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Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

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Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#101

Post by aaaaaaaaaab »

hydrox24 wrote: post #93
aaaaaaaaaab wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FLAC????? Ew... Every audiophile knows that WAV sounds the best. FLAC quality is mediocre compared to WAV. Update: geez, it was satire... ...or was it? https://serato.com/forum/discussion/1541194 https://www.head-fi.org/threads/flac-vs-wav-format-surprisin...

You were not downvoted because people took your comment literally, you were downvoted because being snarky runs against the Hacker News guidelines, specifically: > Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. Sometimes snarky comments will be forgiven if they are substantive. Yours contributes very l…

Thank you for the quick heads up! I’ll make sure to familiarize myself with said guidelines. It’s very useful!

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#102

Post by oneplane »

stordoff wrote: post #94
walrus01 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the things I truly will never understand about "Audiophiles" is their willingness to spend money on products that are, from a technical basis, indisputably categorized as snake oil. For instance: https://www.amazon.com/AudioQuest-Diamond-feet-Braided-Cable... It's an HDMI cable! The video signal has CRC in it and is packetized, it's either going to make it or it isn't. The quality of video delivered at, for in…

> it's either going to make it or it isn't This isn't _strictly_ true - I've seen basically the equivalent of noise in a HDMI picture (white dots all over the picture), and eventually tracked it back to a faulty HDMI cable. I did replace it with the cheapest (<£5) HDMI cable I could find though, so there is that.

That's not 'noise', that is packets that didn't make it. It's not having a perfect picture vs. no picture, but about data packets either going from A to B or not going from A to B.

Say the HDMI cable is crap and it can only do 100 packets per second, and HDR needs 1000 packets per second, the HDMI chips are going to negotiate a HDMI transfer settings without HDR. Going back further, say the HDMI data path is negotiated to do only basic HDMI, say, DVI-like video. If even that is too much for the cable to handle, say, it constantly drops a few packets, you would get either perfect pixels or missing pixels.

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#103

Post by judgardner »

timrichard wrote: post #36
remcob wrote: post #9

$100k in equipment, but I bet none of that went to an oscilloscope to actually quantify the problems they are imagining.

...and in most of the photos of their listening rooms, no acoustic treatment. Even a bit would make quite a noticeable difference for a few hundred bucks (or less, DIY). Zero difference would be 'running in cables', and other things they read about on forums.

Yeah the lack of acoustic treatment is a running thing I see. A few absorbing panels at primary reflection points coupled with diffusers should be the next upgrade on a midrange system. Bass traps as well depending on your sub and music.

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#104

Post by stordoff »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #98
snovv_crash wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One theory I read (for good quality USB cables to a DAC) is that reduced packet loss reduces jitter, which means that the clock rate of the DAC doesn't have to adjust in order to keep the buffer populated, but not overflowing. Sounds plausible, but I'm not sure that packet loss is high enough to actually cause this.

A working USB cable does not create packet loss and definitely does not fix packet loss; if packet loss occurs because of the cable, the cable is defective, nothing else. There is no good quality and bad quality, there are cables that work as expected and cables that are defective.

More or less what I thought about the network cable in GP's post - if the network cable is changing how your FLACs sound, it's _broken_.

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#105

Post by oneplane »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #98
snovv_crash wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One theory I read (for good quality USB cables to a DAC) is that reduced packet loss reduces jitter, which means that the clock rate of the DAC doesn't have to adjust in order to keep the buffer populated, but not overflowing. Sounds plausible, but I'm not sure that packet loss is high enough to actually cause this.

A working USB cable does not create packet loss and definitely does not fix packet loss; if packet loss occurs because of the cable, the cable is defective, nothing else. There is no good quality and bad quality, there are cables that work as expected and cables that are defective.

But there is capacity, and USB1.1 may need less than USB2. That said, we can assume that we are talking about USB cables that are tested/verified/certified, which means they have to follow a few rules about how much Mhz bandwidth it supports, how much EMI it can deal with and how much drop in power it's going to cause. But of course, those are measurable facts and still have nothing to do with the data packets getting 'warm' or 'fuller' or some other subjective term.

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#106

Post by gerdesj »

dylan604 wrote: post #96
gerdesj wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite. Why not also test your hearing first. Find a lab and offer them some serious money to test your "built in" equipment. Then you can get serious on delivering the best possible input. While you are at it, you'd better hire a decent studio and the artists, sound engineers etc and re-record to your spec. Recordings are normally designed to work reasonably well across anything from a car stereo to a disco. Now crac…

>If you were really serious then why not buy a small plot of land well away from the city and build a custom man cave (yes it will be a man!) This is my dream retirement concept, except mine would be to continue taking pictures of the night sky. But thanks for the idea. Now I can plan on listening to high quality choons while I'm at it!

Make sure you don't listen to anything louder than a cockroach farting: the vibrations will disturb your £300k gear. Perhaps you can find some sort of device to deliver the choons close to your ears to avoid problems. No obviously not, you will need heavy plant and a lot of conc. to start off the job. Then there will be the stabilisation and damping systems ... and ... and ...

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#107

Post by wtracy »

kazinator wrote: post #72
robertAngst wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly my thought. A cocktail of capacitors could do the trick.

We'd like to say "battery of capacitors", but we more or less cannot. Ironically, the word "battery" was originally used by Benjamin Franklin to refer to a bank capacitors, not to chemical cells.

Call it a "capacitor array" and you're set.

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#108

Post by danaos »

walrus01 wrote: post #70
bayindirh wrote: post #59

I don't understand this type of audiophiles. I also have a fairly high end, vintage audio system at home, but I'd never do anything like that in the name of audio quality. There's a quote I love about these people: A normal person uses the audio system to listen music, while an audiophile uses music to listen to his audio system.

One of the things I truly will never understand about "Audiophiles" is their willingness to spend money on products that are, from a technical basis, indisputably categorized as snake oil. For instance: https://www.amazon.com/AudioQuest-Diamond-feet-Braided-Cable... It's an HDMI cable! The video signal has CRC in it and is packetized, it's either going to make it or it isn't. The quality of video delivered at, for in…

Admittedly I chuckled. The amazon cable you referenced is full of satirical comments.

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#109

Post by wtracy »

robertAngst wrote: post #51
Izmaki wrote: post #3

When I'm playing music on my stereo from my PC through USB, turning off the lights on my bathroom on the other side of the wall will momentarily kill my USB driver and as a result Spotify stops working. Electromagnetic interference is no joke.

Wait- your USB on your computer stops working? Is this true for every component you plug in? I imagine this is your stereo power supply. I oddly would love to hear more.

I'm also curious if it affects all USB ports on the computer, or only some. (Some PC's have "always on" outlets that supply power even when the PC is turned off, and I imagine that those take a slightly different route through the power supply.)

Anyway, my guess is that there's some line noise that isn't enough to mess up the PC, and the PC is passing it along to some component in the speaker that doesn't like it.

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#110

Post by zw123456 »

Tubes, cables now this. It seems more like religion or superstition than technology IMHO.

If you want to take it to the limit, hire someone to come into your home and perform live for you, then you can eliminate all the sources of distortion.

Not only would you be hearing the ultimate perfect sound, you would be providing employment for artists.

Seems like a win - win to me :)

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