Review and Measurements of Audio-gd NFB2 192 DAC

[Wombat]

Vipassana meditation aims at this. Experimenting as viewer and not beeing implicated. Then you become more free. Beeing free from what you think is good or bad (as it's only good or bad in the mental).
It takes a long time of meditation to reach this.

You could read what Buddhist teachings say about 'attachment', whilst you are in the zone.

 

[Veri]

You could read what Buddhist teachings say about 'attachment', whilst you are in the zone.

 

[amirm]

So you re also a boudhist expert
With boudhism you notice things are always changing and how they affect you and you just watch it. You don't fall in love.

Studied it in college. And my sister followed it.

What I am telling you is that you can mediate for a century and still not understand the proper way to perform listening tests. Two devices for example can have different levels. That leads to preference for one or the other. What in Buddhism would teach you that? Nothing.

Medical science says your short-term memory is most accurate but only lasts a few seconds. Have your Buddhist monk play one system for a few weeks and then switch to another as audiophiles do, and you will be relying on highly lossy long term memory that can't remember hardly anything about the fidelity of music. So once again, you land in the ditch, meditation or not.

At some level though, we are dealing with human psychology. And that is the biggest barrier for you to cross to get enlightenment in audio. Remember, you are in the wrong no matter how hard you try. You are swimming against decades of audio knowledge by an army of researchers, mathematicians, engineerings and innovators. Don't underestimate what you are facing here.

 

[Calexico]

Most Genious were alone facing laughers. Nowadays there is less place for genius because money is the most important.

 

[Calexico]

Bouddhisme teach you how to feel truely. Then you see how you react and you understand reality. With time you understand that how you react is not reality but only in your mind. Then you stop caring about your reaction and you just experiment the present not with the mental or what you like or dislike.

 

[Wombat]

Bouddhisme teach you how to feel truely. Then you see how you react and you understand reality. With time you understand that how you react is not reality but only in your mind. Then you stop caring about your reaction and you just experiment the present not with the mental or what you like or dislike.

Then why do you care so much about audio minutae? It is insignificant in Buddhist philosophy - as it should be.

Let's stick with verifiable statements.

 

[restorer-john]

Bouddhisme teach you how to feel truely. Then you see how you react and you understand reality. With time you understand that how you react is not reality but only in your mind. Then you stop caring about your reaction and you just experiment the present not with the mental or what you like or dislike.

Hilarious, that this type of complete drivel ends up in an audio-gd review...

 

[Audiophonics]

There is conflict of interest. I Already answered earlier on the thread... Qobuz is affiliated with AUDIOPHONICS, neither hide this. Strangely many Qobuzissime products are exclusively distributed by Audiophonics. Qobuz mention Audiophonics as the distributor and they mention Qobuz reviews on product pages... Everybody is happy. That's how Hi-fi press works for the past decades.
Audiophonics also mentions ASR reviews for products but only when measurements are good... For Qobuz, this is a lot easier: everything sounds great and it's done.

We are not affiliated with Qobuz, there is no money relationship between our companies.
It only that M. Daussin like to test many products, and that we are selling most of Chinese brands. So we provide to him all products that he requires, even when sometimes we think that they don't worth a test.
Reviews give them more visits and bring them customers, and for us, it gives an external point of view of the products, different from the commercial description.

All reviews are not 100% positive, if the product don't have Qobuzissime, you can understand that he didn't think the products was excellent.
It's only subjective review according their taste, it's as relevant as a THD measurement to know the sound quality of a product (I'm teasing )

About the Audio-GD case, I think it would be fair to test a recent product, where we could expect better measurements.
For example a NFB-11.28 Performance edition.
If the measurements are really bad, you will be able to say that audio-GD provides biased measures.
Because they never published measure for this 2014 NFB2 unit.

 

[Calexico]

Hilarious, that this type of complete drivel ends up in an audio-gd review...

It's not drivel. As lot of people say we re biased then i say we should do listening tests with people that are not fooled by their mental. It's goal of boudhism.
When i see how you react you seem to not know what it is.

 

[andreasmaaan]

It's not drivel. As lot of people say we re biased then i say we should do listening tests with people that are not fooled by their mental. It's goal of boudhism.
When i see how you react you seem to not know what it is.

The only way to avoid being fooled by your psychology is to do a double blind controlled test.

 

[FrantzM]

Vipassana meditation aims at this. Experimenting as viewer and not beeing implicated. Then you become more free. Beeing free from what you think is good or bad (as it's only good or bad in the mental).
It takes a long time of meditation to reach this.

I suppose that is why one must allow the product to burn in, while one meditates to remove all biases ... Pity the reviewer of some Audio Research products that need 650 hours of born in to reach their potential, that would be a loooong meditation ...

I apologize in advance for the (slight?) ad hominem but it had to be asked...

Do you actually believe in what you wrote or are you pulling our collective legs?

 

[Veri]

About the Audio-GD case, I think it would be fair to test a recent product, where we could expect better measurements.
For example a NFB-11.28 Performance edition.
If the measurements are really bad, you will be able to say that audio-GD provides biased measures.
Because they never published measure for this 2014 NFB2 unit.

I do hope we see independent verification of NFB Performance edition, or even better: AS-1 Ultra low distortion model.

 

[Calexico]

I suppose that is why one must allow the product to burn in, while one meditates to remove all biases ... Pity the reviewer of some Audio Research products that need 650 hours of born in to reach their potential, that would be a loooong meditation ...

I apologize in advance for the (slight?) ad hominem but it had to be asked...

Do you actually believe in what you wrote or are you pulling our collective legs?

Yes i believe what i say.
It's for Music that i asks questions and try to find the truth.

 

[FrantzM]

Yes i believe what i say.
It's for Music that i asks questions and try to find the truth.

Then try to remove the Self (so easily fooled) from the equation and let the instruments , soul-less and self-less be your guides.

 

[PierreV]

We should be kind to Buddhism around here: the way I see it it is the only religion that advocates oversampling your life to lower noise.

 

[Dana reed]

@Duckeenie
@amirm
ASR should be more rigorous and confirm that the audio gd dac don't sound better by validating with a blind test.
If not you re biased like the audiophiles.
And then for us readers who want the truth we don't know who to trust.
Neither scientists neither audiophiles do blind test.
You re all in the same bias and not open minded.

Because blind tests are hard to do with enough data points (different people, different source material, different transducers) to have any kind of statistical validity. It's easy, if you have $50K and enough time on your hands to learn to use the equipment, to do lots of instrumented tests. Of course confirmation bias can go wrong looking at measurements too, and someone can "believe" they can hear the difference between DACs with 105 vs 110 vs 115 SINAD.

 

[Calexico]

Then try to remove the Self (so easily fooled) from the equation and let the instruments , soul-less and self-less be your guides.

I don't want to enroll a sect. My only guide is me who want to find the truth without bias and not blindly.
And in my own experience i don't like too much transparent (in classic measurements pov) dacs.
Once i listened to a pro dac connected to pro monitors for studio recording and found it very hard to listen to. It was ugly.
That's why i think we should moderate the meaning of the measurements.

 

[Calexico]

Because blind tests are hard to do with enough data points (different people, different source material, different transducers) to have any kind of statistical validity. It's easy, if you have $50K and enough time on your hands to learn to use the equipment, to do lots of instrumented tests. Of course confirmation bias can go wrong looking at measurements too, and someone can "believe" they can hear the difference between DACs with 105 vs 110 vs 115 SINAD.

Well if it's hard why asr always say that all has been demonstrated by blind tests ??
So you admit not enough blind tests has been done to prove that some can discern real differences or not.
Then we agree that nobody should say that less good measuring dac are necessarily less good to listen to.

 

[Frank Dernie]

There is conflict of interest. I Already answered earlier on the thread... Qobuz is affiliated with AUDIOPHONICS, neither hide this. Strangely many Qobuzissime products are exclusively distributed by Audiophonics. Qobuz mention Audiophonics as the distributor and they mention Qobuz reviews on product pages... Everybody is happy. That's how Hi-fi press works for the past decades.
Audiophonics also mentions ASR reviews for products but only when measurements are good... For Qobuz, this is a lot easier: everything sounds great and it's done.

I have been a Qobuz subscriber for some years. I don't often read their email releases but once I did and ended up reading a review of Kingsound Electrostatic headphones which I subsequently ordered from Audiophonics.
I rather like them.

 

[VintageFlanker]

We are not affiliated with Qobuz, there is no money relationship between our companies.

Thanks for answering to this, @Audiophonics. I believe there is no money relationship between you and Qobuz.
Still, there is some kind of partnership as you send products for review in exchange (even for free) to a mention to your website in the review. Many Qobuz readers pointed this in comments and some may see a kind of bias behind reviews (to be honest: I do). I hope you can understand this.
As I said earlier on this thread, if I like the teardrop part of products (basically 2/3 of a Qobuz review), I always do find listening tests to be pretty poor and inconsistent. Anyway...

About the Audio-GD case, I think it would be fair to test a recent product, where we could expect better measurements.
For example a NFB-11.28 Performance edition.
If the measurements are really bad, you will be able to say that audio-GD provides biased measures.

Good point. Even if @amirm tested NFB 27.38 and 28.28 (recent both) with no great results. Why not send a 11.28 Performance to him? I think everyone here just want to be wrong and see AGD improving over time!