I agree.
Try " * himalayan goat’s hair grease" it works too.
Not sure one follows from the other.
I agree that you might as well give up on tweaking your system to achieve greater fidelity (the “fi” in hi-fi), as modern equipment is so good any tweaks are unlikely to produce improvements. Not sure that’s the same as giving up on hi-fi… you can still enjoy the music!
But the term “snake oil” has a long and notorious history as both a description and a chronicle of the various schemes perpetrated to sell worthless “improvements” in health to incautious consumers. Often these were in fact addictive or even poisonous, instead of helpful. Clearly there’s a lot of that going on in the audio business, selling worthless or even counterproductive “tweaks” to clueless or over-enthusiastic do-it-yourselfers. For instance, this poor guy.
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Once hi-fi is a commodity, people feel the need for higher-fi, and that usually means snake oil. One example:
“NativeDSD is always on the forefront of perusing new resolutions to live up to listener’s wishes. One of those wishes has been DSD 1024, a resolution few Digital to Analog Converters (DAC) or Digital Audio Players (DAP) can accept just yet. To test the waters of DSD 1024, we spent the past few months creating this Sampler in collaboration with 5 Music Labels and our Technical Advisors.”
Hey, it’s what listeners want…
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From the NativeDSD web page linked to above:
Original Recording Formats
Track 1: DSD 256
Track 2: DSD 256
Track 3: DSD 128 (Pure)
Track 4: Analog Tape
Track 5: DSD 256 (Pure)<<
So basically aside from track 4, the tracks are being upsampled in the DSD domain which means that only track 4 can possibly have any improvement in sound quality, since upsampling does not improve the sound quality when one is using any well designed, modern DAC.
I really HATE responding on these audiophile centric threads since one ALWAYS has to qualify that one is speaking about modern, well designed gear. The audiophiles always seem to bring up the old “what about…” by mentioning some problem that was resolved long ago and that therefore doesn’t apply to 99%of modern playback equipment. PITAs I think is the correct term for these posters.
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Even in the case of analog tape, the improvement over say DSD128 or DSD256 would be in the stratosphere.
But this is the part that caught my eye:
“NativeDSD is always on the forefront of perusing new resolutions to live up to listener’s wishes."
It will never end.
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The phrase “a fool and his money” goes a long way in helping to explain snake oil in the world of high end audio.
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I think DSD is popular because people build these overly bright resolving systems that hurt their ears and is fatiguing to listen too, and then feel the need to smooth it out by upsampling the source file. Kind of putting the cart before the horse imo.
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I have no experience with NativeDSD and I don’t own any music in DSD format. Yet even upsampling 16/44,1 PCM to DSD 64/128/256 with HQPlayer gives different sound quality. Haven’t tried DSD512 since my server can’t handle the processing. PCM vs DSD is two very different sound signatures. It even matters which way you upsample, so much that I happily paid the license fee for HQP.
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This is different however. It’s one thing to up-sample during playback, another to buy and store octaves of pre-converted (or unprocessed - take your pick) quantization noise. Aso, if the D/A process adds a certain signature, it’s wrong.
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Yeah, I have no experience with native DSD files and don’t have any interest to start collecting them. Storage space is cheap nowadays but not that cheap (especially SSD).
Wadax Reference Server $59,000 ($76,495 with Akasa optical interface)
“There’s a sucker born every minute” P. T. Barnum
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Hey, people who paid for Taiko need to have an upgrade path, too!
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Finally! The drawbacks of digital are overcome…
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That one must have fallen from the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down!
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Not sure he ever said that. Or would have. He played up to, and on the foibles of, his customers.
The same can be said for the famous Mark Twain quote “history may not repeat itself but it sure rhymes”
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Ah, well, a Mark Twain quote for this topic might be, “There is nothing in the world like persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus…”
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If we want to understand this crazyness we can also look at a much bigger and mature industry: the car business. Most people cannot afford to buy a Ferrari but they can still buy the wheels. These wheels under a normal car give them the feeling they drive a Ferrari and sometimes add a bit to the handling of the car.
So this same emotion plays a role when people buy an expensive $100 dollar interconnect while their preamp is only $1500,- That interconnect looks fancy and creates a certain positive emotion to someone that can’t afford the $20.000 preamp.
Just look at the advertisements and see it is all about emotion, not performance.
Is it snake oil? I don’t know. Poeple pay fot the adds and marketing and the emotion that is given to the product that one wants to ‘feel’.
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Taking my post above regarding the Wadax Reference Server and the title of this thread, can someone please tell where there is even the slightest hint of truth with anything be written about the Wadax. Harley’s little write up is pure garbage. How can anyone write such nonsense and then be considered an expert, except in the field of BS?
As music lovers and people who care about quality audio equipment I feel that we need to call BS on this type of nonsense otherwise our hobby will be considered a joke, that is, if it is not already.
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I think ChatGPT would make an awesome audiophile gear reviewer.
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