[Liu Junyuan]

But I didn't take a blind taste test when I preferred suan cai yue near the park at Dinghuaimen in Nanjing to the suan cai yue in central Nanjing. Thus, even though I knew to go to Dinghuaimen, my subjective memory interferes, prompting me to suspend judgment to take objective taste tests (lol sarcasm).

 

[purrin]

  Yeah, I've made my own cables and put together a Project Solstice.  Are you suggesting I use CAT5 cable into 3-pin XLR for AES3 connection?
 
BTW, I'm pretty sure at this point that it opened the soundstage and lowered the noise floor a bit.  Not much, but enough to not go back to coax.

 
Yes, use on TP in a CAT5 cable. 1 meter length or less. Blacker, less haze, more expansive stage, more precise location of instruments. Exactly as you said. Not much, but won't go back to coax.
 
Quote:

But I didn't take a blind taste test when I preferred suan cai yue near the park at Dinghuaimen in Nanjing to the suan cai yue in central Nanjing. Thus, even though I knew to go to Dinghuaimen, my subjective memory interferes, prompting me to suspend judgment to take objective taste tests (lol sarcasm).

 
Unfortunately the stupidity goes on and on. Maybe your taste memory is only short term? Perhaps the suan cai is 0.3C colder at one place than other? Maybe allergy affected your sense of taste? Perhaps you have an affinity for once place than the other, hence confirmation bias. You can't win, only lose. What we really should be discussing should be the nature of experienced phenomena, mind, consciousness, and existence.
 
Makes me so hungry for Chinese street food right now. Can't get that in USA.

 

[Liu Junyuan]

Yes, use on TP in a CAT5 cable. 1 meter length or less. Blacker, less haze, more expansive stage, more precise location of instruments. Exactly as you said. Not much, but won't go back to coax.


Unfortunately the stupidity goes on and on. Maybe your taste memory is only short term? Perhaps the suan cai is 0.3C colder at one place than other? Maybe allergy affected your sense of taste? Perhaps you have an affinity for once place than the other, hence confirmation bias. You can't win, only lose. What we really should be discussing should be the nature of experienced phenomena, mind, consciousness, and existence.

Makes me so hungry for Chinese street food right now. Can't get that in USA.

Me too. BBQ lamb and mashed cucumber with garlic on the side, along with spicy eggplant!

Sorry off topic!

 

[Stillhart]

   
Yes, use on TP in a CAT5 cable. 1 meter length or less. Blacker, less haze, more expansive stage, more precise location of instruments. Exactly as you said. Not much, but won't go back to coax.
 
 
Unfortunately the stupidity goes on and on. Maybe your taste memory is only short term? Perhaps the suan cai is 0.3C colder at one place than other? Maybe allergy affected your sense of taste? Perhaps you have an affinity for once place than the other, hence confirmation bias. You can't win, only lose. What we really should be discussing should be the nature of experienced phenomena, mind, consciousness, and existence.
 
Makes me so hungry for Chinese street food right now. Can't get that in USA.

 
Thanks, I'll give it a shot.  I'm assuming one pair into each pin and one pair to connector ground?  Or do I leave off the last pair?  And should I do the same for balanced interconnects between DAC and Amp?
 
And that second paragraph made me LOL.  Thanks for such an illustrative example.

 

[Sapientiam]

   
Audio is like food to me.

 
S-D DACs get my nomination for being like MSG. Impressive at first but leaves me with a headache longer term.

 

[Liu Junyuan]

Ignorance is bliss! I am sorry but I love my Gungnir, and I would agree with Purrin's application of the phrase "sweet sweet tone" to this musical, far-from-fatiguing DAC in the first post.

I did think the MSG analogy was funny though.

 

[Stillhart]

Ignorance is bliss! I am sorry but I love my Gungnir, and I would agree with Purrin's application of the phrase "sweet sweet tone" to this musical, far-from-fatiguing DAC in the first post.

I did think the MSG analogy was funny though.

 
LOL!  Nice avatar pic.

 

[Argo Duck]

Interesting stuff indeed. But I suspect you missed my points. Never mind.

My research field is social dynamics (group behavior within small and large contexts), I'm an ex-lecturer in social dynamics and discourse, am trained in statistics and psychometrics and act from time to time as a research consultant and statistician in both this and the medical field. So there is certainly overlap between my area and yours - although I certainly don't claim anything like your expertise with signal processing and sound measurement. The point though is that many of the measures I developed in the past were cognition and perception based., i.e. somewhat akin to the audiophile phenomenology. What others call "subjective" psychometricians will often go ahead and measure - with the usual requirements that they be repeatable, achieve adequate standards of reliability and achieve validity with respect to some well-founded and well-argued construct.

My comment that 'the audiophile experience' is not a hot research topic was meant seriously. There is no way I or anyone within my faculty could have hoped to attract funding for this kind of thing. Nor were my literature searches some years back particularly fruitful - although I could well have not used the right terms!

Yes, be wary of Amos (Currowong) - he's always watching

Again, I am not discounting opinions or attempting to denigrate them; everyone's opinion and preference counts (or should). I am however attempting to make a distinction between the results of well-designed tests conducted in an controlled fashion and opinion. Again, when differences are clear (and I'll concede that's a relative term) then yes, such structured tests are overkill.... Interesting stuff.

 

[Liu Junyuan]

LOL!  Nice avatar pic.

酸菜鱼！

 

[estreeter]

Taking this hobby far too seriously can lead down a very deep and dark rabbit hole. 
 
http://www.high-endaudio.com
 
Arthur is special - in every sense of the word - read some of his correspondence with various Stereophile writers for confirmation. He's also been a trenchant keyboard warrior on various forums, but I suspect those efforts led to the creation of that site after he was banned from several of the forums. He's just as entitled to his opinions as anyone - particularly given his history selling gear - but he embodies everything that I loathe about zealotry in this hobby. It's like any ideology - once you take a stance (analog v digital, feedback v zero feedback, class A vs the rest) it becomes increasingly hard to ever move from that position and you spend a lot more time at a keyboard than listening to music. Every hobby has such folk, of course, but they can be particularly odious in the audiophile realm.
 
*if I can contradict myself here, the one thing I will say in Arthur's favor is that (until very recently) he was consistent in his assertion that nothing beats analog. It's not because I agree with him - simply because he was consistent to the point where all his digital source recommendations had to come from his anyonymous 'associates'. That seems to be under threat as of Feb this year - 
 
http://www.high-endaudio.com/RECENT.html#Feb
 
I dont know what APL's mods do for the Esoteric CDPs, but in stock form they seem to be a 'love or hate' proposition and the sticker prices are eye-watering. Also no idea what the architecture is or whether the DAC sections bear comparison to anything here, but there is obviously still a market or TEAC would have dumped the division years ago. Attractive casework probably helps, but post GFC I doubt that's the whole picture. 

 

[murrays]

   
Thanks, I'll give it a shot.  I'm assuming one pair into each pin and one pair to connector ground?  Or do I leave off the last pair?  And should I do the same for balanced interconnects between DAC and Amp?
 
And that second paragraph made me LOL.  Thanks for such an illustrative example.

 
The balanced digital signal should be one twisted pair.  Since CAT-5 is unshielded you will have to use one or more of the other wires/pairs in place of the shield.  If the connection is short enough the shield connection may not be vital.
Note: I have not tried this in practice, as I don't have anything that outputs AES/EBU balanced digital to my Adcom GDA-700.  By the way, the match is close, but not exact: CAT-5 is 100 ohm and AES/EBU is 110 ohm. Should be close enough.
 
One thing to note about the sound of the Adcom GDA-700 DAC is that the sound will probably be dominated by the PMD-100 digital filter and the Adcom op-amps (6AA = AD711) which have class-A biasing but may "smooth" the sound a bit.
 
 

 

[Sapientiam]

酸菜鱼！

 
Love that but didn't recognise it from the pic....

 

[immersifi]

Interesting stuff indeed. But I suspect you missed my points. Never mind.

My research field is social dynamics (group behavior within small and large contexts), I'm an ex-lecturer in social dynamics and discourse, am trained in statistics and psychometrics and act from time to time as a research consultant and statistician in both this and the medical field. So there is certainly overlap between my area and yours - although I certainly don't claim anything like your expertise with signal processing and sound measurement. The point though is that many of the measures I developed in the past were cognition and perception based., i.e. somewhat akin to the audiophile phenomenology. What others call "subjective" psychometricians will often go ahead and measure - with the usual requirements that they be repeatable, achieve adequate standards of reliability and achieve validity with respect to some well-founded and well-argued construct.

My comment that 'the audiophile experience' is not a hot research topic was meant seriously. There is no way I or anyone within my faculty could have hoped to attract funding for this kind of thing. Nor were my literature searches some years back particularly fruitful - although I could well have not used the right terms!

Yes, be wary of Amos (Currowong) - he's always watching

Social dynamics. Very interesting stuff (I say that in earnest). Good point about overlap - I can give you one such example, namely, when we do the listening trials, we try to visually isolate (if possible) the jurors' points of view. That is, just like back in grade school, we don't want people looking at their neighbor's keypad to see which key is being pressed. What I don't know about social dynamics though is a great deal. It's interesting how often such simple tests - and in paired comparison stuff we're asking jurors which they prefer, nothing more - how the juried study can impart anxiety in some subjects. We try never to call them "juried tests" because the second word can impart anxiety (we simply refer to them as "listening sessions", and anxiety (as I'm sure you know) can cloud one's ability to judge.
 
I'm not sure specifically which of your points that I missed, but I'll go back and re-read your posts; I hope that I didn't offend. My reply (ies) was (were) more than likely due to my focus and background, and I hope that I didn't come across as heavy handed or rude.
 
Mark

 

[immersifi]

   
Listening isn't as black and white as being either 'based solely on opinion' or 'based on rigorous methodology'. There is middle ground between those two poles - that's falsifiable descriptions of what we hear. Smell is equally a purely subjective perception but qualitative descriptions in that sensory domain have turned out to be useful to developers of scents. Luca Turin has done some excellent work there and you can read about that in his and Chandler Burr's books.

Thanks for this. I was not acquainted with Turin's work until now. Interestingly, a lot of the methodology that is employed in SD (semantic differential) and PC (paired comparison) testing comes from the food industry (the Bradley-Terry model has some of its roots there if I am not mistaken), so there's some similarity (or at least there appears to be) in that all of this is concerned with sensory evaluation, and the extension of methodologies in one field to another.
 
I'll have to check into the books by Burr et al.
 
Thanks,
 
Mark

 

[coli]

But I didn't take a blind taste test when I preferred suan cai yue near the park at Dinghuaimen in Nanjing to the suan cai yue in central Nanjing. Thus, even though I knew to go to Dinghuaimen, my subjective memory interferes, prompting me to suspend judgment to take objective taste tests (lol sarcasm).

Obviously your taste is wrong!
 
And I'm sure an objective test would prove the two restaurants are indistinguishable.