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Review and Measurements of Ayre CODEX DAC & Amp

countbasey

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thanks for the links. interesting difference of opinion. i remember now that i read the test from ja before i purchased.
“As I have come to expect from the Ayre Acoustics design team, the Codex offers excellent measured performance.”—John Atkinson
 

Daverz

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thanks for the links. interesting difference of opinion. i remember now that i read the test from ja before i purchased.
“As I have come to expect from the Ayre Acoustics design team, the Codex offers excellent measured performance.”—John Atkinson

That was a common JA trick. If he wanted a piece with mediocre measurements to come off well, he'd just proclaim the measurements to be excellent. If he wanted to to trash something, he'd pick out some trivial detail that "puzzled" him. Perhaps it wasn't even conscious.

The actual measurements do agree AFAICT.
 
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Xulonn

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“As I have come to expect from the Ayre Acoustics design team, the Codex offers excellent measured performance.”—John Atkinson

What does this imply about John Atkinson? Is he truly incompetent? Or is he a tool of the Voodoo HiFi Manufacturers Association?

Or perhaps Amir is totally incompetent, since he cannot measure pace and rhythm?

1555133481244.png
 

Blumlein 88

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What does this imply about John Atkinson? Is he truly incompetent? Or is he a tool of the Voodoo HiFi Manufacturers Association?

Or perhaps Amir is totally incompetent, since he cannot measure pace and rhythm?

View attachment 24850
Amir is not incompetent. He is simply a soul-less refugee from Microsoft that can't perceive simple pace and rhythm by listening. Otherwise he wouldn't need measurements for his reviews. Like all the competent audiophile journalists normally operate.

Oh shucks who are we kidding. :)

On JA I'll go with option B. I think he is basically competent.
 

cjfrbw

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Very strange to listen to "Jude" on HeadFi go on about how each iteration from prototype just got 'better and better'. So much sales BS, now migrated from high end audio into headphone-i-sphere. Sounds like Amir couldn't rip the headphones out of this thing fast enough.
 
OP
amirm

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thanks for the links. interesting difference of opinion. i remember now that i read the test from ja before i purchased.
“As I have come to expect from the Ayre Acoustics design team, the Codex offers excellent measured performance.”—John Atkinson
It is shocking as he measures second harmonic at just -60 dB which would set the SINAD at best at 60 dB. His intermodulation distortion shows all kinds of distortions too:

616AyCodfig08.jpg


Two tones are input and all of this shows up and this is excellent measurement? What would be a poor one then?

And this is supposed to look like a sine wave:

616AyCodfig06.jpg


I don't run this test anymore but when I did, devices like Topping DX7 produced this:

index.php


Which has more rhythm and pace???
 

Veri

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It is shocking as he measures second harmonic at just -60 dB which would set the SINAD at best at 60 dB. His intermodulation distortion shows all kinds of distortions too:

616AyCodfig08.jpg


Two tones are input and all of this shows up and this is excellent measurement? What would be a poor one then?

And this is supposed to look like a sine wave:

616AyCodfig06.jpg


I don't run this test anymore but when I did, devices like Topping DX7 produced this:

index.php


Which has more rhythm and pace???

But which causes the most pleasing space-time distortion?? /s

No honestly it's most often devices like this that would dare claim "hear the music the way it is meant to be heard" :oops::rolleyes:
 

March Audio

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It is shocking as he measures second harmonic at just -60 dB which would set the SINAD at best at 60 dB. His intermodulation distortion shows all kinds of distortions too:

616AyCodfig08.jpg


Two tones are input and all of this shows up and this is excellent measurement? What would be a poor one then?

And this is supposed to look like a sine wave:

616AyCodfig06.jpg


I don't run this test anymore but when I did, devices like Topping DX7 produced this:

index.php


Which has more rhythm and pace???

I like the sine waveform view, can you bring it back ? :)

Whenever I see the phrase PRAT used by audiophiles it sends me into an uncontrollable rage. It is totally meaningless audiophile bollocks.. It only describes the user of the phrase.

Urban dictionary.

TOP DEFINITION
prat
Basically someone whos a major idiot, or is delusional and dumb. Acts against logic and thinks hes self-righteous. AKA: Major dumbass.


Good example: Percy from HP and from 5th book
"You stupid prat!"


2
prat
n. English term, primarily used in United Kingdom. The literal meaning is "bottom" or "rump"; aka backside, buttocks, sacrum, tail end. This lends itself to the slang meaning of "ass," or "clueless person of arrogant stupidity." It is not always directly translatable to American slang. For example, if you used the term "prat hat" in the U.K., you would likely be laughed out of town by the locals.
I can't believe what an overbearing idiot he is. What a prat!


3
prat
a self-aggrandizing, pompous fuck. Someone who is full of themselves and, almost invariably, stupid as well. With a hint of 'deluded.'
"I'm getting really tired of listening to Vince brag about his conquests. What a prat."


4
prat
Behaving stupidly, or looking stupid. A British slang word, similar to idiot.
Wearing a yellow bowtie made Bob look a right prat.
 
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March Audio

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If this is a democratic process, I'd like to vote against it.
The sine wave measurement provides a quick overview of how a device performs, but tells us absolutely nothing as far as audibility is concerned. It's simply redundant with a full set of measurements.
And that's precisely the point. It provides a quick overview of resolution and noise. Not all readers of the forum understand the extended graphs, or numbers.
 

Shadrach

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This is great. It confirms all my expectation bias.:D
So, what is going on? Ayre is one of the audiophile darling companies. There products drop neatly into the realm of 'of course you'll need a truly resolving system to appreciate the finer aspects of our products'.
As far as I'm concerned amirm can't test enough of these 'state of the art, hi end audio' products quickly enough. I have a funny feeling that an awful lot of them won't perform much better. The reviewers that endorse these products; deaf or crooked, or deluded?
I bet lots here still read Stereophile.:facepalm:
 

Cortes

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More fun:
"In this article, I will evaluate a DAC whose arrival I have been eagerly awaiting for many months: the Ayre QX-8. As I mentioned in my introduction, I am a huge fan of Ayre DACs. My current DAC, the Ayre Codex, has proved a stellar performer, and I regard the flagship QX-5 Twenty, as a reference DAC, one of the best I've heard. Depending on your point of view, the QX-8 should either extend the qualities of the Codex to new heights, or bring the lofty sonics of the QX-5 to a more affordable price point. Ideally, both. Either way, the QX-8 has big shoes to fill!"

https://audiophilestyle.com/ca/reviews/my-quest-for-a-new-dac-part-2-ayre-qx-8-r737/
 

Soniclife

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And that's precisely the point. It provides a quick overview of resolution and noise. Not all readers of the forum understand the extended graphs, or numbers.
I like it too, it really illustrates how mangled the waveform can look from some products, and really kills the lie that somehow this is closer to the original music.
 

anmpr1

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As far as I'm concerned amirm can't test enough of these 'state of the art, hi end audio' products quickly enough. I have a funny feeling that an awful lot of them won't perform much better. The reviewers that endorse these products; deaf or crooked, or deluded?
I bet lots here still read Stereophile.:facepalm:

I doubt the reviewers are deaf, but they should be required to visit an audiologist and then publish their audiograms. Deluded? Reviewers that hear big differences in cables and magic amplifier bricks are most likely true believers. Crooked? Magazines are generally supported by ads. I don't know Stereophile's situation; maybe they are subscriber supported, but that would surprise me. Follow the money.

How did all this come about? In the early days of hi-fi the 'high end' was relatively expensive (McIntosh, Marantz) but you generally got good engineering for your dollar. And dealer support. Other more mass marketed stuff (factory built or kit--Dyna, Scott, HK, Fisher) was generally good quality at the price point. By the early '70s, Japanese manufacturing (sans import tariffs?) put affordable American companies out of business. Either that, or they outsourced production to Japan. The press? Some argued that Pioneer, Sansui, Kenwood, Japanese Marantz bought up all the ads, and got all the reviews. Even if it was true (ask Gordon Holt), most electronic reviews concentrated on specs, and in the spec department a Japanese receiver or integrated amp was, for the most part, good value. Also, the FTC rule on amp power advertising tended to standardize things (of course, to the detriment of tube amps, which were never designed for the 'preconditioning' phase of the power test).

The emergence of an American cottage 'high end' industry allowed American hi-fi to survive. But in a mutated and distorted form. Things moved quickly from engineering, to whatever someone could pay. It seemed a better business model to sell a hundred units for ten times the price of units that sold in the tens of thousands, to average folk. The question was, how in the heck could you sell something that cost ten times what something else did? Whatever could be the selling feature?

Mark Levinson was the Big Kahuna in all this. Before Mark, even an Audio Research tube preamp was kind of affordable; you could even buy a Dyna Stereo 70 'upgrade' kit from them. Mark changed all that. Of course he couldn't tell you why his preamp was better than a Pioneer. Only that it 'sounded' better. His trick was getting Harry Pearson, Peter Aczel (in his earliest iteration) and the Stereophile crowd on board. Aczel was the biggest ML supporter. It seemed that anything Mark sold, Aczel would buy, and then proclaim the 'best' there was. Until the next upgrade--then it was wash, rinse, and repeat. Pearson, for his part, was more a tube guy, etc. But what ever it was, it was all high priced. In order to justify it, specs were declared either meaningless, or elusive. No longer was it harmonic distortion. You now had to check transient intermodulation distortion, and other esoteric electrical goodies. Eventually even these were abandoned as having no bearing on 'sound'. A 'new' vocabulary was invented in order to figure it out. So now, instead of distortion, we have things like pace and rhythm.

However all that was and is, at least with a Levinson amplifier you more or less got/get what you paid for. A beast that could drive any known speaker, and that would probably last a long long time. Plus a dealer that would give you a loaner when it conks out. Back in the day, once you bought your mail order Pioneer from Warehouse Sound Company in San Luis Obispo, you were on your own. Probably the same with modern-day mail order, like Crutchfield, although they have a 60 day return policy. The scene is littered with defunct high end companies that were once the beez kneez, but now are forgotten. I can understand sort of buying an expensive amplifier, if you have hard to drive speakers. But I can't understand something like this Ayre Codex. Something like this would make Mark Levinson cringe. At least his stuff had class.
 
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Frank Dernie

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I wonder if its instructive for the group here to discuss what might be the parts of the euphonic colorations which make us feel that something that measures poorly sounds pleasing. I felt that the soundstage was nice and wide and deep.
Many years ago when looking into why LPs didn't sound too bad despite their relatively (to CD) poor technical performance. The most memorable result was that adding noise increased the apparent size of the stereo image.
 

FrantzM

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It took some time to develop but High End Audio is a luxury market. IOW there is no relationship between price and performance. No Patek Philippe keeps time as well as any Casio watch. Patek may even be less durable.

In Life things are not black and white. Rather they're shade of grays. There are perhaps some sincere reviewers in the High End Audio magazines who actually believe what (BS) they write. I don't think they're the majority. Cynicism is part of life and you have it in High End Audio.

I would label JA a cynic. IMO he knows better but his interests lie in muddling the waters to present an appearance of objectivity.
High End Audio companies cannot survive without the audiophile press and vice versa. Call it symbiotic, I call it flawed.

It is a joy that there web sites such as ASR. Our site has become a kind of beacon. A reference and a feared one at that.
 
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