Proposal: New SINAD Ranking Design (Histogram)

[sprellemannen]

Drop all the numbers, just place the product in its correct category.
The reason for this: It is the audible difference which matters.
Example: Why care if the SINAD is 123 or 118 if there is no audible difference?

 

[KSTR]

Example: Why care if the SINAD is 123 or 118 if there is no audible difference?

And vice versa, two "SINAD 110" products sounding different?

 

[JSmith]

I assume the cut off for "excellent" is 110db... so unsure why there are 2 x 109db DAC's in the "excellent" section?

I have no issue with the current version, but it would be better vertical and broken up into the individual categories... @restorer-john I liked the idea of having increasing categories by 10dB increments.


JSmith

 

[Holmz]

It's a histogram. A spectrum of values is divided into bins. The more devices fall into each bin, the higher the column representing that bin.

I might be better as a bin for each device, and types hight of the bin, the SINAD/cost…?

 

[Lambda]

And vice versa, two "SINAD 110" products sounding different?

Tricky question...
SINAD tells us nothing about Frequency response

Or distortion at Bass/low frequency
Or Filter / cutoff / aliasing.
Or if it pops and clicks at playback start stop.
Or THD+N at other playback levels.

Assuming all the other things are "perfect" they sound the same. but that's a lot of assumptions.

 

[restorer-john]

@restorer-john I liked the idea of having increasing categories by 10dB increments.

Most distortion meters/analysers have range switching on 10dB scales. It simplifies everything. We have 10 beautiful colour scales that have been around for a very long time (the classic ROYGBIV) plus two at each end.

P.S. How do you guys remember the colours of the rainbow from grade/primary school? My maths teacher told us: rip out your guts before I vomit. The English used to say Richard of york got boozed in Vienna.

 

[miero]

I would vote for not generating that graph in new reviews. The rating excelent/very good/fair/poor can be written into the graph with 1kHz measurement.

 

[rdenney]

I'm not a fan of the grades--excellent, etc. I would rather report it as @restorer-john has suggested, by distortion percentage and dB. But it might also make sense to bin them by the bits of data being realized--24 bit, 23 bits,..., 14 bits, 13 bits, .... This would allow people to compare the products being tested against their sources. The advantage is that it reduces the number of bins without being forced to apply a grade that is already claiming that stuff is poor when it is clearly beyond audible transparency limits for nearly all listeners.

If people want to chase dB, that's fine--it would be there--but if they are playing CD's, a DAC with 120 dB SINAD is functionally no better than a DAC with 100 dB SINAD. And that could be reduced to 90 if they are playing compressed MP3's.

If we were forced to identify the "excellent" category, and given that many tests show the inability of the vast majority of listeners to be able to distinguish bit depth greater than 16, shouldn't "excellent" be anything capable of realized 16 bits of SINAD? That is, "excellent" is anything greater than 96 dB.

This seems to me especially the case given that many state that the mission of ASR is to prevent people from spending money unwisely. Some might choose a DAC with a 120-dB SINAD that lacked the features that they needed, and just work around that lack, instead of buying a DAC that has those features but that only has a SINAD of, say, 105 dB. Example: My Ifi Zen Blue Dac on one system does not measure at the highest level but I bought it for it's elegant Bluetooth receiver and it's clear display of the audio standard being played back via Bluetooth. But its DAC is still much better than any source file anyone would play through it.

Rick "wondering how many people feed a 120-dB DAC into a 90-dB amplifier like I do, not to mention the speakers with distortion levels closer to -40 dB at some frequencies, to play music recorded at 60 dB S/N" Denney

 

[machinejump]

This must be on everyone's mind because I took a stab at it last night when it came up in another thread. Here is my attempt https://playful-starlight-e92e38.netlify.app/
Going vertical improved legibility and added price and price per sinad point on hover.

 

[Tks]

Don't get the problem with the current ratings honestly. It achieves what it sets out to do better than any single one of these suggestions. It's meant to give someone an orientation as fast as possible to where the current device's standing is compared to everything reviewed prior. There's only one problem though I'll touch on in a second. As for what people have been suggesting...

The histogram is non interactive, thus pointless.

Making it a Google Doc/Excel is laggy and I hate opening these idiotic web-apps to view something simple, as they always are a stuttering mess and just never really look good to a passerby.

Splitting the sections by ranking as the last user on this post suggested is nice, but a UX fail because it bloats the review post vertically more than it already is by another single page-length worth of vertical space bloat.

On the second page we have the total opposite of the thread's intent where people are veering off into philosophical discussions about changing the entire grading system of SINAD itself...

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The current view is fine, but it is going to get worse since the red box that tried to highlight the product being reviewed will slowly start to become invisible once the list of devices gets big enough. Losing the main advantage of the current view. But this can easily be rectified by having a big arrow pointing where the device is on the list, and then an image right under it (or still within the same image), with a zoomed-in full resolution crop of ~6-7 devices to the left and right of the product being reviewed.

So something like this (sorry for the jank, I'm not a graphics person, just a quick mock-up)

I know some folks want to try and address the elephant in the room about horizontal expansion getting constantly worse, to where if someone opens up the full resolution image, they may be treated to something with 5 length's worth of 4K screens with the amount of devices reviewed. I assume by that time, there'll be a solution that makes more sense than anything here we can whip up in a few minutes worth of thinking. Or things like interactivity of some sort could be made trivial to implement by then.

 

[amirm]

For those of you advocating a vertical list, it will go on for many pages and lead to annoyance.

If you don't click on the image, you get a quick sense of where the product ranks within the quartile. The only reason to click on the image is to see the details. I hope we have that in the Review Index soon for that purpose.

 

[amirm]

It's a histogram. A spectrum of values is divided into bins. The more devices fall into each bin, the higher the column representing that bin.

I now what a histogram is. We are not trying to show a distribution here but rather, individual rankings. What you suggested makes no sense in this regard.

 

[amirm]

The current view is fine, but it is going to get worse since the red box that tried to highlight the product being reviewed will slowly start to become invisible once the list of devices gets big enough.

Thanks but it would take good bit more photoshop work to create that. Is there interest in this? If a product is in top 20, I already show the zoomed view. Below that I feel it is of much less value.

 

[Tks]

Thanks but it would take good bit more photoshop work to create that. Is there interest in this? If a product is in top 20, I already show the zoomed view. Below that I feel it is of much less value.

I personally don't care, but felt compelled to offer something that made more sense than the current suggestions I've been seeing. The only downside is that photoshop work.

I don't mind what is there now. A full res shot of the current device list, and a second shot with a zoomed in crop would be fine (the only reason I included the crop zoom in the same image in my mockup, was to demonstrate how much vertical space savings can be had, and is obviously something you are cognizant of which everyone else seems to be oblivious to for some reason).

 

[Nam]

1. Use vertical list (horizontal product name)
2. Remove the bars, replace bar by product name, move number to the left of product name
3. Add MSRP
4. Split the list and horizontally stack them

I think the result image should be reasonably sized.

 

[Chromatischism]

Tricky question...
SINAD tells us nothing about Frequency response

Or distortion at Bass/low frequency
Or Filter / cutoff / aliasing.
Or if it pops and clicks at playback start stop.
Or THD+N at other playback levels.

Assuming all the other things are "perfect" they sound the same. but that's a lot of assumptions.

Good point. Ideally, all of these metrics would have their own graphs from a database, which you could toggle between with a combo box (drop down for you web folks) or slicer type thing.

 

[sam_adams]

It just looks like the New York skyline at a glance.

Driving West on the LIE just before the Van Dam Street exit, the setting Sun breaks out from behind the clouds, illuminating the Manhattan skyline from behind, as Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue is playing on WQXR. Good times.

 

[restorer-john]

Driving West on the LIE just before the Van Dam Street exit, the setting Sun breaks out from behind the clouds, illuminating the Manhattan skyline from behind, as Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue is playing on WQXR. Good times.

You've painted a great picture there.

 

[sam_adams]

Zooming & Panning in CanvasJS HTML5 & JavaScript Charts example.

How To - Image Magnifier Glass example.

No Photoshop required. Just good coding skills.

 

[sam_adams]

How do you guys remember the colours of the rainbow from grade/primary school?

Roy G. Biv.