Bits is bits?

[Blackmorec]

4 hours ago, Summit said:

 

It is no problem to hear if a sound is coming in front, below or above us. It’s not as prices as horizontal, but I would not say it’s lacking.

Its also far less common in recordings. You don’t hear the effect with every recording as you do with the horizontal plain.  Layering or stacking images seems to be a more recentish development as I don’t recall hearing elevated imagery in old jazz recordings. I’ll check that statement sometime, so its just my recollection. 

[Blackmorec]

46 minutes ago, Summit said:

 

Yes I know what precedence effect is. Its real and you need to take it as well as and all other acoustic characteristics in to question then position the speakers and acoustically treat a room. I was very clear about the big room has to have good acoustic, see condition 1.

 

It’s not a big room that makes the music sound big and airy, see my first conditions about the recording. What a big room does is letting us place the speakers so that that they are further from back, side and back walls, at the same time as we can place the speakers further apart. To place the speakers further from back, side and back walls result in a less compressed sound than in a small room, everything else held equal.

 

I have never been to any concert, no matter if it has been a small intimate club or bigger show, there the stage is 2 meter wide. In a big room there the speakers can be positioned 4 meter apart and 1,5 meter from side walls the sound-stage is more like a live concert. With bigger room you will sit further away from the speakers and the sound from the different woofers will blend in better IMO.

 

Sub bass can be problematic in all room and the problem depends of size, form and material of the room. I would not say that bass is a larger problem in a big room, if anything it’s easier to treat many of the reflections, place tube traps and so on in a bigger room.

 

If you rather have a small room and think it sounds better that’s fine by me and congrats it’s normally both easier and cheaper to get a smaller room. I OTOH would like a big listening room because I know from experience that the best and most lifelike sound I have heard is when all three conditions I stated earlier are achieved in a big acoustic treated room.  

Hi Summit, 

The soundstage is created in the head. All the room does is support or hinder the process with its pesky reflections and resonances. There’s absolutely no reason why a system installed in a small room can’t create a huge recording venue in your head. It should create what's on the recording and if the recording is of a huge venue, with big distances between reflection points, that’s what you should hear, based on all the huge-venue acoustic clues that should be reaching your ears. In a small room what would prevent that is early reflections, but as I’ve already mentioned,  the Haas  effect and some judicious diffusion looks after them. Anyway you obviously prefer large rooms whereas I don’t see anything about a large room that can’t be had from a small one, sonically speaking. With the exception of very deep bass maybe. Anyway, I’ll leave it there and say that I enjoyed our discussion. 

 

 

[Blackmorec]

How about we finish our discussion with some music   Here’a An album that will create a realistic very large venue....you can here the space in the silences and the distance the audience is away. No gimmicks just natural acoustics and some `KICK-ASS’ music.  

Spyro Gyra.  Road Scholars  Heart of the night 

 

I have the CD but you should be able to stream it from somewhere like Qobuz. Guaranteed to sound good in large and small rooms alike 😉

[Blackmorec]

1 hour ago, Confused said:

But if there is the odd poor quality connector used when making the original recording then that is fine, because assuming the playback rig is properly sorted it will allow the brain to connect to the essence of the music?

Personally i would say it all depends on whether the ‘essence’ made it past the bad connector...if it did, then yes, if it didn’t, no. 

[Blackmorec]

On 8/16/2019 at 3:06 AM, fas42 said:

 

 

When one is merely inches away from a speaker on one side of a stereo, directly in front of it, you are effectively listening to one speaker - if someone were to disconnect the other speaker while I was was listening this way, I'm sure it would be essentially an invisible operation, as far as the ears were concerned.

You see Frank, this is the stuff I’m not buying...due almost entirely to the impossibility of the physics. 

 

WE say that the magic happens when the signal reaching each ear from a stereo pair of loudspeakers is sufficiently unsullied to allow the brain the treat both signals as coming from a single source. 

 

When you are so close to one speaker, several things happen.

1. There is only effectively 1 source, so the ears are receiving the same mono signal, which by definition can’t have positioning information, which is based on the differential between 2 signals

2. You are, in all likelihood not even listening to one loudspeaker and are far more likely to be listening predominantly to one of the speaker’s drivers. For sure at the distance you talk about there’ll be zero driver integration so at best you’re going to have massive frequency imbalances. That’s hardly the unsullied signal we’re looking for. 

 

 

[Blackmorec]

3 hours ago, 4est said:

This pretty much tells me that you have no idea what a system is capable of or have not much experience beyond your own room(s). To suggest that room acoustics and speaker placement is of no concern and the system should "just work" is utter folly flying in the face of decades of informed user's experiences. The likelihood of your "magic" being real or of value to anyone seem highly unlikely to me.

Oh the magic is real alright; the entire high end audio industry is built on it. When stereo delivers very well it really has some surprising capabilities. And the most amazing thing is that the recordings keep on giving, indicating that the journey isn’t finished.  The key to the magic is right here, “when stereo delivers very well”.  When the 2 signals from your loudspeakers are well matched enough that the brain can combine them into one, you initially experience a surreal sound as the music no longer comes from the 2 loudspeakers  L & R but is floating somewhere between and the speakers  ap(hear) to be silent.  This is not a state that few or no audiophiles have reached.....its the intended goal of the hobby. Of course the illusion can be further improved, quite dramatically in fact, but when you first hear your stereo ‘with no speakers’ it quite a profound experience if you’ve never heard it before. Kind of an audiophile grail, as in H grail just not so important. 

I think Frank has figured out a way to remove enough of the limitations in even quite humble gear to get a really good, convincing sound. And Frankly speaking I think he should write a book about what he’s achieved and the measures he’s taken. Such a book would be of profound value to the hard-up audiophile why genuinely wants to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear.  College EEs for example. Turns out you can make a pretty fine purse from a pigs ear. Just takes a lot of work, which is what Frank does. 

[Blackmorec]

2 hours ago, 4est said:

Although I generally agree with your first paragraph and have experienced it, I disagree with much of the second one. To begin with, I am no stranger to modding existing gear in hopes of mining further performance. I started doing so in the 80's by doing some of what Frank suggests(well, intimates as he never really does say what he does) by stripping down Dynaco gear and modding their power supplies. Sure, there are many gains to be had removing additional non needed circuitry and making hard connections. Those changes will not and cannot turn a sow's ear into a silk purse. Please note that Frank has suggested that anything is capable of doing this, and that the room or speaker placement doesn't matter. In a previous post he has even stated that his speakers are on a work bench. Although I have no real way of knowing without first hand experience, I struggle to imagine the kind of changes one could make that ameliorates speaker placement and the room let alone the speakers themselves. If I am to use his tag line, no amount of work is going to turn a Trabant into a Porsche.

Yeah, well I’m not going to argue with you because in the end we probably agree about far more than we disagree about. Just to note I was a little careful in my word selection, stating that you can make a nice purse out a sows ear, which is absolutely true.....that lovely soft leather. Its not a silk purse....as you can’t change pigskin into silk, obviously.  

As for making a Trabant into a Porsche, that’s something I’ve never seen. What i have seen was a wonderful photo of a guy who converted his Trabant into a camper.  Cool paint job. 

 

 

[Blackmorec]

Water coming into your home is perfectly potable. You can drink it, cook with it, make tea with it etc.

Can it be improved? Of course it can Can you detect the impurities? Of course you can. Can the impurities cause damage? Of course they can  Can a piece of hose improve the situation? Of course not. Can a  special piece of hose that’s been specifically engineered and prepared to treat the water  make a difference? Of course 

It’s no different with incoming data streams. They can go directly to a printer and they’ll print, or to an Audio DAC and they’ll play music.  But exactly what happens when you clean up the water? You get better tea without the scum, washing machines without the limescale and in data streams you get better music without the HF interference, phase noise and jitter. 

 

The difference between analog and digital is that in analog its difficult to clean up the musical signal without negatively affecting the outcome,  whereas in digital, reformatting and purification of the digital stream brings only sonic benefits. Water comes into the house with a variety of minerals. A 50cm piece of pipe can clean it up  almost completely despite the miles of piping its travelled through. A digital stream is no different in that it too can be cleaned and purified.

 

Take a contaminated data stream and pass it through a variety of different USB cables. Hear a difference? Unlikely.  Why? Because the contamination of the stream is already so profound that a little more will probably go unnoticed. But clean it up so it’s fairly pristine and you’ll immediately notice when you add back jitter and noise, vs  listening to it clean. 

 

If you don’t believe me try this. 

Buy a bottle of spring water and a bottle of single malt scotch whisky. Now prepare 2 glasses, one with 50% whisky and 50% tap water and the other with 50% whisky and 50% spring water. Taste both and tell me which tastes better. The level of contaminants in the tap water is in the parts per million and has a flavour strength of almost nothing compared to the whisky, yet the spring water tastes superior. Why? Human taste is very refined and has no problem detecting trace contaminants. What else will you notice? The whisky with spring water seems to have a far more complex flavour and tastes way more refined. Why? Human taste is very refined. Don’t believe me?  Do the test blind so you don’t know which whisky you’re drinking and simply pick the one that to you tastes better. There’s only 1 proviso. You can only do the test once, with fresh taste buds as your ability to differentiate very quickly disappears as your taste buds acclimatise to the strong taste and lose sensitivity. 

[Blackmorec]

12 hours ago, DonaldT2109 said:

Let me see if I have got this right

 

I want to listen to "Not Sure" from Tim Berne's album Snakeoil

 

1) Spotify server grabs the digitised recording of Not Sure from Snakeoil and sends as a digitised stream (that's ones and zeros)
2) a/d  d/a  a/d   d/a   countless times across countless nodes on the internet
3) my local exchange (through a LOT of equipment) sends the digitised stream, as an analogue signal, to my local cabinet and then to my modem accross a pair of twisted copper wires for 2 miles, shared with my telephone line, running parallel to my mains power supply, past a couple of generators
4) After yet another couple of analog to digital conversions it is sent wirelessly at 2.4 GHz, shared with a few dozen other devices, to my PC
5) The Spotify app, sharing the PCs resources with everything else that is running, sends the bitstream to a USB port

 

At this point, timing, jitter, reflections, impedance and a whole lot of other techno-babble suddenly become a major problem and I need a cable constructed from the mixing of a virgin's tears with the shavings from a unicorn's horn for the last 7 feet which will give 000011110010010001001000000100100010101010001111000011000100100111110010111101000011 "Subtle dynamic shadings beautifully rendered as well as macro and micro dynamic changes" to those blessed with the Golden Ears which defy physics and, crucially, gives the scamming cable company a 99% profit margin (less the kickback given to the reviewer)

 

My qualifications?  Apart from a doctorate in data communications, I can smell BS at a hundred paces and realise that a dumb piece of wire cannot detect that the digital stream passing across it is audio rather than a print stream and then to decode it to audio, add "Subtle dynamic shadings beautifully rendered as well as macro and micro dynamic changes" to the audio, recode it to digital and pass it on to the DAC.

Are you sure about the PhD because there’s an awful lot of flawed logic here?

A digitised stream isn’t ones and zeros....it oscillating voltages. A dumb piece of wire doesn’t detect or decode anything, it merely transmits the voltage stream, either with or without interference. There’s no need to differentiate print from audio streams, they’re either handled with or without additional noise being added. 

[Blackmorec]

44 minutes ago, marce said:

How does this have any affect on the analogue output, remember the claims are similar to what DSP does....

The BIG difference is analogue signal transmission is the SIGNAL, cleaning up the digital transmission does nothing to the analogue because it is encoded as BITs.

 

If the bits are mistimed, you get Jitter and if you get jitter you get phase noise. The point is, if there’s analog noise mixed in with an analog signal, there’s not a lot you can do, because you cant differentiate one from another whereas a digital signal can be reformatted without losing any of its audio integrity. But once you’ve cleaned and reformatted the digital stream you don’t want it recontaminated or mistimed by EMI, poor quality oscillators etc etc which is where the cables comes in. Its passive so it can’t enhance anything but it sure as hell can detract. 

[Blackmorec]

3 hours ago, DonaldT2109 said:

 

Hoorah !. At last somebody who realises that the cable doesn't know it is audio and therefore can not possibly 'enhance'  the music which has been encoded into a bit stream

 

 

Exactly how does the cable reformatt and purify the digital stream?  

 

 

OMG    Pleae don't tell me that you think an expensive HDMI cable can improve picture quality

 

 

Actually no. I clearly know more about data and audio transmission than most of the respondants. You can abuse me as much as you like, but it will not make me into somebody is so out of touch with reality that he will spend next years vaccation money on a cable that does absolutely nothing more than my $10 cable and then try to justify it bu telling everybody that the violins "sound more alive"

------
 

Iso Regens ????    Presumably this piece of audiofoolery makes the ones and zeros look cleaner

 

Comparing USB audio to my water supply ? Why not compare it to a box of frogs?

 

Oh, and the single malt whisky and water comparison is one of the funniest things I have read for ages  ( I am assuming it was meant as a joke)

 

1110011 = 1110011           111111111=111111111  etc etc      get it.   Drag yourselves out of analogue and try to understand digital

 

I  notice nobody can explain how this fragile bitstream survives the 2 miles journey to my house as an audio signal

 

Sorry guys,  I thank you for your time but I'm out of here looking for a forum here they actually know how audio transmission works.

I suggest you do some reading up on how sound is digitised, transmitted and then restored to audio

 

See ya

 

 

You really don’t get this do you, which is why I’m having a hard time with the PhD. The problem isn’t 1110011....the problem is all the hf noise and phase noise that go along with it.  There’s no such thing as 1110011 in an electrical circuit. Its all analog voltages that REPRESENT 1s and 0s 

[Blackmorec]

30 minutes ago, DonaldT2109 said:

 

OK Everybody let's try again

At the beginning of all of this I really wanted to know where to spend the money on a system.

Amp - a given

speakers a given

DAC a given

 

I started to investigate cables.

Speaker cables ? good but not stupid price ( do NOT start a discussion on speaker cables )

When I got to the choice of connecting my stored or streamed music to my system via USB . kabooooooooooom. A Stack of people adamant that USB cables can improve the sound, even though everything I know about communications says they can't. But I wanted to investigate

 

So I started asking how these cables could do that. I then got jitter and reflection and impedance and I said woah ! I do not want to know how to get a clean signal I want to know how the cable can enhance the audio carried by the bitstream coming out of my USB port before delivery to my DAC like the reviewers and cable companies say it can

 

I am still waiting. The cable companies I have contacted either don't reply or reply with something like "It just does"

Forums generally end up like this. stacks of explanation on how a cable could stop a bit error every 100 million bits but absolutely nothing on how the audio gets enhanced.

 

Forgive me being a little jaded on this subject but there must be somebody who knows how these cables do their 'enhancing' As far as I am concerned if nobody, including the manufacturers, can explain how they work...... then they don't

 

I believe the answer to be. Get a USB cable which is well constructed for around $75 and it should last for years delivering bits in exactly the same order they were sent.

 

Thanks for listening       and I am really not having a go at those who think they can hear a difference. If you spend $1000 dollars on a cable and for whatever reason you think it sounds better, then to you it does sound better. Money well spent

OK, lets start again. No passive cable enhances SQ. How could it if its passive?. What cables do is to subtract. A cable that subtracts NOTHING (which to my knowledge doesn’t yet exist) would be considered and judged to be one of the best cables in the World.

Here’s how it works 

 

Lets say I transmit a perfect signal at 100% and I have 2 cables. One loses 5% of the performance and the other 15%, so instead of 100% I’m going to hear 85% and 95% perfection so one cable is going to sound a lot better than the other. This is an oversimplification simply to illustrate the concept. All the items you mentioned above....Jitter, reflection, impedance mismatch,  RFI and EMI, phase noise......non of which are likely to cause bit errors,  will all cause problems of one sort or another with components in the DAC. There’s enough published technical information about how these issues are caused if you care to look. 

So a really cruddy stream arrives at your house, with noise, jitter etc. It goes through a number of cleanup steps to remove noise and reconstruct the timing to remove jitter. This pristine signal is then sent to the USB output. If that has a decent clock and power supply then a good signal is fed into the cable. If the cable is sufficiently screened, has the correct impedance, picks up no EMI or RFI etc then a good clean stream arrives at your DAC. A poor cable on the other hand will deliver a distorted and contaminated stream that causes your DAC problems. This is not an issue about bit stream errors...its noise and timing issues that cause the problems.  Feed a DAC a perfect bit stream i.e all bits present and there’s no guarantee you’ll get great sound. It has to be a clean, error free, contaminant free bit stream to achieve excellent results. 

[Blackmorec]

Which other area do we actually listen to the results, so surely the better questions are; how come we can actually hear differences? Or; What is it about our hearing that makes us so sensitive to these anomalies? 

 

My goal for over 40 years has been to have a system that is completely immersive and 100% musically convincing. I have found this goal to be very illusive and only achieved with the utmost care. One false move and its gone. I have heard literally hundreds of systems and have heard my goal realised on only very few occasions. The replacement of a single DC cable is sometimes enough to rob the system of its magic, so we’re not talking major anomalies. Close to perfect music from an audio system is in my experience a very rarely encountered quality. 

 

[Blackmorec]

22 minutes ago, DonaldT2109 said:

OK

 

Lets say that I have installed the Audioquest Diamond, as an example, into my system

 

I now have a beautiful clean signal reaching my DAC from my USB port, absolutely perfect, couldn't be better with no jitter and perfect signal timing

 

I quote from Audiostream.com, "The Audioquest Diamond’s greatest sonic attribute is its extreme smoothness in the midrange and high end that at the same time, is detailed and very revealing. The Diamond is not a warm sounding cable nor does it roll off transients. Bass is well defined with a very slight fullness of the real thing. The soundstage is large with excellent width and depth"

 

I try The Synergistic Research USB Active SE with Enigma Tuning Circuits instead (Don’t laugh, it really exists)

 

Again from Audiostream.com, "The sonic characteristic of this cable that stuck with me the most was the richness of sound and analog character of the cable. The midrange of this cable can sound absolutely beautiful and revealing at the same time. Sound staging was not only wide, but extremely deep in presentation. The deep black background offered by this cable is very impressive. The Synergistic was never hard sounding or excessively rounded at the high end. Transients were well reproduced with excellent dynamics both macro and micro. The bass was well defined and not overly lean. "

 

So, my question one more time. How does a USB cable do this ? How does it adjust my now perfect bit for bit digitised audio-stream between USB port and DAC to give these results           Anyone ?
 

To do this they would need onboard A/D and DSP chips to derive the digital stream from the analogue USB, decode the digital stream back to audio, make their enhancements, recode to digital, D/A back into the analogue USB, regenrate the signal to the DAC.

 

That would explain the costs for a few bits of wire

 

Or is something different happening?   anyone ?

Lets take your first underlined paragraph.  I now have a beautiful clean signal reaching my DAC from my USB port, absolutely perfect, couldn't be better with no jitter and perfect signal timing. 

 

What arrives at your DAC depends entirely on what leaves your USB port. The cable only transports it. So by definition, all Audiostream.com are describing is the quality of the signal that appears at your USB port. All those cables have done is to transport it while doing minimal damage. If you were to hardwire your USB output to your DAC without any cable, what you should hear should be a combination of both descriptions, because the signal has to incorporate both sets of qualities before its transmitted along the cables, since neither cable can add those qualities, they must have been there before hand and all these cables are doing is not losing them to the same degree as others. 

 

 

 

[Blackmorec]

Deleted

[Blackmorec]

11 hours ago, DonaldT2109 said:

 

Hey Dave,  don't knock it

 

Earlier on they were comparing digitised audio to my water supply !!!!

Well that obviously that went right over your head, like most of this stuff appears to be doing. 

 

Both your water supply and your music stream travel along a myriad of pipes and cables before reaching your home. When they reach your home they both have a level of contamination and while both can be used directly, as is, both highly benefit from some clean-up. 

Once cleaned up both ‘taste’ better....one makes better music, the other better washing water, potable water, tea, coffee or whatever.

Both can be cleaned up by short runs of specially engineered ‘piping’, namely filters 

Both are easily recontaminated, one by contaminated house piping and appliances, the other by EMI, RFI, poor quality power supplies, poorly executed oscillators, noisy mains etc. 

All you need do to educate yourself is to read some of John Swenson’s work...available here on the sponsored Uptone Audio Forum.... .most of this stuff is covered and I highly recommend it. 

[Blackmorec]

21 minutes ago, esldude said:

I happen to know something about electronic filtering and water supply filtering.  Why don't you point out to us the web link for all of John's white papers and testing regimes he keeps promising.  Oh, yeah......right...................you can't.  So sorry. 

 

Don't know whether you'd be better served to learn about water filtration or electronics. Your level of understanding about both seems to be at the level of marketing spiel.  Maybe time to stop digging....................................................................

Oh boy....completely misinformed, as usual. 

 

https://uptoneaudio.com/pages/j-swenson-tech-corner

 

 

 

 

[Blackmorec]

The are 2 ways to make improvements in hi-fi

1. Obtain more detail and accuracy from the source material i.e record grooves, magnetic tape, computer bits or 

2. Remove noise, distortions and resolution losses that mask and hide detail (analog) or interferences that negatively impact detail recovery (digital). 

Both 1 & 2 will give improved sound quality and both sound similar so its only possible to differentiate by looking at what was done to achieve the improvement. 

Improving a turntable, cartridge, CD transport, tape deck, DAC etc will recover more detail, more accurately (1).  Improving power supplies, amplifiers, speakers, cables, vibration control, mains treatments  etc will unmask and reveal hidden detail in line with 2. 

When a USB cable gives a deeper, wider soundstage or more luscious midrange....it actually doesn’t.  What is does is to not allow ingress to the interferences that might otherwise damage the soundstage and  midrange perception elsewhere in the system (usually the DAC). The improvements aren’t added....they’re already there, in the bit stream, just masked. 

 

Both soundstage perception and midrange judgements happen in the head and can result from minuscule changes in the final analog signal, so it doesn’t take much to introduce disturbances that impair a system’s performance. All systems are impaired...some a little and some a lot.  

 

There is no way to add detail that wasn’t extracted from the source...it is however possible to unmask detail that was previously buried in noise or unresolved due to problems later in the processing chain. 

So in summary, an ‘improved’ USB cable increases SQ indirectly by preventing the ingress of interference that negatively affects SQ later in the chain

 

[Blackmorec]

10 hours ago, pkane2001 said:

 

Am I correct in understanding that using knowledge and understanding disqualifies one from being an audiophile then?

Using knowledge and understanding while ignoring direct evidence from your ears would disqualify you as an audiophile. There will almost certainly be times when what you hear contradicts what you know and think you understand. For example, that USB cables can affect SQ. When that’s the case, and you confirm that what you’re hearing is reproducible, then the ONLY logical explanation is that your knowledge and understanding are incomplete. 

Some people here think that we know everything about electricity and electronics but I would say that, given our progress over the last 100 years, it is highly unlikely that we know everything there is to know, or frankly even close to it.  The Universe is a very complex place with a lot of phenomena we can observe but in no way yet understand so the progress we’ve made is likely to continue for a long time yet. Believing we know it all is IMO,  just naive.  

Digital audio is, again IMO rife with misunderstandings. I don’t have the answers but I and many others are constantly encountering contradictions where facts, evidence and outcomes don’t perfectly match. Hopefully they will lead to further investigations, new measurements and improved understandings. But as long as those dichotomies exists, there will always be 3 camps in audio

1. The subjectivists, who base everything solely on what they hear

2. The objectivists, who base everything on what they think they know and can measure

3. The realists, who observe that what we know and can measure doesn’t always perfectly match what we hear, so recognise that our knowledge and expertise has shortcomings.   

 

[Blackmorec]

4 hours ago, Allan F said:

 

Unlike you, John, I don't really care what the reason is that some USB cables sound better than others. It is the end product, i.e. the enjoyment of the music that matters to me. Soundstage is not a particular priority of mine. Rather, I am far more concerned about resolution of detail, accurate timbre, and PRAT. In my lengthy experience in this hobby, I have found that different cables can offer improvements in those areas. Obviously, cables can't improve on what is actually recorded, but different cables can sometimes allow systems to get closer to it. You seem to have a very negative/cynical view of the audio industry in general that I just don't happen to share.

Hi Allan, I agree with what you say, but would like to discuss the concept of soundstage. 

In your priorities you list resolution of detail.  Essentially resolving detail is about resolving the differences between very closely related sounds. Let’s think about those differences for a moment; 

We obviously have frequencies and the frequency spectrum, timing and amplitude, but for me, no less important is space or placement.  If you have 2 voices (ie the same voice multitracked) that are identical in frequency and  timing, you will only hear one voice unless they have different timing and/or different placement in space. Placement in space is soundstaging, so if resolution is a critical priority for you,  accurate soundstaging (or placement in space) is one of the main areas of differentiation .  An example. Very often in poorly resolving hi-fi you will hear female vocals or violins that sound slightly harsh and annoying. Replay that same recording on a highly resolving system with good soundstaging and those female vocals resolve into the voice and the venue ambience. Although the frequencies and timing are similar the position of each is very different so you hear them as 2 separate events or sound entities and that’s why soundstaging is important....it allows you to better differentiate closely related details. 

[Blackmorec]

14 minutes ago, marce said:

4. Those that are affected by bias and refuse to believe perception can be fooled and thus is not empirical data without some form of confirmation testing.

 

As to the rest straight from the the standard audiophile standard reply scripts.

The electronics one always me me laugh, the stuff we are learning allows us to create things that are far more complex than the relatively simple task of reproducing domestic audio...

Do you understand the concept of reproducible?  It means that something is the same every single time.....not imagined to be the same....THE SAME.....reproducible. And how would you know its THE SAME? By doing confirmatory testing. 

 

And you think domestic audio is relatively simple? Recording, electronics, networking, software,  transduction,  materials science, acoustics, psychoacoustics...Yep, that certainly sounds simple to me. The very fact that you think its simple just proves the very point I was making. 😊

 

[Blackmorec]

16 minutes ago, marce said:

And what point was that....

When sound quality improvements are reproducible yet contradict someone’s current knowledge and understanding or the medium, its the knowledge and understanding that is incomplete.  Claiming that reproducible improvements can come from the imagination is obviously illogical.  

 

Your knowledge and understanding of domestic audio reproduction led you to state that it is relatively simple. Logically the only way for that conclusion to be reached is for the knowledge and understanding to be simple i.e likely missing information about the complex interactions between all the various elements I mentioned in my original post

[Blackmorec]

50 minutes ago, mansr said:

It could also be that your lack of knowledge and understanding has led you to perceive audio reproduction as complex and mystifying.

OK, tell me how vibration interacts with silicon to change its output? Texas Instruments tested it and proved the effect

[Blackmorec]

4 hours ago, Speedskater said:

When this happens, either:

1] we measured the wrong things.

2] or more likely, the listening test was flawed.

Exactly!  Number 1.         We hear a change where measurement tells us there shouldn’t be a change. We check and find the results are repeatable, so why the contradiction? Logically we’re obviously measuring the wrong thing. Example from this very thread...we measure the bit stream before and after passing it through a USB cable and it measures identically. Unchanged. The fact its unchanged indicates there should be  no change in the sound, but there is.  Many have argued on the basis of the bit stream’s integrity that there can be no change,  but measuring the bit stream is in actual fact measuring the wrong thing, since its not where the changes occur. 

Naturally listening test can always be flawed, like any test. 

[Blackmorec]

18 hours ago, marce said:

Again, can't you even consider that perceptions are easily fooled and its not the knowledge or understanding that is incomplete, but the perception.

 

Nice insult, typical true believer dig, I state its simple ergo I am simple, get off you high horse for a few seconds, look at how easily perception can be fooled, expectation bias etc. and maybe learn a little electronics... 30+ years since digital audio appeared, look at where we are today with electronics compared to then and there are still Luddites going on about how complex it all is and we don't know what we are doing, measuring etc. Because you can't be wrong, your perception is ineffable.

My system sucks as well and my hearing and I can't be a true audiophile because even though I know cable differences can be measured 130dB below the signal I can't here that far into the mix, oh woe.

As stated reality does not sell cables or exotic fuses for that matter or Synergistic Research thimbles....

Hi Marce,

I wouldn’t say or even infer that you are simple...that’s (a) not my style and (b) I don’t know you from a bar of soap. What I said is based on simple logic. If you say for example that building a suspension bridge is simple, when its fact it involves highly complex math and engineering know how, then from a purely logical standpoint it must be your knowledge and understanding of suspension bridges that is lacking, or overly simple.

 

We have of course made progress in digital audio over the past 30 years, mainly in the area of discovering what can impact the sound negatively and finding way to ameliorate those issues.  You think we’re all done and finished in terms of discoveries and development? If that’s the belief then effectively progress stops.   But ask yourself how well our current systems are able to reproduce the sound of a live drum, trumpet or saxaphone?  If you think that’s the best we’ll ever do, I’m really glad there are others who believe otherwise, as we’re still a long way short, despite the past 30 years. Stated a different way, building a digital system is simple, if all you want are poor facsimiles of the real sound.  So again logically, getting the real thing must involve an extra degree of complexity, including some things we haven’t yet discovered.  

 

Of course I can be wrong about something and when I find out I am I change my mind, so convince me. In my case its taken me 40+ years of trying to build the perfect hi-fi to realise that everything matters AND that even the best systems have shortcomings. If we knew why and what, don’t you think we’d simply build better systems....That’s just the nature of who we are. So the very fact that recordings of musical instruments still don’t sound absolutely real should tell you that there are still shortcomings that remain to be discovered and solved.  Look at the progress we’ve made over 30 years. Do you think that will stop? Do you think we’ll reach a point where we know it all and further progress will be impossible?  I’m actually not aware of any discipline where this has happened so far in human history. As far as I know we are still making discoveries in practically every area of human endeavour. Why should electronics be any different?

Finally, there are 2 ways to handle an anomaly that doesn’t fit what we know. Denial or investigation. I (and my high horse) belong to the latter group.  I agree entirely that its completely illogical for a fuse to make a major difference in a hi-fi. For a start there are probably a dozen or more fuses in most systems. So let’s just deny that such a thing is possible. Poppycock!  But is it? What if the damned things do make a difference?  We’ve just thrown away a perfectly good opportunity to (a). Discover what’s going on that we didn’t know about previously and (b). To improve our system 

For me at least, a lot of the reactions to new discoveries are simply knee jerk ‘“can’t be”.  If that’s not expectation bias, then I don’t know what is. 😉