Track preload affects sonics - HELP!!!

[BrokeLinuxPhile]

Audio quality will never be measurable in the sense that individuals would be able to compare numbers and correlate results with any degree of accuracy.  The telecom industry has struggled with how to measure voice quality accurately for decades, and the best they can come up with is MOS.  You would run tests in a lab using expensive measurement equipment and simulators, then get out in the field and the lab numbers meant nothing because real calls in real life sound like crap every time it rained.  I hated that job.

 

I'd put money on things being physiological/psychological more than a physically measurable phenomenon.  Superstition comes to mind, easy to convince yourself something brings good luck.  Or in this case, better sound.    There could be engineering reasoning behind it although much less likely IMO.  It would be a huge amount of effort to find the root cause either way and would the end result be worth all that effort?  Diminishing returns. 

 

If it sounds good, do it I say.

[BrokeLinuxPhile]

23 minutes ago, sandyk said:

For real life calls to sound like crap every time it rained, it should have only been possible due to partial short circuits or insulation losses to earth in either the customer's riser or main pair cables, or the cables from the premises to the external pit.

(Unless of course, it was in a rural area with aerial cables)

 Unfortunately, this is more of a problem these days, especially with ADSL,FTN ( Fibre to the Node) etc.  with aging local copper infrastructure and lack of proper maintenance. 

 

Regards

Alex

(Retired Principal Telecommunications Technical Officer-Telstra Australia )

 

True.  I was doing  VoIP testing over power lines via BPL.  Basically undeployable and that's why it failed.  Smallest amounts of ground noise would cause huge jumps in latency for us.  Chasing all that noise in a distribution grid was just herding cats. 

 

Small world.  I helped support Telstra way back when during my Nortel tenure, system testing PPPoEoA aggregation.

[BrokeLinuxPhile]

But the junction box full of water can always be found using a sound engineering approach.  It's noise, and can be triangulated, found, and repaired.  It's just a question whether or not it's cost effective to fix most of the time.  It's also erosion of quality over time, it used to work well and now not so much. 

 

Here we are talking about a sense of 'sounds better' right from the get go without decay or breaking.  Or explainable noise even coming in from anywhere.  We are talking about restarting a single track from a CD and it sounding better.    Perhaps something is going on inside the machine that could cause that, but it's not the most likely culprit.  There would have to be a functional delta between starting a track fresh and hitting the back arrow button from either a hardware or software design standpoint.  It would cost more to do, take longer to develop, and you are always going to have 2 situations, one sounding better than the other.  Not saying it's impossible, just would not make much sense to do.

 

I'd put more money on physical changes inside the ear, call it fatigue or "calibration" to a new source track.

[BrokeLinuxPhile]

I don't think you are giving the hw designers enough credit here.  Of course they would know about this if it was real, how many people have claimed to have heard this over the years?  Many, this isn't the first reporting of this phenomena by a long shot, i've heard it a bunch of times before this thread.  I refuse to think they have their heads stuck in the sand all this time, they are in tune to the user base. 

 

Surely someone by now would have invented a CD player by now that did not have this problem, CD players have been around in consumer homes for over 30 years now.  An uber high end boutique maker by now would have said costs be damned and fixed it just to say they were the only ones to do it.  That is, if the problem was real, AND it was possible to fix.  Or it's just inherent to the physical properties of the process, and won't ever be fixed because it can't be fixed.

 

Could it be the supply?  Sure.  But I would not call it likely.  On a walmart player yeah, but a player costing more than a grand?  What are you paying all that money for?  It's not all in the transport.

 

[BrokeLinuxPhile]

35 minutes ago, fas42 said:

Alex, I'm afraid it is the silly little things that matter - checking supply voltages for the precise nature of the noise that exists on them, something that will constantly change, depending upon what the unit and its electrical surroundings are doing, is going to be difficult to do, and merely tells you whether there is a chance of some sort of interference effect being in the pictue

 

The hardest part of problem solving is repeating the initial problem, and establishing a procedure for repeating the result time and time again.  That's been established already according to what's being posted here.  Start track, pause and wait, and repeat track.  Sounds better second time around, on any digital device.  That's according to the OP, yourself, and others.  For any competent engineer, 75% of the work is complete right there.  According to what I'm reading here, you don't need a particular brand/model/anything, just plug your stuff in and you'll hear it every time, right?

 

Slam dunk to solve if given resources.   That is if the problem is real and it's actually a solvable problem.  Sometimes it's the nature of the beast and you can't get around it.  But it should be observable and well understood why things are that way at this point.  Digital media is decades old now.