no such tests and my understanding is largely theoretical, I believe that common measurements in audio are remarkably complex beasts, some depending on quite a bit of stats (weighting schemes, calibration, etc.). From what I see "measurements" are more like (stress-) testing an audio device, by blasting a (simplistic and uncharacteristic of real-life usage) sine wave through it and (yes!) measure how the system responds.
In other parts of the engineering world this is known as laboratory simulation, which will not always yield similar results in real-world conditions (i.e. sonic performance as perceived by human listening). We can take an analogy from the F1 world, where teams will stress test their designs using 60% scale prototypes in a windtunnel, and then cross fingers REAL REAL hard that the lab measurements and estimations correlate with real-life on-track performance. (Some lose by the millions and play years of catch up when they don't.)
This is why, when queried "when will specs become available for the latest and greatest Schiit gizmo?", Jason often suggests that published specs will largely be uncorrelated with sonic performance...

 
And as any "estimator"---is there a statistician in the room?---, it's often an imperfect quantifier of a phenomenon (say, distortion), and there will be various estimators / estimating schemes that could be used. You could take something that tries to bundle it all in one measure (e.g. THD), or look at bits and pieces (e.g. distortion of 2nd, 3rd order harmonics, or THD graphs, etc.). This makes headline numbers without book-long methodological explanations meaningless.
Put differently, estimations often may not mean what people think they do, and the only people who could put any sense into them is those who actually did the measuring (and fingers crossed, actually knew what they were doing and understand what they mean!).
And remarkably few relevant measurements seem to actually be published on DACs and amps... As this RMAF presentation on "What The Specs Don’t Tell You… And Why" rightly points out, single D/A chips may come with a full booklet of specs and graphs, whereas an infinitely more complex full-blown DAC often comes with something like half a dozen published measurements...
 
 
What's more, in my understanding most audio measurements will usually indicate what's wrong with a given gear (cf "avoid egregious mistakes"), but have little to say about what's right. So THD, IMD, and even Frequency response which indicates deviations from flat FR, or SNR which highlights noisy gear.
This can also be thought of as "diseases". If we take the human body as an analogy, doctors can never --- well, they always do, but that's a discussion for another day --- tell someone "you're perfectly healthy" (i.e. the device is "audibly transparent"). The most a doctor can say is that "given the symptoms you describe, and all the tests we've performed, and given the state of science today and our limited understanding of it, we cannot see anything wrong with you, but this doesn't really mean that you're necessarily in good health".
 
Take cancer: if you want to know whether someone is afflicted by cancer, you need to run several tens or hundreds tests on them. If one comes back positive, there is a good chance the person has cancer. If none do, that's lack of scientific evidence for cancer, but not scientific evidence for lack of cancer. So doctors don't know, i.e. they're in the black. The person may be having cancer in very early stages, so not detected by usual tests (that's why e.g. HIV testing is recommended at least 6 months after suspected infection). Or the person may have a very rare form of cancer that wasn't tested for; or a variation of a known type of cancer but which evades the usual tests; or even that as of yet unknown form of toe-nail cancer. Same holds for virus infections, bacterial infections and the like. And same holds for doping in sports: witness Lance Armstrong who has never officially tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs, yet has admitted to being guilty of it and stripped of all Tour de France achievements.

 
In other words, to know if someone is "perfectly healthy" one needs to run ALL known tests and ALL unknown tests, for all known and unknown diseases. That's a tall order.
And for a device being certifiably "audibly transparent", audio measurements don't get anywhere near that. (Jason nicely highlights in his “Improving on ‘Perfection’” chapter how even a device that "is" "perfect" can be improved upon...)
And this is ignoring the fact that most audio measurements usually under discussion generally aren't 'dynamic' tests that would reflect actual real-life music, but instead are 'static' exercises using simplistic (if, helpfully, calibrated) sine waves --- as they stand, and until the advent and wide adoption of dynamic tests and complex pattern-analysis algorithms accounting for the non-linearities of the Human Auditory System, audio measurements can be thought of as... err... primitive. And yes, the human ear exhibits non-linearities (cf Critical band), whereas measurements are in effect linear and fall short of this level of complexity... (Metrum discusses this some in the context of FL NOS R2R tech.)

 
So while it's obvious that measurements are an incredibly useful tool and indispensable for building high-quality gear (again, needed to "avoid egregious mistakes"), it is HIGHLY unlikely that they can possibly be---in their current form and application---the final arbiter in sonic performance and the teller of absolute (or even conditional) truth in things audio. After all, we appreciate a Rembrandt by looking at it with our own eyes, and not by inspecting a color histogram or an IR representation... Similarly, we don't appreciate wine by looking at the chemical breakdown of the thing.
Sure, those tools could hold clues and highlight some patterns, but that's just about as far as it gets. Until we develop algorithms complex and intelligent enough to shame an art connoisseur (e.g. by definitively settling attribution disputes or correcting them on style similarities), the audio world can only rely on human skills for assessing ultimate sonic performance: ear-assisted, brain-performed pattern analysis...

 

[RCBinTN]

I'm getting a headache.  Time for a Guinness.