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Do I really need an amp like this? NO! But I really want an amp like this!


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46 minutes ago, MLXXX said:

They may "cherish" the DAC but it is introducing a conversion step that will need to be undone.

EG: OK you've got beautiful sounding DCS Vivaldi digital stack, you want to dismiss all it's sound quality by then putting it's output back through a cheap A to D then same cheap D to A before it goes to your poweramp/s, just so you can play laptop twiddling, not to mention sterilizing the once beautiful sound you had. GLWT.

 

Cheers George

Edited by georgehifi
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1 hour ago, georgehifi said:

To me yes there is, you have your own cherished dac or cd player with D to A conversion that you like and spent good money for.

Then it's converted back from A back to D with a dac that's most probably not as good as what was in yours, then all the processing dsp  stuff is done. Then! converted back again from D back to A again (with that same unknown dac) then it off to your poweramp and speakers.

"No sacrifice" to the mids and highs after all that trauma!!! give me a break! and that's what I hear (sterilization) every time even setup by "experts"

In my experience the AD/DA chain is completely transparent. 

Even if it weren’t, imho the significant gains to be had via a digital crossover would make it a worthwhile trade-off.  

 

The analog-crossover hybrid electrostats that I’ve heard all sound like there’s a completely different second set of speakers in the room. 

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15 minutes ago, georgehifi said:

EG: OK you've got beautiful sounding DCS Vivaldi digital stack, you want to dismiss all it's sound quality by then putting it's output back through a cheap A to D then same cheap D to A before it goes to your poweramp/s, just so you can play laptop twiddling, not to mention sterilizing the once beautiful sound you had. GLWT.

 

 

No, I'd envisage that the original intact CD digital stream would be subjected to an accurate, "pure", digital crossover, and then converted to analogue by readily available high quality DACs. In case you do not know this already, I regard the reverence accorded to very expensive, exotic, DACS in the 1980s and 1990s misplaced today.  Digital to analogue conversion has become routine.

 

I note this thread appears to have morphed into a free-for-all discussion about almost anything related to sound reproduction! 

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23 minutes ago, Sir Sanders Zingmore said:

n my experience the AD/DA chain is completely transparent. 

Sorry, not for me too many times I've heard cold sterilized sound that you can't warm to,  it all starts there, if it's not great you'll never achieve greatness.

 

Cheers George

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26 minutes ago, MLXXX said:

I regard the reverence accorded to very expensive, exotic, DACS in the 1980s and 1990s misplaced today. 

This is not a 80's 90's dac I put up https://www.dcsltd.co.uk/products/vivaldi-dac/ even the dcs from the 80-90's as you put, deserve to be heard unmolested

 

Cheers George

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43 minutes ago, MLXXX said:

o, I'd envisage that the original intact CD digital stream would be subjected to an accurate, "pure", digital crossover, and then converted to analogue by readily available high quality DACs.

High quality dac's??? in things like this and others, run by wall warts and or smp's. I THINK NOT.

 

Cheers George

 

_MG_4387.jpg

Compared to this kind of quality and design???

 

dcs_vivaldidacinside.jpg

Or this 

21687737_1665667860166826_20911932646402

The-Reference-Powerbase-Jack-Panel-and-I

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18 minutes ago, georgehifi said:

Sorry, not for me too many times I've heard cold sterilized sound that you can't warm to,  it all starts there, if it's not great you'll never achieve greatness.

 

Cheers George

I can warm to it because it’s neither cold nor sterilised to me. 

Your opinion is valid for you, mine differs, please stop telling me that mine is wrong :) 

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8 minutes ago, Sir Sanders Zingmore said:

please stop telling me that mine is wrong

Other way round it's you that's trying to convince me, it will never happen, I've seen inside even the better ones, not just the mini dsp, they don't compete with what's in a good dac or cdp and the proofs in the sound.

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4 minutes ago, georgehifi said:

Other way round it's that's trying to convince me, never happen

I don’t quite understand what you mean. 

What I think you are saying is that I’m trying to convince you that I’m right. 

 

If that’s how my posts come across then you’ve misunderstood me. 

I’m just stating my own personal experience. It can be different to yours without me trying to change your mind. 

Edited by Sir Sanders Zingmore
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15 hours ago, maxsimonjp said:

The idea is when i go active i can play with the xover cut off frequencies and see the i influence of the tweeter

:thumb:

 

 

I spent years playing "supertweeters"  (just 20 to 40khz) .... and one of the hardest things was getting a reliable measurement setup (so I could even reliably see what was occurring 20khz+) .... and then the next biggest trial was excluding effects below 20khz (eg. when you fiddle with the crossover around ~ 10khz or whatever)

 

A steep-ish linear phase low pass filter @ 15 or 20khz was an interesting experiment.

 

 

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33 minutes ago, georgehifi said:

This is not a 80's 90's dac I put up https://www.dcsltd.co.uk/products/vivaldi-dac/ even the dcs from the 80-90's as you put, deserve to be heard unmolested 

 

37 minutes ago, georgehifi said:

Sorry, not for me too many times I've heard cold sterilized sound that you can't warm to, 

One can choose to listen to a sonic signature imparted by an exotic DAC [rather than the less coloured, closer to accurate, sound of a standard, high quality DAC] and refuse to allow relatively transparent (or even fully transparent) further processing.

However It seems to me arbitrary, and ultimately inconsistent,  to adopt a purist position for one link in the chain of reproduction and a non-purist position for another. If a sonic signature is imparted to an audible extent by an exotic DAC, why should one be concerned about inaudible, or barely audible, inaccuracies in subsequent processing? Such a position  makes no sense to me unless perhaps one venerates the "audiophile glory" of the exotic DAC, and on that basis regards its output signal as sacrosanct. 

I suggest we need to move on from worshipping DACs.

Edited by MLXXX
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21 hours ago, Buffle said:

What you've shown there is potentially an example of differences in time alignment, which demonstrates what I mentioned about the distances needing to be small compared to the wavelength - something impractical for higher frequencies.  Driver differences cause errors such as amplitude and phase errors, as well as asymmetrical behaviour.  If these differences are approximately uniform around the non-distorted target (which they won't be for asymmetrical behaviour but may be for amplitude and phase errors) then with enough drivers you'd expect to see a summed regression toward the mean - a more accurate result.  But, as I mentioned, this would require the cross-sectional distance to be small compared to the wavelength - meaning that in practice these advantages are not likely to be achieved.  What you almost certainly will see are time alignment errors due to the distances not being small compared to the wavelength.  Given that these will swamp any likely TS differences, I don't think it reasonable to conclude that the audible differences that you witnessed were due to the drivers being non-identical.

+1  very much.

 

The real thing, is that there is no need for any conjecture/guessing....   If we take "multiple drivers", and exclude the other enormous variable(s)  (ie. like time alignment of non-coincident drivers - as you mentioned) .... and then examine what is going on under different circumstances  (and if we like, very "mean" circumstances, where we force the issue to show up) ... we can see that the different motion (due to things like imperfectly matched TS, or whatever) is trivially small in typical situations.

 

If we don't exclude the "other enormous variable" ... then it's almost certain that's what we'll hear  :) 

 

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5 hours ago, georgehifi said:

"knob twiddler," or I should say "laptop finger slider" We've all seen it, with those that fiddle with them

Couldn't agree more.

 

Such a thing makes it all too easy to dial in settings which are based on no sensible design methodology, and are all too readily influenced by preference or just whimsy  (fiddle until something sounds "wow") 

 

... and even when some sort of methodology exists, it makes it easy to correct for things which should be left alone.    The "reduced pallet" offered by a passive filter, sometimes has its blessings.

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4 hours ago, georgehifi said:

The the esl panel has to be digital as well and sounds like c**p as I said above, the latency problem if the esl is left analogue, and the bass digital, is huge, the bass driver would have to be out in the middle of the room to make up for it. 

 

We need to be really clear here, or it will confuse people trying to actually apply this knowledge.

 

The delay between the sources depends on the filter shape you use.

 

If you were to construct a DSP filter which was the same as the passive filter that it replaced.... it has the same delay.    As you change the shape of the filter .... the delay will becomes greater (or lesser).

 

So we can see that "active = unacceptable delay", is a poor generalisation.

 

However, creating an active/DSP filter which corrects low frequency phase... does create a lot of delay.   It is interesting to note that unless created very carefully (ie. from first-principles, as opposed to from measurements) then these filters are liable to "sound bad", as they are often correcting measurements (of low frequency phase) which aren't representative of what is really happening.

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2 hours ago, MLXXX said:

If a person wanted the closest approximation to true purity they'd go for DSP.

Although I get where you are coming from .... This is an enormous and problematic generalisation.

 


DSP makes it trivial to "correct" things that either should be left well alone ... or to correct things in way which are "worse".    That being said, "misuse" of a tool, isn't a great reason to denounce said tool.

 

For the "most part" speakers do not need (or benefit from) much of the complex correction that DSP enables.   <Achtung!!>

 

Developers of systems like "Dirac Live", spend a lot more time working out "what to leave alone", than they do working out what to fix...   one of the main reasons being that typical measurements of a speakers are dramatic over simplifications of what is really happening, and can't be used as a "roadmap" for what to alter.

 

 

 

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42 minutes ago, MLXXX said:

why should one be concerned about inaudible, or barely audible, inaccuracies in subsequent processing?

Because often it is not inaudible .... but that is often more the fault of the filter programmed, than anything else.

 

I don't 'disagree' with George's experience/description of "cold sterile flat whatever".   I think we've all heard it.... but there's (more than) a little more to it than "evil processing".

 

I guess what I'm trying to say (not trying to pick on you) is that people trying to navigate these waters aren't well served by polarisation like  "do all the processing" .... or "avoid all the processing" ..... but then again, it's understandable that some peoples experience boils down to just that.

Edited by davewantsmoore
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If people "cherish" a particular DAC because it imparts a sonic signature they like, then they are free to use it to colour the sound (and avoid what they might consider cold and sterilized sound). [In a similar vein, people are free to use video settings on a television to make the picture colour warmer (more towards red) or colder (more towards blue). Or to provide a greater, or lesser, extent of colour saturation.]

 

On an objective level, if seeking accurate rendition of the output of a cherished DAC, it would make sense to avoid a digital crossover if the digital crossover processing in contemplation could be expected to impart significantly more substantial artefacts than a passive crossover could be expected to impart to the cherished sound.  And here I believe the traditional thinking of many 2-channel audiophiles is that a DAC is potentially an extremely lossy device, and any ADC would also potentially be a very lossy device, and it is accordingly "automatically" assumed that the conversions between analogue and digital with "ordinary" high quality circuitry (involving any ADCs and DACs) would necessarily have a highly deleterious effect on the cherished analogue signal. 

However given advances in ADC and DAC design and implementation, and the sample rates in use, it is more likely the ADCs and DACs will be transparent or near transparent, and will have negligible impact on the cherished sonic signature.

This dichotomy in the audiophile world of insisting on perfection in some aspects of sound reproduction but embracing imperfection in other aspects is a recurring feature.  It is evident in the desire by some to choose the high difficulty path of using a stylus tracking a rotating vinyl disc to acquire an audio signal that is not sterilized or cold. The imperfect signal thus acquired may then be put through a very expensive preamplifier, and then perhaps fed into an amplifier with outstanding good specifications for accuracy,  such as the one cited at post #1.

 

lthough I get where you are coming from .... This is an enormous and problematic generalisation.

 


DSP makes it trivial to "correct" things that either should be left well alone ... or to correct things in way which are "worse".    That being said, "misuse" of a tool, isn't a great reason to denounce said tool.

In the context I was referring to using DSP to perform a crossover function digitally rather than in the analogue domain (i.e. the same function as a passive crossover, nothing more complicated than that, but without the parasitic resistance and other imperfections of a passive crossover).  I was not intending to refer to use of DSP beyond that.

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8 minutes ago, MLXXX said:

However given advances in ADC and DAC design and implementation, and the sample rates in use, it is more likely the ADCs and DACs will be transparent or near transparent, and will have negligible impact on the cherished sonic signature.

Indeed, my digital crossover was perfectly able to preserve the characteristics even of my turntable 

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32 minutes ago, MLXXX said:

If people "cherish" a particular DAC because it imparts a sonic signature

Your assuming it just that, what your saying with that is, that the DCS Vivaldi dac stack is more coloured than the rubbish ad/da convertor in a mini dsp!!! maybe DCS it's just a better dac which it is by a long long way!

I get the feeling I'm discussing something that not comprehensible to knob twiddlers that enjoy twiddling deconstructing and reconstructing more than the music itself.

 

Cheers George 

Edited by georgehifi
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33 minutes ago, Sir Sanders Zingmore said:

Indeed, my digital crossover was perfectly able to preserve the characteristics even of my turntable 

Yes even down the the lousy 30db of channel separation on a good day at 1khz, either side of that even worse. 

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4 minutes ago, georgehifi said:

Your assuming it just that, maybe it's just a better dac! 

If it imparted no sonic signature, wouldn't it be "cold and sterile"?

[I note there are different solutions for  a sample rate of 44.1kHz as regards how aggressively to filter the highest octave (where the frequency nears the Nyquist limit).  In contrast to that, there is no need for ADCs and DACs for a DSP speaker crossover function to be limited to a sample rate of 44.1kHz. They can use higher sample rates and milder filtering.]

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5 minutes ago, MLXXX said:

If it imparted no sonic signature, wouldn't it be "cold and sterile"?

No, the "cold and sterile" to me comes from to much D/A, A/D  D/A dsp processing.

Convert once from digital to analogue at the beginning with a "good" dac or cdp and leave it be. 

Edited by georgehifi
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40 minutes ago, MLXXX said:

This dichotomy in the audiophile world of insisting on perfection in some aspects of sound reproduction but embracing imperfection in other aspects is a recurring feature.

Indeed.

 

I think the 'confusion' (generally, not yours) comes from the difficulty to distinguish between "remove errors", and "flavour to preference".

 

It is a better approach to remove errors first (avoiding negative impacts of course), and then flavour to preference.....   if instead we end up in a "I like the sound of my errors" situation .... progress becomes difficult.

 

That being said, most people just settle for something they like, and leave it at that.... and that's totally fine.   My comments are only for someone who wants to "do something about it".

 

 

40 minutes ago, MLXXX said:

It is evident in the desire by some to choose the high difficulty path of using a stylus tracking a rotating vinyl disc to acquire an audio signal that is not sterilized or cold.

Perhaps the some of the "errors" involved in playing an LP don't matter so much .... and perhaps some of them are even the reason that it sounds so much "better" (assuming one agrees with that).

 

Distortion (THD/IMD), bandwidth, HF response accuracy, channel separation .... perhaps these things that "LPs suck at" aren't important as the dizzying specs possible would have us believe.

 

Perhaps lower channel separation is desirable.

Perhaps a varying noise floor (aka. jitter) is really really undesirable.

 

There is good evidence to suggest these are true.

 

40 minutes ago, MLXXX said:

The imperfect signal thus acquired may then be put through a very expensive preamplifier, and then perhaps fed into an amplifier with outstanding good specifications for accuracy,  such as the one cited at post #1.

As hinted above.... I think specmanship can be very misleading.    If you need XdB of channel separation (or something) .... then is adding more going to make things better and better?

 

40 minutes ago, MLXXX said:

In the context I was referring to using DSP to perform a crossover function digitally rather than in the analogue domain (i.e. the same function as a passive crossover, nothing more complicated than that, but without the parasitic resistance and other imperfections of a passive crossover).  I was not intending to refer to use of DSP beyond that.

It's quite surprising to many that if we program a DSP with the same transfer function as an analogue filter .... then they can be audibly identical.   This shows that the "parasitic resistance and other imperfections of a passive crossover" are often small in the scheme of things.

 

That said, the above comparison does require dealing with a few "ensuring all else is equal" issues .... matching levels, matching filter shapes, etc. etc.... it's often hard work.

 

 

 

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11 minutes ago, MLXXX said:

In contrast to that, there is no need for ADCs and DACs for a DSP speaker crossover function to be limited to a sample rate of 44.1kHz. They can use higher sample rates and milder filtering.]

A CD player can also use higher sampling rates and milder filtering... if desired.

 

That being said, there is a lot of people who say (and evidence to suggest) that re-sampling of audio damages in subtle ways.

 

Many people experience that non-oversampling DACs (and certain DAC architectures) sound "better" .... but then mistaken conclude there are (unsubstantiated) flaws with other DAC types (for example "delta sigma") to explain what they hear .... when it much more likely that they are experiencing poor quality re-sampling  (eg. when the DAC internally converts 44.1khz to 1536khz).   If we were to use much more careful resampling techniques outside of the DAC ... and then feed the DAC with the resampled content directly, then the "bad sound" goes away.    This is one of the core tenants of MQA, for example.

 

18 minutes ago, georgehifi said:

to much D/A, A/D  D/A

Indeed.  Digital to analogue to digital to analogue ... seems like unnecessarily bad system design.

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