Digital Facts & Realities?

Just laziness in even attempting to set up vinyl. I seem to feel I need vinyl in my life, but then I can never be arsed to set it up. The extra box and wires that a phono stage brings are also an added hassle I also can’t be bothered with. Maybe I’ve just gotten too lazy or my CD sound is just too good for me to care about vinyl.

I really like this player but i haven’t compared it to anything, Tye DAC easily saw off the Digit Refeence but ants about as much compatrinag as I’ve tried. As you say, I guess it must be good enough and the lack of desire to run vinyl should be a clue

Cd players - I was up to about 20 at one point. Chasing rainbows mostly. Provided the amplification is good enough they pretty much all sounded pleasant if different. Only a few have had that extra something that is probably not worth paying thousands for but of course we don't have to any more.

Tusk. For some reason I've had it in my head that the recordings were done elsewhere and then mixed at the new studio. Obviously that wasn't so reading about. In the feature read in 'Answers years ago, I thought it mentioned that the studio was all digital. Seems that too wasn't the case. As for how it was recorded and mixed, it's hard to come up with a definite answer. Analogue recording and digitally mixed. Analogue recording with drums digitally recorded and digitally mixed. Lindsey B's recordings analogue and the rest digital and digitally mixed. Analogue recording with analogue & digital mixes done in tandem. All digital. Even Lindsey B quotes the recordings as digital. I gave up looking at that point. So, take your pick.

Quad. There were two systems, of course: discrete and matrix. JVC came up with CD4 for vinyl (discrete) and CBS behind the QS matrix version. I'd totally, totally forgot about CBS's involvement. CD4 had carrier signals at 30K for the demodulator. When I was looking previously the figure of 50K was what I found. There wasn't any mention of what version that figure referred to. Looking on Wiki, it mentions 76K used as a carrier for the matrix version. There was one or two variants of the matrix system with Sansui's SQ being one. Maybe the 50K figure was used in one of these. At the time I built a surround sound decoder which basically sent the difference signal to the rear with a 90 degree phase shift to one channel. Later I built a genuine SQ decoder with a dedicated i.c. which did give better results. It was interesting hearing something other than stereo for a time, but the point came when it just sounded gimmicky, and didn't really add to the listening experience. In the end I just used a basic Hafler configuration with a pot adjustment to add a bit of sum signal. It gave a bit of ambience and pulled the sound away from the front speakers. Some time later I gave up on it when I discovered an unusual speaker set-up that produced pretty tangible imagery.

Wouldn't like to say that most amplifiers are wide bandwidth in design. There's an awful lot of amps out there. The question remains though why some designers adopt that way, and others don't. But then, that's the thing with designers. One designer will have his way of doing things using a particular topology and decrying an alternative one. Another designer will have his (different) preferred method and adopt the topology the other designer dismissed. Both will have equally valid, if different sounding, products.

HDCD, Jitter, Bitstream and Mash. Just marketing? Don't know. I'd rather listen to a HDCD than a standard one, all things being equal. Haven't heard the effects of a jitter eater for myself. Bitstream. That was basically a cost-cutting exercise. Before Bitstream you had support chips for the main processor. With Bitstream the one chip did away with them. Originally, Bitstream was for models lower down the range and Multibit was kept for the top of the range. I thought Mash was just Technics way of doing things. Never read up on it to be honest. You forgot dither!

Just heard on the news about Dick Dale's death.

Reverb? Reverb? Not something I've heard. I have a small collection including Scott Walker's 1-4, Mike Oldfield's QE2, Five Miles Out, Crises and Discovery, Dave Brubeck's Time Out, The Bee Gees Hits Double and a couple from The Dixie Chicks. The last I got was Roxy Music's Siren about a month ago; the only one I've been a bit disappointed with as it sounds a tad turgid, which I don't remember the album sounding. Might get Avalon. There's Neil Young's 4 disc set, but I'm not a huge fan. I do keep a lookout for them. And The Bee Gees double sounds quite excellent.

Archiemago's remote blind test results are up and pretty much demonstrate what I said in my post above.

archimago.blogspot.com/2019/05/blind-test-results-part-3-do-digital.html

It's a bit tl;dr  but the summary is:

2. On the whole, despite the expected disparity in sound quality between a computer motherboard, Apple iPhone 6 headphone output, Oppo UDP-205 (with current "flagship" ES9038Pro DAC) XLR output, and a Sony SACD player with RCA out, the results suggest that audible differences from 16/44.1 playback are not easily heard.


3. Despite small differences reported by many, the data did suggest a significant ability for those who heard a difference to identify the computer motherboard as sounding "worst", this is consistent with the objective measurements.

These days, after many generations of products with refinements in low-level linearity, lower noise floor, filter optimizations, and jitter reduction, the logical expectation is that 16/44.1 DACs have matured to the point where one has to assume that it should not be easy to detect differences between devices. The idea of "transparency to the digital source" should result in a "common" kind of sound among many devices (especially those with "high fidelity" aspirations) once we equalized listening levels.



Considering the multitude of DACs and players out there, of course some devices can sound vastly different. However, it's also quite likely that such a different-sounding device is either of very low quality (like this) or a company purposely "colored" the sound to differentiate their product (perhaps like this). Needless to say, do not assume that an expensive "high end" DAC/player is necessarily also of "high fidelity" because it sounds different or is subjectively preferred by some!

I've never heard an iPhone playing a lossless file so can't add anything there, but bear in mind this was a blind test. If you don't know that it is a phone being used as the source would you perceive such a big difference? On paper, no. In a blind test, apparently no. But when you know it is 'just a 'phone' you are listening to psychology comes into play.


On paper the motherboard should be the worst performer because of the power supply noise and guess what? It was.


Not a controlled test ofc but still interesting nonetheless in that it demonstrates that when you don't know what you are listening to it is much harder to determine differences. 

The only time I have heard a 'phone used in a proper hifi system was at Scalford when someone wanted to hear some crap they had brought along. System was a 5 way fully active horn set up (Speedy Steve). It was an mp3 file so very lossy but although it did sound 'degraded' compared to whatever full fat source he was using it wasn't unpleasant to listen to. Not harsh or hard or bright. And the speaker set up was very revealing, as you'd expect

There’s lots of “tssss......tssssss......tsssss”. Still has the same problem of massively elevated and spitty treble to the point of making me wince. It’s clearly done to brighten up Sh#t earbuds. The old (pre-classic) iPods used to be better. I updated my iPod and found that out first-hand.

Does sound a bit glassy but then so do my laptop speakers.

Glassy? Glassy? I don't post glassy-sounding Sh#t for people to listen to! I always ferret about for the best sound for anything I link to. Get yourself some better (more *accurate*) speakers for your laptop, as was done with your system, and then seeing the light, as it were.

No glassiness here, either, just some pretty clean percussion. Just listen to that tambourine and cymbals... Think it's better than the original:

Very sad to hear your friend passed away! 

I am very intrigued by his work called" The Graham Holliman Subwoofer" as I am completing my masters' dissertation project about his concept of generating infrasonic frequencies with high efficiency.
The available information about him and the project are very limited as it was published more than forty years ago.
I would like to collect all possible information about Mr. Holliman's career and the project itself. I plan on making my dissertation public afterwards.

Would you mind sharing more information about his professional life?

Thank you so much!!