Can different CD *transports* sound different - when fed into the same DAC?

[MAB]

Nope, it wasn't so much a true inquiry, you were facetious, and I responded in facetious matter as well.

Yeah totally my ears are out of date : )

Maybe I should have not alluded, but kept as I did, in a joking tone, maybe that didn't come across. I just don't have any interest in discussing this past this point. I find that both of you came out of the gate swinging. Cool, I'mma exit stage left.

Have a great day.

I often post in a woodworker's guild forum that I appreciate the the look and feel of plastic.

 

[Deleted member 70178]

I’m always amazed that people spend so little time actually reading a forum before jumping in with what would be understood here as unevidenced. Ten minutes of rooting around here would have revealed that. Maybe even reading the same thread.

And then they use being corrected as an opportunity to deride that generally held view in the forum, and the people who hold it, pretending that any mere challenge to their claim is an affront to their listening skills/credentials/experience/whatever worthy of condescension.

Rick “was not being facetious, but was trying to politely expose the lack of controlled evaluation (or even understanding of how CD transports work), if there was a lack” Denney

My humble peasant apologies Rick "the royal personage who presides of thee forum" Denney.

Show me the evidence that people have the time to post and read thousands of comments.

I think you are being a lil' grumpy bully in the digital sandlot. I already said that I was joking about the whole comment ears and all. New to forum? Yes. Read 1000s of posts? No. Are you amazed that a baby can't drive a car?

"Why would it sound any different? Was the 6000 reading the data incorrectly? I'm surprised it could play any music at all if it was injecting enough errors in the data stream to be audible." - this wasn't facetious? Get over yourself.

 

[MAB]

My humble peasant apologies Rick "the royal personage who presides of thee forum" Denney.

Show me the evidence that people have the time to post and read thousands of comments.

I think you are being a lil' grumpy bully in the digital sandlot. I already said that I was joking about the whole comment ears and all. New to forum? Yes. Read 1000s of posts? No. Are you amazed that a baby can't drive a car?

"Why would it sound any different? Was the 6000 reading the data incorrectly? I'm surprised it could play any music at all if it was injecting enough errors in the data stream to be audible." - this wasn't facetious? Get over yourself.

Rick is a funny and helpful guy.
Not sure what to make of your posts.
You claim you are using a joking tone, I am not reading that vibe.
Apologies if you are in fact engaging the forum, and not trolling.

 

[DonR]

Funny enough it scratched a CD for the first time (Tricky-Falling to Pieces). Must have heard my praise

Another unit is coming to me next week, I'll try it and see.

In the mean time my Shanling ET3 arrived, and it's a fair step up in sound from 6000CDT. In comparison 6000CDT sounded flatter and less defined, while the ET3 ... is probably the best CD transport I have ever heard, personally. It fits unbelievable well into the sonic set up I am after.

Thinking about keeping 6000CDT but I doubt it will get any play time.

How do you know all of this isn't just imagined in your head? More than one professional studio engineer or producer has been fooled in the past by their own bias.

 

[Deleted member 70178]

Rick is a funny and helpful guy.
Not sure what to make of your posts.
You claim you are using a joking tone, I am not reading that vibe.
Apologies if you are in fact engaging the forum, and not trolling.

Not a chance I would be trolling, even if I had the desire to do so I would not have the time.

First time behind a console was in 1995. Never took the time to be on any forum.

So absolutely no need to apologize, I am not offended in any sort of way.

We don't have to draw an argument out of this, as I did not come here to be immediately singled out for what ever amazes Rick.

I don't know Rick, is he funny, is he helpful? No idea. He claimed he wasn't facetious, I did not read that vibe as well and responded accordingly. If I am not welcome here I already said I'd be happy to leave.

 

[MAB]

Not a chance I would be trolling, even if I had the desire to do so I would not have the time.

First time behind a console was in 1995. Never took the time to be on any forum.

So absolutely no need to apologize, I am not offended in any sort of way.

We don't have to draw an argument out of this, as I did not come here to be immediately singled out for what ever amazes Rick.

I don't know Rick, is he funny, is he helpful? No idea. He claimed he wasn't facetious, I did not read that vibe as well and responded accordingly. If I am not welcome here I already said I'd be happy to leave.

Try to be less insulting.

 

[rdenney]

Try to be less insulting.

And maybe less snarky, too. I was giving the guy a chance to explain himself, and he immediately went to 11 on the defensiveness and personal affront scale. That was not my intent at all, but clearly he is not prepared to believe that. Oh, well.

@Perception: As to not knowing me, you have over 2100 examples of who I am on this forum (identified by my real name, too), free for the reading. I have 8 of yours. Please consider that.

Rick "credentials are not data, but they might imply experience worth hearing about from somebody willing to share rather than declaim" Denney

 

[Anderlfs]

I don't have enough technical knowledge of SPDIF etc. to say whether it is even possibly the case, or not. But my thoughts are that it sounds very unlikely anyway and that all CD transports should sound the same

I don´t have too, but I read in the test done by amirm of the Cayin Mini-CD MKII CD transport: "it is odd harmonics which tells me a bit is being toggled. From this, I am pretty sure the Cayin's digital output is NOT bit exact!!! It is literally producing different digital samples" "And if my guess is right that it is corrupting the low order bit of the digital stream over S/PDIF, using an external DAC won't help you either!" (bold emphasis not altered from the original)

If we see a result like that with a product made by an audio company, what evidence do we have to trust that any CD transport or a DVD/Blu-ray player will sound the same when fed into the same DAC?

 

[DonR]

I don´t have too, but I read in the test done by amirm of the Cayin Mini-CD MKII CD transport: "it is odd harmonics which tells me a bit is being toggled. From this, I am pretty sure the Cayin's digital output is NOT bit exact!!! It is literally producing different digital samples" "And if my guess is right that it is corrupting the low order bit of the digital stream over S/PDIF, using an external DAC won't help you either!" (bold emphasis not altered from the original)

If we see a result like that with a product made by an audio company, what evidence do we have to trust that any CD transport or a DVD/Blu-ray player will sound the same when fed into the same DAC?

My guess would be that the Cayin is an aberration.

 

[rdenney]

I don´t have too, but I read in the test done by amirm of the Cayin Mini-CD MKII CD transport: "it is odd harmonics which tells me a bit is being toggled. From this, I am pretty sure the Cayin's digital output is NOT bit exact!!! It is literally producing different digital samples" "And if my guess is right that it is corrupting the low order bit of the digital stream over S/PDIF, using an external DAC won't help you either!" (bold emphasis not altered from the original)

If we see a result like that with a product made by an audio company, what evidence do we have to trust that any CD transport or a DVD/Blu-ray player will sound the same when fed into the same DAC?

The confidence we have is that it is a solved problem, absent any specific and unintended mistakes. If plastic-crap $5 (at cost) disk drives in $250 (at retail) laptop computers can be routinely bit accurate where it really counts (software and data files), and do so 50 times faster than audio CD data streams, then clearly delivering bit accuracy is not heavy lifting. That explains the sense of surprise in what Amir wrote--the sheer unlikeliness that any product is not reading and delivering CD data with bit accuracy. Clearly, Cayin screwed something up--a blunder--or there was a hardware fault in the test unit.

Edit: I was talking about bit accuracy, not long-term robust reliability in high duty cycles. The problems I've had with CD players have been related to long-term reliability and mechanical robustness, not bit accuracy.

Rick "but that's why I asked the question I did to our departed combatant" Denney

 

[BobbyTimmons]

It's 100% not a sighted test, at least what he wrote and what I read. Is it a perfect blind test? No, but it's not meant to be laboratory, science grade analysis, it's a bunch of friends just casually experimenting if they can hear a difference from difference CD transports and they heard no difference.

I wish more people would do these casual and yet simple blind test, not to stick it up to pseudo-scientists of the likes of Danny Ritchie and Ted Denney but for their own edification and for the advancement of human intelligence (which apparently is in short supply nowadays).

It's a 100% sighted test for the hypothesis do CD transports sound different. It has some aspects of single-blind for answering the question which CD transports sound better.

 

[BobbyTimmons]

No - again blind simply means the listener doesn't know which of the devices is currently playing. He *can* know (and usually does) which devices are being tested.

That's not what blind mean in a scientific context. Maybe in a journalistic hi-fi review sense.

 

[Brian Hall]

It's a 100% sighted test for the question do CD transports sound different. It has some aspects of single-blind for the question which CD transport sounds better.

How is it sighted if the people listening to the different transports / players can't see which one is playing at any particular time? How can you test cd transports/players against each other without knowing you are intentionally testing cd transports/players?

Should we have added in a cassette deck, an 8 track player, and an Edison phonograph which would easily be recognizable as inferior to something playing CDs? How about a turntable. That could be a little closer to CD quality. Oh wait, none of those have digital output which is what we wanted to test.

It wasn't scientific or even meant to be. It was a fun thing to do and the results were as expected since BITS ARE BITS.

CD transports and CD players sending output to the same external dac will sound identical unless they are defective and altering the output bits. Bits are bits. A $5000 CD transport or player can't sound better and shouldn't sound any different than a functioning $50 cd player if they are both using the same external dac. Only a misguided person would believe the digital signal improves as the price goes above a correctly functioning device.

Every aspect of audio has diminishing returns. I can reasonably make the assumption that a $50 suitcase turntable with a $5 cartridge and built in speakers will not sound as good as my reasonably priced perfectly functional Fluance turntable with an Ortofon Blue cartridge. It is probable that a higher priced turntable / cartridge around $1000 might sound slightly better. After that price range, the diminishing returns kick in much faster -- higher price for no improvement in audio quality.

Digital output hits the point of diminishing returns at a much lower price point.

I bought a $500 Audiolab CD transport for reliability, better display and better ability to read old CDs. Not for better sound. I would laugh at someone telling me a higher priced transport could sound better.

I bought an Eversolo DMP-A6 because I liked the features and the cool screen. Does it sound any better than the Wiim Pro Plus I already had? No. Would a $5,000 or $10,000 streamer sound any better or offer any useful features? No, of course not.

Above $250 or so (maybe lower), both Dacs and network streamers only differ in features and appearance. A low price before diminishing returns kick in. I think that is a good thing. I care about how the system sounds, not how much it cost.

 

[BobbyTimmons]

How is it sighted if the people listening to the different transports / players can't see which one is playing at any particular time? How can you test cd transports/players against each other without knowing you are intentionally testing cd transports/players?

Should we have added in a cassette deck, an 8 track player, and an Edison phonograph which would easily be recognizable as inferior to something playing CDs? How about a turntable. That could be a little closer to CD quality. Oh wait, none of those have digital output which is what we wanted to test.

It wasn't scientific or even meant to be. It was a fun thing to do and the results were as expected since BITS ARE BITS.

CD transports and CD players sending output to the same external dac will sound identical unless they are defective and altering the output bits. Bits are bits. A $5000 CD transport or player can't sound better and shouldn't sound any different than a functioning $50 cd player if they are both using the same external dac. Only a misguided person would believe the digital signal improves as the price goes above a correctly functioning device.

Every aspect of audio has diminishing returns. I can reasonably make the assumption that a $50 suitcase turntable with a $5 cartridge and built in speakers will not sound as good as my reasonably priced perfectly functional Fluance turntable with an Ortofon Blue cartridge. It is probable that a higher priced turntable / cartridge around $1000 might sound slightly better. After that price range, the diminishing returns kick in much faster -- higher price for no improvement in audio quality.

Digital output hits the point of diminishing returns at a much lower price point.

I bought a $500 Audiolab CD transport for reliability, better display and better ability to read old CDs. Not for better sound. I would laugh at someone telling me a higher priced transport could sound better.

I bought an Eversolo DMP-A6 because I liked the features and the cool screen. Does it sound any better than the Wiim Pro Plus I already had? No. Would a $5,000 or $10,000 streamer sound any better or offer any useful features? No, of course not.

Above $250 or so (maybe lower), both Dacs and network streamers only differ in features and appearance. A low price before diminishing returns kick in. I think that is a good thing. I care about how the system sounds, not how much it cost.

It's sighted when you want to test whether CD transports sound different as you know (see) only the CD transport is being changed. We already know all CD transports should sound the same, we'll introduce the belief it all sounds the same into whatever we hear. That's all within the margin of psychology. It's not testing which product sounds different the hypothesis is does the category of products sound different. Single-blind test means you wouldn't know which product category is being changed.

 

[Brian Hall]

It's sighted when you want to test whether CD transports sound different as you know (see) only the CD transport is being changed. We already know all CD transports should sound the same so we'll introduce the belief it all sounds the same into whatever we hear. That's all within the margin of psychology.

My friend who was also listening knows almost nothing about how all of this works. I did not let him know that all of them should sound the same. He had no reason to expect them to all sound the same, but still said they all sounded the same.

 

[BobbyTimmons]

My friend who was also listening knows almost nothing about how all of this works. I did not let him know that all of them should sound the same.

Your friend knew you were changing the CD transports only? That means it's a sighted test to see if CD transports sound different as he knows you are not changing the other product types between samples, just switching transports.

He had no reason to expect them to all sound the same, but still said they all sounded the same.

People expect CD transports to sound the same. DACs all sound the same when they are level matched. It's just there is advertising claiming they sound different, psychologically there could be more people claiming to hear differences between DACs with this sighted test. Amplifiers also all sound the same if they are level matched, not clipping or with serious design flaws. You could have changed any of those products and they would be hearing the same sample after level matching.

 

[mhardy6647]

I often post in a woodworker's guild forum that I appreciate the the look and feel of plastic.

I've got just the thing for you!

 

[aagstn]

Above $250 or so (maybe lower), both Dacs and network streamers only differ in features and appearance. A low price before diminishing returns kick in. I think that is a good thing. I care about how the system sounds, not how much it cost.

There has been some components from companies like PS Audio, Marantz, Denon, Schitt and so on that were pretty poor performers way over $250. In general that should be true, but I have been shocked by the number of high priced components that performed worse than entry level components.

 

[rdenney]

If one can’t hear a difference when the design suggests they shouldn’t be able to, then controlled testing is not required. If you don’t hear a difference sighted, then there’s nothing to prove. Sighted bias only exists because seeing the difference biases one into believing they should hear a difference. If there is a difference they don’t hear, then sighted bias isn’t the reason they are missing the difference and blind testing won’t fix it.

Rick “hearing a difference is the first proof before having a preference is even possible” Denney

 

[Blueflash]

Hi,

Great forum. I’m a 53 year old computer scientist, who’s also done decades of sound engineering.

If the DAC is separate, the music server is simply transporting digital data, and not deliberately altering that data in any way, then it cannot make any difference whatsoever to the sound quality beyond not messing it up. The power supply doesn’t matter, the circuitry doesn’t matter, the cabling doesn’t matter (unless you’re running over 50m), oxidisation of components doesn’t matter, the shielding on the case doesn’t matter. If there’s some sort of problem with jitter then it’ll be screamingly obvious because jitter is never ‘subtle’.

Think about this: digital data has been around for decades now. Take a digital file that originated in 1980s, and has been copied from computer to computer, disk to disk, USB stick to USB stick, sent over WiFi and down a gazillions cables, losslessly compressed and decompressed… and its contents will be EXACTLY the same. The is a fact that can easily be validated by comparing the binary data in any copy with the original. This is a major feature and use case of digital encoding. We can also do run this comparison with streaming data but collating it, and comparing it to the original. Unless something has gone horribly wrong, then it will be totally and absolutely identical, no matter which transport streamed it.

The *only* way a file *could* be different is if lossy compression were allowed… but that’s up to the user. It’s the same with streaming, the data cannot change unless it undergoes lossy compression… so don’t use Bluetooth to stream music, and don’t encode music in MP3 etc.

The sound absolutely is altered by electronic considerations at each part of the analogue chain, and also in the digital to analogue conversion stage (more of this in a moment), but not within the digital realm itself, not unless it’s undergoing some sort of processing intended to colourise it.

Even the choice of speaker cable has INFINITELY more impact on the sound than digital transport does (meaning slightly less than zero). For avoidance of doubt, lossless digital transport that isn’t undergoing any sort of deliberate processing to alter its contents, has absolutely ZERO impact on sound.

The noisiest power supply in the world will not affect the fidelity of digital data, not unless it somehow reaches a point where the system’s operational integrity has been compromised. For example a computer system with a horrible power supply does not affect the reproduction of MS Excel documents in the slightest. The numbers in the spreadsheet are not impacted, and do not change because the power supply is ‘noisy’… not unless it’s so bad that the computer cannot even be booted.

Same goes for anti-vibration measures. Non-SSD hard drives certainly can be affected by vibration… should that happen then it will be hugely noticeable because the device will probably hand reset itself… but until that point it will faithfully reproduce the data with 100% accuracy.

Sometimes I read or watch hifi reviews, and start to doubt my own sanity. These people talk about digital comms as though those were a form of analogue, where components play a part in the sound. This simply isn’t true; data doesn’t have a sound in the same what that the postal worker’s handwriting is irrelevant to the contents of the mail he or she delivers.

The DAC is a different matter… but even here there’s a crucial piece of information that most people aren’t aware of: while no human has evolved who can hear beyond 24bit depth @48KHz, there is a physical issue with digital to analogue conversion that hasn’t yet been overcome by engineering. The long and short of it is that DACs function much better at higher sample rates, like 88.2K, 96KHz (and upwards into rapidly diminishing returns). So if you’re a practiced listener, who can discern a slight but noticeable difference between 96KHz audio and 48K audio, then that’s why. It’s not that your ears are picking up more frequencies or greater resolution; it’s just that DACs are not well optimised when running at 44.1KHz or 48KHz. Not even the really expensive ones. A cheap DAC running at 96K will likely work better than an expensive DAC running at 48K. This was an unforeseen flaw when the CD standard was devised as 16bit dept @44.1KHz. As an aside, only a child with exceptionally good hearing can distinguish the difference between a 48KHz sample rate vs a 44.1KHz sample rate, and only really practised listeners with good hearing can discern 24bit depth from 16bit depth. To all intents, 16bit depth @ 44.1KHz is at or beyond the limit of what *most* people can hear, due to the Nyquist rate. The advantage of using a higher sample rate is that the DAC will make a better job of the conversion.

When it comes to digital transport though, choose a transport based on how good it looks, how good its build quality is, how good its connectivity and functionality are… because the one thing it shouldn’t do is alter the sound quality. If a digital transport does affect the sound, independently of the DAC, then there are five possibilities:

1. It’s actively and deliberately altering the underlying data as it streams that to the DAC, so as to colour the music. This is just sneaky software engineering, and not due to a lead encased power supply, anti-vibration measures, or cables made of gold.
2. It’s communicating with the DAC at 88.2K or more.
3. It’s outputting at a slightly higher volume (due to digital trim).
4. There’s a short circuit between the headphones.
5. The person listening to it is an ‘influencer’, and there’s an obvious reason as to why they are able to find the time to make those sorts of videos.

I’d be interested to hear any scientific explanations of how cables, power supplies, or shielding can magically alter the ‘sound’ encoded in digital data…