• WANTED: Happy members who like to discuss audio and other topics related to our interest. Desire to learn and share knowledge of science required. There are many reviews of audio hardware and expert members to help answer your questions. Click here to have your audio equipment measured for free!

How Loud Do You Need?

Sal1950

Grand Contributor
The Chicago Crusher
Forum Donor
Joined
Mar 1, 2016
Messages
14,169
Likes
16,879
Location
Central Fl
That math might be a step above me now days. Like you been quite awhile since I was in any schooling. I will read the paper and see what I can learn from it.
Problems began with you younger guys when they stopped teaching the multiplication tables and being able to do long division on paper. Math is becoming a lost art. :p
 

Frank Dernie

Master Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
Mar 24, 2016
Messages
6,452
Likes
15,798
Location
Oxfordshire
FWIW I am listening to Rudolf Serkin playing Schubert at present and at the level around which i would normally listen to piano music my gadget is showing 29.8 dB min, 64.6 dBLeq and 82.2 dB max.
I see higher peaks with symphonies.
 

Sal1950

Grand Contributor
The Chicago Crusher
Forum Donor
Joined
Mar 1, 2016
Messages
14,169
Likes
16,879
Location
Central Fl
Just gave a quick look out of curiosity.
Cheap RS SPL meter C/Fast reading in the high 80s 86-88 peaks.
Old man levels but that's about as high as I run things now, very protective of what little hearing I have left. Super anal at the shooting range each week wearing foam plugs plus good muffs on top at all times.
 

Blumlein 88

Grand Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
Feb 23, 2016
Messages
20,703
Likes
37,442
Problems began with you younger guys when they stopped teaching the multiplication tables and being able to do long division on paper. Math is becoming a lost art. :p

Well they still taught the times tables up to 12 when I was in school. They had developed flashcards for that purpose by then.

I learned long division one summer day after first grade. My Mom had taken a job when I started school. So I called her on the phone during her lunch hour. I asked her how to do batting averages. So she taught me long division over the phone there. Checked to make sure I had it right later that evening. It made it convenient when they got to long division in school as I already knew it. Unfortunately, I don't think Mom will be any help on Bessel functions.
 

amirm

Founder/Admin
Staff Member
CFO (Chief Fun Officer)
Joined
Feb 13, 2016
Messages
44,597
Likes
239,666
Location
Seattle Area
I understand the discrepancy between snr and sfdr. It isn't clear why the number is 9n. The hand waving explanation makes sense to me though it still didn't jump out why 9n rather than another number.
Here is the explanation without math. I will probably create a mini-article out of it later.

The key to understanding this is to realize what is being measured. The core is the idea of how would an ideal analog to digital converter work when sampling an analog signal into discrete digital values. Wiki has a nice picture of this although I am sure we all can imagine it also:

Quanterr.png


The top graph shows the analog waveform in blue and discrete, sampled values by the analog to digital converter. Naturally since we don't have infinite sample resolution, we can't track the original signal completely faithfully. The graph below shows the error between what we sampled digitally and the difference between the two.

We can compute this error if we assume the source is sinusoidal:

3-bit_resolution_analog_comparison.png


Doing this then yields the value of signal to noise ratio = 6* number of bits + 1.67

SFDR is computed using the same assumption of sinusoidal input but now we look at the spectrum of the distortion products generated as a result of fixed quantization and compute its highest peak.

Let's look at a real simulation. I created a floating point 1 Khz tone in Adobe Audition. Floating point gives us much more resolution than fixed point 16 or 24 used in audio and as such can be thought of being near analog in resolution. Here is the frequency spectrum of that:

1 Khz Float.png


We see our main tone at the 1 Khz. No distortion products are visible.

Now I truncate the samples to 8 bits. I don't apply any dither which would simulate sampling an analog signal without dither into 8 bits and look at its spectrum again:

SFDR.png


Our original tone is on the left at 0 dbfs without change. But what is changed is that I now have tons of distortion products. If we eyeball the highest one we find one around 3 Khz. Again an eyeball shows it to be at -65 dbFS. Per notation on the graph, SFDR is 9 times number of bits minus a fudge factor of "c." The fudge factor is there because this is an approximation. "c" for high-resolution systems is 6 so using that we see that the formula predicts the highest peak to be at -66 dbFS which is essentially a match for our -65 dbFS eyeballing.

The connection to bessel function is that it describes the distribution we see of the distortion products. Using that we can compute the individual peak values. Hence the reason the derivation uses that.

Hope this is more clear now.
 

Blumlein 88

Grand Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
Feb 23, 2016
Messages
20,703
Likes
37,442
Here is the explanation without math. I will probably create a mini-article out of it later.

The key to understanding this is to realize what is being measured. The core is the idea of how would an ideal analog to digital converter work when sampling an analog signal into discrete digital values. Wiki has a nice picture of this although I am sure we all can imagine it also:

Quanterr.png


The top graph shows the analog waveform in blue and discrete, sampled values by the analog to digital converter. Naturally since we don't have infinite sample resolution, we can't track the original signal completely faithfully. The graph below shows the error between what we sampled digitally and the difference between the two.

We can compute this error if we assume the source is sinusoidal:

3-bit_resolution_analog_comparison.png


Doing this then yields the value of signal to noise ratio = 6* number of bits + 1.67

SFDR is computed using the same assumption of sinusoidal input but now we look at the spectrum of the distortion products generated as a result of fixed quantization and compute its highest peak.

Let's look at a real simulation. I created a floating point 1 Khz tone in Adobe Audition. Floating point gives us much more resolution than fixed point 16 or 24 used in audio and as such can be thought of being near analog in resolution. Here is the frequency spectrum of that:

View attachment 5479

We see our main tone at the 1 Khz. No distortion products are visible.

Now I truncate the samples to 8 bits. I don't apply any dither which would simulate sampling an analog signal without dither into 8 bits and look at its spectrum again:

View attachment 5480

Our original tone is on the left at 0 dbfs without change. But what is changed is that I now have tons of distortion products. If we eyeball the highest one we find one around 3 Khz. Again an eyeball shows it to be at -65 dbFS. Per notation on the graph, SFDR is 9 times number of bits minus a fudge factor of "c." The fudge factor is there because this is an approximation. "c" for high-resolution systems is 6 so using that we see that the formula predicts the highest peak to be at -66 dbFS which is essentially a match for our -65 dbFS eyeballing.

The connection to bessel function is that it describes the distribution we see of the distortion products. Using that we can compute the individual peak values. Hence the reason the derivation uses that.

Hope this is more clear now.

This is helpful. It is also more or less what I did truncating like that. I see that it works yes. I can accept that no problem. It still leaves a blank spot visualizing this. Which reading the papers and working thru this may fill in.

I suppose it also doesn't matter. As with real digital signals in the analog world we always have thermal noise getting in the way first.
 

DonH56

Master Contributor
Technical Expert
Forum Donor
Joined
Mar 15, 2016
Messages
7,880
Likes
16,667
Location
Monument, CO
Thermal noise, shot noise, 1/f (N/f) noise, flicker noise, popcorn noise, etc.

The original paper I have (but have not looked at much recently) actually predicts the relative frequency of the highest spur but in the real world that part is much harder to correlate due to phase changes and other noise sources (see above) impacting the measurements. It's also probably worth noting that most all modern-day DACs use noise decorrelation (dither) of some form and that raises the noise floor, decreasing SNR, but may increase SFDR a bit (err, "by a small amount", not adding one bit of resolution). And, the spur floor of a delta-sigma design is a different beast though the 9N rule generally holds true since it is based upon quantizing the signal and nothing else.

Edit: Amir, you should pick up a copy of the IEEE Standard 1241. It has a lot of useful info for testing data converters and a method of getting away without windowing in the FFTs. That is why the plots I have simulated have such narrow signal tones and a flat noise floor. It is also how I have tested my designs over the years.
 
Last edited:

RayDunzl

Grand Contributor
Central Scrutinizer
Joined
Mar 9, 2016
Messages
13,247
Likes
17,162
Location
Riverview FL

DonH56

Master Contributor
Technical Expert
Forum Donor
Joined
Mar 15, 2016
Messages
7,880
Likes
16,667
Location
Monument, CO
Glad you found something you can relate to! I have had that book since the first edition, and even got to speak with Rudy about it at a conference (worked with a friend of his), but didn't think to check it. I have a bunch of books on data converters (and hundreds on various EE subjects of interest from device physics to radar system analysis).
 

DonH56

Master Contributor
Technical Expert
Forum Donor
Joined
Mar 15, 2016
Messages
7,880
Likes
16,667
Location
Monument, CO
What is the nature of the error remaining after a DAC converts back to stepless analog?

Similar except the highest-frequency content is gone, filtered by the anti-image filter, which makes the overall RSS'd error lower, natch.
 
OP
watchnerd

watchnerd

Grand Contributor
Joined
Dec 8, 2016
Messages
12,449
Likes
10,414
Location
Seattle Area, USA
first thing I would do is check what the voltage rails were doing when the higher bass SPLs were being called - I suspect they would be a bit of a mess.

No, sorry...it uses a Class D PWM amp with SMPS...
 
OP
watchnerd

watchnerd

Grand Contributor
Joined
Dec 8, 2016
Messages
12,449
Likes
10,414
Location
Seattle Area, USA
Just gave a quick look out of curiosity.
Cheap RS SPL meter C/Fast reading in the high 80s 86-88 peaks.
Old man levels but that's about as high as I run things now, very protective of what little hearing I have left. Super anal at the shooting range each week wearing foam plugs plus good muffs on top at all times.

Actually, it's not old man at all -- it's actually smart given the 83dB reference monitoring / mastering standard proposed by Ioan Allen of Dolby in the 70s.
 

Sal1950

Grand Contributor
The Chicago Crusher
Forum Donor
Joined
Mar 1, 2016
Messages
14,169
Likes
16,879
Location
Central Fl
My point is that I don't know how you plan to tweak an amp-on-a-chip. It's an integrated design.
Please don't feed the trolls. ;)
 

Sal1950

Grand Contributor
The Chicago Crusher
Forum Donor
Joined
Mar 1, 2016
Messages
14,169
Likes
16,879
Location
Central Fl
Top Bottom