What is 'incompetent digital' ?

[Opus111]

It rather depends - USB has two speeds in relation to DACs, 'full' and 'high'. Doing isolation for full speed USB is cheap and simple. For high speed, not at all simple. High speed is needed for above 96kHz sample rates.

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

Thanks.

 

[amirm]

A question primarily to Sonny but everyone please feel free to chip in.
Do you often see what you would consider poor design in audio equipment?
What would you consider poor design, would omitting galvanic isolation from a USB DAC be poor practise?
Keith.

It is hard to find poor design a lot of high-end gear because by definition they have ample money to throw at the problem. They can still screw things up but the main reason that happens, i.e. keep the cost to the minimum, makes it harder. This is with respect to electronics. I think in speakers there is a lot more opportunity to mess things up.

 

[Ethan Winer]

Incompetent digital was the CD from the 80s, and till roughly the mid 90s. ...Sounded real real bad...no life...dysfunctional...disconnected...disjointed.

I thought I posted this recently, but maybe not:

Early Digital

Even the earliest A/D/A devices had very high fidelity, better than any analog tape deck, and vastly better than any LP. Any problems with "brittle" or "harsh" sound etc on early CDs were likely due to using the wrong master tapes.

--Ethan

 

[NorthSky]

My accent was mainly on the recordings, yes Ethan. The software (Compact Disc) was manufactured with several defects; pinholes, discoloration, melting of the label layer (most important surface), ...brief the CD was an inferior medium badly produced.
And then there were the music recordings they put on them CDs; using Sony and Soundstream digital recorders. Bits were fewer, and DACs mediocre @ best.
And like you just said above...the sources...the "bad" master tapes or simply poor copies. They did not care about quality, they cared about selling the NEW forever medium, the Compact Disc.

I was relatively an early adopter, and before that I had an extensive music collection on cassette tapes.
And before cassettes I was of course big on album records (vinyl LPs), and still big on them on the dawn of CDs...in the mid 80s.
But my turntables were not high end, they were very modest. What was the bulk of my investment was the LPs...I started buying them in the later 60s and through the mid 80s, and back again in the later part of the 90s and early 00s. My love affair with the analog LP never truly died. It's just that I cannot afford a nice $33,000 TT. But I can afford SACDs (hybrid multichannel) and SACD players. Yes, it's digital and it's competent.

I have an extensive CD music collection with many titles from the 80s and 90s...and the majority of these recordings are "bad", very bad sounding.
Today there are zillions of places where they remaster old classics, and they sound mucho better. Because they use better gear and better masters.
...In both the digital Compact Disc format, and also on analog vinyl.

Yes, "incompetence" to me is the rushing of life. ...Like they did with the digital CD @ the beginning.

The CD players...today it's hard to get a bad one. The DACs are much better, the transports more reliable, the laser lens better tracking, and some higher end ones with all better parts; caps, resistors, power supply (toroid transformers), quality circuit boards, wiring, shorter paths, better/solider jacks (tiffany), XLR balanced, etc.
And the difference between a $200 Compact Disc player and a $800 one, you can hear. ...And from the $800 to a $8,000 one I bet you could too.
And finally, from the $8,000 CD player to a $80,000 one, I just don't know because I can only afford to read about and not own and salivate all over.

* Now I'll check your above link ...

 

[NorthSky]

It rather depends - USB has two speeds in relation to DACs, 'full' and 'high'. Doing isolation for full speed USB is cheap and simple. For high speed, not at all simple. High speed is needed for above 96kHz sample rates.

• http://www.userbenchmark.com/Faq/USB-30--40-release-dates-and-max-speeds/1

- http://superuser.com/questions/138845/speed-comparison-between-usb-2-0-usb-3-0-and-sata-and-firewire

 

[Sal1950]

I thought I posted this recently, but maybe not:

Early Digital

Even the earliest A/D/A devices had very high fidelity, better than any analog tape deck, and vastly better than any LP. Any problems with "brittle" or "harsh" sound etc on early CDs were likely due to using the wrong master tapes.

--Ethan

I agree and have a couple of the early CDs you mention. I have no big issues with the sound of most early CDs and found their sound has improved over the years along with a few upgrades in my CD player/DAC. Today when buying older music off ebay I will choose a CD from 80-90s era over a later master unless it is something special like a Wilson/Hoffman remaster. As a general rule I find the not highly compressed older releases to sound superior.

 

[Sal1950]

My accent was mainly on the recordings, yes Ethan. The software (Compact Disc) was manufactured with several defects; pinholes, discoloration, melting of the label layer (most important surface), ...brief the CD was an inferior medium badly produced.
.

I had a lot of CDs from the mid-later 80s and still buy a few today. Never ran into any the developed issues due to age and to hear the talk from years back they were all going do die from CD rot. I've yet to run into a single case.
When I was moving to FL in 2011 I ripped all my LPs to my hard drive. Most had not been played in many years but were carefully and properly stored. I ran into a number that would skip or give out loud pops. When I examined the grooves with a magnifier I would see little pits in the vinyl that I blamed on some kind of outgassing from the 30-40 year old vinyl?

 

[NorthSky]

The manufacturing plants of my CDs from the 80s and 90s (many of then...CINRAM, and others), were so bad that they should have been sued for delivering inferior products that were self-destructive...a la Mission: Impossible. In Canada, the early digital adopters were mistreated and subjected to frustration and great stress.
The people who stick with analog vinyls were much more relaxed in general, and addicted as well.

Each decade we've been through since the 40s and to this day, had its fair load of challenges.
...Some very tough periods in the past.

In the year 2016 (now today), it is still tough on an economic and social level...just look @ all the world's crisis, even here in North America, totally unbelievable!
So it's a real good thing that we now have Tidal, Blu-ray, CD/SACD, LP, ...music that can sound very high resolution good...to balance it all with this crazy world.

We have to still be careful though with our sources, because some digital hi-res music downloads of the internet are no more hi-res than 8-track tapes.
Yeah, digital incompetence is still very remnant today. ...And not just on the software side but also on the hardware side with unfinished products, wrong program software implementations, bad quality control (products failing, breaking, ...), bad parts employed. ...And contributing to "digital incompetence" because of human's fault.

The audio science is our best knowledge asset to become aware and prepared. ...All in the service of high fidelity music reproduction...our passionate art.

We are much less crazy, the audio people, than the rest. But within our own circle we do have a lot learn about respect.
Because without respect we are less than nothing, we are nobody. ...No need of a science degree to be technically aware of this true fact.

 

[Opus111]

About three days ago I posted up this link : http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/digital-line-level/288078-bricasti-m1-processor-modification.html and invited questions. None so far have been forthcoming (coyness? don't say its so!) so I'll point out a couple of things I noticed from this, as the thread's about 'digital incompetence'.

Firstly incompetence isn't all-or-nothing, even when its digital. Its a matter of degree - clearly the Bricasti M1 ticks a lot of boxes in terms of sounding relatively decent and also highly respectable measurements.

Yet the designers still missed something - the treble quality as reported by Art V in that post. What was responsible for the sub-par HF? My hypothesis is that it was excessive power supply noise on the AD843 I/V converter rails.

 

[NorthSky]

So the product, from another diy's viewpoint, wasn't optimized to its full potential...or you could say...incompetently realized ?

 

[Opus111]

'Incompetence' sounds a bit harsh in this context because it may be interpreted as a black/white thing where as I use it in shades of grey. So yeah I like your 'not fully optimized' or 'not reaching its fullest potential' much better.

 

[NorthSky]

I tried to de-emphasize the "incompetently realized" but I failed.

The Opp0 BDP-105 BR player cost $999-1,099 (MSRP). ModWright optimizes it with tubes (premium), and a separate power supply, do some surgical work inside.
Roughly $4,000 later it sounds marvelous...competing with $10,000-30,000 players.

Did Oppo "incompetently" missed the digital reaping benefits? No, they competently delivered a product @ a price point.
That's why it was a question I was asking.

 

[Mivera]

I tried to de-emphasize the "incompetently realized" but I failed.

The Opp0 BDP-105 BR player cost $999-1,099 (MSRP). ModWright optimize it with tubes (premium), and a separate power supply, do some surgical work inside.
Roughly $4,000 later it sounds marvelous...competing with $10,000-30,000 players.

Did Oppo "incompetently" missed the digital reaping benefits? No, they competently delivered a product @ a price point.
That's why it was a question I was asking.

Does it measure better after the ModWright upgrades?

 

[amirm]

About three days ago I posted up this link : http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/digital-line-level/288078-bricasti-m1-processor-modification.html and invited questions. None so far have been forthcoming (coyness? don't say its so!) so I'll point out a couple of things I noticed from this, as the thread's about 'digital incompetence'.

Firstly incompetence isn't all-or-nothing, even when its digital. Its a matter of degree - clearly the Bricasti M1 ticks a lot of boxes in terms of sounding relatively decent and also highly respectable measurements.

Yet the designers still missed something - the treble quality as reported by Art V in that post. What was responsible for the sub-par HF? My hypothesis is that it was excessive power supply noise on the AD843 I/V converter rails.

He is saying he measured the output and didn't see a change in distortion. Without measurements and/or bias controlled test, we don't know if his observation is valid. Heck, I would take even scope output of the power supply rails showing a difference. Without any confirmation it is hard to put value on the changes he has made.

 

[Opus111]

How do you know making the Oppo design more competent would impact the price point significantly? For example if they're using opamp I/V (I haven't checked to see if they are, but its a common incompetence area in digital) then adding current sources to the outputs is negligible on parts. The transistors to do that cost at retail (i.e. on Taobao) about half a US cent each. Eight such would be needed for a balanced I/V stage. So a BOM cost increase of $0.04 at retail. Plus extra PCB area of course.

 

[Opus111]

Without measurements and/or bias controlled test, we don't know if his observation is valid.

Sure his observation could be due to placebo. I'm not going to put forward that hypothesis because its not a falsifiable one (hence not science), rather search for the electronic cause which I can verify.

 

[NorthSky]

Ethan recently deployed the phrase 'competent digital is audibly transparent' so what are members ideas on how to spot incompetent (i.e. not transparent) digital? Does incompetent digital have any defining traits?

I'll kick off by pointing out a couple of things I see as incompetent in much digital. Firstly S-D DACs which introduce noise modulation when fed with high crest factor (i.e. music-like) signals. Secondly digital filters (known as half-band) which violate the Nyquist criteria by only being -6dB at that frequency. Hence introduce imaging/aliasing artifacts.

Any others?

Miserable tiny power supply. The transformer is the size of a cubic squared quarter....you know...with that plastic yellow strip.

* Beefy main power transformer (toroid), separate multiple regulated power supplies (a dozen), ...are essential to good digital dynamics and punchy ambiance.
So all those cheap plastic BR players are good mainly with a Fisher soundbar under your CRT TV.

But hey, that's why they cost only hundred bucks.

 

[amirm]

That's fine but let's have the micro-measurement that shows that improvement. That would verify that.

 

[Opus111]

Miserable tiny power supply. The transformer is the size of cubic squared quarter....you know...with that plastic yellow strip.

A small power supply isn't necessarily a miserable one - the trafo size scales down with operating frequency. I doubt a very small trafo with yellow transformer tape on it is going to be operating at mains freq.