-110 dB is easy. Beyond that it starts getting tricky.I don't think "easy" is the right adjective. We only have a handful of DACs and Amps that achieve -120 dBFS and they are all less than 2 years old I think.
-110 dB is easy. Beyond that it starts getting tricky.I don't think "easy" is the right adjective. We only have a handful of DACs and Amps that achieve -120 dBFS and they are all less than 2 years old I think.
I like to watch the fightsI really hope that there are more reasons for attending this site
I am a bit confused. If a SINAD of 130db is equally (in)audible as a SINAD of 90db, or even 80db, why would a DAC designer ever spend any money at all, in a competitive market, to achieve an improvement that no one can hear because of the loudspeaker limitations in terms of distortion (not noise)?
My processor probably measures horribly compared to the stand-alone DACs, and my amps are certainly not state of the art, but it sounds good (enough) to me.
I am a bit confused. If a SINAD of 130db is equally (in)audible as a SINAD of 90db, or even 80db, why would a DAC designer ever spend any money at all, in a competitive market, to achieve an improvement that no one can hear because of the loudspeaker limitations in terms of distortion (not noise)?
I am a bit confused. If a SINAD of 130db is equally (in)audible as a SINAD of 90db, or even 80db, why would a DAC designer ever spend any money at all, in a competitive market, to achieve an improvement that no one can hear because of the loudspeaker limitations in terms of distortion (not noise)?
And, what speakers are you using again there Don?
With modern web pages full of Jabbascript, chances are that it's actually faster. But yeah, SINAD (or better, masking weighted SINAD) is a neurotic number fetish past a certain value.(A) Because he can. Design engineers gotta' design.
(B) Marketing. Which pays for the design engineers to keep designing, 1 additional dB at a time.
My new notebook with a 3.4 GHz multi-threaded CPU and 16 GB memory does not load web pages any faster but it "feels" faster.
Big horn!Some crappy old towers designed 10+ years ago by some geek with no ears. Or so "they" tell me.
IMO you are hung up on the speaker performance a bit too much. THD+N is not like "everything in any unit below the worst unit doesn't matter". THD+N actually adds tones to the signal at each stage of the process. It's both additive and multiplicative. In other words, the unwanted (added) tones carry over to the next link in the audio chain and then are in turn are multiplied AND added to.I am a bit confused. If a SINAD of 130db is equally (in)audible as a SINAD of 90db, or even 80db, why would a DAC designer ever spend any money at all, in a competitive market, to achieve an improvement that no one can hear because of the loudspeaker limitations in terms of distortion (not noise)?
As far as I understand. Each device in the chain compounds the distortion quantity. Maybe someone here can chime in on the formula used.
Was your amp near clipping and did you measure the distortion difference at the speakers? That’s where it would be most audible, right?When I did 8th generation loop backs noise and distortion increased with each generation. Yet one is hard pressed to hear that. The devices I used were non-exotic. Sinad was eroded by more than 12 db.
Some crappy old towers designed 10+ years ago by some geek with no ears. Or so "they" tell me.
So let’s use a real edge case: DAC is a phone at 90 dB, speaker midrange THD is at 2.5% distortion and amp is at 1% (before dynamics). What RSS dB does that give you?Uncorrelated it should RSS -- root-sum-square -- so calculate each distortion term, square it, add all the terms, take the square root, and calculate the new distortion. So if the speakers are at -60 dBc and amp at -80 dBc then the distortion is (10^-60*2/20 + 10^-80*2/20) = 0.00000101 (using voltages) and converting back to dBc (20*log) the result is -59.96 dBc -- about 0.04 dB reduction from the amp. A DAC at -130 dBc is in the mud...
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