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What do we hear when we change the direction of a wire?

Douglas Self wrote a devastating article about audio anomalies back in 1988. With all the necessary knowledge and measuring tools, he did not detect any supposedly audible changes in the electrical signal. Self and his colleagues were sure that they had proved the absence of anomalies in audio, but over the past 30 years, audio anomalies have not disappeared anywhere, at the same time the authority of science in the field of audio has increasingly become questioned. It's hard to believe, but science still cannot clearly answer the question of what electricity is and what sound is! (see article by A.J.Essien).

For your information: to make sure that no potentially audible changes in the electrical signal occur when we apply any "audio magic" to our gear, no super equipment is needed. The smallest step-change in amplitude that can be detected by ear is about 0.3dB for a pure tone. In more realistic situations it is 0.5 to 1.0dB'". This is about a 10% change. (Harris J.D.). At medium volume, the voltage amplitude at the output of the amplifier is approximately 10 volts, which means that the smallest audible difference in sound will be noticeable when the output voltage changes to 1 volt. Such an error is impossible not to notice even using a conventional voltmeter, but Self and his colleagues performed much more accurate measurements, including ones made directly on the music signal using Baxandall subtraction technique - they found no error even at this highest level.

As a result, we are faced with an apparently unsolvable problem: those of us who do not hear the sound of wires, relying on the authority of scientists, claim that audio anomalies are BS. However, people who confidently perceive this component of sound are forced to make another, the only possible conclusion in this situation: the electrical and acoustic signals contain some additional signal(s) that are still unknown to science, and which we perceive with a certain sixth sense.

If there are no electrical changes in the signal, then there are no acoustic changes, respectively, hearing does not participate in the perception of anomalies. What other options can there be?

Regards.
anton_stepichev
manueljenkin
11 posts
 
"If desired, you can come up with a lot of actions that will simulate serious changes in the level of noise and interference of the computer and conduct a simple but effective study of how your DAC reacts to heavy changes in the level and spectrum of interference emitted by it. Have you conducted such experiments?"

Answer: Yes, and noticed a lot of improvements. I have tried a lot of system level tweaks, even went to the extent of taking a custom minimal commandline linux distro for audio (again sounded better than the familiar gui systems), and have also explored custom tools in windows that optimize a lot of the internal system processes. In my experience the more lower noise system gets (lower system activity), any further improvement is far easier to hear than with a stock system configuration. Everything from even changing the buffer size changes the sound. (Includes all types of buffer, either in dac or in system).

"In my opinion, it is quite enough to stop clogging your head with noises and charges and start thinking of something else."

As mentioned I am also trying to set up a proper AB-X to confirm the changes of this player. My friend has successfully done AB-X on other computer audio tweaks I mentioned in earlier paragraph, his network streamers and signal regenerators. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with my approach. I am looking deeper into the intrinsics of the drives (the physical manifestation) since it has an impact that is uncorrelated from the rest of your guesses (doesn’t do defragging, cannot check optimal areas in disk if there was ever one since it is out of control of even the OS, it’s the controller that handles it).
anton_stepichev OP
150 posts
 
@manueljenkin Yes, and noticed a lot of improvements. I have tried a lot of system level tweaks, even went to the extent of taking a custom minimal commandline linux distro for audio (again sounded better than the familiar gui systems), and have also explored custom tools in windows that optimize a lot of the internal system processes.... Everything from even changing the buffer size changes the sound. (Includes all types of buffer, either in dac or in system).

I agree, simple structures, schemes and programs sound better to me either.

In my experience the more lower noise system gets (lower system activity), any further improvement is far easier to hear than with a stock system configuration... ... My friend has successfully done AB-X on other computer audio tweaks I mentioned in earlier paragraph, his network streamers and signal regenerators. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with my approach.

Nothing wrong, of course, if you are just looking for a better sound. The problem is it will not help us understand the reasons for what is happening, and I would like to understand it. The influence of noise is just your assumption, so far you have not given a single description of the experiment confirming the specific influence of noise and not any other causes that occur during the tweaks. At the same time, in the previous message, I gave proof that the work of the program is in no way related to changes in noise or other analog properties of the media. You have not refuted or confirmed the correctness of this proof, instead you wrote:

I am looking deeper into the intrinsics of the drives (the physical manifestation) since it has an impact that is uncorrelated from the rest of your guesses (doesn’t do defragging, cannot check optimal areas in disk if there was ever one since it is out of control of even the OS, it’s the controller that handles it).

Please explain, hypothetically, what can be found in the filling of the HDD so that it indicates the influence of noise (or whatever) on the sound of the file processed by the program?
manueljenkin
11 posts
 
"The influence of noise is just your assumption". Yes, I arrived at this guess after all other guesses of - files being different, defragging, and other causes you listed were found to be not true. The other system noises causing changes to sq gives me more confidence in this approach. If you do have other suggestions, do let me know, I’ll check that too! I don't think neglecting this case scenario would be a good idea. I donot have the necessary equipment to measure the access noise, else I would have tried that too.

Regarding the explanations, I have mentioned it multiple times. I don’t know much about modern HDDs (the head alignment etc involves a lot of modern control theory, and almost each batch has its own specific firmware), but with flash storage it is stored as a set of charges within a specific threshold value inside a floating gate NAND transistor cell. The pattern can change the noise profile when accessing. Modern devices are far more complex than the basic structures I have seen in academic resources and I am searching for leads to check the actual pathway/design (need to check everything from firmware etc, and I am not sure how successful it will be considering that most of these are kept as secrets).
millercarbon's avatar
millercarbon
12,531 posts
 
You tend to complicate things,

The understatement of the year.
and with this approach it is almost impossible to understand the problem,

Indeed.

Why is it I can't help feeling I've seen this all before?  https://youtu.be/EZSx3zNZOaU?t=46

anton_stepichev OP
150 posts
 
@millercarbon, lol)
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