361–370 of 405 posts
I have an external usb dac (Yamaha AG06), a pair of good studio grade monitors (Yamaha HS8's) and that's it for me. Exquisite listening quality without having to sell a kidney.
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As a trained EE, non-practicing, I would think it would be far easier to install filters/conditioners on the line to normalize the voltage and current (e.g. performing phase correction). Also, if you had a local AC->DC->AC conversion, could probably get a more uniform power source frequency. Not sure, been a long time since ive studied this, but I think a lot of thw high-end audiophile stuff is snake oil. I've been a…
You can ML electrostatics for much less than 120k. They do sound great, but are still too much for me :) I'm happy with my 10 year old Paradigms. The next speaker purchase I make is going to get something smaller instead of floor standing. I'm at a point now where I want good sound for music and home theater in the smallest package possible.
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> 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?
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Yeah, and sometimes one car is better than another car, even if they have the same engine ($5 wolfson DAC), because more love is given to everything around the engine. If you just want to put together a cheap car with a good engine, that's a different thing from wanting to build a comfortable or speedy car with a good engine. Someone who isn't in the market for that extra level will just be a sceptic and say "this Au…
"More love" in this case doesn't have to mean more than maybe a retail price of $50 or so, to get a DAC with a frequency response so flat and a noise level so low that any difference to more expensive items is purely academic. Digital to analog conversion is a solved problem, with inexpensive commodity parts. Even if you buy an expensive DAC, the studio gear used to produce the music you listen to has gone through do…
An Audi also has just a couple thousand of extra love worth of physical cost added to it, but the retail price is easily upwards of $20.000 above the equivalent VW car. That's because if you sell fewer units, the r&d and marketing costs per unit are much higher, as well as the required profit per car sold.
If you get a good deal on your hardware, you might have that good DAC in a nice box with a pretty manual for $50 physical costs, then put it on a prime shelf in a nice Hi-Fi store for $130 (30% of $400), maybe $50 to target and prime your customer, and then use $150 to pay your audio engineer, your CEO, maybe outsource the rest of the company infrastructure, and then 8% interest to your lenders. That's 1.7M profit at 10.000 units sold (assuming that you do all of this within a year).
I have no idea if 10.000 units is close to reasonable for an indie hardware startup, but calculations become a little more complex if we're going to have to take a multi year ramp up in account..
edit: Sorry I got caught up a little in the startup aspect of it. Your system sounds great, but your DAC (and DSP+crossover system) also cost $400, so you're not making a point?
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To me, my iPod Shuffles, launch day iPhone, and modern iPhone all sound very different from one another when I play the same song. (I prefer the Shuffles.) Is this a real thing, or should I upgrade to a better brand of crack?
Probably mostly the latter. The headphone adapter with recent iPhones measures remarkably well for such a tiny device: https://www.head-fi.org/threads/what-is-the-sound-quality-of... (scroll down a little for lots of geeky measurements). It's hard for our brain to comprehend that such a tiny gadget can sound so good, so I suspect that accounts for a lot of the perceived difference. Also, some music can sound better w…
The difference is not much. iPhone has slightly better highs and slightly tighter lows. The headphones I'm using is Sennheiser MM70i (They use the same buds with CX400-II, I also have these).
I didn't found the difference with "critical listening". One night I just started listening it, and it sounded different to my iPhone. Then I played the same song on the iPhone and found out the difference.
The difference maybe due to different generations of DACs, different OPAMPS, different power budget, different decoders, etc. As I said before, the difference is not that much, but normal for the evolution of these types of electronics. Nano honestly sounds impressive for a device that compact.
P.S.: I used to play euphonium in a large band and double bass in a symphony orchestra, so I have trained my ears for separation and tracking of instruments and rhythm. This is why I'm a bit more sensitive to these things than most of the people around.
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Record pressers do have very good DA-converters. That's what they do!
It doesn't matter how good your DAC is if your signal path includes scratching the sound waves into lacquer, stamping it into vinyl and scraping it with a stylus. Compared to digital distribution formats, it's utterly Rube Goldberg-esque. Performance Microphone ADC Processing Mixing & mastering DAC \ \ \ Scratched into lacquer Electroplating Stamping into vinyl Scraped with a stylus Phono amplifier / / / Amplifier Sp…
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Digital transmission/storage ensures the signal is not affected no matter how much noise is on the line (well, as long as it can be transmitted at all...) Now, what I think you mean is that the copper in the cable picks up noise either from the device on the other end or from the surroundings and that has the possibility of affecting the DAC. Even moderately well designed receiver should be able to galvanically isola…
For an example possibly familiar in computing circles, Infiniband has easily-accessible counters to record transmission errors. In a properly-built system with hundreds of communication-busy nodes connected with copper, you see remarkably low error rates, even in comparison with the spec (maybe a few a week in my experience).
We have a cluster with ~1000 nodes and all generations of Infiniband (DDR/QDR/EDR) equipment, and routing all these copper cables without damaging them is not easy.
The quality of digital tranmsission over copper cables is dependent on the size and clarity of "eye", which is the pattern which two sinusodial signals when run through and oscilloscope. Lower quality cables (HDMI/DP/Coax/etc.) has blurry and small eyes, which increases chances of artifacts and drives the error correction modules harder, while better cables are easier on the both sender and receiver, since they produce lower number of errors to correct.
Trivia: Amphenol / Gore has high speed digital interconnect cables called Eye Opener Plus [0], which also used some of the Infiniband cables that we use.
[0]: http://www.spectra-strip.com/Eye_Opener_Plus_Cable.cfm?Nav=E...
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> 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...
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Tubes, cables now this. It seems more like religion or superstition than technology IMHO. My advice to everyone is to never ask a hard-core gamer what he's tweaking when he's got his favorite rig open, and cards scattered all over the workbench. There's enough technological superstition in some of them to summon the devil.
Why, and how, would one "tweak" a machine?
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Not sure why you got downvoted, I've seen crappy electricity in my own home office after I got a UPS for my computer system. It would have its fans kick in regularly to modulate the voltage that came in at a crazy high ~255v (Australia). I got the APC Line-R 1200VA Line Conditioner With AVR installed in front of the UPS and couldn't be happier now - it steps down the voltage and gives the UPS peace of mind. Try the A…
Installing a UPS behind the conditioner sounds like a good idea. I have been meaning to get one of those... Thanks for the rec on the APC, I bookmarked it for comparison later. What UPS are you using?
https://www.scorptec.com.au/product/UPS/UPS/44933-VALUE1500E...
I also have one of their smaller BRICs for my HTPC / home NAS JBOD server: https://www.scorptec.com.au/product/UPS/UPS/40279-BR850ELCD
The voltage in that part of the house appears to be better, but the circuit is easily tripped when running toaster + micro or similar, so having these UPSes has taken a lot of frustration away.
Actually just checked my invoice and I got them both in 2012, which is a little while ago now, and they're still good with their original batteries.