Gag Halfrunt

Please stop making assumptions that the 'best of the bunch' is the Lyngdorf. Sean Olive has been remarkably careful to extricate the product data from the test. For all we outsiders know, the Lyngdorf might be the one that performs worse than the room itself. Also, you never answered the question; on what data are you basing your statement that TacT is the industry leader? Were I planning a test that has relevance internationally, I'd want to make sure the products were available in enough countries to replicate the test successfully. Judging by TacT's pitiful availability outside the US, I'd deselect the brand in an eyeblink.

If audiophile labels are adopting DXD than all to the good. I decided to walk away from such audiophile labels when I read utter nonsense in an attempt to justify DSD over DXD a few years back. I take great issue with this statement of yours, though: "How about using your ears and brain as final arbiters of what sounds good or bad instead?" Well, that's making a huge assumption and like most assumptions, it's wholly wrong. My findings were based on comparing a Sony SCD-1 against my Wadia 6, played through the Spectral/MIT/Avalon system I had at the time. I looked at the SCD-1 because I'd started listening to the CD player of DSD recordings that began to roll out and found them lacking. I found the SADCD player was more of the same. Maybe it's just me. Maybe I am more sensitive to temporal precision than most - I rejected belt-drive turntables for the same reason.

You presume FAR too much. You presume my dismissal of SACD is based around poor quality equipment, some kind of dislike toward classical or acoustic music or that I need my hearing tested is both wrong and deeply insulting. I reject SACD because of the way DSD is processed. It uses noise shaping, specifically parametrically controlled noise shaping (virtually the equivalent of gain riding by the engineer) and that means ad-hoc filtration. What this usually means is a trade-off between impulse response and high-frequency performance, and most audiophile labels go for the high-frequency benefits, which is why it usually sound so temporally compromised. It also often gives SACD a higher noise floor than CD at higher frequencies. Of course, native DSD cannot be edited, so the audiophile labels can make fanciful 'no overdubs' claims. Sadly, they also slight DXD, which not only allows editing, but uses less noise shaping, because five-bits are not as 'pure' as one. I have no problems with people going after better than CD sound. I do not think that all we need is 16bit/44.1kHz PCM audio. But to suggest a format that's functional, if limited, is better than one that was fundamentally broken from the outset, but looks like it ticks all the audiophile boxes, is absurd.

Using Taffel's article to point out the limitations of computer audio is a bit like using a broken-down AMC Pacer to highlight the problems in today's motor industry. A Musical Fidelity V-DAC does not cost a fortune and is extremely good. As is the Cambridge Audio DACmagic. You won't get FireWire in a cheap DAC; the connection demands financial tribute to Apple and because it's not used in cheap PCs, it's not going to feature in cheap DACs. Portable and good is difficult, because you are using USB power to drive the DAC. Some have cracked it (HRT, for example), most haven't. Drawing power from the wall seems the way to go to drive the 'AC' part of a DAC. You can get high-resolution tracks from the people listed elsewhere on this site, if CD grade sound is not good enough for you (personally, I'd rather listen to CD than the tinkly-sweet but ponderous SACD any day). But what it sounds like you want does not exist. Just like there were no portable SACD players. What you demand (portable, high-quality, low-cost) falls between those who want portable and low-cost (and don't really give a damn about quality) and high-quality (who don't give a damn about cost and size).

...is that AT's comments in the magazine do not equate to the findings from Stephen Stone IN THE SAME ISSUE. SS reviews the HRT Streamer Plus and loves the thing. Harley too has gone to bat in the past with positive comments about USB audio. I reckon this is an example of Just In Time publishing: RH commissions a feature from AT about USB audio, knowing that AT has got 'form' with computers RH receives copy from AT too late in the day to do anything significant about it I would imagine no amount of rewriting by AT would have revised his position, a mighty rewrite at TAS would have ended up with AT shouting on the forums about TAS putting words in his mouth and getting someone with more up-to-date info to write the feature would be difficult at short notice. It's still inexcusable, though... RH should have killed off the feature, or should have managed it better in the earlier stages. If companies like Wavelength pulled their products on the basis of the author's partnering equipment and level of understanding, alarm bells should have been ringing in RH's ears. Did RH know the back story early enough to help, though? Did he know the Wavelength had been withdrawn, or did AT simply neglect to mention Wavelength to RH? If AT's dislike of USB was part of TAS policy, I would find it questionable... but internally consistent. But having "USB isn't that good" on one page and "USB is fantastic" on the next is horribly inconsistent.

The negative experience you get from a patronising, condescending dealer who looks at you as some kind of annoying interruption, dragging the sales-avoidance-person away the important jobs of making coffee, chatting to their friends, txting their girlfriend and not tiding the shop is enough to turn you away from all dealers. Bright, attentive and switched on dealers suffer because they are judged by the standard of a shop where there's an inch-thick layer of dust over every loudspeaker on display.

Newspapers and magazines CAN survive against online sources, if and only if they resort to actual journalism. In the US - where newspapers tend to be a combination of re-runs of AP/Reuters newswire items and their own posturing - papers are dying back at great speed. In contrast, the Daily Telegraph in the UK has been running something approaching journalism recently (it broke the 'Moatgate' politicians' expenses scandal) and has seen a huge rise in circulation. And this is in a country where there's a huge publicly-funded news website (the BBC) competing for free. With TAS, I see no such journalistic intent. Instead I see nothing but keeping the advertisers sweet.

The new editor at Hi-Fi+ in the UK seems to be more interested in computer audio than most. I spoke to him at the Bristol Show and he said that he wants to do more computer audio products, but he'd already received a barrage of negative comments at the suggestion from the regular readers at the show. His first issue was full of products like the Benchmark and the HRT Streamer, but not so much in the next. Perhaps his readers got to him...

...that's the problem it faces. We aren't TAS's readership. As Alan Taffel said earlier, TAS's readership considers USB the stuff of the 'computer whiz', while everyone else considers it USB. OK, it's not quite as simple as that, but given there's very little support for TAS on the boards, even on AVGuide's board, the editors might be right. I suspect the typical TAS reader really does consider anything that happened after CD to be 'computer whiz' material. As such, we aren't TAS's target audience anymore. We're already lost to them. What an horrific state to be in, an audience so old, it doesn't even 'do' the internet!

Artists are discovering the way to making money in the music business is now through touring and tours only work if you have legions of fans interested in what you are doing. It gets even better if the fans view themselves as a part of a community, especially if that community includes the band members. This is a superb and very intelligent way of doing just that. <br /> <br /> The other clever thing is that every other forward-thinking artist, record company and A&R person will be in negotiation to buy the same app for their own ends. I'd lay bets there will be a dozen similar packages from other acts following soon.<br /> <br /> <br />

We seem to have a lot in common, so maybe both sides can meet in the middle after all. Of course, now we have to argue what represents 'middle' and how we are both wrong for thinking that in the first place

All good points, duly noted. I still maintain that the details of any kind of objective testing quickly get lost on those not couched in the methodology. I include myself in this, up to a (not inconsiderable) point. If the falsification of ABX testing is uncommon (and I have no reason to doubt you on this at all), then it just means the hucksters and charlatans in high-end audio either don't find they need to bother with faking them or haven't found a way to fake them. I suspect it's the former. I think I was terminologically-challenged when I talked about 'agenda-driven testing'; I did not mean someone approaching a test with an agenda in mind, but a willingness to accept whatever results pan out. I was thinking more of those who's personal agenda drives them to shape both test and results. Such things are, unfortunately, all too common in audio. And my own willingness to assume the same agendas exist in other fields of audio testing perhaps suggests just how bad things in high-end audio really are. Although there is a lot of pseudo-science in high-end audio, I don't think it has anything to do with the buying decisions made there. This is why - despite all the hyped up claims and white papers on cables, drawing down physical problems that only cause problems in cables running across oceans or parsing microwaves - the cables are sold like jewelry, on their precious metal content. I agree that there are still people trying to do good things in high-end audio (Kevin Voecks of Revel springs to mind), but I fear the lunatics have taken over the asylum... and won't give it back without a fight. See, I really am paranoid. And they are out to get me.

Axon, thanks for your mannered and non-febrile post. It does make me think still further that my need to cling to AIFF is little more than audiophilia nervosa, which I have long suspected. I may yet pull the trigger on ALAC, just as soon as I can convince Captain Paranoia. One thing I will challenge you on, however, is this: "Whether or not ABX testing has been used in the past to sell a pig in a poke is besides the point. Even if it is, naked subjective testing is worse." I don't agree. I would say that an agenda-driven ABX test is a lot worse than 'naked subjective testing'. Worse, because it wraps itself in a veneer of science and undermines those who are doing genuine research. A 'faked' ABX test would not be hard to generate if you were so inclined to do so. Even if the nature of the 'fake' was uncovered at a later date, the damage would have already been done. The faked ABX test could be used to discredit those doing legit ABX testing for years after the event (Piltdown Man, anyone...) and the person or company that benefitted from the dodgy ABX test gets away with fraud. For a while, at least. Subjective testing has no such scientific background. It's opinion, pure and simple. Yes, the problem with opinion without any kind of objectivity is it lets the crazies in. And it's the objectivist's job to keep the crazies out. But if the objective job of keeping the crazies out is being undermined by gift-wrapped BS passing itself off as legitimate scientific testing, is it any wonder that the crazies keep coming back? This is why I have no problems with subjective reviewers discussing temple bells as treatment for room acoustics. It's basically story-telling for grown ups. If people buy into that, good luck to them. It makes audiophiles look like a bunch of homeopathically-inclined idiots to the real world, but I can live with that. I know someone who laughs at the amount of money I've spent on my amplifier and yet wears a Franck Muller watch that cost more than my whole system... and can't even keep time that accurately. So we all have our inner homeopathically-inclined idiot, then. I have a very big problem with the attempts to justify high-end audio through means of pseudo-science and 'white papers'. And that largely includes the measurements made by audio mags (except for those done on loudspeakers, which can sometimes have an analogue to what happens in the real world). So, I reject all of that and go with what fits the bill and looks right. Then I listen to it and confirm (probably confirm in my own head and nothing more) it fits the bill. There's possibly more than this, because I have often walked into a shop with a clear agenda to buy X and walked out with Y, despite Y being cheaper, less 'bling' and seemingly totally inappropriate for my needs.

There's a big change going on. But nothing's changing. If you go to a hi-fi show, the same faces keep appearing, just a little older, a little more gray and a bit more deaf. These people have been going to hi-fi shows since they were in their 20s and 30s. Unfortunately, that was 20 or 30 years ago. They tend not to buy much, just replacements to products uneconomic to repair, but just want to reconfirm what they bought all those years ago is still 'as good as it gets'. Even if it isn't. This is why there's a lot of inertia in giving up 'legacy' formats and why there will be a backlash against computer audio any day now. The manufacturers and magazines are getting wise to this revolution at last; the 'punters' will cling to their CD players for longer than is necessary just because they fear change. There's also a small, but growing, band of younger people getting interested in high-quality music reproduction once more. Then, there are products like the AudioSmile Kensai loudspeakers, designed by people a generation younger than the average hi-fi show goer. These people aren't hidebound by tradition, or demand the world to stick to 1985 time.

There seem to be a lot of drive-bys on this thread. I guess the guys at HA are having a good laugh at our non-scientific expense. The format seems the same in each case: Drop by, make some statement that challenges the perceptions of the forum, watch the reaction, then post some high-handed 'goodbye' note. Irrespective of the force of the argument raised by these people, it hardly benefits their overall argument. "I'm right, I have science on my side... ner, ner, ne nyer ner!" is never going to find you friends and tends to harden the authodoxies of those who take a more subjective stance. That being said, the over-reaction (for example, 1+1=2 is consensus-based) is just that, an over-reaction. It's a weak defense that leaves you open to grotesque conclusions (if 1+1+2 because we all agree on it, is this forum posting sent by applied science, or by wishing really hard?). Thing is, I do understand the arguments made by the hard science lot. Trouble is, although their argument may work on an intellectual level, it doesn't on an emotional one. Here's why; I remember the double-blind ABX testing of PASC (Precision Adaptive Sub-Band Coding), used to demonstrate the advantages of the short-lived Digital Compact Cassette. I also remember similar tests of ATRAC for MiniDisc. In those tests, PASC and un-compressed PCM off a CD were impossible to differentiate, as were original ATRAC and CD. Why do these two tests pose fundamental problems for me? Because both have subsequently been downgraded as newer formats emerged. PASC has limitations in the sub-band coding mechanism that would rank it alongside 96kbps MP3... and yet in the early 1990s it was 'identical'. ATRAC-1 was announced with a slew of peer-reviewed papers (using double-blind ABX tests) claiming how it was transparent in ABX tests, yet the improved ATRAC-3 was found to be less transparent than Ogg Vorbis and more. The PASC and ATRAC issues serve to reinforce my watching brief on blind tests. Back in the 1990s, these things were 'transparent'. Today they aren't. What does that say for double-blind ABX tests? I am saying this from a position of being 'test agnostic' - it's not that I want to discredit blind-testing, I genuinely want to find out what's going on, and why. There have been a history of blind and double-blind tests in audio, dating back to Edison. Granted, some of these tests have been closer to PT Barnum than good scientific method, but some haven't; in all fairness, I haven't been able to find the paper (not an AES member and $20 per paper gets a bit pricey), but I've been repeatedly told of robust double-blind ABX tests conducted in the early 1960s by Cambridge University, the Audio Engineering Society and Quad Electroacoustics that managed to determine that a open reel tape recorder, valve pre-power and a pair of electrostatic loudspeakers were functionally identical to the original live sound. So, while I don't dismiss the concept of double-blind ABX tests at all, I'm not exactly sure how robust they really are. Could it be that what we can't hear today, we can hear tomorrow? I would hate to adopt a 'transparent' methodology now only to discover it wasn't really transparent in a couple of years time. As disc space is cheaper than sleepless nights, I'll go with the path of least worry. And I would love to post a similar point on Hydrogenaudio, but it won't have me as a member. I wonder why?