Master Thread: Are Measurements Everything or Nothing?

[SIY]

Hypothesis =/= theory. Sorry to be pedantic, but meanings matter.

My insistence on accepting the possibility that we don't know everything that goes into making a device truly transparent is not an attempt to create a placeholder for "voodoo audio science" that claims otherworldly reasons exist that determine audio transparency.

No, but it also is based on exactly zero observed phenomena. I've asked a question countless times and have never gotten an answer (the Bayesian in me suspects strongly that this is due to there being no answer): Can you name even ONE instance where the standard measurement suite for DACs does not perfectly correlate with listening (not peeking, but listening, ears-only)? Just one.

Breath not being held.

 

[Killingbeans]

Umm.. beg to differ. A belief is similar to a hunch or plausible scientific theory that has not been proven yet but seems to explain much of what is observed. All scientific laws began as theories until explanations were found through rigorous experiments or mathematical proofs.

Sorry to be padantic, but you are confusing theory with hypothesis. And nothing is 100%.

It makes me think of the movie Don't Look Up, where the science guy goes something like "There's a very high risk of a huge meteorit hitting our planet soon", and then the moron president goes "But it's not 100%?". Science guy: "Nothing can be 100%". Moron president: "Alright, then it's safe to ignore".

Don't be that moron president.

Your assertion that "reality shows DACs are a solved problem" is a personal opinion, a statement without the benefit of full scientific rigor.

Practically every bit of scientific rigor that's been put into the study of human hearing points to DACs as being a solved problem.

It's not an opinion. I wouldn't call the idea of it not being solved an opinion either. Sounds more like a strangly masochistic dream.

In the early 1900s, Physicists thought and claimed all laws had been discovered and could fully explain the observable world. What was left to improve the accuracy of various scientific constants, etc ....Then quantum mechanics hit that severely upset the apple cart, and many well-known scientists at that time lost much credibility and never fully recovered. They couldn't comprehend QM and what it was claiming. Against this background, you'll not find a scientist today worth their salt who says, "Such and such is a solved problem. Time to move on to other things".

An example is the simple Ohms Law that describes the simple relationship between voltage and current in a resistor (V = I * R). It works great for bulk resistors but falls apart at nanoscale sizes, and to this day, many theories abound, but none has been found to explain why this is so.

Quantum mechanics... again.

And again: Just because there's uncertainty when you throw a single dice, you still get the same predictable patterns ever time you throw billions and billions of dice.

Amir's dashboard (and others before him) is a snapshot of something much bigger and unknown. Not a conclusive set of facts whether some device is transparent or not.

The measurements in the reviews are an indicator. They tell you whether or not the product has an extremely high chance of being audibly transparent.

You are free to ignore the odds, but don't blame people for thinking you're nuts when you do so.

 

[JustJones]

Umm.. beg to differ. A belief is similar to a hunch or plausible scientific theory that has not been proven yet but seems to explain much of what is observed. All scientific laws began as theories until explanations were found through rigorous experiments or mathematical proofs.

This is the drivel you read on forums like audiogon.

Many people think that if scientists find evidence that supports a hypothesis, the hypothesis is upgraded to a theory, and if the theory is found to be correct, it is upgraded to a law. That is not how it works, though. Facts, theories and laws — as well as hypotheses — are separate elements of the scientific method. Though they may evolve, they aren't upgraded to something else.

https://www.livescience.com/21457-what-is-a-law-in-science-definition-of-scientific-law.html

 

[BDWoody]

My point is that there could be other yet-to-be-discovered more comprehensive tests to fully answer the transparency question.

The only thing missing is a shred of evidence supporting the idea that there is more to find. From anyone. Ever.

We get the 'we don't know everything,' comments, then the '...but Quantum Mechanics!...' as a follow up, but none of this ever leads to actual evidence to support the endless claims about what we don't know.

I wonder how many of those who spend their life energy coming into our little corner of the Audio world to tell us how much we don't know, have done a listening test with anything resembling controls.

 

[fpitas]

I wonder how many of those who spend their life energy coming into our little corner of the Audio world to tell us how much we don't know, have done a listening test with anything resembling controls.

Or bother to learn enough about audio engineering to do more than wave hands. I'm not holding my breath.

 

[Purité Audio]

It is just a question of waiting for that alien first contact, they will be able to explain why dacs sound different, then again they may not like music.
Keith

 

[Bridges]

I am probably beating on a dead horse with this post, which seems disagreeable to most members.

Fist to be clear, I am only asking questions, as I know that I am not competent enough to have an opinion.

This site is well known for saying that a €100 topping Dac is in no way inferior to a €3000 R2R Dac
.
Magazines and you tube reviewers, most of which are charlatans or at best ignorent influencers are of a different opinion.

Putting those people aside, there are a few that have technical knowledge and engineering degrees who can be categorized as credible.

Many of these disagree with consensus on this sight and actually buy these r2r Dacs for their own use with their own money.

I am in no way taking sides on this issue, but I think the debate is still open, and I am not ready to part with 2 or 3 thousand euros until I know more.

 

[fpitas]

It is just a question of waiting for that alien first contact, they will be able to explain why dacs sound different, then again they may not like music.
Keith

Whether revealed by aliens or seen in a dream, people will come here expecting us to drop everything and prove it.

 

[staticV3]

R2R DACs are like mechanical watches.

Cheap ones are garbage, ludicrously expensive ones can be surprisingly accurate, but anyone claiming their Grand Seiko is more accurate than some G-Shock Quartz watch is a clown in my book.

You buy them for their novelty or because you appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into them. Not because they're better at telling the time.

You buy R2R DACs for their novelty or because you appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into them. Not because they're better at turning Digital into Analog.

Anyone who claims they do hasn't done their research.

 

[Joachim Herbert]

You buy R2R DACs for their novelty or because you appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into them. Not because they're better at turning Digital into Analog.

Nicely put.

 

[Deleted member 21219]

It is just a question of waiting for that alien first contact, they will be able to explain why dacs sound different, then again they may not like music.
Keith

Oh, don't worry .... they like music!

Jim

 

[BDWoody]

This site is well known for saying that a €100 topping Dac is in no way inferior to a €3000 R2R Dac

It's more that the actual fidelity of the signal isn't going to be better, and in almost all cases the R2R DAC will include more noise and distortion so it will be a lower fidelity result. That said, assuming the R2R DAC isn't complete trash, it is unlikely those differences could be heard by anyone under anything close to normal conditions. The non-normal conditions would be using extreme gain riding to identify different noise levels during transitions for example, but if people are claiming that it must be that they like that 'voicing' or something similar there's no evidence to support that.

Well educated people can often overestimate their competencies in other areas, such as psychoacoustics.

 

[Killingbeans]

Putting those people aside, there are a few that have technical knowledge and engineering degrees who can be categorized as credible.

I think most of the people who design the new wave of R2R DACs have technical knowledge and engineering degrees.

But they are only human. Nothing stops them from putting on rose tinted glasses.

A few years back I was extremely interested in the technology and looked at a lot of products. One thing they all have in common is that the designers never have a credible explanation of why their designs would be better at the DA conversion. It always seems to be based on either wishful conjecture and/or an idea of some "magical unknown".

My personal conclusion is that the romantic notion of "technology of yore" gets the imagination going, and combined with the idea of an array of resistors being "more analogue", it makes people hear all kinds of things that aren't really there.

 

[Deleted member 21219]

I am in no way taking sides on this issue, but I think the debate is still open, and I am not ready to part with 2 or 3 thousand euros until I know more.

The only "more" that you need to know will be obvious in a blind test. Either you will hear a difference or you won't. If you want to be extra scrupulous, do an ABX blind test, against a unit well-known as a reference here. That may control your bias favoring the 2-to-3-thousand-euros unit.

To my mind, there are only two reason to purchase an expensive DAC:

1) It sounds better.
The only way you can find this out is a controlled blind test. Until then, everything is just sales crap, opinion, supposition and bias ... and bias ... and bias.

2) It is more reliable.
I myself am concerned about reliability, but it's an issue that defies all attempts at prediction, especially over a 20-year span of time. If you're really worried about it, buy two or three 100-euro DACs instead of the 2-or-3-thousand-euro DACS, and if something does go wrong, you'll have backups and still be huge amounts of money ahead.
Use the savings to buy music files, room treatment or streaming services.

Jim

 

[Vincent Kars]

If you want to try R2R, have a look here: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...s/denafrips-ares-ii-usb-r2r-dac-review.11166/
Affordable and it even measures quite good.

 

[Bridges]

The only "more" that you need to know will be obvious in a blind test. Either you will hear a difference or you won't. If you want to be extra scrupulous, do an ABX blind test, against a unit well-known as a reference here. That may control your bias favoring the 2-to-3-thousand-euros unit.

To my mind, there are only two reason to purchase an expensive DAC:

1) It sounds better.
The only way you can find this out is a controlled blind test. Until then, everything is just sales crap, opinion, supposition and bias ... and bias ... and bias.

2) It is more reliable.
I myself am concerned about reliability, but it's an issue that defies all attempts at prediction, especially over a 20-year span of time. If you're really worried about it, buy two or three 100-euro DACs instead of the 2-or-3-thousand-euro DACS, and if something does go wrong, you'll have backups and still be huge amounts of money ahead.
Use the savings to buy music files, room treatment or streaming services.

Jim

Of course I would like to do a blind test, but no one here Europe is going to offer to do that, and I am not competent enough to do that.

 

[DSJR]

Forums for subjectivist 'audiophiles' are funny things (should I include ALL forums in this?), with gear becoming fashionable for a while and then interest moves on. In UK audio forums I used to be a regular on, the old Philips TDA1541 chipset (with separate filter chip) was king, the 'Crown' versions revered (even though an engineer well versed with this chipset saying to me the digital filter is what really influenced it's 'sound' at the time, assuming there was one) and so on. Attention then moved on to non oversampling and what I think were called 'Ladder Dacs' at one point, which I think translates here a bit to R2R? My interest in tech over th e music kind of started to fizzle out after 'Bitstream,' this latter sounding quite gentle and 'analogue' at first but then all but indistinguishable from other technologies in later products I heard. earlier ESS Sabre dacs were the next big thing with a notorious? designer (John Westlake?) who 'did' a few odd but interesting things and then jumped ship from the company he was with, leaving them to try to reverse-engineer what he'd done and the products using these chips being found on forums to be 'bright and shiny' sounding, which wasn't always liked...

The above is just my limited take on it all and THANK HEAVENS for ASR and other trusted sites which have helped me and others dig through the ignnorant hearsay-based bullsh*t and get to some proper truths about dacs using modern technology.

I'm sure the Denafrips and new top model 'sorted' Schiit Iggy (MIB) dacs are good 'sounding,' but better to the ears than a cheapo SMSL or Topping, let alone a standard Schiit Modi in current form (assuming the listener didn't know which box was being used)?

Just sayin' loik.........

 

[Lasker]

I love this forum, but I have a question... to write here I have to think that all the DAC with a sinad over 110db sound the same?
Any time that people ask here for listening impressions are crucified.
.....
Personally six month ago returned a DAC more expensive than my Sanskrith mk3, costing two and a half the prices, but to me unlisteanable and It measured well, more then the sanskrith ( listening It with exactly same gear (Adam))

 

[Deleted member 21219]

Of course I would like to do a blind test, but no one here Europe is going to offer to do that, and I am not competent enough to do that.

I see.
Do you perhaps have a bunch of techie-type friends who could help you? They might be willing to do it just out of interest in the process, more so than the outcome. It takes patience and care, but you don't need to be a rocket scientist.
The method is here:

Audio Blind Testing - You Are Doing It Wrong! (Video)

Just uploaded a video on the basics of performing controlled tests in audio. It was motivated by saving myself text in having to write all of this down when telling someone who to do these tests right. And as a counter to a few online personalities to keep saying they do "blind" tests yet when...

www.audiosciencereview.com

Jim

 

[fpitas]

Since we're doing this again (and again, and again, and...)