New phono stage from SOTA

@wynpalmer4 Thank you for the clarification. Would the unit benefit from a larger 14VAC supply?

The larger unit does not use the 14v wall wart. It, presently, uses a very different supply.

The Pyxi WILL NOT BENEFIT FROM A CHANGE IN THE WALL WART!!!

The 240v version uses a 15v wall wart due to availability issues. 

Using a 15v wall wart in the US version could compromise the reliabilty. Even using a different 14v unit could do the same.

The filtering/regulation circuitry was carefully designed for the 14v wall wart that was used.

One other thing, I am well aware of the rather, how shall we say it, questionable (or at least questioned) results concerning the ultrasonic sensitivities of human hearing.

In any case what makes you so certain that those very sensitivities were not taken into consideration in the Pyxi etc. design?

In fact, the design is explicitly structured to ensure ultra-low distortion even for ultrasonic frequencies, and my test/evaluation methodology included signals up to 48khz (96kHz FS/2). Although the Pyxi does not have the extreme non-sensitivity that the Acrux has (read the paper, the multi tone tests which exceed the audio band say it all), it’s pretty darn good.

The Pyxi is not as good as I wanted it to be. SoTa had certain low cost goals that caused compromises to be taken. But it’s pretty darn good.

Dear @mijostyn  : " with other senses this occurs with the lowest frequencies. I have not seen any evidence that we can perceive higher frequencies. "

 

Not exactly becauase exist that evidence. Thhe next information is only the preamble ( that unfortunately I can't share by a link ) and yes this will be a long post but interesting for some of us:

 

 

 

"" Your brain doesn't like to keep secrets. Studies at the University of Texas, Austin, have shown that writing down secrets in a journal or telling a doctor your secrets actually decreases the level of stress hormones in your body. Keeping a secret, meanwhile, does the opposite.

Your brain also doesn't like stress hormones. So when you have a secret to tell, the part of your brain that wants to tell the secret is constantly fighting with the part of your brain that wants to keep the information hidden, says neuroscientist David Eagleman.

"You have competing populations in the brain — one part that wants to tell something and one part that doesn't," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "And the issue is that we're always cussing at ourselves or getting angry at ourselves or cajoling ourselves. ... What we're seeing here is that there are different parts of the brain that are battling it out. And the way that that battle tips, determines your behavior."

Eagleman's new book, Incognito, examines the unconscious part of our brains — the complex neural networks that are constantly fighting one another and influencing how we act, the things we're attracted to, and the thoughts that we have.

"All of our lives — our cognition, our thoughts, our beliefs — all of these are underpinned by these massive lightning storms of [electrical] activity [in our brains,] and yet we don't have any awareness of it," he says. "What we find is that our brains have colossal things happening in them all the time."  

 

Take a close look at yourself in the mirror. Beneath your dashing good looks churns a hidden universe of networked machinery. The machinery includes a sophisticated scaffolding of interlocking bones, a netting of sinewy muscles, a good deal of specialized fluid, and a collaboration of internal organs chugging away in darkness to keep you alive. A sheet of high-tech self-healing sensory material that we call skin seamlessly covers your machinery in a pleasing package.

And then there's your brain. Three pounds of the most complex material we've discovered in the universe. This is the mission control center that drives the whole operation, gathering dispatches through small portals in the armored bunker of the skull.

Your brain is built of cells called neurons and glia — hundreds of billions of them. Each one of these cells is as complicated as a city. And each one contains the entire human genome and traffics billions of molecules in intricate economies. Each cell sends electrical pulses to other cells, up to hundreds of times per second. If you represented each of these trillions and trillions of pulses in your brain by a single photon of light, the combined output would be blinding.

The cells are connected to one another in a network of such staggering complexity that it bankrupts human language and necessitates new strains of mathematics. A typical neuron makes about ten thousand connections to neighboring neurons. Given the billions of neurons, this means there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

The three-pound organ in your skull — with its pink consistency of Jell-o — is an alien kind of computational material. It is composed of miniaturized, self-configuring parts, and it vastly outstrips anything we've dreamt of building. So if you ever feel lazy or dull, take heart: you're the busiest, brightest thing on the planet.

Ours is an incredible story. As far as anyone can tell, we're the only system on the planet so complex that we've thrown ourselves headlong into the game of deciphering our own programming language. Imagine that your desktop computer began to control its own peripheral devices, removed its own cover, and pointed its webcam at its own circuitry. That's us.

And what we've discovered by peering into the skull ranks among the most significant intellectual developments of our species: the recognition that the innumerable facets of our behavior, thoughts, and experience are inseparably yoked to a vast, wet, chemical-electrical network called the nervous system. The machinery is utterly alien to us, and yet, somehow, it is us.

 

 If you were to injure your pinkie in an accident you'd be distressed, but your conscious experience would be no different. By contrast, if you were to damage an equivalently sized piece of brain tissue, this might change your capacity to understand music, name animals, see colors, judge risk, make decisions, read signals from your body, or understand the concept of a mirror — thereby unmasking the strange, veiled workings of the machinery beneath. Our hopes, dreams, aspirations, fears, comic instincts, great ideas, fetishes, senses of humor, and desires all emerge from this strange organ — and when the brain changes, so do we. So although it's easy to intuit that thoughts don't have a physical basis, that they are something like feathers on the wind, they in fact depend directly on the integrity of the enigmatic, three-pound mission control center.

 

Brains are in the business of gathering information and steering behavior appropriately. It doesn't matter whether consciousness is involved in the decision making. And most of the time, it's not. Whether we're talking about dilated eyes, jealousy, attraction, the love of fatty foods, or the great idea you had last week, consciousness is the smallest player in the operations of the brain. Our brains run mostly on autopilot, and the conscious mind has little access to the giant and mysterious factory that runs below it.

 

The brain works its machinations in secret, conjuring ideas like tremendous magic. It does not allow its colossal operating system to be probed by conscious cognition. The brain runs its show incognito. So who, exactly, deserves the acclaim for a great idea? In 1862, the Scottish mathematician James Clerk Maxwell developed a set of fundamental equations that unified electricity and magnetism. On his deathbed, he coughed up a strange sort of confession, declaring that "something within him" discovered the famous equations, not he. He admitted he had no idea how ideas actually came to him — they simply came to him. William Blake related a similar experience, reporting of his long narrative poem Milton: "I have written this poem from immediate dictation twelve or sometimes twenty lines at a time without premeditation and even against my will." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe claimed to have written his novella The Sorrows of Young Werther with practically no conscious input, as though he were holding a pen that moved on its own. """

 

https://www.tnt-audio.com/casse/life_above_20khz.pdf

 

Please read at the end of page 7 ( Significance results. ).

https://www.tinnitusjournal.com/articles/response-of-human-skull-to-boneconducted-sound-in-the-audiometricultrasonic-range.pdf

 

"""" Although hearing by air conduction is limited to ap�proximately 20 kHz, hearing by bone conduction ex�tends to at least 100 kHz [16-19J. Lenhardt et al. [17J demonstrated that speech modulating an ultrasonic car�rier could be understood to some degree, and Staab et al. [18J presented further speech recognition data using an ultrasonic hearing aid based on the work by Len�hardt  """"

https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/jn.2000.83.6.3548

https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/27898/can-humans-perceive-sounds-above-20-khz

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4005747/

https://www.tinnitusjournal.com/articles/boneconduction-propagation-in-the-humanbody-implications-for-highfrequency-therapy.pdf

https://www.scientific.net/JBBBE.52.1

 

 

Now neurologist and scientist agree that the brain knowledge does not goes up to 27% of it and in the whole organism function not more than 38%.

Mijos, as you I'm and ovjective audiophile like true facts/measurements/sharts/diagrams and the like in the overall room/audio system but at the same time and as yiu I have common sense where subjectivity always is involve.

 

So and in this particular issue no scientist or mathematics or electrical theories or engineers can prove that you or me can't " listen " what for mathematics and the like is an inaudible sound for us or any audiophile, no one . I think and you can't prove I'm wrong that " inaudible " high frequencies puts its " color " to what any one of us can concious hear.

Regards and enjoy the MUSIC NOT DISTORTIONS,

R.

 

 

@rauliruegas 

Raul, all that is wonderful and very true, but bone conduction does not work through air. It works by physical contact. It is way less sensitive than air conduction with normal hearing. We use this characteristic to diagnose hearing problems with a tuning fork.  The concept of masking is used in a fantastic number of ways to deal with pain and there is no reason it can not also be used for tinnitus. I always told people with tinnitus who had trouble sleeping to run a fan in there bedroom. The constant droning sound masks the tinnitus allowing them to sleep. A device that is implanted in contact with the mastoid process emitting a high frequency sound not audible by air conduction might indeed mask the tinnitus. Given that it is a very common problem I'm sure there is a lot of money being thrown at it. 

I am still not convinced that airborne sound above 20 kHz can affect what we perceive through normal channels.