Schiit speaks

[amirm]

3. Has it occurred to you that perhaps since we live in a noisy ANALOG world that our ears LIKE TO HEAR the analog noise and distortion that comes from vinyl?

No. A turntable is a mechanical contraption that has no equivalence in nature. When you listen to live music, do you hear grove noise? Pops and ticks? How about copious amount of distortion? How about reduced channel separation?

I love the sound of my Reel to Reel tape deck not because it is superior to CD, it is not. It has background hiss that digital does not. What makes the tapes sound so good is because they are far better the "mastered" versions for digital.

You are under an illusion that we have not heard these claims a thousand times before. We don't entertain them just because you insist they are true where every bit of evidence is against you.

 

[ahofer]

Educate myself? Funny! Let me clue you into something: People have been making measurements since the beginning of time, and Spectrum Analyzers have been available since the 1940s.
I have owned audio components that you would have killed for. I have thrown and given away stuff that would make you cry.
So please don't assume that I'm some neophyte. Do you even know what a modified tap Williamson amplifier is without searching? What about a KLH Nine or Last PAS?

That is some hollow-ass argument to authority right there. Particularly the middle part.

 

[amirm]

Though it is written from the broadcast perspective, most of you should still understand it.

Put Synergies to Work at Your Station (radioworld.com)

We understanding it alright. It is talking about high impedance tube amps that do indeed have load dependency. They are best avoided. There are countless choices of headphone amps available including those from Schiit that have near zero impedance. Even when they have tubes, often they are in buffer duty and not in charge of output drive so the article doesn't apply here either.

 

[THW]

Dude, if you are going to compare your credentials with some of the guys around here, I admire your courage.

Rick "just sayin'" Denney

why does this remind me of this meme here:

 

[MZKM]

Why can different pieces of audio gear that measure similar sound different? It comes down to ONE word: SYNERGY! It's literally how different pieces of equipment 'play' with one another!

The right word is MYTH. Yes, there are rare cases where equipment has odd impedances and such but in general, there is no such thing. It is an impossibility for Schiit for example to have designed their DAC for some random downstream amp you think has synergy with it.

Don‘t mean to sidetrack this thread, but the next time you (or @hardisj) gets a subwoofer in for review that has high-level inputs, would it be possible to use that to test the “sub getting the same sound signature the amp gives the speakers” claim (whether it be purely distortion or even FR)? I just heard this statement again today so it’s on my mind.

Not sure if just hooking up the sub to the speaker amp is enough, I assume a challenge would be how to hookup a speaker during this to not mess with the NFS (long speaker cable run to the speaker playing in another room or outdoors)?

 

[dpuopolo]

There is zero relevance between what you are saying and the topic at hand. The skill you need to have is conducting controlled tests where people don't know which is which and back your stated claims. Or having read research you could cite about it. Otherwise you may have explained you were a plumber and it would be just as apt.

Did you bother to read my RW article before you commented? Obviously not. Funny, considering you seem to alter transfer functions all the time, yet you deny these are synergies too.

 

[THW]

Did you bother to read my RW article before you commented? Obviously not. Funny, considering you seem to alter transfer functions all the time, yet you deny these are synergies too.

We understanding it alright. It is talking about high impedance tube amps that do indeed have load dependency. They are best avoided. There are countless choices of headphone amps available including those from Schiit that have near zero impedance. Even when they have tubes, often they are in buffer duty and not in charge of output drive so the article doesn't apply here either.

it seems to me Amir read it alright.

 

[Spkrdctr]

Synergies? I have to say that Amir correctly came out and said that it is bunk. Crapola, marketing lies, snake oil, ripoff, Lies, and scams. He did not state it in wishy washy terms. I tip my hat to Amir. I know the stink of snake oil when I smell it. Many on here do. So, if you are going to say that "Actually this is not snake oil or marketing lies and I have some information to prove it" then that information will be looked at. But any sighted test of anything is invalid. Period. With some audio engineers I used to know back 35 years ago, I could have you think that sound was coming out of your own knees. So much can be done to "trick" the mind through hearing. So, I say all that to say we are open minded if the evidence shows it to have "some" validity. Sadly, there is a 100% failure rate of any tests that show common snake oil theories work. Amir has politely pointed that out. I'm stating it more forcefully. But that is because I have lived with 40 years of snake oil crap, and it tends to wear on me, a lot. But I still want to be polite and nice. So I try to watch myself in my posting.

 

[dpuopolo]

Synergies? I have to say that Amir correctly came out and said that it is bunk. Crapola, marketing lies, snake oil, ripoff, Lies, and scams. He did not state it in wishy washy terms. I tip my hat to Amir. I know the stink of snake oil when I smell it. Many on here do. So, if you are going to say that "Actually this is not snake oil or marketing lies and I have some information to prove it" then that information will be looked at. But any sighted test of anything is invalid. Period. With some audio engineers I used to know back 35 years ago, I could have you think that sound was coming out of your own knees. So much can be done to "trick" the mind through hearing. So, I say all that to say we are open minded if the evidence shows it to have "some" validity. Sadly, there is a 100% failure rate of any tests that show common snake oil theories work. Amir has politely pointed that out. I'm stating it more forcefully. But that is because I have lived with 40 years of snake oil crap, and it tends to wear on me, a lot. But I still want to be polite and nice. So I try to watch myself in my posting.

Yet another person who didn't bother to read my article before he dissed it.
By the way, I've been involved in several A/B/X tests - one in particular that involved hundreds of people and I correctly identified the unit in question. Every. Single. Time.
I was also able to describe what I heard that made this unit different from the other.
The testers were pretty amazed frankly.
So get your facts straight before you form your opinions next time.

 

[Spkrdctr]

Yet another person who didn't bother to read my article before he dissed it.
By the way, I've been involved in several A/B/X tests - one in particular that involved hundreds of people and I correctly identified the unit in question. Every. Single. Time.
I was also able to describe what I heard that made this unit different from the other.
The testers were pretty amazed frankly.
So get your facts straight before you form your opinions next time.

I have not heard of your test. Do you have anything describing how it was done. As I have said many times on this site, if we find that someone can tell a difference between two items (not including speakers), then it would be the first time ever. Now this is of course excluding a high end amp or preamp or anything where they are deliberately modifying the signal to change it to their own sound. Even then it would have to be fairly large to tell the difference. I'm not saying that you didn't do what you say, I'm just saying that it hasn't been done before. A decent DBT test is fairly hard to do. It does NOT have to be perfect in an engineering sense but it should be kind of close. Level matched, no tells on what is being switched etc.

 

[THW]

I have not heard of your test. Do you have anything describing how it was done. As I have said many times on this site, if we find that someone can tell a difference between two items (not including speakers), then it would be the first time ever. Now this is of course excluding a high end amp or preamp or anything where they are deliberately modifying the signal to change it to their own sound. Even then it would have to be fairly large to tell the difference. I'm not saying that you didn't do what you say, I'm just saying that it hasn't been done before. A decent DBT test is fairly hard to do. It does NOT have to be perfect in an engineering sense but it should be kind of close. Level matched, no tells on what is being switched etc.

also I’m pretty sure impedance matching is already a well known effect around here, not even sure why he thinks people don’t agree with that. and then there’s the bit where a lot of modern equipment just don’t suffer from this issue.

and then there’s the bit about clipping… really I’m not even sure what point he is trying to make when I’m pretty sure most people here are talking about amps working within their linear operating range and limits and are working as intended. If the amp used during his tests don’t satisfy that condition then all bets are off

 

[ahofer]

Muted that guy after the second post declaring how awesome he is. You don’t see Toole or Wurcer doing that, which reveals (again) something about how genuine expertise behaves.

 

[Spkrdctr]

also

and then there’s the bit about clipping… really I’m not even sure what point he is trying to make when I’m pretty sure most people here are talking about amps working within their linear operating range and limits and are working as intended. If the amp used during his tests don’t satisfy that condition then all bets are off

Yes, you are stating it better than I did. If anyone is testing stuff that is out of its normal operating range, then the first question is "why". I assume that no one would do that.

 

[rdenney]

Yes, you are stating it better than I did. If anyone is testing stuff that is out of its normal operating range, then the first question is "why". I assume that no one would do that.

No one would do that on purpose, perhaps. But power requirements for the peaks of dynamic music may be greater than expected, particularly when testing lower-power amps. I refer again to the old test Amir mentioned where the testers blithely acknowledged that the amps were clipping 1% of the time.

Back when a 70-wpc amp was big, clipping behavior was important and definitive. The assumption of linear behavior with inefficient speakers played at reference levels might require many hundreds of watts before clipping to sustain.

Rick “nonlinear behavior defines amps more than we realize” Denney

 

[dpuopolo]

I have not heard of your test. Do you have anything describing how it was done. As I have said many times on this site, if we find that someone can tell a difference between two items (not including speakers), then it would be the first time ever. Now this is of course excluding a high end amp or preamp or anything where they are deliberately modifying the signal to change it to their own sound. Even then it would have to be fairly large to tell the difference. I'm not saying that you didn't do what you say, I'm just saying that it hasn't been done before. A decent DBT test is fairly hard to do. It does NOT have to be perfect in an engineering sense but it should be kind of close. Level matched, no tells on what is being switched etc.

It was in the early 1990s at the National Association of Broadcasters show. QEI Corporation had come out with a device that sent baseband FM audio over a T1 link by converting the baseband into single sideband (CAT link). They had an A/B/X box feeding a pair of high end Beyer headphones using a Benchmark amp (Benchmark started out manufacturing broadcast equipment). For audio they were using a state-of-the art Marantz CD player. The A/B/X box was set to switch between the input signal (CD player) and the output of a baseband decoder. The encoder they were using was a Rhode and Schwartz unit known for its transparent encoding of the stereo baseband. So the chain was CD player (split) ---> Rhode and Schwartz stereo encoder ---> CAT link studio unit ---> 5000 feet of unshielded wire ---> CAT link transmitter unit ---> precision baseband to L/R decoder.

I could easily hear the difference between the two - yet none of the hundreds (possibly thousands) of people before me could hear any difference. It was one of omission rather then addition. The two guys directly after me couldn't hear any difference either.

By the way, the CAT Link wound up being one of the most successful products in FM radio history. Thousands of FMs all over the world bought them and ran them for most of the 1990s and early 2000s. I knew of over a dozen Fine Arts (classical/jazz) FM stations then used them including every one in New York City. Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco.

My ears, while not as good as when I was younger, work just fine. I hear live music every single day (Both my teenaged daughters are in the Philadelphia Girls Choir and song is always breaking out here). My oldest plays the harp; my oldest from my older marriage is a concert oboe player. Having good hearing (And something good to make comparisons with) makes all the difference at times.

 

[amirm]

It was in the early 1990s at the National Association of Broadcasters show. QEI Corporation had come out with a device that sent baseband FM audio over a T1 link by converting the baseband into single sideband (CAT link).

Your story reminds of the opposite at one of the NAB shows we were exhibiting. There was a small vendor with a table showing full transparency of MPEG-4 video codec against the original broadcast signal at data rates that were simply too good to be true. We peaked under the table and realized they were cheating and both monitors were fed from the same signal without one being encoded/decoded! Complained to the show organizers and they shut them down.

Similar story happened at CES when Blu-ray was launched. We were surprised so many BDA members were showing working players as we knew they were having a heck of a time getting anything working. I went to their booth as the show was closing and hit eject on all the blu-ray players. All of them ejected their discs yet the video kept on playing!!! They were cheating by having a hard disk server in the back play the stream rather than Blu-ray discs.

 

[DonH56]

"Rohde and Schwarz" assuming the German instrumentation company (in case others want to search for them). Still making some great equipment today.

 

[dpuopolo]

Your story reminds of the opposite at one of the NAB shows we were exhibiting. There was a small vendor with a table showing full transparency of MPEG-4 video codec against the original broadcast signal at data rates that were simply too good to be true. We peaked under the table and realized they were cheating and both monitors were fed from the same signal without one being encoded/decoded! Complained to the show organizers and they shut them down.

Similar story happened at CES when Blu-ray was launched. We were surprised so many BDA members were showing working players as we knew they were having a heck of a time getting anything working. I went to their booth as the show was closing and hit eject on all the blu-ray players. All of them ejected their discs yet the video kept on playing!!! They were cheating by having a hard disk server in the back play the stream rather than Blu-ray discs.

I once built out and managed a (small) TV station in Boston. We had our own 10 meter dish (think BIG) which received our Pax TV programming. Overnights we used to run a channel called Praise TV. We also had Dish Network there as a back up Praise source (we would do maintenance on the big dish overnights). This meant we could see a direct A/B of Praise - what Dish received vs what they transmitted - on side by side high quality identical monitors. The difference was night and day.

 

[dpuopolo]

"Rohde and Schwarz" assuming the German instrumentation company (in case others want to search for them). Still making some great equipment today.

Correct. One of the best transmitter manufacturers out there too. Their water cooled tubeless 40.000 watt FM transmitter is a true thing of beauty. I put one in down South and it slid right in where their old rig was with a ton of space left over - and their electric and cooling bill dropped by 70%.. It just makes sense to release the heat outdoors rather than inside - and then paying more $$ to remove it via A/C.
R&S®THR9 liquid-cooled FM transmitter family | Rohde & Schwarz (rohde-schwarz.com)

 

[Walderstorn]

Your story reminds of the opposite at one of the NAB shows we were exhibiting. There was a small vendor with a table showing full transparency of MPEG-4 video codec against the original broadcast signal at data rates that were simply too good to be true. We peaked under the table and realized they were cheating and both monitors were fed from the same signal without one being encoded/decoded! Complained to the show organizers and they shut them down.

Similar story happened at CES when Blu-ray was launched. We were surprised so many BDA members were showing working players as we knew they were having a heck of a time getting anything working. I went to their booth as the show was closing and hit eject on all the blu-ray players. All of them ejected their discs yet the video kept on playing!!! They were cheating by having a hard disk server in the back play the stream rather than Blu-ray discs.

Which CES?