Audio Science Review = Rebuttal and Further Thoughts

You said the following:

IMO speakers, room treatments and EQ account for about 90% of what you hear. I don't sweat the other stuff. 

Although the EQ part was missing from the original post, you immediately added the EQ part after my reply.

From my experience, people who slap the "room" stuff in your face and dismiss the importance of anything else, tend to have zero room treatments for themselves. That's all.

 

@prof : I am scratching my head… why don’t you participate in forums with like minded people with the same beliefs and ideology like ASR? Do you really have to team up here with human equivalent of malware like @crymeanaudioriver who literally got banned and resurfaced here with dozen+ of usernames? 
 

crymeanaudioriver

 

theaudiomaniac 

 

theaudioamp

 

deludedaudiophile

 

thynamesinnervoice

 

cindyment

 

snratio

 

yesiamjohn

 

sugabooger

 

dletch2

 

audio2design

 

dannad

 

roberttdid 

 

roberttcan 

 

heaudio123

 

audiozenology

 

atdavid

Sorry @prof , have not been following this ASR thread(s) closely. Any thread Cin Dyment aka @crymeanaudioriver this time around is pointless. It’s a “drama” I have seen dozens of time before.I just see you arguing a lot the party line position of ASR. So I was just wondering. I do remember you praising Devore speakers who measure like crap according to the party line of ASR, so I know you do listen to determine your preferences in this hobby. It’s fine, it’s just a hobby. Not a life or death situation 

Well, there are thousands of ways to “skin a cat”. To me, there is no point of pushing one’s method of evaluating audio down the throats of others. We are all adults, and can figure stuff for ourselves. This whole thing is starting to become like a missionary work from the 1400s. Again, just a hobby, not a life of death situation 

@hotei :

Does audio replay equipment sound good or not.

You are not supposed to post anything on how something sounds unless you have proof to back it up. If no proof, they you are in a nutshell making baseless claims 🤦‍♂️

 

Dude. It’s not a claim. It’s sharing own experiences. What part of “sharing experience “ don’t you understand. Claim? You guys crack me up. And “counter claim”? 😂🤦‍♂️🙄

 

And why do you try to mask where you stand on the Great Debate. Can’t you just be honest? Why the fuss. There is nothing wrong with you being a measurementalist

People “making claims” is typically people sharing experiences. If you are not interested is these people sharing experiences, you can disregard them. Simple. No? Golden ears or not… does it matter?

Then you go to the ASR party line:

without any objective evidence to back it up

So I am really confused.

But then agaiN;

I’m much more persuaded by evidence, than mere claims.

So this tells me all I need to know about what I need to know where one belongs in the Great Debate spectrum. Which is fine. But why do you have to mask it.

There is no such thing as EVIDENCE. One has to figure out him/her self. No other way around. How? Whether by trusting own senses (listening) or by reading Amir’s measurements, does not matter. Pick your method. Just don’t shove YOUR method to other peoples throats

 

 

@prof : I completely miss the point of your dissertation. But I am not a professor. My reply I thought was pretty simple. 
 

You say:

I’m much more persuaded by evidence, than mere claims.

May I ask: how do you find your evidence? What “persuades” you? 
 

To be clear, it has never been my intention to persuade anyone by sharing my experiences (or “making claims” as you call it). Anything I have ever posted 

prof

3,127 posts

10-20-2022 at 03:34pm 

 

What timing.  Sure enough, after writing the above, I'm going through just this same debate on ASR once again, where someone there has declared subjective impressions as meaningless and useless.  

Because you are making baseless unsubstantiated claims! 😁😀

You should add the following disclaimer after each post and you should be fine: "every opinion expressed herein is  based on unproven unscientific listening sessions and should not be construed as claim on sound quality of any and all components. For information purposes only"

 

Well @prof I am sorry. You are wrong 😆. You have said it yourself: if you share any listening experience that is not backed by either measurements or double blind ABX tests certified by a panel of independent third party individuals (preferably both). you are simply making baseless claims. Such obnoxious behavior will not be tolerated 😉

I am all for middle ground. It’s just some don’t like that, my way or the highway sort of thing. Not me. And:

NO audiophile needs to justify his purchase or engage in measurements or controlled testing. To each his own.

Yup! Exactly.

But:

But some claims fall in to the "controversial" category based on their dubious plausibility, pointed out by relevant experts (or even identifiable as dubious simply by applying critical thinking to the claim). Plenty of audiophile beliefs fall in to such categories. So if an audiophile wants to describe the sound of speakers, like I’ve said, I’m all ears. If he wants to say an expensive USB cable altered the sound over a cheaper functioning, properly spec’d USB cable, based on the claims made by the marketing, then I am justified in wanting stronger evidence than an anecdote.

Or, you can just ignore those posts. One should not ask people to only post selectively about their subjective findings only on stuff that you believe have merit. They should feel free to post about anything. Then, we, the readers, can sort through the maze of posts, and only read what catches our interests. No?

 

After all, you've been in these threads making arguments.  You could have just skipped them, but you didn't.  Why? 

That's true. And honestly, I shouldn't. 

prof

3,131 posts

10-20-2022 at 05:18pm 

Or, you can just ignore those posts. One should not ask people to only post selectively about their subjective findings only on stuff that you believe have merit. They should feel free to post about anything. Then, we, the readers, can sort through the maze of posts, and only read what catches our interests. No?

Sure that could be someone's approach.

But it's not so simple as that.

Yes. It's as simple as that. Meaning, I believe everyone should be free to share their experiences in a public forum, subjective or not, and let the readers be the judge. The reader(s) then can determine what interests them and what doesn't. Read & participate in threads of interest, ignore the threads with no interest. 

And hence the measurements tell us how closely a playback of say a piano sounds like, say… a real piano. We do not care whether person B hears a piano sounding like flute, we only care that it is replicated correctly.

 

if you need measurements to tell a piano from a flute, then I don’t know what to tell you… Maybe take on another hobby?

 

 

@fleschler : arguing about DACs with ASR crowd is a waste of time. Quit it while you are ahead. I was once told a DAC is not even part of the audio chain. Just part of the electric delivery. Just like a power cord, or any cable for that matter, which obviously makes zero difference, all sound the same, etc. A $2 DAC does the job. Or the DAC built in your laptop. 

You never answered the question. Which is fine. I know your answer. You just don’t want to sound ridiculous. I understand.

 

I can’t really imagine how anyone who has ever pressed “play” on a digital system can take you guys seriously. Absurd

 

So it’s $3.50 now? Three American dollars and fifty cents? Yup. Your original two dollars two year ago adjusted for inflation 🤦‍♂️

So $2 DAC transparent enough? Or do one have to spend a lot more, like $50 Toppings DAC?

 

Some eye popping proof here: https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/how-good-are-2-dacs

OK got it. We established it’s $3.50 for a DAC chip. How much one should spend maximum for a DAC “machine” to get “transparent” sound? Ballpark. Does not have to be super accurate. Plus / minus 25 cents.

Answer the question: is a $2 DAC transparent enough? Thank you

Now head on back to ASR ladies.

Nobody left to save at ASR. They are all saved (I.e. converted). Thus need to go places. Finding other poor souls to save

 

fleschler OP

1,648 posts

10-23-2022 at 08:03pm 

@thyname  I'm not arguing with the ASR crown, that's why I'm on Audiogon

You are. Whether in Audiogon or not. You are. These dudes are everywhere. In every single audio forum. Their raison d’etre

Hmmmm….. show me YOUR room treatment and I will never argue with you again 

@herbreichert : could you please elaborate a bit more on what you said above for those who don't have the patience to google Benchmark parts by part number?

By the way, are you THE Herb Reichert?

it's the stuff around the chip that matter. 

Absolutely! I feel sorry for those who don’t get this pretty simple fact. 
 

I will copy / paste below what Charlie Hansen (Ayre) said before he died:

———-

The thing that I see over and over and over in this thread is an irrational belief in the importance of the DAC chip itself. Just about everything affect the sound of an audio product, but when it comes to DACs, I would rank (in order or sonic importance the general categories as follows:

 

1) The analog circuitry - 99.9% of all DACs are designed by digital engineers who don't know enough about analog. They just follow the app note. The specs on the op-amps are fabulous and digital engineers are inherently seduced by the beauty of the math story. There are minor differences in the sound quality between various op-amps, but it's kind of like the difference between a Duncan-Heinz cake mix and a Betty Crocker cake mix. 99.8% of the op-amps are used a current-to-voltage converters with the inverting input operating as a virtual ground. This is probably the worst way to use an op-amp as the input signal will cause the internal circuitry to go into slewing-limited distortion. http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/anablog/4311648/Op-amp-myths-ndash-by-Barrie-Gilbert

 

With discrete circuitry, the only limit is your imagination. You are free to adjust the topology of the circuit, the brands of the parts, the active devices, the bias current in each stage - anything you can think of. Think of this as going to a world-class patisserie in Paris and seeing all the different things that can be made.

 

2) The power supplies - 99.9% of all DACs use "3-pin" power supply regulators, which are pretty much op-amps connected to a series pass transistor. Everything in #1 applies here.

 

3) The master clock - jitter is a single number assigned to measure the phase noise of an oscillator over a fixed bandwidth. It is far more i important to know the spectral distribution of the timing variations and how they correlate to audible problems. 99.9% of all DACs use a strip-cut AT crystal in a Pierce gate oscillator circuit. It's pretty good for the money but the results will depend heavily on the implementation, particularly in the PCB layout and the power supplies (#2).

 

It's hard to rank the rest of these so I will give them a tie score.

 

4) The digital filter - 99.9% of all DACs use the digital filter built into the DAC chip. About a dozen companies know how to make a custom digital filter based on either FPGAs or DSP chips.

 

4) PCB layout - grounding and shielding, impedance-controlled traces, return currents, and return current paths are all critical. For a complex digital PCB, 8 layers is the minimum for good results.

 

4) The DAC chip - almost everything these days is delta sigma with a built-in digital filter. Differences between different chips is one of the less important aspects of D/A converter designs. Both ESS and AKM have some special tricks to reduce out-of-band noise, which can be helpful, but not dramatic.

 

4) Passive parts - the quality of these can make a large difference in overall performance, especially for analog. Not many digital engineers sit around listening to different brands of resistors to see what sounds best.

 

These are just a few of the things that make differences in the way that a DAC will sound.

 

Hope this helps,

Charles Hansen

 

 

Yup. Stare on those graphs, and you will know exactly how it will sound. This way, one can “audition” and compare dozens of DACs from the comfort of their home without lifting a finger or spending any money 🙄🤦‍♂️

@kota1 :

too funny :)🤣

Not a joke. This is exactly how those people operate. To the dot. See comments above

 

@kota1 : Yup! And it works. Think about it. Blame AmirM what you want, but he is very smart. He figured out his niche on the market.

Often, it’s not even graphs. I am willing to bet the majority of those guys don’t know how to read the graphs. Neither do they care. A Point system by the measurement guru & authority is what all it takes. Two data inputs from the comfort of mom’s basement bed: points by the guru system, and price. Boom! Done. Ka-Ching 

He is going to light it up here before all said and done. Banned or not, he will always be back. Sick dude.

@oddioboy Oh man, you would never give up, no matter how many times you get banned. Sick dude.

——-

crymeanaudioriver

 

theaudiomaniac

 

theaudioamp

 

deludedaudiophile

 

thynamesinnervoice

 

cindyment

 

snratio

 

yesiamjohn

 

sugabooger

 

dletch2

 

audio2design

 

dannad

 

roberttdid

 

roberttcan

 

heaudio123

 

audiozenology

 

atdavid

@holmz : why do you ask? What are you trying to convey?

 

I have no turntable. Clearly stated under my system here. Pictures, descriptions and all. What about yours? The only thing I see in your picture is you proudly displaying lump cords

@prof 

disdainful of anything that would defend purely subjective reviewing.

Because no such thing exists. Or simply anecdotal at best. Not BACKED by anything. Is that what you want to hear? You are welcome!

 

@holmz : broken record? Come again?

Skip it? You will need to move your ass up your sofa 😂🤦‍♂️. Hardship 

Well good for you! 

@prof : I think you already got enough points with Amir to be out of his shit list again at ASR 😉😉😉. Just with your kissass posts here. He loves you again 😉