Richard Dale

I think how the theory is expressed can affect how 'simple' or 'elegant' a theory appears to be. For instance when Maxwell formulated his equations using 'quarternions' they were very difficult to understand and not obviously a giant step forward that we know them to be today. It wasn't until Oliver Heaviside reformulated Maxwell's equations in terms of complex numbers and vectors and greatly simplified them, that they became widely understood and their full power could be realised. Maybe it is the notations that prevail tend to be the simplest because they allow a theory to have maximum leverage.

I don't think subjectivism is a belief system, it is about subjective experiences. I have no 'belief in tube amplifiers' for instance, but I just find I like the sound of them. In 1977 there was article comparing amplifiers in HiFi Pleasure where a tatty Radform STA25 was voted the best sounding out of a range of expensive modern amplifiers. The guy who provided the Radford worked for Audio T and was a friend of friend of mine. I met Alan after he modified my friend's Radford STA15 power amp and associated preamp. He had all these apparently wacky ideas such as the power supplies being the most important part of an amplifier (tube or solid state), which is now pretty mainstream in high amp designs AFAIK. But the proof was in the pudding and my friends STA15 sounded amazing. After that I got hold of a tatty pair of Quad IIs and compared them with my huge flashy looking Rotel RX-602 receiver which I thought was the bees knees up to the point. Much to my surprise the Quad destroyed my Rotel receiver even with my relatively inefficient KEF 104Ab speaker I had at the time. EDIT: Just found this link about the HiFi For Pleasure blind test: http://boneshifi.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-radford-sta-series-of-amplifiers.html

Maybe! But if the ideas of subjectivism were random and unrelated to some underlying reality I would have expected the ideas to have changed in some way over time. I think Douglas Self poo pooed the idea that capacitors could sound different in the 30 year old paper, but I did find this recent talk he gave apparently about cost effective ways to avoid sonic degradation by capacitors: http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=19535

I think it is amazing how well subjectivism has stood up all these years.

Maybe ! I couldn't help finding your comment 'you only need to open your eyes' at odds with defending blind tests.

Surely you mean 'only willing to close their eyes'?

You may have spotted the nature of the troll.

Being pedantic it is actually 0 to 65,535

That seems a bit over the top to me. Wouldn't it be easier to describe the mistake you think The_K-Man is making, and try and restate a revised description in plain language? Everything he says seems correct to me apart from the assumption that to send an unsigned 16 bit value involves sending '65,500 values for each sample', because it actually involves sending 16 bits for each 16 bit sample. Where a bit is either a 1 or a 0.

I use KEF LS50 Wireless speakers with a KEF R400b sub woofer and it sounds great. I cross the sub over at 70 Hz and cut the LS50s at 70 Hz with the KEF Control app. At the moment there is no way of configuring the impulse response to time align the subs with the main speakers, and there is only a phase switch on the R400b to switch to out of phase. I could physically move the sub backwards and forwards though instead, and I think I'm going to get a UMIK-1 microphone and REW to tune the sub woofer via measurements.

No it wouldn't in itself. But if you are into audiophile RCA interconnects it might limit your options in comparison. I think Audioquest might do a suitable 3.5mm to RCA cable in the right price range.

Both of the above statements are correct. The only digital data that gets sent to the DAC is PCM. The process of converting the PCM data to analog in the DAC is quite complex, and so it isn't a matter of saying 'the DAC simply takes the PCM...'. The decoding of FLAC or MP3 to PCM in the music player software is much less complex than converting PCM to an analog signal in the DAC.

No the DAC just receives PCM from the music player and it doesn't have to know how the file was originally compressed. If the music player decompresses an MP3 or a FLAC to 16 bits depth and 44.1 KHz bit rate by the time they get to the DAC they are the same from the DACs point of view. Different digital files can have different bit depths and bit rates though such as 24 bits at 96 KHz bit rate, and so the DAC doesn't always see the same format of PCM. The DAC doesn't decompress to the original analog, you would normally say it converts to the original analog - hence Digital to Analog Converter.

Good suggestions. But one correction - we're both recommending the KEF LS50 *Wireless* speakers which are active an so they don't need an amplifier or DAC or a local music server. They are a complete system. I use a single R400b sub woofer which is connected to the sub woofer output of the right hand master speaker. The sub woofer crossover frequency and level can be controlled by the KEF control app that runs on an iPad or android phone. This configuration means you have an active sub woofer crossover, and I have the LS50 rolling off at 70 Hz, and the sub woofer coming in at 70 Hz. I use a single sub in a large 10m x 4m x 3m room and it really drives the room well. Maybe your suggestion to use two subs might be a good idea depending on the room, but just one seems to be working well for me.

Seconded from me. I've got a system with a pair of KEF LS50 Wireless speakers on KEF Perfomance stands and a KEF R400b sub woofer which sounds great in a large room. That is all you need as it is a complete system. I have a USB drive attached to my router with my music on it. The router runs the OpenWrt OS and I've installed MiniDLNA on it to serve the music to the KEFs. The OP didn't say what his budget is, but if there is any money left over you can spend it on acoustic treatment for the room.