opaqueice;183063 Wrote: > I'm waiting for GaryB to clarify what he wants tested. Is it two > identical CDs, one treated and one not, through a CD player? Or two > files over SB, one ripped from a treated CD and one not? Or is it just > to see if the treatment helps with read errors while ripping?
My original request was to copy a CD to one's hard drive and then treat the same CD and make a second copy and then compare the different copies through the SB3. By compare I meant do a listening test. Since that request, there have been some interesting additions to the discussion that raise a lot of new questions we could try to address. Going to the Stereophile article referenced earlier in this thread: http://www.stereophile.com/reference/590jitter/ One finds the following quote: > There are two general misconceptions about CD errors and sound quality: > 1) errors are the primary source of sonic degradation; and 2) if there > are no uncorrectable errors, there can be no difference in sound. > And the article then goes on to show that both tweaked CDs and untweaked CDs had no uncorrectable errors, yet there were clearly audible differences. And the plausible suggestion is made that its not just the integrity of the data but also timing information that may matter and that jitter in the datastream might be affected and perhaps that affects the sound. Our own jhm731 then weighs in with the results from some experiments and reports: jhm731;183028 Wrote: > For the record, I can't hear(via a SB3)any difference between files > ripped from CDs which were Nespa'd, but CDs and CDRs, which have been > Nespa treated and played back via a transport/DVDP have the > improvements discussed in the sixmoon review. > > I will also add, these treated CD/CDR played back via any of my > transports/DVDPs sound much better than my SB3 feeding exactly the same > DAC. So this is interesting in a couple of respects. 1)Jhm731 finds the sound of his treated CDs played on a transport/dac sound better than the SB3 feeding the same dac. 2)The differences between treated and untreated CDs aren't apparent through the hard drive / SB3 playback system. Now one could make a couple of assumptions here. One could assume that all this discussion about differences between the sound of treated CDs vs. untreated CDs or CDs played by a transport vs. through the SB3 is hogwash and people are deluding themselves. It could just be the placebo effect. I personally don't believe this. I've been involved in single blind tests where I've clearly heard effects between treated and untreated CDs and the effect was not subtle. Or one could accept that these differences do exist and try to understand what's going on. I find it very telling that jhm721 found the differences to disappear once copied to a hard drive. Somehow the timing / jitter issues of the originals are getting replaced by the timing / jitter issues of the hard drive system and in a consistent manner when copied. It would be interesting to me if others would try the same thing and report if they hear differences between treated and untreated CDs and if those differences disappear on the hard drive copies. It's also interesting to speculate on why the SB3 sound is worse than the transport sound but perhaps that's a discussoin for another day. ---Gary -- GaryB ------------------------------------------------------------------------ GaryB's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3169 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=32993 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
