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2022-04-24 On this day I heard music free of distortion for the first time in my life!

Glitch

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Joined
Apr 4, 2022
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Queens, NY
A bold claim, I know but I fall back on measurements showing that distortions of my recently acquired gear test below the threshold of hearing.
A DAC with at least 16bit resolution - THD < 96dB.
An amplifier with a noise floor below the range of human hearing - THD < 120dB.
Speakers/headphones measuring below the audible musical distortion - THD < 66dB (between 1-4kHz)

What can be said really? It's transformative! 99.9% of humanity have never heard music without distortion. Yes, there's live acoustic music but what about synthesizers or electric guitars, people have no real basis of what they sound like because they are always played through a distorting speaker. But more importantly hardly anyone has ever heard undistorted bass. I think this will be disruptive and not only in the audiophile scene because this level of fidelity has become cheaper and more available.

What does it sound like? It's like having a magnifying device in your field of vision that can zoom on any minute detail you wish without resolution degradation. Every little thing becomes significant. I find that audio is most intelligible at a certain window of loudness so you can you use the volume control to really focus on various details of the song by placing them in your most discernible loudness band. You hear new sounds in your whole music collection. Badly recorded music sounds good too because some of the dynamics are restored. Other distorting gear sounds better too because now your brain has a basis to reconstruct the music back to what it should sound like.

My endless thanks to Amir and members of this forum!
 
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