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RE: Does Anyone have experience of an AD/DA versus direct feed comparison ?

Posted by stehno (M) on May 6, 2015 at 20:08:52

In Reply to: RE: Does Anyone have experience of an AD/DA versus direct feed comparison ? posted by beppe61 on May 6, 2015 at 13:00:03:

Although analog may have its own demons (did I say may?) compounding distortions to further elevate an already severely raised noise floor the common problem lays not primarily with the format.

To give you an example, a few years ago John Curl and I engaged in what I call "meaningful dialogue" and numerous times he confessed that every one of his designs (and all other mfg'er's designs too) all contained at least one serious flaw for which nobody could figure out.

He (and Mark Levinson) also agreed that similar flaws were found in their sensitive measuring instruments where even though they were using professional-grade measuring instruments that were professionally calibrated, etc, the sensitive measuring instruments often times still could not discern what their and their colleagues ears could repeatedly discern.

Well, the "meaningful dialogue" really went south and kinda' started with Curl equating his and Mark's designs to BMW and Mercedes and I said performance-wise their designs were more accurately equated to Chevrolet and Buick. It was only after this that Curl admitted to the serious flaw thing and I asked him if he thought I was psychic or if maybe I knew his products' performance better than he (even though I've never heard his designs).

Nevertheless, my stance was that their designs contained NO serious flaws of any sort, but only that their and other designs were simply incomplete and I offered to demonstrate that I could take the least of his amp design and probably make it run musical circles around his greatest amp.

Toward the end of our "meaningful dialogue", he told me to go smoke corn and I said something unflattering about his mother. To me, that exchange among other things was an excellent example of traditional designers' (and the industry in general) inability to think outside the box or outside of their rabbit holes.

But the point being of this story is that while some may think every component has at least one serious flaw others think a design is complete, not a single word was ever mentioned about formats being the problem.

But here's one of the primary reasons why I speculate the format is not the problem the MQA dope pushers are trying to convince us it is. These are my notes borrowed from another thread.
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Tremendous volumes of music information is already embedded even in a Redbook formatted recording. More than enough info to satisfy even the most discriminating listener and all that info is already being read and processed. Again they've been backing up and archiving data storage bits for decades with hardly an issue.

Only just like a severely blurred photo of a beautiful red Ferrari where the noise floor of the photo is so high, you can barely even tell it's a Ferrari. So too with reduced amount of info coming from the speakers.

Is all the detail of the Ferrari stored in the photo? I say yes. But much of the signal is so distorted, it remains invisible due to the much raised noise floor. A performance-limiting governor if you will, that plagues every last playback system. This is why even well-thought-out playback systems all sound more alike than they do different (a quite inferior sound) and not one of them comes even remotely close to the absolute sound aka the live performance.

Bear in mind that the most severe distortions are not even audible per se. These are inaudible distortions that quietly go about their business utterly crippling our components' precision and accuracy, thereby catapulting a given playback system's noise floor to very high levels. And it's not just low level detail as many speculate. The harm is induced pretty much equally between low and high level detail.

And just like with a 3.5MP camera or a 13MP camera, the problem with the blurred photo is regardless of the camera's resolution capability or the number of pixels stored per photo graph. An unblurred photo of a beautiful red Ferrari taken with a 1.5MP camera is far more beautiful than a blurred photo of the same Ferrari taken with a 16MP camera.

And just like the camera/Ferrari analogy, it's not the number of music info bits that remain inaudible, it's the percentage of music info bits embedded in the recording, read, and then processed, yet still remain inaudible due to the much raised noise floor.

This is not hypothesis, this is fact and is demonstrable. But when "scientists" and the science-minded are already halfway up the wrong technology tree, it's pert near impossible to call them down until the entire industry has been forced to buy into it at great expense.

Only for many of us to wake up 5 or 10 years later realizing they've been doing cartwheels over small incremental improvements when the industry had them convinced the advancement would be life changing.

This is why a well-engineered MP3 recording played back on a SOTA-level system theoretically isolated from the harm induced by such universal distortions should sound at least if not far more naturally musical than a well-engineered 24-bit / 192 kHz high-rez recording on the same SOTA-level system fully susceptible and affected by these universal distortions.

And like the higher rez camera susceptible to distortions, It's simply impossible for higher rez formats to cure the ailments plaguing our systems. Nor will Bob Stuart getting metaphysical while manipulating the bits and playing DSP with the music. That has nothing whatsoever to do with preserving the fidelity of the recorded music itself.

Edits: 05/08/15 05/10/15 05/10/15 05/14/15

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