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The other day some colleagues and I were discussing how, back in the day, the acceptance of consumer digital audio was facilitated by the fact that compared to LP playback, CD playback was tweak-free and didn't require the care and rituals associated with record-playing.
We quickly learned that "indestructible" CDs could be made unreadable through rough handling, just like records. And we learned that read-errors and jitter abounded, and....
Decades later, where are we? while digital in its simplest form can still be straightforward and tweakless, we've found that for a variety of reasons, digital audio can be enhanced/tweaked/improved at every step in the playback process: optical tweaks and read-until-right for CD, power supply and storage enhancements for files and streaming, USB and Ethernet cables can in fact make a major difference, and on and on.
Just look at the amount of column-inches on this page devoted to Regen, Jitterbug, and so on. I've heard experiments with similar but more elaborate devices, and even on an excellent system (in PS Audio's Sound Room 1), the effect has been profound.
So: that simple, set-and-forget digital sound is proving to be every bit as fussy as analog sound. Bits are bits--kinda-sorta, most of the time, but-- we tend to forget about the "A" in DAC, the analog end of things--and that's one (of many) area in which huge improvements can be made.
So: do you think digital audio can ever be perfected to the point where we're all done, no further improvement can be made? Or will we continue to discover newer and even fussier elements that requiring massaging?
I tend toward the latter viewpoint, but would be interested in hearing the thoughts of others.
Bill Leebens
Director of Marketing, PS Audio
Follow Ups:
IMHO, you've jumped ahead to the next planet closer to the inhabitable zone. The rest of us back here on Pluto are just trying to figure out how computer audio even works. Let me clarify.
CD's
1. Buy one. Pleasure going to the store, picking out some titles, taking them home. Even ordering online = fun.
2. Open the package.
3. Insert into your CD player.
4. JUST PUSH PLAY
5. End of story.
Computer Audio
1. Whattttt??? Where do I start? Audissey? Bippessey? Low res, hi res, extra hi res? No res????
2. DAC?? Smart phone for control?? How?? Apps?? Drivers?? Synchronize????? Download what?????
3. File storage and backups. Failing backups. More downloading. More drivers????? Nothing works!!!!! What????????
4. OH MY GOD! WHERE AM I AND WHAT HAVE I GOTTEN MYSELF INTO?????!!!!!!!!!!
Screw it. Back to CD's. JUST PUSH PLAY. Ahhhhhhh. Music.
CDS:
Drive 40 miles to store.
Nothing you want to buy in stock.
Drive 40 miles home.
Downloads:
Find an album that interests you on a web page. Click on previews and immediately listen. Decide if you want the album.
Click on Buy. Enter your PayPal password on the secure web page.
Click on Download. Wait five or 10 minutes for download to complete.
Copy download to music library. (Less effort than removing shrink wrap.)
Listen to music (In higher than CD quality if that's what you purchased.)
Backups are automatic. No effort.
Only problem: you have to be computer literate.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Drive 40 miles to store. Nothing you want to buy in stock. Drive 40 miles home.
Or, in rest of world and as most albums not sold as downloads, leave car in driveway, browse on-line retailer, find wanted CD (maybe second hand), click, pay, wait a day or two. Rip or play to taste.
My only CD player is in car (see driveway) but Mike Porper's point is a fair one. To do PC audio well takes a lot of work or a wodge of money, often both.
Only problem: you have to be computer literate.
To address same, visit PC Audio forum. Quickly discover that experts, though claiming relevant skills, are argumentative, immature and socially disfunctional. CD player now seems jolly good idea.
Drive 40 miles to store . . .
That was a hoot.
As an old analogophile who has worked for a number of digital companies...I can relate. ;-)
> > So: do you think digital audio can ever be perfected to the point where we're all done, no further improvement can be made?
Curious, when was the last time that humankind achieved perfection in anything? Why would you expect such in a consumer product?
that digital audio would end up being even tweakier than a phono system.
And it is true, probably truer than he ever imagined.
...you're gonna give my buddy cj a swelled head! ;->
Even though trying to correspond with Clark is like consulting the Sybil or the Sphinx - one wonders if those abbreviated responses are steeped in meaning or Clark is just not willing to expound ...
The latter hard to believe when one retains memories of his POSITIVE FEEDBACK expositions of long ago.
Wish he was still INTERESTED in audio ...
...he's just not interested in audiophiles or the Audio Engineering Society. ;->
n factorial variables in digital audio, there will be many permutations of hardware, software and data transfer protocols that will affect sound quality. This stems partly from a lack of standardisation of transfer hardware even down to the inability to select and install a connector such as BNC50R or 75R.
As for computer based audio, the audio industry relies on operating systems that are constantly being changed and so called upgraded, mostly for reasons not connected with audio. There is therefore no steady state from which to develop and refine.
I agree with your sentiment about the analog side of things. It seems that the digital wizz kids have all but forgotten about the lessons learnt about sound quality in analog systems and instead have gone for 'magic' software and hardware tweaks such grounding blocks that sell for $600.
So, it seem that changes and improvements in digital audio will continue.
When will we get true 32 bit 768k replay through something like a 3 wire (R,L,Clock) transfer protocol such as sdif?
The fact that grounding a computer to a grounding block makes an improvement to the sound indicates that the future does not necessarily rest with off-the-shelf computers for high end audio.
close to single point common grounding is fundamental to setting up audio systems and it doesn't and shouldn't cost $600 to do it.
So, if you think it is a rip-off and too expensive, don't purchase it. It was originally designed for Synergistic Research's Atmosphere cables.
But it did make a significant improvement to the sound with components and Synergistic's cables.
I guess you just can't help yourself.
I guess you are one of the digital whizz kids.
Edits: 09/25/15
And you are special Fred:)
LOL Very good Steve...
Oh I'm sure they won't stop until you have a port in the back of your neck, and they can bypass the ear completely. Then audiophiles can shop for the gold plated Audioquest neuro connectors. They may even want to put a Jitterbug between the neuro connector and the port in their neck.
If you are looking for different ideas, then I would suggest a one box solution for the server/dac problem. You (the manufacturer) get to control everything. All the clocks, all the connections. For the consumer no neurosis about jitter, or cables, or little black boxes. It's just it has to be done right. If it's not done right people will figure it out.
Nice to see a manufacturer keep in touch with things.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Big speakers and little amps blew my mind!
Not so thankful for those creepy initial images, though!
Agree that a one-box-does-all solution is necessary for inroads into the mainstream.
> Decades later, where are we?
In my opinion, it took only one decade for digital to become perfect. In 1991 I bought a Sony DAT recorder that could make transparent copies of my vinyl LPs. Whether or not digital sounds good to you, it could make perfect sounding recordings of my best audiophile vinyl LPs. It can still do that today, but it's difficult to find a modern DAC that is accurate. However, I recently bought a TASCAM DA-3000 DSD recorder that can be used as a DAC, and it is as accurate or more-so than the best and most expensive DACs I've heard to date. Furthermore, it is exceptionally nice sounding and very musical, too. Cost is only $1000.
I considered the Decware version, but decided I didn't want a bunch of SD cards, and the added expense of having to buy them regularly.
I do think it is an interesting option for digital recording. Has anyone compared the Decware and stock version? I suppose if I did a search, this may have been discussed, in the past.
Or maybe it's a third of the fun. Or maybe.. oh forget it.
or do you see it ever moving into the loudspeaker as well? How well will DACs and digital crossovers interact? Will the DAC still be dominant, or will the digital crossovers start masking the DACs?
Just wondering.
JE
for the DYI'r and small manufacurer. It if far easier to develop an Active system (digital or analog) than a passive crossover system. If you want a passive you can model it from the Active parameters.
"The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat" - Confucius
it's already happened. Meridian et al dis it years ago.
There will continue to be active speakers with built-in DACs and room-correction, a la B&O and Meridian, but they haven't been warmly received in the US. I think we'll continue to see parallel paths of development--all-in-ones like Avant-Garde's Zero 1--and regular old passive systems.
Some folks just like to pick and choose each piece--and I get that. There are advantages to each philosophy.
I've heard CD playback that is surprisingly good - *really* good. It was some old huge gold-colored Sony player going into an old VTL preamp, c-j Premier 12s, and Vandy Quatros in a wonderful room. It was good enough so that I didn't think "Ah, that's better!" when putting on an LP at home.
Even from that level, there's a long way to go. I had a half-track Otari deck, and even with the stock repro amps, it was astonishing. 15-ips half-track, when properly done, is a revelation. Once you hear it you can see why the ebay "tape lady" and Bottlehead/Tape Project's Dan Schmalle tapes sell so fast for so much money. You'll also probably agree with Harry Weisfeld, who, in the VPI Factory tour video, points to a tape deck and says, "That blows away everything else in here."
So yes, there's a long ways to go for digital *and* LP. I think digital may get there. With data storage becoming so cheap, new better-sounding digital conversion/standards that might require huge files will no longer be prohibitive. Even though most of the recorded-music-consumers are listening to MP3 on earbuds in noisy environments, there will always be engineers working at the opposite end of the quality spectrum, trying to push the envelope. When they succeed, we can reap one big advantage of digital playback: making devices or software for those new standards is a relatively low cost item.
And yes, there will always be tweaks, and now and then a tweak will turn out to be pretty important.
WW
"A man need merely light the filaments of his receiving set and the world's greatest artists will perform for him." Alfred N. Goldsmith, RCA, 1922
With data storage becoming so cheap, new better-sounding digital conversion/standards that might require huge files will no longer be prohibitive.
Some folks tend to forget that the Redbook standard was fenced around the limited storage medium created over thirty five years ago. In computer terms, that is ancient technology. As an IT professional, I remember the astronomical cost of storage in that day. The 2 TB drive used in my music server that I paid $80 for (and have a spare on the shelf) would have cost tens of millions of dollars and have taken up a warehouse full of space.
I'm convinced that the primary (not only) advantage to the high resolution formats returns to the "A" part - more gradual filters that behave far better in the primary ten octave analog domain used by our ears. Those who voice the usual canard about being better only for dogs and bats miss the point. :)
Redbook was also an unfortunate compromise that came about because Philips had developed oversampling technology and wanted to capitalize on it. High sampling rates will allow the use of filters with no audible effect in the audible range, and while it's a difficult task and it's been a long haul, there's no reason that converters and their associated analog circuitry can't be developed to the point at which they're inaudible. The industry is also slowly getting a handle on the jitter problem, although there are still too many converters out there that use substandard techniques (PLLs, ASRCs as opposed to genlock or isochronous USB). Finally, I think more attention has to be paid to gain structure.
All of that new digital speed, as has been pointed out by Todd Kreiger so many times, is not all wonderful.
AS with all things kooky audio there is a trade-off - you probably will get higher resolution, though of greatly diminishing returns, at the cost of much more digital noise intertwined with the signal you want.
Whether this can be removed remains to be heard. Once one hears this noise one can no longer ignore it. I have to believe many simply do not notice it and that's fine but as Pearson pointed out many years ago there is something fundamentally different with digital noise. Record noise and tape hiss, etc, we seem better able to separate from the signal, both with our brains and by the nature of the system but digital noise is endemic and literally, indelibly mixed into the signal.
The higher sample rates only increase the quantity of this, though it is shifted upwards, it is there in proportion. One of those cases where more is not better.
Not to say digital music cannot be enjoyed. Again, another famous Pearsonism, "one can enjoy listening to digital music as long as they do not listen to analog". Things have improved since then but there is still much truth in that statement.
Why would high sampling rates increase noise or distortion, or shift them anywhere?
Indeed, that was many years ago. Let's move forward in time and remember that he very much embraced the SACD format and used EMM Labs players in all three systems. Perhaps it would be helpful to review his thoughts circa '06 found on The Absolute Sound SACD Sampler , a copy of which he gave me.
"This disc is my unabashed effort to put together a sonic spectacular that will rot your shocks (sic),and to demonstrate the superiority of the DSD multichannel system so convincingly that will be no doubt about which high-resolution digital medium is the technological best. To be sure, this disc is meant to show that the multichannel concept intelligently applied to the real thing (unamplified music played in real spaces) represents a significant jump towards bringing us closer to the absolute sound, which is, of course, the real thing: music."
I tend to think he was on the right track before.
Forgive me, but I cannot separate market forces from Pearson's change of heart.
I listen to digital and analog and can enjoy them both but the digital always eventually wears me out and I have to take a break.
Mainly wanted to point out the "no free lunch" aspect of extra information in the digital realm. Similar in my experience to the "be careful what you ask for" syndrome.
Forgive me, but I cannot separate market forces from Pearson's change of heart.
Nor can I separate genuine progress.
I remember hearing the Burmester 969/970 pair at Sea Cliff about ten years ago. While it was hideously expensive, it proved to me that digital could be done right with a good recording. For me, it has only gotten better since then. Mind you, he always liked to spin the Clearaudio Statement as well. :)
"there will always be engineers working at the opposite end of the quality spectrum, trying to push the envelope"
I hope so. The problem is most of those engineers like me are getting old. I hope there are young engineers around that care about quality sound
Alan
""The problem is most of those engineers like me are getting old. I hope there are young engineers around that care about quality sound""
IMO there will always be some. Maybe the group will be small, but there will always be people that care about quality and craft...
Seems damned hard to find young engineers outside of software engineers--could be it just seems that way in Boulder.
seems like lots of interest in audio there.
Might be worth a look?
They are more interested in the wider world. My son wanted to study Acoustics Engineering but I dissuaded him because of the limited career scope. (I knew the UK audio and acoustics industries well, as a sideline to my main professional engineering interests).He is now in Aerospace Engineering and enjoying it.
An additional point is that well qualified professionals are unlikely to be attracted to the whacky things that go on in the industry, like expensively clad resistors being called 'bullets' and dacs that are 'zero jitter lite'.
Edits: 09/25/15
...than narrower. Much of what he studied has applicability in audio and acoustics, anyway.
Personally, I studied mechanical engineering and journalism in college. Besides audio, I've worked in racing (high-performance/racing engines), and found a lot of similarities between engines, acoustics and speakers. Engine intakes and exhaust systems are tuned for resonant reinforcement just as speaker enclosures are.
You never know what'll be useful, and the more you know, the more interrelationships you'll find in the world.
"So: do you think digital audio can ever be perfected to the point where we're all done, no further improvement can be made? Or will we continue to discover newer and even fussier elements that requiring massaging?"
Fortunately for PS Audio and other manufacturers, so long as audiophiles are alive and kicking, the latter. The scary part for manufacturers is whether this niche will grow or shrink into total oblivion.
Well, yeah.
The thing that we will see--I think, I hope--in the next few years are digital streamers and servers that are smoother to operate and less glitchy. We're a little bit of the way there, but in order to achieve more mainstream acceptance, we're going to have to get past the assemble-it-yourself nature that is still a big part of much digital gear. We're certainly working on next-gen-and-beyond stuff at PS.
Figuring out exactly what things like the Jitterbug and Regen are doing would be nice, too. But that's for nerdy me, not the mainstream public. ;->
has been the price escalation for high end products, which has gone beyond what people who can still afford them want to spend. This coupled with the absurd price of some accessories can only mean a smaller consumer base.
I saw some speaker cable being reviewed at £800/m the other day.
As a manufacturer it makes sense for you to create products that work well in the mainstream. I think it is getting there as computers are part of so many devices that we use our everyday lives, so higher quality audio just makes sense for everybody.
These systems will get smoother and less glitch free and will benefit the average audiophiles.
But... There will always be a niche market for knowledgeable people who prefer to separate the computer from the audio and be able to adjust and tweak and create hopefully a better system.
As a kid we had our hi-fi Fisher receiver etc., but the desire was always to have separates and to build better speakers etc. Some of us just have more passion than others. It is part of the hobby and is a great deal of fun for many of us. Some things do not change.
Maybe it's easier for some of us than for others. Life experience and mentors make a big difference. 40+ years of audio experience, and almost as much computer experience helps a lot. Everybody does not have this background and maybe that's why many here struggle. That is why good manufacturers like yourself can step in and fill the void.
Regards
Bob
Thanks for the kind words.
We do what we can, but it's tough to predict market trends, tech developments and cost of new technologies.
Challenging, and occasionally scary. We'll manage. ;->
My 3,000+ silver disks are categorized and shelved in alphabetical order and easy to search. I may buy a music server and DAC, but will never subject myself to the horrors witnessed in this Asylum.
"Challenging, and occasionally scary. We'll manage."
We've come to expect nothing less from PS Audio. Heck, you guys have been around for at least 3 or 4 decades now. ;-)
Wikipedia says the company started in '73, first shipped in '74.
I'd ask Paul to verify, but he'd probably shrug and say, "who knows? It was the '70's..." ;->
""So: do you think digital audio can ever be perfected to the point where we're all done, no further improvement can be made?
Or will we continue to discover newer and even fussier elements that requiring massaging?""
The latter... As it is part of being human...
Agreed. Annoying, no? ;->
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