I always admire how and how long you take people serious and what general respect you have for people.
This is not against @dancingsea, we’re all not really different.
I mean there are just some clueless listeners like us, who not even take their own spontaneous ideas really serious and we come along trying to tell someone of a calibre we’d hardly ever meet in real life, in his own specialist field where only few in the world have deep knowledge, what would be a good idea instead of what he does for years (and that successfully)? I mean hellooo?
No one else except you would “waste” his time to explain himself to that audience. Thanks for doing it anyway! I guess your wife told you the one or other time “you’re too good for this world”
I realize my post is a bit like talking to a Colombian drug cartel about the ill effects of cocaine
The main point is what “sounds best” is entirely subjective. It’s determined by the level of enjoyment of the individual listener. It is NOT determined by audiophile dogma, or any predetermined technical philosophy. In that regard, it’s similar to religion, or art. The beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Entirely. Completely…
For a narrow few, that beauty and enjoyment is enhanced by audiophile ideology. For the the vast majority of souls in this world, it’s far more about the music itself than the quality of the equipment playing it.
There’s no right or wrong here. There’s no position to be taken or defended. There is no winning or altering which way the wind blows. Speak passionately about your audio beliefs. Just remember, that they ultimately are true only for oneself. And that’s ok.
Tho you can argue that for any given person things are entirely subjective, for any statistically significant number of people it’s not subjective. That’s precisely why lossless audio compressors are built using double-blind tests. I may or may not make any given individual happy with a particular release, but over time lowering noise has made a (statistically significant) majority of people happy.
I take a turntable example again because it’s easier to comprehend for for all of us who don’t understand digital deeper:
Lowering noise at a turntable (bearing noise, motor induced vibration, base induced vibration, arm resonance etc.) undoubtedly makes the quality of the sound better.
This doesn’t mean that a turntable which played with all that noise in a certain perfectly voiced setup before, necessarily provides a better overall sound in the same room and with the same surrounding gear when improved like that.
Reason is, that the voiced original setup compensated the tonality effects of the noise problems of the original turntable and the improved turntable now might produce unpleasant side effects because its sound is more accurate.
That’s the point where you are right…a factual improvement (lowering noise) of a component doesn’t necessarily lead to holistically improved sound.
But that doesn’t put the fact in question that the noise improved turntable as such sounds better the.more noise is avoided…and provides a much improved holistic experience as soon as the whole setup is being voiced towards the improved characteristic.
So why then are there setups which don’t have to be newly voiced after such singular improvements and others that have to? So far I thought it might have to do with good phase coherence as well as even FR within a setup, but that’s talking about things I don’t really understand.
Totally unrelated I’m sure, but just read the most relevant book to our current times, and Kinda relevant to someone asking Ted to explain.
Don’t be selfish…don’t piss the hand that feeds you off:
“The Death of Expertise”
Tom Nichols.
The guy is basically Jack Ryan in real life.
But yeah,
Sometimes you need to trust the People that are smarter than You, sometimes they care about others, not just themselves.
The Book speaks to that, in a “genuinely there’s people smarter than you” kinda way.
We have a (particularly naff, and that’s an achievement given the current crop) politician in the UK who declared a couple of years ago that “people have had enough of listening to experts”.
(admin - sorry - little bit of politics )
You know the more I read about challenges and issues with DAC and how to get it right, the more I get interested in MQA, end to end. Like if one uses the same ADC then the one in reverse in the m DAC with same algorithm, it’s the only way to achieve a more consistent AD, and DA. I know many hate MQA and he definitely has some financial benefits to promote it but the logic sounds right and I definitely like the MQA version of songs on Tidal vs. standard red book.
MQA requires everything that a regular ADC/DAC needs and lot more math, filtering and processing of the sound… DSD is much closer to your minimal processing, simpler system. Like DSD you can’t edit, or otherwise process MQA without going back and forth to PCM and MQA to and from PCM looses a lot more than DSD to and from PCM.
Well, then it’s truly sad that iPod/mp3 KILLED DSD/SACD when it was introduced. If done a few years earlier, probably would have become the standard format… but now it’s a niche market and I don’t see anything in the horizon to change that.
True, BUT, if DSD became popular earlier, MORE STUDIOS would produce and mix in DSD, hence more songs released would have been available in DSD rather than the measly selection now.
Yeah happy days - we saw Mr. Elton perform at Chester late last year, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but he was really really good, up to date, and yet with all of his old passion and delivery pace intact. There were a lot of “middle class brexiters” in the house, I don’t think they enjoyed it very much
(again, sorry admin - little bit of politics!).
FWIW, my Border Patrol SE-i DAC arrived. It’s R2R utilizing a Philips TDA1543 DAC chip and a tube rectifier. NOS or digital filtering of any sort. It has the beeswax capacitor upgrade. It measures notoriously poorly, creating a virtual scandal at Stereophile regarding its lab results … and I absolutely love it. Sweet, open and relaxed.
