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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

#311

Post by x100vc »

hansjorg wrote: post #262
hwillis wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> say, a $1,000 bottle of wine (which cannot be distinguished in a blind taste test from a $5 bottle)? Well for one thing, that's wrong- distinguishing wine is easy. Even people who are just pretty into wine can identify different vinyards etc. and actual sommeliers can nail wine down to the year it was bottled and the conditions it was stored[1]. The thing you're referring to is that when you line up regular people…

Oenologists can't even distinguish red from white in a blind test: https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infam...

They were students and as such did not dare to question authority or were afraid to make a fool of themselves.

This "study" has no value. I can certainly distinguish between the average $10 bottle and $50 bottle.

Actually the study does have a value: It induces people to think there are no differences between wines and keeps the prices for the good stuff lower. So please continue to post it.

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#312

Post by Nullabillity »

cheeze wrote: post #267
hansjorg wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oenologists can't even distinguish red from white in a blind test: https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infam...

> The two wines were actually the same white wine as before, but one was dyed with tasteless red food coloring Yes, Oenologists assumed that the wine which was red was actually... red wine. This study is always quoted and is a sham IMO. What this is saying more than anything is "the placebo affect does work." which is totally true. But IMO it doesn't say a whole lot about wine tasting being BS.

Then how would you do a blind test instead?

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#313

Post by Nordo »

fvdessen wrote: post #310
deltron3030 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good DACs and ADCs are useful for recording studios who have a lot of analog outboard gear (where the signal leaves and enters their digital setup multiple times). But for normal listening where there are only one or a few conversions, the point of diminishing returns is pretty low. Most of the perceived gains in quality of higher end equipment (DACs, Amps etc.) come from the higher voltage of the outputs (where you…

I have a decent hi-fi audio system at home, and there is a clearly audible difference between playing from my high-end CD player, and playing FLAC from the audio out of my Macbook. The difference is not one of loudness but of 'energy'. A snare hit played from the high-end cd player sounds like someone actually hitting a snare; you can feel there's actual energy in the hit, while the macbook out sounds flat, even at h…

> The difference is not one of loudness but of 'energy'

Aren't those the same? Put more joules into the speaker wire and more joules of sound pressure waves will come out of the speaker cone, which just means the sound will be louder (until you reach the mechanical limits of the speaker, of course, but no DAC in the world could possibly change those).

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#314

Post by datenwolf »

stcredzero wrote: post #189
AdrianB1 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

> Also, there are cheap analog to digital converters which use voltage comparison, which basically linearly "search" for the voltage they should be encoding.

Integration type ADCs are not necessarily cheap. And you always put a sample-and-hold circuit in front of integration type ADCs, which completely eliminates the sampling time variance.

Also many people are unaware that the Nyquist theorem states, that the _average_ sampling frequency must be at least twice the highest signal frequency. The sampling points may indeed jitter around a little bit, as long as the jitter is distributed evenly. As a matter of fact, adding a little bit of sample jitter can be used as a poor man's dithering, to shift the LSB noise spectrum above the reconstruction filter cutoff frequency.

Jitter is mostly a problem with sample clock distribution. Too much jitter and the sample clock no longer arrives with the right delay with respect to the data, which may create large transients, e.g. whenever the numeric value rolls over some power of 2 (a lot of bits change); this problem could be avoided using Gray codes, though.

Oh, and then there's Sigma-Delta Modulation.

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#315

Post by kyberias »

bsaul wrote: post #295
thaumasiotes wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do $1,000 aftermarket wooden knobs (with no detectable physical effect) differ from, say, a $1,000 bottle of wine (which cannot be distinguished in a blind taste test from a $5 bottle)? They're just class signifiers. The difference I see is that audiophiles are less prestigious than oenophiles, but I don't see how you get from there to "audiophiles have a mental illness".

I understand what you mean, but just for the record, professional winetasters can pretty much guess which part of land in a given region a wine comes from in blind tests. So, i can tell you that there is a huge difference between a bottle labelled 1000$ and a 5$ one. One telling indicator is that wine does practice blind tests a lot, and has blind test wine competitions that lead to prices, that help small wine produ…

Also, some professional winetasters can't tell the difference between white and red wine.

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#316

Post by cerebellum42 »

Nordo wrote: post #313
fvdessen wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a decent hi-fi audio system at home, and there is a clearly audible difference between playing from my high-end CD player, and playing FLAC from the audio out of my Macbook. The difference is not one of loudness but of 'energy'. A snare hit played from the high-end cd player sounds like someone actually hitting a snare; you can feel there's actual energy in the hit, while the macbook out sounds flat, even at h…

> The difference is not one of loudness but of 'energy' Aren't those the same? Put more joules into the speaker wire and more joules of sound pressure waves will come out of the speaker cone, which just means the sound will be louder (until you reach the mechanical limits of the speaker, of course, but no DAC in the world could possibly change those).

>Aren't those the same?

Not really. If you take some of the transients out of recorded drums they will sound lifeless, without "energy", but not necessarily quieter.

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#317

Post by yayana »

fvdessen wrote: post #310
deltron3030 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good DACs and ADCs are useful for recording studios who have a lot of analog outboard gear (where the signal leaves and enters their digital setup multiple times). But for normal listening where there are only one or a few conversions, the point of diminishing returns is pretty low. Most of the perceived gains in quality of higher end equipment (DACs, Amps etc.) come from the higher voltage of the outputs (where you…

I have a decent hi-fi audio system at home, and there is a clearly audible difference between playing from my high-end CD player, and playing FLAC from the audio out of my Macbook. The difference is not one of loudness but of 'energy'. A snare hit played from the high-end cd player sounds like someone actually hitting a snare; you can feel there's actual energy in the hit, while the macbook out sounds flat, even at h…

That sounds like amp presets to drop bass, which would make perfect sense on an Amp expected to be used on laptop speakers.

I think the general problem is mid-range speakers and reasonable settings is all it really takes to have quality sound, but people want to be above average and therefore look for ways to discriminate between better sound and worse sound differences they can't "yet" hear. From there you get into placebo and random correlations.

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#318

Post by Nordo »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #297
tlrobinson wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a DAC can "open" or "close" "the stage" by low quality processing of the signal In principle a low enough quality DAC certainly could affect "the stage", but in reality even cheap ones are likely good enough. > There is no way to convince these people they are wrong I'm pretty sure many of them don't want to be convinced since it would make their hobby pretty boring. I also wouldn't be surprised if industry players…

No, cheap DACs are not “good enough” unless you’re completely indifferent to audio quality. There’s certainly woo and outright fraud in audio. But there’s also attention to detail. Professional studio engineers will spend $3000 on a high-precision digital clock for their DACs because it makes a clearly audible difference. Software people don’t understand that human hearing, and human sensitivity to timbre and distort…

> Professional studio engineers will spend $3000 on a high-precision digital clock for their DACs because it makes a clearly audible difference.

I don't know what kind of frequency stability you really need (please enlighten me), but I checked on one of the components retailer websites, and found that even the most stable MEMS oscillators are only a few bucks a piece, any DAC or ADC manufacturer that claims that's worth a $3000 markup is running a scam.

> Software people don’t understand that human hearing, and human sensitivity to timbre and distortion, is spectacularly non-linear. Hearing isn’t a linear counting device with x volume levels.

As a "software person" I take exception to this. Who exactly of my colleagues claimed that it was? Not even the cheapest, most terribly sounding, incompetently designed child's toy's "what sound do cows make" 8-bit 8kHz DAC produces output with x discrete volume levels, it produces a continuous signal. A bad sounding signal perhaps, but a continuous one nonetheless. Plenty of software people know this, but do audiophiles?

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#319

Post by FraKtus »

Most of the time the room where those high-end audiophiles have their equipment is just not designed to listen to music. The room around you is as important as the equipment. I remember making speaker tests in the anechoic chamber of my university, and it's just mindblowing, even with average equipment.

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#320

Post by unsignedint »

So he installed a pole to prevent perhaps fairly subtle common mode interference from his neighbor's appliances. Wouldn't a ham (or any potential EM source) in the proximity that he cannot control ruins his installation easily? Maybe he is lucky to not have them nearby...
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