Mains conditioner for SMPSs?

[fas42]

4 hours ago, marce said:

So how does this noise have an effect on the resolution?

 

 

Blackmorec's net analogy is excellent for what occurs - the noise can't be heard as a signal in itself; but it impacts the ability of the system to be accurate. As mansr states above, just remove the possible noise maker entirely from the circuit - this means unplugging it from the outlet - and see whether an audible difference occurs. This is precisely what I've been doing for years, and it's been an excellent 'tool'.

 

Typical subjective symptoms are, with the "noise maker" operating, and causing an issue: sound is greyer, treble dulled, the 'life' is sucked out of the presentation, you don't want to keep listening to it - there's a sense of 'wrongness' about the sound ... remove the culprit, and all the negatives vanish - a sense of 'rightness' is restored.

 

The technical, measurable resolution merely moves, but the ability of the brain to "resolve" changes greatly - it's a psychoacoustic mechanism we're playing with here.

[fas42]

Alex, some people want to live in the world where audio is merely a set of Black Boxes, which work "perfectly" in their designated spaces - and you just have to plug 'em together like Lego bricks. Nice try ... but no cigar, 😉. The unfortunate reality is that there is always enough interference leakage to impact perceived SQ - which means doing a lot of juggling to reach an acceptable solution; and that is why there is the current madness of umpteen solutions in every area of the audiophile world.

 

"Fire all the incompetent engineers!!", they cry out - trouble is, even the "best" brands aren't sufficiently sorted - Benchmark is one of those held up as a "good example"; yet it's easy to pick that their products still have weaknesses, when you read people's experiences with them.

[fas42]

Part of the skill set is to be able to listen to equipment as part of a working system, and have no trouble hearing it misbehaving - call it a form of Quality Assurance if you like, 😉. Unfortunately, there is now a ritualistic downplaying of the human ability to perceive 'wrongness' in what they listen to - because, well, it makes life easier for the geeks ... "Show us the measurements !!!"

 

The insistence of those who should know better, that a system will perform exactly as expected or desired by a consumer, if each part goes through some highly specific set of tests to confirm basic meeting of specs, is a huge hole in the road preventing the goal of optimum audio sound being reached  - those who have been lucky enough to fluke achieving the necessary standard of integrity understand this major deficiency in the thinking; but are unsure how to proceed from this point ... 😜.

 

 

[fas42]

3 hours ago, Blackmorec said:

For me at least, hi-fi seems like a continuum that when expressed as Sound Quality goes from quite ugly to very beautiful. Quite ugly would be both rather boring and sometimes uncomfortable to listen to for tonal, resonance, haze and lack of resolution reasons.  Many poorly installed systems can sound like this.  Then we move along the continuum the components get better and set-up is improved, so everything is now ok in terms of playing music. Better yet components and some made-to-measure set-up detailing like racks, platforms, power cables etc.now make an appearance and sound quality takes a corresponding leap. Now move up a class; here you find carefully installed dedicated mains and maybe some mains treatment.....certainly power cables and probably some really good amps and speakers to match. And the sound quality? Pretty great usually, if the right work has been done on the installation; things like vibration, local noise sources, careful siting, some room treatments etc then sound quality can reach very believable and extremely high levels. 

 

Indeed it's a continuum ... as mentioned elsewhere, one can 'train' oneself to become consciously aware of attributes in the sound that mark, say, MP3 from uncompressed - one deliberately uses clips that elicit misbehaviour in the perceived sound, to quickly nail, identify problem areas. Many of those who rely on measurements would have close to zero ability to articulate what they don't like in some playback chain - "it just just doesn't good" or variations on that is about as good as it gets ... the absence of "magic" when listening occurs because there is a presence of the 'wrong' type of distortion - but one has to be able to point one's finger precisely on what is faulty in the sound, to then be able to work on that.

 

3 hours ago, Blackmorec said:

Finally you get the real Triers; guys with well refined gear and a great set-up who go to work on the rest of the ancillaries to ensure for example a really clean, noise free (as much as possible), very close to jitter free, cable and power supply optimised network.  Some lucky ones even get to build and enjoy their own customised listening rooms. How does it sound? Pretty stunning in a lot of cases, the sound actually surprising in both its beauty, complexity and room-filling capacity and how much different and better it sounds in all regards...Its simply more beautiful in all regards and therefore more enjoyable.  If you’ve never heard that, and most people haven’t then you’ve no idea about the pinnacle that stereo really well done can reach. From an enjoyment standpoint its getting close to perfect for simply getting out of the way and leaving a room full of pure beautiful music for us to hear.

 

Precisely.

[fas42]

The answer lies, as I've mentioned so many times, in that a playback chain is almost never thought of as a complete system - the engineers only concern themselves with getting acceptable numbers from a specific part of that system, and never verify that the complete assembly is of high enough standard.

 

Which is why careful sorting of a working chain achieves so much - the enthusiast, especially those with a good working knowledge, can compensate for, 'fix' the silly weaknesses and shortcomings that are just not on the radar of most engineers - an extremely simple rig of good quality components is far easier to push over the line; as I discovered decades ago.

 

One approach that will work is to make each component 'bulletproof' - assume that its environment is relatively hostile, and that all inputs are of poor quality; 'overengineer' everything. But this costs money, is quite inefficient - while people continue to want to play with hifi in a hobbyist way, and just buy assorted bits to fiddle with, this may be the only answer. Vastly more effective, of course, is to take complete control, and engineer the completed setup to perform as required - the car industry worked this out, a long, long time ago ... 🙂.

[fas42]

9 hours ago, semente said:

 

 

Isn't it possible to use existing equipment and knowledge creatively to create new measurements, like one that would provide more insight to how packet noise or other may affect digital trasmission of the data stream from the processing software to the DAC?

If I got the IMD story correct, people were complaining about audible problems and some engineers were shouting "you're hallucinating".

 

 

 

Unless the measurements assess the output of a full system this will be doomed to failure - it's the weaknesses of the engineering of how the components of an audio system, including the cables, react to the presence of each other, and the environment that need to be understood better.

 

If the Voyager probe had to meet up and interact with another piece of hardware, in space, designed and built by another mob of people, who had no contact with the Voyager team apart from a very bare set of publicly available specs - what do you think the chances would be for everything to go 100% swimmingly well? 😉

[fas42]

Don't need to know electronics to be able to hear what's going on with cables ... but having a keen interest in understanding things allows one to investigate why there may be issues with cables. Which has lead me to using extremely normal, cheap cabling - but to be very careful in how it is installed ... this provides me with perfectly acceptable results.

[fas42]

2 hours ago, semente said:

 

What would you measure and what would you expect to find if noise were to affect the D/A conversion?

I don't think that it would be possible to compare the input with the output, would it? Could you meaningfully compare conversion (analogue output) of a clean vs a dirty signal, not static test tones but live streaming music or at least something more complex and varied?

 

 

That's the million dollar question - no-one has a decent grasp of how to measure analogue audio signals, to be able to say definitively that noise is, or isn't, an issue. If it were otherwise, all the continuing nonsense in audio la-la land would have died down ages ago - as it is, one's ears are currently the best measure.

 

Unfortunately, achieving what I call competent sound requires noise to be got almost completely under control - the disturbing aspect of remaining anomalies can't be discarded by the listening brain; the only solution I'm aware of is to persist with eliminating all possible causes - convincing sound then emerges when enough has been done, completely automatically.

[fas42]

4 hours ago, Blackmorec said:

That was a very reasonable and helpful answer, which I understand perfectly. So engineers can measure these types of noise and resulting distortions, but it is, I’m sure you’ll agree, beyond the scope of your average audiophile, given that the measurements take some fairly specialised instruments, test tones with added jitter and specialised knowledge on how to conduct the test and evaluate the results. And the results will depend very much on the individual audiophiles’ systems and system environments, so what works superbly for some will have very little effect for others, which is exactly what audiophiles find, which is why they generally try before they buy where possible. 

 

What isn't measured is how components interact with each other - one obvious example is when all the boxes are plugged into the same effective socket, and the varying current draws by the individual power supplies add constantly changing noise to the mains voltage - power amplifiers are a major contributor here ... no-one is telling you anything about the robustness of the designs here.

 

Quote

 

The paper from Intel was very interesting and shows how the envIronment in which a hi-fi is installed is critical....and in that paper they only examined USB 3.0. Think about how many other sources of EMI and RFI there are and how many other components have the ability to pick it up.  For me at least its hard to avoid the conclusion that everything that goes into a hi-fi has the ability to affect how it sounds, assuming that the hi-fi is sensitive enough.

 

 

It's not that the hi-fi is sensitive - rather, that it reaches a standard where it becomes easy for the listening brain to unravel what the low level information means - a frequent term for this is that one can "hear deeper into the recording".

 

This is a two-edged sword - the plus is that one appreciates far more what is going on; the minus is that this 'finer' information is far more delicate, far more easily disrupted by system replay misbehaviour - and the better the 'transparency' is, the easier it is to hear variations in the tonality and degree of detail of this low level information - one can point to a highly tweaked performance road vehicle which when used as intended is delicately balanced between performing excellently, and crashing catastrophically. ... If one wants a boring shopping basket to trundle around in, never coming close to exploring what's possible, then you reap the "benefits" of that sort of transportation, 😜.

[fas42]

Yes, but when you buy an audio component there is nothing mentioned in the literature about how well it performs, in this area.

[fas42]

21 minutes ago, mansr said:

Few amps have a frequency range extending much beyond 100 kHz, so there's not going to be anything of interest to measure.

 

Should mention here that I have a rule of thumb for an amplifier design - in a Spice simulation it should be able to output a 200kHz sine wave into a pure resistive load which doesn't look a mess; one might be surprised how badly many circuits do at this ... if the unit can do this, then it bodes well ...

[fas42]

For me, playing games with how the digital side operates is not best method to optimise SQ - yes, I'm doing this now with my laptop 😀, but it's a 'closed box'; and I'm happy to use shortcuts to "prove a point".

 

Far better, is to make the analogue areas as close to 100% robust as possible in their own right - no matter what happens in the world outside their realm, the SQ never alters. This means that one can happily substitute the digital components as needs change, things wear out, and technology advances - without going through a whole rigmarole, to optimise the sound all over again, with each new arrangement.

[fas42]

17 minutes ago, Blackmorec said:

This is where we do disagree. When you achieve audio Nirvana, that’s not the end of the road. The instruments sound lifelike and stand 3 dimensionally in space, but there’s still a whole lot of improvements possible and the music can become yet more lifelike, real and enjoyable.  The improvements have to do with greater detail, more profound silences, deeper saturation, better timing, lower level timbral detail, greater focus etc etc. 

 

I don't think we disagree - audio Nirvana can only be as good as the recording provides, but I have heard enough instances over the years, when a rig has been in an especially good place, to know there are almost no limits.

 

I particularly focus on doing what is necessary to rescue "terrible!!" recordings - there's a certain satisfaction in being able to hear what almost no-one else has ever heard; a capture of a musical event which still conveys the spirit and energy of that moment, in spite of all its 'handicaps', 😉.