[TheSonicTruth]

That is basically it. My thinking is that in home audio there is already WAY too much theoretical BS that doesn't add up to anything audible. When I read about jitter hoodoo and digital stair step shrillness and frequency response up where bats can't even hear and dynamic range that would require putting your stereo system at the bottom of Carlsbad Caverns to hear, I just shake my head and dismiss it with the wave of a hand. I wasted weeks of research on all that baloney in the past, and I'm not going to entertain those ideas any more until I can hear it with my own ears. The purpose of thinking logically and scientifically is to help people make their home audio systems sound better, not to give them a lesson in quantum physics. Audibility is paramount. If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, I say "Who cares?"

I know enough about how human hearing works to have good ballpark concepts about where the thresholds lie. If the specs show that something should be clearly inaudible, I assume it is inaudible until someone proves to me that it can be heard. If a hundred carefully conducted listening tests say one cable sounds just like any other and no studies show they sound different, I don't care how many people claim to hear a difference. People can claim whatever they want. But I'm not going to pay them any mind if the established knowledge says their claims are probably baseless. I don't see any purpose in thinking up excuses to justify their claims before I know they have done their homework and proved it. Talking purely in theory is just mental gymnastics. The idea is to solve problems, not think up theoretical problems that don't even need to be solved. Prove it and I'll be your biggest fan, because you're handing me something I can use. Until then, I operate on what is already established.

Also, I don't care about subconscious craziness because there's no way that buying a different piece of audio equipment is going to fix that!

When it comes to your home audio system, theoretical science only muddies the water and doesn't make your music sound any better. Practical applied science does.

Combining "Who" with "cares" perpetuates an attitude more powerful - and potentially more dangerous - than the strongest nuclear weapons currently on stand-by.

Just sayin'...

 

[KeithEmo]

Believe it or not, while sighted tests are susceptible to all sorts of bias, occasionally they are actually correct... or, to be more precise, occasionally what you think you hear is actually closely related to what you DO hear.
I've also heard rumors that some art experts were actually able to tell a real Rembrandt from a cheap forgery, and be correct at least some of the time, before colorimeters and mass spectrometers were invented.

In the case of ringing, I wold agree that it is not "THD".... I would say it technically falls under the category of "noise".... and, further, "data correlated noise".
(Which is just a fancy way of saying that it is noise that is correlated in some fashion to the signal.... )

However, my point was not what to call it...
My point is that it is something which is clearly audible, at least under some circumstances, but will not show up on traditional frequency response, THD, IMD, or S/N measurements.
It is only detectable, or measurable, with certain specific types of test signals and test equipment... however, those test signals are quite characteristic of music, which pure sine waves are not.
(And anyone versed in science knows that, when devising a test, it must be designed to approximate the actual usage conditions as closely as possible, and not be chosen "because it's easy to measure".)

I'll give you a precise analogy.
Let's assume that, in an otherwise very quiet room, I set off a firecracker once an hour...
If I measure the SPL of the explosion instantaneously I will get a very high reading...
But, if I average the reading over an hour, the firecrackers will make almost no difference at all in the reading...
And NEITHER of those measurements would accurately reflect "how audible the firecracker really is".
(Neither is wrong; but neither accurately represents the entire reality of the situation.)

Ringing is exactly that sort of situation...
If you measure the contribution it makes to the average levels of noise or distortion it will be small...
However, if you measure it over very short periods, at certain instants, there will be a signal which is pure noise (or whatever you care to call it)...
And we're right back to the question of whether a burst of that particular type of noise, of that particular amplitude and duration, is audible or not...

And, incidentally, being electro/magnetic and electro/mechanical, even the "linear transfer response" of speakers isn't really linear...
So the amount and type of ringing will be different if you make the measurement at different SPL levels.

So, in this specific case, if you send a continuous 440 Hz sine wave through a Sabre 9018 and an AD 1955, and measure the steady state THD, it will be very low for both.
And, if you measure the frequency response of both, it will be quite flat - and nearly identical.
HOWEVER, if you send a tone burst at some particular frequency through both, then measure the output for a few seconds after the signal stops, you will see significant DIFFERENCES in the output.
The actual differences will themselves be very different depending on the frequency, duration, and envelope characteristics of the test signal you choose.

And we're right back to determining whether those particular differences are or are not audible.
And, as far as i know, nobody has actually conducted a comprehensive test to determine whether the various filter settings on specific DACs are or are not audible.
All of the tests I've seen, when the details were documented at all, tested individual specific hardware.

For example, when whoever it was did that test between CDs and high-res files, what filter did they use on the 44.1k "CD quality sample"?
How steep was the filter?
How much ringing, and at what frequencies, did it exhibit?
And, did the particular music they used as a test signal include transients with very little ringing to begin with, so as not to mask any ringing caused by the filter?
In fact, what was the overall provenance of the music signal they used?
And how much ringing was present in the master recording because of the particular microphones, preamps, and ADCs they used?
And what filter was used on the high-res audio signal?
Etc...

This is where I see a very solid distinction between "scientific testing" and "consumer reporting".
Are we trying to determine whether "there is a clearly audible difference between most DACs when tested with typical consumer music files"?
Or are we trying to determine, scientifically, if there is ANY audible difference between different DACs, even if it can only be detected with certain test signals, or on certain audio tracks.
Many folks may only be interested in the former...
Whereas, my interest is more scientific, so I'm looking at the latter...

As far as I know, MANY people subjectively say that they often hear significant differences between Sabre DACs and other DACs (in specific).
The manufacturers claim that there are audible differences - and claim to have "done the tests".
Are you aware of anyone else who has actually tested for an audible difference between a variety of products with Sabre DACs, and a variety that use other brands, with a variety of music and test signals, and a variety of other equipment?
I have personally never seen or heard of such a test.
And, since there ARE in fact measurable differences, I prefer not to claim to know, beyond my subjective personal experience, whether the differences are audible or not.

I would find it interesting to see actual PROPERLY CONDUCTED tests - with actual results.
However, lacking that, I prefer to avoid reaching conclusions based on vaguely similar data, derived from incomplete test results.

You could spend your entire life banging blocks of metal together - and eventually conclude that "banging blocks of metal together never produces an explosion"...
I would even say that "it's a good ballpark estimate that all you get when you bang metal blocks together is a bit of a clang".
However, I would suggest you rethink your conclusions BEFORE someone believes you, and decides to try it with Plutonium...
(Luckily, or unluckily, some scientists figured out that particular exception to "the rule", and tried it out.)

It has been my personal (subjective) experience that MOST DACs do sound very much alike... except some of them don't.
It is my THEORY that the difference I hear is related to the filter differences I can measure... but I could be entirely wrong there.
(Perhaps it's the color they painted the plastic case that really does it...)

I would rather think that the reputation of the Sabre DACs would account for the 1dB of subjectively perceived high boost (where 1dB shouldn't be audible anyway)--unless you specified anywhere that the tests are blind?



That matches no definition of THD I'm aware of... 1. it would be at the same frequency you fed it with, hence not a harmonic 2. it can be accounted for by the linear transfer function of the speaker which does explain ringing without the need for talking about distortion at all.



Again, there is no technical sense in which this is distortion--as for controlled research, I believe that controlled studies relating to CD vs high res would fit the bill, since CD reproduction would have included the brickwall ringing while the high res version wouldn't (not to mention including extra ultrasonic info).

 

[KeithEmo]

It isn't the first such product to be offered for sale (and so I assume a few people actually do buy them).
And, if you look, you'll find "audiophile Ethernet cables" as well.
And, no, from the claims, it's strictly a re-clocker, isolator, and power cleaner, so it won't make your Internet access any better or faster at all.

Ethernet networks are essentially a very noisy environment - and equipment designed for them is tolerant enough that this is not a problem at all.
So, from the Ethernet point of view, they're trying really hard to fix a problem that doesn't actually exist.

I would guess the claim is this....
Networked audio equipment contains both network and audio circuitry.
Assuming it's designed at all well, the network circuitry will be totally unaffected by things like noise on the signal and ground lines, and small amounts of clock jitter, so no problem there.
Likewise, as far as I'm concerned, if you're designing audio gear to connect to a network, then it should work as intended when connected to a typical network.
However, it's possible that some designers of networked audio products have failed to do so; in which case making the network part of the signal chain super-clean might help it somehow.
(In other words, AT BEST, it might actually improve the performance of some few devices that currently suffer from design flaws.)

It's my opinion that, if that's really the case, you'd be better off buying equipment that works right to begin with...
Rather than spending a lot of money attempting to compensate for its shortcomings...

However, as someone in marketing no doubt once said.... audiophiles love complicated expensive tweaks...

I haven't posted in here in quite awhile, but are people really spending money on something that cleans your ethernet? Will this give super duper fast internet too? This is seriously head scratching stupidity.

https://parttimeaudiophile.com/2018/10/10/wavelength-ethernet-spacelator-rmaf-2018/amp/

 

[KeithEmo]

I absolutely agree with BigShot's first statement...

However, I've always assumed that this thread was dedicated to "audio science" rather than "common sense consumer advice"...
And, in science, the idea really is to think up new theories, and see if they turn out to be true or not, or to find out more details about existing things.

I should also point out that, even among "ordinary consumers", priorities and "what's obvious" differ considerably...
For example, I probably wouldn't notice the difference between an original Rembrandt and a $500 copy... even though art aficionados insist the difference is quite obvious.
I should point out that there actually was a time when everyone "knew" that "nobody could hear the difference between cassette tapes and real life".

That is basically it. My thinking is that in home audio there is already WAY too much theoretical BS that doesn't add up to anything audible. When I read about jitter hoodoo and digital stair step shrillness and frequency response up where bats can't even hear and dynamic range that would require putting your stereo system at the bottom of Carlsbad Caverns to hear, I just shake my head and dismiss it with the wave of a hand. I wasted weeks of research on all that baloney in the past, and I'm not going to entertain those ideas any more until I can hear it with my own ears. The purpose of thinking logically and scientifically is to help people make their home audio systems sound better, not to give them a lesson in quantum physics. Audibility is paramount. If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, I say "Who cares?"

I know enough about how human hearing works to have good ballpark concepts about where the thresholds lie. If the specs show that something should be clearly inaudible, I assume it is inaudible until someone proves to me that it can be heard. If a hundred carefully conducted listening tests say one cable sounds just like any other and no studies show they sound different, I don't care how many people claim to hear a difference. People can claim whatever they want. But I'm not going to pay them any mind if the established knowledge says their claims are probably baseless. I don't see any purpose in thinking up excuses to justify their claims before I know they have done their homework and proved it. Talking purely in theory is just mental gymnastics. The idea is to solve problems, not think up theoretical problems that don't even need to be solved. Prove it and I'll be your biggest fan, because you're handing me something I can use. Until then, I operate on what is already established.

Also, I don't care about subconscious craziness because there's no way that buying a different piece of audio equipment is going to fix that!

When it comes to your home audio system, theoretical science only muddies the water and doesn't make your music sound any better. Practical applied science does.

 

[bigshot]

If people, not microphones, are doing the "hearing," you need to account for what's happening in the brain to make the perception of hearing possible.

My point is, if my brain is telling me a piece of audio equipment sounds bad, going out and buying a better piece of audio equipment won't necessarily solve that problem. The problem may be in my head, not the electronics. All I can do is find a component that performs to a level of audible transparency. Beyond that, the equipment doesn't matter. The only way to help then is to see a shrink.

If you want a good psychological study, look into why people on Head-Fi churn through equipment. They buy something that is "new and improved", and six months later, they sell it for a loss and buy the latest "new and improved" model. There are people here who have bought 14 different DACs and 8 different amps and 20 different headphones in the space of a couple of years. The reason they go through so much equipment is because they never define the parameters of what kind of sound they are looking for. They let the pleasure center in their brain do the shopping for them. The problem is, human brains aren't that far from monkey brains. What gives us pleasure in this moment may be different than what gives us pleasure in another.

It's a complete waste of time and money to try to cater to subconscious urges like that. Snake Oil salesmen love to fuel the consumer culture of buying the same thing over and over. They try to convince you that you're getting something better every time. That is a lie. All you need to do is define the quality you are looking for, shop for it carefully, and then keep that optimal rig until you die or the equipment wears out, whichever comes first.

Keith, the purpose of audio science is to give us common sense advice on how to improve the quality of our systems. That is the purpose of this forum. There are plenty of non-common sense approaches to the problem- green felt markers, specs far beyond our ability to hear, magic filters, power wash for electrical currents, purity tests, inaudible frequencies... It's the job of this forum to provide solid scientifically based solutions to counteract the snake oil, placebo and hyperbole.

As for the Rembrandt and cassette tape... If the Rembrandt copy looks exactly the same to you, spending a lot of money for the original won't make it look any bigger hanging over the fireplace in your living room. And cassette tapes may have been capable of great sound back in the 80s, but they clearly weren't audibly transparent the way digital audio is. We have achieved audible transparency now. A simple scientific listening test proves that. That is a very useful application of science right there.

 

[KeithEmo]

I think you also need to consider the possibility that, for at least some people, the enjoyment comes from shopping for and purchasing new equipment.

They're enjoying the hunt...
Compare them to people who enjoy fishing, even though they may not eat what they catch, and actually prefer to "catch and release".
I've spoken to many people who "just enjoy trying different equipment"; and who will never "reach the end of the game" because they're not trying to.
And, for those sorts of folks, there's no point in "defining what they're looking for" in terms of results - because trying a new piece of equipment every month actually IS what they're looking for.
(But, no, I personally do NOT feel that way.... I'd much rather get to the end, collect my prize, and NOT have to go looking for another one next week.)

My point is, if my brain is telling me a piece of audio equipment sounds bad, going out and buying a better piece of audio equipment won't solve that problem. All I can do is find the one that performs to a level of audible transparency. Beyond that, the equipment doesn't matter. The only way to help is to see a shrink.

If you want a good psychological study, look into why people on Head-Fi churn through equipment. They buy something that is "new and improved", and six months later, they sell it for a loss and buy the latest "new and improved" model. There are people here who have bought 14 different DACs and 8 different amps and 20 different headphones in the space of a couple of years. The reason they go through so much equipment is because they never define the parameters of what kind of sound they are looking for. They let the pleasure center in their brain do the shopping for them. The problem is, human brains aren't that far from monkey brains. What gives us pleasure in this moment may be different than what gives us pleasure in another.

It's a complete waste of time and money to try to cater to subconscious urges like that. Snake Oil salesmen love to fuel the consumer culture of buying the same thing over and over. They try to convince you that you're getting something better every time. That is a lie. All you need to do is define the quality you are looking for, shop for it carefully, and then keep that optimal rig until you die or the equipment wears out, whichever comes first.

 

[bigshot]

I think you also need to consider the possibility that, for at least some people, the enjoyment comes from shopping for and purchasing new equipment.

I totally understand that. But I have nothing to offer that. Science won't help. Practical advice won't help. That kind of person should stick to snake oil sales pitch, spend their money randomly, and not try to convince a forum dedicated to finding solid scientific practical ways to achieve better sound that their willy nilly spending of money means that they have achieved sound nirvana that mere mortals can only dream about!

Here in Sound Science we have our own forms of being crazy and impractical. They aren't all that far removed from the audiophool forms actually. It's the same sort of splitting fractions off into infinity, ego boosting, and providing reams of dense theoretical verbiage that don't get people any closer to solving their problem at hand. It would be a good idea for us to be more practical and focused on the goals too. I'm not saying that we are any better than the audiophools when it comes right down to it.

 

[Phronesis]

I'm in general agreement with the last three posts by @bigshot and @KeithEmo. There's a lot of wastage of money by people chasing some sort of nirvana through headgear, which is especially problematic for the many people who can't really afford to waste that money ("I'm saving up for X," "I need to sell X so I can buy Y," etc.). And a lot of people are clearly misguided about how various items of gear influence sound, being overly influenced by hype, hope, appearance, comments of others, misperception, etc. Forums like head-fi can be genuinely helpful, but they often also facilitate people making and rationalizing bad purchasing decisions. It's kind of sad.

 

[tmars78]

Agreed. If the company who built whatever product you bought needs some other company's product to fix it, you probably shouldn't buy their products. Who spends thousands(and thousands) on equipment that's faulty? It's so insane to me.

As an aside, my super fast internet comment was sarcasm.

It's my opinion that, if that's really the case, you'd be better off buying equipment that works right to begin with...
Rather than spending a lot of money attempting to compensate for its shortcomings...

However, as someone in marketing no doubt once said.... audiophiles love complicated expensive tweaks...

 

[Joe Bloggs]

I absolutely agree with BigShot's first statement...

However, I've always assumed that this thread was dedicated to "audio science" rather than "common sense consumer advice"...
And, in science, the idea really is to think up new theories, and see if they turn out to be true or not, or to find out more details about existing things.

I should also point out that, even among "ordinary consumers", priorities and "what's obvious" differ considerably...
For example, I probably wouldn't notice the difference between an original Rembrandt and a $500 copy... even though art aficionados insist the difference is quite obvious.
I should point out that there actually was a time when everyone "knew" that "nobody could hear the difference between cassette tapes and real life".

Agreed but I wish the new theory were about something more interesting than theories explaining why sighted results say that two brands of DACs with exemplary performance actually sound a bit different when it is established psychological fact that sighted tests almost never find two objects "equal" even when the objects are provably indistinguishable stimuli without the benefit of knowing in advance which is which...

I'm sitting here every day listening to the fruits of independent research that could revolutionize audio quality and drive sales of audio equipment up by multiples... just wish I could get the corresponding thesis and patent squared away soon so I can talk about it in public. Then wishing that one can more easily make actual profit out of the revolutionary technology and make it a talking point among audiophiles. But too often actual audio science and technology can only be discussed among tiny groups while audiophiles at large only understand ad copy (wherein there's not really much to be understood)

Oh, and no expensive DACs were procured or harmed during the research... on the other hand quite a bit of recording equipment was procured to tune up loudspeakers and headphones as a necessary step in the research... with the side benefit of creating an audio system that would beat the socks off most systems several times its price... and the fruits of the research giving it certain capabilities that money cannot buy at the moment.

 

[bigshot]

That's what Head-Fi should be about... tuning gear to optimize its performance. Not acting as the audio equivalent of Home Shopping Club.

 

[castleofargh]

It is my THEORY that the difference I hear is related to the filter differences I can measure... but I could be entirely wrong there.

nit picking, but if we're interested in science, shouldn't this be an hypothesis, an idea or a guess until it has been validated through testing?

 

[sonitus mirus]

nit picking, but if we're interested in science, shouldn't this be an hypothesis, an idea or a guess until it has been validated through testing?

I would suggest verifying that a difference was actually being heard before attempting to correlate what might be attributed to it.

 

[gregorio]

...to be more precise, occasionally what you think you hear is actually closely related to what you DO hear.

That is virtually never the case. For example, what "you DO hear" is some external soundwaves hitting your eardrums plus a rather large amount of heartbeat sound, the sound of blood moving though blood vessels and even the sound of your nervous system. What we think we hear is typically NOT closely related to what "you do hear" because, except for some rare circumstances, we never think we hear these constant, relatively loud body function sounds because our brain eliminates them from our perception, and this is just one of many similar examples. The reality of the situation is that almost never is what we think we hear "closely related" to what we do hear, the best we can truthfully say is that occasionally, what we think we hear aligns quite well with what other people think they hear.

[1] My point is that it is something which is clearly audible, at least under some circumstances, but will not show up on traditional frequency response, THD, IMD, or S/N measurements.
It is only detectable, or measurable, with certain specific types of test signals and test equipment...
[1a] I'll give you a precise analogy. Let's assume that, in an otherwise very quiet room, I set off a firecracker once an hour... If I measure the SPL of the explosion instantaneously I will get a very high reading...But, if I average the reading over an hour, the firecrackers will make almost no difference at all in the reading... And NEITHER of those measurements would accurately reflect "how audible the firecracker really is".

1. True but in this particular case we're talking about filter ringing, something which should be clearly inaudible, unless it's been specifically designed to be audible.
1a. OK, let's run with your analogy. By orders of magnitude, the most common type of equipment used to examine sound is the graphical representation of sample data over time (in say a DAW/audio editor) and graphical representations of frequency content over time, both of which would blatantly obviously "reflect how audible the firecracker really is". In fact, you'd have to doctor the firecracker recording in the case of the SPL measurement or use a measurement type specifically designed not to report amplitude variations (only an average), all while avoiding the almost unavoidable other types of measurements. In other words, one would need to be deliberately trying to avoid a measurement that would "accurately reflect how audible that firecracker really is"!

[1] For example, when whoever it was did that test between CDs and high-res files, what filter did they use on the 44.1k "CD quality sample"? How steep was the filter?
[2] And, did the particular music they used as a test signal include transients with very little ringing to begin with, so as not to mask any ringing caused by the filter? ... And how much ringing was present in the master recording because of the particular microphones, preamps, and ADCs they used?

1. The controlled tests I'm aware of used standard type filters, with a transition band of around 2kHz or so. What about the inverse of the question, how steep were the filters used in controlled tests where a difference could be detected? As far as I'm aware the answer is either: Steeper than is ever found in consumer equipment or extremely shallow and well into the audible range (for some "warmth" or other lower audible fidelity and supposedly subjectively better result).

2. A very good point and one often omitted in the arguments made by audiophiles (or marketed to them). How many pieces of music do you know that were NOT recorded by mics and had no EQ (or other ringing/phase inducing effect) applied during mixing or mastering? All of which can not only produce far greater amounts of ringing/phase related artefacts than any well designed/standard reconstruction filter but also in a freq range to which we're actually sensitive!

Are we trying to determine whether "there is a clearly audible difference between most DACs when tested with typical consumer music files"?
Or are we trying to determine, scientifically, if there is ANY audible difference between different DACs, even if it can only be detected with certain test signals, or on certain audio tracks. Many folks may only be interested in the former...
Whereas, my interest is more scientific, so I'm looking at the latter...

We're trying to determine scientifically/factually whether there is any audible difference between DACs designed for high-fidelity conversion when reconstructing commercial digital audio.

Why would anyone be trying to "determine, scientifically, if there is ANY audible difference between different DACs, even if it can only be detected with certain test signals"? Of course there is, that's already been determined scientifically, decades ago! It's easy to deliberately make a DAC sound different with certain test signals and there are actual, commercially released, deliberately obvious examples of this. For example there were some which did not oversample and had no reconstruction filter (the NOS/Filterless DACs) and it's simple to design a test signal which would result in the DAC producing alias images which are clearly audible or at least, easily differentiated from a DAC with a competent filter.

The thread is: "Testing audiophile claims and myths". What audiophiles are we talking about? How many audiophiles are there who listen exclusively to test signals and are not interested in fidelity? Even if there are some, the audiophile claims and myths clearly relate to reproducing commercial audio.

The above points are all misrepresentations or obfuscations, although I can't be sure if they're deliberately so or inadvertent but they are obfuscations, as per my last post (#9650), and I fail to see how any of this makes your "interest more scientific". If anything, it demonstrates to me "less scientific" or at least, less factual.

G

 

[Phronesis]

That is virtually never the case. For example, what "you DO hear" is some external soundwaves hitting your eardrums plus a rather large amount of heartbeat sound, the sound of blood moving though blood vessels and even the sound of your nervous system. What we think we hear is typically NOT closely related to what "you do hear" because, except for some rare circumstances, we never think we hear these constant, relatively loud body function sounds because our brain eliminates them from our perception, and this is just one of many similar examples. The reality of the situation is that almost never is what we think we hear "closely related" to what we do hear, the best we can truthfully say is that occasionally, what we think we hear aligns quite well with what other people think they hear.

Great points. It's an interesting topic which has a philosophic aspect. I'm generally in the Kantian camp, with the view that we can never directly hear physical sound 'as it is', nor can we really even talk about how close we're getting to 'the thing in itself'. Instead, I view our perception of sound as being a model of reality, with the nature of that model being shaped by evolutionary history based on utilitarian factors.

So, for example, there are species that can't hear frequencies as low as humans, can hear frequencies much higher than humans, and have ears which can move independently of each other and have an anatomy much different from human ears. We can assume that the world of sound they perceive is much different from ours, but we can't really even imagine what that world of sound is like. We have horses and cats on our property, and I sometimes wonder what world of sound they perceive (and what goes through their minds in general), but I'll never know the answer, and no advancement in science could help me know it.