8 ms·

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

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.

sigi45 8y ago
Whatever your basic statement was, it's proven valid. Tremendous how much you can discuss it in such a wide small area. AD, wine, Jitter ... :-)
fabioborellini 8y ago
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.
- sjwright 8y ago
  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. Rinse, repeat.
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    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.
- AdrianB1 8y ago
  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.
  - cheeze 8y ago
    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 :(
    - jungler 8y ago
      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.
reaperducer 8y ago
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?
- sopooneo 8y ago
  Could you have a couple friends help you set up some double blind comparisons? I'd be interested if learning the results.
  - janekm 8y ago
    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.
    - Simon_says 8y ago
      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.
- janekm 8y ago
  Probably mostly the latter. The headphone adapter with recent iPhones measures remarkably well for such a tiny device: https://www.head-fi.org/threads/what-is-the-sound-quality-of-iphone-ipad-ipod-touch.627111/page-20 https://www.head-fi.org/threads/what-is-the-sound-quality-of... (scroll down a little for lots of geeky measurements). 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.
  - bayindirh 8y ago
    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.
tlrobinson 8y ago
> 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.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  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.
  - rasz 8y ago
    >Professional studio engineers will spend $3000 on a high-precision digital clock for their DACs because it makes a clearly audible difference. No, this is pure steaming BS. $0.2 crystal has 50 ppm stability. >Some people’s brains and ears are better at all of this than others. Better than radio receivers operating at GHz ranges I guess.
  - d21d3q 8y ago
    Can you elaborate more about $3000 digital clock for DAC?
stcredzero 8y 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.)
- kakarot 8y ago
  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.
robdachshund 8y ago
There are degrees here. Jitter is real, so are ground loops, and the difference between compressed and uncompressed audio. I can tell an mp3 from a cd. However I don't think there's anything to gain from "hi res audio." 44/16 is all we need. I think these people would be fine with some noise filtering on their house house wiring. I'm not about to drop 60k on equipment, but 1k would do wonders.
fro0116 8y ago
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.
- thirdsun 8y ago
  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.
- sk5t 8y ago
  It could be a ground loop hum, not USB's fault really, but you do get electrical isolation with toslink.
bassman9000 8y ago
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.
ladzoppelin 8y ago
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.
- atoav 8y ago
  If you use speakers add amplifiers, speakers and (most important) acoustics
coldtea 8y ago
>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?

sigi45 8y ago

Whatever your basic statement was, it's proven valid. Tremendous how much you can discuss it in such a wide small area. AD, wine, Jitter ... :-)

fabioborellini 8y ago

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.

sjwright 8y ago
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. Rinse, repeat.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  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.
AdrianB1 8y ago
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.
- cheeze 8y ago
  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 :(
  - jungler 8y ago
    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.

reaperducer 8y ago

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?

sopooneo 8y ago
Could you have a couple friends help you set up some double blind comparisons? I'd be interested if learning the results.
- janekm 8y ago
  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.
  - Simon_says 8y ago
    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.
janekm 8y ago
Probably mostly the latter. The headphone adapter with recent iPhones measures remarkably well for such a tiny device: https://www.head-fi.org/threads/what-is-the-sound-quality-of-iphone-ipad-ipod-touch.627111/page-20 https://www.head-fi.org/threads/what-is-the-sound-quality-of... (scroll down a little for lots of geeky measurements). 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.
- bayindirh 8y ago
  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.

tlrobinson 8y ago

> 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.

TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
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.
- rasz 8y ago
  >Professional studio engineers will spend $3000 on a high-precision digital clock for their DACs because it makes a clearly audible difference. No, this is pure steaming BS. $0.2 crystal has 50 ppm stability. >Some people’s brains and ears are better at all of this than others. Better than radio receivers operating at GHz ranges I guess.
- d21d3q 8y ago
  Can you elaborate more about $3000 digital clock for DAC?

stcredzero 8y 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.)

kakarot 8y ago
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.

robdachshund 8y ago

There are degrees here. Jitter is real, so are ground loops, and the difference between compressed and uncompressed audio. I can tell an mp3 from a cd. However I don't think there's anything to gain from "hi res audio." 44/16 is all we need. I think these people would be fine with some noise filtering on their house house wiring. I'm not about to drop 60k on equipment, but 1k would do wonders.

fro0116 8y ago

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.

thirdsun 8y ago
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.
sk5t 8y ago
It could be a ground loop hum, not USB's fault really, but you do get electrical isolation with toslink.

bassman9000 8y ago

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.

ladzoppelin 8y ago

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.

atoav 8y ago
If you use speakers add amplifiers, speakers and (most important) acoustics

coldtea 8y ago

>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?