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KozmoNaut posted:but does it have to be so overpriced and do they have to sell it using audiophool wankery?
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Jan 13, 2014 21:31
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| # ? Apr 18, 2024 13:34 |
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Come on, we all know the only thing that sounds better than a $10,000 DAC is the one you build yourself using this neat trick discovered by a single mum that the record companies don't want you to know about.
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Jan 13, 2014 21:44
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http://www.boulderamp.com/3050-p1.html $115,000. It has a 32 amp ceeform connector and needs it's own dedicated circuit.
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Jan 14, 2014 00:15
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Waldo P Barnstormer posted:Come on, we all know the only thing that sounds better than a $10,000 DAC is the one you build yourself using this neat trick discovered by a single mum that the record companies don't want you to know about. Audio companies hate her.
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Jan 14, 2014 05:56
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Neurophonic posted:http://www.boulderamp.com/3050-p1.html 445 lbs. 
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Jan 14, 2014 07:28
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I can't help myself reading this as a reaction to the "$115,000" prize tag:quote:“I’ve never heard anything like this. I don’t even know how to put it into words because I don't think what I'm hearing can be described in a way that would give anyone even an approximation of the experience. I keep coming back to the lamentation that so few people will ever hear or feel this as I am." quote:The sound of the amplifier itself cannot be described because the 3050 has no sound of its own. Bass, mids, highs, soundstaging, resolution, transparency, liquidity, musicality, realism, separation, pick your cliché: Everything is better. quote:Most companies have a pipe dream, a product they would build if the time were right and the customers were there, if there were no limits, if a new benchmark could be achieved. Practically nobody builds this kind of product. Many claim to, but careful scrutiny nearly always reveals compromises or cynicism in the results.  KillHour posted:445 lbs.
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Jan 14, 2014 09:21
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RoadCrewWorker posted:I hope one of the internal parts is just an actual 350 lbs rock for the weight. Knowing audiophiles, it wouldn't be out of the question, probably for "vibration dampening" or something. Also, "The sound of the amplifier itself cannot be described because the 3050 has no sound of its own" is a description I've heard of other amplifiers before, but it's just a generic description of any properly-designed solid state amplifier, so whoop-de-do. Unless the design is screwed up (as in early solid state designs), pretty much any amplifier made in the last 2-3 decades is ruler-flat within +/- 1dB from 20Hz-20kHz, and most are even better than that. When a <$4000 pro amplifier can do everything your $230,000 monoblock set does and people are still buying the monoblocks, there is some seriously powerful woo-woo going on.
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Jan 14, 2014 09:43
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KozmoNaut posted:Well now, this is something neat. A fully open-source USB DAC: http://www.qnktc.com/i02.php DIY Audio forum member posted:“I am surprised how well it plays right out of the box. Much too close to my approximately 30 times as expensive CD player.” - DIY Audio forum member Well, to be fair, this statement at least is not very ridiculous. The DAC of an expensive CD player is likely to sound very similar to this new DAC, because DACs sound the same (unless they're faulty, I guess). Hippie Hedgehog fucked around with this message at 11:18 on Jan 14, 2014 |
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Jan 14, 2014 11:11
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I use a Minidisc recorder as a DAC because the analog out on my iMac is horrendous (probably faulty). This probably causes seizures amongst the audiophool community. I paid about $30 for it.
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Jan 14, 2014 16:40
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EL BROMANCE posted:I use a Minidisc recorder as a DAC because the analog out on my iMac is horrendous (probably faulty). This probably causes seizures amongst the audiophool community. I paid about $30 for it. Oh man, that's evil. I love it.
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Jan 14, 2014 16:54
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Are all DACs pretty well fundamentally the same nowadays? I understand back in the 80s they were kinda bad, but haven't they been "perfected" by now? Like they can reproduce 20-20000 Hz pretty well perfectly?
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Jan 14, 2014 17:00
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BANME.sh posted:Are all DACs pretty well fundamentally the same nowadays? I understand back in the 80s they were kinda bad, but haven't they been "perfected" by now? Like they can reproduce 20-20000 Hz pretty well perfectly? Yeah, everyone basically one of a handful of standard chips made by Texas Instruments, Wolfson, C-Media etc. etc., and they all have pretty much identical specs and cost next to nothing.
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Jan 14, 2014 17:27
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Oh well, time to reinvent the wheel.
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Jan 14, 2014 17:45
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Waldo P Barnstormer posted:Oh well, time to reinvent the wheel. There's gotta be some batshit insane all-tube DAC out there somewhere. E: Oh gently caress, 5 seconds on google. http://www.accusticarts.de/pages/en_tube-dac_ii.html
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Jan 14, 2014 18:18
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That would probably actually sound really nice and I would be interested in trying such a thing if it had 6 outs and was a reasonable price. Edit: Three thousand GBP. Get hosed. AU$3400 per tube channel is just crazy. Edit 2: Was looking for audiophoolery in the review but: "Where we will give Accustic high marks is in the elimination of jitter, with the audio output showing no trace of distortion." Why bother buying a tube preamp if it doesn't distort? But then... It has all the hallmarks of classic high-end kit, with excellent neutrality, effortless detail and almost tangible grip, authority and control. One of the consistent features we've found across a range of upmarket CD players is the high degree of polish they bring to the sound, making cheaper players sound rough by comparison. Computers are renowned for being a jittery source... Accustic Arts may not thank us for saying this, but the TUBE-DAC has very good rejection of incoming jitter and is therefore quite unfussy about the source. If there is anything to criticise, it's a very slight degree of hardness in the highest registers when reproducing instruments with an extended harmonic structure - a violin being perhaps the most critical. In such cases, the 'air' around the instrument is not quite so pure, the decay at the end of notes a touch less well-defined. But they never, ever measured it. A Lone Girl Flier fucked around with this message at 19:05 on Jan 14, 2014 |
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Jan 14, 2014 18:47
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Maverick Audio makes DACs with tubes in 'em for a lot less money (around $200 ish) - http://www.mav-audio.com/base/product No idea if they're any good or what.
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Jan 14, 2014 18:56
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This may signal my lack of audiophile "breeding" or whatever, but what the gently caress is grip?
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Jan 14, 2014 20:58
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grack posted:This may signal my lack of audiophile "breeding" or whatever, but what the gently caress is grip? If you ask me, it's all a load of wank.
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Jan 14, 2014 21:52
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Audiophile poo poo is so lame. The DIY crowd and small garage based companies are doing stuff with speakers that sound better and are more advanced than anything in the audiophile world. These days the hobbyists are better engineers than the big companies.
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Jan 14, 2014 21:58
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jonathan posted:These days the hobbyists are better engineers than the big companies. You've got a point, but I don't agree 100%. NAD has a couple of direct digital amplifiers on the market right now. They're fully 100% digital all the way from the input to the speakers, the class-D amp also functions as a DAC. (Yeah yeah, I know class D isn't *really* digital as such or something) I haven't seen anything like that from hobbyists yet, and I bet it took some serious R&D to get right.
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Jan 14, 2014 22:10
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I don't know why every EE student isn't hooking up with a marketing student and putting some bullshit out there - if anyone actually bites you just throw together your 'boutique' product and make a few thousand to help pay your tuition. It's not like it has to be anything more than serviceable, they're paying for the dream after all
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Jan 15, 2014 01:28
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You could just take a regular dac, stick it in an impressive looking box on special steel alloy stands, hook the cables up, fill the box with rocks for weight and bam! I might go into business.
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Jan 15, 2014 01:44
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grack posted:This may signal my lack of audiophile "breeding" or whatever, but what the gently caress is grip? Look at the context - authority and control. It is usually used to describe a quality of the mid bass part of the audio spectrum. You know when you change your DACs or pre-amps and suddenly your usually flat system starts sounding, wooly, muffled and flabby in the bass area? Well, that DAC or preamp has little grip. It doesn't have the authority to tell the rest of your system what to do. It can't control the actions of your monoblocks, so the amps just decide to do whatever the gently caress and you go, "Gee, I really need a DAC with better grip." Edit: My DAC's specifications list grip coefficient of 9.32mN/W. Is this good? tldr: It's how you anthropomorphosize your audio equipment. A Lone Girl Flier fucked around with this message at 07:53 on Jan 15, 2014 |
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Jan 15, 2014 07:43
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There's a clip from TNG where data loses his memory and lives with a pre-industrial civilization. It's relevant because the people try to explain their world using some very basic misconceptions. Data says something like "You're reasoning by analogy to support conclusions not based on facts". Basically audiophiles are the clueless villagers who don't know what wood is, but will bang it against something and conclude it must contain rock as it's hard, then surmise it would sink in water.
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Jan 15, 2014 12:18
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Their obsession with jitter is a great example of this. They accuse jitter of causing veiled highs, cramped soundstage, loss of transparency, lack of PRaT, smeared sound, shrillness, imbalance, thin sound, bloated sound, warm sound, cold sound, congestion and so on and so forth. In reality, all jitter does is cause low-level noise (mostly intermodulation) until the level gets high enough that the signal cannot be recognized as a proper bitstream anymore  A reclocking DAC is all it takes to reduce jitter to a completely irrelevant level.For a bit of perspective, anywhere between 10ns and 250ns is claimed as the "audible limit" of jitter. TOSLINK is often accused by audiophiles as being a high-jitter interface. The highest jitter commonly seen on TOSLINK is around 200ps. That's 200 pico-seconds, or around a thousandth of the average claimed audible limit. And it doesn't even matter as long as the DAC is of the re-clocking type.
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Jan 15, 2014 13:26
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Boiled Water posted:You could just take a regular dac, stick it in an impressive looking box on special steel alloy stands, hook the cables up, fill the box with rocks for weight and bam! I've considered doing this so so many times. I personally would go the wood route because metal conducts and thusly will be stealing your precious bits of data...
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Jan 15, 2014 17:04
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KozmoNaut posted:If you ask me, it's all a load of wank. The audiophile community is easily one of the biggest circle jerks on the planet.
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Jan 15, 2014 17:11
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AlexDeGruven posted:The audiophile community is easily one of the biggest circle jerks on the planet. The audiophile community is like a group of horribly inept boys who hang out in a basement and call themselves "The Ladykillers Club". They talk about all of their amazing seduction techniques and pickup lines that they are going to use on girls to get laid. All they do is brag to each other about their lines and what they will do to their theoretical women . . . naturally never acting on them but patting each other on the back for doing nothing. If by some chance one of them somehow manages to get laid and comes back and tries to explain that horribly awkward pickup lines and "suave" techniques don't work in reality, he's immediately banished from the club. Most audiophile forums dogpile or ban anyone who even hints at blind or double-blind tests disproving $6000 magic rocks.
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Jan 15, 2014 18:48
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Blistex posted:Most audiophile forums dogpile or ban anyone who even hints at blind or double-blind tests disproving $6000 magic rocks. To be (ever so slightly) fair, I think most audiophiles don't buy into the outrageous Machina Dynamica-type tweaks, those are for the real fringe wackjobs. Most of the average audiophiles probably stick to their $5000 power cords and USB cables.
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Jan 15, 2014 18:53
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It's more a sign of how far logic has slipped, that a $5k cable that can't be DBT against a $2 kettle cord is somehow the sane side of the spectrum.
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Jan 15, 2014 19:31
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Boiled Water posted:You could just take a regular dac, stick it in an impressive looking box on special steel alloy stands, hook the cables up, fill the box with rocks for weight and bam! This describes most small scale audiophile projects. TI/Maxim/Wolfson/Linear/etc chip surrounded by the external parts shown in their datasheet and tossed inside an aesthetically pleasing box. It ends up costing these little guys a shitload to manufacture because they don't have economy of scale so the price is absurd for what you get. Then they circle jerk around tuning/upgrading capacitors to "tighten the bass and open up the soundstage" because it gives them something to do and may end up with a mod named after them which is the ultimate badge of honor for an audiophile.
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Jan 15, 2014 19:41
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You guys might be joking, but there are literally tear-downs where people have shown very costly audiophile equipment is just a standard item in a different case. One semi-infamous one was a Blu-ray player that had rave reviews, but was just the mid-range unit in a box. Quite a simple thing to do would be to get the innards of an amp, stick it in an aluminium box with some heavy magnets and talk about how it shields the amp from the earth's magnetic lines.
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Jan 15, 2014 22:30
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Khablam posted:You guys might be joking, but there are literally tear-downs where people have shown very costly audiophile equipment is just a standard item in a different case. One semi-infamous one was a Blu-ray player that had rave reviews, but was just the mid-range unit in a box. You forgot to mention one thing: audiophiles do not consider that fraudulent in any way.
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Jan 15, 2014 22:32
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Jerry Cotton posted:You forgot to mention one thing: audiophiles do not consider that fraudulent in any way. That extra box acted as a faraday cage that dramatically reduced my interdevice jitter thankyouverymuch
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Jan 15, 2014 22:46
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Khablam posted:You guys might be joking, but there are literally tear-downs where people have shown very costly audiophile equipment is just a standard item in a different case. One semi-infamous one was a Blu-ray player that had rave reviews, but was just the mid-range unit in a box. Oh yeah, I remember that. Didn't the "manufacturer" come out with some outrageous explanation of how their mods made the sound and picture so much better, completely unlike the hack jobs their competitors do with the same DVD player 
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Jan 15, 2014 22:53
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Double-postin' up in this mother. This isn't audiophile woo-woo as such, but very related. I bring you HDMI cables with virus protection! http://www.zdnet.com/this-xbox-hdmi-cable-has-anti-virus-protection-7000001601/
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Jan 15, 2014 23:51
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KozmoNaut posted:Double-postin' up in this mother. Hm... quote:Gizmodo asks if there are any people in this world "so stupidly stupid as to believe that a virus may attack your video cables and cause noise." I see a business opportunity!
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Jan 16, 2014 00:41
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Wasn't there a post from some forum where a guy's dog chewed a very expensive cable it it turned out that it was just cheap wire encased in run of the mill flex hose with a horrible soldering job keeping it together? I'm trying to find it but google isn't cooperating. It was some really beefy cable that turned out to be nothing but cheap materials from a hardware store and some flashy connectors.
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Jan 16, 2014 04:53
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Blistex posted:Wasn't there a post from some forum where a guy's dog chewed a very expensive cable it it turned out that it was just cheap wire encased in run of the mill flex hose with a horrible soldering job keeping it together? I'm trying to find it but google isn't cooperating. It was some really beefy cable that turned out to be nothing but cheap materials from a hardware store and some flashy connectors. If I remember correctly, it was a cat. And the hose was filled with metal filings.
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Jan 16, 2014 06:05
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| # ? Apr 18, 2024 13:34 |
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It was on head-fi, and it was a Virtual Dynamics cable. His dog chewed through it, and it was just cheap electrical wire and filled with metal filings. The best part about that thread wasn't the cable though, it was the Virtual Dynamics rep (audio chef or accoustic chef or something chef) defending it, the VD fans defending it, and everyone else calling it a piece of poo poo. I want to say it's from 2005 or so, but I don't remember. It was before the whole coathangers as cables thing existed.
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Jan 16, 2014 06:43
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