By claiming that it is and praising the status of the listeners he knows even though they are senior citizens.
Are you telling him how to run his business?
A declaration is a more ephatic than a claim, so I wrote declare - meaning declare.
Without measurements anything you claim is just subjective. Considering the performance of Topping D90 it is very likely that all audible differences (or "better" sound) are caused by colorations or distortions. Nothing wrong in that but it does make your listening test just a pointless repeat of OP's test.
What happens when there are measurements and people still don't want to accept there is an audible difference? Then the goalposts are moved and controlled DBT ABX is demanded.
What happens when you explain to people that two FFTs can look perfectly identical yet sound different to anyone and everyone? They refuse to believe it.
If you post files to prove it then they stop complaining maybe until the next thread. At that point they start over from scratch and start demanding measurements, as though they never learned anything from the last time around.
If people do remember there can be audible aberrations that don't show up well on FFTs, they should acknowledge the fact as a starting point. They also should acknowledge what ESS says about what they think audiophiles are hearing, and why FFTs are of limited use. For serious people who are not familiar with those things and or didn't read those threads, links can be provided.
Otherwise no point spending time on what amounts to "Groundhog Day" repeating conversations.
What happens when you explain to people that two FFTs can look perfectly identical yet sound different to anyone and everyone? They refuse to believe it.
If you post files to prove it then they stop complaining maybe until the next thread. At that point they start over from scratch and start demanding measurements, as though they never learned anything from the last time around.
If people do remember there can be audible aberrations that don't show up well on FFTs, they should acknowledge the fact as a starting point. They also should acknowledge what ESS says about what they think audiophiles are hearing, and why FFTs are of limited use. For serious people who are not familiar with those things and or didn't read those threads, links can be provided.
Otherwise no point spending time on what amounts to "Groundhog Day" repeating conversations.
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Exactly. Thanks for sharing despite being shat on.
I hope you are enjoying listening to the DACs in the house. Id like to be on your couch to hear the SOTA AK4499 and a compensated R2R! Happy days. Im looking forward to reading about your experiences.
I have said nothing about measurements disproving audible difference. Most of the tweaks you listed in post 73 should show up in measurements. Simplified there are 3 scenarios:
1. Your AK4499 measures better than Topping D90. This would be a result worthy of publishing.
2. Both measure the same. If you hear audible differences then your claim about measurements not showing everything would be more credible.
3. Your AK4499 measures worse. If you still find it sounds better then a likely cause may be that you simply prefer more distorted or coloured sound.
There are other scenarios you seem to be ignorant of eg the known measurements are internally invalid.
Are you posting in the wrong thread in error? This thread is about listening impressions not tech measurements.
If you post in a measurement thread Id like to read what you write as you are clearly very knowledgable. I will be fascinated to see what measurements have evidenced based validity and reliability in predicating listening quality
Without that basic knowledge base the field is just conjecture.In the well-tempered master clock thread, Joseph K measured far bigger noise sidebands (skirts) around the D90 output signal than around a Yanasan AK4499 DAC output signal. We later figured out that it was probably the voltage reference causing that. No idea if that has anything to do with the rest of this thread.
We have, arguably, had that for a while now. It might be time to accept that you can't please all of the people all of the time.
... It is of course possible that you prefer noise floor modulations and time-variant nonlinearities
Ive just measured the SNR of this thread with my trusty trollmeter and since you've been posting today the noise floor is modulating in an alarming way. I think youve gone off spec. Whats your ethanol concentration at
Oh dear. I just did a self test and its operator error contaminating the results
Its not hard too hard to hear what's not quite right with D90 sound. There appears to be more than one factor attributable to the particular implementation. There is also an issue which AK4499EX is supposed to address, which is IC substrate-coupled front end noise affecting the output. IIRC that's what John Westlake said AKM told him was the reason for the two-chip solution back at the time they let him audition an AK4498 prototype during a factory visit.
I don't see specifications/measurements, in themselves, as a problem. I do, however, see their intellectual interpretation, in terms of a set of printed figures and graphs, as a problem. This seems the problem of the intellectual presumption that, if an instrumented measurement looks good the eyes (to the intellectual mind), it necessarily sounds more correct or more right to the ear/brain. The ear/brain being the reactive/emotional mind. I know, objectivists among us will protest that they make no such presumption regarding the reproduced acoustical event sounding more correct, only that it necessarily sounds is more accurate. Or what's worse in my estimation, is more accurate, whether it sounds that way, or not. In such, it seems to me that they are making the presumption that a more accurate sound is more correct or more right sound.
Let's test the above notion of whether objectivists do, or don't make such a presumption with the following thought experiment framed as two opposing extremes. Which of the following hypothetical music reproduction systems would you prefer: System 'A', which reproducers music as an utterly believable natural sounding acoustic event, yet measures very poorly. Or, system 'B', which features essentially perfect standard specification sheet figures which are certainly beyond human auditory limits, yet, is in no way believable as an natural sounding acoustic event, to the point of sounding uninteresting. I suggest that those choosing system 'B' over system 'A' are making an intellectual choice that's based on the intellectual presumption that the system featuring the better specifications must sound closer to the originally captured acoustic event. Again, this is just a thought experiment intended to reveal our individual audio system decision making motivations. Whether, or not, the two systems are realizable in practice isn't the point.
I truly don't intend to offend anyone, but the problem I see with those who may consider themselves as pure objectivists is that, their musical enjoyment is more of an intellectual enjoyment (or, maybe, peace of mind) over their system's technical specifications, than it is an enjoyment over the musical event itself. That said, there is risk for the pure subjectivist as well, since one cannot be certain what the original musical event actually sounded like. A point readily and correctly made by objectivists. As a consequence, subjectivists may be listening to an emotionally enjoyable, yet highly false reproduction of the original event. I do believe that there is an valid integration of the above two hypothetical system priorities. An integration which both sounds like much like a real acoustical event, yet also measures well. Taken further, I believe that eventually it will be well understood, at a scientific and technical level, exactly which groups of measurements, and how they behave dynamically, accurately inform a listener of to what degree a component sounds more like a real acoustic event than will some other component. It just seems obvious, as evidenced by the continuing subjective/objective divide that we haven't yet arrived there.
Guys, the above is just my two-cents worth of thought, it's not presented in any way as supposedly authoritative fact.
+1, Ken, people seem to forget that audio is just entertainment, that's all. No need to get into a ******* contest over it.
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