SoftwireEngineer wrote: > Ralph, I think you agree you have to pay a bit more to get some quality > equipment and sound. So how is this equipment different from the > 'consumer' range ? There is some engineering differences, right ? What > are they ? Does a Behringer sound as good as a Lavry DAC ? Is it power > supply, is it the output stage, is it DAC chip, is it the jitter > reducing receiver before the DAC chip ? > I think audio quality is not a open-shut case. It is a complex system of > various engineering approaches to achieving high-fidelity (meaning loyal > to the original) sound. Lower priced equipment make > 'approximations'..higher priced equipment take it to the theorertical > limits. Probably, these high-end companies take the circuit design to > the limits even though after some point the audible benefits are beyond > human perception. But this 'perception' thing is relative, what is not > good to you, maybe is good enough for some. What is good to you maybe is > not good enough for others. You can always say it is the placebo effect, > snobbishness etc. We cannot make DBT a law .. so the unscrupulous of the > engineers survive on the fringes of 'over-speced' equipment or as Mynb > says, even on 'invented' specs of their own.
Softwire you are starting to sound as if you drank some the Kool-Aid :) You are correct that audio quality is not an open-shut case but it's also not the night and day case that the audio rags would have us believe. However in the case of jitter there is quite clearly a case of the audio press selectively choosing when jitter is audible and when it's not. In order to pedal asynchronous USB DACs for aging audiophiles to use with their precious miniMacs jitter became this horrible beast to slayed at any cost. However when pedaling high end NOS DACs jitter is no longer important because the DAC is just so wonderful. Give me a break! Look I've stated my case many times on many other posts on this forum. I agree that is a place for envelope pushing state of the art designs and equipment that by its very nature costs a small fortune but that is quite different from refusing to use ANY objective testing standards in ANY of the reviews. All manufacturers are free to charge as much as they possibly can for their products because it's always caveat emptor as far as us poor consumers are concerned and again this is quite a different thing from having a entire industry of audio review magazines which serve the manufacturers (also know as advertisers) rather than the readership. Pushing $500 USB cables makes them CLOWNS. Ignoring the big bad jitter monster when it suits the proposes of the manufacturer makes them CLOWNS. Refusing to do the least bit of any kind of objective testing makes them CLOWNS. Now that being said does not absolve the manufacturers of their share of the blame. Just as there are more clownish members of the high end press (TAS are by far the master clowns) there are more dishonest manufacturers (with high end cable manufacturers leading the way). Charging $3,000 for a black metal speaker is dishonest no matter how you slice it. Charging $7,200 for a power cord or $13,100 for a one meter pair of interconnects (no that's not a mistake $13,100 is correct) as do Crystal Cable and then having that same over-priced piece of garbage named a Product of the Year, as is the case in the latest issue of TAS, only makes it case of CLOWNS squared. So I'm going to continue to calling out these CLOWNS as often as I like because the audio press is just not interested in honestly helping their readers. It's a dirty job but someone has to do it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ralphpnj's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10827 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=97950 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
