131–140 of 270 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s a huge gap in quality between most onboard DACs and externals. It’s not necessarily because the onboard is worse at C-ing the Ds to the As, but because they’re not isolated from the noisy electronics that share the power supply. My laptop emits different squeals when I scroll a window, for example.
That’s not the DAC.
> Nobody is having those arguments anymore. There are many class-D amplifiers on the market now, and the best of these are dominating the upper reaches of the high end. Not quite. Frankly, Class A or AB still has the upper hand from a pure sound quality perspective, and class D struggles to output sufficiently at high levels with lower levels of distortion in my experience. That said, there have been many small class…
This may be true of Class D amps commonly used in home equipment, but many high end powered PA speakers use Class D amps and get very loud with minimal distortion.
Being powerful and reliable is more important than being all that good, since the room always sounds bad anyway.
I'm probably the only one with this opinion...but I sure miss the old days of tube amps that weren't able to be highly accurate. They would roll-off the on the high end, distort a bit all over, and gave a very warm and relaxing feel to the albums I played obsessively. Now I've owned high-end tube and solid-state gear, and the music hasn't sounded good for decades. Combine that with the very limited bits provided by C…
Your statement that CDs have a very limited number of bits is false by every known objective measure (compared to any prior consumer analog medium). CDs afford a bit depth of 16, while tape provides at most 6, and vinyl at most 12. See this great video by signal engineers for more info: https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml I suspect this is a classic case of "you think you want X, but what you actually want is your yout…
Oh geez they could have left this statement out: "When I wrote my previous article, class-D audio was fairly new, and audiophiles were still arguing about whether class-D amps could sound as good as class-AB or class-A units. Nobody is having those arguments anymore." Those arguments are still front and center when it comes to amplifier design, both on the manufacturer and consumer sides.
Tangentially, the placebo effect is everywhere. If it can affect tasting (wine) and hearing (audiophile gear), I'm surprised not to have noticed its affect in discussing photography. Will "computational photography" (as touted in the latest iPhones) that alters photos based on criterion of perceived quality end up bringing these kind of inane discussions there too? Edit: Never mind, I didn't factor in all the argumen…
To do good work in mixing and mastering, it's important to study the human perceptual mechanism and its propensity for illusion, and it's also important to understand masking effects and how to amplify certain components long enough to tweak them before dialing them back to recede into the gestalt.
It's also important to understand that in sound reproduction the vast majority of the distortion on the analog side comes from transducers (microphones and speakers), not amplifiers. (I'm not even going to bother with the article, because amplifiers aren't an important problem: buy something decently engineered and overpowered, and you're basically all set. Then worry about your speakers and your room, because they're the hard part.)
But it's likewise crucial to grok that the distortion introduced by digital components is disproportionately disturbing because it is enharmonic. And that practically speaking a lot of the damage that gets done in practice happens because people don't handle gain staging right and often don't understand the fundamental principle of preserving high resolution throughout production and only exporting to lower resolution as a final step.
In summary, there are a whole lot of interesting conversations to have on the subject of audio and how perception relates to production. But it's basically impossible to find a community to discuss these subjects with. Either it will be overrun by audiophiles and their pseudoscience, or well-meaning but undereducated skeptics will dominate the discussion with plausible but misguided debunking.
So every once in a while I throw up a piece like this into the middle of a giant discussion, with about as much hope as tossing a message in a bottle into the ocean.
Oh geez they could have left this statement out: "When I wrote my previous article, class-D audio was fairly new, and audiophiles were still arguing about whether class-D amps could sound as good as class-AB or class-A units. Nobody is having those arguments anymore." Those arguments are still front and center when it comes to amplifier design, both on the manufacturer and consumer sides.
I'm not convinced audio engineers are having that argument anymore (which is more the audience of IEEE). I get the impression from an engineer I know who's specialized in digital signal processing, and who's done a significant amount of analog work, that anyone who's still having some of these arguments doesn't understand some of the basic maths of the problem space. That basically, you can always digitally encode an…
If you just want the amp without building it, you can get a TPA3116 Class D amplifier. It is only $21 USD from aliexpress (with free shipping of course!). It accepts a supply voltage of up to 24V meaning that you can just dig around for your old laptop power supply (19V). It comes with a nice and sleek aluminum case, and has low enough noise floor that I can't detect it at all unless my ear is right up against the sp…
I guess in technical terms this article is about "making" an amplifier as opposed to "building" an amplifier. "Making" as in "Maker", since the electronics come as pre-made assemblies connected together and put in a case.
It's bizarre how none of these chips seem to have a digital input. All my music is digital, and despite the modern rise of vinyl, I don't think that's unusual. If I want an amplifier like this then I'm forced to have a completely useless DAC/ADC pair degrading the signal quality. Does anybody know of an easily available class-D amplifier with digital input? You'd think that would be an obvious feature for a digital a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your generalisation is unfair. Most Audiophiles just want to listen to music the way the artists intended. This is not easy in a industry where colouring the sound is even celebrated, e.g. 'Beats by Dre'. I recently tried the latest noise cancelling headphones by Sony (1000XM3). The noise cancelling was excellent, but the bass was +5db overblown, boomy and drowned out most of the mids, the treble was dark to hide the…
Yes the noise surrounding headphones is incredible (pun not intended), even stranger I find the denigration of 'studio monitor' quality very odd. Recently I bought a nice pair of headphones, naturally enough I wanted the ones that colour the music the least, went looking in the headphone section at the nearest consumer electronic shop for the ones that were on their web site and couldn't find them. There were stands…
It's the same for everything they sell at those shops. They are there to upsell shiny shit to people who don't know what they want. Try finding a decent laptop for a decent price at one of those stores.
It's bizarre how none of these chips seem to have a digital input. All my music is digital, and despite the modern rise of vinyl, I don't think that's unusual. If I want an amplifier like this then I'm forced to have a completely useless DAC/ADC pair degrading the signal quality. Does anybody know of an easily available class-D amplifier with digital input? You'd think that would be an obvious feature for a digital a…
> You'd think that would be an obvious feature for a digital amplifier. That's because these amplifiers are not digital. The control loop is generally analog. Though there are chips which do in fact use digital inputs and do most of the work via fixed-function DSP, but those are mostly bigger chips targeted at 5.1 or 7.1 systems.
So what's it called if it is time quantized? The simple open-loop design depicted on the Wikipedia page could have the analog comparator + triangle wave generator replaced with a digital delta-sigma modulator (1-bit DAC). Then the switching times of the power stage would be quantized to the sample rate multiplied by the oversampling ratio. (Although it seems this open-loop model is an oversimplification, and real class-D amplifiers have feedback, so it wouldn't be that simple in practice.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nothing wrong with vinyl, that’s more about physically handling the media, reading the sleeves, listening to an album the whole way through etc. Than the audio quality. No vinyl enthusiast would say the quality is objectively better, but the experience arguably is
Yea, I removed the Vinyl argument. That's for another time. Nothing wrong with Records but I've had the same issue talking to people about Records wrt to audio quality. I own Records and like you, I enjoy the experience. There is something amazing about listening to the entire album without distractions and in the sequence that the artist intended. You could do this with mp3/CD, but Records get me in the right mood :…