I don't understand this type of audiophiles. I also have a fairly high end, vintage audio system at home, but I'd never do anything like that in the name of audio quality. There's a quote I love about these people:
A normal person uses the audio system to listen music, while an audiophile uses music to listen to his audio system.
You don't understand the power of naivety, placebo effect, dreams and stupidity composed (multiply all). Not in any way intended to insult these people, I know a few (not as rich) and they simply do not want to understand the basic principles behind digital signals, error corrections etc. I know people that work in IT and still pretend that audio transmission over USB can add jitter to music and that a DAC can "open" or "close" "the stage" by low quality processing of the signal. There is no way to convince these people they are wrong, so I stopped trying many years ago.
I know people that work in IT and still pretend that audio transmission over USB can add jitter to music and that a DAC can "open" or "close" "the stage" by low quality processing of the signal.
Audio transmission over USB with cheap converters and poorly chosen levels can result in loss of sound quality. I'm pretty sure you can tell the difference between 8 bit, 12 bit, and 16 bit sound. Choosing levels poorly can reduce your resolution.
Also, there are cheap analog to digital converters which use voltage comparison, which basically linearly "search" for the voltage they should be encoding. So those fundamentally do introduce jitter. (Large changes in signal voltage get encoded a bit later than small ones.) I'm sure there are ways that jitter can be introduced the other way around by cheap DACs. However, if you add more bits and increase the sampling speed, those should largely go away.
Devices like DACs also include a small amplifier, and if those aren't properly designed, there can be some distortion introduced there as well.
That said, there are times when people think they hear a difference, and it's woo. There are other times when the difference is real, however. Audio is a real field with some real science and know how behind it. Please don't grant yourself instant superior expertise just because you've read some stuff online.
(On more than one occasion, I've gotten the "all audio is woo" knee-jerk from programmers who were just reacting to hearing the words "frequency response" not knowing what it was, but labeling it as woo. Ironically, they did remember stuff about Fourier transforms. Go figure.)
> Also, there are cheap analog to digital converters which use voltage comparison, which basically linearly "search" for the voltage they should be encoding.
Integration type ADCs are not necessarily cheap. And you always put a sample-and-hold circuit in front of integration type ADCs, which completely eliminates the sampling time variance.
Also many people are unaware that the Nyquist theorem states, that the _average_ sampling frequency must be at least twice the highest signal frequency. The sampling points may indeed jitter around a little bit, as long as the jitter is distributed evenly. As a matter of fact, adding a little bit of sample jitter can be used as a poor man's dithering, to shift the LSB noise spectrum above the reconstruction filter cutoff frequency.
Jitter is mostly a problem with sample clock distribution. Too much jitter and the sample clock no longer arrives with the right delay with respect to the data, which may create large transients, e.g. whenever the numeric value rolls over some power of 2 (a lot of bits change); this problem could be avoided using Gray codes, though.
Regarding your usage of 'cheap', I would read this as the difference between a 50c or $5 component. I can understand spending more to get a reputable brand compared to buying the cheapest no name item from AliExpress.
However audiophiles are a whole different level. People spend tens of thousands of dollars on items that have questionable difference in quality. I guess people do the same with cars though, a Toyota Corolla will get you to work just as well as a Rolls Royce Phantom.
Wine might be a better comparison (at least a Rolls and a Toyota look different). Many could tell the difference pretty well between a $5 and $20 bottle (hint: the $20 one is the one not loaded with sugar), but not a whole lot of people can tell the difference between a $20 bottle and a $200 bottle. The law of diminishing returns kicks in pretty quick with both wine and audio. I think with audio once you’re in over a few hundred bucks for your set that wall comes up pretty quickly.
> difference pretty well between a $5 and $20 bottle (hint: the $20 one is the one not loaded with sugar)
Wine loaded with sugar??? AFAIK, in a dry wine all the sugar is converted to alcohol- even in the case it's been added before the fermentation, which is still pretty rare, at least in major wine producing countries. That is definitely not the difference between a $5 and $20 bottle of wine (in Italy you can still get excellent wine for $5 a bottle if you buy it from the producer, btw).
This is incorrect, there is always "Residual Sugar" [0] in wine, even when it's dry. Of course, GP is also not correct as there are plenty of wines with high RS that are very expensive while I can get a 7g/L RS wine for around 4€ here.
It also depends on the wine... The difference between a typical $10 bottle of pinot noir and a better $30 bottle is like night and day... But most varieties aren't as delicate and hard to make, so the differences get way more subtle.
If it's added before fermentation, it's still not in the final product, as it's been converted to alcohol.
But you're right, champagne, even the best brands, has some sugar added after the fermentation, about 12g/l. It's part of the method. It's still a rather tiny amount if you consider that an orange juice without added sugar has about 90g/l (and you do drink it by the litre, as opposed to champagne...)
Yeah, and sometimes one car is better than another car, even if they have the same engine ($5 wolfson DAC), because more love is given to everything around the engine.
If you just want to put together a cheap car with a good engine, that's a different thing from wanting to build a comfortable or speedy car with a good engine. Someone who isn't in the market for that extra level will just be a sceptic and say "this Audi is just a volkswagen with a prettier body", but if you sit in one you'll feel the difference. (not sure if Audi's have VW engines)
"More love" in this case doesn't have to mean more than maybe a retail price of $50 or so, to get a DAC with a frequency response so flat and a noise level so low that any difference to more expensive items is purely academic.
Digital to analog conversion is a solved problem, with inexpensive commodity parts. Even if you buy an expensive DAC, the studio gear used to produce the music you listen to has gone through dozens of A->D->A conversions, all done using standard commodity parts. No one builds fancy audiophile-approved DACs and ADCs into mixer or studio gear.
In my home setup, I'm using a DBX DriveRack PX as a DSP EQ and crossover between my main monitors and subs. It's almost a decade old, but its signal/noise ratio is on par with the newest gear you can buy. Any competently built pro gear from the last ~10-15 years with 24-bit conversion can be plugged right into any analog signal chain and be 100% audibly transparent.
People worry way too much about the electronics, and way too little about their speakers and rooms.
You think they're overpriced, but I bet you no one is getting (very) rich off these $400 DACs. Even more, I think many of them profit so little every once in a while a company pivots or goes out of business.
An Audi also has just a couple thousand of extra love worth of physical cost added to it, but the retail price is easily upwards of $20.000 above the equivalent VW car. That's because if you sell fewer units, the r&d and marketing costs per unit are much higher, as well as the required profit per car sold.
If you get a good deal on your hardware, you might have that good DAC in a nice box with a pretty manual for $50 physical costs, then put it on a prime shelf in a nice Hi-Fi store for $130 (30% of $400), maybe $50 to target and prime your customer, and then use $150 to pay your audio engineer, your CEO, maybe outsource the rest of the company infrastructure, and then 8% interest to your lenders. That's 1.7M profit at 10.000 units sold (assuming that you do all of this within a year).
I have no idea if 10.000 units is close to reasonable for an indie hardware startup, but calculations become a little more complex if we're going to have to take a multi year ramp up in account..
edit: Sorry I got caught up a little in the startup aspect of it. Your system sounds great, but your DAC (and DSP+crossover system) also cost $400, so you're not making a point?
No one is getting rich off DACs, except for the makers of outrageously overpriced 4- or even 5-figure retail price units. After all, DACs are commodity hardware, boutique devices serve primarily serve as audio jewelry, with no technical benefit.
The DAC I use cost less than $30, yet performs well beyond the limits of human hearing. The DriveRack did have an MSRP around $300 when it was new, but usually $200 on sale, but it does do a whole lot more than a DAC, and the base price level for pro gear is somewhat higher than for consumer gear.
As I said, people focus way too much on electronics, when even basic devices are more than good enough. I don't even have to use the DAC anymore, after I switched to DisplayPort for my monitor, which has a perfectly good analog stereo output. The only reason I keep the Toslink DAC hooked up is pure laziness.
It's almost as if there's a middle ground to be had somewhere.
There are definitely things which can perceptually detract from audio which people just don't think about.
I'm about to buy a couple power conditioners for my electronics because the wiring in my new apartment is garbage and every little spike in voltage comes through as a loud pop in my speakers and headphones.
But more subtly, my audio is constantly being degraded because I have a few cheap dimmers which cause a constant interference pattern in my electrical circuit that weren't a problem in my last apartments, and I can even hear fluctuations caused by my refrigerator if I listen closely.
And all of these things which can subtly degrade audio are 100x more of an issue when you're recording audio. Run any given song through a spectrogram analyzer and you'll usually see a horizontal line or two which could be anything from a little cable noise to a CRT screen.
Not sure why you got downvoted, I've seen crappy electricity in my own home office after I got a UPS for my computer system. It would have its fans kick in regularly to modulate the voltage that came in at a crazy high ~255v (Australia).
I got the APC
Line-R 1200VA Line Conditioner With AVR installed in front of the UPS and couldn't be happier now - it steps down the voltage and gives the UPS peace of mind.
Try the APC, not the most expensive thing but it's worked well for me.
Installing a UPS behind the conditioner sounds like a good idea. I have been meaning to get one of those... Thanks for the rec on the APC, I bookmarked it for comparison later. What UPS are you using?
The voltage in that part of the house appears to be better, but the circuit is easily tripped when running toaster + micro or similar, so having these UPSes has taken a lot of frustration away.
Actually just checked my invoice and I got them both in 2012, which is a little while ago now, and they're still good with their original batteries.
Wow, that is pretty bad wiring. I can hear an audible hum from my subwoofer when my wife runs the vacuum or blow dryer but that’s about it. And those are about the highest pulling appliances you could have in a household and the sub is pretty big with pretty powerful amp.
Good DACs and ADCs are useful for recording studios who have a lot of analog outboard gear (where the signal leaves and enters their digital setup multiple times). But for normal listening where there are only one or a few conversions, the point of diminishing returns is pretty low.
Most of the perceived gains in quality of higher end equipment (DACs, Amps etc.) come from the higher voltage of the outputs (where you connect your speakers and headphones), this translates into an increased loudness/volume level.
So if you want to do blind tests between different kind of equipment, you have to measure that voltage and make sure it's equal across different pieces of equipment (you can adjust in realtime by volume knobs), otherwise the louder one will always win and perceived as higher quality.
I have a decent hi-fi audio system at home, and there is a clearly audible difference between playing from my high-end CD player, and playing FLAC from the audio out of my Macbook.
The difference is not one of loudness but of 'energy'. A snare hit played from the high-end cd player sounds like someone actually hitting a snare; you can feel there's actual energy in the hit, while the macbook out sounds flat, even at higher loudness.
I'm not sure what is the exact cause but I've always guessed that it comes from the qualities of the built-in amps in the DACs.
That sounds like amp presets to drop bass, which would make perfect sense on an Amp expected to be used on laptop speakers.
I think the general problem is mid-range speakers and reasonable settings is all it really takes to have quality sound, but people want to be above average and therefore look for ways to discriminate between better sound and worse sound differences they can't "yet" hear. From there you get into placebo and random correlations.
It can be the case that the output of your Macbook isn't really flat, or that you have some kind of software processing enabled. You could test a $20 class compliant Behringer UCA202 USB interface against it, which is flat, and try to disable processing or use a software which just passes the signal to the interface.
It can also be your room. If you're not exactly located in the same listening position the listening experience can change a lot, even with the same setup.
Your room is basically an equalizer and should be regarded as a part of your audio system. That's how some Hifi sellers can trick you into more expensive setups, they just change the speaker positions or your location to optimized defaults. It's crazy how they can trick people.
A harder hitting snare can be caused by changes to the upper mids and lower highs, by anything that is located between you and the speakers, and then the later reflections of the room which also add up.
> The difference is not one of loudness but of 'energy'
Aren't those the same? Put more joules into the speaker wire and more joules of sound pressure waves will come out of the speaker cone, which just means the sound will be louder (until you reach the mechanical limits of the speaker, of course, but no DAC in the world could possibly change those).
Another possibility is that your CD player might not be flat. Marantz, Yamaha and other manufacturers add their slight sound signatures to their higher and models.
I never benchmarked my Yamaha CD-S300 to other devices, but its flyers and web site never says it's completely flat on the analog outputs. The reviews of the player notes that it has the distinct Yamaha signature too.
Also "Monitor" and "Flat" devices as their name implies sounds pretty flat and dull.
All-in-all you should consider taking response graphs of your devices rightmark.
> a DAC can "open" or "close" "the stage" by low quality processing of the signal
In principle a low enough quality DAC certainly could affect "the stage", but in reality even cheap ones are likely good enough.
> There is no way to convince these people they are wrong
I'm pretty sure many of them don't want to be convinced since it would make their hobby pretty boring. I also wouldn't be surprised if industry players actively spread myths like these to sell more (expensive) products.
No, cheap DACs are not “good enough” unless you’re completely indifferent to audio quality.
There’s certainly woo and outright fraud in audio. But there’s also attention to detail.
Professional studio engineers will spend $3000 on a high-precision digital clock for their DACs because it makes a clearly audible difference.
Software people don’t understand that human hearing, and human sensitivity to timbre and distortion, is spectacularly non-linear.
Hearing isn’t a linear counting device with x volume levels. It’s an incredibly sophisticated neural network that performs real time classification and source separation based on spatial and ambient cues, spectral analysis, predictive modelling, and entropy estimation.
Some people’s brains and ears are better at all of this than others. Those people can hear things other people can’t.
In music, someone with a trained ear can name the notes in a chord. Someone with exceptional skill can name the notes in a random cluster of pitches on the lowest octave of a piano.
Audio quality has analogous levels of sensitivity. People who have neither shouldn’t be telling people who do what they can and can’t perceive.
> Professional studio engineers will spend $3000 on a high-precision digital clock for their DACs because it makes a clearly audible difference.
I don't know what kind of frequency stability you really need (please enlighten me), but I checked on one of the components retailer websites, and found that even the most stable MEMS oscillators are only a few bucks a piece, any DAC or ADC manufacturer that claims that's worth a $3000 markup is running a scam.
> Software people don’t understand that human hearing, and human sensitivity to timbre and distortion, is spectacularly non-linear.
Hearing isn’t a linear counting device with x volume levels.
As a "software person" I take exception to this. Who exactly of my colleagues claimed that it was? Not even the cheapest, most terribly sounding, incompetently designed child's toy's "what sound do cows make" 8-bit 8kHz DAC produces output with x discrete volume levels, it produces a continuous signal. A bad sounding signal perhaps, but a continuous one nonetheless. Plenty of software people know this, but do audiophiles?
The main kind of clock you can spend $3000 on is an atomic clock (usually a rubidium frequency reference). There's absolutely no point in this for an audio system, but it's a quite trendy money sink (especially because atomic clocks are if anything worse than a good crystal over short time periods and only dominant over very long time periods: if you need both you can combine them).
"Some people’s brains and ears are better at all of this than others. Those people can hear things other people can’t."
Well, a lot of this Audiophile stuff is voodoo but if it makes them happy, who cares. But I am skeptical about your statement. The easiest way is to always do a blind or double blind study. A German computer magazine did this once with CD vs. mp3:
The guy who was best in spotting the difference and assign it correctly had an ear damage. Since mp3 was developed for "healthy" ears this is not too surprising.
"People who have neither shouldn’t be telling people who do what they can and can’t perceive. "
Let's agree on the scientific method. Anything that shows a significant difference in a double blind study, even for a specific individual I accept.
By the way, I hear my music on my computer via mp3 and send it into my super old tube amplifier. :-)
Or even if it makes no physical sense so it even seems worth doing a test. It is depressing to be told people shouldn't do science, especially for the benefit of consumers.
What kind of arguments you've been using? Are you talking specifically about the DA chips or the black boxes containing them? I pretty much can agree with you regarding the digital side of things, but could the actual appliances have notable differences in their analogue side or configuration? Maybe the actual value of having a $400 DAC appliance (built around a $2 Wolfson DAC chip) is going around problems in a computer's noisy or badly pre-amplified integrated audio output.
I don't mean to question your expertise on the subject, I'm just after an explanation what are the exact reasons why the setups with separate DAC and amp boxes have made me find new musical instruments on my audio files. And of course it would be nice to know if there is an inexpensive way of getting the analogue signal to a good amplifier without somehow ruining it.
I fully agree that an external USB DAC can have a much better output quality than the motherboard output that can be influenced by interference; I have an external DAC myself, but I bought it for about $50 (list price was $200 in a hi-fi store, I ordered it from a small reseller).
Not talking about the $400 box with $5 parts in it, but about common sense (plus some physics and math) in understanding what a DAC does and does not.
Not an audiophile myself (well, not that kind of audiophile, but with some passion for the music), I cannot provide good and trusty advice to others, but a digital-out (very common) to an amplifier with a digital-in (very common) is a very simple and cheap way to do it; I am not aware of a cheap way to get very good quality analogue signal out of a PC, for example, as add-on sound cards are very rare these days and very good audio on motherboard is fairly restrictive, but the digital path is wide open. Coax or optical out is the cheapest, a DAC is the next, but the difference between a $50 DAC and a $500 DAC is negligible.
I do agree. I think it has to do with the fact that most motherboards have pretty terrible analog audio support. Every motherboard I've ever had has sounded meh compared to a cheap USB DAC.
It would be super interesting to compare an iPhone analog vs iPhone with a DAC.
I guess you'd have to use an old iPhone with an audio jack though :(
Even the motherboards have gotten better over time. I recall being over at a friend's house in the early 2000's and he was saying, "my speakers are so bad, I guess I need new ones" and I said, "wait, try plugging those into a different source", which we had in the form of another friend's laptop. The audio immediately went from tin can quality to reasonably transparent. The issue was with the cheap DAC in his computer.
But I usually go with onboard sound these days. I did get a FiiO E10K when I got new headphones recently, but I've put it away even though the sound is noticably smoother and less compressed-sounding than my onboard sound - it's another cable and associated hassle.
The reason to go for pricier stuff in my mind is to get more I/O. Good audio interfaces for recording can run you hundreds, and you're paying there mostly for having more channels and some recording features. There's more of an expectation of getting what you paid for.
Spend a lot of money on object —> Expect difference that doesn't exist —> Listen for this difference —> Careful listening reveals previously unnoticed nuance —> Revelation is attributed to new object.
to an extent, it's often part of the ~value of new devices too. your new computer seems so much better when most people have zero idea if it is or where it is.
I don't disagree with the point you're trying to make, but I'm not sure if USB is the best example to make that point.
Case in point: when I used a USB DAC with my NUC there's an intermittent electrical noise that's actually quite audible and distracting (even when nothing is playing). I ended up switching to another cheap DAC that accepts optical input, and the noise completely disappeared. I'm not entirely sure what caused the electrical noise to begin with, but that it existed means there's some potential for USB to mess with the audio signal.
Can confirm. Using my SPL Crimson audio interface with a cheap USB hub leads to clearly noticeable noise and distortion (particularly when silent). Connecting the interface directly to the Mac Mini removes the issue.
Power audiophiles don't do digital. Noise is a very real thing in analog. Go to any rehearsal studio and ask about the power conditioning: almost sure they're not using power as coming from the steet.
To me, my iPod Shuffles, launch day iPhone, and modern iPhone all sound very different from one another when I play the same song. (I prefer the Shuffles.)
Is this a real thing, or should I upgrade to a better brand of crack?
It's hard for our brain to comprehend that such a tiny gadget can sound so good, so I suspect that accounts for a lot of the perceived difference. Also, some music can sound better with a poorer output device by e.g. smearing noise in the treble or rolling off excessive bass.
I also have a 6th generation iPod Nano, an iPhone 5 and an iPhone X. I can hear the difference between the Nano and the iPhone 5.
The difference is not much. iPhone has slightly better highs and slightly tighter lows. The headphones I'm using is Sennheiser MM70i (They use the same buds with CX400-II, I also have these).
I didn't found the difference with "critical listening". One night I just started listening it, and it sounded different to my iPhone. Then I played the same song on the iPhone and found out the difference.
The difference maybe due to different generations of DACs, different OPAMPS, different power budget, different decoders, etc. As I said before, the difference is not that much, but normal for the evolution of these types of electronics. Nano honestly sounds impressive for a device that compact.
P.S.: I used to play euphonium in a large band and double bass in a symphony orchestra, so I have trained my ears for separation and tracking of instruments and rhythm. This is why I'm a bit more sensitive to these things than most of the people around.
I've always wondered if the headphone adapter contains a DAC or if it just acts as a breakout box for a DAC already in the phone. I found some people claiming it does, but none that I can see cite a source for it.
As far as I know, lightning connectors (as opposed to their 30 pin predecessors) carry no analog signals, so the DAC necessarily has to reside in the headphone adapter.
Forgot to mention in my other response... the volume is the biggest influence in perceived sound quality. Equalising that in such devices can be tricky in an impromptu setup.
Then maybe you don't need to equalize it? Run your experiment with both sources at a wide range of volumes. If there's actually a noticeable difference, it should come across in the data.
Power, DAC'S and headphones are pretty much all that matter when it comes to sound quality. Power matters the most. "You don't understand the power of naivety, placebo effect, dreams and stupidity composed (multiply all)." Its not that simple.
>You don't understand the power of naivety, placebo effect, dreams and stupidity composed (multiply all). Not in any way intended to insult these people, I know a few (not as rich) and they simply do not want to understand the basic principles behind digital signals, error corrections etc.
You also don't understand that these people have found a pastime that makes them happy and engaged. Who cares about the actual difference in sound compared to that?
That's a very apt quote. The way I look at things like this is: Do recording studios go to the same lengths? After all, if the effect is real, and the studio didn't do something to mitigate it, then it's going to be on the track regardless of what you do in playback at home. Much more so, even, because of the gain stages involved when recording a microphone signal.
(Spoiler alert: Recording studios do not install their own power poles. What they do, though, is install isolated ground circuits.)
Most larger studios have a huge isolation trasformer for the whole set of studio circuits, and then smaller local filters like furmans. Balanced wiring as noted, also occasionally makes an appearance, but is less common. I run a dedicated ground. I personally use 3 transformers, and 3 filters (one capacitance, 2 mot). Not all in series mind you, but digital and analog gear are on seperate circuits, and a 3rd for hybrid designs (yay 80s synths). Analog recoding is sensitive to power in a huge way, but listening is seldom as affected. Note all studios use balanced audio, while most 'audiophile' crap is still unbalanced.
One of the things I truly will never understand about "Audiophiles" is their willingness to spend money on products that are, from a technical basis, indisputably categorized as snake oil. For instance:
It's an HDMI cable! The video signal has CRC in it and is packetized, it's either going to make it or it isn't. The quality of video delivered at, for instance, 2160p 60fps 10bit color to an expensive 80" 4K TV is going to be literally indistinguishable from the same video delivered by a $16 Amazon house brand HDMI cable.
Or this, it's a $340 cable for 1000BaseT Ethernet:
I can sort of understand methodology and expensive equipment modifications to separate AC power from amplifiers, and shield AC power lines and such, keep AC power runs away from speaker wires, etc. That has at least some basis in technological reality.
> It's an HDMI cable! The video signal has CRC in it and is packetized, it's either going to make it or it isn't.
I don't disagree with your main point, but this actually isn't quite true. The HDMI signal is split into 3 distinct interleaved periods: video data, data island and control. Video data is not packetized and the only possible error detection it has is from TMDS signaling, but no such error handling is required by the TMDS spec. You can absolutely get imperfect transmission of an HDMI video signal due to cable or other electrical problems. Auxiliary packets in the data island, including audio data, do have an error correction scheme (BCH + TERC4).
Yes, but when when there's signal degradation in an HDMI cable it shows obviously, not as a subtle video quality change. If you can see an HDMI signal with white blinking dots everywhere, you can be confident that the cable is not altering the signal in any really detectable way.
"If you can see an HDMI signal with white blinking dots everywhere, you can be confident that the cable is not altering the signal in any really detectable way."
I have seen an HDMI transmission with white blinking pixels at content edges that were not from the original signal. I ran test signal through that source and verified the errors on an HDMI waveform monitor, after which I tested the cable and threw it away.
HDMI video is not magically impervious to error because it is digital. It's actually a pretty straightforward transmission scheme.
This was while working on an HDMI-output device, working with team members who had written the original HDMI specifications (so, yes, I've read them).
It is possible to have subtle degradation in HDMI-delivered content. It's rare, but possible. As one might expect, comprehensive failures (e.g. black screen, periodic HDCP key mismatch) are far more common, as are negotiation/configuration failures (e.g. wrong resolution, wrong framerate, wrong color space).
HDMI cables used to be a great example, but now there are something like 8 different levels of certification and only the highest have the bandwidth to carry a 2160p, 60fps, 10 bit, 4:4:4 signal. And as far as I can tell, they are all passive so your source or sink can't warn you that your cable isn't compatible. You'll just get artifacts.
The AmazonBasics cable will do 18Gbps, so it can do 2160p, 60fps, 10 bit, but only with chroma subsampling (which is fine because most video sources have chroma subsampling). The Amazon cable may work with a 4:4:4 signal, but it's not certified for it. There's a level above that for 48Gbps cables.
I totally agree with the general idea, though. As long as a cable for a digital signal meets the specifications set by the standards body, you're good.
Okay, so the last time I bought hdmi cables I got 2.0 rated. Just looked and HDMI 2.1 rated 48Gbps cables are $25-35 each for 6 foot. That's not totally unreasonable. Now how is a $350 cable or a $800 cable any better?
One thing I can say about copper is that it is noisy.
We are running FPGAs (with NICs) and were getting lots of packet errors over the copper cable SFP cables. Turns out, we either needed to write out noise cleanup logic into the FPGA, or add in a noise cleanup module which would add an extra 50ns to packet processing to the FPGA. Simple solution was to convert to fiber and the noise and errors all went away.
I'd say if audiophiles truly want unmolested electricity, they ought to use optical fiber for as much of the run as possible.
Digital transmission/storage ensures the signal is not affected no matter how much noise is on the line (well, as long as it can be transmitted at all...)
Now, what I think you mean is that the copper in the cable picks up noise either from the device on the other end or from the surroundings and that has the possibility of affecting the DAC.
Even moderately well designed receiver should be able to galvanically isolate itself from outside sources of noise without having to resort to fiberoptics or wireless. It's just couple of dollars max for extra few components on the board.
For an example possibly familiar in computing circles, Infiniband has easily-accessible counters to record transmission errors. In a properly-built system with hundreds of communication-busy nodes connected with copper, you see remarkably low error rates, even in comparison with the spec (maybe a few a week in my experience).
Infiniband is using extremely isolated and well balanced cables for passive/copper transmission. Also the cable lengths are very short for EDR and beyond (3m-5m is max usable length). For anything longer you need to use fiber cables with embedded converters.
We have a cluster with ~1000 nodes and all generations of Infiniband (DDR/QDR/EDR) equipment, and routing all these copper cables without damaging them is not easy.
The quality of digital tranmsission over copper cables is dependent on the size and clarity of "eye", which is the pattern which two sinusodial signals when run through and oscilloscope. Lower quality cables (HDMI/DP/Coax/etc.) has blurry and small eyes, which increases chances of artifacts and drives the error correction modules harder, while better cables are easier on the both sender and receiver, since they produce lower number of errors to correct.
Trivia: Amphenol / Gore has high speed digital interconnect cables called Eye Opener Plus [0], which also used some of the Infiniband cables that we use.
> Digital transmission/storage ensures the signal is not affected no matter how much noise is on the line (well, as long as it can be transmitted at all...)
There is no such thing as a digital transmission. All signals are analog.
Digital transmission refers to the whole transceiver system, not just the transmission medium. If I can put a "1" in and reliably get a "1" out, it doesn't matter that it was only a 0.9 part way down the wire.
I suppose you need to read up on digital protocols, it is all well handled. If it wasn't there could be no Internet or digital media or even processors or motherboards.
I'm just so tired of all the bullshit where it "Must be a 1 or a 0". That is patently not true. HDMI video, to name one example very relevant to this thread, has no error correction, and bit errors will indeed crop up as the "sparkling" artifacts GGGGGP reported.
Sorry, copper is not ‘noisy’! Any medium has limits and methods to properly use it. E.g. shielding / grounding. Have to look at whole system. Agree fibre might be more practical in some situations.
Obviously don’t spend $1000 on a normal passive HDMI cable, but I’ve found that increasingly the all-or-nothing argument doesn’t work for some reason. I recently had to upgrade all my HDMI cables to get 4k HDR video working reliably. Before upgrading, the video would work, but I would occasionally see white “sparkles” on the video output. Googling this problem led me to many people recommending upgrading HDMI cables if you have very old cables.
Certainly there are bad cables, and sparkles are clear signal dropouts.
The description of that cable though, says Perfect-Surface Technology applied to extreme-purity silver provides unprecedented clarity and dynamic contrast.
An HDMI cable can not affect the "clarity" or contrast of the image or audio it carries. It can just succeed or fail (and failure results in obvious pixel noise, not some overall lowering of contrast or clarity like in analog)
All cables have some probabilistic failure of corruption, it isn't binary. It's the same as what going from 5 9s in your application to 7 9s, which involves a huge cost with distributed databases multiple data centers etc. etc... For most people it's a waste, but if you really value not having the occasional white speck, it could be worth a better cable, which may cost a lot more to recover design costs of making a cable very few will want to buy.
I don't know this world. But could it be because the HDMI protocol doesn't require correcting all errors? And newer cables produced fewer corrupt packets which might have resulted in "sparkle"?
Different HDMI cables have different bandwidth which is a result of their physical construction, same way as you have different bandwidth ethernet cables. Sending signal on the edge of cable's capability may be causing intermittent problems.
Many years ago I saw gold plated TOSLINK cables. They were $500. TOSLINK is a pure fiber audio connection standard that uses multimode fat plastic fiber.
Anything "audiophile" in the digital domain is all equally absurd. The only difference is that some require a half-second of consideration and others require literally no thought at all to identify as stupid.
I wouldn't go as far to say "anything", but certainly most. As long as a DAC with sufficient resolution and stable clock is being fed with enough bits, then yes.
If it’s all-digital and marketed to audiophiles, it’s a scam and/or absurd. You can’t improve upon bit-perfect. (Room calibration being a notable exception.)
You mean like those people, who argue, that: "Everything is a sequence of Zeroes and Ones, therefore the signal either gets transmitted or not!", while totally leaving out the fact, that this digital signal materializes in the real world via an analogous signal, which is electricity, and therefore each digital data transmission (as long as not optical) is submitted to physics that happen totally outside of the "digital domain"?
I don't understand the point you're trying to make. Everything is ultimately subject to physics, including optical signals. Nobody claims otherwise.
But it is incorrect to say that digital transmissions must be at the mercy of physics. Digital transmissions can defy physics. There are numerous techniques which ensure that a signal reaches the destination with precisely zero flipped bits and exact timing. And even when the signal has no integrity mechanisms, in practice the error rate will be low enough to never matter in practice.
And you know what, even if bits were getting flipped and jitter was extreme, you still wouldn't have signal degradation in the ways described by audiophiles; you would get a raised noise floor. Random error is noise. Noise is random error.
Of course this is never an issue. We can send digital signals that are millions of times more complex than digital audio, with zero problems, using equipment that is insanely cheap. The assertion that the extremely low data rate PCM audio signals have some special risk associated with them is delusional.
> I don't understand the point you're trying to make. Everything is ultimately subject to physics, including optical signals. Nobody claims otherwise.
Sorry, I misformulated my sentence.
It should have read (emphasizing what I left out from the sentence in my previous post):
> You mean like those people, who argue, that: “Everything is a sequence of Zeroes and Ones, therefore the signal either gets transmitted or not!”, while totally leaving out the fact, that this digital signal materializes in the real world via an analogous signal, which is electricity, and therefore each digital data transmission (as long as not optical) is submitted to the physics of electricity, that happen totally outside of the "digital
domain"?
Though, I think you are nitpicking, because, from the rest, it should be totally obvious, what I wanted to say. Use the error correction, man ;-)
Therefore:
If an analogous signal's "success" can suffer from the material, through which it travels, then a digital signal will suffer for the same reasons, simply, because it is not a digital signal, but, materialistically, both signals are of the same sort.
Even if we could create the perfect mathematical concept in our brain and have a solution for anything, as soon as we step into the real world, that is, the material side of affairs, many unexpected things can happen, that have to be accounted for at the next time.
For what it's worth I deal with race conditions on a daily basis with multi-threaded programming. What I don’t understand is the point you’re trying to make and how it relates to real digital audio systems. Can you please explain it.
tl;dr: As soon as the "digital domain" steps into the "physical domain", you can not guarantee a "side effects" free system.
Let's start with a real-life example:
I have a Macbook from 2006, which has a Firewire port. I have an external audio-interface (Onyx Satelite Pro), that has a (Logitech Z4) active speakers system connected via line-out. When I got the Onyx, I had to realize, that the delivered Firewire cable was too short for my setup, so I had to purchase a longer one. I took great care to buy the cheapest one in the store (which was a Radio Shack type), because, hey, digital is digital, or isn't?!.
When I came home and exchanged the two cables the first thing I realized, much to my surprise, was, that the audio sounded different!
The old cable sounded more "relaxed", "warm", "analogous". The new sounded "faster", "analytical", a little "sterile". How could that be? All I changed was the cable...?!
Conventional audio wisdom, especially of those, who call audiophiles "audiofools" dictates, that a digital signal is just zeroes and ones. The sequence either get transmitted or not. Add in the timing component, which is either to the point or off, and things should be pretty clear: What goes in is what comes out. No loss of information. Should there be such loss or distortion, we can error correct it, at least up to a certain degree. Therefore, one always get a perfect, or near perfect, signal.
That, at least, is the argument.
If that argument (alone) would hold true, and be sufficient to describe all, that happens in such a system, I would not have been able to hear a difference, by exchanging the digital interconnect, right?
But I did!
Therefore there must be something happening outside of the digital domain, that influences the signal. In my case, clearly the cable!
And now I come to the conclusion, which should answer your question:
> What I don’t understand is the point you’re trying to make and how it relates to real digital audio systems.
Former example covers exactly your request for a real digital audio system. What happens here is, that we step out of the digital domain into the real world domain, which means the physical and chemical domain. Namely, the domain of audio components. These components are made out of matter. In the case of electrical signals (Firewire, USB, etc.), the medium, which transmits our signal, is the same, which would transmit an analogous audio signal. Signals get transmitted as electricity with ever changing voltages (leaving out optical transmissions now). Therefore all, that applies to an analogous signal transmission, applies to digital signal transmission, as well, as long as the transmitting medium is electrical.
Now, you may, say, that that is not of importance, since the information carried is still a sequence of binary data, and it gets transmitted or not, given the theory behind it, it should be perfectly reproducable. But then, I ask you, why the difference in sound?
Given a perfect program (our digital concept), when applying it to the real world (physical/chemical), race conditions may occur, simply, because of unpredicted side effects (you know the importance of this), that come with this domain. Our perfect program, here, would be the theory of lossless, bit-perfect data transmission: the digital domain. Or - Theory. Our real world would be the cables, connectors, building blocks of electronics, which are: the chemical and physical domain. Or - Matter. And there is something happening in the material domain, that makes an impact on the sound. I don't know what that is. But I can clearly hear it on sub 1000€ system. Now imagine, how much more this could be heard on a stereo system, that cost 25.000€ or more...
> Anomalous behavior due to unexpected critical dependence on the relative timing of events.
The anomalous is the key word here. There are side effects, that happen outside of the "digital domain". And it is these side effects, that change the sound. And audiophiles know this. If a cable can change the sound, then capacitors, resistors, whatever, may well change the sound, too.
> ... given the theory behind it, it should be perfectly reproducable. But then, I ask you, why the difference in sound?
Placebo effect. 100% guaranteed. It is literally impossible for digital audio signals to degrade in any way that even vaguely aligns with your descriptions. It is analogous to using a different brand of SD card to get richer, more vibrant colours out of your digital camera. It is analogous to changing the ethernet cable on your computer to make web pages more insightful.
Bits don't work that way.
Whereas the placebo effect is very real and very powerful.
Firewire is also a two-way packetized, error corrected protocol. If a cable was not delivering the signal reliably, the consequence would have been a lower maximum transmission rate, not error that could affect sound. If there was any change in the signal due to the cable, your Onyx interface could not maintain a stable connection with your computer and you'd get no sound at all.
Your attempt to describe how digital signals are transmitted is actually just plain wrong.
Furthermore, race conditions have absolutely no relevance to this discussion.
> [Digital] Signals [when not transmitted optically] get transmitted as electricity with ever changing voltages [...]
You wrote:
> Your attempt to describe how digital signals are transmitted is actually just plain wrong.
Wikipedia writes:
> A waveform [...] as a digital signal [...]. The two states are usually represented by some measurement of an electrical property: Voltage is the most common [...]
Are you referring to noise being transferred to the analog stage, or digital data transmissions being corrupted?
The latter is very unlikely with asynchronous USB DACs since USB will retransmit corrupted packets, and jitter isn't a concern since the DAC buffers then uses it's own clock.
The former, well yeah, it's impossible to completely eliminate RFI no matter what you do, short of optically isolating the source, putting the analog equipment in a faraday cage, and running it all off of batteries.
That still leave the dirty old storage drive. Fortunately Mojo audio have got that one covered.
“Integrated Sorbothane resonance control under the chassis, main board, and SSDs isolate resonance.”
This isn't _strictly_ true - I've seen basically the equivalent of noise in a HDMI picture (white dots all over the picture), and eventually tracked it back to a faulty HDMI cable.
I did replace it with the cheapest (<£5) HDMI cable I could find though, so there is that.
That's not 'noise', that is packets that didn't make it. It's not having a perfect picture vs. no picture, but about data packets either going from A to B or not going from A to B.
Say the HDMI cable is crap and it can only do 100 packets per second, and HDR needs 1000 packets per second, the HDMI chips are going to negotiate a HDMI transfer settings without HDR. Going back further, say the HDMI data path is negotiated to do only basic HDMI, say, DVI-like video. If even that is too much for the cable to handle, say, it constantly drops a few packets, you would get either perfect pixels or missing pixels.
You are correct. I suppose serial data is more like a clocked stream than packets. Perhaps I was thinking of TDMA instead of TDMS. Flicking bits is easy indeed, which should be mostly mitigated with the requirements on the conductor and shielding.
It's a stream based cipher, so you'll get the same amount of blips as you'd get with normal bit damage. Difference is probably that you can get a whole missing frame as a blip instead of just missing pixels, because the stream key operates on frames instead of single pixels.
You are right. I went back and read hdcp spec. Now I understand my confusion. What I experienced multiple times with hdcp and bad/low quality cable/connection was screen going blank for a short moment. I always assumed it was cryptography itself breaking apart, but the spec requires resetting connection in case of logged TMDS layer errors
" While the receiver may reach a determination
sooner, the receiver must determine loss of synchronization at least by the time it has detected 50
consecutive data island packets with ECC errors. The HDCP Receiver must either assert the
REAUTH_REQ bit of the RxStatus register or de-assert HDCP_HPD to the upstream transmitter
once it determines loss of synchronization. "
The examples you linked are crazy. It is possible, especially with the Ethernet, to just check the packet error rate, and see if there is a problem.
There's something to be said for a bit of extra effort in filtering, but most of what audiophiles pursue has no basis in electrical engineering reality.
And then there's even weirder audiophile accessories like cable elevators, amplifier stands, CD "demagnetizers", and "quantum chip" stickers -- all complete nonsense which doesn't even have any plausible way of affecting the audio.
I think this is a straw man, since a majority of audiophiles will tell you that a 1000 dollar HDMI cable is stupid. nobody actually buys that shit.
What does matter is getting a decent HDMI cable. I'm going to get a braided cable which I know supports the bandwidth of HDMI 2.1 (I think that's the current version).
Technically there is jitter in the digital domain, and it's possible to see problems at high bandwidth signals, but in low bandwidth transmissions like Flac, you're absolutely right.
If you have nanosecond timing requirements, then those might be useful, but for audio they are overkill.
The difference is that with digital signal there is limited number of components that actually make a difference and as soon as a certain level of quality is reached (basically reliable transmission) nothing can be improved further.
For listening purposes the transmitted data can be buffered on the receiver DAC. This means that as long as the buffer on DAC is not emptied everything else may be failing badly and it will have zero effect on your listening experience.
You were not downvoted because people took your comment literally, you were downvoted because being snarky runs against the Hacker News guidelines, specifically:
> Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Sometimes snarky comments will be forgiven if they are substantive. Yours contributes very little beyond what the parent/grandparent comments had already mentioned.
And that's exactly what real high quality cable is.
Professional cables are usually flexible, with robust insulation and connectors. They may also be fire rated. Quality control ensures that cables will always be up to specs because people doing the installation have other things to do than dealing with defective cables.
Like most pro stuff, pro cables are not "better", they are cables that won't be a problem.
One theory I read (for good quality USB cables to a DAC) is that reduced packet loss reduces jitter, which means that the clock rate of the DAC doesn't have to adjust in order to keep the buffer populated, but not overflowing. Sounds plausible, but I'm not sure that packet loss is high enough to actually cause this.
A working USB cable does not create packet loss and definitely does not fix packet loss; if packet loss occurs because of the cable, the cable is defective, nothing else. There is no good quality and bad quality, there are cables that work as expected and cables that are defective.
But there is capacity, and USB1.1 may need less than USB2. That said, we can assume that we are talking about USB cables that are tested/verified/certified, which means they have to follow a few rules about how much Mhz bandwidth it supports, how much EMI it can deal with and how much drop in power it's going to cause. But of course, those are measurable facts and still have nothing to do with the data packets getting 'warm' or 'fuller' or some other subjective term.
Yeah but still, the biggest loss is going to happen within your plug/jack connection. So if you really care, solder your cables in. Better than every gold plated connector your audiophile purse is ever going to buy.
Also: Acoustics are what matters the most (and they are the hardest to get right, just by throwing money at the problem, that is why it is not usually beeing discussed that much).
Jitter is itself an audiophile scam. The audible consequences of extreme jitter is an increased noise floor, which itself is being drowned out by the sound in a typical "quiet" room.
Yeah that basically describes me, between the ages of 16 and 26. We would spend hours moving gear to different locations (homes), fiddling with cables, different amplifiers and loudspeaker to find the best possible match our (limited) finances would allow.
Tube amplifiers combined with mosfet pre's, magnapans with external bass speakers. Class A amplifiers that would require a dedicated powerfuse per amplifier. First press vinyl from Japan. Van-den-Hul needles. Granite turntable platform.
Every single weekend we'd swap pre amps, amps, turntables, arms, elements, needles and listen to the "audio system via music" :)
What happened to my setup, you ask? I got married. My living room was modelled around the audio experience: it was not an ideal love nest :) I actually gave my hand crafted, tailor made end amplifiers away just a year ago to a young stranger I overheard talking about his audio quest and who is in the phase where he is searching for his ideal setup like I was 30 years ago.
I used to obsess over the sound quality before. But when I grew as a musician, I started to care less about the frequency balance, dynamic range and started to care more about the emotional content. Now I listen to music on the cheap and convenient bluetooth headphones, going through dozens new songs every day (in crappy streaming quality), and instead of tweaking Ozone settings, use LANDR for mastering and use this time to work on lyrics instead.
I think that you can consider extreme audiophilia to be an expression of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and therefore the audiophile industry is predatory in that it preys upon the mentally ill. I’ve seen it all - including $1,000 aftermarket wooden knobs that were said to dampen sound-corrupting vibrations in your power amplifier. The people who sell these items know exactly what they’re doing, and I hope more people will see them for what they are - common con men.
How do $1,000 aftermarket wooden knobs (with no detectable physical effect) differ from, say, a $1,000 bottle of wine (which cannot be distinguished in a blind taste test from a $5 bottle)?
They're just class signifiers. The difference I see is that audiophiles are less prestigious than oenophiles, but I don't see how you get from there to "audiophiles have a mental illness".
> say, a $1,000 bottle of wine (which cannot be distinguished in a blind taste test from a $5 bottle)?
Well for one thing, that's wrong- distinguishing wine is easy. Even people who are just pretty into wine can identify different vinyards etc. and actual sommeliers can nail wine down to the year it was bottled and the conditions it was stored[1].
The thing you're referring to is that when you line up regular people and give them $5 and $1000 bottles of wine, they will rank them in essentially random order. That should be no surprise at all. People have their own favorites. When you line up experts, they can differentiate cheap wine from expensive wine, but inside a broad category (say $200-$1000) they will rank essentially randomly. Again, that shouldn't be surprising at all, because "quality" itself isn't what's being paid for or looked for. Each wine is developed for a taste, not for some abstract quality metric that is the exact same for every wine.
Normal audiophiles will typically aim for objective metrics like THD, but the extreme guys are often aiming for subjective/vague things like timbre, color and soundstage. That leads to some esotericism. They also tend to have gobs of money to throw at this stuff, so a $1000 knob may be more about getting exactly what you want, or even just prestige. Both rational choices. Regardless, its inherently way more absurd than wine because even audiophiles with the most virgin ears will get nothing from .001% THD (very high end) vs <.0001% THD (verging on a lab setup), and virtually all will get nothing from <.01% THD. On the other hand, wine fanatics who have found their favorite wine will be able to recognize it quite accurately.
> The two wines were actually the same white wine as before, but one was dyed with tasteless red food coloring
Yes, Oenologists assumed that the wine which was red was actually... red wine. This study is always quoted and is a sham IMO. What this is saying more than anything is "the placebo affect does work." which is totally true.
But IMO it doesn't say a whole lot about wine tasting being BS.
They were students and as such did not dare to question authority or were afraid to make a fool of themselves.
This "study" has no value. I can certainly distinguish between the average $10 bottle and $50 bottle.
Actually the study does have a value: It induces people to think there are no differences between wines and keeps the prices for the good stuff lower. So please continue to post it.
> Normal audiophiles will typically aim for objective metrics like THD, but the extreme guys are often aiming for subjective/vague things like timbre, color and soundstage.
They should probably be using $200 equalizers to get that, not buying $10000 components where more than half of them couldn't possibly change the sound.
What I find interesting is that equalization seems to be looked down on among a lot of audiophiles. If you don't like how your $2000 amplifier is voiced, get a different one instead of dropping a cheap equalizer inline.
A $1000 bottle of wine is going to be from a specific year, from a specific vineyard. There's naturally a limited supply, so price will increase with demand like any collectible.
A wooden knob is not unique and anyone could manufacture an unlimited amount at low cost.
Oh, clearly you haven’t dug deeply enough. The wood is handchosen to minimize resonance, handcrafted by an artisan coming from a generation of Italian woodworkers, etc etc. Exactly the same as wine.
There is no natural limit on bottles that are labeled with a specific year and a specific vineyard. The only way to know the label is genuine is the stringent chain-of-custody requirements that have become normal in the world of expensive artwork under pressure from forgeries. As far as I know, those are not yet the norm for wine.
I wouldn't say they are the norm, but they're certainly expected by any re-seller (auction house, retailer, restaurant) when dealing with the highest echelon of wine (1st Growth Bordeaux, Premier Cru Burgundy, Vintage Champagne) they'll also expect a description of the storage conditions over time.
See the documentary Sour Grapes to understand how this system was undermined and trust evaporated from the industry.
I've had a $400 bottle of scotch (37 yr McCallan over 15 years ago), and it was significantly better than the 18 yr old you could get at the time for about $120. Was it worth it? Yes-once. I wouldn't do it again, but I enjoyed that bottle over a 3 month period.
I understand what you mean, but just for the record, professional winetasters can pretty much guess which part of land in a given region a wine comes from in blind tests. So, i can tell you that there is a huge difference between a bottle labelled 1000$ and a 5$ one.
One telling indicator is that wine does practice blind tests a lot, and has blind test wine competitions that lead to prices, that help small wine producers get their brand recognized ( search for wine labelled with « medaille d’argent » or « medaille d’or » of any french wine contest and you won’t be disappointed) .
There's a slight difference. AFAIK oenophiles don't typically try to use pseudoscience to justify their purchases (or encourage others to make purchases)
If someone told me I should buy a wine because the doorknobs in the winery were special wooden knobs I would also question their judgement/sanity.
You evidently haven't encountered the biodynamic viticulture people, who are everywhere these days. They will tell you to buy a wine because its grapes were harvested when the stars were in a particular alignment and the moonlight a particular intensity.
It would be like if the $5 bottle was glass, and the $1000 bottle contained the same wine in a special wooden bottle that allegedly dampened any disruptive vibrations without any research at all.
$5 is tough to hit. My 'cheap' goto is anything from Rosemount. It's in the $10 range, and is consistently good. The shiraz was their original known variety, but they have others now.
It also used to be cheaper at just under $10, but popularity pushed the price up.
"I don't share these values, the person must be mentally ill. Wine is not at all the same thing, because let me explain my values which are obviously universal."
I don't know enough about wine, but judgding from experience, I can definetly tell the $1,000 and $20,000 whisky bottles apart by taste. And controlled double blind studies usually tell the same story: people can taste them apart.
Good point. I think that by their logic selling "enthusiast" versions of anything will almost always be classifiable as a practice that "preys upon the mentally ill".
Previously worked for an after market sales site for the industry and the level of fraud in the marketplace is what got me into anti-phishing in the first place. I’ve never seen anything like it.
The 82-year-old lawyer already had a $60,000 American-made amplifier, 1960s German loudspeakers that once belonged to a theater, Japanese audio cables threaded with gold and silver, and other pricey equipment.
Meanwhile, my wife plays her Dean Martin records through her own personal 15-watt AM radio station in the closet, picked up on vintage tube radios scattered around the house so the music sounds like it was intended by the audio engineers of the day.
There are all kinds of audiophiles. I don't understand any of them.
I take it you didn’t grow up in church. Hear me out: Audiophilia is a combination of technophilia and ritual, and it’s no surprise that Japan is the center of the audio technology world, given its culture.
All sound perception is subjective. In “MP3: The Meaning of a Format,” the author sites a study that showed college students preferred the sound of 128 MP3 over “lossless” or “HD” audio, probably because that’s what they cut their teeth on. This is why we have mastering with blown-out loudness and compression, even on CDs.
For others, though, even secular people, music is sacred. The quest for the perfect sound through fiddly nobs and fancy cables is like building a personal cathedral.
It’s all subjective, but there’s no denying that ritual enhances it.
Not to mention that any recorded music is going to:
1. sound quite different because it was recorded by several point microphones instead of your actual ears
2. Already have distortion introduced by the microphone and recording equipment.
That distortion will obviously be quite small, but higher end audiophile setups will often be easily smaller. It does not make sense to spend $XX,XXX to get to .03% THD from .03000001% THD.
Nothing crazy geeky. She picked up the transmitter at Goodwill for $5. It’s one of those “talking house” things that real estate agents use to tell people about houses when bobody’s around.
Looking at that web site now, I think I misremembered the 15 watt figure. That seems way too high. But whatever it is puts out a clean signal across the neighborhood.
It came with just a long wire for an antenna, but she found something on the internet to augment or change or replace it or something to improve the clarity in the backyard.
It's not a new idea, really. I remember seeing Nagra come out with a battery-powered preamp for home stereos, many years ago (and I think they still make them).
I also remember hearing back in the day of some audiophiles powering their systems with regenerating UPS from APC (like the kind you'd see in a data center), though PS Audio has been making such units marketed for audiophiles for a while now too.
DC to AC converters in common inverters (where your battery power gets turned into AC wall current) are usually digital (mosfets usually) and unless they're running at 96khz+, which is probably not the case even with "pure sine wave" inverters¹, they could also introduce some noise. Additionally, if you were charging the batteries at the same time, that charger could be carrying some noise into the DC current.
I'd love to see somebody sell an old-fashioned motor-generator set for generating absolutely pure sine-wave current from a noisy input. Give it a really heavy flywheel and maybe some complicated flexible interconnect between motor and generator, to remove any effects of the input power. Or, even better, have the motor crank up some sort of mechanical/hydraulic/pneumatic power storage, then switch off to let the generator run for an hour or so.
Yeah I mentioned it in my other comment, spinning flywheel generator with a motor on one side and generator on the other would work well here too filter out any noise.
Some datacenters have these attached to their generators to avoid the need for huge battery banks. They can actually support several megawatts. They spin constantly at the motor's rpm with a clutch that engaged when the input power is lost. This instantly jump starts the generator, at the grid's phase, and prevents
"Battery" is a sort of nebulous term for a collection of similar objects working in concert, whether that be artillery guns or electrical cells. Consumer electrical batteries are a collection of electrical cells.
Batteries have significant and unavoidable source impedance. When the current goes up and down, as it does once per cycle, tens of thousands of times per second, the voltage of the power bus would move up and down slightly. You can obviously regulate it, but the whole point of what these guys want is an absolutely clean input.
The voltage of the grid will fall MUCH less when you pull current.
It does depend on the load. The grid voltage is transformed to a lower suitable voltage. The transformer has an inner resistance as a battery has.
The AC voltage is rectified and smoothed with a relatively big capacitor. There is a ripple in the DC voltage because the AC can only charge the capacitor in the part of the AC cycle when the varying voltage is higher than the voltage level on the capacitor. If you charge an equal size capacitor from a big battery there will be ripple due to the inner resistance of the battery, but much less ripple because the battery voltage is always higher than the capacitor voltage.
Other things equal the battery will give a smoother DC to the amplifier.
Anyway ripple is not the problem in question here. The problem is various noise from the grid finding its way through the transformer and further into the amplifier. There is very little noise from a battery compared to the grid.
I work in the audio industry, and I can say two things: 1) most everything they do is audio mysticism (i.e. complete BS), and 2) they are very profitable customers.
As a trained EE, non-practicing, I would think it would be far easier to install filters/conditioners on the line to normalize the voltage and current (e.g. performing phase correction). Also, if you had a local AC->DC->AC conversion, could probably get a more uniform power source frequency. Not sure, been a long time since ive studied this, but I think a lot of thw high-end audiophile stuff is snake oil. I've been able to listen to a couple of high end audiophile installs. The electrostatic speakers are amazing, but I'm not going to appreciate enough to justify a $120k install over my $2k commodity home theater sound.
I used to work as a musician professionally, and have dealt with “dirty” power in old theatres. It was solved completely by bringing in a power conditioner. I don’t know why they can’t do that in this situation.
You can ML electrostatics for much less than 120k. They do sound great, but are still too much for me :)
I'm happy with my 10 year old Paradigms. The next speaker purchase I make is going to get something smaller instead of floor standing. I'm at a point now where I want good sound for music and home theater in the smallest package possible.
I like the Martin Logan Motion series (with the folded/ribbon tweeter) better than the electrostatics. I have the LX16 bookshelfs and they are amazingly clear and diminutive and were like $250 each from Crutchfield.
+1 for the electrostatic speakers. I bought a used pair of Martin Logans about ten years ago and I'm still totally in love with them. The model is Aerius i and they are from '99. Paid 1350 euros for them.
All of the above.
Most people want to buy a product that solves a particular problem. Some want to be convinced that what they get results in "perfect" audio, for whatever definition of perfect they have.
From what I've heard talking with a variety of these: it's similar to how every programmer is also asked if they can help with computer problems, and how they all know that turning it off and on again is the primary fix. It just goes with the field - everyone even tangentially related will encounter this kind of thing with some regularity.
What I like about this article is that they just find a few weirdos in Japan who actually end up doing that, and you get a blanket statement like "Audiophiles in Japan" while the proper headline should be "A few crazy old rich people". Journalism at its best.
If you parse a sentence that begins “Audiophiles in Japan...” as making a claim about every Japanese audiophile or even most of them, you will find the world
a confusing place. These sentences are everywhere. “Men are pigs”, “tacos are awesome”, etc.
Only two exemplars must exist for any such sentence to be true. Once you understand that, you will understand a lot more of what’s being said around you.
That depends on what categorizes "Audiophiles". If out of a million self-proclaimed audiophiles, a few hundreds are genuine ones and if out of those, a few tens are behaving this way, I think it can be reasonable to say that the audiophiles are behaving like that ;)
You must be aware that the audiophile community lives in a completely different world, where recreating sound is of more importance to them than rather enjoying the music on its own. The amount of money and time these people put in satisfying their "passion" is unrealistic. So, no. The article is right in talking about the weirdest of the weirdos ;)
I always wondered how people selling some of these audiophile gadgets can justify to themselves over long run what might appear as a scam to many outsiders. But then I was explained that this is little different than my|your|their wife spending $$$ on some ridiculously expensive Bottega|Hermes|Burberry|... handbag. Which after all is functionally about the same as $1 handbag.
Some people choose handbags, or cars, and I guess them audiophiles choose thick cables, and concrete poles. Each to their own.
When I'm playing music on my stereo from my PC through USB, turning off the lights on my bathroom on the other side of the wall will momentarily kill my USB driver and as a result Spotify stops working.
Hire an electrician. While you are at it, get them to do a quick inspection of the rest of the 'leccy stuff at your home. Throw away any power bricks/wall warts/devices whose name you cannot pronounce easily or can't even read. Clear the fluff out from behind your fridge.
Fire is no joke and given the EMI in your place I suggest you take it seriously. I'm not suggesting that fire hazards are exacerbated by EMI but that the sort of environment that has one may be more prone to the other.
For the sake of what ... USD100(?) in time plus some materials you could fix and head off some potentially seriously life shortening problems. If nothing else, you'd keep Spotify working. If it dies say five times a day and costs you a few mins, then that is say 20 mins per day. Cost your personal time at say $20 per hour. Now tell me you can't afford to get it fixed.
I live in an apartment with little or no connected ground. We had weird laws once that allowed electricians to cut corners which they did. If its serious, I could try to convince the landlord... Hmm...
That does not sound too good. I doubt that the weird laws allowed outright dangerous practice but you never know. I don't know your landlord (obvs!) but you are probably keener on your own well being than they are.
Please get some advice: blow a few quid (bucks, whatever) on a sparky. If you have a friend who knows what they are on about then bribe them to come over and cast an eye over things.
Just to re-iterate the point: it is not normal for your bathroom light to cause a USB (bus) to crash in another room.
I had a similar problem with an aluminum Silverstone case. Turned out there was a grounding washer connected by wire to the front panel that had to be attached to a screw on the motherboard (I think). Fixed USB disconnecting issues right up.
I had an old Dell laptop where I could "hear" an external USB hard drive spinning up in my headphones, but only if it was connected to a USB port on the same side of the laptop as the audio jack.
Dell is terrible about this; On my last 2 workstations I could hear my mouse moving if I plugged my mouse into the USB port next to the headphone jack.
UGh. Reminds me of the terrible USB powered speaker bar for an HP LCD I have at work. The audio comes from the 3.5 mm jack and power from USB. All you hear is the damn switching noise from the motherboard. Any time there is significant CPU use you get this noise in the background and it's quite audible at even moderate volumes.
Not sure if it's the crap speaker bar; power and audio coming from the same chassis using two different cables or the motherboard. Could be a ground loop? Now That I think of it, I'll try to power the USB from a lab supply or beefy USB charger.
Did you buy it from the guy who took his battery powered Dell with him as he sailed from California to Hawaii? 1000 miles from land, he could still hear the 60 Hz. hum.
Turning on my ceiling fan kills my USB audio device as well. Audio applications on Windows do have a tendency to more or less self-immolate when the audio driver fails.
I'm also curious if it affects all USB ports on the computer, or only some. (Some PC's have "always on" outlets that supply power even when the PC is turned off, and I imagine that those take a slightly different route through the power supply.)
Anyway, my guess is that there's some line noise that isn't enough to mess up the PC, and the PC is passing it along to some component in the speaker that doesn't like it.
I wonder if a battery-inverter setup would give cleaner power for less money? For less than $40K you can buy a couple powerwalls along with a top-rate inverter/charger.
That’s a double-conversion UPS: AC to DC, a small siphon for batteries and control hardware, and then DC to AC out.
I imagine an audiophile would say that the sine wave generated by such a setup wouldn’t be smooth enough. They’d want something like a double-rotary converter, so that a spinning generator is making the final sine wave.
I had the Tesla guys out the day after xmas doing the survey for the roof! Looking forward to power off the grid (PGE has 15 outages this year). For my audio equipment I did the sane thing an used a good PDU. 40K for a power pole is silly money for no really use. I have a reasonably priced tube amp, speakers and record player. There is some point where I just cannot hear the difference. This is stuff is here is just freaking stupid level of money.
Are you going to get a powerwall? If not be aware that in some (all?) states if you don't have your own battery source, your power will be designed so it is interrupted during an outage.
Any cheap op-amp you get on the market has 60dB (seems to be a standard) of noise rejection from the power lines. Add a filter you'll have to put anyway at the internal PSU and an amplifier should be able to deal with about any kind of noise.
An amplifier conditions the line power in a couple of ways.
First, it converts line power to stable DC voltages while filtering out spurious signals that could affect the audio output.
Second, the power amplifier circuit is designed so that the output voltage is proportional to the audio input voltage, even in the face of power supply variations.
A well designed amplifier tolerates a fair amount of noise and amplitude variation on the input power line. The end goal is for any residual variation to have a minimal audible effect.
For this reason, additional power conditioning is rarely if ever needed. My source of this information comes from the musical instrument and live-sound side of audio, rather than the hi-fi side. But most mainstream designers do not recommend additional power conditioning.
Of course nothing prevents people from buying additional gear if it makes them happy. And in the audiophile world, there is some interest in exploring the behavior of historical or minimalist designs that might not have a very high level of power conditioning. I'm only thinking about "mainstream" gear.
Tubes, cables now this. It seems more like religion or superstition than technology IMHO.
If you want to take it to the limit, hire someone to come into your home and perform live for you, then you can eliminate all the sources of distortion.
Not only would you be hearing the ultimate perfect sound, you would be providing employment for artists.
Tubes, cables now this. It seems more like religion or superstition than technology IMHO.
My advice to everyone is to never ask a hard-core gamer what he's tweaking when he's got his favorite rig open, and cards scattered all over the workbench. There's enough technological superstition in some of them to summon the devil.
So true, a friend and I had a holiday party at my house and we talked about having a DJ but instead we went online and got a piano player instead for less money and honestly way classier and BTW, it was fun and nice, sort of a cool thing really.
When marketing a product one must consider the four basic segments: the smart rich, the stupid rich, the smart poor and the stupid poor.
Obviously you are not going to make any money selling to the poor, so strike them. Good luck trying to separate the smart rich from their money- they tend to save. Thus we are left with the stupid rich. High end audiophile products are a perfect fit for this lucrative segment.
> he realized that electromagnetic interference from his neighbors’ appliances was propagating through their shared power lines, reducing the quality of the sound he was getting.
This actually seems a lot more reasonable to me than the monster cable level of absurdity audiophiles are famous for.
When I last visited family my sister's home's electricity exhibited all sorts of overload artifacts. Her lights would dim when the neighbor's AC or refrigerator compressor ran. I convinced her to contact ComEd about it as it suggested there was an overloaded supply shared across their homes making voltages sag under load.
They sent someone out to just look around her house and act like they did something, then said nothing's wrong. Of course they're not interested in actually fixing the infrastructure when it involves costly work.
She's had an exceptional number of electrical appliances fail over the years she's owned the home as well, which I presume is related.
But I figure with this audiophile guy he could just run the system off a UPS using the mains just to top up the batteries.
the power companies accurately assume that most people calling them don't know anything about electricity.
have a trustworthy electrician inspect the situation, and then they can figure out what the problem is, where the problem is, and convey said problem to the power company if it is actually their fault.
I'm not sure what you mean by "if". If it goes between houses, the blame is pretty certainly on the power company, isn't it?
You could argue that the voltage is still within acceptable bounds, so it's not something that needs to be fixed, but that wouldn't change whose fault it is.
Cheap UPS inverters can actually have much higher harmonic distortion than mains power. For laughs, try plugging in a UPS with power quality detection into another UPS as its "mains" source, it will probably detect the other UPS as providing poor quality (i.e. high THD) power.
If you don't actually need UPS, it's probably easier to use an AC low-pass filter to remove harmonics than back-to-back DC conversion.
Did they check your sisters electricity meter? We had similar issues here. Random light flickers/dimming, electrical devices shorting out and such. All tests in house returned with nothing wrong yet we were having issues.
Electric company sent someone out and they got the same results inside as we did. Not deterred they next checked the line into the residence and it was good too. Eventually they tracked the issue to our electricity meter and replaced it. Haven't had an issue since.
They claimed to have checked 'everything', but from what I saw they did nothing.
I wouldn't expect her meter to be responsible for dimming lights when the neighbor increases the load though. There didn't seem to be any problems related to loads generated within her home, which I would expect to be a problem when the meter's the culprit.
It just seemed to me like they had something inadequate in common between the homes, maybe a deteriorated transformer or bad connection. They don't seem motivated to do anything until the power is completely off, monopolies aren't known to prioritize customer service.
I suppose these folks don’t want to know that utility transformers transmit noise both directions, so this doesn’t do much. It may help isolate from noise that comes from the audiophile’s house, though — nasty current waveforms will cause noisy voltage drops in the house’s wiring, and that will cause nasty voltage waveforms in the house (and everywhere else on the block, but less so).
A much better approach would be to buy a motor-generator pair with a decent-sized flywheel.
But this is all silly. The noise in question might cause audible noise in the power supply, but the power supply can go in a different room. As anyone who has listened to a problematic audio system can attest, the noise that really matters is the 50/60 Hz AC hum, and none of these hacks will help.
Of course the records will sound better; they will have their dynamic range squashed to fit the medium. Compression sounds nice: all the quiet parts are so clear, yet the transients are cleanly articulated.
Compressed audio, like from a record player, also works better with a cheap back end. Protecting the record player's needle from skipping out also helps the amplifier and speakers.
Don't confuse the sound of compression with the sound of music being louder. Compression can help with poor quality equipment or noisy listening environments (e.g. cars), but it also adds audible distortion and is tiring to listen to for long. Most dynamic range compression in music is there to trick people into playing it louder (see "loudness war"), and louder music sounds better. Of course, you can get the same benefit without the distortion by turning the volume up yourself.
But despite vinyl being poorly suited to high dynamic range, the vinyl release sometimes has higher dynamic range than the CD/download release. This is probably because vinyl purchasers are thought to be more discerning customers. This isn't always the case; the most popular dynamic range measurement algorithm (see http://dr.loudness-war.info/ ) is fooled by all-pass filtering, and vinyl record players do this, so the measurements will be falsely high for vinyl. Often the supposedly higher dynamic range vinyl release is actually from an identical master.
> Most dynamic range compression in music is there to trick people into playing it louder
That's a relatively new phenomenon, together with the distortion.
Compression doesn't add audible distortion, except if it is used in an extreme way to boost the signal so that it sits at close to maximum volume.
Compression is a tool that can combat distortion. Reduce the transients; reduce the clipping.
Compression can be used to obtain more consistent distortion on purpose over longer envelopes of the signal, like in a common configuration in guitar audio: compressor followed by distortion effect.
Obtaining more consistent distortion can mean consistently less of it, not only consistently more.
Audiophile grade equipment doesn't clip transients at normal listening volume. I agree that compression can help with poor quality equipment, but at the cost of permanently harming the sound on good equipment. Nobody complains about acoustic live music having too much dynamic range. The proper place for dynamic range compression is in the playback equipment, not baked into the audio data (DVDs/Blurays get this right with AC3 DRC). And compression used as an effect on individual instruments isn't what "loudness war" is referring to.
The proper place for dynamic range compression is basically upstream of anything that requires it or benefits from it.
In the case of a phonograph player (which unconditionally qualifies as "poor equipment"), we have to prevent the needle from jumping out of the groove. This is downstream from the record itself, and so the signal that is on the record is manipulated.
What's the dynamic range of vinyl? Usually 70 dB, whereas 16bit PCM is around 90 dB. That's what OP was probably referring to. Since the master was done for the CD then compressed for the vinyl it sounds softer/cleaner.
CDs do have superior dynamic range, but when modern mastering squashes everything within a few dB of full scale it hardly matters. But I disagree that vinyl releases[0] typically have lower dynamic range than CD releases (most often it's the same, sometimes it's higher, and only very rarely it's lower), and I disagree that lower dynamic range sounds better on good equipment.
[0] Talking about popular music only. I don't know enough about classical to say how it's done there.
I have no actual data about the musical signals present on the discs themselves (be they made of any kind of plastic with grooves or pits), I just mentioned the technological limitations of them. ( see also https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_(Vinyl)#My... )
However, as far as I know the loudness wars is coming to an end finally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war#2010s "Analysis suggests that the loudness trend may have peaked around 2005 and subsequently reduced, with a pronounced increase in overall and minimum album DR (crest factor) for albums since 2005."
It doesn't matter how good your DAC is if your signal path includes scratching the sound waves into lacquer, stamping it into vinyl and scraping it with a stylus. Compared to digital distribution formats, it's utterly Rube Goldberg-esque.
Performance
Microphone
ADC
Processing
Mixing & mastering
DAC
\
\
\
Scratched into lacquer
Electroplating
Stamping into vinyl
Scraped with a stylus
Phono amplifier
/
/
/
Amplifier
Speakers
Room
Ears
Well, all I'm saying is that it could... If you have a really shitty DAC for some CD player, or you have a really good DAC to convert it to record, it could be the DAC quality that creates a superior sound. All other factors always reduce quality; only the DAC may actually explain the improved quality. That's my point. Which I made jokingly.
Yes you are right, vinyl might sometimes be better than horribly, catastrophically broken digital.
In reality, bad DACs are uncommon, mostly found in disposable-grade consumer products and on computer motherboards. (And even then the problem is poor implementation, not a poor DAC chip per se.) Anything sold into the mainstream Hi-Fi or audiophile market is nominally perfect relative to our ears’ potential.
More fundamentally I think you are overestimating how bad a DAC can be. The “bad DAC” is mostly a myth invented by the manufacturers of expensive DACs and their gullible customers. It’s a scam and far too many people have fallen for it.
(Edit: To be more precise, these DACs aren’t scams, there is legit engineering going on, but they are pointless if your intent is listening to the output with human ears rather than test equipment.)
Quite. Why not also test your hearing first. Find a lab and offer them some serious money to test your "built in" equipment. Then you can get serious on delivering the best possible input. While you are at it, you'd better hire a decent studio and the artists, sound engineers etc and re-record to your spec. Recordings are normally designed to work reasonably well across anything from a car stereo to a disco. Now crack out your oscilloscope and work away at the environment, which is what gets in between your input and ears.
If you were really serious then why not buy a small plot of land well away from the city and build a custom man cave (yes it will be a man!)
Oh and don't forget to get your FLACs recorded in 32 bit - you'll need all those extra bits to be able to treat your golden ears properly 8)
>If you were really serious then why not buy a small plot of land well away from the city and build a custom man cave (yes it will be a man!)
This is my dream retirement concept, except mine would be to continue taking pictures of the night sky. But thanks for the idea. Now I can plan on listening to high quality choons while I'm at it!
Make sure you don't listen to anything louder than a cockroach farting: the vibrations will disturb your £300k gear. Perhaps you can find some sort of device to deliver the choons close to your ears to avoid problems. No obviously not, you will need heavy plant and a lot of conc. to start off the job. Then there will be the stabilisation and damping systems ... and ... and ...
Yeah the lack of acoustic treatment is a running thing I see. A few absorbing panels at primary reflection points coupled with diffusers should be the next upgrade on a midrange system. Bass traps as well depending on your sub and music.
I wish it was all an elaborate joke, but unfortunately it's not. The rest of that site is just as perplexing and appears to cater to the same sort of people who believe in psychics. Here's one example:
Actually it is quite fun to do thought experiments on what a flat earth would be like. I think (not a physicist) that the sea and atmosphere would end up dome shaped, centred on the centre of the disc. Non symmetric continents would cause instability so can't exist. I wonder what is on the other side?
For even more fun why not (re)read Sir Terry's oeuvre. Pissing yourself laughing is good for you.
From my limited observation of flat-earthers on YouTube, they at least seem to be willing to do measurements but then either misinterpret the results (due to lack of knowledge) or knowingly twist them to say what they want to say.
Audiophiles on the other hand seem to reject the whole idea of taking measurements.
sadly, no, there is a $10,000 1000BaseT ethernet cable that is a real product. Never underestimate the gullibility of a certain segment of the population.
Gonna toss a related idea out there: Converting single-phase AC power to DC requires treating a lot of ripples. Maybe an audiophile should convert three-phase AC power to DC to ensure higher power quality?
Funny you should mention this. I’m concerned about how clean the feed is to his power pole. A dedicated line is definately needed, shielded etc all the way back to its own power plant.
Hyperspectral cochlear implant would be cool thing to have.
When I had my ear wax removed by a nurse first time, it was really awesome experience. I had no idea how much it helped. For example when I was walking on the street, I heard strange rhythmic sound just behind me. Every time I stopped the sound stopped. Finally I figured out that the sound was coming from my backpack that was chafing against my jacket. Habituation removed the hyper-hearing sensation in 3-6 hours afterwards.
Walking around with binaural mics in your ears is an enlightening cyborgian experience. Especially when you whack the input and monitoring volumes right up. (But don't do it near busy roads. Or roadworks. Obvs.)
I'm interested in the playlists of these guys. What are the songs that are worthy of being played on your $100K+ setup? I had never heard of that Queen song before, wonder what his top 10 songs are.
I'm not sure they have playlists. They probably spend more time tweaking their system than actually listening to music on it, negating the need for a playlist.
Seems like it’d be easier, cheaper, and more “accurate” to put conditioners on the input to the equipment directly... by doing this to the transformer you’re still including your whole house and any noisy equipment (like lights) on your power line.
Now to sell them a motor-generator set.[1] Total isolation from power fluctuations. The only connection between input and output is a rotating shaft.
I once worked in a mainframe computer installation which had one of those. Before switching power supplies, many mainframes used them for power cleanup. Cray used them to convert to 400Hz, so the power supplies had smaller transformers.
I have a power amp whose transformer hums once in a while, for periods of a few seconds. Then it goes quiet just as abruptly as it started humming. Someone is unbalancing the power in the building, causing a DC offset.
Most of the time the room where those high-end audiophiles have their equipment is just not designed to listen to music. The room around you is as important as the equipment. I remember making speaker tests in the anechoic chamber of my university, and it's just mindblowing, even with average equipment.
These guys need to do the Richard Clark 10K challenge.
Richard posited that when compared evenly, the sonic differences between amplifiers operated below clipping are below the audible threshold of human hearing.
No-one took the 10 grand in 15 years if my memory serves me correctly.
So he installed a pole to prevent perhaps fairly subtle common mode interference from his neighbor's appliances. Wouldn't a ham (or any potential EM source) in the proximity that he cannot control ruins his installation easily? Maybe he is lucky to not have them nearby...
If their stereo equipment is so high end, then why are their input power electronics so crappy at producing clean voltages? Filtering and isolating against common noisy power lines seems a pretty obvious design consideration.
I love throwing that point at situations like this.
You could just use a proper sine wave filtering UPS which actually runs everything through the transformers internally to produce cleaner voltage.
I'd be inclined to make a battery powered mechanical AC generator with a big old flywheel on it to sell to these audiophiles :)
Regarding the equipment, most of the "audiophile" grade gear is analog, using very little input cleaning circuitry if any at all. Whether this is desirable from a sound quality perspective or not (assuming the input power is clean) is debatable. Would be interesting to see what an electrical engineer in the audio field says about this.
I'm sure there is some method to the seemingly mad claim that having your own "pole" could make a difference in your audio quality through your amplifier. If you consider that the coils on the other transformers that are positioned on the same medium voltage lines (running the other houses on the block for example) act as attenuators which partially soften out any harmonics from devices under them (like switching power supplies found in any computer), then effectively by installing your own, dedicated transformer (not actually just having your own pole) you would be isolating to some extent potential noise from those neighbors (noisy neighbors in the real sense), to only devices in your own home. If you think of electrical harmonics like sound waves, they would lose amplitude when traveling through the coils of a transformer. There are also ways for transformers to be built so that it prevents these harmonics from carrying upstream (see zigzag winding, isolated or "harmonic mitigating" transformers) but this would do nothing for the noise on the low voltage side coming from neighbors on the same transformer. This would be the power line equivalent of sharing a single broadband connection with your entire neighborhood while trying to play a latency sensitive game with no QOS.
It would have been really interesting to see the ocillosope before and after.
The "can" attached to the pole is called a "pot."
At least in the U.S., four homes are normally attached to a pot. But sometimes, you might have as many as eight.
When eight are attached, you will have power drops, momentary losses of electricity. Without a UPS, your desktop will turn off.
Or your stereo system will--flash on and off.
Intolerable.
The solution is an additional pot. Or this man' solution, a pot of his own.
It's not so crazy, in areas where electricity is affected by a tropical climate or...
not enough pots.
I learned this while struggling with electricity issues after surviving Hurricane Wilma and talking to the repair crews.
Commercial power is noisy and sloppy, especially in my neck of the woods. I use a double conversion UPS (always on) to clean it up. I can feed them with a generator and the output is still a nice steady clean sine wave. Beyond that, I use line conditioners and rf chokes to clean up the noise a little prior to reaching the ups.
Double conversion ups are not cheap. They start around 15x what you pay for the AVR UPS that you can find in electronic stores. My power is so sloppy that AVR UPS catch on fire after about 10 months.
A tangent, but seeing as this thread has awoken the HN audiophiles: What should I look for/avoid in a DAC? Does it really matter if my source device is an iPhone/iPad?
Reading blogs and review sites talk about the personality of DACs has started to grind on me. Surely it’s just a question of accuracy which can be summarized in a metric?
(I’m currently probably going to get a NAD D 3045 integrated amp/DAC, mainly for the specs, and fond memeries of being a teenager with a 3020).
There's a sharp curve of diminishing returns, for DAC's especially. The super cheap units you find for like $10-20 will usually have serious shielding / noise issues, which is immediately apparent upon listening. Beyond $100-200, the design and components are usually pretty competent, and what you are mainly hearing is just how the implementation was "tuned" by the manufacturer (not necessarily better or worse).
Playing from an iPhone or iPad is perfectly fine. Make sure EQ and Sound Check are turned off. Most music streaming formats are nearly impossible to differentiate from lossless (i.e. Apple Music, Tidal, Spotify), so I wouldn't sweat that.
> The super cheap units you find for like $10-20 will usually have serious shielding / noise issues
That's not true if even possible (because dac and amplifier are on a single cheap). I've tested like five different DACs, from $2 to $150, even those for $2 that play distorted sound and don't bother putting output capacitors for headphones have no noise/shielding problems.
Not sure why it's not possible, though I could've had a defective unit. Specifically, I had a Fiio D3 ($20) which had bad background noise, even when not playing. I always assumed it was a power supply or shielding issue. The audio output from it actually sounded decent, just I could always hear the background noise. Don't think it was a grounding issue either, because it was the only DAC I ever had that consistently did that, no matter what system I plugged it into.
I've played around with the DAC built-in to the Raspberry Pi 3 as well, and that one was more of a distorted output problem, similar to what you describe with the $2 DAC.
Other DAC's I've tried (from around $75 and up) I've never heard noise / shielding issues, so again rapidly diminishing returns once you get past the super budget options, in my experience.
If you hear high frequency noise it's just means the amplifier has too much gain for your headphones and doesn't automatically mute when there is no signal (many do). But all amplifiers have noise. If you use the line output though, it doesn't go through the amplifier and of course doesn't have its noise.
Recovering audiophile here...my favorite DAC right now is the EarStudio ES100. In addition to functioning as a USB DAC, it also enables regular headphones to "become" Bluetooth devices.
It's by far my favorite because my nice wired headphones are now no longer obsolete. I often use it with my iPhone + Roku + Roku iPhone app's "headphone" option. It's perfect for listening to TV late at night after my kid is asleep.
The cheapest chip-on-board USB DACs from China are the ones to avoid, they can't even do conversion well. Everything else that has proper surface mount chips (even if they are cmedia clones) and output capacitors for headphones is of decent quality.
Even if noise in the power signal were to influence audio quality to an appreciable amount, this way of solving the problem is rather curious for the uncompromising audiophiles.
Why would you install your own secondary transformer when you could just rectify the current, accumulate it and then use an inverter for a fraction of the price? Or even better just store the current and use it to power the audio equipment with direct current, skipping AC entirely.
A $60k amp should have a phenomenal PSRR, making power quality irrelevant. Then the amp quality becomes the differentiating factor, and one would hope that a $60k amp sounds better than a $399.99 amp.
...and clean power can be achieved by adding some capacitors and inductors at the right locations in the power supply. This'll cost a few tens of dollars, if you really want to go wild you could spend around $100. Not that this should be needed in a $40K amplifier of course. Private pole pigs are not needed for this application, the only function they serve is as a form of affluence signalling to 'those in the know'.
Wow. That's next-level not understanding Nyquist bandwidth "records are better" extremism. I also get why Nakamichi or early Mark Levinson audio gear was outrageously expensive: they were like modern Apple but in the 1980's... ridiculous engineering and design. Hipsters should love 'em too. :)
I read through this and I’m surprised at all the negativity. Audio is subjective, and even if it’s just placebo good for them.
In my limited experience audio is all about component matching. Sometimes you want distortion, like what you get from a tube amp. The right mix of distortion is what makes things sound good to some ears.
If you want to get something legit of this nature, keep the AC power entirely away from the audio room. The wires in the walls can give off AC hum. Run DC over shielded twisted pair cables. At this level you'll also be doing something about noise from aircraft, wind, trucks, birds, and everything else.
I believe the law of diminishing returns kicks in realllly fast in terms of 'ultra high quality audio'.
I have an external usb dac (Yamaha AG06), a pair of good studio grade monitors (Yamaha HS8's) and that's it for me. Exquisite listening quality without having to sell a kidney.
> There’s a debate among audio enthusiasts about whether personal poles make any meaningful difference. Audiophiles, though, “live in a kind of no-compromises world,” says Mark Bocko.
Plus the requisite "no blind A/B testing" world of course.
Geesh, I just sold my ranch last year that had its own transformer at the very end of a distribution circuit. I could have gotten extra for it's "audiophile grade electricity" if only I knew that was a thing!
can someone explain why my phone and laptop both produce an annoying noise in 3.5mm jack when connected to AC? Is the lack of a grounding pin in the charger or the source at fault
The amplifier converts the AC to DC anyway. Any marginally competent amp is going to include plenty of power filtering to reject noise. Surely with a $60,000 amp, it makes no difference whatsoever if your input waveform has some ripple.
Consequences. If it's disposable income, your hobby can be blending $100 bills into mulch to grow a bonsai tree. If you are eating up your retirement at 40, it's a disease.
Of course I'm not an expert whatsoever. Just my loose sense.
Yeah. It's similar to the point where drug or alcohol use becomes addiction — it's a disease when it has significant negative impact on the rest of your life.
Lots of really good low-hanging-fruit actual improvements and solid equipment in that price range (combined, for the whole system); above that you're just getting crazy, and likely seeing marginal gains you can't actually hear and/or aren't worth the cost for what you (maybe, possibly, unlikely) might be fooled into hearing.
And I'd argue that's still extremely high. Something as simple as a standalone DAC or good headphones/speakers can make a noticeable difference, even entry-level devices!
