We shouldn't be able to do this with sighted subjective listening, but we did...

[PeterSt]

From Post 29 :

 

Clicks and plops can happen with poorly implemented USB. It can also be due to other applications doing housework for example .

As an example this may even happen in a PC when listening to music while the email client is open and it does a regular scheduled check for new mail. Setting Audio at a higher priority or other processes to a lower priority, may help in that case.

If you record an output waveform where that is happening you may see glitches which show as small sections of missing data (<100mS) in the recovered analogue waveform.

 

LOL

 

What do you think I will be thinking when I read something like this ? So Alex, I am sorry, but this is 10 years back for me (think about my MinOS stuff which of course will not allow any email client in the hood).

But to be somewhat more constructive :

If such a thing happens (email would be audible because it causes distortions - disk head movement is another example) then 1:1M the grounding is wrong somewhere. IOW :

If email really would be able to imply such disturbances then I don't know what PC is in use, but it must be an Amiga or whatever prehistoric. So, out of the question, no matter how Dennis finds it a good suggestion. Sorry.

 

Something else is that I don't see the context with the buggy device, but that could be my too fast reading.

 

Peter

[sandyk]

From Post 29 :

 

 

 

LOL

 

What do you think I will be thinking when I read something like this ? So Alex, I am sorry, but this is 10 years back for me (think about my MinOS stuff which of course will not allow any email client in the hood).

But to be somewhat more constructive :

If such a thing happens (email would be audible because it causes distortions - disk head movement is another example) then 1:1M the grounding is wrong somewhere. IOW :

If email really would be able to imply such disturbances then I don't know what PC is in use, but it must be an Amiga or whatever prehistoric. So, out of the question, no matter how Dennis finds it a good suggestion. Sorry.

 

Something else is that I don't see the context with the buggy device, but that could be my too fast reading.

 

Peter

 

Peter

If you regularly read other areas of the forum you would realise that these kinds of things are still a problem, just as USB Mouse and Keyboard operation can still result in small clicks when listening to Audio for some members.

IIRC, it was you that originally prompted me to look at a recorded waveform for these clicks, and at the time I posted a screen grab of the waveform showing the small discontinuities.

 

Alex

Alex

[Jud]

Wow, a lot of great comments here, too many to respond to at once, so I will be taking each, or perhaps a handful, individually.

 

But first, some corrections are due on my part, as I jumped to some unwarranted conclusions on partial information.

 

Besides the flutter and the ticks and pops, the other problem I had with the equipment or software is that often the music stopped entirely. When I gave my feedback, I was told the second individual liked the same version I did in spite of having the same types of issues.

 

It turns out that "the same types of issues" applied only to the music stopping, not to the distortions I heard while music was playing. Those issues (the distortions) had been experienced by the third party, but had since been eliminated in their testing, as well as the issue with the music stopping. So the situation is that we all strongly prefer the same version; I and the second individual experienced the issue with the music stopping; and I am the only one currently experiencing distortions during play, though the third party had experienced them in prior versions of the equipment or software.

 

After discussions with the third party, what I'll be doing is making some changes to my system to see whether that eliminates either or both the distortions and the stoppages.

[Jud]

Personally I never considered it brutally honest. In the way back when, it was near unique in sounding delicate, detailed, never hard on its own, and simply honest. You had an overwhelming sense of rightness that you were hearing no editorializing by the Spectral gear. Not overly neat nor soft nor anything.

 

Not "analog"? That is a real shame ! Brutally honest is a "good thing" Sterile, not so much ...

 

In my case both have not been such good things, Genelec speakers were way too sterile to be any fun, and most of my equipment is on the forward/bright side, and they really show up everything downstream for exactly what it is, totally unforgiving. This pretty much makes bad mastering unplayable on my systems.

 

On the other hand, they are extremely fun on a Bose speaker sound dock, though they invariably lose all of the detail.

 

I agree with Dennis's (esldude's) characterization, which is why I own them. I was pointing out that I have read descriptions of Spectral equipment *by others* that have included the terms "honest," or even, in critiques, "sterile," but never adjectives like "warm," "colored," "analog," "tube-like." I wouldn't like "sterile" (or "warm") myself. To the extent any piece of equipment provides its own sound, it eventually becomes boring, even irritating. You come to realize there is a "sameness" to everything that is getting in the way of hearing the music. What I want ideally is something that imparts no sound of its own, that gets out of the way and lets through the full variety of the recordings I have. Of the electronics I've heard, Spectral and Pass come closest to doing that for me.

 

As always with only two data points it could as likely be coincidence as not.

 

However, the audio world is rife with such situations. Compression is one. Just a little compression will seem to make everything better to very nearly everyone. A moderate amount even will seem best by the great majority.

 

When done skilfully a little reverb of the right type also will seem far better to nearly everyone.

 

These are colorations pretty much no one is immune to even when generally preferring precise uncolored playback gear.

 

So what you are describing is interesting, but hardly unique nor difficult to believe nor requiring coincidence to be so.

 

It also shows why in my opinion, we should strive for the most accurate playback possible, and then color it to taste without guilt about doing so. It is mixing up accuracy and preference that I dislike.

 

The compression and (for my personal taste, to a lesser extent) reverb examples are very good ones. You're right, there's no possible way in the midst of the other audible stuff going on that I would catch something like that. Even with the distractions gone, it is possible the second individual and third party would subjectively prefer sound with just a little compression or perhaps a very little added reverb. (I'm subjectively pretty sensitive to added reverb, but if it's little enough, who knows?)

[davide256]

noise isn't distortion. We all live with recordings where performers scrape chairs, drop things or have instrument failures during performance. We tune these out easily in most cases. Actual distortion is pervasive and ongoing vs intermittent... like a white shirt that's picked up color from something else in the wash it makes you aware the product is a degraded copy.

[Jud]

To me the drum's on Shadowfax's "Another Country" are dramatic but unrealistic. They have an overly sharp attack and no natural decay, as though someone intentionally tried to emphasize certain frequencies. I found that I could achieve a similar effect through some of the iZotope settings in Aurdirvana, but as "dramatic" as they felt at first, I found them tiresome for longer listening sessions.

 

The one effect that seems never to tire me is when a variety of different live recordings can successfully depict the space they were recorded in. By that, I mean that a small venue sounds small and a concert hall sounds like one. When I reliably hear those subtle cues across a variety of content, then I'm comfortable that I have things dialed in properly.

 

This is a very good point. The drum attack is certainly tremendously sharp, and there is little if any decay. It is intentionally dramatic, and could well be (in fact, very likely is) processed to achieve that effect. That's what tells me the second version I listened to (the one without the evident distortions) was not accurate, because the (over-)dramatization was much less evident or entirely absent.

 

But while "Another Country" is useful for checking whether this specific drum sound is rendered correctly, you're absolutely right that you have to listen to a variety of content to come to valid conclusions. This is related to Dennis's point that a little compression or reverb can sound like an improvement to nearly any individual piece of music. (There are exceptions, which I use to check on these sorts of things. For example, I have a guitar piece - "The Prophet," by Rudy Perrone, from the album "The Gathering" - where the instrumentalist intentionally plays off the sustain, only beginning each new verse just as the sustained note from the previous verse dies. You can easily tweak iZotope to mess up the timing of that piece. Or there is Tom Waits' version of "Heigh Ho" from the brilliant album of Disney music covers by various artists, "Stay Awake." He does it as exactly the sort of industrial dirge you'd expect dwarves laboring in underground mines all day to sing. It has a "soundstage" about at my knee level. Great big soundstage on that song? Not accurate.)

[Jud]

Jud,

 

The only merit of some sort I see you writing about, is that the imaging seems more believable to you, but about there is stops (for me). And then still you won't know what reality was, especially with multitrack studio recording.

 

I don't see how "clarity" will be about more real instruments, although it will contribute (when it would be about the real clarity as the word tells literally).

 

My main issue, though, is this :

You talk about accuracy as your best measure, but you actually don't talk about that at all. Accuracy should be as in accurate numbers and not as the outcome of the multi page formula; When the formula seems to represent reality, well, it just does that. We don't say the formula is accurate, I'd say.

But why this BS ?

 

Because accuracy in music as such is a very technical thing, once you know what to listen for. Example :

When my speakers are faster than any transient in the music source is (this is not so, but alas), they can be accurate; they can follow all up to 100%. This represents a sound in itself.

Side note : to this regard the result of the sound can never be accurate, because digital filters can not be - the famous tradeoff between Time and Frequency domain, digital playback assumed. Still, we can imagine that a smeared time domain will never ever be observed as accurate (as in the numbers) because it just is not; it is smeared and you can hear it (with the reference of non-smeared). It is literally averaged, while it also could be the discrete number of the source (no ringing, frequency domain totally off).

 

Feel what I'm getting at ?

 

Difficult thing of course is that while the time domain could be 100% accurate, how to observe/judge the frequency domain which at the same time will be "100%" off. Is that a less realistic instrument perhaps ?

I have no answers to that, except for that we might wonder how we'll judge it as individuals. I mean, I may like each guitar while you may not like any of them, knowing that you play some. Or at least it could be so that the few you play yourself are recognized as unrealistic.

Sure you get that ...

 

Once you got the notion of what accurate is to the sense of how I imply it, you will never talk about accuracy as in "sounds realistic" any more. That is just another phenomenon. So ... I would never talk about my system as "all sounds realistic" because I can't know in the first place (never mind I feel I am mighty close these days). What I sure dare say though is that my system is super accurate, and whether I can show that depends on the dials of the day. Example of that : I must have been playing with XXHighEnd's "Low" filtering (for 32/705.6) for more than 6 months, until something finally started to bother me and I went back to the "High" setting only 3 days ago. And it is so much more accurate ...

Can I say that all sounds more realistic now ? no, not anywhere (at least not in this case). But a flavor was able to disappear, which was exactly which annoyed me to begin with.

 

 

I don't know whether your English is getting better or if I understand more of what you say the more I read, but I think I know exactly what you mean here.

 

If you say "Wow, that sounds so real," reality, in the sense of accuracy, is precisely what you cannot be hearing. Because reality is not constant drama. It is like the difference between working as a doctor and watching a TV drama in which actors play doctors. The latter is much more dramatic; it may even be so dramatic you say "Wow, that felt real," meaning actually you felt a heightened sense of emotion not at all typical of the great majority of a doctor's daily work.

 

As I said after hearing the Phasure DAC, it felt a lot like listening to singers or players in the room, in the sense that when my stepson plays his acoustic guitar, I don't run around weeping with emotion and exclaiming "Omigod, that sounds so amazingly like an actual acoustic guitar!" I simply think about whether he's played the piece well or not. If what we're listening to is in fact accurate, does in fact approach some piece of reality, then we should not be amazed at what we are hearing, or think "Those sound just like real drums/guitars/violins." We should be thinking about whether the producers and engineers and players and singers did their jobs well. When you go to a concert and experience the reality of live music, that's the type of thing you think about - whether the "hall sound" is good at your seat (equivalent to the engineers and producers on recordings), and whether the players and/or singers are doing a good job. To the extent this (and only this) is what you think about when listening at home, to this extent your system may approach reality.

[Jud]

noise isn't distortion. We all live with recordings where performers scrape chairs, drop things or have instrument failures during performance. We tune these out easily in most cases. Actual distortion is pervasive and ongoing vs intermittent... like a white shirt that's picked up color from something else in the wash it makes you aware the product is a degraded copy.

 

Also a good point. One can listen past ticks and pops and other noises, though a "fluttering" alto sax is somewhat distracting, I have to tell you. Still, I think there is something to Dennis's point that with such distractions it is very easy to lose something like just a little added compression making things sound more dramatic and punchy.

[alfe]

Audio Distortion | How to Add Weight, Warmth and Volume to Your Mix - Hip Hop Rally – Hip Hop Rally

[alfe]

Or being serious :http://www.bksv.ru/doc/BO0385.pdf

[mansr]

noise isn't distortion. We all live with recordings where performers scrape chairs, drop things or have instrument failures during performance. We tune these out easily in most cases. Actual distortion is pervasive and ongoing vs intermittent... like a white shirt that's picked up color from something else in the wash it makes you aware the product is a degraded copy.

 

Distortion is by definition a non-linear response. Noise is uncorrelated with the input but can otherwise take any shape.

[Jud]

Distortion is by definition a non-linear response. Noise is uncorrelated with the input but can otherwise take any shape.

 

So phase noise correlated with input ought not to be called phase "noise"?

[alfe]

Peter

 

Be careful too, as some of your posts come very close to unpaid advertising. (wink)

 

Kind Regards

Alex

P.S.

 

And how do you call your 2000 comments about Regen.

[mansr]

So phase noise correlated with input ought not to be called phase "noise"?

If you mean clock phase noise, the noise itself generally isn't correlated with the input. The effect of clock phase noise on the output is, however, proportional to the amplitude of the signal. If the phase noise is random, you get a noise floor rising and falling with the signal level. Sinusoidal phase noise causes side bands around every frequency component of the input. The end result is an error that can be characterized as part noise and part distortion.

[Jud]

If you mean clock phase noise, the noise itself generally isn't correlated with the input. The effect of clock phase noise on the output is, however, proportional to the amplitude of the signal. If the phase noise is random, you get a noise floor rising and falling with the signal level. Sinusoidal phase noise causes side bands around every frequency component of the input. The end result is an error that can be characterized as part noise and part distortion.

 

Thank you, that was informative.

[Jud]

After discussions with the third party, what I'll be doing is making some changes to my system to see whether that eliminates either or both the distortions and the stoppages.

 

I did, and it did (eliminate both distortions and stoppages). My preference remains the same.

[semente]

I did, and it did (eliminate both distortions and stoppages). My preference remains the same.

 

The million dollar question is whether you prefer accuracy or euphony?

[jabbr]

Sinusoidal phase noise causes side bands around every frequency component of the input. The end result is an error that can be characterized as part noise and part distortion.

 

+1 which is why this is an important type of phase noise to minimize, also difficult because under a PLL corner frequency.

[alfe]

+1 which is why this is an important type of phase noise to minimize, also difficult because under a PLL corner frequency.

 

[Jud]

The million dollar question is whether you prefer accuracy or euphony?

 

Yes, it's a question I'm always asking. Impossible to know for sure, but in general I haven't liked equipment that has a reputation for being euphonic, and have liked equipment with a reputation for accuracy.

[semente]

Yes, it's a question I'm always asking. Impossible to know for sure, but in general I haven't liked equipment that has a reputation for being euphonic, and have liked equipment with a reputation for accuracy.

 

Yes, your equipment selection speaks in your favour.

 

You never replied to my question: did you use Mario's files during the evaluating?

[Jud]

Yes, your equipment selection speaks in your favour.

 

You never replied to my question: did you use Mario's files during the evaluating?

 

I haven't so far, but there is still time.

[sandyk]

And how do you call your 2000 comments about Regen.

 

The difference is that I am not selling anything, or receiving any commission from saying what I think about the Regen, based on my own experience with the device using an improved power supply for it. In fact, in HFC Forum I have suggested that the Intona Isolator, which is a more recent product may be a better alternative than just the Regen, although I also said that quite a few report further SQ improvements when using the Regen in tandem with the Intona Isolator.

[Superdad]

I find it humorous--and a bit flattering--that the REGEN, our modest optimized USB hub-at-the-DAC device, gets dragged into nearly every subjectivist/objectivist argument. On this forum and others. Clearly it really struck a nerve with both camps over the past year.

Wait until you see our encore...

[jabbr]

I find it humorous--and a bit flattering--that the REGEN, our modest optimized USB hub-at-the-DAC device, gets dragged into nearly every subjectivist/objectivist argument. On this forum and others. Clearly it really struck a nerve with both camps over the past year.

Wait until you see our encore...

 

I find it perplexing that there are such widespread issues with USB!