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In Reply to: RE: WAV better than FLAC accoring to Absolute Sound.. posted by ThomasPf on January 11, 2012 at 20:15:08
Its not the bit-compare that I am debating, its the real-time behavior of the CODEC. Something must be going wrong.
Follow Ups:
But the real time behavior of the codec is exactly what you see when you record that digital output. All timing and RFI issues aside you can verify for yourself with a wide range of material that the decoder is working just fine whether you use it standalone and asynchronous or synchronous during playback.
After all you are in the business of selling USB DACs. The drivers and firmware to deal with that are at least as complex as a lossless decoder counting the number of lines of code and the timing issues involved. One way of looking at it is that there is an encoder that takes a PCM signal and encodes it for transport over USB and firmware in the DAC that decodes it back to PCM. If you do not believe this can be made to work then I question many more things.
Cheers
Thomas
Have you done listening tests yourself on a resolving system?
I only know what I hear and it's broken. It's too bad you were not in my room at RMAF. I could have played the demo for you there.
Yes, I do listening tests on a resolving system every day although my ears are no longer what they used to be...There can be many reasons why playback can be impacted using FLAC. Intermittent real time errors from the decoder are not a likely candidate. As I said there is a higher probability for you to have a software issue in your driver or firmware.
Cheers
Thomas
Edits: 01/13/12
"If you do not believe this can be made to work then I question many more things."
It does work. It just doesn't work perfectly. In as much as at least one third of any DAC constitutes analog circuitry the Uncertainty Principle guarantees that it can not work perfectly. I am not nit-picking. Voltaire wrote, "Perfect is the enemy of good."
This is nothing but a (hard) engineering problem. One needs to define what it means to be good enough and then ascertain what level of performance is necessary. Then one needs to devise a way of reliably and quickly measuring whether a component is performing at the requisite level. At this point one can use any number of relatively straightforward hardware design techniques to achieve the result. It is possible that the resulting product will be "high end", i.e. affordable by only a minority of audiophiles, but I suspect that if this is true the situation won't last for long.
Note: it is unlikely that anyone whose mantra is "everything matters" will ever succeed in such a quest. They are defeated from the get-go by their attitude. One must believe in one's goal. This is the first prerequisite for success in any endeavor.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
''This is nothing but a (hard) engineering problem. One needs to define what it means to be good enough and then ascertain what level of performance is necessary. Then one needs to devise a way of reliably and quickly measuring whether a component is performing at the requisite level.''
It is a hard software/hardware inetraction issue. Player software makes a difference when the writer of software fails to define a good enough convergence criterion when driving a defined piece of hardware.
I don't believe you've got it quite right. The problem is that the software runs on a given piece of hardware and this hardware does not come with a sufficiently accurate specification, i.e. the hardware is not sufficiently defined.
There is no "best" software possible for all hardware, because one player may work better with one set of hardware and a different player with different hardware. (Here the difference in "hardware" might just be a different cable connecting a given computer and DAC.)
This is why I have said before and will say again that the problem is not in the computer or in the software, it's in the DAC. This is the only place where the problem can be solved in general. One can cobble together various combinations of (off the shelf or modified) computer systems, cables and DACs and run various "player of the month" software and get different sounds, but one will never achieve what is possible except by solving the problem at the DAC end. This is a hardware problem, and it concerns the correct operation of the mixed signal and analog circuitry in the DAC, together with protecting the operation of this critical circuitry by providing sufficient electrical isolation from the purely digital portions of the DAC as well as the overall electrical environment in which the DAC is operating.
It is the stubborn rejection of this simple truth by audiophiles that prevents them from forcing the manufacturers of DACs to do their homework and build ones that work properly.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
You need to take onboard the integration of electronics, mechanics and computing as a discipline to understand what I said. There are various names given to such an appraoch, eg at Philips Einhoven, they recognise it as Mechatronics.
We were instrumental in introducing such approaches in UK universities and most engineering courses now take on an interdicipinary approach towards invention and design.
I understand perfectly what you said. If one designs a complete system one can of course adjust the individual components to give a higher level of performance within given design constraints. But this is completely impossible in the context of Computer Audio, which is predicated in building systems that leverage off of mass market hardware and commercial off the shelf software. However, this does not contradict what I have proposed. For example, if one tweaks the software one can reduce the amount of electrical noise that has to be rejected in clock and signal circuitry of a DAC. This may be a cost-effective way in building a one-box system, but in the context of computer audio it is completely impractical, among other reasons being the proprietary nature of the inner workings of the component parts of the computer system. In any event, this bespoke approach is fraught with many perils and comes at great expense. Indeed, this complex approach has failed. If not, why aren't you just using your DCS gear instead of dabbling in computer audio?
One can build a complete DAC that provides a high degree of isolation from the vagaries of amplitude and phase noise on the input digital stream while outputing an accurate representation of the encoded information provided by the format. In the case of a DSD DAC this can be done using no more than a few hundred transistors. One has some hope of getting good results with a careful execution of such a design. Contrast this simplicity with a typical PC. My audio PC uses about 100 billion transistors.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
''But this is completely impossible in the context of Computer Audio, which is predicated in building systems that leverage off of mass market hardware and commercial off the shelf software.''
Highend and pro audio seek to do this, although at a price. What you said explains why PC audio is pot luck because there is inadequate understanding of what is going on.
Voltaire wrote, "Perfect is the enemy of good."
But what the heck did he know about audio??? :)
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