@raysmtb1 he is not doing this for free. Laughable. He has a patreon. Every single review asks for donations. He doesn’t disclose how much the website makes but it’s surely not nothing.
Did Amir Change Your Mind About Anything?
It’s easy to make snide remarks like “yes- I do the opposite of what he says.” And in some respects I agree, but if you do that, this is just going to be taken down. So I’m asking a serious question. Has ASR actually changed your opinion on anything? For me, I would say 2 things. I am a conservatory-trained musician and I do trust my ears. But ASR has reminded me to double check my opinions on a piece of gear to make sure I’m not imagining improvements. Not to get into double blind testing, but just to keep in mind that the brain can be fooled and make doubly sure that I’m hearing what I think I’m hearing. The second is power conditioning. I went from an expensive box back to my wiremold and I really don’t think I can hear a difference. I think that now that I understand the engineering behind AC use in an audio component, I am not convinced that power conditioning affects the component output. I think.
So please resist the urge to pile on. I think this could be a worthwhile discussion if that’s possible anymore. I hope it is.
That’s right. My Revel Salon 2s have excellent measurements and perform just as well in controlled listening tests. This sharply increases others liking them. John Atkinson at his talk at RMAF was asked what was his favorite speaker after testing and listening to 750 of them. His answer? Revel Salon 2: https://youtu.be/j77VKw9Kx6U He says: "I wept before I had to send them back." Of course, they have to perform given how expensive they are. Against this landscape, you want to just jump into a ring and compete. I suggest while you are waiting a year for PAF audio show that you 1. Send your speaker with a $2,000 check to Workwyn folks to properly measure your speaker. Listen to their feedback and correct errors they find. For a bit more money, they can even test your drivers using laser Interferometer and such. 2. Build the turntable or shuffler to handle large and heavy speakers. My speakers weigh 120 pounds each. It is non trivial to swap it against other speakers which I assume are just as heavy. We have a member who uses an engineering friend to build him one for bookshelf speakers. You can contact and chat with him on challenges he faced. 3. Perform such blind tests yourself. Don’t just use yourself as a listener. Invite a few local audiophiles and put them through the test. Put in a control (really bad speaker) to weed out listeners who clearly can’t tell the good from bad. Once you do these things -- which any speaker designer must do -- then I say you are ready to put people through a public blind test. For that, you don’t need me. Just have visitors go through it and collect the data across the population. Again, put the control in there to make sure people know what they are doing. But really, the show is not the educational part. All the other stuff before that is what you need to do. An Olympic swimmer doesn’t become a champion if he just waited for the Olympics to come. You need to put in the work before. | |
I have 2 that handle 330lbs and have done such testing for a while, both mono and stereo. You can't know any of this ensconced inside your little kingdom. You only need to concern yourself about one thing, taking a controlled listening test in public. PAF 2024 | |
It is for "nothing." Actually less than nothing. There is no business plan that would support what I am doing. I just bought a $22,000 dummy load to emulate reactive loads for speaker testing. You know how many donations it would take just to get that money back? You didn't see me going and getting sponsorships from companies to do that as others do. Members expressed interest in more tests, I agreed and wrote the check -- in a declining economy no less where our investments are worth much less than a year ago. When someone sends me gear to test it, I almost always pay to ship it back. By your logic, I should keep coughing that up out of my pocket so I can't be accused of doing something for money. And let's say I didn't ask for donations. Which one of the arguments in this thread would go away? Answer is none. Complainers will complain. Fact is that your fellow audiophiles are the ones suggested that I accept donations. I thought about it and I agreed it would help expand the work, allowing me to test things that I would not otherwise test. If you think this is a money making venture, why don't you make an offer to buy it from me? Remember, you would have to buy all the gear, learn to use them and produce near daily reviews. And come to a place here to defend your work and personal reputation. I would love to hand this off to someone else and go and enjoy my other hobbies. | |
So no measurements are in our future? Nor any documented case of above shuffler being used? Your only interest is to duke it out with me at a show? Is that right? | |
"Why?" You haven’t covered the "what." You said people shouldn’t use measurements to assess fidelity of amplifiers. I showed you that your own expert witness in two occasions used tones and measurements. And that the disconnected sine waves in his paper has zero resemblance to any music. How come he can do it but you complain about me? Answer is that sine waves are a subset of music. If an amplifier is high fidelity, it better ace the simple signals. If it manages to screw that up, why do you hang your hat on music? Really, it is the holy grail audiophile claim that "something that measures bad sounds good." As to shout "science doesn’t matter." Well, for the millions of times this is stated, not one person has provided a proper listening test to prove this. I actually think it is possible to show pathological cases where the above is true but folks are not even trying. So trusting they are that people will just believe the salesman/engineer and give them the ticket to produce less peformant amplifiers while charging so much more for them! It is such inverted logic and remarkable that it works with people. Fortunately this is changing. We are making that change. We are taking some control of our destiny and driving toward proper, transparent audio gear that can be shown to be so. | |
What is your fear of posting measurements and results of controlled tests? Do they not exist? Are they not flattering? | |
Hopelessly biasing you like your reviews. Since a garage show operation can't have better measurements (from your limited understanding) , have no fear.
Stay tuned for a Youtube vid after PAF 2024 | |
Why putting in my mouth what i never said... You are in complete lack of arguments about my main point in hearing theory ? I never said that measures dont matter, i said measures cannot replace listening , nor in evaluation nor in design process...
Another distortion of what i said and of what Van Maanen said...You repeat that without being able to refute my point about hearing theories are you too frustrated? ANY DESIGNER USE SINE WAVE PULSE ...Van Maanen too... But he use also real music bursts ... Is it too much difficult to understand why he use the two? You are so frustrated you invented contradictions which had no relation with hearing theories and Fourier methods and the qualitative aspects of hearings .. ... Anybody can read Van Maanen articles ...
Another falsities you put in my mouth ... Are you just a marketer now or have you retain some scientific biases ? Are you speaking to ME or to a crowd? I spoke ONLY about science here, Magnasco and Oppenheim and Van Maanen are scientists not marketers, and Gibson is a science genius in the psychology of the visual field.. Then why speaking to ME : "science does not matter" as if i was the most idiotic here... I NEVER said that "something that measure bad will sound good"...This is the opposite of your claim about measure... what i wrote and try to demonstrate is that because hearing cannot be explained by Fourier method which are used for the best in material design , trained listenings is always necessary as evaluation and in the design process , as was necessary to implement in the design process the right Fourier conditions to be able to predict a well behave working by each designed parts... In a word good measures are not LINEARLY linked to good sounds.. And bad measures are not linearly linked to bad sounds... Why ? because no set of measures is COMPLETE and perfect concerning all aspests of design ... And because we dont understand completely the relation between our tools and hearing... You miss that essential part in Van Maanen articles ?
Sorry but you spoke as a seller yourself more and more it seems ... You market your own methodology as truth...You did not bother to answer my hearing theory explanations which are a refutation of your HUBRIS and claims that your idea of "transparency" is all there is in audio listening evaluation and all come from your limited set of measures... Your listening test and blind test are there only to debunk any opposition.. But the evaluation by listening is necessary even for parts and complete systems... And a sine wave trhough an audio system dont tell all the story there is to tell to the ears... Music matter... i will not wait for future answers... You never adressed my objections and anybody can read them and see for himsdelf that you are unable to contradict my points..And now you did not speak to me personnally but you speak for an IMAGINARY crowd ... i learned a lot trying to explain these things to you... But when you explain to someone a truth that contradict his way of living, nothing will convince him... i like to discuss too much😊... I miss my students after my retirement ... But it is no more possible to go further, you cannot and dont want to understand... For you Van Maanen is a seller and Oppenheim and Magnasco experiment is a mere anecdote... You are not interested in hearings theory, you play with toys...
Thanks for the discussion .. my best to you...
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There is nothing there to understand. You have no information on what music was used. How the testing was done. Who were the listeners. What was compared to what. You are asking me to believe in something that even you don't know about. | |
@soundfield you look silly. You call out @amir_asr and then don’t answer. smh | |
Measurements are all I use, so they are very useful, but for you prior to review, a bias. It shows in every speaker review you do. JA and Erin pointed this out to you, the latter you banned. The only thing you’ll need for a listening test is your 2 ears, the same ones that can hear Class D bass vs AB. No 10% volume thing will be allowed though. | |
There are hundreds of things that effect the sound and can be heard by most anyone on a good system and these things do not change the measurements of the DUT. You can give me 10 Purifi amps that all measure the same. I will mod each one sound way, way different from each other. These amps will all measure the same.....exactly the same......but they all sound different. The objectivists do not believe this.....they will argue and argue but they will never listen to equipment with mods and see if there is a difference......they say the same thing about cables off the floor, cables, footers, other tweaks, amp stands, etc. to infinity. Just yesterday I was tweaking my system and it sounded kind of dry and recessed. I had heard Cat Stevens here sounding much better......However, I was listening with the cover off. Before, I felt the cover on the unit made it sound too fat and rolled off. However, that was really a problem with the amp module that I corrected last week.......so, I put the cover back on and the sound changed dramatically. His voice was now way bigger sounding and everything was more real.....really MOVED me. Without listening tests (and they do not need to be blind or double blind.....unless you are deaf or double deaf....he he) you have no idea of what something will sound like. I can remember what something sounded like years later......really! I do not have golden ears......I just listen. You come to my house and I will demonstrate tons of things that alter the sound.....and none of it can be measured.....this is the truth the objectivists (who do not listen) will fight and fight. These kinds of threads never go anywhere becasue the Amir type people just keep pounding on their EE bibles....saying the same thing over and over. This game is way, way more complex than measurements. I was one of the first people on the planet to do straight wire bypass testing on 7 inch pieces of wire (back in the late 70s). None of the wires sounded as transparent and pure as the half inch reference.....not even close. We have much better wires today that would be very close. I did not even know about wire directionality back then (every wire....whether solid core or stranded..... (no matter if it is PCOCC or ordinary copper wire) sounds different when you reverse the direction of the wire. Did I say this game was infinite? Well, it is. The measurement people make like it is so simple.....it is not. Doing serious listening tests on a super system is critical to KNOWING ANYTHING about sound.
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Do you play idiot or do you think i am an idiot ?... Stop... The point is not about Van Maanen specific design value... The point of the discussion is about the non linear relation between measures and listening evaluation FOR ANY PRODUCT... We dont speak about the market for your method... We speak about the meanings of Magnasco and Oppenheim crucial experiments implications which experiment you dismiss without any shame and falsely as anecdotal ... You could not object anything to my interpretation and you play theater with me now... I will not go further... I am not a clown in a piece written by you where you pretend not to understand for the gallery and put in front of all some points missing completely the main argument... The center of my argument is the articles of Magnasco and Oppenheim... Their conclusion falsify your claims that a limited set of linear measured will always predict Qualitative musical qualities... Your set of measures is not complete and being well and useful for the standard design needs but they never will replace trained hearings ... PERIOD...
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Exactly. I believed something "told" once. Thought I’d put it to the test myself. It was about a really great measuring DAC on said forum. All looked good on measurements and graphs. I took the plunge, went out and bought it with intent it would be a long term keeper DAC. Played it for just under two weeks. Unfortunately, ended up sending it back for a full refund and kept a different unit that measured worse. This other worse measuring unit sounded so much better and was notably more engaging to my ears - for half the price. My ears, my preference, is #1. Summary, what measured better did not sound better. End of story for me. And, preference can vary from one person to the next, no matter what the graph wants to show. Thanks to those in business who understand this and offer a helpful refund policy. Not everyone is going to like the sound of their designs. | |
I am not reviewing your speakers. I want to see the measurements so can put some meat behind the bold claims you are making regarding their performance. Your unwillingness again shows you either don't have proper measurements or that they show too poor of a performance. You are also contradictory. You have no issue biasing people with the way the speaker looks. or how it is designed. But ask for some objective data and oh, "that will bias you." Well, hell you already biased everyone.
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Sad as if you had spent a modicum of effort performing a blind test, you would have arrived at a very different conclusion. But no, you wanted to involve your eyes and ignore elasticity of your brain and its poor recall memory. Reminds me of someone who sent me a Schiit Yggdrasil $2,500 DAC. He told me it sounded much better than a well measuring Topping DAC. I asked him how he tested. He gave me his tracks and said he used Stax headphones which I also had. I went to setup an AB test and it was clear that levels were not matched between the two. I matched them and then performed a blind test. With normal volume, there was no difference whatsoever between the Topping and Schiit Yggdrasil. Again I replicated his entire setup. And this was the conclusion. The problem continues to be that people believe in random testing of the gear where many factors are involved beyond the fidelity of the two products. And then complain when their observations don't match science and engineering. Well, you can't mix non-science and science. So tell your stories but not to me please. Come back when you can at least be bothered to do an AB test without your eyes involved. | |
Yes we can. And, there it is for all to see. My goal was to further expose more of your self-inflicted BS to everyone here. Wishing you best of luck on the future! | |
Years back, when Halcro first came to market, one of their claims to fame was that they had amps that were exhibiting such amazing measurements that they were ground breaking. No other manufacturer could deliver a product with the type of measurements that these amps delivered. Problem was that as soon as any reviewer with half a decent ear listened to them, they were pretty much dismissed as not good sounding at all!( even though JA and others did measure them and were astounded by what they found, which conformed to Halcro's marketing). This ultimately hurt their sales, but i suspect they did sell a few to the ’objectivists’ out there....who then promptly tried to unload them onto the secondary market...with minimal success. I wonder if all of the Halcro adherents would easily pick out their favorite amp in a ’blind test’...or whether they would all opt for a poor measuring single ended tube amp, and question whey their measurements were deceiving them?? | |
Incredible that people with eyes wide open continue to claim that they only used their ears. No matter how much you show them that such testing produces completely wrong results, they cant even be bothered to state what they really did. "My ears." No, it was not your ears. It was your ears, eyes and a brain that loves to please you by telling that higher priced items must sound better. I know you disagree. To do so, you need to come back with an ears only test. Why is it so difficult to accept when all you talk about is "trust your ears?" How come you must see what you are testing? How come you don't realize that if levels are different, preference shifts just because of that? | |
The "sound" was the first thing that was sacrificed in your testing. I was once talking about to a rep for a product line. He told me he was the #1 salesman in selling CD players at the high-end store near us. I asked him how he did it. He said he would first play music on the cheap player. He would get the customer to like that. And then he would take him to show him the $4,000 player. He said all he had to do is push the eject button and watch the drawer come out with fluid motion and the sale was made! So no it is not about sound. Folks are easy pray when they use their eyes to eat.... | |
I am in no position to listen to your speakers. I like to see the measurements. Why are they not forthcoming? You understand that measurements provide incredible value beyond anything a listening test shows, yes? | |
The only thing you exposed is that the most basic fundamentals in how you assess sound fidelity is not know or appreciated. Give me that poor measuring DAC, and i will put it in an old beaten up box that looks like a $20 audio gear from 1970s and i will guarantee that everyone like you will hate its "sound." And heap praise on the well measuring gear you said didn't "sound" as good. You can't be this proud of ignoring how your brain works. Are you?
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We know Amir, we know. But you'll have to trust your ears for once. | |
How about people who want to measure measure and people who want to feel feel. Neither is a crime and it makes everyone happy which should really be the only goal. Otherwise the result is a thread like this where people just double down on their positions and argue. Gets old fast. ”She has illusion and you have reality. May you find your way to be as pleasant!” | |
But what about those measurements? I would imagine if they are complimentary, as the company salesman you would want people to see them. Ergo, they must not paint a good picture of either your skill in measuring them, or flaws they expose. | |
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The problem is, you are short of any bias controlled listening tests that show this. You keep saying that such exists, but can't even remotely demonstrate it. As I said should be possible to at least create a contrived one but you don't even have that. For our part, we have large library of tests that show the opposite of what you claim. That good measurements often do predict better sound. Take this Audio Engineering paper: Some New Evidence That Teenagers May Prefer Accurate Sound Reproduction Sean E. Olive, AES Fellow Check out this set of measurements ordered from top being A and bottom D: See how clean and tidy the top speaker is and how "muddy" the measurements are in the rest? Keep that in mind as you read the results of the listening tests:
We are so lucky that what our ears pass for good sound, also passes the test of logic: that we want neutral sounding speakers. Not something that screws up the tonality of our content. That is again, if we just listen and don't look. Above is also the reason I keep asking @soundfield for measurements. This should always be the first question you ask of any speaker company. If they don't have measurements are are afraid of sharing them, run, and run fast. | |
I don't know such history but the Internet does. Here is JA's review of Halcro DM38:
Ahem. It is not going your way, is it? :) Continuing:
Still not backing your claim. But maybe it is this bit of subjectivity that you are hanging your hat on:
He ends with:
So this matches your definition of "they were pretty much dismissed as not good sounding at all!"??? Really? He couldn't gosh any more than he did. Was he wrong about all of the above? That it can satisfy your soul? How about this other reviewer:
This is your definition of bad review? No, companies go out of business because in high end audio, it is 80% marketing, 20% engineering. Fail at the former and you go out of business. | |
A lot of fun to follow. A J you are looking weak! @soundfield are you going to take that!? | |
Now a nail in the Amir coffin...
Magnasco and Oppenheim experiment demonstrated the nature of non linear human hearing and how the ears beat the uncertainty Fourier principle or the Gabor bounds and then why we need more an ecological theory of hearing than a hearing theory inspired By Fourier linear frequencies based methods ... the consequence of all this is that a set of linear measure used in design for the control and the good behavior of components CANNOT predicted a good sound experience only by the lecture of the number measured.. Amir for sure negated this fact and never adressed the fact that any measures must be interpreted in some hearing theory context to be meaningful and also compared with the set of all possible measures not only with the Amir limited chosen sets..
But there is more to say ... But what are the consequence of the non linear structure of the ears in the ways audio signals are treated by the ears ? It turns out that a small amount of noise can improve the way the signals will be perceived... Yes you read it here and well... Then "tweakers" and audiophile experimenting with cables can rejoice...😊 Good cable are not those measured by Amir after all... All there is to tell to the ears is not in the perfection of a linearly PERFECT measured signals in the design process , not for the human ears.. it seems that the design process as said Van Maanen is more about noise and signals degradation CONTROLS than about inexistant linear perfection... Van Maanen called these controls the " Often disregarded Conditions for the correct https://agilescientific.com/blog/2014/6/9/the-nonlinear-ear.html
read this short article : Hearing, audition, or audioception, is one of the Famous Five of our twenty or so senses. Indeed, it is the most powerful sense, having about 100 dB of dynamic range, compared to about 90 dB for vision. Like vision, hearing — which is to say, the ear–brain system — has a nonlinear response to stimuli. This means that increasing the stimulus by, say, 10%, does not necessarily increase the response by 10%. Instead, it depends on the power and bandwidth of the signal, and on the response of the system itself. What difference does it make if hearing is nonlinear? Well, nonlinear perception produces some interesting effects. Some of them are especially interesting to us because hearing is analogous to the detection of seismic signals — which are just very low frequency sounds, after all. Stochastic resonance (Zeng et al, 2000)One of the most unintuitive properties of nonlinear detection systems is that, under some circumstances, most importantly in the presence of a detection threshold, adding noise increases the signal-to-noise ratio. I’ll just let you read that last sentence again. Add noise to increase S:N? It might seem bizarre, and downright wrong, but it’s actually a fairly simple idea. If a signal is below the detection threshold, then adding a small Goldilocks amount of noise can make the signal ’peep’ above the threshold, allowing it to be detected. Like this: I have long wondered what sort of nonlinear detection system in geophysics might benefit from a small amount of noise. It also occurs to me that signal reconstruction methods like compressive sensing might help estimate that ’hidden’ signal from the few semi-random samples that peep above the threshold. If you know of experiments in this, I’d love to hear about it. Better than Heisenberg (Oppenheim & Magnasco, 2012)Denis Gabor realized in 1946 that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle also applies to linear measures of a signal’s time and frequency. That is, methods like the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) cannot provide the time and the frequency of a signal with arbitrary precision. Mathematically, the product of the uncertainties has some minimum, sometimes called the Fourier limit of the time–bandwidth product. So far so good. But it turns out our hearing doesn’t work like this. It turns out we can do better — about ten times better. Oppenheim & Magnasco (2012) asked subjects to discriminate the timing and pitch of short sound pulses, overlapping in time and/or frequency. Most people were able to localize the pulses, especially in time, better than the Fourier limit. Unsurprisingly, musicians were especially sensitive, improving on the STFT by a factor of about 10. While seismic signals are not anything like pure tones, it’s clear that human hearing does better than one of our workhorse algorithms. Isolating weak signals (Gomez et al, 2014)One of the most remarkable characteristics of biological systems is adaptation. It seems likely that the time–frequency localization ability most of us have is a long-term adaption. But it turns out our hearing system can also rapidly adapt itself to tune in to specific types of sound. Listening to a voice in a noisy crowd, or a particular instrument in an orchestra, is often surprisingly easy. A group at the University of Zurich has figured out part of how we do this. Surprisingly, it’s not high-level processing in the auditory cortex. It’s not in the brain at all; it’s in the ear itself. That hearing is an active process was known. But the team modeled the cochlea (right, purple) with a feature called Hopf bifurcation, which helps describe certain types of nonlinear oscillator. They established a mechanism for the way the inner ear’s tiny mechanoreceptive hairs engage in active sensing. What does all this mean for geophysics?I have yet to hear of any biomimetic geophysical research, but it’s hard to believe that there are no leads here for us. Are there applications for stochastic resonance in acquisition systems? We strive to make receivers with linear responses, but maybe we shouldn’t! Could our hearing do a better job of time-frequency localization than any spectral decomposition scheme? Could turning seismic into music help us detect weak signals in the geological noise? All very intriguing, but of course no detection system is perfect... you can fool your ears too!
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There you go again, making assumptions that everything is black or white and there is no such thing as "gray" in between. This is common engineer-only type of behavior and reaction. Its to be expected. Nobody confirmed we are only using our ears. Only you said this. We all see how you make up your own rules and conclusions, yet typically not respectful of others input when it comes down to it. Sure we respect measurements. It’s a helpful guideline to test, measure, validate however we can, the best we can. Most everyone gets that Aamir. However, it does not encapsulate the whole spectrum of what some hear or don’t hear. I believe there is a long ways to go with scientific measurement, tools, and what’s going on with humans and hearing today. There are wild animals that hear and see things in the darkness that we cannot even begin to fully understand yet as humans. One last thought - your measurement results do not always coincide with what we are hearing some times. Your definition of "perfect" is your opinion, not always fact for some of us here. This is something you will likely choose to continue to ignore. That’s okay. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion - whether you like it or not. That’s what makes for good horse races and keeps audio alive and well LOL.
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@decooney maybe the most well put statement in this whole discussion | |
Amir seems to like to argue for the sake of arguing. I noticed that he conveniently fails to highlight in his example the words…’However, I couldn't escape the feeling that the amplifier's tonal balance was on the lean, cool side.’
instead of believing what I posted about Halcro’s, I suggest Amir buy a set of their amps, he will marvel at their spec’s, and he will probably enjoy their sound. Plus, he can get a very good price on them…I wonder why? LOL. | |
@daveyf Clearly he likes it. He has spent so much time its kind if not believable on here. And he is arguing on his site. I like a good debate as much as the next person but at a certain point I want middle ground and a commonality. He is like the Antifa or Maga of audio | |
The feedforward technology in that Halcro amp (and prior, from Kenwood and others), has completely transformed the headphone amplifier market. THX reintroduced it by eliminating the inductor in the design and with it, make a giant leap in distortion and and noise. Drop.com shipped an amplifier with it in it and changed the industry forever. The amplifier was raved about by both objectivists and subjectivists. The THX design then created an arm race among a number of companies to even better its performance. They used a composite op-amp technology (op-amp in feedback loop) which avoided THX patents while producing even lower levels of noise and distortion. Topping was the first company to do this. Check out their latest incarnation, the A70 Pro:
Check out the stunning performance as far as distortion and noise: Distortion is at whopping -150 dB. As a way of reference, best case hearing threshold is -115 dB. We now have 35 dB of headroom! The noise performance is better than the best DACs even though this amplifier produces more power: At $499, this headphone amplifier costs less then the shipping cost of many high-end gear! It is this kind of transformation which is fueling interest in what we do at ASR. The measurements have created a closed loop process with clear goals of what needs to be done to create state of the art audio products. Same technology is now used in low to mid power power amplifiers with similar stellar results. Again here is Topping LA 90 Discrete: It now beats Benchmark AHB2 which was also based on same feedforward technology as Halcro/THX: Will be interesting to see if they scale it up in power some more. Net, net, there is an incredible world of technology that you are not aware of. It is advancing in real time and provide incredible pleasure to us as true music lovers who want full transparency to the source. "LOL" indeed but not in the way you meant it. | |
Putting aside that my last job was a Corporate VP in charge of a full division including marketing, business, PR and of course engineering, my job is to remove those shades of gray. I strive to find audio products that shrink impairments below threshold of hearing as you see above. This is what gives clarity and confidence to buyers. This is why so many people are gravitating to this science and engineering based method of evaluating audio technology. High-end audio industry wants that gray fog out there. They want you to not know left from right. They want you think any and all thing can change the sound. They want you to think you all are the greatest listeners there and what one hears has little to do with what another hears. That way, all of you can be simultaneously right. There is a market for everything then. You cut through the fog by combining multiple disciplines together. We use audio research in advance areas such as perception of sound in a room. We use electronic engineering design to tell the difference from real to imaginary in design. We use measurements to tease out the performance of a product or lack thereof. And we use controlled listening tests when needed to arrive at unbiased outcomes. Yes, some gray is still left in there. Speakers and rooms are that way and headphones eve more. But outside of that if you think the world is gray, that is just wrong. We cut through that day in and day out ad are happier for it. | |
@amir_asr gray is everywhere. Space in your head. In outer space. There is color too. Black and white thinking causes racism. It causes wars and intolerance. Which is what you’re propagating. I believe in old audio as I do in new. I heard atc recently. Sounded neutral. It sounded boring compared to the harbeths next to it. Why would I buy something that doesn’t interest me or excite me to look at and play every day. That topping dac is nice in its measurements but the benchmark looks better and is made in the USA so for those reasons I’ll take that over the topping. Why can’t people take measurements into account and spice them up with other variables? The only good black and white I know is in an Oreo cookie. | |
Had you, at any point, actually addressed me; I would have responded to your inane and vapid retorts to my post sooner. Believing this thread a waste of time: I hadn't bothered to peruse the stupidity any further, until tonight. Then I noticed that you'd quoted me (pg 15). I'll copy/paste my post, to save keystrokes.
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Feynman was and will remain, my favorite lecturer (yeah: I'm that old). He mentioned often (and: I took to heart) his favorite Rule of Life: "Never stop learning!" For all his genius, he never grew overly confident in his beliefs. The perfect obverse to the Dunning-Kruger sufferer. ie: “I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong.” and: “I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything.” Tesla is probably my favorite innovator, who (despite the incessant, projectile vomit, from his day's naysayers), took the World, kicking and screaming, into the 20th century, with his inventions. His thoughts: “Anti-social behavior is a trait of intelligence in a world full of conformists.” | |
"Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction." (Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse , 1872) "The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon," (Sir John Eric Ericksen, British surgeon, appointed Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria 1873) "The super computer is technologically impossible. It would take all of the water that flows over Niagara Falls to cool the heat generated by the number of vacuum tubes required." (Professor of Electrical Engineering, New York University) "There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom." (Robert Millikan, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1923) "Man will never reach the moon regardless of all future scientific advances." (Dr. Lee DeForest, Father of Radio & Grandfather of Television) "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible!" (Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895) "The bomb will never go off. I speak as an expert in explosives." (Admiral William Leahy, re: US Atomic Bomb Project) When the steam locomotive came on the scene; the best (scientific) minds proclaimed, "The human body cannot survive speeds in excess of 35MPH." Until recently (21st Century); and the advent of the relatively new science of Fluid Dynamics, the best (scientific) minds involved in Aerodynamics, could not fathom how a bumblebee stays aloft. Often; Science has to catch up with the facts/phenomena of Nature and/or, "reality" (our universe). I haven't been in school since the 60's, but- at Case Institute of Technology; the Physics Prof always emphasized what we were studying was, "Electrical THEORY." He strongly made a point of the fact that no one had yet actually observed electrons (how they behave on the quantum level) and that only some things can really be called, "LAWS." (ie: Ohm, Kirchoff, Faraday) PERHAPS: that's changed in recent years and I missed it? |