Thank you for the very helpful post and link. I feel so good that I will know the noise level of my mains soon!
It is a common misconception that everything that matters can be measured, and therefore if there are no measurements to prove something, that something does not exist. In other words, if you canât measure it, you canât hear it. That is ridiculous.
It assumes we have figured out everything there is to measure, and figured out exactly how everything we do know how to measure relates to how we hear. Ask any audio designer how they work. They generally start with some calculations to predict how a circuit will measure. Then they confirm this with measurements. Then they fine tune by listening. Yes⌠that may seem crazy to the measurements are everything crowd, , but they finalize how their design sounds by using their ears⌠not measurements,
Weâre talking about one of the human senses. Can you measure everything that has to with sight? Can you predict how something will taste or smell with measurements? What makes anybody think they can measure everything that has to do with hearing?
If you do, head on over to AudioScienceReview and join that cult.
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No, it doesnât sound crazy, but it does sound⌠artisanal. And sometimes it works out, and sometimes it doesnât. Iâd rather rely on industrial processes for my equipment design.
I actually agree with you here. This is why I think telling people what you hear is such a ridiculous thing to do. What people hear is so intimately connected with what they think and what they know and the particular convolutions of their brain and their particular experiences, both ancient and recent, that it makes little or no sense to expect two people to hear the same thing the same way. Or even for one person to hear something the same way a week later.
So, how then can we compare two pieces of equipment? We have to rely on objective measurements with instruments. Thatâs free of the innate human biases everyone is subject to.
Look, Iâm just asking. Someone says weâre missing out by using such and such a piece of equipment. What is it weâre missing out on? If we canât show some measurements of the difference, I think thatâs probably BS. Iâm just asking for the measurements. If you canât produce them, donât blow smoke up my⌠well, my whatever by implying the magic difference exists. Thatâs what a salesman does with a gullible mark⌠er, customer.
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The problem is it gets very boring in there with these folks talking amongst themselves. Besides, as good missionaries, they have to go places. To save the poor souls. There is nobody to save at ASR. They are all in heaven already 
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I think itâs touching â and kind of creepy â that youâre apparently keeping a scrapbook of my posts, friend. But I applaud your good taste in that!
Why images and not links? The conspiracy-minded might think youâre trying to avoid having the quotes be in context.
We do not âhave to rely on objective measurements.â They are a starting point. Any competent audio designer will tell you that. There is an interesting read in this monthâs âAs We See ITâ column in Stereophile that speaks to that. Also a review of the AR preamp where they talk about choosing capacitors⌠âŚnot that I take Stereophile as the bible⌠I mainly get it for music reviews, but it talks about how some designers work and discusses the limitations in measurements.
Like many, my objective, scientific side wants to believe that everything can be quantified. My ears tell me differently.
I agree with your angle that many hear what they want to hear, many are duped, many are easily influenced by a variety of factors that have little or nothing to do with how something sounds including looks and price. And you are correct, the breakdown in communication is the inability to adequately describe what we hear. However, that doesnât prove we arenât hearing it.
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Iâve got one of these, its really great, and like the article I too have some interesting radio stations. I just picked up an LPS for it and it really improved the sound.
I was going to ask what ASR stands for, now I know I was there before, they do provide some focused measurements. However, I like to say that, at least for myself, there are so much more that I donât understand and yet to be discovered beyond what are known to be measured.
Hi @Bill_Janssen, I saw a similar comment of yours elsewhere, could you please elaborate the concept a little more? I truly think that I could get something useful from your experience.
Iâm still happy I can at least hear enough coming out my speakers that I can enjoy the musicâŚand really thatâs all that matters in the scheme of things.
Age related hearing loss and damage over the years plus tinnitus means I have to suffer a sub 100% experience at best and Iâm sure many are all in that boat in one way or another.
Iâll still try different gear despite the imperfections of my hearing, and setups. But I always enjoy the music.
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Sure. The short answer is, computers, teams, and components.
Modern industrial engineering is done completely in the computer. The device is designed, prototyped, simulated, and analyzed in a CAE environment before itâs built as a hardware prototype. Monte Carlo simulation is used to explore component tolerances and variances. Simulation results are captured and analyzed six ways from Sunday. Really, I think most people donât realize how radically computers have changed society over the last forty years. And engineering over the last twenty.
Whatâs more, itâs not done by some lone âaudio designerâ. Itâs done by teams. Companies like Sony have hundreds of engineers, each working on fairly narrow parts of any design. And itâs not just about hardware, either. Engineering in general is a discipline of management â management of risks, of costs, of tolerances, of time. Thatâs no different in audio engineering. There are, for example, logistical engineers, people who think about, if we use this component Y from company X in our product Z, and weâre still making Z five years from now, will company X still be able to supply us with Y? Are their supply chains stable? Howâs their corporate governance? Where does Y occur on their product roadmap? And other engineers are essentially market research people, who try to figure out what features will yield what payback, and whether the feature actually has to be built in, or could be just a marketing point. There are specialists in circuit board design, who ponder the dialectric characteristics of the board, the conductivity of various trace materials, and the routing and length of traces. And more. All of these people work together on a modern industrially engineered product.
Finally, thereâs the sticky situation, if youâre an audio engineer, that more-or-less perfect reproduction of stereo audio from digital recordings is pretty much a solved problem. Everyone knows how to do it. Thereâs no magic anymore. And in engineering cycles, that means itâs ripe for commodity components. Thatâs how Chi-Fi companies like Topping manage to turn out DACs that measure perfectly. You donât need grey-haired engineers with thirty years of experience anymore, you need young kids fresh out of grad school who can run a CAE environment, and you need a careful selection of available components. You get the Akami or ESS chips and build a DAC. Or the Hypex nCore amplifier components, which give you beautifully transparent amplification, and build a power amp. These components are turned out by the thousands on modern manufacturing lines with modern quality control methods. All you have to do is connect them up.
So Iâm sure Bruce is correct. There probably are old-school audio designers, using the techniques prevalent from the 1950âs through the 1980âs â a period which might be called âbefore computersâ â hunched over a breadboard on a workbench, every so often pausing to play something through their tinkered-together circuit, listening to use their intuition about how to change the circuit. But we should be clear; theyâre not building audiophile components. Theyâre building nostalgic throwbacks to a simpler time, gear that should be sold in the arts-and-crafts section of Etsy, not in audio stores.
And there are owners of small audio boutique operations who are tearing their hair out, trying to figure out how to differentiate their product from everyone elseâs. If anyone can do it, how do I justify my multiple-hundred-percent markup, theyâre asking themselves. So they add things like multiple filter options to their DACs, which maybe 1% of purchasers will ever even fiddle with. Or like one DAC I saw the other day, add âcast-iron insulating feet to suppress vibrationâ â cast iron isnât an insulator, and vibration doesnât matter to a solid-state assembly, at least not if itâs built properly. What cast iron does do is add weight, so that if you heft the DAC, it will seem impressively⌠heavy. Most consumers have little to go on in terms of objective measurements of components, and both price and weight play a much larger and almost wholly inappropriate role, as the only things a consumer has to go on. I always wonder about these massive toroidal power transformersâŚ
There are actually interesting things going on, actual innovations. MQA and Dirac Live are two of them. MQA, of course, has basically been sunk by mishandled marketing claims, and its primary utility of reducing required streaming bandwidth was only ever valuable for a window of time, a window which seems to be closing as bandwidth improves. Dirac Live, another technology enabled by the ability to do massive amounts of computation relatively cheaply, seems like a truly valuable bit of technology which will in fact justify the design and purchase of new audio equipment. But it is itself a component, and can be designed in to a lot of audio gear.
I could go onâŚ
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I run my MAC Mini entirely on a 12VDC input and itâs dedicated to Roon. I removed the AC supply.
I also do not like Dirac ( I have a Mini DSP 88A with Dirac Live) and I dislike their idea of Room Correction because it takes the Analog input and does an A-D-A conversion that completely wastes all the work my outboard DAC has done! I much prefer using Home Audio Fidelity and a Gent named Theirry who creates Convolution Filters that can be installed in Roon.
Yes, thatâs an unfortunate side effect. Of course, it has to tranform into the digital domain in order to do the computation (analog computing having been sadly neglected since the 1960âs). I think itâs early days here; integration with other equipment will improve.
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I really enjoyed all that so, if youâre minded, go on?
Yes, and this is the key problem with saying that measurements donât tell the whole story. So the designer has to start swapping parts out seemingly randomly to âtune the soundâ. This becomes an insurmountable task with an infinite number of potential combinations to listen to and rank. As an example, lets say you have a simple op-amp circuit with 5 resistors and an op-amp. Lets say you have a choice of three types of resistors (a really small choice), and 5 op-amps (out of the thousands available). Your circuit has 625 possible permutations and that doesnât include power supply changes etc. And in theory all circuits will behave nearly identically on paper and in measurements.
Now intuition and listening can make a difference, but as you can see in the simple thought experiment above any tuning by ear is a shot in the dark at best because there is no way to really systematically arrive at the best combo by listening. And listening fatigue and other mental issues will cloud any judgements.
Sheldon
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Well, not quite at random. Based on their past experience. And, letâs face it, most engineers are mediocre or worse â thatâs why the phrase âcream of the cropâ exists, after all. They either go into personnel management, or repeat their most successful designs over and over.
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Or they believe that its no fun to re-use a perfectly good design, so they take unnecessary risks with their employerâs time and money to come up with a better design that is usually not better, just different. Intelligent design reuse is one of the reasons the electronics industry has advanced as quickly as it has.
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Hi @LarryMagoo, I think this post mis-represents Dirac a little, and Mini DSP who are a different company.
This is just an implementation detail for a particular product, Dirac can just as easily work in the digital domain up-stream of the DAC and Mini DSP also produce boxes that do just that.
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I think youâre wrong.
Almost all high end companies are relatively small, and are build around one or two good designers.
If you have created a product that sells well, you could have actually have a problem, and loose money. But thatâs another story.
As my answer is about you rather rely on industrial processes for your equipment design.