Everything sounds the same

[Richard Dale]

17 minutes ago, Nordkapp said:

This entire thread was intended to be a satirical joke, nothing more if I'm correct.  My God............

No I don't think it was intended to be a satirical joke, it was making a point about the discussion on another thread.

[Richard Dale]

12 minutes ago, audiobomber said:

What,  no one replied to my query? This website is shit. I'm going over to Super Best Audio Jerks. Those guys know everything.

I can't say that I've tried either salt, but the French one is reassuringly expensive at $20 for 125g. I suspect they serve different purposes, and if you have a Hawaiian pig to roast, there will be no substitute for the red salt.

 

There doesn't seem to have been any discussion of suitable grinders yet. I use classic Peugeot 18cm Paris U Selects. Some say the salt can be directed with less angular error using the longer Paris models,  but I have yet to try the 25cm.

 

One pair of lovely salt and pepper grinders that might appeal to audiophiles are the Vipp ones. The sound of the grind is "Inspired by the significant sound of a Franz Jaeger safe" and I would love to hear it: 

 

https://vipp.com/en/products/salt-and-pepper

[Richard Dale]

1 minute ago, mansr said:

That strikes me as an inefficient place to collect salt.

As an audiophile I'm always prepared to pay extra for the 'highest'.

[Richard Dale]

13 minutes ago, esldude said:

No, not for a $5 clock radio.  That would be appropriate with a $20 clock radio.  It is smart to keep your expenditures in proportion to not run out of resources prior to maximizing the benefits.

Why would you spend $20 and a clock radio when it sounds just the same as a $5 clock radio as per the subject of this thread? Sadly I will have to mark your post as off-topic.

[Richard Dale]

4 minutes ago, Albrecht said:

sadly: it is reason that has been abandoned here

What is your position on salt then?

[Richard Dale]

17 minutes ago, kumakuma said:

 

This is faulty logic along the lines of the Survivorship Fallacy.

 

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/238/Survivorship-Fallacy

 

By focusing on the few who have made outrageous claims and who were proven right, you are ignoring the tens of thousands who have made outrageous claims, were proven wrong, and have been forgotten forever.

This is where we need the ideas of Thomas Kuhn and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, instead of the usual talk of Popperian Falsification. Galileo and Newton created paradigm shifts in scientific research, and the other guys who we've forgotten about didn't create such shifts.

[Richard Dale]

32 minutes ago, wgscott said:

 

This is exactly where Kuhn got it completely wrong.

 

It was only because Heliocentrism makes falsifiable predictions, that could be experimentally tested and in fact falsified, that Galileo prevailed.

 

 

My understanding is that Heliocentrism made falsifiable predictions about Geocentrism, which proved to be correct. So it wasn't Heliocentrism that was falsified, it was Geocentrism.

 

Popper may have argued that they were both theories because they were both falsifiable. Maybe Popper doesn't capture the idea of a theory giving better predicitions which more easily match reality, and which don't need lots of exceptions and caveats that are characteristic of a paradigm in crisis that is nearing the end of it's life. Geocentrism was beginning to give everyone big headaches at the time as far as I know.

[Richard Dale]

24 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

 

Funny how USB isochronous protocol is one of the very few that actually accomplishes this. Not, SPDIF, not AES3, not any of the optical variants do the same. 

According to my understanding that is not exactly how Isochronous USB works. The clock at the DAC end is certainly used to dictate how many samples are to be put in the current frame by the computer end, and so it does flow control. However, that doesn't mean the clock at the DAC end is driving the clock frequency of the USB bus - the rate at which frames are sent is still done by the computer end.

[Richard Dale]

25 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

 

The point of flow control is to adjust the rate of data sent by the PC to the local clock at the DAC. Why would you need this if the PC side controls DAC timing?

 

The host end in the PC doesn't control the DAC timing, it controls the timing of the rate at which frames are sent. The DAC end can control how fully populated the frames are with audio samples.

[Richard Dale]

7 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

 

The samples are sent in micro packets every 125 micro-seconds. That's the clock rate that drives PC output. That is not (and cannot be) the rate that drives the DAC, otherwise you'll have a very broken analog output that sounds like an 8KHz signal. The packets are received on the DAC side, stored in a buffer, and then doled out to the D2A converter by a local clock, independent of that on the PC.

Yes, that sounds correct to me.

 

With respect to your original comment, I think the protocol you really want is I2S where the slave's clock can actually control the timing of the transactions with the master, rather than just the flow control like isochronous USB. But then there is no agreed cabling standard for I2S.

[Richard Dale]

11 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

 

With I2S the clock at the source can drive the DAC directly.

 

My point was that although the source or master can provide the clock for the I2S transactions, it is also possible for the slave end, ie the DAC, to provide the clock.

[Richard Dale]

10 minutes ago, jabbr said:

 

Not in the I2S protocol itself. One could develop an extension of the I2S which could be bidirectional, but that would be proprietary.

There are certainly Raspberry Pi I2S DACs where the DAC has the clock controlling the I2S transactions and not the source. Maybe in I2S terminology it says that whichever end is the clock is the master, and the source of the data is not always called 'master'.

[Richard Dale]

34 minutes ago, jabbr said:

I am unaware of a RPi board which itself accepts a clock input. AFAIK there are FIFO reclocking boards (mezzanine) for the RPi which accept the RPi I2S ouput, then buffer and reclock with the DAC master clock. This s is an excellent way to do it. DIYAudio @iancanada provides such boards, and I’ve used. 

The HiFiBerry DAC+ Pro has its own clocks and they are used for the DAC and the I2S bus: 

https://www.hifiberry.com/shop/boards/hifiberry-dac-pro/

[Richard Dale]

19 minutes ago, Superdad said:

 

And sadly, John tells me the LVDS chips used in most of the DACs and DDCs that offer I2S over LVDS/HDMI are really poor and add substantial jitter.  There are better ones for a couple dollars more, but no-one seems to be using those.

Of course such would still not address the shortcoming of the master clocking being at the source end.  As noted, virtually nobody does that right either.

I'm puzzled about this problem with I2S not being able to have a clock at the DAC end, only the source end. I never come across it being a restriction, and I've read about GPIO based Raspberry Pi DACs having clocks at the DAC end. Are you sure that the DACs that use I2S over LVDS/HDMI all depend on clocks on the source side for timing?

[Richard Dale]

5 minutes ago, mansr said:

I thought it was for Hawaiian, invented by a Greek in Canada.

I think you're right. It is still a bad idea.