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I had a real winner on the line a few months ago on diyaudio.com, he claimed that the same CD ripped using EAC would result in different sounding wave files depending on if it was ripped with any old drive and a fancy blu ray burner. This INCLUDED him showing md5 hashes of the two files clearly showing they were identical down to the last bit. He claimed the two .wav files clearly sounded different. Must have been the hard drive storing the jitter!  Except even then he claimed he could copy the files around (burn them to a data disc, etc...) and still hear it.I try to stay away from the tweakers, but I've enjoyed the semi-audiophile Do-It-Yourself community for many years. Most of the guys are pretty level headed, it's an incredibly fun hobby, and even if you do want to try something crazy, it's not costing nearly as much when you're building it yourself.
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Oct 4, 2009 20:38
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 08:38 |
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Yeah my point was he ADMITTED that the md5 of the files, and thus every single bit of data was the same. But he insisted that they consistently sounded different. The one credit I will give him is he actually didn't try to come up with some bullshit reason for it. He just said "This is what I hear, I don't know why." And at least that I can respect. It's still crazy, but whatever floats his boat I guess. It's the people that make insane claims about how things work, like the existence of 'optical jitter' in CD players, that drive me insane. Shut up. If you think one thing sounds better, just say it. People will either try it or ignore you, so be it.
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Oct 6, 2009 04:08
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TheMadMilkman posted:
Master tape sounds soooooo good though. Seriously. Unfortunately the tape project's catalog is so small and the price is astronomical. (Like $200/record last I checked.) Elentor posted:I presume the biggest problem with the CD is the 16-bit rate instead of 24, and not the 44.1kHz right? Because I can't imagine many people being able to listen to the accurate frequency range of other formats. It's actually the sample rate (the 44.1khz part). And it's because 1/2 the frequency (called the Nyquist frequency) is so close (22.05khz) to the range of human hearing, it is difficult (re: impossible) to filter out the noise without inducing phase shift at high frequencies. A process called oversampling is used, which works fine (some crazy audiophiles complain about it, but mathematically it's basically inaudible.) However, on top of that, a lot of cheap (and some not so cheap) digital to analog converters use a process called noise shaping with low bit-width dacs. These high-order noise shaping filters are inherently unstable and are 'nontrivial'. Meaning there is no perfect one under all conditions. Personally they are one thing I avoid, although good R2R dacs are getting rare and expensive.
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Nov 2, 2009 23:42
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Doc Spratley posted:
Do you think Mark Levinson might have paid for design/development of the amp and then the chinese manufacturer gets a deal where they're allowed to sell it on the side under a different name (especially if it's not supposed to be shipped to the USA/Europe)? I definitely see stuff like that all the time. Of course which one came first doesn't chance the fact that it makes the markup really obvious and embarrassing.
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Nov 5, 2009 03:46
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Yeah there's a difference between a recording of a concert hall or something with a stereo pair of microphones and something that's just been mixed together (although maybe some engineers have equipment to do a transfer function that fakes it better). Simply making a sound louder on the left channel and quiet on the right is not nearly the same thing. BUT, as HKR said, this is a function of the recording and any half decent system should let you hear it, as well as almost any headphones. Beyond that it's just another magical 'thing' to make better using quantum beads or whatever.
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Dec 7, 2009 05:28
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I do a lot of fiddling, building my own tube headphone amplifier and so forth, and I'm always planning on what sort of ridiculous thing I'll buy once I have more money and a proper room to put it in and so forth. But the article linked a few pages back from the founder of Stereophile made me reflect a bit about actually reproducing what sounds real and I realized I've only ever experienced it in two distinct cases, with totally different systems. One is with fully horn loaded systems, like the vintage Klipsch stuff, and at the ridiculous top end, the Edgarhorn Titans. Especially for rock and roll, they sound incredible just because they sound like Pro/PA speakers to a large degree and have effortless midbass power (but not necessarily super bass extension). The other was a fullrange single driver horn loaded speaker (A fostex Sigma 208 in a double back horn), in this case the Cain & Cain BEN. I remember one of the grumpy old guys on the audioasylum forums talking about how you can always tell when you walk past a bar if there's a real band inside or just a stereo, and obviously it's not the 'soundstage' or frequency response or anything. But those two setups have it for me, regardless of the reason. I don't even remember the electronics hooked up to them, and I can't imagine it matters. Rescue Toaster fucked around with this message at 19:40 on Sep 14, 2017 |
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Jan 4, 2016 15:34
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Panty Saluter posted:http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/audiovideo/the-cool-sound-of-tubes/3/distortion Some of the better tubes have significantly lower distortion than MOSFETS and bipolar transistors, depending on what you're measuring. These measurements were taken without feedback so they're analyzing just the small signal distortion of the device itself. This is of questionable value as a single data point. The 300B is an astonishingly low distortion amplification device when run push pull, when you think about the power you're getting with only local feedback. No pair of transistors is going to get close in that power range without feedback. But when you've got the kind of gain that modern bjts and fets have, you can add so much feedback that the small signal distortion of the device is basically irrelevant. Rescue Toaster fucked around with this message at 04:37 on Jul 10, 2017 |
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Jul 10, 2017 03:42
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Not sure why I just thought of this but I once got into an argument with someone who claimed that two wav files ripped from the same CD and proven to be bitwise identical could sound different if the CD was 'treated' with markers and poo poo between the two rips. Like they had just heard the term 'jitter' once and assumed it meant all of physics was subjective.
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Aug 3, 2017 05:02
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 08:38 |
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Combat Pretzel posted:The audio community seems to have a hard-on (or at least used to, haven't checked up on that) for the rubber mantled power cables of the company I work at. Actually, they're manufactured in my department. I wonder what mumbo-jumbo they'd come up with when I'd tell them that each spool of final cable that exists the extrusion line gets subjected to 2KV AC for 15 minutes to test for defects. That sure fucks up their "burn-in". No, that speeds up the erosion of the electron channel, saving them break-in time. You should be charging extra for that service. The downside (upside?) is people will try to do it themselves to wire they bought elsewhere.
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Mar 9, 2019 17:00
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