Bits is bits?

[Jking]

    In the article he mentioned digital filters of the dac.  On a Sabre 9018 I can hear a pretty big difference switching the filter.  Not even sure which one it is but, I have to remote into the dac to set it via cfg file as it resets to the default once power is removed.   Is the filter in the digital or analog stage?

[asdf1000]

 

7 hours ago, jabbr said:

rather powered by RPi3 with stock wall wart RPi branded supply.

 

Maybe it’s source (not just source power) related too...

 

I have a microRendu v1.4 providing the same clean bus power as your Regen.

 

Never had any pops/clicks/hum at DSD512 for me... 

 

[fas42]

20 hours ago, kumakuma said:

 

Let us know how you make out once you actually get started.

 

Obviously I'll add commentary here,

 

 

as I move forward on things. Unlike apparently some here, I have a ToDo list a mile long on other life stuff that has to be dealt with - which tends to take priority, for some strange reason, .

[DonaldT2109]

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.

[crenca]

10 minutes 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

 

You got it wrong at #2...

[DonaldT2109]

Just now, crenca said:

 

You got it wrong at #2...

 

Actually, it depends on the topoloogy of the networks, but I asssure you that there can be plenty of A/D and D/A,  I designed some of them.  Even so the rest stands, crucially the 2 miles of analogue from the exchange to my house. The data  seems to survive that but not seven feet from my PC to my DAC ?

[crenca]

1 minute ago, DonaldT2109 said:

 

Actually, it depends on the topoloogy of the networks, but I asssure you that there can be plenty of A/D and D/A,  I designed some of them.  Even so the rest stands, crucially the 2 miles of analogue from the exchange to my house. The data  seems to survive that but not seven feet from my PC to my DAC ?

 

Given that we are talking about the the "Internet", there is no "a/d  d/a  a/d   d/a   countless times..." at all - assuming by "a" you mean "analogue" or "audio" or "aardvark", the normal things used and abused by digital voodoo pedlars.  Yes, all "digital" has an "analogue" physical layer somewhere somehow, but that is besides the point - or should be, but again we are talking about digital voodoo pedlars who wrongly make much of this in their confidence game...

[DonaldT2109]

24 minutes ago, crenca said:

Given that we are talking about the the "Internet", there is no "a/d  d/a  a/d   d/a   countless times..." at all - assuming by "a" you mean "analogue" or "audio" or "aardvark", the normal things used and abused by digital voodoo pedlars.  Yes, all "digital" has an "analogue" physical layer somewhere somehow, but that is besides the point - or should be, but again we are talking about digital voodoo pedlars who wrongly make much of this in their confidence game...

 

Ok Crenca we will agree to disagree on that, but there certainly is Digital to Analogue at the exchange and Analogue to Digital in my Modem n'est-ce pas?

[sandyk]

1 hour ago, DonaldT2109 said:

 

Actually, it depends on the topoloogy of the networks, but I asssure you that there can be plenty of A/D and D/A,  I designed some of them.  Even so the rest stands, crucially the 2 miles of analogue from the exchange to my house. The data  seems to survive that but not seven feet from my PC to my DAC ?

 

As Crenca has already  pointed out, you are completely out of touch with current technology as used in the Internet.

 How long ago did you retire ?

Yes, there are plenty of Snake Oil peddlers out there, but not all are. USB Audio in particular needs quite a bit of help to achieve best results, including the use of Iso Regens etc. designed by highly experienced E.Es. such as our member John Swenson.

If you can't hear the differences,  then perhaps your equipment is also in need of an upgrade to recent standards, or your hearing is even worse than this 80- year old's hearing, which was damaged when a Principal Telecommunication Technical Officer with Australia's Telstra.

 

 Perhaps both you and Crenca should also read reply #57 here

https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/56979-who-has-tried-out-different-usb-cables/page/3/#comments

 

[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. 

[sandyk]

1 hour ago, Blackmorec said:

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. 

 

 A good analogy .

 And perhaps not too surprisingly, the same applies to Digital Video as well .

[DonaldT2109]

58 minutes ago, Blackmorec said:

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. 

 

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

 

2 hours ago, Blackmorec said:

whereas in digital, reformatting and purification of the digital stream brings only sonic benefits

 

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

 

14 minutes ago, sandyk said:

 And perhaps not too surprisingly, the same applies to Digital Video as well

 

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

 

12 hours ago, sandyk said:

As Crenca has already  pointed out, you are completely out of touch with current technology

 

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

 

 

[mansr]

14 hours ago, DonaldT2109 said:

Ok Crenca we will agree to disagree on that, but there certainly is Digital to Analogue at the exchange and Analogue to Digital in my Modem n'est-ce pas?

As crenca said, of course every signal ultimately has an "analogue" carrier of some kind. That doesn't mean the digital audio signal is converted to an analogue audio signal by the modem or whatever, which is what some people seem to suggest (if they are selling) or believe (if they've been suckered into buying). You seem to agree that if the digital bit sequence is correctly received, the details of the transmission don't matter. I think the confusion here comes from your mention of D/A and A/D conversions in the transmission without making clear that you were referring to various modulation schemes, not the audio signal itself.

[sandyk]

45 minutes ago, DonaldT2109 said:

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

Nowhere did I say it was due to an  expensive HDMI cable. I was talking about the use of a USB Regen in this instance to improve the Signal Integrity.. All that I want from a HDMI cable is to meet the specs and not radiate too much UHF RF/EMI due to poor earthing techniques (pigtails) with many cheap Asian HDMI cables.

 Please don't slam the door as you head back to Hydrogen Audio forum, where even they will tell you that you are out of touch with current Internet Technology including the widespread use of FTN and more recently FTP.

[marce]

5 hours ago, Blackmorec said:

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. 

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.

 

[John Dyson]

17 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.

 

I agree with you up to a point -- true errors in the digital stream can cause problems.  Errors in the digital stream do NOT happen very often relative to the analog problems.   However, if some of the non-technical audiophiles understood how many delays and the extreme processing that is done to the audio, they'd realize how darned robust the digital signal really is.

The keys to a good digital signal (other than the underlying analog based transport of digital data being good) is that the timing be well quantified.   Once the timing delays through a system are well understood, you can do things like the DHNRDS does...   In the heavy processing, super-clean-up modes, the DHNRDS has about 28k sample delay at 66.15kHz (long story about using that frequency as an example.)   That delay ends up being on the order of approx 1/2 second, but when you look at the input vs. output files, the difference in timing is at the 1-5 sample level, often much less.

No matter the delays, and assuming error free transport (most HDMI type stuff is error free, even CDs are relatively error free), digital makes a perfect copy across the digital transport.

There be many dragons in the A/D and D/A mechanisms...   Interfering jitter into the digital signal itself is not a problem.  The problem with 'jitter' is in the A/D, noise in the grounds, the output clock, etc.

 

Digital by itself is really, really good.   When digital is fed poor material (mismastering, for example), then the digital will reproduce the mistakes very accurately...

 

John

 

[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 

[charlesphoto]

3 hours ago, DonaldT2109 said:

 

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

 

 

 

Look at his avatar name - and imagine that, coming on here and in a dozen posts coming off as an ass%&@* and insulting the entire forum, like his beloved has the entire world. Good riddance. 

[DonaldT2109]

15 minutes ago, charlesphoto said:

Look at his avatar name - and imagine that, coming on here and in a dozen posts coming off as an ass%&@* and insulting the entire forum, like his beloved has the entire world. Good riddance.

 

Still here……………….. but can we keep elementary schoolers out of this forum please?

I have been very careful, unlike you, to insult no one, read back, I am afraid that it is you that has come across as an ass%&@*

You are so so typical of those with fingers in your ears going 'la,la,la,la,la' when you can't win an argument. Stamp your feet next?

All I want is for one person to explain how this special USB cable rearranges the bit stream coming out of the usb port to enhance the audio that it carries before it presents it to the DAC. Nobody has offered an explanation yet. Does it have a DSP chip built into it? No cable manufacturer or 'reviewer' can answer that very simple question.

 

All I have got so far is mains water supply, scotch and other completely irrelevant nonsense

 

Please can somebody explain how these special USB cables work

[charlesphoto]

Just now, DonaldT2109 said:

 

Still here……………….. but can we keep elementary schoolers out of this forum please?

I have been very careful, unlike you, to insult no one, read back, I am afraid that it is you that has come across as an ass%&@*

You are so so typical of those with fingers in your ears going 'la,la,la,la,la' when you can't win an argument. Stamp your feet next?

All I want is for one person to explain how this special USB cable rearranges the bit stream coming out of the usb port to enhance the audio that it carries before it presents it to the DAC. Nobody has offered an explanation yet. Does it have a DSP chip built into it? No cable manufacturer or 'reviewer' can answer that very simple question.

 

All I have got so far is mains water supply, scotch and other completely irrelevant nonsense

 

Please can somebody explain how these special USB cables work

 

I think I/we could spend all morning explaining it to you and you would still be adamant in your (dis) belief. And then just call us 'audio fools' and announce that you're 'out of here (again and again). You seem to be a person who comes off like that.

 

So, all I'll add is  "La, la, la, la...." 

[DonaldT2109]

1 minute ago, charlesphoto said:

I think I/we could spend all morning explaining it to you and you would still be adamant in your (dis) belief. And then just call us 'audio fools' and announce that you're 'out of here (again and again). You seem to be a person who comes off like that.

 

So, all I'll add is  "La, la, la, la...." 

 

Laughing my socks off here !

 

I am not and have vever called anybody an 'audio fool' I a have been brought up not to be as rude as you

 

Go on then, I have time. Explain to me how this special USB cable rearranges the bit stream coming out of the usb port to enhance the audio that it carries before it presents it to the DAC

 

 

[pkane2001]

28 minutes ago, charlesphoto said:

 

Look at his avatar name - and imagine that, coming on here and in a dozen posts coming off as an ass%&@* and insulting the entire forum, like his beloved has the entire world. Good riddance. 

 

I love the role reversal. DonaldT arguing for an objective, scientific explanation and those against him arguing for an unproven conspiracy theory! Hilarious.

[charlesphoto]

And, I'm sorry, but unless your name is really Donald and last name begins with a T,  your screen name was chosen specifically to trigger people, so expect to reap what you seek.