Errors of Mis-Placed Precision in Audiophility

[Miska]

On 12/5/2017 at 3:46 AM, esldude said:

32 bit DACs?  SOTA electronics can manage maybe 130 db or more often a good 120 db (20-21 bits).  If you wish to listen to music as loud as 120 db, you'll have noise 10 db below the hearing threshold in rough terms.  So instead of the 144 db that can be addressed by 24 bits we need 32 bit DACs that could address 192 db, except of course no electronics are anywhere close to that quiet.  What is the point? Oh, and should I mention much music has less dynamic range than ever in the history of recorded music.  

 

And it is good to count for some 30 dBA background noise in a listening room...

 

On 12/5/2017 at 3:46 AM, esldude said:

Sample rates above 96 khz?  768 khz DACs are starting to be almost common (384 khz already is not unusual).  Why the increasingly common 384 khz rates and now 768 khz rates when devices to record at those numbers are sparse?

 

External oversampling? Why would oversampling process need to be inside the DAC and offer only low sampling rates as input?

 

So far all DACs I've seen to do 8x oversampling inside still leak images indicating incomplete reconstruction. Making an analog filter to fully reconstruct signal in frequency domain will screw up phase response badly in audio band...

 

[Miska]

One thing I would add to the list:

 

DACs that do DSP inside instead of just simply converting input data into analog as well as possible. Computers are anyway used for playback and can do the DSP stuff better than what is inside DACs, without added cost. So the in-DAC DSP is just stealing money from the parts that really matter, which is the actual conversion section and analog stages.

 

[Miska]

11 hours ago, Ralf11 said:

the most recent study on this was a meta-analysis that found small significance in tests of hi-res vs. Redbook

 

Reiss, J. D.  2016.  A Meta-Analysis of High Resolution Audio Perceptual Evaluation.  JAES 64(6): 364-379.  

 

http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=18296

 

This is one the many bogus AES publications. Were the subject persons trained in listening for differences? And in many cases the equipment used is not suitable for hires in first place.

 

I know how much listening training can make a difference after training passive sonar operators for many years. When they are fresh they are not able to detect almost anything from background noise, and couple of months of training and experience they are soo much better listeners already...

 

My primary tool for listening differences is Sennheiser HD-800 headphones.