6 ms·

NwAvGuy: The Audio Genius Who Vanished

128 points by StandardFuture 13y ago

syassami 13y ago
He's the satoshi of the audio world
doe88 13y ago
Beware of Newsweek if this story becomes too popular they'll start a thorough and extensive work of research and finally claim NwAvGuy is no other than Dorian S. Nakamoto.
- nawitus 13y ago
  "I'm no longer involved with DOCs, I've handed it over. Now where's my free lunch?"
  - tripzilch 13y ago
    > where's my free lunch? Noise-shaped dithering. (seriously the closest thing to free lunch I've seen in information/signal theory. or computer science. I think it's pretty magical)
steve19 13y ago
I followed this guy for a long time until it was obvious that he quit and did not mean to return. The design of that amp was frustrating. The power, the input and the output are all on the front of the amp. I always wondered why nobody cleaned that up and put power and input at the back. I also wished it used DC rather than 12 VAC. Now I know, it was the no-derivative license. When I was young I would mess around with audio circuits, trying different opamps, seeing if they changed the sound. These days I am far more concerned about connectivity. His Objective DAC is more interesting in my opinion. If I ever need a 24bit USB DAC, I will get one. Considering I think 256 bit MP3s sound just fine, and FLAC far to much effort, I probably will never need one. http://www.jdslabs.com/products/48/o2-odac-combo/ http://www.jdslabs.com/products/48/o2-odac-combo/ NwAvGuy proved what he wanted to do, that simple circuits are good enough and doing things like hand matching resistors with very expensive equipment is not required for a clean reproduction of audio. I still wonder if he really cared, or if he was a troll (he spend a good amount of time getting himself banned on forums).
- nawitus 13y ago
  Hmm, I thought it used DC rather than AC. It uses batteries.
  - wfraser 13y ago
    Correct. It also needs a wall wart.
  - makomk 13y ago
    It's got a built-in battery charger and can also run from a wall wart without using batteries at all. The reason the external power supply has to be AC is that it needs dual negative and positive power supply rails, which it gets from rectifying the AC and using that to charge a pair of batteries. Cheap, easy, and in theory gives decent audio performance. If you read NwAvGuy's blog, the modifications necessary to run it off DC are pretty much exactly what he wouldn't want people to do.
- runeks 13y ago
  > His Objective DAC is more interesting in my opinion. If I ever need a 24bit USB DAC, I will get one. FWIW I purchased his Objective DAC (from this site: http://www.headnhifi.com/odac-rca http://www.headnhifi.com/odac-rca) and I don't hear less noise from this than my internal sound card (Terratec Aureon 7.1-Space). So I was a bit disappointed. But perhaps my internal sound card was just that good, although I think the noise level is greater than is reported online. Audible noise at normal listening levels.
  - josh-wrale 13y ago
    This sounds like a ground loop or otherwise interference from the power input. Have you tried these on a power conditioner or a UPS?
  - ggreer 13y ago
    I have an ODAC and I can't detect any noise unless I max-out the volume knob with my ER-6is. Not that it matters, since playing anything at that volume with those headphones would be deafening and painful. I definitely hear more noise with my FiiO E7, and my laptop's headphone-out is even worse. In the hope that I have some idea of what I'm talking about, I've listed some possible reasons why you may be hearing noise and how to fix them. 1. Using analog inputs (RCA or line in) instead of USB. This will just amplify the noise from your input source. Analog inputs are enabled even if you're playing sound through USB, so be sure to disconnect any secondary source from your amp. 2. Nearby EMI. I found I could hear a high-pitched whining if I put my amplifier near the lower-right of my monitor. Repositioning your amplifier and/or headphone cable may fix the problem. 3. Grounding issue (unlikely). Try unplugging the amp's adapter and using the DAC-line output[1]. If there's no noise, the problem must be in amplification. That means either a defective amplifier circuit or a grounding/EMI issue. 4. Bad software (very unlikely). I once had a copy of VLC that output low-level noise when paused. This was when x86-64 was new. There were plenty of other problems with VLC on 64-bit at the time, since it used ints and longs as bitfields. You'd have this problem with all soundcards, not just the ODAC. It might also be useful to describe your set-up in more detail, including what headphones you've tried your amp with. Edit: Another thing you'll want to do to improve audio output: Make sure your OS is sending 24-bit audio to the ODAC. On OS X, open up Audio Midi Setup, then select the ODAC output and switch it to 24 bit. The default is 16-bit, which reduces dynamic range if you don't have the software volume at 100%. 1. It's the right-most output on mine: http://abughrai.be/pics/IMG_0594.JPG http://abughrai.be/pics/IMG_0594.JPG. I'm not sure where the DAC-out is on other versions.
loup-vaillant 13y ago
No derivative works… Hmm… Couldn't we just "reverse engineer" the thing, and rebuild a design "from scratch"? I mean, his work should allow us to go back to first principles, from which we can rebuild a new design.
- lutusp 13y ago
  That's always a possibility, but I think most people who build his designs don't know how they work. High-quality audio reproduction isn't mysterious, but it's not trivial either. One must have a good sense of how and why amplifiers distort signals. That limits the possible candidates for a new design and assures that many will simply build a proven design they don't understand.
Zenst 13y ago
Well his internet domain was renewed so he ain't dead, just afk still.
- codezero 13y ago
  Could be that his provider auto renewed and his card happened to still work. But more likely he's alive :)
fr0sty 13y ago
Wouldn't an easy way to find this guy be to publish an altered version of his designs and see if you get a CnD letter?
- starky 13y ago
  There are already companies out there producing modified versions of his designs which technically break the license. See the version from Head n Hifi http://www.headnhifi.com/O2-ODAC-fully-modded http://www.headnhifi.com/O2-ODAC-fully-modded I think if we were going to see him surface again he already would have.
jrockway 13y ago
If he's gone, the solution sounds like to ignore his license.
kbar13 13y ago
This actually reminds me of ripster55[0], who is (in my mind) the leading expert of mechanical keyboards online, and is banned from many of the popular mechanical keyboard forums. [0] http://www.reddit.com/user/ripster55 http://www.reddit.com/user/ripster55
- lytfyre 13y ago
  It's seemingly not an uncommon pattern in electronics related hobbies, you'll have a few main forums with their own orthodoxy, and a banned former member who disagrees, and clearly has at least a good idea what they're talking about. For instance, rc multirotors has "timecop", who was banned from rcgroups. He designed a flight controller which is popular and well thought of. AIUI, he also did the hardware design for what are probably the most recommended enthusiast motor controllers today.
anigbrowl 13y ago
Off topic, but I found this layout painful to use, with something like 60% of the window devoted to links for other articles and the actual content squeezed into a column on the left. Why would anyone intentionally make things so hard to read?!
joshontheweb 13y ago
I'd love to see a blind test of Pono. The kick starter campaign is totally driven by celebrity testimonials. Hard to reall tell if it's better.
- hnha 13y ago
  including RHCP members where Californication is famous for being terribly mastered. Such a disgusting snakeoil campaign...
  - badsock 13y ago
    I think we agree on the 24/192 thing being foolish, but the one significantly positive aspect of Pono is that it would allow access to remastered recordings without the loudness-wars style compression (Californication being a great example). My hope is that it will be a market that you can safely sell high-dynamic-range audio to because presumably they value that over preceived volume.
    - zastavka 13y ago
      Eh, I'm not holding my breath on that (though of course I hope I'm wrong). In all the Pono marketing material I've read I've seen almost no reference to (re)mastering; it's all been about chasing the hi-res dragon. Meh.
      - badsock 13y ago
        You know, you're right - I'm extrapolating too much from the "released in whatever format the masters are in" claim.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
mrmondo 13y ago
I was speaking to him within a day of when he was last heard from. I got the feeling he was getting sick of the 'fame', I know he was getting a lot of flack from products he measured / reviewed from creators of high-priced, low quality manufacturers.
busterarm 13y ago
I'm not sure this is really that remarkable, he just had a personality and got some attention. There have been high-quality amplifiers around for a long time now and Class T (http://www.google.com/patents/US5777512 http://www.google.com/patents/US5777512) amplifiers at that pricepoint are over a decade old. They're very popular with DIY audio guys. I've had my Trends TA-10 close to 10 years old now. He did something cool, but I don't see it as all that remarkable.
- analog31 13y ago
  I'm a pretty intensive electronics enthusiast. I checked out his site, and skimmed some of the materials. My impression is that he deliberately designed a fairly mundane circuit using commonplace parts, to show that an esoteric design is unnecessary. So it's a "political" design, if you will. The impressive thing is that his documentation of design decisions and techniques is pretty exhaustive. I've definitely bookmarked it for a closer read.
mynameishere 13y ago
Always wondered about audiophiles. Seems like a simple truism: The best quality reproduction of a recording will come from whatever the final mix engineer was using. If he was using a 400 dollar pair of Sennheisers and similar equipment, I'm not sure how you could possibly do better. Maybe you could do better if you had the masters and could remix it with more expensive crap, but that's unrealistic. And if the engineer really screwed up, no pricey amp is going to fix it.
- gregsq 13y ago
  Not exactly. Sound production and sound reproduction are separate pursuits. Sound reproduction should ideally be input transformed with transducers to a listening environment. In the absence of perfect transducers there's a lot of play area for enthusiasts to modify the transformation stage to interplay with what is by far the weakest part of the chain, the transducers. Massy complex mechanical circuits with all the imperfections that entails. Despite this, it's very possible to improve the state of the art. Sound production on the other hand is whatever the producer wants it to be. And the best transducers are often purposefully avoided for monitoring, because it won't necessarily sound too good on the radio when driving to work, or an MP3 through Dr Beats on a noisy tube or metro.
- gnaffle 13y ago
  The recording might capture a lot more detail than what the sound engineer was hearing. For instance, the recording could have been made in the 60s or 70s, and the state of the art in sound reproduction can have improved since then. So unless you want to argue that hearing that extra detail that the mix engineer didn't hear is "wrong", I don't see how you can make your point. If someone records a live concert using a pair of high quality mics and a pair of crap headphones, is the "truest" reproduction of that recording made with the crap headphones, or is the "truest" reproduction what sounds closest to being present at the concert?
Kiro 13y ago
For me NwAvGuy is most famous for his Headphone & Amp Impedance article where he coined the 1/8th rule so many audiophiles refer to all the time. http://nwavguy.blogspot.se/2011/02/headphone-amp-impedance.html http://nwavguy.blogspot.se/2011/02/headphone-amp-impedance.h...

128 points by StandardFuture 13y ago

He's the satoshi of the audio world

doe88 13y ago

Beware of Newsweek if this story becomes too popular they'll start a thorough and extensive work of research and finally claim NwAvGuy is no other than Dorian S. Nakamoto.

nawitus 13y ago
"I'm no longer involved with DOCs, I've handed it over. Now where's my free lunch?"
- tripzilch 13y ago
  > where's my free lunch? Noise-shaped dithering. (seriously the closest thing to free lunch I've seen in information/signal theory. or computer science. I think it's pretty magical)

steve19 13y ago

I followed this guy for a long time until it was obvious that he quit and did not mean to return. The design of that amp was frustrating. The power, the input and the output are all on the front of the amp. I always wondered why nobody cleaned that up and put power and input at the back. I also wished it used DC rather than 12 VAC. Now I know, it was the no-derivative license. When I was young I would mess around with audio circuits, trying different opamps, seeing if they changed the sound. These days I am far more concerned about connectivity. His Objective DAC is more interesting in my opinion. If I ever need a 24bit USB DAC, I will get one. Considering I think 256 bit MP3s sound just fine, and FLAC far to much effort, I probably will never need one. http://www.jdslabs.com/products/48/o2-odac-combo/ http://www.jdslabs.com/products/48/o2-odac-combo/ NwAvGuy proved what he wanted to do, that simple circuits are good enough and doing things like hand matching resistors with very expensive equipment is not required for a clean reproduction of audio. I still wonder if he really cared, or if he was a troll (he spend a good amount of time getting himself banned on forums).

nawitus 13y ago
Hmm, I thought it used DC rather than AC. It uses batteries.
- wfraser 13y ago
  Correct. It also needs a wall wart.
- makomk 13y ago
  It's got a built-in battery charger and can also run from a wall wart without using batteries at all. The reason the external power supply has to be AC is that it needs dual negative and positive power supply rails, which it gets from rectifying the AC and using that to charge a pair of batteries. Cheap, easy, and in theory gives decent audio performance. If you read NwAvGuy's blog, the modifications necessary to run it off DC are pretty much exactly what he wouldn't want people to do.
runeks 13y ago
> His Objective DAC is more interesting in my opinion. If I ever need a 24bit USB DAC, I will get one. FWIW I purchased his Objective DAC (from this site: http://www.headnhifi.com/odac-rca http://www.headnhifi.com/odac-rca) and I don't hear less noise from this than my internal sound card (Terratec Aureon 7.1-Space). So I was a bit disappointed. But perhaps my internal sound card was just that good, although I think the noise level is greater than is reported online. Audible noise at normal listening levels.
- josh-wrale 13y ago
  This sounds like a ground loop or otherwise interference from the power input. Have you tried these on a power conditioner or a UPS?
- ggreer 13y ago
  I have an ODAC and I can't detect any noise unless I max-out the volume knob with my ER-6is. Not that it matters, since playing anything at that volume with those headphones would be deafening and painful. I definitely hear more noise with my FiiO E7, and my laptop's headphone-out is even worse. In the hope that I have some idea of what I'm talking about, I've listed some possible reasons why you may be hearing noise and how to fix them. 1. Using analog inputs (RCA or line in) instead of USB. This will just amplify the noise from your input source. Analog inputs are enabled even if you're playing sound through USB, so be sure to disconnect any secondary source from your amp. 2. Nearby EMI. I found I could hear a high-pitched whining if I put my amplifier near the lower-right of my monitor. Repositioning your amplifier and/or headphone cable may fix the problem. 3. Grounding issue (unlikely). Try unplugging the amp's adapter and using the DAC-line output[1]. If there's no noise, the problem must be in amplification. That means either a defective amplifier circuit or a grounding/EMI issue. 4. Bad software (very unlikely). I once had a copy of VLC that output low-level noise when paused. This was when x86-64 was new. There were plenty of other problems with VLC on 64-bit at the time, since it used ints and longs as bitfields. You'd have this problem with all soundcards, not just the ODAC. It might also be useful to describe your set-up in more detail, including what headphones you've tried your amp with. Edit: Another thing you'll want to do to improve audio output: Make sure your OS is sending 24-bit audio to the ODAC. On OS X, open up Audio Midi Setup, then select the ODAC output and switch it to 24 bit. The default is 16-bit, which reduces dynamic range if you don't have the software volume at 100%. 1. It's the right-most output on mine: http://abughrai.be/pics/IMG_0594.JPG http://abughrai.be/pics/IMG_0594.JPG. I'm not sure where the DAC-out is on other versions.

loup-vaillant 13y ago

No derivative works… Hmm… Couldn't we just "reverse engineer" the thing, and rebuild a design "from scratch"? I mean, his work should allow us to go back to first principles, from which we can rebuild a new design.

lutusp 13y ago
That's always a possibility, but I think most people who build his designs don't know how they work. High-quality audio reproduction isn't mysterious, but it's not trivial either. One must have a good sense of how and why amplifiers distort signals. That limits the possible candidates for a new design and assures that many will simply build a proven design they don't understand.

Zenst 13y ago

Well his internet domain was renewed so he ain't dead, just afk still.

codezero 13y ago
Could be that his provider auto renewed and his card happened to still work. But more likely he's alive :)

fr0sty 13y ago

Wouldn't an easy way to find this guy be to publish an altered version of his designs and see if you get a CnD letter?

starky 13y ago
There are already companies out there producing modified versions of his designs which technically break the license. See the version from Head n Hifi http://www.headnhifi.com/O2-ODAC-fully-modded http://www.headnhifi.com/O2-ODAC-fully-modded I think if we were going to see him surface again he already would have.

jrockway 13y ago

If he's gone, the solution sounds like to ignore his license.

kbar13 13y ago

This actually reminds me of ripster55[0], who is (in my mind) the leading expert of mechanical keyboards online, and is banned from many of the popular mechanical keyboard forums. [0] http://www.reddit.com/user/ripster55 http://www.reddit.com/user/ripster55

lytfyre 13y ago
It's seemingly not an uncommon pattern in electronics related hobbies, you'll have a few main forums with their own orthodoxy, and a banned former member who disagrees, and clearly has at least a good idea what they're talking about. For instance, rc multirotors has "timecop", who was banned from rcgroups. He designed a flight controller which is popular and well thought of. AIUI, he also did the hardware design for what are probably the most recommended enthusiast motor controllers today.

anigbrowl 13y ago

Off topic, but I found this layout painful to use, with something like 60% of the window devoted to links for other articles and the actual content squeezed into a column on the left. Why would anyone intentionally make things so hard to read?!

joshontheweb 13y ago

I'd love to see a blind test of Pono. The kick starter campaign is totally driven by celebrity testimonials. Hard to reall tell if it's better.

hnha 13y ago
including RHCP members where Californication is famous for being terribly mastered. Such a disgusting snakeoil campaign...
- badsock 13y ago
  I think we agree on the 24/192 thing being foolish, but the one significantly positive aspect of Pono is that it would allow access to remastered recordings without the loudness-wars style compression (Californication being a great example). My hope is that it will be a market that you can safely sell high-dynamic-range audio to because presumably they value that over preceived volume.
  - zastavka 13y ago
    Eh, I'm not holding my breath on that (though of course I hope I'm wrong). In all the Pono marketing material I've read I've seen almost no reference to (re)mastering; it's all been about chasing the hi-res dragon. Meh.
    - badsock 13y ago
      You know, you're right - I'm extrapolating too much from the "released in whatever format the masters are in" claim.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

mrmondo 13y ago

I was speaking to him within a day of when he was last heard from. I got the feeling he was getting sick of the 'fame', I know he was getting a lot of flack from products he measured / reviewed from creators of high-priced, low quality manufacturers.

busterarm 13y ago

I'm not sure this is really that remarkable, he just had a personality and got some attention. There have been high-quality amplifiers around for a long time now and Class T (http://www.google.com/patents/US5777512 http://www.google.com/patents/US5777512) amplifiers at that pricepoint are over a decade old. They're very popular with DIY audio guys. I've had my Trends TA-10 close to 10 years old now. He did something cool, but I don't see it as all that remarkable.

analog31 13y ago
I'm a pretty intensive electronics enthusiast. I checked out his site, and skimmed some of the materials. My impression is that he deliberately designed a fairly mundane circuit using commonplace parts, to show that an esoteric design is unnecessary. So it's a "political" design, if you will. The impressive thing is that his documentation of design decisions and techniques is pretty exhaustive. I've definitely bookmarked it for a closer read.

mynameishere 13y ago

Always wondered about audiophiles. Seems like a simple truism: The best quality reproduction of a recording will come from whatever the final mix engineer was using. If he was using a 400 dollar pair of Sennheisers and similar equipment, I'm not sure how you could possibly do better. Maybe you could do better if you had the masters and could remix it with more expensive crap, but that's unrealistic. And if the engineer really screwed up, no pricey amp is going to fix it.

gregsq 13y ago
Not exactly. Sound production and sound reproduction are separate pursuits. Sound reproduction should ideally be input transformed with transducers to a listening environment. In the absence of perfect transducers there's a lot of play area for enthusiasts to modify the transformation stage to interplay with what is by far the weakest part of the chain, the transducers. Massy complex mechanical circuits with all the imperfections that entails. Despite this, it's very possible to improve the state of the art. Sound production on the other hand is whatever the producer wants it to be. And the best transducers are often purposefully avoided for monitoring, because it won't necessarily sound too good on the radio when driving to work, or an MP3 through Dr Beats on a noisy tube or metro.
gnaffle 13y ago
The recording might capture a lot more detail than what the sound engineer was hearing. For instance, the recording could have been made in the 60s or 70s, and the state of the art in sound reproduction can have improved since then. So unless you want to argue that hearing that extra detail that the mix engineer didn't hear is "wrong", I don't see how you can make your point. If someone records a live concert using a pair of high quality mics and a pair of crap headphones, is the "truest" reproduction of that recording made with the crap headphones, or is the "truest" reproduction what sounds closest to being present at the concert?

Kiro 13y ago

For me NwAvGuy is most famous for his Headphone & Amp Impedance article where he coined the 1/8th rule so many audiophiles refer to all the time. http://nwavguy.blogspot.se/2011/02/headphone-amp-impedance.html http://nwavguy.blogspot.se/2011/02/headphone-amp-impedance.h...