How much does it cost to be an audiophile?

[gmgraves]

2 hours ago, mansr said:

ICs have a huge advantage in component matching as well as thermal coupling, both very important for an R2R DAC. There is no way a discrete design will get even close to an IC in this application.

That they do!  Also modern op-amps are quieter, and the latest audio specific ones are faster than discrete circuitry due to shorter paths. They also tend to be more consistent in performance fro example to example because the end-to-end processes can be more tightly controlled.

[gmgraves]

2 hours ago, sandyk said:

 But despite this, it does NOT mean that all 75 ohm Digital leads (Coax SPDIF) MUST sound the same, even though their bandwidth is many 100s of MHZ.

 Like you, I was a sceptic there, but got quite a surprise when I used a fairly cheap Digitec cable instead of my DIY one using a quality double screened 75 ohm cable from a damaged  Telstra Carrier system patch cord. ( (broken plug)

I wasn't asserting that they do or don't sound the same, I was making a joke about the overkill  a lot of audiophiles and audio sales people seem to find important. You know; the "if enough is good, then more must be better" mentality. I wasn't serious at all.

 

And when you tested this Digitech cable did you Double-blind test it? While I don't believe that DBTs are a panacea or anything like it, they do make false positives very difficult.

[gmgraves]

2 hours ago, Audiophile Neuroscience said:

My real disagreement is regarding the audio community accommodating these people. It would be naive to think that a dealer would be anything other than delighted to have these customers. I don't think that means they don't equally look after their core clientele. I see it as a food chain of sorts. A long time ago I had a very good relationship with a dealer whereby I bought the second hand trade-ins of the rich folk, and at a great price. The dealer moved the second hand stock and made his profit selling new stuff. When I did buy new stuff he also looked after me with both price and service.

I think you misunderstand me. I too am sure that a dealer (or one worth his salt, anyway) equally looks after his core clientele. What I'm talking about, mostly, are manufacturers who see this market as an excuse to build higher and higher priced products. Mostly these products perform (sound) no better than much more reasonably priced offerings, but they have lots more snob appeal and people like GUTB fall for that with his "if it doesn't cost a fortune it's not high-end audio" attitude. The truth is that above a certain price point there is little to no correlation between price and sonic performance. Dan D'Agostino makes good stuff. There's no doubt of that. I'm listening to one of his Krell Integrated amps as I write this. but how much do you think His $40K integrated amp would cost if it had the same plain-jane casework as does my Krell KAV-300i? 

[gmgraves]

1 hour ago, opus101 said:

 

Got a heads-up for which forum that was? I'd be interested to read that. Btw, its ESS not ADI that makes 'SabreDACs'.

I wish I remembered. I read so many of them. It might have been "Superaudiofriends" or perhaps it was Head-Fi. 

[gmgraves]

1 hour ago, Audiophile Neuroscience said:

 

 I listened to the MSB diamond and platinum, extensively. They are in my opinion very impressive sounding. The key for me was impressive in that they threw out a huge soundstage and were overly detailed and etched IMO. There was no denying the "wow" factor. The exact same DAC module was seen in a Rockna DAC at much less price. I didn't like that either. The MSB Select DAC is monumentally expensive. I have not heard it.

Oh, I agree. But I have auditioned (at great length) the MSB Diamond IV DAC with the Clock upgrade ($25,000+?) against the Schiit Yggdrasil, and everyone listening agreed that the Yggy was miles better sounding. Smoother, especially in the lower treble region and imaged much more realistically. Now the MSB had a more "etched" soundstage, that is true, but it didn't sound as natural as the Yggy. I haven't personally heard any of the newer Diamond or Platinum stuff.

[gmgraves]

2 minutes ago, sandyk said:

 Come on George, not everybody needs to use DBTs to tell whether something is better or worse sounding.

Swapping backwards and forwards a few time is usually enough !

DBTs lessen the possibility of false positives, and people are easily fooled by the twin sighted biases of expectational and confirmational bias. That's my only point. Like I said, I agree that there are some things that DBTs are not needed for and some that they don't work so well for, but comparing one interconnect against another is not one of those things. It allows one to instantly compare the characteristics of one cable against another without any fear of unequal volume levels, or switching errors and such tests are usually easy to set up. All that is needed is a pair of interconnect sets. a pair of Y connectors, and an amp with two line-level inputs. If the listeners hear no differences between the two units under test at the instant that they are switched, then it means that no matter what they thought they thought they heard initially, it was their imagination. This is not worth a big brouhaha about. I wasn't making big deal out of it. so lets' not OK Alex?

[gmgraves]

2 hours ago, sandyk said:

That's a completely flawed concept George !

It put's 2 lots of interconnects in parallel at the output of the device, with the source device seeing double the capacitance at it's output.  

Many people ARE capable of hearing the differences between 2 cables in parallel, often  with half the load resistance, or one cable unterminated !

We're just gonna have to agree to disagree on this one Alex. I simply know too much about wire and cable to buy that. They are only "in parallel" if both ends of both cable are terminated at the same point at the same time. In the DBT configuration that described, only one end is in parallel, the other, depending on which input is selected, is unterminated.

[gmgraves]

10 hours ago, sandyk said:

That's plain wrong ! There will be double the capacitance seen at the output of the source device if the cables have the same capacitance. Several of us went through the same crap with an E.E. from The Netherlands in another forum who attempted to show how to compare headphone cables.

 The cables ALSO need to be switched at the source device end !!!

 Perhaps you weren't sufficiently clear with what you were proposing, and I misunderstood you  ?

No you did not misunderstand me. And you're right! There will be double the capacitance seen at the output of the source device if the cables have the same capacitance. RG59 has about 60pf/meter of shunt capacitance. Put two runs in parallel and the total shunt capacitance is 120 pf/meter (capacitance, in parallel is Ct = C1 + C2 + Cx. In series it is Ct = 1/1/C1 + C2 + Cx).

 

That's about 23 dB loss/100M @ 100MHz or 0.00435 dB loss at 100 Khz over 1 meter. At 20 KHz that would be a loss of about 1/100th of a dB (give or take a few hundredths) for two 1 Meter parallel runs of RG59! It's minuscule, it's irrelevant. If one goes by the standard measurement in use in the electronics field today. Of

course, those who insist that LRC is not what gives cables their sound, then of course these calculations are meaningless.  

[gmgraves]

1 hour ago, mansr said:

 

This image shows the built-in AFG of my Tektronix scope outputting a 10 MHz square wave through 0.5 m RG-58U to the channel 1 input, then via T coupling and 2 m RG-58U to the channel 2 input which is set to 50 Ω termination. The somewhat distorted top of the yellow (channel 1) trace is due a slight impedance mismatch somewhere causing reflections. Other than that, the only discernible effect of the 2-metre length is a 10 ns delay. I think this is good enough for audio.

Of course it is!. 

[gmgraves]

2 hours ago, phosphorein said:

 

George,

 

I never measured them specifically for square wave performance, but I know they were passing signals with bandwidths greater than  a GHz. Obviously these were not garden variety coaxes but were designed for high frequency applications. And I had a couple of those Tek probes as well.

Stop taking this seriously. Nobody expects any coaxial cable to pass a 1 GHz or higher frequency square wave perfectly! I used an absurd frequency to show how ridiculous such a requirement for an audio cable would be. I was merely joking with Alex. It never occurred to me that anyone would take such a ridiculous criterion seriously! But many of you bit, just the same.

[gmgraves]

7 hours ago, semente said:

 

Sounds like a job for @fas42 

Yeah he needs to go in there and dress cables and solder connectors. Then that room will win "Best Sound of Show"!

[gmgraves]

20 hours ago, sandyk said:

George

 It's not about losses due to the cables, it's the effect of the additional capacitance seen by the output device, and many opamps do not like to see a lot of direct capacitance at their output and may even become unstable, which is why most output I.C.s in typical consumer gear   (e.g.LM4562, LME49720 etc.) have something like a 100 ohm series resistor at their output.

 

Alex

Agreed, that op-amps don't like highly capacitive loads, but 120 pf/meter isn't a highly capacitive load.  

[gmgraves]

18 hours ago, sandyk said:

 

The simple fact is that many members (including Mani) report hearing differences that you consider are technically impossible.

 

The cables should be switched at BOTH ends !!!

It's not necessary. A difference that makes no difference is no difference at all. And, brother 1/100th of a dB @ 20KHz makes no difference at all. 

 

18 hours ago, sandyk said:

Obviously.  But the interconnects used as George is suggesting may need to be longer than 1M.

??????!!!!!

[gmgraves]

5 hours ago, sandyk said:

 

 2 in parallel, like you were suggesting, that would be quite a bit longer with the layouts of many members, is entirely different.

 

AGAIN : The cables should be switched at both ends !!!

 Are you E.Es too slack, and complacent in your blinkered views of what people can ,and can not hear,to do this properly ?

I can't speak for anyone else, and I won't. But I like to think that I'm practical. Practicality means that one only goes the extra mile when one thinks that the extra effort will yield different or better results. I would agree that cables would need to be switched at both ends if not doing that would change the (audible) results. Since it doesn't change the audible results, I see no reason to go to the extra trouble of complicating the setup. In fact, a passive switch on the other end would possibly add more circuit resistance and capacitance to the setup than just the two lengths of interconnects in parallel on one end! I hope you don't think that I haven't tried this approach of one source paralleled to two line-level inputs, because I have - several times.

And Alex, I have no views about what other people can or cannot hear. But I know what I can hear, and that's all that should matter to any of us - what we, individually, can hear!  From your emoticon, I get the general idea that you are angry. Is this stuff really so important to you that you get hot under the collar because of it? I certainly consider you to be a friend (we've been talking to each other here for more than a decade, after all) and I would not like to think that I have angered you over a difference in opinion on what is, after all a simple procedure. 

 

[gmgraves]

5 hours ago, sandyk said:

 Dennis

 The graphs that I posted for the LM4562 clearly show that it doesn't like to see capacitive loads of loads of >100pFwithout a series output resistor. Not all output stages will have a series output resistor of adequate value to cope with much higher capacitive loads. Not so long back, designers often didn't think that they were even necessary !!!

 Constructors' feedback to Silicon Chip magazine re the schematic that I posted clearly demonstrated this problem.

 

Alex 

 

Any audio component that wasn't designed to handle at least 20 ft of interconnect cable was incompetently designed. You know, you can put enough restrictions on anything to make an argument for almost any position. Any designer who doesn't design his products to drive the kinds of loads that are likely to exist in the types of domestic situations that the product is likely to encounter is not doing his job. Believe me most DACs, disc players, tuners, phono preamps, and the preamps themselves will be comfortable driving practically anything that those components are likely to be connected to. Especially preamps. placing mono blocks next to the speakers they're driving while the control preamp is 10-20 feet away is a common application. Don't tell me that the designers haven't designed them to do that! Also, I don't know about you, Alex, but I've never seen an owners manual that placed restrictions on either interconnect length or load capacitance!

[gmgraves]

20 hours ago, esldude said:

Well optimally you'd switch at both ends.  But if not doing that is adequate for 90% of those doing this maybe that is still an okay suggestion.  Especially if you amended it to say unless your interconnects exceed 3 meters you'd be safe doing it as George suggests.  

Which makes no sense. Coax is rated in pF/foot (or meter) and is parallel capacitance. The longer the cable, the more capacitance, as parallel capacitance is directly additive. So if you had a 1ft coax that had 20 pF/ft, then of course, the 1 ft long cable would have 20 pF of capacitance, if you doubled the length, it would give you 40 pF overall capacitance. Here's the rub. If you put two 1 ft coax cables in parallel, to the circuit, it looks just the same as a 2 ft long coax because both lengthening and doubling up of the coax adds capacitance in parallel. 

In the case that Alex presents, where we are talking about RG59U as an example, it has 30 pF/foot. Three meters of that cable would have 270 pF of parallel capacitance. same as two runs of 1.5 meters in parallel with a Y-adapter cable. So I don't see how increasing the length of the cable would make not switching the driven end OK, where a shorter pair with less capacitive reactance would require switching the driven end???!! ?

[gmgraves]

16 hours ago, sandyk said:

Is that why you resort to such stupid images ?

There is a correct way to do things,

and switching both ends is the correct way.The other method is lazy and any conclusions reached would be rejected as scientific proof.

Those conclusions wouldn't be rejected by anyone who understood the physics and maths behind the methodology!

[gmgraves]

13 hours ago, sandyk said:

George 

Just because you personally can't hear differences between cables,or the effect of the extra capacitance on the output stage I.C. doesn't mean othat others are unable to. I would give a lengthier reply, but I am typing this on a small mobile.

You haven't been paying attention. I have said repeatedly, that I can and do hear differences in cables. Unfortunately, since those differences disappear in every interconnect DBT in which I have ever participated, I generally ignore them as being my imagination. After all, there is no theory that covers why short runs of coax should or even could alter the signal passing through it, especially at such a low frequency. It also doesn't make any sense that short runs of cable could alter an audio signal while not affecting other, more important or higher frequency signals at all! It should strike anyone noting the phenomenon as very odd that this aberration has never been noted with any other kind of signal than audio. I've looked long and hard for other instances of this phenomenon and have not found anything approaching any academic paper seeking to explain or even to note this phenomenon. In fact all you can find on the subject are "white papers" written by companies whose self-interest is tied up in this controversial subject being real. Unfortunately, if you read these self-serving "explanations" with an educated eye, it's clear that what these white papers are saying is either sheer double-talk or is alluding to real-world phenomena that only affect coaxial cables in the VHF or UHF regions, not in the audio spectrum. I've seen allusion to skin effect (does not exist below 100 KHz at least), references to dielectric absortion distortion (it exists in audio, but only in quite large capacitors with very high dielectric coefficients - like paper film and acetate film capacitors), the way the braid is woven, or the twist in stranded core coaxial. Which company is it that designs their cables to mimic the spiral of a nautilus shell? As if this natural mean somehow affects electrical conductivity of coaxial cables in an audio circuit? 

Now I have a question for Alex. Why do so many of you guys refuse to entertain the possibility that your belief in interconnect sound is the result of human bias? Given the number of ways in which the brain can fool us, would suggest that bias is a very real possibility, and given what we know about the way electrons behave, it's a very logical possibility as well. Most sciences realize this and it's why everything from drug tests to food tasting tests are done using double-blind and other bias minimizing test procedures.

[gmgraves]

5 hours ago, esldude said:

I think you read my post in too big a hurry. You have it backwards.

 

 ....... if you amended it to say UNLESS your interconnects exceed 3 meters you'd be safe doing it as George suggests.  

 

UNLESS your cable exceeds 3 meters you'd be safe using George's method.  In fact you'd usually be safe with more, but few people have cables longer than that so I picked it as a cutoff which in itself is arbitrary.  Mainly trying to get the point across that yes at some point it might be a problem, but rarely, and for very few people.  So I think Alex is being far too hard line about it. 

Yeah, I misunderstood what you wrote, I guess. 

[gmgraves]

46 minutes ago, sandyk said:

There are many other areas of the forum where a great deal of experimentation is going on , especially in the PSU area, clocking,modifying or using later generation cables etc. that are done independently of any Forum advertisers.
Many older E.E.s appear to be living in a Time Warp , with them assuming that their knowledge is completely up to date, and hasn't been updated due to more recent research and availability of vastly improved semiconductor devices.
How many E.E.s (with the exception of perhaps a select few such as Mansr) who post in the General Forum area, and have the capabilities, have even bothered to try replacing the now elderly voltage regulators such as the LM3x7 series, LM7xxx series etc. in some of their equipment  with the new ultra low noise voltage regulators such as the LT304x series due to their deeply ingrained belief that the lower noise floor is purely ACADEMIC, and the human ear is incapable of hearing any further improvement ?
This includes you too, Dennis !
 How many E.E.s etc. completely reject the possibility that a gadget such as a USB Regen is capable of improving USB Audio, and claim that if it does, it's due to poorly implemented DACs, which after all, weren't designed by laymen, they were usually designed by competent qualified E.E.s and Software designers ?
 

I'm all for anything that would improve USB audio. Generally, I try not to use it as much as I can. Luckily I can do that (mostly). My system is connected via coaxial SPDIF. and the only time I resort to USB is when I have to use a computer web-site for my audio such as when "Auntie Beeb" (the BBC) is streaming the audio in 16/48 FLAC for the Proms like they did last year and one had to use specific build of Firefox to access the FLAC stream. 

[gmgraves]

19 hours ago, AudioDoctor said:

 

 

The old Commie!

[gmgraves]

12 hours ago, sandyk said:

Your typical Audiophile simply does not feel the need to provide proof of any kind to others. 

That doesn't mean that their belief in this phenomenon isn't delusional. I don't feel any need to provide proof that if I climb up on top of the barn and flap my arms real fast and jump off, that I will likely fall to my death, either, but I know enough physics to realize that it is true. And even all the faith in the world that I WOULD fly, will not stop such an action from killing me. 

 

12 hours ago, sandyk said:

There are large numbers of C.A. members who hear differences between cables of various kinds etc.

Large numbers of people see ghosts and poltergeists as well, Alex. That doesn't mean that they are real. 

 

13 hours ago, sandyk said:

 Very few Audiophiles could care less if what they are reporting is accepted by E.E.s or not !

That's neither here nor there. The question is, do these audiophiles CARE whether what they believe they are hearing is REAL or not? At this point, your assertion has left the area of hobby or interest, and has crossed over into a religion, or at least it has a acquired many of the trappings of a religion. By that I mean that these audiophiles are assigning characteristics of religious belief whereby truth and facts are replaced with faith. Faith that no matter what the scientific or engineering knowledge says, they prefer their belief in their empirical observations, no matter how unlikely that belief system might be. 

I suppose that it's good for commerce that so many audiophiles are so zealous about this subject. It keeps companies like AudioQuest, Kimber and Nordost in business selling extremely high-profit (crazy profit, actually) cables to the unwary and the deeply committed.  

[gmgraves]

12 hours ago, Jud said:

 

But not the science?  

 

A friend who won an award a few years ago for best civilian engineering project for the Department of Defense has many stories of fellow engineers who felt various factors could be safely ignored in their work, and were proved wrong when the end product failed.

 

Of course those make the best stories; I'm sure there are also  plenty of examples of people obsessing over things that ultimately don't matter.

Engineering is like anything else. Some failure is inevitable. Same with medicine. We count on our physicians to make the correct diagnosis and we rarely question his/her sage advice. But mis diagnosis is actually fairly common. When engineers err, buildings collapse and bridges fall down in strong winds because the engineer on the project failed to take into account the strong winds in the Tacoma Narrows and designed his bridge span accidentally to resemble an upside-down airfoil. Bernoulli's principle then took over and a dog died! 

[gmgraves]

12 hours ago, mansr said:

Science gives us the tools to calculate everything in minute detail. The trouble is that for real designs, such a detailed analysis is unpractical. Engineering is all about simplifying the science to make it practical while still resulting in a working product. For example, a complicated calculation can often be replaced with a much simpler approximation guaranteed to be greater (or smaller) than the exact value. Suppose the task at hand is to choose a wire capable of carrying the current required by some apparatus. Calculating the exact current might be hideously complicated, so instead we use an approximate value that is at least as large as the real one and pick a wire accordingly. If the wire gauge we arrive at is still practical from a mechanical (and cost) perspective, we're all good. It doesn't matter that a slightly smaller wire could have worked.

 

A famous case of ignoring the wrong thing is, of course, the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse of 1940:

 

Modern bridges include damping elements to prevent such uncontrolled oscillations.

 

Yes, this forum is full of them.

Often when I think of the exactitude required in engineering, I'm reminded that it was not that many years ago when everything (including the Tacoma Narrows bridge design) was calculated using a slide rule. When I was in college, the slide rule was still a major part of the curriculum. Unlike scientific calculators, and computer programs, slide rules give the engineer, at best, an approximate answer, and I have often noticed with awe, how some engineers can look at a slide rule and extrapolate very little actual information into 5 or 6 figures! It's a lot like measuring something with a yard-stick graduated in 16ths of an inch and from looking between the graduations, coming up with a measurement out to a 10 thousandth of an inch! That inexactitude might be why common engineering practice is to over-design almost everything. Look at the hundreds of thousands of miles of interstate highway built in the 50's and 60's. All done with a slide rule and material stress specifications gleaned from a materials handbook chart. Very few overpasses in this vast network have ever failed (the ones that did fail, failed due to seismic activity, not engineering errors). Look at the Boeing B52. Designed with slide rule accuracy and still in service 60 years (this year) after the last one rolled off the assembly line. Now that's engineering for the ages!   

[gmgraves]

8 hours ago, mav52 said:

cool. I know a couple people that are using the Jelco arms with nice results. https://www.jelco-ichikawa.co.jp/products/tonearm.html

I have Jelco SA-750-9 and I find it to be better than most arms I have owned. When I first got it, I thought that it looked an awful lot like something that came attached to a Pioneer direct drive turntable, but upon closer inspection, I found that the materials used and they way they were finished were head and shoulders above an inexpensive DD table from Japan. Many don't know this but the manufacturing company that makes Jelco arms is called Japan Jewel. They specialize in high quality jeweled thrust bearings. The  build quality on my SA-750-9 is actually better than that of the beautiful SME 3009 and I have been happy with it for about 8 years. It's a gem (no pun intended).