Synergistic Research: SCAM

[Confused]

If we are doing car and aircraft analogies.

 

In terms of safety, performance and similar considerations, car and aircraft designers tend to take due consideration of the laws of physics.

 

Many Synergistic Research products do not.

 

Sorry, that is not a very good analogy., Maybe just a fact?

[Confused]

1 hour ago, fas42 said:

The whole audio industry has a very poor grasp of what is essential, and what is of minor importance, when creating new products ... if this were not the case, why do we still have audio shows where expensive rigs are almost unlistenable in one room, and SOTA, subjectively, in the next?

At the last show I visited there was nothing I would classify as "unlistenable", but some rooms were not as good as others for sure, and not in order of cost of the kit.

 

My view is that 99% of this is related to the basic set-up in the room.

 

I know that you will not agree with this, by the way! 🙂

 

A a converse argument. At the last show I visited I spent a lot of time listening to many headphones, in two different rooms, different headphones and electronics.

 

Some kit I liked more than others, but nominally everything I tried sounded very good.

 

In one room operated by a UK dealer who specialises in headphones they must have had a dozen or more systems running simultaneously. So not an ideal environment form an electrical interference perspective, but nevertheless everything sounded good.

 

The only one difference to this and the speaker based systems really, the room.

 

(That's not me in the picture, by the way)

 

 

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13 hours ago, Racerxnet said:

High quality cables that were purchased, and you forgot about the other 1000 feet from the pole/transformer to the breaker box. Then from the romex to the wall plug. Of course, the manufacturer never thought about noise on the line and so you purchased some filters for the amps and pre. You want to hear a change for the money spent, and confirmation bias fullfilled the need. It always improves no matter what. The more spent, the better the improvement. 

This comment reminds me of the one time I was at a dealer. They were demonstrating a system that was being fed from a Shunyata power conditioner. (Shunyata, not to be confused with Synergistic)

 

Now this is fine for me. The Shunyata power conditioners seem to be reasonably well engineered and respected devices. Depending on the quality of your own domestic mains and the sensitivity of your own hifi kit to clean mains, maybe such a product could help? There are certainly technical reasons why this might be the case.

 

So far so good. The bit that puzzled me though was why this super duper power conditioner, that presumably can filter out and correct all mains nasties that proceed it, needed a £3.5K power cord between the wall and the conditioner itself.

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2 hours ago, fas42 said:

But audiophiles are obsessed with bling ... if it comes in a fancy wooden box, with cotton gloves to install it ... well, gosh, it must be fabulous! With the right price tag too, of course ...

Excellent, that's another one for my collection.

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7 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

Lowering the "noise floor" is the name of the game. If you have a system which is on the edge of the necessary SQ, then doing something which pushes it over to the necessary integrity can be quite a shock- this happened to me many decades ago. At that time I didn't have a handle on the cause and effect link, so I spent months and months with a setup that kept flipping between below and above required quality; this guaranteed I had a rock solid understanding of the difference in the subjective standard .

 

The noise back then came from static - but I didn't know this; I gave up on solving that one. Static and noise originating from the physical structure of, say, cables is a biggy - this is why the SR devices do help, when a setup has too much interference in parts of the chain - currently, I'm still finding adjusting the cables in my present system absolutely critical to optimising SQ; the slightest misstep is enough to degrade what I hear, giving me unsatisfactory sound.

I sometimes wonder about claims of "lowering the noise floor".

 

On another forum, I once mentioned that with no music playing, I could set my system to maximum volume, and hear absolutely nothing, no hum, no buzz, genuinely I could not hear any sound of any kind. So what is this noise floor that people refer to, does it suddenly appear only when music is playing?

 

In response to this, someone pointed out that some DACs effectively cut the output if no signal is being received. A fair point I think.

 

Later I tried an experiment. I ran my system using HQplayer, and set the HQplayer volume to -60dBFS. I ran my system at full volume. Even going right up to one speaker, I could hear no noise, nothing, just very very quiet music. Note that in normal circumstances I cannot run the system at full volume, the SPLs reach genuinely painful and levels before I get to full volume.

 

Maybe I am still missing something here, but the more objective types point out that most modern kit has noise levels that are so low that it is essentially beyond the threshold of human hearing. When I try an experiment to establish if this is also true subjectively, I find that indeed it is.

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2 minutes ago, fas42 said:

Yep, it's a dynamic thing. No music, no noise. With music, low level details are masked by the addition of noise; effectively, the say 96dB dynamic range of CD digital is not happening - the detail may still emerge, but is buried in mush; the ear/brain can't descramble it ... you have your classic,"bad recording!", .

Did you miss the bit when I detailed the results of playing actual music at -60 dBFS?

 

There was very quiet music, and zero noise.

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7 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

Noise ain't noise ... that is, what you hear is not going to be something like the twittering of tape hiss - something which is obviously nothing to do with the music. The noise of digital chains is embedded in the fabric of the music - the infamous digititus is the same thing, and in that case very obvious. So, you don't hear its presence - what you will definitely hear is its absence ... the words people often use is something like, "Wow, this sounds sooo analogue ... "

Ah, OK. So this would be measured as a "signal to signal" ratio, as this noise is not noise.

 

So what are, say, the top three causes of the "noise" that that imbeds itself in music? 

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16 minutes ago, DrT said:

Why do tube amps in general measure poorly but sound beautiful and why do most solid state amps (particularly when compared to tubes) measure perfectly but sound flat & two dimensional? There's an intangible, unmeasureable aspect to sound, our hearing, and how we process it that defies scientific measure.

Is this mysterious? In many respects tube amps tend to measure quite well. They might have more measurable distortion than solid state, but this is typically harmonic distortion. Harmonic distortion is generally euphonic, so from a scientific and measurement point of view, a well engineered tube amp should sound great. Nothing intangible to see (hear) here.

[Confused]

On 6/19/2022 at 12:40 PM, Blackmorec said:

Here are few sources of noise that will benefit SQ when cleaned up

 

Wi-fi devices close to sensitive audio components

SMPSs on the mains supply

Poor quality power supplies

Oscillators (phase noise)

CPUs and Switching chip activity

Circuit board SMPSs

General cable and component leakage

General EMI in the environment 

Network traffic

 

No doubt much of the above stuff matters to some extent. As an example, it is well established how much noise some SMPSs can drive back into the mains.

 

That said, there is one point I made earlier that nobody has a (sensible and logical) answer to. In my system I can reduce the level of the music by -60dBFS (which is a lot) run my system at full volume (which normally would be ear shattering SPLs), and hear nothing but very faint music. When reducing the HQPlayer volume level by 60dBFS, the ONLY thing I am reducing in volume is the 1's and 0's that make up the music file. SMPS noise or anything else is not reduced by a software digital volume control.

 

I am not saying that there is no benefit from anything in your list, but I think the -60dBFS experiment must tell us something about what matters, where, and by how much.

 

I think the more the we can understand the exact mechanisms, the better we can focus out time and money on what matters. It is about knowledge and understanding.

 

And as an aside, when people say "trust your ears", I trust mine to a degree, but when we are at the very small change to SQ level I do not fully trust my ears. The problem I have with my ears is that they are connected to my brain, which is something not to be fully trusted I can assure you. (other brains might vary)

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10 minutes ago, Blackmorec said:

The SMPS noise isn’t noise you can hear directly….its far too high frequency. The SMPS noise has some sort of modulating effect on the conversion of the digital stream to an analog music signal so what you hear isnt SMPS noise per se, its the SMPS noise’s effect on the creation of the analog signal. The SMPS noise interferes with the conversion of digital stream to analog signal so what you hear has been subtly changed by the SMPS noise. You don't hear the SMPS as separate noise, you hear it as a loss of fidelity.   

Thinking about this. My headphone system uses a SMPS powered RME ADI-2 DAC fs. I also have a Paul Hynes SR-4 sat on a shelf doing nothing.

 

So there is an easy enough subjective experiment I could try here when I have some time.

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14 hours ago, One and a half said:

Apart from a physical connector issue, the SR-4 should be capable of supplying the RME with 12V @ 2A with ease.  You should hear a difference (for the better) right away.

I checked the SR-4 cable that I have, the connector was originally for an sMS-TX-USBultra. It looks identical in size to the RME connector, and it physically fits. So unless I am missing something subtle here, I am good to go.

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8 hours ago, fas42 said:

No, it doesn't. I bought a reasonable Yamaha player, a CD-1050, from a pawnbroker once; and tried the -60dB test. What it told me was that one channel was down in linearity, but the other one was fine. The slightly poor one made some hashy noises, a bit like a tube guitar amp with the gain wound right up - but with normal material this weakness was completely inaudible.

How did you do an equivalent type -60dB test with a CD player? 

 

8 hours ago, fas42 said:

Yes, people say this all the time ... and then ignore anyone who doesn't follow the accepted lines of thinking, .

 

Personally, I do not ignore anyone who does does not accept the accepted lines of thinking, as long as the thinking they are describing is logical.

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4 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

By using a Denon CD, full of test tracks - have had this one since the 80s. Some classical music, at 0, -20, -40, -60dbs, on successive tracks.

 

 

Did you have this one?

 

https://www.discogs.com/release/5794742-No-Artist-Denon-Audio-Technical-CD

 

I thought that my -60dBFS idea was pure genius, but I see Denon beat me to it by 38 years. 🙁

 

Definitely a useful tool for tracking down noise issues.

[Confused]

40 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

I'm feeling lucky today, I really think some conclusions and agreements are within reach, in this thread. 

 

Only kidding. 

Can we agree that with audio, for any view, any opinion on a particular piece of kit, any idea for improving a system, you will without question find someone who disagrees with that view?

 

I bet someone will come along an disagree with the above before too long ....

[Confused]

On 6/23/2022 at 12:26 AM, fas42 said:

What I need to tweak for has changed - decades ago, amplifiers were pretty hopeless; with SQ that collapsed when higher volumes were asked for. These days, noise and interference problems - which always been a key issue - are still the big ones to address. No-one does measurements that actually detect these factors; meaning everyone has to chase band-aids, and "snake oil", to try and improve the integrity of their setups.

Are you sure nobody has performed measurements relating to noise and interference issues? I have seen some.

 

Maybe you do not think that the right measurements have been performed?

 

So in terms of the issues that you think need addressing when "sorting" an audio system, what type of measurements would you like to see performed. For example, could you suggest some experiments that would cover the static issues that concern you? Or anything for the cable touching and moving scenarios? Measurements that would identify changes to the mains feed, electrical interference or anything else? What is practical? What would satisfy you? 

 

Where I am coming from here, I am not a great fan of the subjectivist versus objectivist thing. If something can be subjectively observed, lets find a way to identify the cause, measure it, test it, understand it, improve it further.

 

What do you suggest? Maybe you and @Archimagocould join forces? He seems to be good at measuring things and I'm sure he'd welcome a bit of "blue sky" thinking in terms of testing methodology. You might even become friends and make the audio discovery of the decade - Synergistic Research look out!

[Confused]

On 6/19/2022 at 12:40 PM, Blackmorec said:

Wi-fi devices close to sensitive audio components

SMPSs on the mains supply

Poor quality power supplies

Oscillators (phase noise)

CPUs and Switching chip activity

Circuit board SMPSs

General cable and component leakage

General EMI in the environment 

Network traffic

 

Thinking about this, lets take one example, say swapping a SMPS with a LPSU. Lets say I try this with my ADI-2 DAC fs, remove the factory supplied SMPS , swap in my SR-4, and I hear an improvement.

 

Is there any way to establish why the LPSU offered an improvement? We can speculate that eliminating noise and interference from the SMPS is a factor. But what if it is not and it is actually something else offering the improvement? As an example, I recall the last time I was looking at LPSU options, one factor that many people keep highlighting was the importance of low output impedance of the regulator circuitry. I also know that people like Paul Hynes would talk about transient response and ultra low settling time.

 

This post kind of relates to the one above. I firmly believe we need to do more to align subjective experiences with what can be measured.

 

Yes, we can swap in a LPSU and hear a difference, but unless we know exactly why the difference has manifested itself then it is possible we waste time focusing on the wrong things.

 

I firmly believe that we need a term for those half way between the subjectivist and objectivist camps. After all, it seems to me that most of us want the same thing, the best sound quality for money. A while back I proposed the term "lucidist"  - it hasn't caught on!