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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

#181

Post by v_lisivka »

ericabiz wrote: post #121
confounded wrote: post #97

A tangent, but seeing as this thread has awoken the HN audiophiles: What should I look for/avoid in a DAC? Does it really matter if my source device is an iPhone/iPad? Reading blogs and review sites talk about the personality of DACs has started to grind on me. Surely it’s just a question of accuracy which can be summarized in a metric? (I’m currently probably going to get a NAD D 3045 integrated amp/DAC, mainly for…

Recovering audiophile here...my favorite DAC right now is the EarStudio ES100. In addition to functioning as a USB DAC, it also enables regular headphones to "become" Bluetooth devices. It's by far my favorite because my nice wired headphones are now no longer obsolete. I often use it with my iPhone + Roku + Roku iPhone app's "headphone" option. It's perfect for listening to TV late at night after my kid is asleep.

Can you try [1] (using Vp9/Opus codec in HQ) on your Bluetooth and then via cable? IMHO, Bluetooth is not good enough.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT-rdjv8wgQ

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#182

Post by MisterTea »

eigenvector wrote: post #50
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.

I had an old Dell laptop where I could "hear" an external USB hard drive spinning up in my headphones, but only if it was connected to a USB port on the same side of the laptop as the audio jack.

UGh. Reminds me of the terrible USB powered speaker bar for an HP LCD I have at work. The audio comes from the 3.5 mm jack and power from USB. All you hear is the damn switching noise from the motherboard. Any time there is significant CPU use you get this noise in the background and it's quite audible at even moderate volumes.

Not sure if it's the crap speaker bar; power and audio coming from the same chassis using two different cables or the motherboard. Could be a ground loop? Now That I think of it, I'll try to power the USB from a lab supply or beefy USB charger.

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#183

Post by Dylan16807 »

oneplane wrote: post #102
stordoff wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 negotiat…

HDMI doesn't have packets. It's largely digital VGA. It's very easy to flick individual bits, and the effect is basically the same as analog noise.

The only difference is the threshold.

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#184

Post by cheeze »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #149
fabioborellini wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of arguments you've been using? Are you talking specifically about the DA chips or the black boxes containing them? I pretty much can agree with you regarding the digital side of things, but could the actual appliances have notable differences in their analogue side or configuration? Maybe the actual value of having a $400 DAC appliance (built around a $2 Wolfson DAC chip) is going around problems in a comp…

I fully agree that an external USB DAC can have a much better output quality than the motherboard output that can be influenced by interference; I have an external DAC myself, but I bought it for about $50 (list price was $200 in a hi-fi store, I ordered it from a small reseller). Not talking about the $400 box with $5 parts in it, but about common sense (plus some physics and math) in understanding what a DAC does a…

I do agree. I think it has to do with the fact that most motherboards have pretty terrible analog audio support. Every motherboard I've ever had has sounded meh compared to a cheap USB DAC.

It would be super interesting to compare an iPhone analog vs iPhone with a DAC.

I guess you'd have to use an old iPhone with an audio jack though :(

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#185

Post by eiz »

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…

> 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.

I don't disagree with your main point, but this actually isn't quite true. The HDMI signal is split into 3 distinct interleaved periods: video data, data island and control. Video data is not packetized and the only possible error detection it has is from TMDS signaling, but no such error handling is required by the TMDS spec. You can absolutely get imperfect transmission of an HDMI video signal due to cable or other electrical problems. Auxiliary packets in the data island, including audio data, do have an error correction scheme (BCH + TERC4).

Feel free to check out the spec: https://glenwing.github.io/docs/HDMI-1.4b.pdf

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#187

Post by brightball »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #179

I think that you can consider extreme audiophilia to be an expression of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and therefore the audiophile industry is predatory in that it preys upon the mentally ill. I’ve seen it all - including $1,000 aftermarket wooden knobs that were said to dampen sound-corrupting vibrations in your power amplifier. The people who sell these items know exactly what they’re doing, and I hope more peopl…

Previously worked for an after market sales site for the industry and the level of fraud in the marketplace is what got me into anti-phishing in the first place. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#188

Post by ekianjo »

What I like about this article is that they just find a few weirdos in Japan who actually end up doing that, and you get a blanket statement like "Audiophiles in Japan" while the proper headline should be "A few crazy old rich people". Journalism at its best.

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#189

Post by stcredzero »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #95
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.

You don't understand the power of naivety, placebo effect, dreams and stupidity composed (multiply all). Not in any way intended to insult these people, I know a few (not as rich) and they simply do not want to understand the basic principles behind digital signals, error corrections etc. I know people that work in IT and still pretend that audio transmission over USB can add jitter to music and that a DAC can "open"…

I know people that work in IT and still pretend that audio transmission over USB can add jitter to music and that a DAC can "open" or "close" "the stage" by low quality processing of the signal.

Audio transmission over USB with cheap converters and poorly chosen levels can result in loss of sound quality. I'm pretty sure you can tell the difference between 8 bit, 12 bit, and 16 bit sound. Choosing levels poorly can reduce your resolution.

Also, there are cheap analog to digital converters which use voltage comparison, which basically linearly "search" for the voltage they should be encoding. So those fundamentally do introduce jitter. (Large changes in signal voltage get encoded a bit later than small ones.) I'm sure there are ways that jitter can be introduced the other way around by cheap DACs. However, if you add more bits and increase the sampling speed, those should largely go away.

Devices like DACs also include a small amplifier, and if those aren't properly designed, there can be some distortion introduced there as well.

That said, there are times when people think they hear a difference, and it's woo. There are other times when the difference is real, however. Audio is a real field with some real science and know how behind it. Please don't grant yourself instant superior expertise just because you've read some stuff online.

(On more than one occasion, I've gotten the "all audio is woo" knee-jerk from programmers who were just reacting to hearing the words "frequency response" not knowing what it was, but labeling it as woo. Ironically, they did remember stuff about Fourier transforms. Go figure.)

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#190

Post by cheeze »

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…

I think this is a straw man, since a majority of audiophiles will tell you that a 1000 dollar HDMI cable is stupid. nobody actually buys that shit.

What does matter is getting a decent HDMI cable. I'm going to get a braided cable which I know supports the bandwidth of HDMI 2.1 (I think that's the current version).

1k? No. Probably more like 25.

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