Fas42’s Stereo ‘Magic’

[ray-dude]

Dan (@dmance) is indeed a fellow traveler!  My last way excessive write up was for his Opto*DX product (with some wide detours into RF/power hygiene).  See:

 

https://www.head-fi.org/showcase/audiowise-opto•dx-optical-isolation-bridge-for-dual-spdif.23757/reviews#review-22155https://www.head-fi.org/showcase/audiowise-opto•dx-optical-isolation-bridge-for-dual-spdif.23757/reviews%23item-review-22155

 

It was quite remarkable what one can hear as one starts to strip away all the things that were keeping you from hearing it.  For me, DAC's like the Chord DAVE are true reference pieces.  Everything else in a chain takes something away from it.  The trick is to eliminate those things or minimize the impact of those things, to get as close to true references as you can.

 

 

[ray-dude]

At the risk of being the person intruding in a passionate debate at a dinner party...

 

At RMAF and my local dealer, I have heard amazing systems that are the pinnacle of a sound that I sought for decades, but they hold only intellectual interest for me now (which is remarkable, given how passionately I sought out those heights for so many years).  They are truly a world class HiFi experience of listening to music, but only hint at what I've come to think of experiencing and participating in an in person performance.

 

I shared the experience before that even when walking down a street, I can tell whether it is a live performer in a coffee shop or whether it is recorded playback.  Needless to say, the distortion through walls and glass with street noise raising the noise floor is atrocious HiFi, but I know it to be real, and one draws me in, and the other does not.

 

With traditional HiFi rigs, the analogy I use is moving from looking at a photo of a forest to an even better photo of a forest to a full 100" 4k HDR OLED photo of a forest, where you start to get an inkling of what it is like to look through a window at a forest.  If you work hard enough, the "through a window" feeling becomes more and more prevalent and the window gets more clear and larger and you start to get the barest hint of being in a forest with no window at all.

 

I compare that to walking through a forest, where even with scratched up sunglasses that cast a yellowish tint, I am unambiguously IN A FOREST, and all my senses have shifted to a completely different of experience and engagement and feeling of being alive.

 

That difference is not due to fidelity of the image.  It is the amalgam of sensory inputs that cause my brain (which has been trained by Darwin and 53 years of hard knocks) to switch to "this is real, pay attention" mode.  It takes precious little to break that sense of reality and go back to trying to get a better and better photo, then a better and better window.

The last several years for me have been about starting all over, and trying to get that sense of reality from the ground up.  It has been devastaingly humbling, but incredibly rewarding.  So much that I put on the first tier "this can never be compromised" I've realized just doesn't matter once my brain kicks into "this is real" mode.  Back to my earlier analogy, given a choice between listening to Carly Simon live in a noisy coffee shop with the crappiest acoustics and listening to Moonlight Serenade on a $1M PinnacleFi system, find me in the coffee shop, completely engaged and over the moon delighted for the experience, leaving afterwards inspired and elevated by the artistry.

 

I listen to the mega Wilson and YT setups and I'm blown away by how incredible they are (truly...after decades of tweaking and tuning I know intimately what an incredible achievement and performance level they are delivering), but it is now a intellectual interest rather than a passion.  I'll happily give up 90% of what they deliver, to get that sense of reality (the walking in the forest experience) that they struggle to deliver (at least for my brain).

 

All that being said, the reaction of people when they hear my rig is decidedly bimodal: there are those that have a proverbial red pill moment and want more and more of that reality rush, and others that are scratching their heads going "I thought you had a nice stereo system...what's up with this?"  The former group has had their brain click in on that sense of reality, the later is focused on what I was willing to give up to get that sense of reality.  The sharp divide I've seen in my living room really highlights how differently our brains get triggered, and the different response we all seek in music.

 

[ray-dude]

27 minutes ago, fas42 said:

What I am curious about, is what you feel you had to give up, that is lacking, now, compared to conventional audiophile sound ... ?

 

Key to my new world order has been the high efficiency single driver speakers, driven directly by my DAC.  It has allowed me to eliminate the cross over in the speaker (devastating to my sense of reality) and the amplifier (ditto, but less so with the right amp)

 

My speaker drivers are 104dB sensitivity, so they are remarkably light and fast, and they are point source so I can have perfect phase alignment and no dispersion between drivers.  My DAC (Chord DAVE) has remarkably low noise floor and remarkably fast dynamics, with only a couple of elements on out the output (the 2W "amp" is intrinsic to the analog output stage, so the analog signal goes through remarkably few components)

 

It is the speaker that is the biggest compromise for "traditional" high fi for me.  I came from B&W 802d3's and adore the B&W sound.  These were life time dream speakers.  As soon as I heard a modest $1400/pair set of Omega Super Alnico Monitors (single drivers), it was a revelation, and I knew I needed to leave the B&W dream behind.  I struggled mightily for a long time to get that sense of reality from the B&Ws, but I just couldn't

 

With the single drivers, the biggest things I give up are tonal balance, and the sense of "power" (not loudness...plenty loud even with 2W).  Interestingly, I found that within a couple days my brain fully adjusts to tonal imbalances and doesn't notice them, but it NEVER adjusts to the sense of reality being gone.  With the sense of "power", one never gets that with a live singer or piano player or horn player, one instead gets a compelling sense of space from the power of their voice/playing/etc.  The single drivers have an amazing sense of space.  I am transplanted into the physical space where the recording was made but I have given up the "blow your hair back power cord" feeling,

 

Before this life pivot, tonal balance and physicality were key for me, with a sense of space being a nice occasional bonus.  That has completely inverted.  I appreciate deeply a MegaFi setup that delivers perfect tonal balance and tangible physicality, but I infinitely prefer to be in the studio with Coltrane.

[ray-dude]

More goodness coming in part 2 tomorrow...full 360 degree soundstage!

[ray-dude]

Frank, FWIW, the upsampling/interpolation is based on a standard Whittaker-Shannon interpolation filter.  Professor Shannon published that back when he invented information theory. Anyone in an advanced undergrad course on signal processing will learn about it.  

 

There are very advanced windowing and noise shaping functions. These are standard DSP techniques.  The magic is in the coefficients (which I do not know, haven't seen, and wouldn't know what to do with if I do see them).  People do research and publish results for different windowing and noise shaping functions all the time (this is a very active research area in signal processing).  People have proprietary algorithms all the time.  The how one defines "quality" and "accuracy" for these filters depends on what one is doing with the output signal (there is no single right answer).

 

For audio signal processing the  IP is in tuning the algrithms so things sound good.  Depending on how one balances between the time and frequency domain, it sounds different. Depending on your playback chain, folks have a preference for different tradeoffs between the time and frequency domain.  Making one more accurate makes the other less accurate. Not everything is absolute. Simplifying things so folks have simple knobs/buttons to experiment with to see what tradeoff sounds best for them is a good thing, not snake oil.

 

I upsample my music files to 16fs/32 bit.  Each music track is typically ~2GB.  This is the polar opposite of compression, and unlike MQA, I have all my original music files and can do whatever I want with them.  I appreciate the sensitivity, but I think we're a long way from MQA territory here (I don't see Tidal streaming music at 2GB/music track any time soon)

 

YMMV of course, but given your focus on time domain accuracy (which I share), I'd love to hear what you hear when you hear some content that has been processed through this pipeline.  

[ray-dude]

1 hour ago, fas42 said:

Yes, it will be fascinating to hear, and see(!), what it does to the waveforms ... hopefully we will have access soon to some samples, so that something like DeltaWave can be used to pick apart some clues as to what's being done ...

 

If you or others know of some high quality digital music files where the owner would be OK with this, please let me know.  I'd love to post some samples to get more ears on things, but I'm very sensitive to copyright issues.