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  1. Another question is whether the current drawn by headphones will modulate the supply and thereby cause jitter and how much. The single USB supply supplies both digital and analogue circuitry. My listening suggests this modulation occurs.
  2. Yes, exploratory work is important. It sometimes raises insights that, while seeming small in the application in which it was found, can generalize to provide deeper insight into more foundational matters to a device's working or sound. This is in addition to incrementally ridding the sound field of layers of noise layer by layer.
  3. Good on Ed Meitner. I do like his stuff.
  4. I used the DragonFly as a DAC for an Ncore amplifier I patched together today. I think the device sounds better in this mode. I don't hear as much digital edge or sibilance. Mercman posted over an AA saying his DragonFly sounded better used as a signal source for an amplifier. If this device does in fact sound better in low-current operation, I suspect operating it at higher currents required by headphones causes an extra measure of jitter, among other things, given the several sources of psu voltage noise that current will cause or induce.
  5. I received a DragonFly today. Listening via Audirvana+ (direct, integer) through Ultrasone 8 headphones, and with my laptop power supply unplugged, the DragonFly's sound is better resolved than that of my headphone output. Bass is excellent, low-level detail is better, headphone-output-mud has cleared somewhat, and the music is on these grounds more interesting and involving. That's the good news. I also hear upper-midrange hardness and distortion and lower-high-frequency edge. For me, this translates as digititis and sibilance on female vocals and a general upper-midrange sharpness and subtle spittiness that is dissonant to my ear ... in that way digital does best. I'm listening out of the box, so these qualities may ameliorate with time (they have somewhat already). My hunch, however, is that despite a cleaner, better resolved sound in other respects, I will find listening through this device fatiguing. I already do. I'm unsure I prefer it to my iPod. I think I'll hook a Hynes supply to it to see what results.
  6. Hi Julf, I do appreciate a direct, concise, fact-oriented style of communicating. If English is your third language, you must have some facility for communicating in (Finnish?). I mean that as a compliment. You have very high language skills. There were a few posts that felt over the line to me. Here are the two that stood out to me: The first post appeared after I'd posted several posts. In some of those, I spoke from a philosophical, intuitive view. Because these were among the more philosophical on the thread, and given I was contending that the listening experience is the ultimate goal of engineering technique, I felt your reference to "true believers desperately and fanatically defending (a position)" quite comfortably included me, and I felt it to. I personally love religion, and I love deeply investigating assumptions in an intuitive way, so I felt slighted. But I didn't know if you intended to include me in writing that post, and the one after, which is why I asked. Ouch.
  7. That's essentially my perspective likewise, Barrows. Distortions have their own sonic characteristics, and some are worse than others. Quality (type of distortion) and quantity (amount of distortion) always appear together. Only listening will tell one whether a given distortion sounds better or worse than an equivalent level of another, different form of which.
  8. Esl's answer is this, in part: I would categorize Julf's comments to me as out of the blue. Am I off-track with this perception?
  9. I like Nordost also, but their prices! If you want good Nordost interconnect cable, go here: New & Used Specials - Cables & Accessories - Upscale Audio Near the bottom of the page you will see some ancient video cables. I'm pretty sure these video cables compete with their best audio cables, as audio cables. The video cables use dual-micro-filament wraps around the conductors---two twisted teflon filaments that, by the twisting, have less contact with the wire than mono-filament. I've compared specs, and these video cables are excellent. They are also 75-ohm spec so can be used as digital cables. And can be used as shielded speaker cables. A real deal, in Nordost terms.
  10. esl, have you nothing more specific, reasoned or scientific to say than misinformation?
  11. I'm with you, Barrows. I have tremendous respect for Charles Hansen's design techniques. I have personally never preferred class A/B feedback amplifiers. I'll be interested to hear the Ncores, as feedback would seem to work differently (have different sonic effects) with class D. Oh, one other incentive manufacturers have to create complex circuits: complexity can allow greater tolerance for looser-tolerance components. Every hour a designer spends matching output devices is an hour not spent by competition relying on feedback and complexity to absorb component mistolerances. As to which sounds better, a simpler, zero-(other than naturally occurring)-feedback amp, or a more complex, feedback amp, one can only determine that from listening.
  12. Also compare listening reports of people making the L'Amp SIT amplifier (L'Amp: A simple SIT Amp - diyAudio) or reviews of Pass' new SIT line of amps. These amplifiers are single-stage, one-active-component amplifiers, and are as simple as an amplifier can be. They thus represent the furthest end of the simple-complex continuum, and are an ideal comparison to complex, feedback amplifiers.
  13. You're bucking the laws of physics to think feedback doesn't create its own sonic effects, if that's what you're saying. Yes, feedback reduces levels of distortion, but it changes the overall distortion signature, of necessity because it introduces forms of distortion not otherwise produced by the circuit if operated without feedback. I meant 'ugly' in a technical sense. For instance, it's well documented, if not broadly understood, that in a smoothly declining 2nd-to-nth harmonic distortion spectrum, sonic effects of odd-order distortions are masked where the previous-higher even-order component is higher in amplitude (higher-amplitude 2nd thus masks lower-amplitude 3rd, etc.). And fwiw, there's considerable evidence the human ear can hear into the noise floor. This makes sense, as noise is generally chaotic. One would expect that the ear can identify an orderly voltage signal appearing in a sea of chaotic noise. We do this all the time. Designers have several incentives to complicate circuitry. One important incentive is to reduce quoted, on-paper distortion figures, an important marketing concern that, from what I can tell, is driven less by a priority for sonic fidelity than a simple numbers competition. And you're oversimplifying to think I'm saying feedback is necessarily undesirable. It desirably reduces certain forms of distortion. I'm merely adding that it does so for a price. Some people are unwilling to pay that price. And for good, articulable reasons that cannot be brushed away as unscientific.
  14. Pass is quite obviously correct, imo. Feedback creates ugly forms of distortion that replace simpler, lower-order forms. I also like to think the latter sound better.
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