UpTone LPS-1 Linear Power Supply Review and Measurements

[Oliver Hyams]

Thanks for the welcome.

So, do you think that all CD players sound the same, because all they are doing is playing digital signals?

And what about turntables and cartridges?

 

[Oliver Hyams]

Incidentally, I am not talking about "new" cables being compared with "old" cables, or "new" bits of equipment being compared with "old" bits of equipment. Sometimes I reluctantly have to accept that something genuinely new is not better than what I had previously.

I agree fully that doing tests blind is the best way to test whether or not one is imagining something, but if one has a vinyl pressing (and a very good turntable sound) as one's reference, then it is highly unlikely that one is imagining the differences.

In any event, even if there is a placebo effect, who cares if one enjoys the music (more because of making a change in the configuration), which is what it is all about? But I do think that you are failing to acknowledge that you are saying that the differences are imaginary. One cannot "hear" something that is not there without imagining it. And how do you know that there are differences between the "sound" of e.g. cables which you are incapable of measuring?

 

[Oliver Hyams]

Actually, that last question should be: And how do you know whether or not there are differences between the "sound" of e.g. cables which you are incapable of measuring?

 

[Wombat]

W

Actually, that last question should be: And how do you know whether or not there are differences between the "sound" of e.g. cables which you are incapable of measuring?

Why do you state that any difference in sound can't be measured?

 

[DonH56]

Need a popcorn emoji...

 

[amirm]

Actually, that last question should be: And how do you know whether or not there are differences between the "sound" of e.g. cables which you are incapable of measuring?

I can certainly measure wires. It is the most trivial thing to measure! See this test of USB cables for example: https://audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/do-usb-audio-cables-make-a-difference.1887/

Let's remember that in this thread we measured flaws in LPS-1 that even the manufacturer did not know existed or even could exist!

Our measurement ability is superb.

 

[amirm]

So, do you think that all CD players sound the same, because all they are doing is playing digital signals?

No, they don't just play digital signals. CD stream has both digital audio samples and analog timing of when to play them. The latter needs to be extracted and cleaned up enough to be below threshold of our hearing to not be a factor.

Also CD players have different analog output stages so that can be different regardless of the back-end optical engine and even DAC.

All of this is quite measureable. Here is for example the same test on two different CD players by stereophile:

As we see there are clear differences in the analog output of the CD players.

So why do we say generally CD players sound similar? It is for two reasons:

1) the signals used here exaggerate the real life. In the above tests for example, a 19 and 20 Khz tone is used at around -10 db. Music simply doesn't have that high of an amplitude that far up. What is there is orders of magnitude is lower and hence its distortion is well into noise level.

2) As audiophiles, we simply don't know what these distortions sound like and hence, can't hear them even if they were there. Our hearing system is designed for information extraction and ignores a lot of things. Heck you would go mad if every sound in nature was captured fully and analyzed by the brain! The lossy nature of our hearing is there for our own good!!!

So no in this forum we don't make empty chants that digital is digital so everything is the same. They are not. We know they are not and demonstrate it through hyper-sensitive measurements to show it. It is just that when we do and show problems, they are simply lack of engineering hygiene than audible problems.

 

[amirm]

And what about turntables and cartridges?

Oh, they sound crazy different to me. I hope to be measuring phono pre-amps soon so we will be able to add some data to this topic.

 

[amirm]

Incidentally, I am not talking about "new" cables being compared with "old" cables, or "new" bits of equipment being compared with "old" bits of equipment. Sometimes I reluctantly have to accept that something genuinely new is not better than what I had previously.

I understand and didn't make any such assumption. Whether old or new is not the question. The question is whether you changed your mode of listening the moment you decided to try out a new cable. Answer is you did. You try a new cable and I mean different in this context and immediately your brain operates differently. That difference results in capturing different data.

I agree fully that doing tests blind is the best way to test whether or not one is imagining something, but if one has a vinyl pressing (and a very good turntable sound) as one's reference, then it is highly unlikely that one is imagining the differences.

I have not heard of this argument before. I have Reel to Reel tape and I don't hear the differences you mention. What does that mean?

To hear the differences we are talking about, you would need to be trained specifically for them. You would need a system that would inject various amounts of it from very obvious to very hard. Listening to LPs doesn't help in that regard. Indeed one of the most famous audiophiles and one has more LPs than you can remotely count, subjected himself to a cable test. Sadly he lost that and in a spectacular way.

Here he was testing the "cheap" Monster cable against Transparent Opus cable. This is all at his house with his music, etc. So LP experience did not help him at all. He could only identify his own cable 3 out of 7 times!!! I think the Opus costs $20,000 or something? He was so sure prior to the test that he could hear it against the Monster cable.

In any event, even if there is a placebo effect, who cares if one enjoys the music (more because of making a change in the configuration), which is what it is all about? But I do think that you are failing to acknowledge that you are saying that the differences are imaginary. One cannot "hear" something that is not there without imagining it. And how do you know that there are differences between the "sound" of e.g. cables which you are incapable of measuring?

I am saying that it is NOT placebo difference a lot of times. Yes, it becomes one after the fact as in the case of Mike above. Once you believe your current cable is better than old, then sure, you will continue to hear the difference. But it starts off different in that your hearing perception is variable. What we hear is always, always combination of sound, visuals and other information. The ratio of those things vary from time to time.

If you want to call that imagination then sure, it can be that but one has to accept that it is always imagination! Isn't imagination that let's use visualize an instrument in the track that we have never seen? You know that they are playing the violin now?

As to living with the imagined improvement anyway, sure. You can. The problem with it is that the effect disappears since it had no valid source in the soundwaves. This is why people once hooked on this phenomena, will be on a never ending "upgrade cycle." After all, every time you make another comparison, you will hear improvements yet again and you have to buy that and sell the old. Then the next cycle and next cycle. Soon you will be trying everything in the world, no matter how impossible for it to change sound. Yet you hear it as well as you "heard" the cable difference. You will be investing in huge amount of money in these things when as you say, they could have zero effect. All of for a fleeting days or weeks where you think they do something they do not.

Please know that I am not just describing you. I am describing all of us. I have had the same experiences you have. All of us can hear and do hear what is not there. What changes some of us is performing controlled tests and realizing the outcome was so different and what audio science and engineering predicted. So we take our anecdotal experiences casually if anything at all. That is the learning which awaits you.

 

[Soniclife]

Actually, that last question should be: And how do you know whether or not there are differences between the "sound" of e.g. cables which you are incapable of measuring?

My understanding is Amir (and others) take the measurements, and then compare them to the research that shows at what level things become audible, before declaring them to sound the same. If you look at the measurements he takes nothing measures exactly the same, this seems reassuring to me, it shows his instruments are more sensitive than than what is being measured.

If you believe that things that are being declared identical sounding do sound different then you need to conduct controlled listening tests to prove the science is missing something. The great thing about this is should you or someone else prove via a controlled test that differences are indeed audible then good audio scientists will get excited in finding out what the gap in their knowledge is, which will lead to better and cheaper toys for all of us.

If you have never done any blind testing I strongly urge you to try it, it's truly interesting to experiment on yourself like this, I learnt a huge amount from playing with it, and lots of things I used to believe evaporated away.

 

[dallasjustice]

I have had the same experiences you have.

I sat next to you in the Synergistic Research demo at RMAF. It was a hilarious Denney Demo!

 

[Jinjuku]

Also, the sound differs significantly according to whether I have the music file on an M.2 SATA SSD in a slot on the motherboard (with the Windows 10 Pro operating system on the M.2 SSD) or a SATA 2.5 inch SSD (the latter being a good Samsung one, the former being reasonable Crucial one) via a (standard) SATA cable.

We can easily blind test this:

Using www.fixme.it to remote control the machine I can create two folders with the same tracks. One on the M.2 and one on the SATA. Using Foobar ABX comparator you A/B between the folders.

I don't buy this argument at all when you are talking about asynch, burst transfers, where you have media that is capable of data xfers in the 400MB/s range. Entire CD's worth in SECONDS.

Let me know when you want to do this.

 

[Soniclife]

Using www.fixme.it to remote control the machine I can create two folders with the same tracks. One on the M.2 and one on the SATA. Using Foobar ABX comparator you A/B between the folders.

I don't think that will work, my understanding on how the foobar abx works is when it starts it pulls both file into it's ram, and inflates them if required, so you are not listening to the data from the disk direct. But then again every player does the same so maybe it's the same.

 

[Jakob1863]

It should be mentioned that a listener who is not used to "blind" controlled listening tests in general and the ABX protocol most likely will need a prolonged training time to get really correct/useful results .....

 

[amirm]

It should be mentioned that a listener who is not used to "blind" controlled listening tests in general and the ABX protocol most likely will need a prolonged training time to get really correct/useful results .....

Only if the difference is much smaller than they think it is!

 

[Jakob1863]

Only if the difference is much smaller than they think it is!

Surely it could also be, if the difference is bigger than they think it is.....

But if you could supply actual data that it could "only" in the case that you´ve meant, i´m of course interested as up to now i didn´t know about such studies.

 

[amirm]

Surely it could also be, if the difference is bigger than they think it is.....

He needs training to hear even bigger differences blind than sighted???

But if you could supply actual data that it could "only" in the case that you´ve meant, i´m of course interested as up to now i didn´t know about such studies.

I am not clear on what you are asking. I proposed a test to OP and provided $100 for funding of it. If he does and reports back, we data that what he thought was clear advantage in sighted testing, disappeared in blind. That alone would be a significant data point for him and perhaps us.

 

[Jinjuku]

I don't think that will work, my understanding on how the foobar abx works is when it starts it pulls both file into it's ram, and inflates them if required, so you are not listening to the data from the disk direct. But then again every player does the same so maybe it's the same.

This should be your moment of awakening.

 

[Jinjuku]

It should be mentioned that a listener who is not used to "blind" controlled listening tests in general and the ABX protocol most likely will need a prolonged training time to get really correct/useful results .....

Hmmm.... They were able to get the current results with no training whatsoever.

 

[Jakob1863]

He needs training to hear even bigger differences blind than sighted???

I stated "....most likely needs prolonged training...."
You stated "only if the difference is much smaller than they think....." which means imo that listeners (not used to do "blind" controlled listening tests" only need prolonged training ....if the actual difference is smaller than they think.

To the contrary (of that "only") i asserted that they even would (most likely) need prolonged training .... if the difference is bigger than they think.

But i was asking if you could cite some studies examining if training is only needed if differences are much smaller than expected.

I only know experiments (already mentioned) where researchers found - already in the 1950s - 1960s - that results were inferior when using an ABX protocol in comparison to the results of an A/B protocl; in addition they mentioned that subjectively participants/they considererd the ABX task as more difficult. They were exploring DL numbers in listening tests (non multidimensional).

Apart from that i only know about comparisons of ABX to other protocols in sensory food evaluations where results of larger groups were examined in different conditions. While all protocols showed significant results, the proportion of correct responses was higher in A/B tests than in ABX tests.

I am not clear on what you are asking. I proposed a test to OP and provided $100 for funding of it. If he does and reports back, we data that what he thought was clear advantage in sighted testing, disappeared in blind. That alone would be a significant data point for him and perhaps us.

As said before in other threads, i encourage everybody to participate/use controlled listening tests, but money bets aren´t a good idea as we already know (since publications from Signal Detection Theory in the 1960s) that listeners/participants do behave differently if rewards are offered. So an additional bias factor is introduced.

Data gathering is/might be important if is clearly stated what variables were really tested. Wrt something that a listener might be able to percecpt in "casual/normal" listening mode it most likely does not help to gather data from an experiment where the listener is participating in an artifical setting introducing additional variables.