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In Reply to: RE: Oh ye of little faith... posted by Steve O on November 02, 2017 at 22:06:01
>> you might be underestimating your audience. I'm sure some of us would love to hear your thoughts on the matter. <<
I've said it before many times over the decades. Arguing about which op-amp sounds better is no different than arguing which cake sounds better - Duncan-Heinz or Betty Crocker.
Just like all ICs, they are all designed to meet a certain measured performance standard at the lowest possible cost.
A discrete circuit can be made the same way, or it can also be made with any circuit topology imaginable, with only the highest quality (best sounding) resistors and capacitors, with each stage tuned for the absolute best sound quality by adjusting bias levels and resistor values at every single location.
Just as a master French pastry maker can make a transcendentally better cake by specifying the best, freshest organic ingredients, prepared in the most elaborate ways possible, and adjusted by taste to yield the best possible result.
The only difference is that with the cake, there is no "reference" cake, while with the audio circuit, there is the reference of reproducing a live acoustic performance of real musicians playing in real space. Interestingly enough, something that passes that test will also sound superb with all kinds of music, from processed "girl + guitar" folksingers all the way to completely synthesized modern pop "music"
Do you really think that any IC op-amp has been designed by ear to give the best sonic result?
Follow Ups:
> > I've said it before many times over the decades. Arguing about which op-amp sounds better is no different than arguing which cake sounds better - Duncan-Heinz or Betty Crocker. < <
Kinda like "dancing about architecture "?
> snip <
> > A discrete circuit can be made the same way, or it can also be made with any circuit topology imaginable, with only the highest quality (best sounding) resistors and capacitors, with each stage tuned for the absolute best sound quality by adjusting bias levels and resistor values at every single location. < <
So your real complaint is is about IC op amps and not op amps in general? IOW, a discrete op amp like Burson's current offerings or the old Jensen 990 (or whatever it was called-as used by early Boulder IIRC) would (or could) be acceptable.
> snip <
> > Do you really think that any IC op-amp has been designed by ear to give the best sonic result? < <
Yes, that's quite possible and even plausible. I recall the intro of the AD 711 / 712 / 714 series where it was claimed they were designed to sound better than then popular offerings such as the TLOXX series implying at least that someone listened at some point during development. A technical review even went into how some traditionally important op amp parameter(s) such as CMRR was "sacrificed" to improve audio performance.
A reasonably current offering is the LME49720. In the data sheet it is stated "The LME49720 is part of the ultra-low distortion, low noise, high slew rate operational amplifier series optimized and fully specified for high performance, high fidelity applications." . I'd assume the designers listened during the development process but maybe you don't . And even if they did listen, they probably listen differently than you.
Could it be that the days of artisanal audio design are coming to an end? Where are the really high quality discrete components going to come from when everything seems to be going the way of cheap and tiny SMD?
"Where are the really high quality discrete components going to come from when everything seems to be going the way of cheap and tiny SMD?"
To answer directly: Small locally owned Asian companies drawing upon the growing number of STEM graduates and fanatical music lovers.
But we 'might' have to learn Chinese to begin to understand how to use the products. :-(
Link below:
I have a couple PCM1704 DACs from mainland China that seem to fit this bill.
And while it is fashionable to say that mostly the Chinese are exporting cheaply built copies of crap to the Audio world, remember we used to say the same thing about the Japanese.
> > And while it is fashionable to say that mostly the Chinese are exporting cheaply built copies of crap to the Audio world, remember we used to say the same thing about the Japanese. < <
Both you and the designer for Audio G_d are the prototypes of "Knowing just enough to be dangerous". Neither you nor he now nearly enough to know what you are talking about. Just complete misunderstandings of reality to seemingly make sense.
Sorry to not give a more detailed reply, but it would literally take an hour or more of typing to correct the misinformation in your post and your link. And to what end. You (and many more) would probably just dismiss it as "just your opinion".
How about knowing just enough to sound very, very good.
Remember when high fidelity was a hobby*--for ordinary folks and not just for the carriage trade? Well, the hobbyists that remain may be looking to head-fi and Computer Audiophile rather than to Stereophile for advice these days. Not to mention that our trust may be higher in the considered opinions of a large group of experienced hobbyists rather than a Stereophile reviewer who can't discern between a Benchmark and a PS Audio device.
Watch out for the likes of Audio G_d, Holo and LKS DACs. 90-95% of the best for 15-20% of the $$. And quite frankly, it doesn't matter what you and Atkinson think. We can purchase from across the world as easily as from across the street. Labor intensive goods for the rest of us will not be made in NA or Europe. That battle is over. And we will no longer pay big bucks for mediocre Asian goods with Western names on the face plates.
*"We know from our experience at the now-defunct Audiocraft magazine that there are plenty of people who are seriously interested in high fidelity as a hobby." J.G. Holt (Nov. 1, 1962)
> > And we will no longer pay big bucks for mediocre Asian goods with Western names on the face plates. < <
I guess that's why Classe is out of business. Lets's see, where should we draw the line? Is it OK to pay big bucks for great Western products> Is it OK to pay small bucks for mediocre Asian goods? Or were you hoping for great Western products for small bucks?
It's a problem. Even the gorgeous Devialet products have their chassis made from solid aluminum billet in China - maybe even the whole thing, I'm not sure.
I'm not one who permits the outstanding to stand in the way of the merely excellent. I have the sense that we're at opposite poles on such a question.
Great Western manufacture may require high prices because of high labor cost, in which case they will always play to a small market. Think Maserati.
Great Western manufacturers with a low labor cost component, but higher capital and intellectual property, have a choice of lower prices for more sales and lower overall margins, or fewer sales and high margins. Some examples of the former do direct selling. Great Western products for small bucks? That's entirely up to the producers. I just examine all the options.
Mediocre Asian goods, priced right, will always do well. Eg., Oppo.
But quickly emerging are Asian entrepreneurs turning out excellent, if not (by some standards) outstanding, components.* They have less expensive labor and are quickly accruing the intellectual capital.** They can certainly outsell the high labor cost and high margin Western producers. Apparently, they can sometimes outperform them. At the moment they seem to be selling principally in Asia, but if they develop the desire and wherewithal to scale, watch out.
*Of course they get absolutely no coverage in Stereophile, for obvious reasons.
**According to Forbes, China produces 4.7 million STEM graduates each year. India produces 2.6 million. The US produces 0.57 million.
> > Great Western manufacture may require high prices because of high labor cost, in which case they will always play to a small market. Think Maserati. < <
Um. Did you know that Maserati went out of business a long time ago and the brand name and assets were purchased by Ferrari? An did you know that Ferrari was bought by Fiat? And did you know that Fiat is subsidized by the Italian government? (Please don't start any flame wars because I have something out of sequence, or other irrelevant details.)
> > Mediocre Asian goods, priced right, will always do well. Eg., Oppo. < <
Um. Did you know that Oppo is made in China by slave labor, with no EPA, no OSHA, no unions, no nothing? Did you know that Oppo is subsidized by the Chinese government? Do you know why Oppo is subsidized?
If you don't know the answers to these questions, then the plan is working - keeping you distracted with "entertainment" so that you are unaware of what is really happening in the real world.
You had asked: "Is it OK to pay big bucks for great Western products? Is it OK to pay small bucks for mediocre Asian goods? Or were you hoping for great Western products for small bucks?"
I think I answered those questions. You have basically ignored.
But here you go on your soapbox far off-topic with little relevance to the subject. Why should I care who owns Maserati? Who bailed out GM? As for the Chinese subsidies, as I wrote elsewhere they were gifts to China from Bush, Clinton and their American corporate contributors.
As for China's workers, I think this 2013 summary by a Stanford researcher brings us closer to reality:
"The average assembly worker in Shenzhen now [2013] makes 2000 RMB ($328) per month. This is up 4 times from 500 RMB a few years ago. A basic staying-alive conversion is about (1 RMB to $1).
Though marginal by our living standards, this is the minimum wage that'll keep workers in the factories, albeit briefly. In China, worker unions are prohibited. But they live by their cellphones and have a vast network of instantaneous information. If factory X is going to pay WorkerA just .01 more per hour, he's relocating there before dinner.
Sometimes I feel that our fear of Chinese manufacturing taking all our jobs is a bit unfounded. Increasing environmental and humane policies in China are driving mass production labor to new countries in South Asia, Africa, etc. Unsexy, low paying, bulk manufacturing cannot survive there much longer."
As I wrote elsewhere, one has to compare to the conditions in Western countries at the dawn (and beyond) of our industrial revolution. Recall: Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, etc.
If I were you I would not accuse someone whom you do not know of being unaware of anything.
I think we are basically on the same page. Many of the audio manufacturing jobs have moved back to North America (NAFTA) - especially in car audio, which is the biggest profit center of them all - over half of Harman's revenue came from OEM car audio where there is guaranteed "churn". I'm unsure about what's happening now that Samsung has purchased Harman. Just a few weeks ago the entire AKG plant in Vienna was shut down as "redundant", and a group of around a dozen or so engineers decided to keep making microphones (at least) under a new corporate name, Austrian Audio. (see link below)
Here's another example - AudioQuest has the bulk of their products made in China. But when they released the DragonFly DAC series, everything is sourced and assembled in the US - excepting two parts - one is the injection-molded metal case and the other is a special USB connector with solid-silver pins. It's easier to track and control inventory when suppliers are in more-or-less the same time zone, and there aren't concerns about language barriers or proprietary information being "leaked" by some insider. Robotic assembly techniques remove a lot of hand labor from the equation, and the labor cost advantage goes away, while the problems with IP and secrecy are and shipping things half-way around the world are scary to the giant US corporations.
I used to be constantly amazed by the cultural differences I observed when traveling abroad. Unfortunately I can no longer travel by air. Even the British culture is surprisingly different from the US culture. Cheers!
Apparently OPPO was good enough for a couple of high end brands to put their equipment into their own boxes and sell them for 5 times more.
China and India produces STEM grads and we produce MBA's, a fancy name for bean counters. Our economy has been going downhill ever since the ascendence of the The MBA back in the '60s. Jobs are fleeing and the current political issues in the US can trace their origins to the end of those jobs. It's cheaper to build it over there so let our neighbors starve in their shacks while an elite develops that will need maids, gardeners and butlers to provide jobs to those left behind. America you are lost and headed to third world status.
When they discover the center of the universe, a lot of people will be disappointed to discover they are not it. ~ Bernard Bailey
I do know how to troll a bit, so there is that. ;-)
And I know that feedback steals the soul from the music.
I suppose that's why I mostly prefer vinyl, SET amps, horns and have always disliked SS amps and digital, without actually knowing quite why.
And of course I have no idea what the paper I linked to actually says, but I'm also pretty sure my DAC doesn't use op amps or negative feedback, which was the point of my post.
OK, plus it was a pretty good troll, wasn't it? ;-)
I have had the chance to directly compare my Audio-GD DAC to PSAudio's Direct Stream. Unlike some reviewers who we won't embarrass my naming because they sometimes read these posts, I could hear a difference and for 3x the $$$ I'm likely staying put.
But the Chinese are coming.
I'm retired now, but while working I had the chance to spend some time in mainland factories and...
They are coming for us all!
Thank you for being honest.
> > I'm retired now, but while working I had the chance to spend some time in mainland factories and...
They are coming for us all! < <
I agree 100%. The Chinese culture generally thinks in terms of centuries and millennia, not in "quarterly reports" as do the mega-corporations that currently control the US.
China was royally screwed over, first by the British, and then by the US, over a century ago. They want their revenge, and they will likely get it - even if it costs the lives a millions of their own peasants. After all they know they have too great of a population - which is why they for decades instituted a "one child per family" law that had terrible consequence. (None of these kinds of things are "unforeseen" - it's just that the "leaders" were too arrogant to properly think things through and find the *easily* foreseen consequences. I'll stop there as this is not a political forum.)
So yes, "the Chinese are coming", and in ways that we in the US will *not* be happy about - and this is far from limited to "high-end audio".
... "I suppose that's why I mostly prefer vinyl............."
Isn't a tonne of negative feedback utilized to linearize cutting head response? Uh-oh!
> > Isn't a tonne of negative feedback utilized to linearize cutting head response? < <
Absolutely true.
There are some places where the sonic effects of negative feedback are far less deleterious to sound quality than other places. For reasons I only partially understand, vacuum tubes (for example) are far less damaged by the presence of negative feedback than solid-state devices.
Yet in every single case I have heard, when the negative feedback is removed (such as has become relatively common among modern vacuum-tube preamps) the sound quality improves tremendously in terms of coherency and overall musical believability - and most importantly of all, in the ability to emotionally engage us in the *music* itself.
So while I cannot deny that vinyl LPs made with high-feedback cutterheads can make great sounding records, my natural question is "what if someone were able to make a cutterhead free from the resonances found in "normal" cutterheads, so that negative feedback were no longer required?"
My guess is that the results would be truly staggering, and a huge step closer to an all-analog magnetic tape recorder - which to the best of my knowledge has never been made with zero-feedback electronics either. Which leads to my next "what if" question....
...They'll sell us back as audiophile grade PIO caps the PCBs we sent to them for recycling/disposal. True environmental justice.
> > Could it be that the days of artisanal audio design are coming to an end? Where are the really high quality discrete components going to come from when everything seems to be going the way of cheap and tiny SMD? < <
Could be. Just like with MP3, cheap and tiny SMD circuits may be "good enough" even for audiophiles.
I don't like any kind of op-amp, discrete or integrated. The entire basis of an op-amp is that it was the first electronic computer - an analog computer, kind of like an electronic slide rule. The name "operational amplifier" refers to the fact that the amplifier can perform mathematical operations such as adding (summing), subtracting (differencing), and with more work, multiplying and dividing. Analog voltages would be input and the analog computer would output an analog voltage that could be read with an analog meter.
The basis for operation of an op-amp is the use of negative feedback. To reduce the (inevitable) errors, the open-loop gain should be as high as possible (theoretically infinite), so that the signals are controlled by the external feedback components. One problem is that high gain requires limited bandwidth to ensure stability once the feedback loop is closed. In the end the "op-amp" really acts as an integrator - not an amplifier.
It's almost a random accident that they even work for audio use, but in my experience, they don't sound very good. I know that there are all kinds of mathematical proofs that show when the circuit will be stable, and what the "phase margin" will be at the unity gain point and all of that. But in the end, all negative feedback designs are trying to correct for an error that has already happened. Which unfortunately violates causality.
My experience is that negative feedback confers three advantages:
1) Lowered amounts of measured distortion with steady-state test tones.
2) Reduced noise levels besides the inherent noise of the input device.
3) Reduced output impedance.
However zero feedback circuits sound much more musically natural in my experience. The challenge for me has been to create circuits with sufficiently low levels of distortion, noise, and output impedance without falling back on the crutch of negative feedback. And I believe I have been successful in achieving this. I am very happy with the results of my efforts and find them to sound better than other circuits that achieve comparable (or even better) measured performance, yet the absence of feedback creates a more "organic" presentation of the music. Just my experience. YMMV.
As I've noted in other posts, most loudspeakers are horribly colored with many audible resonances, largely due to resonances in the diaphragms themselves. While these resonances are typically damped fairly well so that they tend to measure "flat", the energy stored in a damped resonance is merely spread out over time at a lower level. The same total amount of stored energy is the same, whether the resonance is damped or not.
There are only a handful of loudspeaker models ever made that operate in true pistonic mode throughout the entire audio band. That means that 99.9% of all speakers are audibly colored, and that is one reason there is so much disagreement on electronics and cables - people are trying to build a house of cards based on balancing colorations. But if you ever have a chance to hear a fully zero-feedback electronics chain driving a pair of speakers operating in purely pistonic mode, the first order colorations will all be disappeared. It can be disconcerting as to how real things can sound on a system such as this. All genres of music, with various qualities of recording will all still be musically enjoyable. That is the ultimate goal for me.
The Giya's use a dome midrange -but so do (many) horns. Even ATC (a 'waveguide') uses a dome.I don't know if this makes them 'pistonic', but it appears to...
Edits: 11/04/17 11/04/17
You're getting warmer...
nt
And I don't agree with much 'Reggie' has to say!
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