[miuywu]

I've been passively absorbing a good amount of music listening and hifi gear info for just over a few months through listening to youtube reviews in the background, discussions and reading reading reviews and comments on such.

Seems like some enthusiasts like to reference science to justify their experience, frequency graphs are the most common. Source and amp electrical measurements are not as common but talked about as well.

In contrast to this trend of using measurements and math to make the 'best' (at least optically) decision, the more experienced listeners will fallback to a word that means nothing to new people:

***Synergy***

The whole chain creates the sound. Makes sense, but the way the word synergy is used makes it a mystery on how to achieve it accurately without much experience.

It seems like the goal is to find a chain with your taste of:

• sound signature
• sound stage
• environment / airy-ness
• natural sounding - timbre
• resolution - microdetails / texture
• separation - no clue how this is quantified atm

From what I gather, these characteristics of sound are a result of distorting the original source, whether it's upon signal creation (DAC), amplification, or sound creation (monitors).

Because each of those steps are physically different, I am keen on why similar types of distortion can be achieved at all 3 stages. I want to know if there's a best use case for each component - and why? I'd love to see the math / science.

My guess for best cases are:
DAC creates the base, the map of a song...

• resolution, timbre, separation, environment

AMP adds topology to the map, a scaling up the previous characteristics to get...

• sound stage, sound signature

Monitors creates sound from the 3d map, letting it modify both of the previous aspects but most important are..

• timbre - you don't want a nice signal but unrealistic / unpleasant sound creation from it
• sound signature - taste
• resolution - you don't want to bottleneck your chain with slow drivers ( or maybe you do )

Then there's jitter and noise.
Maybe this is all different for speakers. My only hifi experience is with IEMs and headphones as of now. For example, decent sound stage for speakers can be too small sounding on headphones.

 

[someguyontheinternet]

My personal opinion:
Everything in the chain should do it's best to alter the original signal as little as possible. Additional distortion or shaping of the frequency response should happen in a way that can be influenced by the user (via DSP).

If a recording that is accurately reproduced doesn't sound natural/to my preference I would like to know and be able to apply a fix for the specific recording. If a component of my chain alters all recordings, I don't have that option. That's the biggest issue I see with static distortion components. It can fix some recordings to sound more realistic, but it will impart that distortion whether the recording needs it or not.

 

[GREQ]

I think you might be making some 'imaginative' guesses based on what you've read online.

The reality is that amps, DACs and cables add very little if nothing to the sound.
• The most important 2 things are the source material - and I don't mean FLAC vs MP3 - I mean GOOD recordings.
• And the headphone which is the significant 'interface' between the source and your ears that dictates the quality of those colourful adjectives.
Everything else is secondary and make up a small fraction of the 'pie'.

 

[miuywu]

I think you might be making some 'imaginative' guesses based on what you've read online.

The reality is that amps, DACs and cables add very little if nothing to the sound.
• The most important 2 things are the source material - and I don't mean FLAC vs MP3 - I mean GOOD recordings.
• And the headphone which is the significant 'interface' between the source and your ears that dictates the quality of those colourful adjectives.
Everything else is secondary and make up a small fraction of the 'pie'.

Monitors for sure are the most impactful as they are the last step between the chain and your ears. In a lesser degree but not insignificantly, amp quality can bottleneck and lesser so again, dacs can bottleneck. Those limits appear as reduced resolution, stage, etc. - you think they don't matter noticeably?

So when making a comparison between lower quality components and higher quality (whatever that entails), the dac amp and monitors are just trying to reproduce the music as it was recorded. The differences in components are not distortion of the source, but rather the level of "accuracy" that they can turn the data back into the recorded music?

In use, instead of a chain adding staging to a music, the chain can only reveal / reproduce the amount of stage that already existed in the sound that was recorded.

My thought is now that the perfect reproduction approach for components may be increasingly applicable to the high end chains.
The lower end chains limited by lower quality builds which lead to less stage, resolution and etc may rely on distortion to make up for their reproduction inadequacies.

Examples would be observed sharpness or harshness vs detail and overbearing bass vs impactful bass with texture, in both cases the lesser may be enough to elevate a system if the monitor quality isn't above that of the dac and amp.

 

[GREQ]

Monitors for sure are the most impactful as they are the last step between the chain and your ears. In a lesser degree but not insignificantly, amp quality can bottleneck and lesser so again, dacs can bottleneck. Those limits appear as reduced resolution, stage, etc. - you think they don't matter noticeably?

So when making a comparison between lower quality components and higher quality (whatever that entails), the dac amp and monitors are just trying to reproduce the music as it was recorded. The differences in components are not distortion of the source, but rather the level of "accuracy" that they can turn the data back into the recorded music?

In use, instead of a chain adding staging to a music, the chain can only reveal / reproduce the amount of stage that already existed in the sound that was recorded.

My thought is now that the perfect reproduction approach for components may be increasingly applicable to the high end chains.
The lower end chains limited by lower quality builds which lead to less stage, resolution and etc may rely on distortion to make up for their reproduction inadequacies.

Examples would be observed sharpness or harshness vs detail and overbearing bass vs impactful bass with texture, in both cases the lesser may be enough to elevate a system if the monitor quality isn't above that of the dac and amp.

It's 2022.
High end source parts are cheaper than they've ever been, and what is considered low-end now was high-end/flaghip tier 20 years ago, particularly when considering DAC chips.

There's really not much point worrying too much about it if you ask me.
It's not as if people can actually hear the difference between 0.001% and 0.010% distortion on any system anyway.

 

[miuywu]

It's 2022.
High end source parts are cheaper than they've ever been, and what is considered low-end now was high-end/flaghip tier 20 years ago, particularly when considering DAC chips.

There's really not much point worrying too much about it if you ask me.
It's not as if people can actually hear the difference between 0.001% and 0.010% distortion on any system anyway.

Thanks for having this discussion with me!

What's your starting price range for high end sources / amps? Not that it's impossible to find unicorn products that are seemingly under priced for their value.

From my experience so far the sweet spot right now is about $1200 to $1600 for a stack / desktop unit that gets you about 80-85% of the maximum experience you can get with headphones. Beyond then seemingly the price skyrockets with benefits but small and only for those maximizing every single part of their chain.

i started with the modi 3+ magni stack and after trying the smsl m400 + a90 I definitely observe a difference. I still have the modi magni stack as they wouldn't sell for much anyway. I still notice the difference switching back and forth today. I can't chalk it up to imagination as actually I noticed less difference when first a/b-ing but as I got used to the stacks I now can notice more nuanced differences in songs. I'm not really using anything special for files.

It's mostly song dependent but I can tell when something is holding back the song, whether it's the compressed mp3, or the resolution of the modi magni, or the slightly less warm m400 + a90.

 

[tomb]

I respectfully disagree with some of what's been said here, except for this statement:
It's not as if people can actually hear the difference between 0.001% and 0.010% distortion on any system anyway.

That is true, but make it the difference between 1.0% and 0.1%, then yes - people can tell the difference. The fact is, that everything in the OP's post makes a difference, but the key is in the magnitude of difference. It's relatively easy for an amplifier or DAC to achieve 0.01% distortion or even less, but it's very difficult for a headphone to achieve less than 1%, for a speaker - even more difficult. It's very difficult for pure tube amplifiers to achieve distortion levels of even 0.1%, yet there are multitudes of listeners who prefer tubes over solid-state. The level of distortion we can tolerate depends on a lot of factors, including the type of equipment.

FLAC files are definitely better than mp3 - one uses compression with no loss, the other loses some of the music. Of course, great recordings sound better than bad ones, but assuming the same quality recording, FLAC will be better than mp3. Whether you can hear that difference, again depends on a lot of things, especially the quality of the equipment and the experience of your own ears. With little experience in listening or listening to the wrong things - you may not hear these differences.

As for this word: "synergy," it simply means the weakness of one component is matched up with another component that has a strength with that same weakness. Finding those combinations are the subject of endless debates, so are measurements, and objective/subjective opinions.

Noise, Dynamic Range, Distortion, Frequency Response, Power, Output Impedance, etc. All of these can be used to judge the component for yourself prior to listening, but nothing replaces your ears. That is the goal after all, isn't it - what your ears hear? The attempts at lowering those things that are bad and increasing those things that are good are generally a good indication that a component will sound good to your ears, but not always. Combined components with the same weaknesses will magnify those weaknesses as opposed to those with "synergy."

Anyway - this is something the OP should've posted in the Sound Science forum section, but it looks like his/her post count is much too small to do that yet.