Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] FUD, intellectual honesty, digital facts, and the TAS articles...
Soulkeeper;693578 Wrote: No. But I am saying that if you have two bit-identical files, it is impossible for the history of the content of these files to cause them to be play differently on any computer. And therefore absolutely no effort needs to be wasted to refute such a claim, and those making the claim are fools. Note that I said -the history of the content-. If one file is stored on an SSD disk and the other on a 5,25 floppy, that may affect the performance of the computer at playback, and thus affect the sound. But that wasn't at all what I said. Phil Leigh;693583 Wrote: Indeed - because if that were true, computers simply WOULD NOT WORK AT ALL. What the TAS idiots seem to be unable to grasp (unlike any 6 year old) is that raw data is... JUST RAW DATA! It doesn't have a history or heritage embedded within it, or a soul or any form of high conscience. It's just NUMBERS!. I don't understand history of the content. By that you mean which one came first, etc.? So let's be more precise and say we have two bit-identical audio/video files stored within the same physical filesystem (i.e., same partition) on some type of storage device on a computer. You really want to claim that it is absolutely impossible for there to be any differences between the two files that could lead to playback differences on that computer? Really?? I would suggest that you might want to think a bit harder, or perhaps study how large files actually get stored in filesystems. Hint: ever had to defragment a filesystem? Even if two files are bit-identical, they may not be stored in exactly the same way in the filesystem. One may be nearly contiguous, while the other may be scattered among a set of relatively small blocks. Certainly it would be possible to store a sequence of copies of a file in a filesystem so that the successive copies are increasingly fragmented, and this fragmentation could potentially cause increasing playback problems in the copies based on their generation. I myself have absolutely encountered situations where some multimedia files played fine while others--created later--did not, precisely because the filesystem (NTFS) was becoming increasingly fragmented. Defragmenting the filesystem fixed the problems (though the machine was unusable for a couple of hours!). While I too doubt TAS' claims--and the mere fact of some files being copies of others is irrelevant--it is definitely NOT IMPOSSIBLE that one might experience increasing playback issues with successive copies made on a fragmented filesystem. While I think it UNLIKELY that the scenario I laid out is what happened to TAS, rebutting their claims was worthy of a bit more than simply sniggering at their stupidity and calling them names. -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=93549 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] FUD, intellectual honesty, digital facts, and the TAS articles...
Phil Leigh;693431 Wrote: Perhaps I can interest you all in my sorbothane mouse mat? Except that the performance of (computer) mice can be affected by various characteristics of the surface they are used on. I could imagine that a Sorbothane mouse pad might in fact be excellent for some mechanical mice. The university where I teach installed podiums with the computer projection systems that have a black surface that causes most optical mice to behave extremely erratically. Of course you objectivists can feel free to brand me as a flake since I haven't confirmed my observations with double-blind testing or some kind of measuring equipment--it just seems obvious: I move the mouse and the cursor on screen doesn't move. But maybe this is just all in my head, due to my expectations that the podiums surfaces aren't any good. :) -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=93549 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] FUD, intellectual honesty, digital facts, and the TAS articles...
Soulkeeper;693482 Wrote: No, because what you say isn't impossible. Unlike the claims made about bit-perfect file copies sounding worse than the original. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The audiofool claims are extraordinary and without evidence. Of course my post was mainly in jest--perhaps you missed the smiley? I thought a sorbothane mouse pad a poor choice to poke fun at audio tweeks, since it might actually perform very well for mechanical mice, and pads/surfaces can absolutely affect performance of mice. Just to clarify, are you saying that it is so clearly impossible for two bit-identical copies of an audio/video file stored on a computer to play differently on that computer, that absolutely no effort needs to be wasted to refute such a claim, and those making the claim are fools? -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=93549 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Can old speakers be repaired?
On older speakers that use foam surrounds, the foam eventually deteriorates. Look at whether the surrounds (just outside of the cones) are foam or rubber. If foam and falling apart, you can buy replacements from various sources online (come with instructions plus glue). -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=91818 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] New Squeezebox Touch Mod
cymbop;665297 Wrote: I'm also running a hardwired touch via coax into a W4S DAC-2. Can you share your experiences with different coax cables or point me to a link if you've reported on them already? I've only used my trusty Bluejeans coax, and am really curious about the differences you heard with other sorts. My experience has been that while many coax cables sound different, which sound better appears to be more a matter of matching the particular components than anything else (exactly what I believe John Swenson said in a thread I read recently). I have a bunch of coax cables, some purchased, some constructed by various people. They range in price from a couple of dollars to a couple hundred or so, and I have had most for 20 years. I have tried maybe ten cables between the Touch and W4S DAC. While many produce slightly different sound, determining which produces the best let alone the correct sound is a tough call. For now at least, I have decided that my ancient MIT coax (the one with the little interface box with dipswitches) probably sounds best overall, but a very close second is another similar age Radio Shack video cable with BNC connectors and adapters, which cost ~10 back then. My maybe third favorite coax is a $3 Radio Shack really crappy looking video cable. Clearly, I haven't seen any correlation at all with price. I have a Blue Jeans coax I bought several years ago, so don't know how similar it is to current models. While it has never sounded bad, it has never provided the best sound in the few systems I have tried it in. Interestingly, I bought a recent vintage MIT digital when they had them for half price a while back. At first I kind of liked its sound (though it sounded different from the 20 year old one), but I would keep thinking I heard weird instances of high frequency noise when using it, particularly when I was listening at very low volume levels--and this happened only with that cable. Very odd. Have never encountered anything like it before. Eventually that newest cable was consigned to the wasted purchase bin. That about sums up my experiences with coax cables between the Touch and W4S DAC. Tried a cheap Toslink briefly too. Not bad, but not as good as the best few coax connections. -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=89359 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] New Squeezebox Touch Mod
mjock3;661122 Wrote: Is there no one willing to give me a hand on this? Could it be my firmware updated? Is anyone using 7.6.1 r9486 and hearing changes on the fly with the spdif settings? Not sure what you mean by on the fly with the spdif settings. chrt immediately changes a process real-time scheduling type/priority when it is run, so the effect of each chrt command is absolutely on the fly. However, the rcs file is intended to be used as part of the boot process to set everything up as desired during bootup. Thus, there really is no on the fly associated with using the rcs file. You can easily check what a process rtpriority is currently set to using the chrt command or ps (see the commented ps command in the rcs file). -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=89359 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] New Squeezebox Touch Mod
Finally got around to trying this mod. Created scripts to set and reset all the relevant rtpriorities, then sat with a (Linux) laptop and toggled the settings back and forth as desired while listening. Results: nothing at all. Not even the slightest hint of a possibility of there being a difference in the sound. Tried some very extreme settings and still heard no differences (except for when some made the Touch unresponsive so it had to be power cycled). For reference, I am streaming flac files from the server (SBS) via ethernet (wired), with the Touch connected via coax into a Wyred 4 Sound DAC-1. By comparison, I have found that most every digital cable I have tried between the Touch and DAC-1 affects the sound slightly (ah, but which one is correct??). Running top shows the Touch cpu is generally 75-80% idle while playing flac files, so I am not surprised that changing process priorities had no effect. -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=89359 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Digital vs. Analog (again)
I was just reading a NYTimes article about manual coffee makers, and how some people get pleasure from spending several minutes hand pouring water into their coffee making devices. I believe LPs can produce similar feelings in many people (aligning cartridges, handling the LPs, cleaning them, building up expectations about eventual sound, etc.). I would rather get my pleasure from actually drinking a good cup of coffee--and from actually listening to music. I am also quite sensitive to noise compared to most people I meet, so LPs have always been a problem for me. Yes, clean LPs played on high end equipment can have much less apparent levels of surface noise than cheap equipment, but they never have none. For me, this noise virtually always intrudes on the illusion of hearing real instruments. I have infuriated a number of analog fanatics by complaining about surface noise artifacts in their absolutely realistic sounding systems. -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=85590 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Digital vs. Analog (again)
RonM;610655 Wrote: What, there's a problem with that? I actually roast my own coffee beans. You sayin' that's like liking vinyl? Say it ain't so! Have you subjected your roasted beans to double blind taste tests to scientifically prove they taste better? If not, you are obviously just fooling yourself about their superiority! :) Along a similar vein...I got a charcoal grill against last summer after many years with gas only, and my wife and I were ecstatic about how much better burgers and steaks were on the charcoal grill...until I read that double blind taste tests have proven that for meats cooked for as short a time as those, people cannot actually distinguish gas vs. charcoal grilling! Really? Is that people with no sense of taste?? (Like those tin ears that can't hear differences in speaker cables?) I had gas-grilled burgers for the first time in several months recently because I didn't want to spend much time out in the cold, and I didn't finish mine because it was so tasteless, relative speaking. But of course this is all in my head--a double blind test has proven it!! Actually what it does is add more reasons for me to be skeptical about many double blind testing protocols and whether the results of such tests truly have any general applicability or not. -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=85590 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Quality of digital outs from the Squeezebox
Phil Leigh;607905 Wrote: If you are using an external DAC, the only cast-iron way to remove jitter is to use the DAC clock to drive the transport. This usually requires mods to both the SB and DAC. I still find that different coax cables can produce quite different sound from either my Touch or Receiver into either of the two DACs I own. Supposedly the Wyred 4 Sound DAC should be good at dealing with jitter of the level from the Touch (though of course cable impedance mismatch can also introduce issues). The problem for me is that while I find -differences- among some of the cables to be very obvious, which sound is more -correct-? I found it very difficult to locate descriptions of what lack of jitter should sound like. Frankly the best was a posting I came across elsewhere by John Swenson (http://www.audioasylum.com/cgi/t.mpl?f=pcaudiom=26508). Interestingly, the same two cables produce more of the sound characteristics John attributes to low jitter with both the Touch and Receiver into both DACs. One is an audiophile digital cable that is no longer made, while the other is a quite cheap Radio Shack one. I have a Blue Jeans cable from several years ago, but have never found it to produce terribly good results. On the other hand, I purchased the current top digital cable from the audiophile company when they were on sale, and it produces very strange results; nothing at all like the 15 year old version. -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=84903 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] DAC Resolution Test and Don't EVER use Digital Volume Control
Daverz;594719 Wrote: I've had a chance to use the Touch's digital volume control with a variety of equipment over the last several months. ... In my opinion, the digital volume control is as transparent, if not more so, than my pre-amp volume control (a BAT 3ix tube pre-amp). Frankly, I find the statement that opened this thread to be absolute nonsense. I don't know where the don't use more than 10 dB of attenuation idea mentioned by some comes from, either. I assume the PIOOYA method. You don't say how you used it, but I can tell you that setting the Touch's digital volume to like 30-40 to get quiet music leads to something that sounds only slightly like the original, while leaving it at 100 and setting the analog volume controls on my preamps way down does nothing of the sort. So, frankly, I find your absolutist statement to be just as much nonsense as the statement you are objecting to. -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=77725 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Boom headphone out quality?
Thanks for replies. I understand that Boom would not be audiophile quality sound. Not looking for that while I cycle. Just looking for something a bit better than the iPod. Also want something fairly portable and compact, so do not want to deal with the mess of a Touch plus a headphone amp, etc. Continuing the off topic: 4000mi of riding outside is definitely quite a bit of cycling. I did only a bit over 1600mi this year due to limited time. Used to do more like 2500-3000mi. Surprised to hear about using a rowing machine during winter. I have an old bike on a trainer. Is the rower more fun, or why not cycling inside? -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=83067 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Boom headphone out quality?
tomjtx;587206 Wrote: To put together a great portable headphone (in ear monitor) system check out head-fi.org ... I have a 160gig Ipod Classic with all files in lossless format. If your mp3s are only 128 that could be one factor. I can hear differences blind consistently at 128. 256VBR becomes MUCH harder to identify and that's what I use on my Iphone and Ipod touch. ... I think the earphones are the most important part of the chain. Buy the best IEMs at your preferred price point and try out 3 different file sizes of the same music: 128, 256vbr and lossless. See if you hear a difference and go from there. ... Will check out the site. Should have stated that all MP3s are are 320k. Did tests with WAV files and even with expensive headphones could not hear a difference with iPod output. I also have some quite good sets of headphones, both IEM and circumaural. The issue is really the iPod amp quality. -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=83067 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Boom headphone out quality?
maggior;587241 Wrote: I'm a little confused about your setup - you mention your high end system and you talk about listening while exercising. Are you looking to connect a boom to your high end system and listen over speakers? Are you looking to connect a pair of headphones directly to the boom? Guess I thought it was clear since I said I started using iPod for exercising. The bike setup is not in the listening room, and bike trainers are somewhat noisy, so want to wear sealing headphones (IEMs). Choice here is whether to continue using iPod for music source while cycling or buy a Boom to use. The Boom has the added benefit of being able to use my FLAC files directly plus Internet radio. -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=83067 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Boom headphone out quality?
ralphpnj;587325 Wrote: I can't comment on the Boom headphone out however I do have one question for you: Don't you find that doing moderate to heavy exercise while wearing headphones or iems to be rather uncomfortable? Assuming that you already own a Boom, why not just give the headphone out a listen? Obviously if I already had a Boom, I would just listen. I do not own one. Actually I find that the right music makes it much easier to cycle hard while indoors. I used to watch TV but found I ended up just piddling along instead of really pushing. Also, I find the noise from bike trainers to be very annoying, so I want IEMs that seal out most of that noise (and the music covers up the rest). -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=83067 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Boom headphone out quality?
After resurrecting my high end system and listening to that for a number of weeks, going back to using my iPod while cycling inside was quite a shocker (in a bad way). Was curious how good Boom sound through headphone jack is, as that would actually be even more convenient (wouldn't have to convert files to MP3). Anyone who cares about sound and has listened to Boom headphone out care to comment? Thanks! -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=83067 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Most bang for buck? Add DAC to SB or buy Touch?
SuperQ;583497 Wrote: Use a white or pink noise track. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_noise I would just figure out a good calibration volume at the source. Use the digital volume control of the squeezebox. This way it's easy to write down the calibration levels of various DACs. Example: Set the squeezebox volume to 90. Measure final stage output voltage ... I think you are proposing using the Touch's digital volume control to equalize outputs, but I would prefer to avoid that since this is supposed to be for a test of sound quality so I really don't want the Touch modifying the source. However, this gives me an idea: since sound quality doesn't matter for the calibration, I can avoid high level noise from the speakers while still using a suitably high preamp volume setting by simply turning the Touch volume down quite low for the calibration. Assuming the Touch analog and digital out volumes track each other precisely, I could calibrate with noise at like 20 but then listen to music at 100, with the same preamp volume settings. That should work great to avoid cat distress. Thanks! (If this is what you actually meant, then sorry I did not understand it as such.) -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=82067 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Most bang for buck? Add DAC to SB or buy Touch?
SuperQ;582703 Wrote: As other people have pointed out here, level matching is still very important here. Both DACs will have different gain levels on their line-out stages. Having a voltmeter or SPL meter attached while playing some white noise should let you get things calibrated. (measure at your speaker terminals, this should give you the final gain for both sources) Sorry but I pointed out in a different post how I avoided having to do exact level matching last night due to not want to freak my cats out with white noise! I simply alternated making each source sound just slightly louder than the other. In the past I have found this a quite reliable substitute for level matching when in a hurry, as it makes obvious how slight volume changes alter perceived tonal characteristics. Here, that caused whichever one sounded best to always be the louder one, indicating they are very close in sound. Furthermore, I do not hear any obvious tonal or other differences. Only if I were interested in trying to make a definitive determination would I bother with level matching, and that was not my intention last night. So thank you for your concern, but I know very well how to avoid being fooled by simple level differences. -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=82067 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Most bang for buck? Add DAC to SB or buy Touch?
SuperQ;582881 Wrote: Whups, sorry I missed it. The method I was suggesting for calibration would allow you to do the white-noise test at a lower volume (because you measure post-amplification) and then you know what gain diff between your sources is. With the voltmeter method you can do the calibration without any speakers attached. Just measure the open circuit voltage on your amp (harmless). But I need to figure out precisely where to set the volume control on the preamp for each source, at my desired listening volume, and since I want to listen fairly loudly I don't see how I would avoid having the volume up pretty high at the speakers. I use tests discs for noise source, but I don't think I have a pink noise track at a really, really low level. So, I don't see how measuring at the speakers avoids freaking the cats out. Is there something I am missing? It is immediately obvious that the DAC has quite a bit a higher output than the Touch. Actually I wanted to not have to swap cables last night so I was running DAC into preamp balanced but Touch obviously single ended so very large volume difference between the two. Luckily my Krell preamp has gain switch that changes by 6dB to offset balanced vs not, so I was hoping for a close match using just that, but no such luck. -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=82067 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Most bang for buck? Add DAC to SB or buy Touch?
Mnyb;582892 Wrote: Or spl meter measuring the actual output in the room. Hey, yeah, I have a meter somewhere. Have never used it since we moved here. Wonder where that thing might be? Never found it nearly as easy/reliable as making voltage measurements, though. -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=82067 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Most bang for buck? Add DAC to SB or buy Touch?
opaqueice;582254 Wrote: By the way, you didn't answer this question. Would you mind doing so? Depended on the types of tests that we were doing, but sometimes yes. I find this important only in doing immediate back and forth comparisons, however, which was not always what we were doing. We sometimes did tests where we just sat down and listened to an unknown cable/whatever and tried to determine what is was based on our previous characterizations of its sound. Level matching is totally irrelevant here, since we never had the volume exactly the same twice, basically. -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=82067 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Most bang for buck? Add DAC to SB or buy Touch?
I agree this is getting pointless, as no actual concrete evidence is forthcoming, but I don't want to make it appear I was intentionally misrepresenting what opaqueice said: opaqueice;582251 Wrote: So I am not going to just take your word for it that there have been numerous tests that scientifically prove what you claim. Conventionally, putting marks around something indicates you're quoting a passage. Can you please point out precisely where I said there had been numerous tests that scientifically prove something? And if you can't, please don't fabricate quotes that I didn't say. OK? Sorry, I did not mean those quotes to apply directly to you, and I should have made it clear that I meant them as generic statements that I read all the time on this list. I truly apologize for any confusion. However, I did think that accurately represented your point of view given these definite direct quotes from you in this thread: opaqueice;582211 Wrote: Well, to my knowledge no one has ever succeeded in hearing differences between cables in a controlled level-matched blind test. Thus leading me to expect that you actually knew of several such tests that had been conducted, i.e., numerous tests. opaqueice;581949 Wrote: ...I'm a professional physicistI concluded that audibility more or less conforms to what common sense and science says it ought to Hence the scientifically prove statement as I thought you were claiming scientific validity for your point of view. BTW, I did not get this: opaqueice;582251 Wrote: Bingo - that's exactly the straw man. Thanks for a good example. You sound like you are being sarcastic here. You did see the smiley, didn't you? That means my statement was meant as a joke. Or is it that pesky unreliable human perception thing? Again, a JOKE! -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=82067 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Most bang for buck? Add DAC to SB or buy Touch?
MBlue72;582396 Wrote: ... and all I asked was whether next to buy a Touch or a DAC. Dave PS ... I'm leaning toward the DAC. I am close to being motivated enough to actually go to the trouble of listening to the analog output of my Touch vs. through the DAC I have in this system, which is a Wyred 4 Sound DAC-1: http://www.wyred4sound.com/webapps/site/74030/117839/shopping/shopping-plusB.html?find_groupid=18157 Would that help you? Not sure it really would since the DAC-1 isn't what you were talking about and cost quite a bit more than the Touch. If you are interested then I will try to take a listen tomorrow. (Hey I realized that I could even use the same cables since the DAC-1 has both balanced and single ended outputs. We all know how important it will be to remove the cable factor. :) ) -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=82067 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Most bang for buck? Add DAC to SB or buy Touch?
opaqueice;581950 Wrote: Would you mind giving some specific examples? Unfortunately this was 20 years ago, so a bit hard to recall exactly what we were testing. But certainly much of our time was directed at cables, and all three of us decided cables could sound different. We did both blind testing (e.g., with another person changing cables) as well as independent listening where multiple people would write down their impressions of the differences (if any) two cables made in their systems, for later comparison. Did a lot of reading of the psychoacoustic literature, plus all three of us were trained scientists, naturally skeptical and also very methodical. The typical description I hear of an audiophile testing a cable always goes something like this: I rushed home with the Wondersound 6000 that just got the rave review from TAS, popped it in my system, and wow, yeah, a thousand veils were instantly lifted, so I bought it. Hah! Nothing could be further from the methods we used in our subjective listening tests. It is easy to change something and think the system sounds different the first time you listen. Now try going back and forth 30 times (or more). Hear the exact same difference every time? Often you will realize that what you first thought you heard you actually do not reliably hear. The only way I would consider deciding two cables sound different is if I can find a couple of passages in particular recordings where I can repeatedly hear a particular difference (e.g., more room echo, longer cymbal decay, sense of depth to some instrument). And by repeatedly, I mean over and over and over again, for a number of days. Of course you also need to be careful to avoid well known issues with human hearing. For example, if you are listening to something loud, stop for a minute to change a cable, then start the loud music right back up, the new source will inherently sound fuller because your hearing has adjusted back to the silence (I think this is called a threshold effect in psychoacoustics--it has been along time). Of course switching back and forth repeatedly equalizes this factor. Recently I resurrected my high end system that had been sitting unused for a good long while. One of the things I have been playing with is cables, which I have not done for a very long time. Do some sound different to me? Absolutely. Do all? No. Of course I have not done blind tests, but I have been able to repeatedly correctly identify which of two particular cables was in the system after not doing any listening for a day or two (I been changing them back and forth, so often do not remember which was left in--at least consciously :) ). Now of course you guys will chant your usual bias, bias, bias mantra, but what is my bias here? I own all of the cables already, and have owned most of them for 15 years. None of them were particularly different in price, nor have I ever seen any reviews of any of them. So exactly which one am I biased to pick? And of course just because I think they sound different, does not mean I think one sounds better. In fact, I like some sonic aspects of one and some of the other. One is clearly just slightly brighter, making the system sound incredibly detailed (you can hear every little pluck of a string, etc.), while the other has more beautiful sounding midrange (so female vocals are gorgeous). It may be all in my mind, but I keep hearing the same specific sonic differences over and over for the last two weeks. Unfortunately for me, on certain tracks one sounds better since it enhances that track, while on others track the other sounds better. So I ask again, how does bias explain this? My bias should be to have one sound definitely better than the other, since I am stuck with these two as my only choices (rural location now makes it impossible to borrow cables for listening). No, the bias argument is highly exaggerated IMNSHO. -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=82067 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Most bang for buck? Add DAC to SB or buy Touch?
opaqueice;582211 Wrote: Well, to my knowledge no one has ever succeeded in hearing differences between cables in a controlled level-matched blind test. Well I would be very interested to see citations for a set of serious tests that have been done with cables so that I could evaluate their validity. Years ago I read all of the original David Clark and associates ABX papers in JAES and such, and every single one of those tests had rather serious methodological problems that drastically limit what one can infer from any negative results. So I not going to just take your word for it that there have been numerous tests that scientifically prove what you claim. This is all I ever hear on here (that there are lots and lots of such tests); I never see even a SINGLE ONE ever cited. If there are so many that support your position on this that you feel this is a scientifically proven fact then you ought to be able to provide me with a list of half a dozen or so of such tests, with detailed descriptions of the protocols available, and I would of course expect that some would have been published in appropriate peer reviewed journals. I would be particularly interested to see reports of tests where an effort was made to establish the resolution of the test setup (using previously established limits of human auditory perception). Otherwise, negative results from the test are quite meaningless in a scientific sense. opaqueice;582211 Wrote: I think that's a strawmanAll we really know (from generations of experiments in cognitive psychology) is that biases, expectations, mood, hormones, what you ate for breakfast, etc. all have a very, very strong and almost completely unpredictable effect on perception and cognition. What the effect is, or even what direction it will go - psychology is miles away from being able to predict things like that. Glad to hear you think bias explains it all is a strawman. Seems like I already saw that point of view earlier in this very thread, however. Obviously I like my yellow jacketed cable today because it is a sunny day. :) Actually your statements make me feel amazed that fields like psychology can continue to exist when they have until very recently relied almost exclusively on human observation (i.e., almost completely unpredictable human perception) to gain knowledge. What completely unscientific quackery. Oh wait, though, you are using psychological experiments, where results were judged and interpreted by humans, to argue that human perceptions are completely and utterly unreliable. Hmm. Me senses a bit of a paradox here! :) -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=82067 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Most bang for buck? Add DAC to SB or buy Touch?
opaqueice;581914 Wrote: I've tried that myself at home some years ago, where my girlfriend randomly chose between two components (DACs in that case) every day by flipping a coin, and I tried to tell the difference. I couldn't :). And this is supposed to be meaningful to anyone else why exactly? You have a clear bias against hearing differences, and then you report that is indeed what you heard (or did not hear). What a shock. What's that favorite anti-audiophile refrain. Oh, yeah, bias explains all your results. Since you obviously made no effort to establish the resolution of your test setup, your negative result has virtually no value. If we are going to engage in proof by anecdote (which is all I see you anti-audiophiles doing in this thread) then here is mine: When I first got into audiophile equipment, I knew two PhD research scientists besides myself that also were audiophiles. We performed many (single) blind listening tests on various electronics, cables, and DACs. There were many occasions when we established to our satisfaction that differences were audible with particular components. Always? No, but certainly nowhere close to never. Were these tests done well enough to be published? No, since this was just a hobby to us and doing that requires a vast amount of time plus additional equipment that we did not have. However, the testing was done by three scientists with training in experiment design, who had done extensive reading in psychoacoustics. So sorry, but my anecdotal evidence trumps yours IMNSHO. :) -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=82067 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Most bang for buck? Add DAC to SB or buy Touch?
firedog;579337 Wrote: I like the 24/96 A Love Supreme better and the 24/96 Kinks Preservation Act II better that 16/44.1 versions. I have other examples, but you claimed no one liked the 24/96 bit versions better. So there are two. Well I just asked for some specific examples where people had compared a CD-quality and hi-res version of the same exact source and could hear a difference. Got lots of examples of hi-res tracks people liked, but not of such comparisons. I was interested in saving myself some time selecting material to see if a difference was audible to me on my system. Clearly, though, examples are relevant only if the exact same master was used and simply encoded differently. If the masters are different, the comparison is meaningless because I have quite a few CDs from different master that can sound extremely different. Where did you purchase the different versions of the two examples you cited in what I quoted? So far I haven't done any terribly serious listening tests, and my system has undergone a number of changes over the last month, so I still don't feel familiar enough with its sound to engage in reliable tests yet. I did decide that people's suggestions to use SOX to downsample 24/96 material is probably a good one to isolate the encoding as the sole source of the any audible differences. Will try to get around to that soon, after looking for best parameters to use. -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=82067 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Most bang for buck? Add DAC to SB or buy Touch?
MBlue72;577430 Wrote: 5)#8230; I am now considering an additional outlay (Touch or DAC) for two reasons. First, I have read more and more about improved sound quality via ever-improving digital-to-analog conversion technology. Second, I have noticed something odd recently. During the last few years I have become more and more interested (and appreciative of) #8220;legacy#8221; recordings and artists from the 60s and 70s. Of course these recordings were originally analog and later converted to digital for releasing as CDs. Some have been re-mastered and re-released, some have not. I recently discovered that on these discs the A-B comparison on my system has been much more dramatic #8211; the music played through my Sony player sounds obviously better. If the sound quality improvement is so substantial using a twenty year old DAC chip, what miracles might be occur with the newest technologies? (BTW, I do not understand how a DAC can seem to dramatically improve the sound quality of some CDs, have minimal impact on others and none on still others.) DAC chip technology has definitely changed since 1990. However, as noted already, if a 1990 DAC properly converted 44/16 sampled material to analog, then there isn't much that new technology can do to improve on the resulting sound. Of course it used to be that there were 16 bit DAC chips that were not actually 16-bit linear so they didn't get the D-to-A conversion quite right, and I seem to recall some noise shaping issues with early 1-bit DAC chips. So the actual D-to-A conversion might be better these days. I frankly have not been motivated to do the work to compare the final result. My 15+ year old PS Audio Ultralink DAC unit still sounds excellent in a relatively high end system, but I needed a second DAC so I also own a new state-of-the-art unit. As for you noting that some recordings sound much better through the Sony than the SB3 and others do not...well that is just what you would expect from two components with different levels of resolution (to put it simply). I recently resurrected my high end system (expensive equipment just sitting around unused for years, yikes!). Some songs are just stunning in their realism now (I had actually kind of convinced myself that my other systems were not that bad--but they weren't that good either). However, then I went to listen to some other favorite music and it was very disappointing because it didn't sound any better than with the lower quality systems. Unfortunately that is the reality of recorded music: some recordings are excellent and some are not. If you are hearing this sort of difference between the Sony and SB then you definitely should upgrade the SB sound in some way. As for how to best upgrade the sound of the SB3 (external DAC vs. Touch), I am not sure. I have not done any listening tests with the Touch analog, having always used it with an external DAC for various reasons. Most people seem to think the Touch' analog section is much better than the Duet, but how much better? As I already said, the Duet Receiver analog vs. my 15 year old Ultralink was no contest in even an only entry level high end system. I am rather skeptical that a $300 Touch would sound as good as a well designed DAC unit, which would generally have put a lot more expense into the final analog section, but it is certainly possible it would be good enough for you. So the best option is clearly for you to try to get both and listen, but I can sympathize with how hard this is when you live in a fairly rural area (as I also do now). Yes, both have 30 day return policies, but I suspect (from personal experience) that AA is not going to just take the DAC back, they are going to try convince you to do more testing and keep it--returning online audio is not like returning something to Walmart. -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=82067 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Interesting post.
RonM;577322 Wrote: One of the great debating techniques is to set up a straw horse, easily dismantled, and then claim victory. But it's a cheap victory And another favored debating technique is to claim you never said something that you did. Ho, hum. Just the kind of response I expected. -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=81616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Most bang for buck? Add DAC to SB or buy Touch?
I don't have a SB 3 but I do have a Duet. The difference in sound quality between the Duet analog and an external DAC was not subtle, even in an only moderately good system (15+ year old entry-level high-end equipment) and using a 15 year old DAC (PS Audio Ultralink). The Duet analog is fine for a typical receiver-based mid-fi system, but not for even an entry-level high-end system. Now also have a Touch running into a new Wyred4sound DAC 1 in the much better system, but have not had the time nor motivation to do any comparative listening tests. If your main concern is sound quality, I would personally go for an external DAC. I personally don't know anything about the DAC Magic. I was pretty surprised at how good the 15 year old Ultralink still sounds. -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=82067 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Most bang for buck? Add DAC to SB or buy Touch?
Since one of the reasons I bought the Touch rather than another Duet was for the ability to play 96/24 tracks, let me just comment on this. I started another thread on here asking for specific tracks people had purchased that sounded better in 96/24 than 44/16. Nobody provided even a single such track. Got lots of suggestions about really good sounding hi-res tracks, but not a single person claimed to have done comparisons and been able to hear a difference between the two versions of the same track. I have purchased a few hi-res tracks now and have a couple both hi-res and CD quality. While the hi-res tracks sound very good, so do CD quality tracks from the same labels. When you add in the premium price labels are asking for the hi-res material, it is not at all clear to me that it is worth buying, and I would not now consider this an important reason for purchasing the Touch (even though it influenced me). -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=82067 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Interesting post.
possible listening environments, and so on; all very valid comments as the test was undoubtedly far too limited. However, the good-natured panel proceeded to give out their judgements, many of which proved to be incorrect - the Praill was mistaken for both the Strad and the Guarneri (Beare and Stern did the best with two out of four correct). So this is the particularly famous test? (In fact Science Daily, in the article linked from Wiki, refers to it as the most serious of all such tests!) Three subjects, given one chance to correctly identify four violins, under less than optimal and certainly not reproducible listening conditions. Wow, I guess that sure proves that no concert violinist can ever ID a particular violin. What an absolute joke! Of course it should be plainly obvious to anyone with half a brain that this test is far too limited to establish any result with any useful level of confidence. Yet this is a particularly famous and serious example of these kinds of tests? Yeah, boy, real science at its best. NOT! Of course it was never billed as a scientifically valid listening test. It is people like Dan that make that sort of totally bogus claim. Now Dan also claims that the results of these kind of tests is always at the level of pure chance. Is that true here? If I did my caluclations correctly, choosing totally randomly (unable to distinguish instruments at all), the probability of correctly identifying 2/4 violins is nearly 3/4. Yet here 2/3 of the judges correctly identified 2/4. So while the sample size is way too small to draw reliable conclusions, if anything it contradicts Dan's contention about chance. Now on to the next of the many, er, yes really only two tests. Wiki refers to it as the Biotech violin blind test. It was conducted just last year. Unfortunately, the descriptions of this testing are again rather sketchy, but it definitely did not involve famous concert violinists (it was held at a forestry conference). The one result that is clearly spelled out in all accounts is that in a blind test of five different violins (including one Strad), 90/180 listeners all rated the same violin as the best (it was not the Strad but a new instrument treated with wood fungus!). Now hopefully the Wiki article was written/edited by multiple people because this description of 90/180 people selecting the same 1/5 violin comes almost immediately after the above sentence claiming that the many blind tests...have never found any difference in sound between Stradivari's violins and high-quality violins. A bunch of us had quite a good laugh at that contradiction. Never found any difference in sound, yet 90/180 selected 1/5 violins. Right! Sorry again, Dan, not even close to always at the level of pure chance. The other problem with the fungus violin test is that it was not a test to try to see if listeners could DISTINGUISH different violins, it was designed to determine which violin's sound was PREFERRED. In fact, that is what virtually all of tests that I was able to find described on the web involved (I was able to find descriptions of only about three other tests). I would have no problem if Dan had claimed that people didn't always PREFER Strads under blind conditions, but that is not the claim he made. He claimed they could not distinguish (tell the difference) them under blind conditions. So that is a quick summary of what I found when actually bothering to look into the subject of violin listening tests instead of just taking Dan's word. Until somebody can present some significant additional evidence about other tests, I will consider Dan's claims about violin testing extremely misleading and inaccurate. -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=81616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Interesting post.
Nonreality;575906 Wrote: Really now, I feel bad that I hit such a cord of hurt in you. You are ... You do not know anything at all about me, and from the above statements you obviously still do not understand me nor my motivations in this thread at all. It is really rather incredibly presumptuous for you to even imagine that you would. I certainly have never claimed to understand you, because I would never assume I knew even the slightest thing about you from a couple of posts on some web forum. Now you say it is all just joking around; I shouldn't ever take anything you say too seriously. I guess that is what you are suggesting. Fine. While your fiend Dan is the worst kind of pseudoscientist in my opinion, I did learn one thing as a result of reading his site. He mentions that in blind tests concert violinists cannot tell a Stradivarius from a regular violin. Now this struck me as highly suspect given that I know that acoustic instruments each have unique tonal signatures and musicians make their living from being able to understand and manipulate tonal color. Sure enough, with about 15secs of googling I found nice graphs of the harmonic structure and resonances of various violins, and of course each and every violin has a unique acoustic signature. Anyway, suffice it to say that Dan does not exactly have his facts correct, and in any case has drawn the wrong conclusions from what he does know. Of course I wouldn't expect anything less! However in doing some reading of factual information I did learn a few new things. So reading Dan wasn't a COMPLETE waste of my time after all. :) -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=81616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Interesting post.
Nonreality;575753 Wrote: I'm kind of dismayed at your response to all of this. You have taken it as Dan and myself have attacked the very nature of your existence. It's anything but for myself. I know you think you hear a difference between cables and all is good. You have the money to spend and it may well sound better to you. I don't really mind that. I didn't post this to make you feel bad my friend. I posted it to show what cable vendors are willing to do and you don't get it. It's fine. No problem whatsoever if thats a word. I don't think he called you stupid he just said that some are very believing and get sucked into things that they ought not to buy. I don't think you would ever buy anything that you didn't fully check out. I'm not sure why you take such a negative to all of this but really don't take it personal, I really,really never meant it that way. I make fun of audiophiles sometimes but only in jest and wish I could afford to be one so that I could find out the truth. But I know I never would but it would be fun to try. And I am equally dismayed that you find Dan's response as reasonable and the manufacturer's response as some sort of proof that cables are snake oil and he knows it. I went back and reread the linked post to make certain that I hadn't misinterpreted some of it. I did not! The manufacturer offered Dan his cables to test, and his only qualification was he wanted to do this only if Dan felt that cables were something that has an impact on audio quality. You find that hilarious and proof that the manufacturer is a charlatan interested only in positive reviews. I see nothing of the sort. Just because somebody believes cables can affect sound doesn't mean they are going to like (i.e., positively review) these particular cables. The manufacturer didn't offer them only if Dan agreed upfront to review them positively. Show me one single piece of evidence for that--I challenge you to do this. Dan responds with a long harangue that makes it clear that he has already 100% made up his mind that cables do not and cannot under any circumstances make a perceptible difference in the sound of an audio system, and that anyone that believes this is fooling themselves. So in other words, Dan says right up front to the manufacturer that he is 100% certain to say his cables make no difference. This is the sort of review opportunity that Dan is offering? And you think it proves something about the cables that the offer wasn't taken?? Are you serious??? In effect Dan already wrote his review--right in his response--without even needing to have a set of cables to measure or listen to. Hell, why should he bother since he is obviously brilliant and knows the TRUTH about audio equipment. Sorry, but I actually am a practicing scientist, and Dan's position is not AT ALL scientific (and certainly not worthy of being touted as a great article). My response has little to do with me feeling personally attacked--I could care less what you or this Dan guy believe. What annoys me is when people that appear to be closed-minded, (think they) know-it-all jerks are being promoted as good examples of objective, scientific thinking. (Yes I do realize Dan's writing style is intended to be amusing and attract readers, which accounts for what I find the jerk style of it.) I am definitely now done here unless something is posted from Dan's response that shows he was actually willing to give a fair and objective review--as I already asked. -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=81616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Interesting post.
RonM;575709 Wrote: Leon Festinger's concept of cognitive dissonance is also salient here. When we have commited to something (bought a car, acquired a religious belief, bought a ton of expensive audio gear and become a true-believing audiophile) we tend to pay attention to things that reinforce or support our action or belief. We experience what Festinger called cognitive dissonance when we encounter information that tends to cast our choices in a less than positive light -- we'll read articles praising our swell new car or describing the tenets of our new religion (whether or not it's the Catholic Church or the Church of Sound), but will avoid those that lead us in a different direction. Which is why audiophiles BORROW equipment to listen to before they purchase it, so they have little/no commitment. Honestly, some of you people mention things like this as though subjectivist audiophiles could never possibly have considered these things. We have. I personally know a number of audiophiles that are actually practicing research scientists. Despite being highly skeptical in the beginning, they have come to believe that things like cables can make subtle differences in the sound of some systems. I have actually read most of the original ABX papers by David Clark and associates, which appeared in places like JAES. Have you guys? The tests all have serious methodological flaws that severely limit what conclusions can be drawn from their negative results. Severely! And yet these were the tests that largely established support for the point of view (one might even say meme) that almost nobody can hear the differences they think they hear when subjected to double blind conditions. So when somebody tells me they know for a fact that cables cannot sound different, I am going to demand that they provide citations for the studies that establish this as a fact (bet they can't). -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=81616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Interesting post.
Nonreality;575702 Wrote: So it wasn't funny that the vendor when confronted with a possible bad review decided it wasn't worth the risk? He only wanted someone to rubber stamp their approval not really review the cables. Sorry if his (Dan's)beliefs don't jell with yours but I'm sure even you would want vendors to work differently than this. The way I read Dan's response was that he had already made up his mind and knew exactly that these cables would not sound any different than any other cable, and that he did not even need to be doing any measuring let along listening. Why on earth anyone be foolish enough to have somebody review his product if the reviewer had already made up his mind before even doing the review? Sorry, but I found Dan's response to be the complete opposite of being objective/scientific, and so it is Dan that is funny (or really pathetic). -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=81616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Interesting post.
Nonreality;575596 Wrote: I think that a few missed the point and the humor of this link. ... We all know that music and sound is subjective but we should also be able to laugh and take offense at people that take advantage of others in the search for money. I guess I didn't find this funny because I am not sure how the cable company guy was trying to take advantage of others by asking somebody with an audio website to review his cable. Yes, it is somewhat amusing that he asked somebody who believes that all cables sound identical. The only way this is funny is if you believe that cables really do all sound the same, are just snake oil, and are known to be such by the people that make and sell them. Since a great many of us do not believe this, the linked post is not in any way funny. It is not that we missed the point, it is that you don't understand why we would be offended by a post that effectively calls us stupid and deluded. -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=81616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Best 24/96 demo tracks?
It was suggested to simply use something like sox to convert 96/24 files to 44/16, and this would be cheaper than buying both. Anyone care to post the appropriate options to use to best do this? So far I do not hear definite differences, so don't want to buy two of lots of things. Thanks! (Will be doing this on Linux machines, so need Linux software.) -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=81634 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Interesting post.
Mnyb;574398 Wrote: You actually did more work than you think in that regard, you chosed to test something, that we know is different and it does influence the signal coming out of your system. the 16/44.1 signal IS different than the 24/96 signal and DAC's do measure better with 24/96 conditions noise is lower etc. So you tested something that is verified by countless reliable measurements by others. So we already know that there is a difference . You wanted to to try to hear that difference for ourself. snip Cables are a can of worms in that that they obvuisly are in the signal path. And ofcourse have an measurable impact on the signal, All measuring in normal systems shows that the difference is very small lower than all known thresholds of human hearing. AND controlled listening tests= subjektive but with the power of double blinding and statistics, seems to conclude that this is the case . So the normal 1m signal cable case is done by now. snip Cannot resist making a couple of clarifying comments... Yes we know that there is some difference between 96/24 and 44/16, but this is also true for cables. The question is whether the difference--since it should be very small in both cases--is audible. Why you are convinced that any cable in any system will definitely not be audible, but 96/24 might be I find inconsistent. Definitely I do not consider the cable case to be done and decided in the negative for all situations. Give me links to the testing you think establishes this as a fact and I bet I can proceed to pick apart every single one of those tests as having flaws that I consider serious. People keep talking about using subjective listening tests to pick the better of two components, but if that is the way people are doing subjective testing or thinking that everyone is doing it, I believe they are wrong. The way I do subjective testing is by trying to identify a different characteristic of sound reproduction that I can hear repeatedly as I switch back and forth. E.g., I listen to a track with particularly good recording of cymbals and see if at certain points I am able to hear a difference--and I have to be able to hear it reliably and repeatedly. The notion that subjective testing has to involve popping in the new $2000 wondercable and within minutes proclaiming it fabulous is just rubbish. Only a moron would proceed like that! Apparently you anti-audiophiles believe all audiophiles are morons and are doing stupid tests, but I can assure you that we are definitely not (all) morons. :] Deciding whether a component improves your sound quality and musical enjoyment should be a secondary question--after you have established that you can reliably hear a difference that you can characterize. This is the part of subjective listening where listeners most often disagree. We have often done separate listenings and then compared notes. Now one person might say one component had extended highs while another says too bright, but clearly they are both hearing a perception of increased highs/brightness. Whether or not that is good will of course depend on how bright your system already is, what your hearing is like, what kind of music you listen to, etc. To give an example: I have been comparing two different interconnects between my preamp and power amp for the last week. These are both like 20 year old hi-end cables, that I already own, and I frankly do not remember what I have decided about them previously since it has been quite a while since I have done any listening tests with them. So not much bias here--whichever one sounds better I will use. Well I definitely hear a difference, but I cannot really say which is better. One definitely improves cymbals (the system is a bit soft there now), but makes female vocals sound too dry and midbass sound too strong/bloated. I have gone back and forth with these cables for a week and keep hearing the same differences. Of course on some recordings one sounds better, but on other recordings the other sounds better. -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=81616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Interesting post.
Phil Leigh;574391 Wrote: Between the black and the white exists the land of grey and pink. Pink? Hmm. :-] -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=81616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Interesting post.
Robin Bowes;574198 Wrote: On 04/09/10 02:57, ncarver wrote: Well I will post a dissenting view of the OP's linked site. Yes there are plenty of wacky audiophiles around, but there are probably even more everything measures perfect so it must sound perfect types, and they are just as deluded. Yes, those are the two extremes, and as always the truth lies somewhere in the middle. rest of rant snipped I feel that you too are falling into trap of pigeon-holing people into one of two camps - either they're loony audiophiles with green pens and cables in the freezer, or they're measurement-obsessed scientists who don't really use their ears. Most of the talk about measurement, etc. on here is in relation to eliminating the possibility of expectation bias, ie. thinking something sounds better because you've spent a few quid on it. I don't think there are many on here that advocate equipment selection based on measurement alone. My view? Well, I have a background in sound engineering, and a degree in Acoustics so I am firmly in the middle ground. I generally trust my ears to tell me whether I like what I hear or not, but I also think that (in theory at least) it should be possible to measure any differences that my ears can hear. However, in practise, I don't think we yet know what to measure to do that. In the end, it's all about the music. For example, I have heard several performances of the Rachmaninov piano concertos, but the one I come back to is a very early recording of Rachmaninov himself playing them - poor sound but performances to die for. Of course I was reacting to a post about how great a site was that in my opinion pigeon-holes all/most audiophiles as loons and was specifically making fun of them for believing that cables could sound different because they don't measure substantially different. It was not me doing any pigeon-holing (except perhaps for 1980's era Stereo Review--and they fully deserve it). As I said, I have never met a single audiophile who meets any of the loony stereotypes; such stereotypes are straw men. The rest of your post sounds very reasonable, and I agree with most of it (though it is my experience that expectation bias is vastly less of a problem than many believe). Since I am a scientist, I put quite a bit of effort into eliminating as many issues as I can when doing listening tests. Ultimately, though, I am simply trying to get a system I enjoy listening to music on; I am not trying to prove generalities. The latter is frankly difficult in the extreme, and people that say things like just do ABX testing are quite naive. Incidentally, I had an interesting exchange with a class of my college-age computer science students after I showed them a shell script to convert MP3s back to wav files. Why would you want to do that? This eventually led to a discussion of sound quality and it came up that I had gotten some 96/24 flac files to test sound quality. Their response: aren't those files large so you cannot store as many? Sound quality is not ever considered by a single one of these kids. Their focus is on how many thousands of tracks they can store on one device. I told them that when I was their age our focus was on obtaining better and better sounding hi-fi's along with buying more and more records. Their focus is solely on fitting tens of thousands of low-fi MP3s on their iPods. If the music industry wants to know why CD sales are dropping so fast, I can tell them: these students to a one had no idea why one would want a CD, and also frankly did not care when it was explained to them. -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=81616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Interesting post.
Phil Leigh;574307 Wrote: Unfortunately, since listening - and interpreting the results - are 100% subjective, the one issue you, nor indeed the rest of us, can't eliminate is your brain :-) Of course if we could eliminate our brains, what would be the point of audio? :] But seriously, if because human observation is not 100% accurate and reliable you conclude that we can never gain any knowledge whatsoever from human observation, then you have wiped out a lot of what is generally considered science that does indeed involve human observation. Furthermore, decisions about what to measure, how and under what conditions to measure it, and how to interpret the results (since you can virtually always measure some difference) also involve the brain and thus some degree of subjectivity. So it appears that gaining any reliable knowledge about anything is just a hopeless pursuit. :] -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=81616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Interesting post.
Phil Leigh;574340 Wrote: Well there are some fairly heavyweight philosophers who basically agree with that ad absurdio argument I didn't mean to take it to that extreme, just that there are fields like psychology where most knowledge has resulted solely from human observation until fairly recently. I guess some of the people on here would say that because human observation was involved there was simply no point in pursuing these fields at all or that we should not believe a single accepted idea from those fields now. :) Anyway, this could go on and on, but just let me finish this by describing the results of my latest subjective listening tests. I recently got a Touch and then bought a new DAC, and I did this to a large extent to be able to play 96/24 material. So now I have been conducting listening tests with 96/24 and 44/16 versions of some tracks. So let's go over my supposed biases: (1) bought Touch and DAC specifically to be able to play hi-res material; (2) hi-res material is much better than CD quality with larger word size and sampling rate; (3) hi-res material is more expensive; (4) I want my system to be able to resolve the differences that must exist; (5) I want my ears to be able to hear these differences. Geez! That is quite a list of reasons for me to be biased to hear differences. Looks like pretty much a slam dunk if you are to believe people like Dan, with his loony audiophile straw man. And yet...I do not reliably hear a difference in sound quality that I can ascribe to the hi-res tracks. Wait, what??? How on earth could I have reached that conclusion with so very many factors biasing me to conclude the opposite How indeed! -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=81616 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Best 24/96 demo tracks?
Yes--I am looking for specific tracks/recordings where the poster found the hi-res encoding sounded better than the CD-quality encoding. The encodings/files would have to have originated from the same hi-res master or what would be the point? I have lots of CDs that have been remastered multiple times and they all sound different. The point of what I was asking was to try to find out whether on my system I can actually discern a difference when the only difference in the files is the bit depth and the sampling rate. Just listening to some hi-res tracks that sound great says nothing, as many CD-quality sources also sound great. Thus, what I want are a few -specific recordings/tracks- (that originated from a hi-res master) that are available as both 24/96 (or 96/24 if you prefer) and 16/44 encoded FLAC files. I had assumed that with all the previous discussion of hi-res files here that several posters would be able to provide such examples. -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=81634 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Best 24/96 demo tracks?
iPhone;573423 Wrote: The point I was making was that some (not all) HiRes files are of different or better engineered then the 44/16 red book which is the real reason to get the 96/24 in my mind. I can tell you without any reservation that it will sound better. This also translates to the 44/16 vs 96/24 which was the point I was trying to make but must have made confusing. OK--I understand now the point of your post (which I had felt did not answer my question). I am well aware that some companies make much higher quality recordings and that these will generally be the companies that make hi-res tracks available. However these companies also virtually always make CD-quality versions also available. Like R Johnson, what I want to try to find out is whether it is worth the expense and hassle to buy the hi-res files (e.g., my Duet cannot play them natively). The hi-res tracks I have purchased so far sound excellent, but they are from companies whose CD-quality tracks also sound excellent. I have only one such track in both CD-quality and hi-res, but a difference in sound quality is not immediately obvious, though I have not yet had time to do serious comparisons. Would prefer not to have to buy lots of tracks in both encodings looking for one that can reveal differences -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=81634 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Best 24/96 demo tracks?
I realize I was unclear about the hassle factor. I have a Touch being run through an external DAC in the better system but also have a Duet in the living room system. So buying lots of tracks that won't play natively on the Duet I would consider a bit of a hassle. I appreciate the suggestion to try the Linn site, but again, any specific tracks/recordings where people hear improvements from the hi-res versions on their systems? I am trying to avoid buying a large group of recordings looking for differences. Would like to start with a few that other people have already found to be able to discern a difference. -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=81634 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
Re: [SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Best 24/96 demo tracks?
R Johnson;573490 Wrote: If that's typical, an easy choice -- I'll stick with 16/44.1 ... Yes, there would have to be a significant sound difference, it would have to be music I really cared about, and a great performance to pay $28 for one album's worth of files. That seems like rather a ripoff given that it doesn't take Linn any more work to make hi-res vs. CD-quality files. The HDtracks difference in cost seems reasonable, however. I am still waiting to hear whether anyone here has actually heard a difference between 44/16 and 96/24 with even one track that they can actually name. So far it looks like the answer could be no. (I do realize people don't check in every day, so I am simply waiting patiently--and not buying any more hi-res tracks for a while). -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=81634 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
[SlimDevices: Audiophiles] Best 24/96 demo tracks?
Finally now able to play 24bit/96kHz tracks and have gotten a couple from HDTracks, but would be nice to get some input from others about tracks they have that demo the aural superiority of the hi-res tracks (e.g., by comparing them with 16/44 versions). Any suggestions? Not big into jazz BTW, so would prefer classical and/or rock/folk, etc. Thanks. (If there is already such a thread somewhere on here, let me know of course) -- ncarver ncarver's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15905 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=81634 ___ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
