More 'Audiophile' bullsh*t

[TonyRPH]

A mains filter with a £1500 starting bid.

It must be good, it has a "liquid air module" and 2 "i.P.F." modules (I'm thinking that should possibly be "LPF" but I may be wrong)

[TonyRPH]

Deva Link said:

I note it doesn't include power cords - may I suggest these: http://www.highendcable.co.uk/Nordost%20ODIN%20Pow... (you need two, of course).

I might as well take four please.

[TonyRPH]

probedb said:

Well it's these sort of people that think moving a file to a different location on a hard drive will change the sound.

I once got into a huge debate on another forum regarding this.

The poster was claiming there were differences in sound between an external USB disk, internal disk, internal SSD and USB dongle.

Honestly...

And all this over a LAN too.

Not to mention the drivel I've read about switches and routers making the sound different, along with someone suggesting that placing a hub directly behind their Squeezebox improved the sound too.

And not to laugh at the suggestions that internet radio also sounded better like this.

The same internet radio data that has just traversed several thousand miles of cable and half a dozen routers...

[TonyRPH]

tvrforever said:

Adrian W said:

I'm a bit confused by this thread, usually when we discuss snake oil some of us has tried the products and are talking from experience, has anyone on here actually tried one of these?

Admittedly no I haven't - but for some reason I appear a little short of "Quantum Physics passive noise disrupters" and "Leviton hospital grade duplex's" right now. Let me phone the nearest si-fi toy shop...

And neither have I (well not a product at this level) - however the talk of "Quantum Physics passive noise disrupters" and "Leviton hospital grade duplex's" puts me off too.

As someone who has been involved with electronics for some 35 years, I do know that power filtering can be beneficial to remove 'clicks' from electrically noisy appliances (rare these days).

But statements like: "imaging improved" and "wider sound stage" and "deeper bass" frustrate me, as I've yet to hear any of these differences with basic power filtering.

Your electricity supply would have to be appallingly noisy - i.e. you would be hearing constant clicks and pops through your speakers, for these to be of any real benefit - and even then they would only reduce noise from the mains supply, I cannot see how they would improve "imaging" / "sound stage" / "bass" etc.

Also - if your power is subject to brownouts (severe voltage fluctuations) these are not going to help either.

I've also read about people claiming that a computer UPS cleans up the sound etc. etc.

However, most computer UPS devices distort the 50Hz waveform quite significantly at even a relatively small load - so that will usually be worse than the mains.

It's all just snake oil.

The only devices I would trust are (proper) AC regenerators, and even then these are only necessary in extreme cases.

[TonyRPH]

JDFR said:

TonyRPH said:

I once got into a huge debate on another forum regarding this.

The poster was claiming there were differences in sound between an external USB disk, internal disk, internal SSD and USB dongle.

Please point me in the direction of the thread as it sounds bloody hilarious!

This was about 4 years ago - on the What HiFi forums IIRC - I'll try to find it...

[TonyRPH]

IforB said:

I've tried out quite a few things that audiophiles often consider essential and have had mixed results.

<snip>

These were;

Cone feet for not just speakers but for kit as well
Torlyte (sp.) boards

Better/thicker speaker cable (not necessarily expensive stuff made of unicorn pubes and sunbeams)
Blanking plugs for the unused inputs at the back of the amp

I will hasten to add that I have never paid for any of these things apart from the speaker cable.

Protecting components from vibration can be hit and miss, however I've only ever noticed a difference with turntables (which stand to reason).

Some components such as larger capacitors can be prone to microphonic effects - but to actually hear said effects I feel would be extremely difficult.

Valve equipment on the other hand is a different story. Valves are very microphonic, and I think that airborne vibrations are probably a bigger worry than vibrations through the chassis / stand.

The blanking plugs are another hit and miss item for me - if the equipment is designed properly in the first place, RFI should not be a problem through an unused phono socket.

As for speaker cables... well I think enough has been written about those! Suffice to say that thicker (to a point) is always better than the thin stuff most people tend to use.

Of course length plays a part here too, but I am referring to the average run of 3 - 5 meters.

[TonyRPH]

AdeTuono said:

IforB said:

I've tried out quite a few things that audiophiles often consider essential and have had mixed results.

...there are things where I truly have thought "hang on, that sounds different/better"

These were;

Blanking plugs for the unused inputs at the back of the amp

Really?

The theory here is that unused inputs will pickup stray RFI and corrupt the sound.

However, many amps have an RF filter on the input anyway - and also - when the input is not used - it's not connected to anything...

Again - it comes down to design, and if the amp is designed properly in the first place, this shouldn't happen anyway.

You would practically need to live adjacent to a radio transmitter for it to be any kind of problem IMHO.

The only time I've had any issues is with a phono input, and in that instance the pickup cartridge was acting as an antenna, picking CD radio signals with some clarity

No amount of blanking plugs will solve that.

ETA: As per toxicnerve's reply above - they simply ground unused inputs. (post overlap)

Edited by TonyRPH on Friday 4th January 17:45

[TonyRPH]

IforB said:

Now that's something that confuses the hell out of me. Burning in cables? What is it supposed to actually do?

Running in speakers is one thing, but cables? Methinks that some people have their intelligence to Money ratio a bit wrong.

If you've ever bought a new house, you'l notice that the lights get brighter and produce a more even lighting field as the mains cables burn in.

I can't believe you didn't know this.

[TonyRPH]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

[TonyRPH]

May I just leave this here. (I think it conveys where this thread is headed!!)





ETA: Found a better meme

Edited by TonyRPH on Saturday 5th January 14:01

[TonyRPH]

custodian said:

Tony, thanks for yet another off topic post. Do you ever put your head above the parapet and post something relevant?

Bottom post on page 1, two posts on page2.

I don't see the problem with bringing a little humour to (my own) thread?

[TonyRPH]

It looks as though it's discontinued now - but Item Audio did something similar back in 2011.

The Silverstone

A mere £2000 bought you this highly tweaked computer with massive linear power supplies which require an entire ATX sized case to house (it's not for nothing that the computer industry has used switch mode PSUs for years...)

The heat from this beast must be something to behold.

[TonyRPH]

Globs said:

Perhaps I was thinking of the DM58 as that draws 350W while delivering up to 200W - that's a Class B ratio.
The DM88 is the same with a few tweaks by Candy.

What do you mean by "Class B ratio"?

Globs said:

The DM88 inside


It looks nice enough but not exactly hand wired point to point. I'm sure it's very good but if it's affected by a mains conditioner I suspect you are hearing things that are not there or the PSU is not adequate for the price.

I see what looks like a choke in the PSU there - if so, even less reason for it's sound to be influenced by a power conditioner.

[TonyRPH]

Adrian W said:

Please can you point out the choke for me, if you mean the wound component in the power supply, how did you count the number of windings? I make this stuff for a living and that thing looks cheap, I could write a list, but I'll start with the 1.6 mm pth boards, hardly high end!

I'm referring to the ferrite looking device at the bottom. in between the large caps.

It actually reminds me of a commutation coil out of an old 1980's TV set.

Of course I could never guess the mount of windings on that - if there was a prize, I would have a go!

[TonyRPH]

Seeker UK said:

DodgeRam Van Man said:

Surely the zeros and ones are just as good as a more expensive transport?

Google "Jitter"

With modern high end DACs, jitter is largely irrelevant due to re-clocking etc.

Even relatively modest DACs will recover the signal with a high degree of accuracy now.

[TonyRPH]

Seeker UK said:

That's true but it was a question about transports. A £12 transport will probably generate more jitter than a £1000 one.

If the tests in HiFi world are anything to go by, quite frequently expensive high end transports do generate a lot more jitter than expected.

There are many good, cheap, low jitter transports out there - much of the Cambridge Audio stuff tends to yield low jitter figures.

DiyAudio has a thread that spans several hundred pages, describing how to use a cheap JVC boom box as a CD transport.

Recovering data off a CD reliably is so trivial these days, with modern machine tolerances.

Unlike 30 years ago or so, when tight tolerances were quite difficult to achieve.

When you think about Blue Ray - and the density of the data stored on a Blue Ray disk - it makes CD look quite silly really (in terms of data density).

And yet, even the cheapest of Blue Ray players manage to recover the data without significant* error.

• not significant enough to cause audio / picture dropout.

[TonyRPH]

In my experience, it doesn't matter which forum you frequent, opinions always vary wildly, and many are expressed with great fanaticism.

Just in the same way that some people here on PH think that car 'X' is fast and others say car 'Y' is faster.

There are simply too many variables - in the case of the car, the driver / fuel / tyres etc. etc. - in the case of audio, the listening room, personal taste, source material (and the list goes on).

I have even heard several different pressings of the same CD sound grossly different (when sourced from the same master) in the same system.

I once owned two Marantz CD17 players - both the same model but not necessarily form the same batch - and even they sounded different to each other in the same system with the same cables etc.

Hence much of the argument / discussion / debate (call it what you want) on topics such as this tend to remain open ended.

I also find that many people find it difficult to be objective - particularly those who have spent £1000's on cables, mains filters etc.

I just like to sit back and enjoy the music - because after all, that's what its all about for me now.

Back in my 20's, I used to build and modify kit with some fanaticism - and then spend hours trying to hear the difference - I lost sight of the real purpose to listening to music. I woke up in my mid 30's (after losing much of my system in a house move getting it replaced bit by bit due to no insurance) - and I realised that even basic kit can sound good, because it's all about the synergy.

[TonyRPH]

FlossyThePig said:

A few months ago I was talking to the chairman of the company I work for. He said there was more error correction in the original cheap CD decks than is built in to the most expensive cd decks these days.

As he used to own a recording studio before moving into the manufacture of mixing desks for other studios I think he may have some practical insight.

As far I can remember from my rusty old CD player theory - the Reed–Solomon error correction used in CD players is not applied in a 'more' for player 'x' than player 'y' system.

It is a system that detects errors in playback, and provides correction.

I suspect your chairman may well be referring to oversampling, or possibly single bit vs. multi bit dacs.

[TonyRPH]

PhilboSE said:

I am from an IT background and know nothing about how a hi-fi CD transport may differ, so...

...I simply don't understand how a music CD *should* be affected by re-seeks, error correction etc. If the same CD player wasn't capable of streaming the data for a computer executable with 100% reliability, it would not be fit for purpose. Even a single bit error would be enough to cause problems.

IIRC, due to the real time nature of reading a music CD, there is no time for re seeks.

PhilboSE said:

So, to my mind, it *must* be possible to extract the raw PCM data from a CD with zero bit rates. It must also be possible to send this data, lossless, to a DAC/processor, which can them assemble it into a nice big buffer and THEN that DAC/processor can do everything it needs to do to generate some kind of waveform, generating intermediate samples as required. Obviously at this final stage, with processing going on to upsample and create the analogue waveform, there is the potential for various quality thresholds in the process.

Part of the problem with CD players is that the information has to be retrieved in real time.

A computer CDROM reading a data* disc* can simply retry multiple times until it either managed to recover the data, or fails.

If a CD player can't read the information first time, it simply fails, and bit(s) lost.

IIRC a few years back Meridian made a CD player that did actually cache the reads, giving it the opportunity to re-read multiple times (I'm not sure what the delay was - but think it was in the order of millseconds).

• of course an audio CD is 'just' data as well - but I used the term data (meaning computer data) for the purposes of the explanation.

PhilboSE said:

But I don't understand the need for all these locked clocks and so on. That would be necessary if the whole system was purely streaming end-to-end, needing on-the-fly processing, but why can't the DACs just have a suitably sized buffer from which they do all their processing? That would eliminate the need for all this clock locking and given that we KNOW that ANY CD transport can generate a perfect digital image of the bitstream, it would all come down to the DAC....<snip>

See the explanation above, re: Jitter.

• Disclaimer: My CD player theory is really rusty (I did all this back in the mid 80's) so happy to be corrected.

Edited by TonyRPH on Monday 7th January 16:47

[TonyRPH]

Globs said:

For a 1x player that is true, for a 40x computer CD/DVD reader that is not true at all because the computer will already be well ahead of the time-point in the CD track (buffered in memory) so it has ample time to re-read parts as required.
In fact many CD rippers have this facility and they rip a lot faster than the CD would take to listen to.

But most computer drives wind down to 1x when playing CDs, so surely the same caveats apply as to a CD player?

I know some can (and do) play back at high speed - but most software disables that.

In fact, if this was the case - then wouldn't the ultimate CD player have a drive that reads at 40x (or at least anything faster than 1x)?

Globs said:

Many people are stuck in a world 3 decades old with thinking about CDs, a modern computer CD reader is simply light years ahead of anything available in the 1980s, in fact a £5 DVD reader would embarrass any 80s or 90s CD transport with speed and accuracy - comparing the two is almost ridiculous

I hope that wasn't a dig at me lol!!!

Globs said:

Ripping a CD on a computer will get you as close to bit perfect as you are ever going to get from a CD, which most of the time is in fact bit perfect to the master. The days of paying over a tenner for a CD reader are long gone, raw/Flac CD files now sit on hard disks with total error correction to computing standards (i.e. _exact_). The real challenge is how to turn that data into decent analog, because the data is fairly sparse and there are challenges. The best way I have heard is to upsample and re-clock with a decent DSP/clock, and then feed into a decent DAC at that high (re)sampling rate.

CD transports do not and cannot alter the sound unless something is very wrong with the transport, and if there are any errors a PC reader will always be far better (assuming the reader is not faulty). Remember a PC CD drive can read in a DVD at high speed, a clunky old CD is a doddle. Paying money for an expensive CD transport is a total waste of cash, unless you want to donate to the factory that made it for other reasons.

Ripping should always result in a bit perfect copy, but despite re-reads etc. somehow that still doesn't seem to be the case?

At least not if you believe what some software tells you anyway.

Edited by TonyRPH on Monday 7th January 17:50