Anybody want a laugh?

Understanding how networks work is just that: a primer on how it’s designed to work and not how it will sound if noise is introduced at some juncture. Knowing how it works doesn’t preclude that something poorly designed won’t have an effect.

I have a funny feeling that there are some who actually believe that since it’s just ones and zeros, that they’re so small as to be unimportant. That’s fine for printing text but reproducing sound is another matter.

Here’s a link that shows just how fragile those ones and zeros are since they are an electrical representation of them and are just as susceptible to damage as anything else in the audio chain:https://6moons.com/audioreview_articles/audiocadabra/

Just the first two pages or so are needed to be read and even though the review is on a USB cable, the primer at the beginning still applies, I would think.

All the best,
Nonoise

janehamble,

’My philosophy about these things...if I need to ’blind test’ or switch the product in and out of my system, to double-check if it’s really improving anything - then it’s not doing enough for me.’


Does not compute.

If it’s so stunningly obvious to you then surely you’d welcome any comparison - sighted or unsighted.

Wouldn’t you?

For many years I also ’knew’ my Marantz CD player was better than my Sony MP3 player as a source for my main system.

Then one day, just for easy access to 64GB of stored music/playlists and unwillingness to keep getting up to change discs I wired up the MP3 player to my Creek amplifier with a bog standard RCA to to Sony connector (as that was all that was available).

All went well but I was a little concerned with the sound quality. It somehow sounded flat and dull to my ears.

To console myself that I shouldn’t be expecting too much from a mere £100 MP3 player I decided to compare some tracks with those ripped from the original CDs. I think they were mostly Doors tracks taken from Morrison Hotel and LA Woman and maybe a few from U2s Achtung Baby.

The next 15 minutes left me feeling very strange indeed.

Each and every comparison between the CD and MP3 output, with levels matched by ear, proved to be indistinguishable from one another.

I kind of felt sick and confused for a while. This was going in the face of everything I knew about audio - and I thought after 20 years I knew a few things.

I even tried to alter the EQ settings on the portable device but they had no effect on the feed going to the amplifier.

Then I remembered some of the stuff that I’d seen mentioned occasionally hidden away in the margins of the audio press. One such name was the writer / enthusiast Peter Aczel.

I managed to find some pdf copies of his magazine The Audio Critic, and then began to take a closer look.

That was my first steps on the road to Damascus, or at least its audio equivalent.

It was shocking, it was heretical, and it was disturbing. It was worse than Proust’s Marcel finding out his girlfriend was a lesbian and that his macho uncle a masochistic homosexual. Ok, maybe quite not that bad, but on the same page.

Yet some 10 years later I still have to find something he wrote that I know to be a falsehood.

Sadly it’s unsurprisingly getting harder and harder to access those magazines now, far too many vested interests who’d wish the name Peter Aczel to disappear from history, but you can still find the odd reference here and there.

In a perfect world I’d love to see decent reviewers such as Steve Guttenberg, who must have known Peter, at least discuss his writings and opinions, but I guess the business politics of the industry doesn’t work that way.

Aczel doesn’t seem to have made many friends in the audio press and in a world drowning in euphemism, he wasn’t one to pull his punches.

Here’s just a snippet of Aczel’s work. Once again calling out the lies that seem to pervade the world of consumer audio.

https://www.ecoustics.com/articles/ten-biggest-lies-audio/


https://www.biline.ca/audio_critic/audio_critic.htm

"Financial interests" link in the beginning of above 6moons article lists what people do in their lives, but does not really state that they have no conflict of interest in this particular matter. A little unusual approach, one could say.

There are one or two members here who personally knew Peter Aczel and he had notoriously very bad hearing, to the point where he really couldn't hear readily discernible differences that everyone else could.

Back in the day, before I knew that, I read The Audio Critic and took solace in my modest system and wrote off all the more expensive stuff as just that: expensive. I know better now.

All the best,
Nonoise

I make my own amplifiers and get to choose to over-design: resistors rated for several times the wattage they will dissipate, Polypropylene power supply capacitors rated at more than twice the voltage (2.3 kV rating foe a 1 kV power supply) transformers chosen the same way. I don't have to worry about electrolytic capacitors' limited life expectancy. I avoid marketed junk physics for cables costing thousands of dollars.