Higher End DACs

Hire that man!

Glass is more transparent to RF but photons can travel through solid building structures, too. Like a knife through butter 🧈  Elevators (metal) not so much. That’s why reception improves as you move toward the window in many cases. Depends on where the signal is coming from, etc. Sometimes 24” can make all the difference.

I didn’t find where the White Paper discussed RF coming in through the windows. Maybe I missed it. But RF comes in from outside, all kinds of it, where it can easily migrate into unused wall outlets, unused input and output jacks of electronics, holes in electronics, and into unshielded cabling. The entire room is lit up like a Christmas tree. 🎄 As I stated earlier the first line of defense should be the windows. And the unused wall outlets the second line of defense. 

Sorry, I only got as far as the second sentence, “Magnetic transducers (loudspeakers) get perturbed to produce hums and rumbles in sympathy with RF frequencies in the audible range,”  before I stopped reading. RF frequencies are not in the audible range.  I bet you didn’t know this forum was peer reviewed, did you? 😬 Shut the cave door and back to pigmy country!

Funny stuff. 😂 Is he.... gulp, Ethan Winer? 😳

The problem is that everything is affected by RF. I’m not sure that’s saying anything new. But that shouldn’t be terribly surprising since the signal itself is RF, no?

Allow me to remind you, gentle readers, claiming to be a perfectionist is just another logical fallacy. It’s along the same lines as I’m a PhD in EE or I’ve been an audiophile for 40 years. You might as well start quoting Shakespeare and Einstein and posting links to How Electricity Works. I haven’t met too many audiophiles, by that I mean real audiophiles, not the fake ones, who didn’t consider themselves perfectionists. Perfectionism and obsessive compulsive disorder kind of go hand in glove you know.

Easy target 🎯 

Speaking of perfectionists one potential problem is see is that human beings are by nature imperfect. And human beings that consider themselves perfect oft work in isolation, developing their own theories of sound and physics. I’m 100% sure there is a logical fallacy in the very concept of referring to oneself as a perfectionist. Argumentum absolutum. 😬 Yet, the theories and physics that perfectionIsts develop are frequently DIFFERENT from each other. And if they are different from each other then they all can’t be perfect. Make sense? This conundrum I like to call the Stove Piping of audio systems. 🏭 It’s like musical chairs - you can get stuck without a chair. 🤗

I do not wish to derail this thread, either, but I feel it’s worth repeating that by the time the signal arrives at the DAC it’s too late, the damage has already been done. The signal is irrevocably distorted as soon as the laser touches the metal layer on the CD and attempts to read the nanoscale data encoded thereon. It’s mostly because of the fluttering and vibration of the disc itself whilst spinning, the effect of external and internal vibration on the signal in wire, fuse and laser assembly, etc. AND the introduction of scattered CD laser light into the photodetector. The Error Correction Codes and the Laser Tracking servo system can’t save it. All the King’s horses and all the King’s men can’t put Humpty Dumpty together again. 🥚

No matter how much you have in the end you would have had even more if you had started out with more in the beginning. As the little mice say in the movie Babe 🐷 - That’s the way things are! 🎶 You can paint a donkey different colors but it’s still a donkey. 🦓

Or do what I do and stop the RF at it’s source (coming in through the windows from outside) and turn the entire building into one giant Faraday cage. Problem solved! 🤗 it’s not that difficult. Furthermore, while not widely known, tiny little bowl resonators are effective in normalizing pressure zones in the room for acoustic wavelengths AND RF wavelengths. They’re Two! Two mints in one! 👯‍♀️

I’ve said this before but by the time the signal arrives at the DAC it’s too late. The damage to the audio signal is done as soon as the laser in the transport strikes the spiral data stream on the metal layer. And there’s almost nothing you can do about it. There’s no recovery. So, I don’t get the whole thing with super-expensive DACs at all. GIGO. 🤗