Do equipment stands have an impact on electronics?

Tom, thanks for emailing me your web site. So your patents are in audio circuit design? Vinyl record technology? Or for cello end pins?

I’d love to hear the audio clips of your end pins versus carbon fiber. Looking at a waveform tells nothing useful. And why did you choose carbon fiber for comparison? My end pin is typical, regular steel, and it works fine with sufficient mass and rigidity. Unfortunately there’s no way to perform a controlled test. Even Yo-yo Ma can’t play the same passage exactly the same twice in a row. But being able to hear what was played, and how it was played, is needed to assess how your end pin is different. For all anyone can tell, those recorded waveforms were from completely different notes.

That said, why are there no prices on your web site? I hate when vendors force you to ask them for prices. When I see that I assume the seller is hoping to rope me in and get me to like him with chit chat, then he’ll hit me with an outrageous price. Or worse, that the seller wants to size me up to determine how much money I have and how much I’d be willing to pay. So when I see sites like that I just leave. I bet many people feel the same way.

Finally, I’m certain there’s a way to properly compare your 70 pound battery on the floor versus hoisted up on a platform. Have you ever done that?

Ralph, aliasing should be included within a typical "THD plus noise" spec, and I see no reason to call it out separately. Harmonic, inharmonic, IMO it’s okay for all artifacts to be lumped together. If the sum of them all is below 80-90 dB, none of it will ever be heard anyway. With a typical converter the sum of all artifacts is well below 100 or even 110 dB.

OK- we’re on the same page, except for one thing. And that is that if the artifacts are at -80 or 90 db, that’s no guarantee that they can’t be heard!!

You have to understand that the rules of human hearing have to be the number one thing in audio. But the industry in generally usually finds them a bit inconvenient.

This is an example:
Even if the artifacts are really down that far (and I question that as aliasing is really best detected with an analog-sourced sweep tone, and further just because a DAC is pretty good at it has nothing to do with how good the ADC was- and without the ADC you’ve got no software....), the human ear uses higher-ordered harmonics to calculate loudness. In addition, the ears are tuned to be most sensitive at bird-song frequencies (and aliasing produces ’birdies’ all the time), meaning that the artifacts can be that low and yet easily detected.

Of course we won’t hear the artifacts as they are- the ear converts them to tonality.

This is why there is a digital/analog debate!!

Many people object to the ’brightness’ or ’hardness’ of digital as opposed to analog, and there is no way that such can’t be interpreted as a **coloration**.

There has been an analog/digital debate going back to the early 1980s and you’re looking right at the reason in this post. When you have a coloration like that, there is no way it can be considered neutral and ridding digital of this problem is the cutting edge of where real advancements in the digital art are being made. The thing is, the distortions of analog are less audible to the human ear, and so even if on the bench they **appear** larger, in reality (because our ears are the reality, not the bit of paper) they are in fact **smaller**!

If you don’t understand how human hearing perceptual rules work, you will have trouble understanding how this is so. Think of it in a logarithmic fashion, but instead of being related to sound pressure (decibels), its instead related to higher ordered harmonics and intermodulations.

This is why I have been harping about the fact that our understanding of how human perceptual rules work is where the big advances in audio are occurring, and why it is that as an industry we fall well short of knowing all that should be known for **real** high fidelity. This is why high end audio exists, to plumb these issues and offer solutions, since mid-fi is only dollar-oriented and has to be pushed pretty hard to change. Of course, some high end audio things don’t work because in a way many of us are stumbling around in the dark due to the industry’s overall lack of interest in human hearing perceptual rules!

Because things like equipment stands can reduce tiny amounts of microphonics and other HF artifacts, they have a value; this is due to how our ears work- and I concede that the differences can be hard to measure because our test equipment lacks the required sensitivity that our ears easily have. There are many things where our ears are less sensitive than test gear; higher ordered artifacts just happen to be an exception.

You may or may not hear very soft artifacts, depending on their makeup and what else is playing at the same time. But you can measure them, and you can ask people to identify them in a blind test. So again, this is not unknowable or even difficult to sort out. Yes, it is just barely possible to hear certain combinations of tones when one is 80 dB below the other, but not at 90 dB as far as I know. So if we measure artifacts (including aliasing), and they’re at least 90 dB down, then nobody will ever hear them. Again, with most digital gear such junk is 110+ dB down. But I said 80-90 dB down because it requires a very special contrived test to hear -80. Heck, even -40 can be difficult in many cases due to masking. Have you ever done tests like this? I have, many times. I wish more people would! Here’s one that plays a very nasty harsh noise under gentle classical music, and then under a synthesizer based pop tune:

http://ethanwiner.com/audibility.html

All the other stuff you said about why people believe [whatever] about digital audio could be resolved in a single 5-minute blind test. (Likewise for isolation platforms.) These tests have been done. Many times. There is no legitimate dispute. There’s only willful ignorance by the Geoff Kaits and Dave Cockrums of the world.

There is nothing jarring about digital audio. In controlled tests people are unable to tell when a 44/16 "bottleneck" is inserted into an analog playback chain. This is well known and well documented. The key is "controlled tests" which apparently many people here are unfamiliar with. :->)

Hmmm.  I would be interested to see that study.

I am sure you and others are familiar with this one:  http://www.stereophile.com/features/203/#um3KMoxJTFAhwZAf.97

agear, I’m not willing to read 11 pages of Stereophile blather. Can you quote the one or two key paragraphs here?

Below is one test that proved people are unable to identify a 44/16 "CD quality" bottleneck inserted into a "high resolution" playback chain. They tested 60 people having an interest in audio and music over a period of one year in 554 separate trials. So it was a serious study indeed with little room for error. This is a for-pay article, but the summary tells the story, and I have the article and can answer any questions about it:

http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=14195

Here’s another, this time with an analog playback chain, from 1984 when even expensive digital convertors weren’t as good as the today’s budget stuff:

http://www.bostonaudiosociety.org/bas_speaker/abx_testing2.htm