Finally it’s kinda wrap-up for this topic, just find this quoted from Daniel R. von Recklinghausen, Chief Engineer, H.H. Scott back to the vintage time:
“If it measures good and sounds bad, – it is bad. If it sounds good and measures bad, – you’ve measured the wrong thing.”
Why is it “wrap up” for the topic? I just saw it and I’d like to continue discussing.
Both “sides” are often mis-represented. The “measurebators” aren’t all as one-sided as they are presented. People get EE degrees for a reason and it wouldn’t be a good thing if uneducated whackos started designing bridges or radio transmitters.
Octave!
Best is to visit ASR for in-depth education.
I can’t wait to get my Windom firmware updates.
Not to confuse, I’m far from supporting the measurementists approach!
I should have pronounced that Audio Note UK is not so much out of my „kind of fish“ range because of their well known partly ignorance of purity, neutrality or measurement background, but more related to my preference of rather full range, full dynamics & impact playback. Their setups to me sound quite fascinating in their cosmos, just not true enough to what I need.
I guess the formal Uneducated men as Marconi, Tesla and Edison himself should never have been considered credible … They were as you say “WACKOS” with no EE degrees. who should have quit …TRUST YOUR EARS and not others agenda !
Only one was self-educated - Edison.
The other two were EE , university educated chaps.
Can someone SUM UP this thread? The technical side of the DAC discussion, not the political stuff, fake poster here pretending he’s not Amir, etc… @tedsmith maybe?
Here’s my takeaways, correct me if I am wrong:
Would be good to have some sort of a consensus on the above, for anyone who may find this thread in the future.
I find Miska’s ASR comments on the limitations of SINAD interesting.
Mostly wrong, probably because the “review” was mostly wrong (especially their conclusions) or at least misleading. I stated this in my first post on this thread. Most of their misunderstandings (if not outright FUD) stem from not seeming to realize that when the noise floor gets in the way of the measurement, it’s the measurement that’s not revealing what’s really going on in the DAC. E.g. linearity - This is the mapping between the levels of the input of a tone to the level of the output. If you use the typical test it screws up when it reaches the noise floor. A much better test is to play different levels, use an FFT to see the output levels and plot the relationship…
No, the transformer contributes essentially no noise, it does contribute a small amount of distortion, especially with very loud signals or very low frequency signals. If you want to see the distortion measurements look at the Stereophile link I gave and read what JA has to say (https://www.stereophile.com/content/new-firmware-measurements)
No, see the measurement by Stereophile and pay attention to the scale on say, figure 4, those levels in the bass are quite low, lower than that that a CD can represent.
Similarly Figure 7 shows the lack of spikes in the higher region. I explained these anomalies in the post with three plots (Another review of the DS DAC - #203 by tedsmith)
Yes, I would like to have a lower analog noise floor, (And do on the upcoming TSS), but the ear is very good at ignoring white noise. The biggest problem with the noise is that it makes the DS a little harder to integrate in a system that doesn’t have a preamp.
Yes, I have improved the digital noise floor on most releases, I also made a small difference in the aanalog noise floor a few times.
Completely wrong as my plots (ibid) and Stereophiles plots show. Resolution is the smallest chainge in the input that has the correct change in the output. We can resolve many things that are in the noise floor, the simplest example is averaging, say multiple frames of video to show something more clearly than any individual frame.
Measurements can be very useful for verifying that things are working right, but this whole thread is an example of people not understanding what measurements really mean (or purposefully misrepresenting what they mean.)
I am confused, I do see a lot of noise under 1K, albeit improved in the firmware.
Now, this applies to me, I don’t have a pre-amp, does that mean DS isn’t ideal? What about DS Jr, or next version of it?
Look at the scale of the plots, the loudest noise represented is -105dB (compared to the roughly 96dB that CDs can deal with.) 1) FFTs always have weird values for the first bin, this can often show up as a misleading first line segment in a plot, 2) there is a little low level low frequency hash, but go look at any other DAC measured by Stereophile.
Ideal? Our speakers are far from ideal, none of our brains are ideal, nothing is the world is ideal. There are many who love the sound of their DS directly into their amps. There are also those that are unhappy with driving their amps with the DS without doing something to better match levels. The beauty of a preamp is it’s designed to match levels, but there are lots of other (kludges) to try if you don’t want a preamp.
The DS Jr is much less ideal than the DS on this point.
IMO everyone should have a preamp on hand, if they can get away without it for some configurations fine, but they’ll probably need it sooner or later and just having it available for experiments now and then is useful.
Thanks for the post, and the responses from @tedsmith it solicited.
Cheers.
So, my statement above was correct, that there is some noise at lower frequencies, being -105dB, but that’s essentially acceptable from your point of view, as it’s lower than CD dynamic range. What about Hi-res though?
Maybe I don’t understand, but isn’t the larger the number, the greater signal to noise ratio, the better?
You can’t hear it with any real signal playing. It’s much lower than many forms of noise and distortion in the rest of your system. The ear is much less sensitive to very low and high frequencies: it’s most sensitive around 3k: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-weighting
If you are asking about my statements that CD’s have 96dB signal to noise ratio and that the noise in question is at most -105, that means that the noise is 9dB quieter than the quantization noise of a CD.
What would be a kludge to work around not having a pre amp?
Some sort of buffer? Mine is plugged into an active crossover that then feeds the amp. The ds volume control doesn’t lose any bits, correct?
Ok, thanks. That explains it and I now have full understanding of how DS works and why it may not measure as well. The pre-amp though, we need to stop requiring more and more equipment. People’s homes are getting smaller and we can’t just pile on more equipment, hope the next DS has some robust volume control and output stage not needing a separate component!