I like the idea of better/cleaner stuff....but in the range of gear generally these days its not a particular issue. I'd look to better transducers and rooms and a few other things easily over some amp or pre-amp as far as "better" generally goes (let alone headphone stuff I'm not interested in)
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Is it audiophoolia to care about SINAD differences which have no correlation in blind listening tests? H2/H3 distortion 'enriches the sound'?
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BobbyTimmons
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The idea of a 'cleaner' signal is entrenched in audiophile culture. Fundamentally people should do what they enjoy including chasing inaudible distortion measurements in electronic equipment. Just if it's not perceivable is it more rational than fussing about cable lifters? We're talking about things which people enjoy doing just they have no influence on the sound.
HarmonicTHD
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I like the artist to add all the distortion they think should be there, not my gear.
(And we had a almost identical thread a few weeks ago).
(And we had a almost identical thread a few weeks ago).
Yeah, and the more that's explored seems some just prefer more distortion....
It's not just the artist, there's quite a few people between that and the recording. I would like the artist to be more technically on top of things, but that doesn't always happen.
Its still weird to have this much thd in the playback electronics.
This is no one size fits all sounds better on everything additive you can add ?
This is the job of the record producer and artists to add colouration if needed during the creation of the art .
Sinad is also include noise , noise is never good . Even if we are not super sensitive to THD we are to noise and frequency response deviations .
Is not so that the nonlinearaty in the amp that generates the THD also generates IMD and other stuff that’s not preferred by anyone ? So by making a better amps all kinds of distortion gets lower , hence sinad can be a proxy for a good design if it’s high enough ? Given that it also can handle a real speaker ofcourse.
Also I think your loudspeakers are giving you more than enough of all kinds of distortion so that the amp don't have to do,that
we got an earful already.
This is no one size fits all sounds better on everything additive you can add ?
This is the job of the record producer and artists to add colouration if needed during the creation of the art .
Sinad is also include noise , noise is never good . Even if we are not super sensitive to THD we are to noise and frequency response deviations .
Is not so that the nonlinearaty in the amp that generates the THD also generates IMD and other stuff that’s not preferred by anyone ? So by making a better amps all kinds of distortion gets lower , hence sinad can be a proxy for a good design if it’s high enough ? Given that it also can handle a real speaker ofcourse.
Also I think your loudspeakers are giving you more than enough of all kinds of distortion so that the amp don't have to do,that
we got an earful already.HarmonicTHD
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It’s part of the artistic or call it creative production process. Same difference
D
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Preferences relating to perceived sound quality in blind listening tests are [only] pertinent if they can be correlated to measurements.
Even here, "preferences" would not be the best of words. I would use the word "choices", which leaves us with the statement, "Choices relating to perceived sound quality in blind listening tests are only pertinent if they can be correlated to measurements."
This statement leaves the door open to two fails:
1) Choices regarding sound quality were not pertinent because they were unable to be correlated (for whatever reason), and
2) Perception was at an inconsistent level.
With sufficient rigor applied to the test, I very much doubt that either of these two would apply.
Jim
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BobbyTimmons
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Modern DACs and solid state amps working within their limits (below clipping) are transparent enough you shouldn't be able to hear distortion in blind tests. Richard Clark's 'Amplifier Challenge' still has an unclaimed prize. Clark said even 2% THD is hard to reliably detect. Most of the amps measured on this site fell between 0.01% and 0.0001%.
Galliardist
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What you put in the first post is not a citation. There's no referral to the source, only the author's names. And you actually got that wrong as well, as only one of the two authors you quote wrote the post you quoted from.
I think it also needs to be made clear that the post you quote from is about loudspeakers and not electronic components. Specific to audio/hifi sites like this, SINAD is normally a measurement quoted for electronic components, making it harder to relate the questions in the title to the contents of your post.
This is a forum, not an academic environment, so you're allowed some leeway in my opinion with the first post. Defending the error when it's pointed out makes it a different matter though, so let's be correct about it, then move on.
In a way, sometimes it's blaming the artist for those making decisions beyond their involvement....not a lot of provenance for that but....
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BobbyTimmons
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This is an oddly pedantic reply in about three different ways. It's a quote from a text by Geddes with the date listed. The citation is from MarnixM where I read it. There's no chance of 'misleading' people to think it was an academic peer-reviewed text as part of the quote is written in all CAPs, just missing some emojis. It's not less impactful for that as he's explaining his findings. It's pertinent to the debate as lower order harmonics won't sound different if they were added by a speaker, a DAC, an amplifier or the source. Just a DAC and a solid state amplifier below clipping are not adding any which could be audible, a speaker and not inconceivably certain tube amps could add enough to be audible.
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Galliardist
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And I'm going to be more pedantic than that. Editing your post after you were first criticised, and not pointing that out after you did it, is disingenuous. Because I'm posting while working (a slightly naughty thing to do, to be sure) I wrote my response before, but pressed send after, you updated your initial post with the link to MarnixM's post.
By the way, MarnixM's citation is also wrong, just as yours was. Only one of the authors wrote what you actually quoted: and it's not an "article", it's another forum post.
Some of this stuff is actually important. Somebody holds copyright on all of this stuff, including my own post here (I don't care if it's me or the site owner, stlll applies).
I think of ASR as an engineering forum not a hobby or music forum. I know it’s not really very technically rigorous (usually) once we plebeian members chime in and dilute the good scientific work Amir has done. SINAD is a number only an engineer should really love. But I do appreciate good engineering. And it is a measure of at least that.
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BobbyTimmons
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I didn't 'edit the post after you were first criticized'. I inserted a hyperlink under the existing text as a conciliatory concession to the potential pedantry among certain users, as it turns out I was being optimistic. It's not even pedantry as the 'criticism' is wrong. My original post attributed the quote more than adequately and there was no need to add anything more. The original post already goes above and beyond in terms of attributing the quotation.
Nowhere in my post did I indicate the quote was from an article. Honestly I think you must have no contact with academia if you are confused by my citation. Citing a quote doesn't say anything about the nature of the quote . It's very common for even academic articles to cite forum posts and YouTube videos as long as they attribute the author.
You think we can't cite quotes from other forums? Quotations are allowed under any interpretation of copyright law as long as you indicate the author and don't modify the quote without indicating that you modified it.
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Galliardist
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But they do have an influence on our perception of the sound. Unless we do something definitively bad in system setup or component quality or mismatch, it's almost as if the damned sound waves themselves don't matter.
If you've learned that H2/H3 have an influence on the sound, and you believe that the components you see in front of you produce sufficient H2/H3, you'll probably hear the result no matter if it's the lowest distortion system on the planet in practice.
Subjectivism is key in audio, we all have it. There's nothing wrong with it as long as we understand it for what it is, and don't start translating it into magic, pseudoscience or religion. The problem is we've been doing just that for the last forty years or so, whether it's "high SINAD sounds better", "more H2 sounds better", or the extremes of believing in ultra expensive "audio" fuses and such. Objectivism is really a shield against the nonsense, and not that much more.
This being a forum that has some kind of relationship to "science", I'll agree that we do have a thing about the sound waves, mainly because we can understand them a lot more easily than what is between our ears.
Galliardist
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I've had enough of this, time to leave the forum for a bit again. You're fine, just be careful with real academia.
HarmonicTHD
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BTW. Topic was also discussed here in case you are interested
Thread 'Do we crave distortion?'
https://audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/do-we-crave-distortion.45978/
Thread 'Do we crave distortion?'
https://audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/do-we-crave-distortion.45978/
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BobbyTimmons
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We're consumers fooling around on a forum not submitting articles for peer-review. Just even if our forum posts were academic articles we were submitting to a journal we would still be allowed to quote from the post by 'gedlee' as long as we attribute it accurately.
The quote by 'gedlee' was attributed by MarnixM to Earl Geddes and Dr Lidia Lee who are partners. This is supported by the user name of the account who posted the quote. The user name 'gedlee' could be a combination of the names of Earl Geddes and Lidia Lee. The author seems to be one of them, 'my partner and I published'. Just it's not indicated if it was written by Geddes or Lee. It's probably Geddes as they use 'Geddes on distortion perception' in the title. It's posted by their joint account so I don't feel MarnixM was wrong to include both of them in the attribution.
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The best sound source I have ever heard was the mastertape from a reel to reel taperecorder from Revox.
According to Amirms reviews, such a recorder ( of similar quality ) has a SINAD about 50 .
A turntable has a SINAD of 30 , and many people like the sound from a good vinyl record more than a high res 24 bit 96 kHz recording.
So, its clear that the SINAD has no correlation at all regarding the perceived soundquality, and we seems to like distortion .
Edit: the noise floor from many good microphones are about -80 dB , and theres many of them used in the studio.
