HOW DOES A PERFECT DAC ANALOG SIGNAL LOOK DIFFERENT THAN A CHEAP DAC

[Speed Racer]

2 hours ago, d_elm said:

I am dissapointed mansr, as you should think before you write and choose your words carefully.

 

You know what I am disappointed in? The blind worship of Charles Hanson that seems to be going on here. Some of Charles' comments are quite disturbing yet almost none of you seem to care. At least @mansr is not afraid to call a spade a spade....

[beerandmusic]

2 hours ago, mansr said:

Are you seriously claiming that the Pono Player is superior in every way to every other DAC at its price and far beyond (you said earlier the $2500 Schiit Yggrdasil was the cheapest DAC to compete)? While I have no reason to doubt your competence, I refuse to believe that every other DAC designer is incompetent. A little humility would make you much more believable. Right now you're coming off as a pompous know-it-all. Your sweeping dismissal of entire nations isn't helping either. In fact, some of your comments about the Japanese were downright racist.

Although I agree with much Mr. Hansen says, I do agree with you that it is a "stretch" to suggest the yggi is the only dac at that price point that is better than a $300 pono.  What does the yggi have specifically that the bifrost multibit doesn't have that would make the yggi the only dac better than the pono.  And if the pono was that good, why is it discontinued?

 

On the other hand, did someone just misquote Mr. Hansen?  I don't recall him stating no dac under the $2300 yggi is better than the pono.  I think he suggested the Yggi as a dac purchase over the pono, but not that the pono is better than any other dac under the $2300 yggi?

 

I don't think he would suggest the lesser expensive ayre codex ($1800) in his line is not as good as the pono. Re-read what he wrote, not what others misquoted him?

[beerandmusic]

^^^^ THE SIMPLE FACT THAT ONE CAN CLAIM A $400 DAC IS AS GOOD AS ANY $2000 DAC, AND NO ONE CAN CATEGORICALLY DISPROVE SUCH A STATEMENT, IS MUCH TO MY TOPIC OF THE THREAD.

 

NO ONE CAN PROVE DIFFERENTLY.  IT'S ALL SUBJECTIVE AND AT THE HANDS OF BIASED REVIEWERS, WHETHER THAT REVIEWER IS A MAGAZINE, A FORUM, OR YOU, YOURSELF AS THE REVIEWER AND PURCHASER OF THE DAC.  EVEN THEN YOU ARE THE BIAS AS HAVING SPENT THE MONEY.

 

THIS FURTHER SUGGESTS TO ME, THAT WHEREAS THERE MAY BE SLIGHT DIFFERENCES, THE MODERN DAC MAY VERY WELL HAVE COME CLOSE TO REACHING A PLATEAU, IF THERE IS NOTHING WITH A GENERAL CONSENSUS OF "ANOTHER LEVEL". 

 

I HEARD WHEN THE BIFROST CAME OUT, BEST DAC EVER, THEN AGAIN WITH THE GUNGIR, THEN AGAIN WITH THE YGGI, BEST DAC EVER.  THEN I READ THIS LKS SOUNDS BETTER THAN THE VEGA OR THE YGGI, WHERE OTHERS WILL ARGUE.

 

IT'S ALL SUBJECTIVE ANYMORE, AND GRANTED I MAY HEAR SLIGHT DIFFERENCES, BUT NOTHING AS NIGHT AND DAY LIKE WHAT UPGRADING THE AMP HAS DONE.

 

I THINK IF YOU HAVE ANY MID-FI DAC, A NICE RECORDED SONG, AND DECENT AMP & SPEAKERS(WITHIN YOUR BUDGET), PROPERLY TUNED, IS ABOUT AS GOOD AS IT GETS....I AM NOT SURE IT MAKES SENSE TO "CHASE A GOOD DAC".

 

[Panelhead]

  This thread has gotten too personal for me. The original question of looking at an output waveform to tell dacs apart is long lost. 

[beerandmusic]

8 minutes ago, Panelhead said:

  This thread has gotten too personal for me. The original question of looking at an output waveform to tell dacs apart is long lost. 

Well, i started the thread, and like most all threads, things go other places, but i have gained a lot from it, and continue to do so.

 

For the most part, the thread has and is continuing to serve my interest and purpose.

[mansr]

42 minutes ago, beerandmusic said:

On the other hand, did someone just misquote Mr. Hansen?  I don't recall him stating no dac under the $2300 yggi is better than the pono.

 

Allow me to refresh your memory:

On 01/09/2017 at 8:36 AM, Charles Hansen said:

To get significantly better sound than a Pono Player (strictly my opinion and my experience), you are going to have to spend at least $2300 for the Schiit Yggdrasil. After that you are going to have to spend between $5,000 and $10,000 for a meaningful improvement in sound quality

 

[mansr]

1 hour ago, barrows said:

When someone reaches the level of experience (and success) which Charles Hansen has, they are entitled to have some very strong opinions about their craft.  Indeed.  You, mansr, on the other hand, as far as I know, have never developed and brought to market any audio product.  Considering the vast gulf of knowledge and experience between you, I would suggest that you treat Mr. Hansen more respectfully; of course you can choose to disagree, but I find your tone mean spirited and insulting, and it makes you appear like small person.

Let me get this straight. I'm mean-spirited, but it's fine for Charles to declare the entire nation of Japan incompetent, simply because he's famous and I'm not? Go back and reread Charles' posts, but mentally substitute Jewish whenever he says Japanese. Do his statements still seem reasonable to you?

[barrows]

1 hour ago, pkane2001 said:

but idol worship is also not a grounds for respect.

Of course not.  there is no "idol worship" here.  The respect I give to Mr. Hansen is based entirely on his experience in developing and bringing to market some of the most innovative and best sounding audio products.

[barrows]

1 hour ago, pkane2001 said:

Unless either one has something more tangible to back them up

Exactly, mansr has done nothing tangible (at least of which I am aware) and Charles Hansen has years and years of experience developing innovative audio products and bringing them  to the market.  There is nothing more tangible than that!

[mansr]

2 minutes ago, barrows said:

Of course not.  there is no "idol worship" here.  The respect I give to Mr. Hansen is based entirely on his experience in developing and bringing to market some of the most innovative and best sounding audio products.

It would still befit him (or should that be Him) to acknowledge that others are also capable of designing great products.

[mansr]

2 minutes ago, barrows said:

Exactly, mansr has nothing tangible (at least of which I am aware) and Charles Hansen has years and years of experience developing innovative audio products and bring to the market.  There is nothing more tangible than that!

The same could be said of any designer who isn't Charles Hansen. I never said I, personally, was as skilled or better. I merely pointed out the implausibility of every other DAC being inferior in every respect, which is what Charles claims.

[jabbr]

23 minutes ago, mansr said:

Allow me to refresh your memory:

On 9/1/2017 at 3:36 AM, Charles Hansen said:

To get significantly better sound than a Pono Player (strictly my opinion and my experience), you are going to have to spend at least $2300 for the Schiit Yggdrasil. After that you are going to have to spend between $5,000 and $10,000 for a meaningful improvement in sound quality

 

He should be very proud of the quality of the product at the price point. He qualified that it is opinion, and the opinion is deserved.

[mansr]

2 minutes ago, jabbr said:

He should be very proud of the quality of the product at the price point. He qualified that it is opinion, and the opinion is deserved.

It is possible to be proud of one's achievements without belittling everybody else. It is also possible to be proud without being racist.

[beerandmusic]

52 minutes ago, mansr said:

To get significantly better sound than a Pono Player (strictly my opinion and my experience), you are going to have to spend at least $2300 for the Schiit Yggdrasil.

 

That is not saying the same thing as every dac less than the yggi is inferior or even that the pono is better than everything less than the yggi.  He basically is making my same assessment as I have made, through my testing.

 

"significantly better"

 

Significantly is a subjective word.  And to be honest, i haven't heard anything significantly better in the $300 to $2K price range that i have tried.  I still haven't tried the Yggi, so I may have the same impression.  It appears he uses the term "significantly better" in the same way as I use "a new level".

 

I can hear slight differences in dacs i have tried, but none I can say are significantly better than the other...i am not even sure that if I tried the yggi that I would say it is "significantly" better.  The key word here is significantly.  I place a high value on the word "significant", especially when talking 5 times the price.  Maybe rich people are comfortable paying 100 times the price for a marginal improvement (and many are), but to me, to spend $2K it must be "signifcantly better" and I have yet to hear anything that is.

 

Regardless of any of that,  HE NEVER STATED that nothing is as good as the pono less than the $2300 yggi, and you responded to a misquote.

 

[beerandmusic]

53 minutes ago, mansr said:

It is possible to be proud of one's achievements without belittling everybody else. It is also possible to be proud without being racist.

I agree that his "generalizations" are a little hard to swallow, but I wouldn't go as far as saying racist. That's also stretching what he is saying.

 

If you "try", to read what he is trying to say, even in his effort to clarify, he states things like "swiss are known for their watches", "usa for their muscle car", etc...  He is making the point that they are generalizations and that it is known different cultures have spent more effort and more time in different technologies and have different niches. 

 

Some of the best cooking comes from the southern kitchens.

[mansr]

13 minutes ago, beerandmusic said:

I agree that his "generalizations" are a little hard to swallow, but I wouldn't go as far as saying racist. That's also stretching what he is saying.

He said the Japanese are incapable of making a good product without foreign leadership. How is that not racist?

[beerandmusic]

6 minutes ago, mansr said:

He said the Japanese are incapable of making a good product without foreign leadership. How is that not racist?

What was his exact and complete quote with surrounding context?

I may have skimmed it, as i thought i caught his generalizations, but regardless, i did have tough time swallowing some of his generalizations....obviously not the most charismatic speaker.

I understand his bitterness though as much has been reverse engineered and cost the industry...but he needs to tame his words and think thoroughly before speaking.

[mansr]

4 minutes ago, beerandmusic said:

What was his exact and complete quote with surrounding context?

 

Exact quote:

On 01/09/2017 at 1:20 PM, Charles Hansen said:

Japanese companies have never been able to build amazing sounding audio equipment. The only exception has been when they have hired foreigners to help run their programs

 

Follow the back-link for the full post.

[beerandmusic]

5 minutes ago, mansr said:

 

Exact quote:

 

Follow the back-link for the full post.

yea, that's a bit hard to swallow...hopefully he will apologize and put in different context....at least his apparent racist remarks are at the companies, not the people....

[mansr]

1 minute ago, beerandmusic said:

yea, that's a bit hard to swallow...hopefully he will apologize and put in different context....at least his apparent racist remarks are at the companies, not the people....

That distinction, if it ever existed, vanished when he brought up the supposed improvement under foreign leadership.

[beerandmusic]

7 minutes ago, mansr said:

That distinction, if it ever existed, vanished when he brought up the supposed improvement under foreign leadership.

yea, that's a true point.  I don't know if he is racist or not, but people need to learn not to generalize when speaking about different people or cultures.

It's a shame it came up in a thread that I do believe offered a lot of information and a lot to be gained.  The thread should probably be killed at this point.

[mansr]

Just now, beerandmusic said:

yea, that's a true point.  I don't know if he is racist or not, but people need to learn not to generalize when speaking about different people or cultures.

It's a shame it came up in a thread that I do believe offered a lot of information and a lot to be gained.  The thread should probably be killed at this point.

We could just stop talking about Charles and resume talking about DACs.

[Charles Hansen]

1 hour ago, mansr said:

It is possible to be proud of one's achievements without belittling everybody else. It is also possible to be proud without being racist.

 

Hi Mansr,

 

I think it is silly to call what I said "racist". Let's assume you are from Germany. I think it is safe to say that Germany makes some of the most well-engineered products in the world. Cars are one good example of this - compare BMWs, Mercedes-Benz, Porsches, and even VWs to Fords, Chevrolets, and Chryslers (although I heard that one Mercedes-designed Chrysler model they got just before the split is quite good). I'm sure that there are many Americans who will say that the US products are just as good as the Germany ones, but I would argue that is simply due to their ignorance - what would you say?

Is that being "racist"? Or is it politically acceptable because most American and most Germans have white skins?

 

If I said something stupid, such as "The reason the US builds worse cars than the Germans is because the US has more minorities, including blacks, Jews, and Asians, working in their auto makers", that would clearly be racist.

 

Instead what I said is that when it comes to true high-end audio equipment, you simply don't see much (if any) come from Japan. If you think that the super high-end Pioneer electronics sold in Japan are true high-end, it's only out of ignorance, like the guy who thinks that a Mustang or Camaro (or even a Corvette) is the pinnacle of automobile engineering. Everything about those cars is crude in comparison with German cars, with one exception - the electrical systems of US cars are almost uniformly reliable. In contrast the last German car I had was having constant electrical failures, almost exclusively due to under-rated plug-in contacts. It reached the point where enough of the connectors on the plug-in relay/fuse panel had failed that I sold the car.

 

I think in Japan the cultural differences are such that it is extremely rare for "entrepreneurs" to exist. They either join gigantic mega-corporations or very occasionally start very small family owned businesses - but nothing in-between. Where are all the $5 to $10 million companies that are coming up with new ideas all the time? I don't know of any in Japan, except possibly making hand-crafted moving-coil phono cartridges.

 

It has nothing to do with the color of their skin or their hair. It has everything to do with thousands of years of developing their culture. Japan has a completely different culture than the US, which you would know if you ever visited. They have a law that the highest-paid person in the largest corporation can only make 7x as much as the lowest paid person. Can you imagine that in the US? There are janitors making $10 per hour ($20,000 per year). Can you picture the president of Goldman Sachs only making $140,000 per year? Of course not! He probably makes 1000x that much and flies to work in a private helicopter. It's a completely different culture.

 

When you buy a sushi lunch at a nice place, it might cost $100 per person. Part of the reason for that is because no less than a half-dozen people "own" that fish from the time it is caught until the time it is served at the restaurant some 8 hours later. They deliberately make the distribution system inefficient to make sure there are enough jobs for everybody. With 100 million people on an island the size of Montana (slightly larger than New Mecico). Their prison population is less that 1/10 that of the US (per capita). I could go on and on, but the bottom line is that their culture is such that it is rare for someone to think they have enough of a better idea for how to build audio equipment that they will go out and start a company. I'm sorry if you think that's racist, because it is simply true.

 

Hope this helps,

Charles Hansen

[beerandmusic]

I think the question has been answered, these are my take-aways:

 

1. The analog output signal will look very close to the same on any DAC,

2. That SQ is subjective.

3. not even the most expensive test equipment is capable of measuring what our ears are capable of.

4. No one can say without authority or debate that a $400 Dac doesn't sound as good as a $2000 DAC.

5. Reverse engineering and cheap labor costs make it difficult for companies to compete.

6. The DAC market isn't as big as I thought, where companies are able to discount their profit margins for volume sales.

7.  Keep my eyes on the LKS MH-DA004 and the Pro-Ject Pre Box S2 Digital

8. Consider trying a DAC outside of my budget just to see if the concept of a "ultimate dac" is even worth chasing.

 

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

2 hours ago, mansr said:

Go back and reread Charles' posts, but mentally substitute Jewish whenever he says Japanese. Do his statements still seem reasonable to you?

 

Not defending anything here, but just thought about substituting Samoan for Japanese. I've never seen a single audio component from a Samoan. Would that make me racists if I said that stuff about Samoans?

 

Ok, carry on.