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Thomas J

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  1. and in a sense, there is only bit-perfectness, but bits transmit electronically as an analogue waveform the form of which (the bits!) is subject to distortion, jitter being the main named such.
  2. to a 96K downsample of the 192, my system being out of commission for the moment with 192.
  3. he came into flak because he said he heard something somebody didn't and furthermore couldn't measure. That's a familiar situation to me. I suspect the resistor creates some sort of phase difference or noise that combines with that across the cylinder to reduce what I think is the 1/f noise the Bybees target. The cylinder is conductive, btw.
  4. We hear much more than we can say, so both hearing and the enjoyment of audio are therefore largely implicit. You hear an incredible live performance. What can you say but "you had to be there"? Why would that be? The question points the direction of objective subjectivity, which means music---both its content and transmission---will ever be subjective, and objectively so. Yin and Yang as elcorso says. I mean, who can capture in words the sound of «that violin»? Yet I know it when I hear it, because I keep playing it on my stereo, and wanting more. Why do I know more is there? We know from real experience how real sounds sound. And depending on our diligence in developing both a more finely graded language to describe what we hear, and our hearing sensitivity itself*, will we find ways to understand at the electronics and coding levels what is inadequate. On goes the search. * I once heard David Bohm describe a man who, on his death-bed, reported seeing, in amazing detail, a fly out a window at something like 100 metres. I have no doubt our auditory input is as detailed as our visual, and that for various reasons and functions our mental processing reduces the resolution of our sense inputs to allow some functional internal balance. This implies that our sensory perception can evolve, tremendously.
  5. The emotional beauty of music is contained disproportionately in the music's subtlety, which is diminished or destroyed by poor recording techniques. People often compare what audiophiles do as chasing some last few percent that, by comparison to the 97% already attained, is practically meaningless. That is imo a false analogy. I find that those last few percent compute on a log scale of enjoyment. We'd all otherwise be listening to AM radio. A good analogy is to physics: quantum physics, which is all about subtlety, goes a good many decimal places Newtonian physics cannot. Subtlety!
  6. I hear an obvious difference no matter the quality of the source, and the better the source, the more subtle (and thus more powerful) the difference that transmits.
  7. Does anyone think Leonardo would prefer a 500kb jpeg of one of his paintings to that painting? That's the proper comparison, so you can say I fixed this analogy for you. The proper analogy to music is 1411kbps to captured soundwave. I don't think more brush strokes, here, can really get us to that original, but I certainly prefer a 2mb jpeg to 500kb. I can hear the difference between low and high res (same recording, both downsampled if needed) in two seconds. I personally know what direction that would tend me as regards theoretical investigations and speculation.
  8. Paul Hynes taught me that each power regulator must have its own supply fed by an independent transformer, or transformer winding at least, to work optimally. In such a case, ground currents for each regulator won't mix, and thus won't cause the ground to bounce around dependently upon what voltage a given ground current creates as it finds its way merrily back to source.
  9. I think that's right, but the problem with an external clock is it's ... external. I must be connected with a cable that for its part may introduce the Weiss' ground noise into the clock circuitry. And the cable will pick up noise from the environment. I read a thread over on DIY Audio where a fellow built a Buffalo DAC. After placing it in his stereo, it worked fine, but every time he turned a light on or off in his house, the DAC would lose its lock on the signal and reset. In investigating this with the help of several other posters, the eventual conclusion reached was that the cable connecting the digital input to the DAC was picking up an RFI spike caused by switching a light elsewhere in the house. There are also cable effects introduced in transmitting the clock signal into the device in question. Not ideal.
  10. The 202, like other typically designed components, run their clock off a dirty power rail. The BLA has its own, cleaner power, plus it probably has a better clock circuit to begin with. I had a Weiss AFI1. I upgraded its power supply and it sounded noticeably better. This is the dirty secret these brand-name components that reviewers gush over. They're by definition mediocre at best, but a reviewer must stay within the confines of the review market, which means never really comparing a stock, manufactured component outside the stock-component market.
  11. So the rumour seems to be going: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/feb/28/apple-audio-file-adaptive-streaming
  12. crossover resolution here, Talos, not crossover distortion. And most music has some or another bass line, which makes me wonder more about Ed's statement.
  13. Miska and Talos2000, I don't want to let go of the Meitner quote quite yet. Ed Meitner is one of the originators of DSD (with Andreas Koch) and the theory of DSD resolution is in part what is being questioned in this thread. I took a screenshot of a portion of Peter Gabriel's Red Rain from his New Blood CD (download). I'm unsure how the original was recorded, but this version is 24/44.1. From the screenshot, one can see very little crossing at the zero-point. Most of the musical information is carried by transients (changes in acceleration, ie, graphical curvature) quite distant from it. I don't see how zero-point crossing carries, per Meitner, the most important musical information. Does anyone else question this?
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