[DuncanDirkDick]

Well the simplicity is the nice thing. Except for the phase compensation / inverting the signal path is equal. I would agree, without the correct phase compensation you can't null it. There is a project over at diy forum to build a simplified version. But it's pretty quiet over there.

 

[castleofargh]

I do own a 5.1 system, thanks, but your comments don’t really tell me why I’m getting very strong depth perception from one product and not others and then after noticing this independently I read his explanation which confirms this and goes some way towards explaining it.

Maybe it is all BS, but if that is so could you kindly expand on why his ideas about human hearing and interpretation are so wrong?

you cite how people wouldn't have a clue what sound localization is, because at anytime in real life there is stuff several magnitudes louder than what he's trying to fix, but surely the whole point is that in real life the sounds you hear aren’t converted to digital before you hear them.

don’t get me wrong, if you have a valid point that you can illustrate I would be more than happy to learn more, it’s why I’m following this thread in the first place.

I can't tell why you feel how you feel. I can't even tell if it has anything to do with sound, or if maybe it's about volume difference between DACs more than anything else. We understand a good deal about perception of audio cues thanks to many very specific controlled experiments, testing one variable at a time and learning more about the consequences of changing it. But considering some subjective consequences and finding out the cause, that's a different story. We might be lucky to even come up with some educated guesses.


About Mr Watts explanations,
we can start with a pretty serious lack of controlled experiments to validate anything before he came to tell everybody about it. A few years have passed, so I can only assume that he has no intention, or no mean to demonstrate any of it.
But I'd still say that the biggest issue comes with the magnitudes involved in his stories. He's talking about playing with ludicrously small stuff in the signal, then declares those changes audible. Even he is puzzled by that "discovery" and mentioned it a few times, because of how it so obviously goes against all we know about human hearing abilities. And yet he doesn't look for testing error or interpretation error on his part as the most logical answer to this conundrum. Instead he basically went something like, "oh well", and then talked as if we now knew for a fact that humans can perceive changes at magnitudes they really can't so we should probably keep an open mind about all those accepted limits...
One might conclude that he's really ignorant about human hearing, another might argue that it's all just marketing. What it's not is rigorous.
Be it in the time domain or in the amplitude domain, what he attributes as causes for the alleged audible improvements, are many times smaller than a all lot of crap omnipresent in recording, playback signals, and around us(in us) at all time. Most of which we already don't notice. And from our understanding of hearing, we know about auditory masking, where the loud stuff tends to mask the very quiet signals. Which leads to my not controversial belief that crazy low amplitude stuff aren't audible in music. Something he doesn't seem to care about in his reasoning.

 

[Don Hills]

I said there's no easy way to get a convincing null between analog signals. ...
... I had to play back and record the test signal twice ...

True. You need to digitise them and use something like this:
DeltaWave Audio Null Comparator
It adjusts for phase and timing differences so you should be able to get useful results from comparing your two runs.

 

[118900]

I can't tell why you feel how you feel. I can't even tell if it has anything to do with sound, or if maybe it's about volume difference between DACs more than anything else. We understand a good deal about perception of audio cues thanks to many very specific controlled experiments, testing one variable at a time and learning more about the consequences of changing it. But considering some subjective consequences and finding out the cause, that's a different story. We might be lucky to even come up with some educated guesses.


About Mr Watts explanations,
we can start with a pretty serious lack of controlled experiments to validate anything before he came to tell everybody about it. A few years have passed, so I can only assume that he has no intention, or no mean to demonstrate any of it.
But I'd still say that the biggest issue comes with the magnitudes involved in his stories. He's talking about playing with ludicrously small stuff in the signal, then declares those changes audible. Even he is puzzled by that "discovery" and mentioned it a few times, because of how it so obviously goes against all we know about human hearing abilities. And yet he doesn't look for testing error or interpretation error on his part as the most logical answer to this conundrum. Instead he basically went something like, "oh well", and then talked as if we now knew for a fact that humans can perceive changes at magnitudes they really can't so we should probably keep an open mind about all those accepted limits...
One might conclude that he's really ignorant about human hearing, another might argue that it's all just marketing. What it's not is rigorous.
Be it in the time domain or in the amplitude domain, what he attributes as causes for the alleged audible improvements, are many times smaller than a all lot of crap omnipresent in recording, playback signals, and around us(in us) at all time. Most of which we already don't notice. And from our understanding of hearing, we know about auditory masking, where the loud stuff tends to mask the very quiet signals. Which leads to my not controversial belief that crazy low amplitude stuff aren't audible in music. Something he doesn't seem to care about in his reasoning.

Thank you for explaining.

it seems rude to just write a one liner to your long and detailed comment but to be clear you have given me much to think about and research.

 

[renanrischiotto]

Can a better cable make my out-of-phase headphone fixed?
https://www.head-fi.org/threads/phase-audio-problem.956966/

 

[magicscreen]

My phone charger is altering the sound quality if I plug it in the power strip. Why?

 

[bigshot]

Grounding problem. Phones have problems with that sometimes.

 

[castleofargh]

Or some heavy power saving feature when unplugged, or it's in his head, or....

 

[bigshot]

I'm assuming it is clearly audible noise. If it's noise it's grounding. If it's some sort of "veil" or "more alive" or some other subjective description, then I'm fairly certain a blind test hasn't been done and it can be chalked up to expectation bias.

I'm waiting to get some clarification in another thread where the person says that something that sounds like a ground loop is caused by being in contact with wood. That makes no sense, and I've asked for a clarifying test.

It's kind of weird because I haven't experienced ground loop problems or RF interference in many years. People must live in houses with out of code wiring, they live under AM radio antennas, or the equipment they buy must be very poorly designed.

 

[renanrischiotto]

I'm assuming it is clearly audible noise. If it's noise it's grounding. If it's some sort of "veil" or "more alive" or some other subjective description, then I'm fairly certain a blind test hasn't been done and it can be chalked up to expectation bias.

I'm waiting to get some clarification in another thread where the person says that something that sounds like a ground loop is caused by being in contact with wood. That makes no sense, and I've asked for a clarifying test.

It's kind of weird because I haven't experienced ground loop problems or RF interference in many years. People must live in houses with out of code wiring, they live under AM radio antennas, or the equipment they buy must be very poorly designed.

Welcome to technology.

 

[Headbander]

Grounding problem. Phones have problems with that sometimes.

Do you mean when charging or when operating on battery. There shouldn't be grounding issues when on batteries

 

[118900]

Do you mean when charging or when operating on battery. There shouldn't be grounding issues when on batteries

He was specifically replying to someone asking about changes in SQ when charging the phone.

 

[redrol]

I'm assuming it is clearly audible noise. If it's noise it's grounding. If it's some sort of "veil" or "more alive" or some other subjective description, then I'm fairly certain a blind test hasn't been done and it can be chalked up to expectation bias.

I'm waiting to get some clarification in another thread where the person says that something that sounds like a ground loop is caused by being in contact with wood. That makes no sense, and I've asked for a clarifying test.

It's kind of weird because I haven't experienced ground loop problems or RF interference in many years. People must live in houses with out of code wiring, they live under AM radio antennas, or the equipment they buy must be very poorly designed.

Nope. This is very very easy to run into no matter how 'good' your equipment is. I could post a quick video showing how to get a ground loop in 2 seconds. For instance, just plug a usb dac's output into a power amp sharing the same room ground.

 

[bigshot]

This conversation went in circles so many times with conflicting information and completely new info thrown in later that should have been mentioned up front. Then he said he was unable to test using a different location. I gave up. He’s using an AC converter of some sort. That is probably the source of his problems, but at this point I don’t care any more. You can try to help him if you want, but it’s a waste of time to argue with my posts because I couldn’t get him to explain the problem clearly. It kept changing.

 

[redrol]

Gotcha. I don't know how to help him because ground loops can be extremely hard to diagnose. I do know that I could stop mine by literally breaking the pin off the ground on my KRK speakers... this isn't a great idea however.

Here, I made an example of a ground loop.