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In Reply to: RE: Context is the key.-This post demonstates that posted by Ugly on August 30, 2014 at 11:15:05
You can spend endless time testing an astronomical number of potential PC audio tweaks. Since you aren't inclined to do so, then I suggest you try a very simple one first to see if you can hear a difference. Experiment with buffer sizes in your hardware driver and/or your player software. Find the smallest size that works without audible glitches. Find the largest size that works. Now play music to your heart's content switching between old and new settings and see if you hear any differences. This test involves only one or two parameters, so it's hard to screw it up or do any damage. Just write down what the parameters were before starting and then put them back when you are done.
If you hear differences, then you go on to all the other tweaks. If you don't hear differences then there is no need to hang your head in shame. There are a large variety of reasons why others might hear differences that you do not:
1. The music you listened to was not suitable for uncovering the differences.
2. Your system has problems that limit its ability to show up differences that would otherwise have occurred.
3. You didn't hear any differences because you have not learned how to focus your attention so as to be able to hear them
4. You didn't hear any differences because you have hearing damage
5. You didn't hear any differences because there weren't any to hear because your system and its setup have excellent isolation between the digital and analog components and your DAC has excellent isolation from jitter and other variations from the ideal signal that an ideal transport might send to the DAC.
6. Others who hear differences are hearing defects in the corresponding portions of their systems, e.g. they have noise coupling through cabling, they use a DAC that lacks excellent isolation of digital noise, etc. They may find it more effective to tweak their computer than to get a new DAC that lacks this isolation, or they may have such a DAC but prefer not to use it because it is deficient in other characteristics such as clean analog sound.
7. Others who report hearing differences are fooling themselves. They may be misinterpreting random sensations as definitive results. This may be due to inexperience, carelessness or even dishonesty. From reading posts it is difficult to know how careful and experienced these posters may be. "On the Internet, nobody knows you are a dog".
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Follow Ups:
you have read and digested my posts, you will have learnt that I did this years ago and have posted on the subject.
For you personally, on your system - what is the result of that simple test with buffer size?
If I remember correctly (and I might not), at some point you insisted that it doesn't really affect sound quality.
discussed this with him several times; he just didn't or couldn't get it.
Now he brings it up as though this has been a revelation for him and others.
There is plenty on the audio web on the issue.
I have been aware of the buffer size issues from the very beginning of my use of computer audio, all the way back to 2005 when I first started using a computer system to record and playback music. They were already in print in that period, and cics explained some of the issues in his long thread. (Actually, my understanding of buffer size issues goes to far earlier periods, see below in this post.)
My position was and has been that if buffer size issues exist it is because of a deficiency in the DAC, not a fundamental defect in the transport. Adjusting the buffer sizes may be a free system tweak, but if it works it is just proof that the DAC is not as good as it might be. Ditto for decoding FLAC in real time. Again, this is a case where if you hear a difference it's because the DAC is not up to snuff. I doubt very much that either of you have experience designing audio cards, drivers and DSP software and understanding how all of the components fit together, from both a practical and a theoretical perspective. Instead you appear to be a bunch of tinkerers. It has been a basic principle of mixed signal systems to separate the digital and analog portions back as long as I can recall, which goes back to a summer job in 1961 working on a hybrid computer consisting of a digital computer coupled to an analog computer. The principles are well known, but the consumer audio marketplace has done a crappy job of following them. In general the best mixed signal engineers have not gone into consumer electronics. They have gone into military electronics, telecommunications and the computer industries, as this is where the money is.
Fmak, you make a lot of cryptic comments, but I can't think of much that I have learned from you. There are others here whose engineering comments have proven valuable and non-technical reviewers who have made a many cogent observations as to what they have heard.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
I am not here to teach you and I do not preach to others either.
"For you personally, on your system - what is the result of that simple test with buffer size?"
Well, I don't recall what I may have posted in the past. However, the last time I checked this, my impression was : 1) smaller buffer sizes don't sound worse and 2) smaller buffer sizes probably sound better. I don't like to make definitive statements unless I am prepared to put my life, fortune or sacred honor on the line. :-)
While I am not certain that playing FLAC files doesn't sound worse than playing WAV files, I suspect that is the case on my system. I do not make a practice of playing FLAC files in real time. Instead, my practice is to convert them to WAV and then play the resulting WAV files. I get an additional benefit from this conversion: I store the resulting WAV files in a RAM disk, so I don't have to worry about I/O taking place from my 4 GB piece of spinning rust. While I have not personally heard differences between WAV files that were converted to FLAC and then re-converted back to WAV, I have observed that the two WAV files are not necessarily identical. While they have the same PCM samples the headers are sometimes different. Accordingly, I consider claims that WAV to FLAC and back to WAV produce different sounding files can be valid if the player software is not written appropriately. For this reason, I do not consider Cookie Marenco’s claims to be kooky. (I love the sound quality of her recordings, so I am certain that she has good hearing.)
Unfortunately, that Asus tablet that you suggested I purchase has proven an excellent device for reading documents and I have yet to butcher it up to use it for audio. (Thank you!) It seems to be fairly low power, but not as low power as I would like for an audio transport, probably because of the Intel processor and the use of DRAM instead of static RAM. So if you leave it on standby for a while the battery runs down and then you have to put up with the back of the unit getting warm while recharging the battery. My metric for a system being low noise is the equivalent of one that I came up with for cars in the 1960's. The less power consumption the better. So if you look at power consumption in watts, that's a single number where lower is clearly better. The metric for cars was gas mileage. I figured that worse gas mileage meant less efficiency and hence more wear and tear, and the general rule back then was that one dollar spent on gasoline translated sooner or later into one dollar spent on repairs. (Or more, in the case of my 1965 Lotus Elan.)
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
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