USB audio cracked... finally!

[fas42]

Peter is one of the very rare individuals who has also discovered the magic that lies within recordings that nearly everyone else has discarded as not being worth listening to - he is still hestitant about whether all recordings can be "rescued", but he can rest assured that it will be difficult to find anything that can't rise, phoenix like, from the ashes of crap sound .

 

Above he mentioned Deep Purple - Machine Head: I have an original, unfiddled with release - and this is an amazing album - blows all the audiophile "rubbish" I've heard 100's of yards into the weeds . So much to hear in it, with fabulous changes of pace and atmosphere. So, you see, it's very easy for me to appraise some unknown rig - if it can't extract at least some of the magic in this recording then it's stuck in first gear; it's trivial to be able to hear what a system is doing wrong, once you know what to listen for ...

[fas42]

2 hours ago, Speed Racer said:

Come on, now. Peter is not somehow unique or a "rare individual" in this regard. Let's not put him on too high a pedestal.

 

It's using the word "rare" in the sense of very few who have determined this, having come to having such an attitude from various experiences over the years - nothing to do with pedestals, much more to do with lucky "accidents", and having a keen curiousity to investigate interesting behavious when they happen - and not just ignoring them as "one of those things" ...

 

I happened to start with a "lucky accident", got extremely frustrated because I couldn't control what was happening, gave it away for many years; then was reinspired and tried again, and slowly but surely got a better handle on things ... it was never an easy road.

[fas42]

40 minutes ago, Audiophile Neuroscience said:

I am lucky to have a fine system and have striven for transparency, the system and room getting out of the way of the music. I have been startled at how good some old stuff can sound and for example, cliche or not, have been rediscovering old music from Julie London to Dire Straits. There is a lot of information hitherto not realized on some old recordings. Then, if your system removes every ounce of *superimposed* grain, noise,glare and other artefacts there are additional boosts.

 

I am talking about reaping the benefits of increased transparency and not further detracting with superimposed flaws. Not sonic sunglasses coloring the playback.

 

My prediction is that the best system on the planet *should* resolve and render a bad recording as a bad recording.Best sound will come from best recordings. People who say everything sounds great on their great system I believe are listening to euphonic colored sound, a facsimile of the real thing, not Hi- Fidelity, faithful to source. I have no issue with that, just not my cup of tea.

 

 

The best system on the planet will both reveal a bad recording as such, and allow one to fully immerse oneself in the music, and enjoy it fully, as a powerful, emotional experience. Allow me an analogy: a master music player performs on his instrument, completely acoustic; firstly in an excellent concert hall, with you near him - this is a top class recording scenario. Then he plays again, outside on a busy street, "busking" for passerbys; you are the same distance from him - and there is all the background noise of the street, cars passing, the works ... this is the, 'bad' recording!

 

Now, some people would say they wouldn't be able to appreciate the musicianship in the latter situation - but I certainly can! The musical event, and all the acoustic muck that happens to accompanies it, are heard as two separate entities - it's trivially easy to focus on the musical event, and it is also possible to shift one's focus on the additional detritus - but the latter is much harder to do, because it is somewhat random, and certainly far less interesting as an acoustic experience.

[fas42]

Main problem with over-compressed recordings is that the lack of light and shade is very wearing in the listening - it doesn't sound distorted, rather that THEY'RE JUST GOING FULL BORE, ALL THE TIME!!! See, those last words aren't 'crap', they're just irritatingly "in your face" - and you wouldn't want to keep seeing that 'boldness', constantly.

 

A solution is to decompress overly irksome recordings - I've done some experiments, which were quite successful ... a really intelligent algorithm could undo most of the damage, with the changes essentially invisible, I believe.

[fas42]

2 hours ago, Audiophile Neuroscience said:

 

Agreed, but you have started with a "master musician". He or she could be enjoyed if played in a cupboard, the brain sorting through the distractions of sub optimal circumstances. This also applies to a good recording, it can be appreciated even on a car radio! Even better on a great HiFi.

A crappy musician OTOH sounds bad anywhere. He or she can be improved but will never sound like the virtuoso.Always best to start with quality.

 

Which then leads to the question of what you consider to define a bad recording - is it because it sounds "bad" on your system; or because the musicians are not very good at creating music; or because the musical ideas are very pedestrian, and repetitive; or because the recording "engineers" appear to have been very sloppy, or fixated on some tiresome sets of guidelines in the mastering, etc ... ?

[fas42]

7 hours ago, PeterSt said:

 

For fun, try The Beastie Boys - Fight for your Right on your main rig and try to get it right there. I think I have it with the necessary umph and body these days but it really needs some wild changes.

And in the car it is fine to begin with.

 

I'm pretty sure that most people will regard this a boat load of noise, badly recorded and a lot of shouting meanwhile. I think it is a great track for the tunes and even the lyrics, it is not badly recorded at all, but it is not inherently suitable for a "nice system". But mind you, those distortion guitars can really sound beautiful once you got the necessary air(iness) into them. 

Try Rammstein; one degree less rough and with that beautiful all over. Yes, I said "beautiful". 

 

I use a variety of high energy albums, recorded roughly or with no special care, as "ball-breakers" for  systems - if they make a mess of them, then it shows that there is plenty of work to be done, to sort the problems out ...

 

A couple that happened to come to mind last night was,

 

 

and

 

https://www.discogs.com/Ike-Tina-Turner-Rockin-And-Rollin/release/7028894

 

The latter in particular is mastered incredibly "hot", the slightest problems with treble makes it sheer torture to listen to - only to be used in the final round of confirmation of system competence!! ...

[fas42]

17 hours ago, Audiophile Neuroscience said:

 

If confining the discussion to HiFi then no, the particular performance of the artist/s is a different topic. You mentioned live musicians in your analogy you made so I ran with it. Running further with it I would ask you this: If an artist delivered a shocking performance which was recorded would you expect the best HiFi in the world to make it sound great? I would expect not, you would hear every flat and bum note....absolutely gorgeously reproduced!

 

The reproduction of a poor musician should be as as embarassing and unsettling as listening to it live - the only saving grace could possibly be that the texture of the accompanying instruments makes up for the lacking ...

 

Along these lines, I present ... Yehudi Menuhin - I struggle listening to recordings of the old man play, his technique is close to intolerable, for me, to put up with ...

[fas42]

19 hours ago, PeterSt said:

I am not sure how many are helped with this, but if one only I am already happy :

 

So I have my own Lush in use now for quite some months. I quickly got used to its "sound" and am amazed each day again how albums I have known forever, now suddenly sound for the so much better. But ... this always has been with one consistent set of settings in XXHighEnd I was used to, hence, I never tried anything else, which I already shouldn't because of changing two things at the time (like USB cable plus settings). But a week ago I started with that, actually encouraged by a new XXHighEnd version with inherently better SQ to begin with and so automatically from one came the other. And what I now notice is that this cable allows for "infinitely" tweaking SQ by means of changes at the source (which is the playback software). The SQ suddenly is outrageous and the Lush is doing something quite differently from before : it carries another dimension. But let me quit being a commercial by means of this :

 

I started thinking about posting this because elsewhere I just posted about W10 Build 10074 and how this sounds like total crap now, while it has been my standard for 6 months or so. The difference ? the Lush. There is no single way that this OS can ever be made to sound satisfactory, so bad it is. There is just no mid, to name something. Bass is devastating, highs are thin as thin can be.

Point sort of is : 10074 always had a flavor which never is a good thing. But, I could like it, until a new (supported) build came about and that became the reference/standard for a longer time (these are matters all XXHighEnd users agree over easily). So, 10074 is wrong somewhere and the Lush brings that forward wherever it can. At least that is my reasoning now.

 

Yesterday it was Haloween. For me this meant that I found a couple of "Haloween" albums on Tidal, of which many appear to be up to hard core metal. It sounded gorgeous.  Now *that* is something (a kind of big victory that this can happen, right ?).

The other day we talked about Beastie Boys and how they now sound so good in a "hi-fi" system. But metal ?

 

 

 

Yes, the general trends are: the more "debugging" is done, as in eliminating particular system deficiencies and weakness, the more intensely, glaringly obvious are the remaining issues - one is so much more aware of the sound being 'right', versus being 'wrong', depending upon almost anything. In the end, something like a single poor quality metal contact, somewhere, anywhere in the chain, can be the difference between audio hell, or heaven - the knowledge that is vital is being aware that such is just how it works ...

 

Powerfully driving, hard rock and similar tracks are excellent stress tests - they have been recorded well, it's now up to the playback chain to get its act together, and not be a total wuss when trying to reproduce them.

[fas42]

8 hours ago, Teresa said:

I’ve been back and forth and the Lush sounds more like live music to me. Voices, instruments and the recording space sound more realistic. More ambiance retrieval, more body and attack in musical instruments, more lushness in vocals. What I don’t totally understand is why? However, I am liking how my high resolution music files sound with the Lush. By contrast the Dynex USB sounds a little cold, it was hard to go back to listening to music with the Dynex after living with the Lush for two weeks, but I did.

 

This is the process. It's always doing whatever's necessary to get closer to what's on the recording, alone - and each step is removing one or more artifices that the playback chain introduces into the mix. That you suggest your gear would be considered midfi by some has nothing to do with anything - I've spent most of my tweaking time with equipment that people have ridiculed often, as being of such a low order of performance that my results must be fantasies. But my interest is in the learning - and it's very clear that extremely low cost audio gear can be made to operate at an extremely competent level - far beyond what most people with very expensive rigs ever get to hear.

[fas42]

Man, how it takes so many words to say that altering an aspect of a system can change the nature of unwanted artifacts in the sound - for all sorts of simple, and complex reasons, . I would go mad trying to unscramble all that counter counter counter stuff ...

 

I'm a simple man ... I just want to hear what's on the recording, the playback chain must be as invisible as possible - I don't care if something is different with the sound, I just want it to get closer to what was captured at the time of the musical event. And this is relatively easy to sort out if one can always pick when the playback chain is the culprit - then you don't worry about differences, you just want to eliminate the flaws in the setup.

[fas42]

9 hours ago, CuteStudio said:

 

 

It's an interesting observation, let me tell you my perspective as an aside:

About 14 years ago I realised that the games and politics that go on in the recording and mastering chain (many involving multiple DA-compress+limit-AD chains and the truncation of up to 6dB off all of the peaks to 'fit' something onto a CD format disk or stream) concerned me far more than the playback chain.

 

This was the result of a multi-day operation to cure an odd buzzing sound that came and went on my HiFi. It wasn't the speaker connections, or a loose RCA, or a bad USB cable, and after a while I worked out that it didn't affect old 'Floyd or Dire Straits at all: just the new stuff, at which point I used Audacity to look at the CD content and that showed the problem.

 

It was this that made me relax about the law of diminishing returns in the playback chain, my efforts were merely giving me a clearer image/sound/insight into the terrible disasters that I quickly got tired of buying. As it's almost impossible to buy any rock/pop album with even a single track complete with all the peaks not looking like they'd been run through a mangle today it takes most of my time to find something decent to play.

 

I did find this though - no connection to me - but the quality is amazing. 

http://evo88.com/en/music?page=shop.browse&keyword=chlara

http://smarturl.it/Chlara_InADifferent

 

 

And in turn this directs me to a learning that has evolved over decades: "there is no such thing as a bad recording" - take 3 times a day, after a meal ...

 

What that means is a system can be evolved to a point where all the flaws of the recording become subjectively invisible - it becomes a mental effort to focus on the technical failings, as something that's part of the aural picture - as compared to many systems which forcefully draw one's attention to every tiny defect in the recording source.

 

Extreme mashing of source is the worst 'problem', I do agree - but intelligent decompression can get such under control - I would see doing that as being part of a playback chain which has been optimised in every possible way.

[fas42]

36 minutes ago, CuteStudio said:

 

If you can describe/design a system that make's Norah Jones 'The Fall' listenable toI'll be all ears  

 

"Chasing Pirates"? - never heard it before - I'm liking it more and more, with each repeat ... . Found a YouTube clip, grabbed the best audio version, had a look in Audacity - hmmm, classic limiting, running the peaks to the max constantly - the laptop playback doesn't like full level stuff, so just give it 0.5dB attentuation, for a touch of breathing space, and export to WAV. Use Media Monkey - very nice, the voice works well, lots of heavily processed backing stuff, like the piano ... but full of Easter eggs - it's an interesting listen, I could be tempted to buy the album ...

[fas42]

6 hours ago, Doak said:

 

Great that something so simple works for you. 

Such simplicity would not result in the quality/type of sound many of us are getting out our music systems, however. It's another one of those age old questions/debates - as old as music reproduction. 

 

What's "simple" for me is hearing whether the sound is correct or not - and that, yes, simply means that there is nothing in the sound that disturbs me, draws my attention to the fact that I'm only listening to reproduction - it is as per the "real thing", the same vitality and sense of specialness pervades what's happening around me - I'm certainly not just staring at a pair of speakers squawking away, trying to imitate life, and quite obviously not succeeding ...

 

A good fortune occurred to me 30 years ago - the system, extremely simple in its nature - that word again - snapped into place, totally unexpectedly. I was literally staggered, I had no expectation or experiences of this - it was the full deal; speakers 100% invisible, and a sense of space that was overwhelming. Super expensive rigs I heard after that were ludicrously incompetent, in comparison. So, one thing is indeed simple - knowing what the goal is ...

 

However, achieving that is not simple - that's hard work, obsessive attention to detail, never being satisfied with "almost good enough" - worrying about "balancing" aspects of how the sound comes across is not the way.

[fas42]

3 hours ago, Doak said:

 

Seems we are quite possibly pursuing similar goals ,,, just have different ways of expressing it.

 

Highly likely, . From what others have said, how they've recounted some audio experiences they've had - there's a common thread. That being, at some time point of time, in some particular circumstance, they've heard a system, their own or somebody else's, deliver a burst of "magic" sound - which has knocked their socks off. Which galvanises them to assiduously pursue repeating the experience ...

 

Because of the circumstances of the original experience, a belief forms that "there is a way", which must be followed for success - and the followers tend to stick pretty strongly to that path. My particular shtick is understanding how far one can push extracting high SQ, in terms of cheapness, and variety of equipment - the good news is that amazingly pedestrian gear can deliver the goods, if one understands what's particularly important, and what can be largely ignored.

[fas42]

13 hours ago, PeterSt said:

Theoretically because of less distortion. So say that where the highs jumped out because of being false (it is distortion really) you can play louder because it does not annoy. From there - but it does it by itself already to some degree - there is more umpf under everything. More fundament.

 

"Fuller" sound, a subjective sense of a diference in volume, with the same gain setting, are all markers of getting closer to sound which has no artifacts from the playback system mixed in. It all can be related to the experience of listening to 'natural' sounds - as an experiment, get someone to play a musical instrument, or failing that, some other quite intense sound - and 'observe' how your hearing reacts to that sound, as you get closer, and further from the source. Our hearing system adapts to the volume in a very instinctive manner, and can handle moments of sharp SPLs with complete ease - and that's exactly how competent playback will come across - it mirrors how 'natural' sounds are preceived.

[fas42]

1 hour ago, Speed Racer said:

...

 

So what did I find out? I found out that music sounds better with the Lush USB cable in place. The Lush USB cable does something to reduce the workload of the USB PHY in my Yggdrasil with Gen 5 USB. I also found out that the Topaz isolation transformer is critical to getting the best sound quality out of my system. I found that a quality LPS in place of an SMPS helps sound quality a lot too.

 

Finally, I found out that how the system works together is the most important factor in getting the best sound quality.

 

This is a very good account of the process of "debugging" a system - the components are able to do the job quite nicely, but a lack of 'ruggedness' of the overall is holding the potential back; actively recognising what's happening and doing something about it is the smartest way to make fast gains to getting better sound.

 

Sibilance and "digital harshness" are giveaways - they mean that the system playback is contributing audible anomalies, which can be eliminated if the right measures are taken.

[fas42]

Gearslutz has done quite an extensive thread where interested parties have posted captures of a particular file after it's passed through a whole variety of 'professional' DA/AD loops, https://www.gearslutz.com/board/gear-shoot-outs-sound-file-comparisons-audio-tests/607481-evaluating-ad-da-loops-means-audio-diffmaker.html, and tried using DiffMaker to give meaning to those. Of little value in itself, but I'm trying an exercise of examining the waveforms to see what's interesting there - and indeed there is. Some "pro" converters make a right mess of the audio HF content, others do it almost perfectly - so, "transparency" ain't a given ...

 

Now, precisely what's happening is another story ... but it does demonstrate that one can see misbehaviour in supposedly correct circuitry.

[fas42]

42 minutes ago, CuteStudio said:

After looking at some measurements showing that susceptible DACs worked better with short cables I saw a suggestion to eliminate the cable entirely. As this also tidied up the HiFi area I now use one of these:

 

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/USB-Adapter-female-male-to-male-plug-type-A-B-micro-mini-coupler-gender-changer/282418030187

 

It sounds very sweet, clear and detailed indeed (exactly the same as the previous cable in fact), and the cable doesn't influence the sound because there is no cable.

 

QED, now I can use that $300 digital cable budget to buy some more CDs with

 

What's the world coming to?!! Gosh, solving an issue by eliminating the bits that cause it, rather than spending large amounts of time, effort, and money fiddling with umpteen variations of those bits ... that's the sort of thing that wrecks hobbies, you know!!

 

Who knows when it will end!!! God forbid, one day someone will put everything into one box, and it will work beautifully with no extra fussing required - The Day the HiFi Died ...

[fas42]

49 minutes ago, elcorso said:

I remain faithful to my Lush, it gives me the musicality and free of noise that I like so much.

 

 

 

This is one part of competent sound, and an essential one - if the "musicality" is lost at the expense of some other "gain", then you're going in the wrong direction; or, you've elected to try and attain competency from a different direction, which most likely will require another, alternative set of optimising and tweaking procedures to recover the "musicality".

[fas42]

8 hours ago, elcorso said:

 

I never talked about "masking".  My gear is the contrary, revealing and harmonic rich.

 

if it comes from the recording I do not listen to it anymore, and if the interpretation is still bad, it ends up in the trash.

 

I don't want to talk about brand names because someone may feel offended...

 

Roch

 

The remarkable thing about recordings, and the human hearing system, is that the latter is very forgiving if sufficient clues, detail is reproduced from those recordings with no extra distortion in key areas added. "Trash" recordings can reveal great riches, and end up being one's favourites, because of what has been captured at the time the microphones were switched on. This in fact is an important indicator of a system's competence; because the better the latter becomes, the more recordings that one rejects as poor come fully to life, and are given full marks as being worthy of being heard.

[fas42]

11 minutes ago, elcorso said:

 

Strange logic for me ... I hope that my system reproduces what is recorded as it was recorded, not that it does "repairs", because it would not be transparent.

 

Roch

 

The "repairing" is done by our ear/brain, when it has enough 'information' to reconstitute the 'damaged' areas, completely unconsciously. A good example of that happens often for the listeners to music, but they are quite unaware of it happening - you're listening to a crappy car radio, playing too loudly, and on comes a favourite song - your brain puts together how it should sound, and you get a buzz listening it; that's then followed by a song, of a related style, which is completely unknown to you - this in comparison sounds pretty awful, and you're well aware of how terrible the radio sound is, now.

 

What very high grade replay does is similar - you get all the information, good and bad, that's in the recording, and almost no signficant "bad" from the playback chain  - it turns out that there's enough "meat" in the good for our internal DSP to sort it all out - and the listening is a very enjoyable experience.

[fas42]

43 minutes ago, Bystander said:

I feel like something like this would actually sound better on a less revealing, less neutral (objectively worse and colored) system which would mask the distortions inherent in the recording somewhat.

 

WARNING: Might offend audiophile sensibilities... ! 

 

 

 

Disagree ... this is exactly the type of recording that can present superbly, subjectively - as an example of how far one can take this, Nellie Melba recordings from the dawn of recording can shape up remarkably well - the quaint, caricature quality of operatic female singing one normally hears is replaced by a living, breathing person ...

[fas42]

Which demonstrates that there are multiple ways of listening to the quality of the sound; mine is to listen for what the potential of the sound is, rather than how it happens to come across on a particular playback chain ... .

 

Curious, having never heard of Feinberg, I looked around, and found this, https://www.allmusic.com/album/js-bach-well-tempered-clavier-mw0001858981. This provides even more motivation, or should, to elevate a system to the point where the inadequacies of these recording no longer matter, subjectively - it is, after all, all about the music ...

[fas42]

8 minutes ago, Bystander said:

 

 

I guess I could be wrong...  Thankfully the sound quality of some of his other recordings isn't quite as bad and even very enjoyable at times. I'll always value the quality of a particular performance over the sound quality of the recording, but when the recording contains  obvious defects such as in this one, it still tends to bother me. 

 

 

There's much worse!! ... a needle drop CD of Gene Pitney hits, from eastern Europe - this is shocking on a "good system" - the 'noise reduction' artifacts are hideous, it's impossible to listen to ... but, it still amazes me how my hearing just puts this aside when the listening is good enough, and I can "just hear the music" ...

[fas42]

4 hours ago, elcorso said:

 

I am sorry, but I have not reached that level of enlightenment ... I have worked hard and have been in Yoga disciplines and concentration most of my life.

 

Roch

 

Ummm, no higher state of conscious required ... it all happens automatically. I managed to fluke getting an audio setup to the necessary quality level three decades ago, and got a huge shock from the difference it made; from then on, all 'normal' playback sounded like, well, hifi - the latter always has the smell of the equipment working, it never really "gets out of the way".

 

My current system has been offline for quite a while - and I finally got it up and running again. It's never hit the heights that I aim for, because I haven't gone through all the steps, looked at all the things that I would see as important - but it got to a pretty decent level. On restart, quite reasonable - but a fair way to go ... . And that means, I can put on a recording, and it's, "Oh Dear!!"; the distortion of the playback chain is obvious, and any "repairing" by the brain ain't gonna fix it! But I'm not fussed ... I've been here so often, and I know it's only a process of elimination of weaknesses until the necessary SQ will be restored.

 

Me wanting it to sound great doesn't make one iota of difference - the ear/brain works by its own set of rules, and it decides when the sound is good enough to accept the presentation, after "repairing", as a convincing illusion.