USB audio transmission isn’t bit true

[fas42]

Not quite sure why you have such a problem with noise or interference effects being the culprit for degraded sound ... IME this is everything in terms of optimising SQ - running after digital misbehaviour as causing issues is a fast road to nowhere ...

 

Poor analogue qualities of the digital transmission can cause sound quality to be less, but this is because the analogue circuitry is being affected directly by those waveforms, or by the receiving or capture circuitry having to "work harder", and the analogue qualities of waveforms within the latter then doing the damage ... digital errors mean nothing in themselves.

[fas42]

The actual bits will be accurate - if interpreted as data, digital IOW. It's all about how one looks at a waveform - the identical signal, it can be looked at as information, or as an electrical 'picture' - how the circuitry that follows reacts depends on which way it's looking at things.

 

A visual analogy: a piece of paper full of numbers is photocopied multiple generations, and the toner is running out. The final 'picture' looks 'orrible - but if someone carefully views the poor result every single number can be accurately determined, and a 100% correct new version of that page can be recreated, with perfect clarity ... that's the 'magic' of digital.

[fas42]

Again, the bits at the input pin can be super clean, or electrically very ugly - how well the DAC handles that depends upon the circuitry inside the DAC, how 'robust' the implementation is.

[fas42]

1 hour ago, beerandmusic said:

The only assumption you can make is that data is accurate as a flat file....or at least only as accurate as the digital recording placed the bits....all processing and internal noise and everything can and will corrupt the digital stream.

 

While you keep trying to have the digital corrupting as "the answer of everything" you will keep getting the wrong end of the stick - as people here are trying to tell you, it's trivially easy these days to guarantee perfect, digital transmission - why are you having such a hard time accepting that the end analogue representation is highly sensitive to all sorts of interfering effects, and that the design has to be very robust to prevent those effects being audible?

 

I have a personal example of incredibly corrupted digital - a NAD CDP which from new had great difficulty reading CDRs, and the data being fed to its internal DAC is a complete mess with many such disks. Listening to this can be much worse than an appallingly dirty LP - yet the tonality of the recorded sound is still there, accompanied by a racket of rude noises as the mechanism manfully tries to grind its way down the track.

[fas42]

4 hours ago, beerandmusic said:

 

 

Also, as stated,  different dacs can interpolate, drop, etc.. so no matter what, no one can suggest one digital input is superior to another...it just depends on how the dac processes the errors (along with everything else) which ultimately matters...which goes to my point, about why worry about accuracy at all in the digital end, because DACs interpolate, use algorithms, etc...you can never achieve 100% accuracy. so why sweat it.  Why worry about fancy cables...any differences are subjective and are system dependent....might as well go the cheap route without usb cables...besides people wouldn't know accuracy compared to desired sound if it hit them in the face.

 

And this is where you do lose out - like many people in audio, you're grimly determined to separate out the different areas of operation, and insist that each is 100% independent of the other. Umm, no ... an audio rig is a system working in an environment, where any part can be somewhat sensitive, in a bad way, to the functioning of other parts of the system, or the environment. That "fancy cable" may in fact be a key factor in making the system robust - ditch that, and your SQ problems may go up many notches ...

 

Getting good sound is all about eliminating the weaknesses - people in other fields of endeavour understand this well, the need to strengthen vulnerable areas, to get competent operation. But audio is a bit of a bizarro world, where people believe the normal rules don't apply ... and our ears suffer ... .

[fas42]

35 minutes ago, Teresa said:

 

Who says so but you? I have always know that an audio system is only as good as its weakest link. I believe most other listeners believe this as well. Except for internal mods that you do, must of us have sought the greatest symmetry between components and speakers to get as close to the sound of acoustic instruments and human voices we hear in good performance spaces. Some things work well together, some do not, it is a trial and error and the major reason I only purchase with a money-back satisfaction guarantee. YMMV. ?

 

The normal rules do apply to audio, you must be hanging out with the wrong crowd.

 

Unfortunately, , you are indicating here the normal approach that people in the audio world use - worrying  about the "big stuff" ... yes, you can get a long way towards a better experience this way - but then you, for example, say how 'normal' CDs are not very pleasurable to listen to - which is giving the game away, you see .

 

It's the "devil's in the details" issues which prevent that type of material coming across well - the remaining weakest link is undermining the potential of that type of recording to show up well, and it will remain so until properly addressed.

 

Working with 'unpromising' gear as I do always reinforces this understanding - I worry about "silly things", and are then able to listen to "terrible" CDs at high volumes with complete pleasure - meaning, I have the full world of recorded music at my disposal, for my enjoyment .

 

The normal rules of audio are that only a tiny subset of recorded music is worthy - such a small hole to live in I would find very claustophobic, .

[fas42]

Just to point out, yet again, that when noise and interference effects are an issue, you don't hear this as noise. What you hear is degraded playback, like going from hi-fi to mid-fi - there may be a general 'dirtiness' to the sound, the treble is disturbing, it lacks the sparkle and bite of live music, you have to put on your "best" recordings to get a sense that the sound is "special" ... an excellent visual analogy is a quite dusty pane of glass: there appears to be no real problem, but if one half is scrupulously cleaned then it's obvious what is being lost on the 'noisy' half ...

[fas42]

14 hours ago, beerandmusic said:

that was in his test case....there are literally a million different possibilities with different hardware and different environments...the point is that error rate can and will affect SQ...but again, I believe can be avoided with a "properly optimized system".  I think USB can be fine, but that it is subject to SQ issues....even when using a non-optimized multi function pc, i had hard time telling if i liked usb better than enet or visa versa...so with a well tuned usb system, i see no practical issues.

 

If one looks at things more closely, there are very obvious reasons why USB audio has sound quality issues, as often implemented. And it has zero to do with the digital "gettings the bits right" - how the receiver is set up, and feeds into the DAC, to me, is a rat's nest, guaranteed to cause SQ degradation. I looked at a few designs of what's out there, and I didn't like a single one of them - only someone who has scrupulously looked at, and considered every aspect of how the circuitry should operate is likely to get optimum quality from that part of the chain ... as you say, best is a solution that completely eliminates the USB link.

[fas42]

13 hours ago, beerandmusic said:

Why do people buy expensive power supplies like Paul hynes if there is no noise to begin with?  Even you said you use lps in your server?

So you are saying low power media converters have a lot of noise measured on them, like the one in picture? (more noise than a generic pc doing quad dsd upsampling w/stock ps?)

 

Truly trying to learn, and am listening.  My goal is to create optimal solution in very low budget, and am currently buying parts to create ethernet over fiber system, and using parts similar to ones suggested by Miska and Jabbr.

 

Your questioning is like asking whether a computer program is a better one if something arbitrarily, randomly alters a bit of the code to junk, and the user can't then see the program crashing. What you want is for the audio system to work correctly under all reasonable conditions, and the USB connection is part of that system. So, work towards getting optimal SQ with whatever you happen to own; deliberately 'sabotaging' part of it to see if it "sounds worse" is pointless, really ...

[fas42]

4 minutes ago, beerandmusic said:

was said in jest....figured someone would get a kick out of it....you must admit other technologies seem to have come a lot further....think of where we were without the internet or mass storage not that many years ago....and we can put a man in space, or cause nuclear holocaust....but we can't figure out how to isolate noise from usb audio with anything but subjectivity....amazing.

 

 

 

 

Because audio isn't important ... close enough is good enough for most manufacturers; people still buy the product ... if people's lives depended on it, this would have been sorted decades ago ...

[fas42]

The infancy thing is true, in the sense that only a small number of people who do the manufacturing understand how fussy one has to be, for digital playback to really shine ... it's not a universal awareness, by a long shot.

 

The really good thing at the moment is that companies who are at the top of the quality tree have got a pretty good handle on things, finally - many of their products are hugely expensive; but it will trickle down ...