High resolution digital is dead. The best DAC's killed it.


Something that came as a surprise to me is how good DAC's have gotten over the past 5-10 years.

Before then, there was a consistent, marked improvement going from Redbook (44.1/16) to 96/24 or higher.

The modern DAC, the best of them, no longer do this. The Redbook playback is so good high resolution is almost not needed. Anyone else notice this?
erik_squires
Actually let me look for old threads on this, and then if not, let's have a group listening test.

See who cares, or thinks this is at all an earth moving issue.

Best,
E
Polarity has some effect, but it has more to do with pressurization of the room than imaging IME.

If you want to properly test this and you have balanced analog cables in your system somewhere, then there is a simple tool:

Just solder a female and male XLR connector together and connect pins 2 and 3 between them.  Make 2.  Insert this into your cabling.

Test with the same track, with and without the adapter.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
This just in! From Clark Johnsen, author of the book on Absolute Polarity, The Wood Effect.

From Clark’s Diary over on Positive Feedback from some time in cyberspace,


Masked by random combination with other distortions in the music reproduction chain, an unsuspected major contributor has lain hidden: Aural sensitivity to "phase inversion", the Wood effect.

Musical instruments normally create compression waves in their attack transients. Electronics, however, often invert that natural, positive polarity to negative, unnatural rarefaction as emitted from loudspeakers, thus diminishing physical and aesthetic impact. The term Absolute Polarity uniquely describes the correct arrival to the ear of acoustic wavefronts from loudspeakers, with respect to actual musical instruments.

Wrong polarity, when isolated, is obvious to almost everyone. Its present neglect results primarily from habitual disregard for linear phase response in loudspeakers, due largely to the erroneous auditory theory of Helmholtz.



So many recordings were made or mastered in reverse polarity.  Here's an excellent expose of polarity issues pertaining to both equipment and recordings.  https://iamyuanwu.wordpress.com/audio/audio-direction-ltd-adl/adl-absolute-polarity/

Equipment is often in reverse polarity, with speakers being a major culprit, both reversed or drivers in and out of polarity to each other.

Even two sides of an LP could be different (1 side correct, 1 side wrong).