Post by danfaz June 10, 2012 (21 of 29)
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jackan said:
2) Never is the idea that the phenomenon experienced is human based entertained.
I was one of those reviewers, and I fully admitted it was probably just in my head:
"Second listen (yes, this could be just my imagination) things really openned up."
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Interesting posts. All in your head or scientifically proven? It is my belief that the brain takes the input from the ears and processes the sound to create what it (the brain) perceives to be the best sound experience matching it to some 'template'. Walk into a noisy room/bar etc and first off it is very difficult to make out what any individual is saying. After a little while the brain works on the input and you find you can make out more. I have often found that second or subsequent hearings of a disc lead to a perception that the disc actually sounds better. I believe it is a function of the brain processing which tries to make the sound nearer to an ideal. It may be that a live performance or some previous audio experience is programmed in your brain as the ideal.
Maybe this could explain why people who have not been exposed to live music, analogue recordings or such are happy enough with RBCD or even mp3.
Has anyone noticed that when playing a RBCD their initial reaction is usually un-favourable but after some listening time the sound seems more accceptable? The fatigue element is, of course, still there. Maybe this is the result of the subconscious brain activity/processing. The more it has to do, the more tiring. After all any hard brain work is ultimately fatiguing.
Not a scientific explanation but to me it is more plausible than lumps of plastic somehow getting 'run in'.
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Post by Nagraboy June 10, 2012 (23 of 29)
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DSD said:
I never heard of breaking-in SHM-SACDs before, however here are four things that should make SHM-SACDs sound better.
1) The Super-High Material should make SHM-SACDs more accurate, has anyone measured this?
2) The green-label should help audio quality by lightening the burden on the servo mechanism for the player’s tracking head and introduce fewer errors for the player’s error correction to handle, has anyone measured this?
3) Mark Levinson claims single-layer SACDs are sonically superior to hybrid-SACDs based on in-house tests he performed. Other listeners have also noticed a fuller, richer sound with single-layer SACDs.
4) They are uncompressed, by making them Stereo-only there is enough space on the disc to avoid DST lossless compression. Many claim uncompressed music sounds better, for example in computer audio uncompressed WAV and AIFF are believed to be superior to lossless FLAC and ALAC.
Four major changes with SHM, it's hard to evaluate which ones contribute the most to the improved sound quality. I for one would love to hear a pure DSD recorded SHM-SACD from Channel, PentaTone or Telarc.
These are all characteristics of SHM-SACDs, but there is no good reason to expect that any of them could improve the sound of an SACD.
That some people say uncompressed WAV or AIFF sounds better than losslessly compressed formats for computer audio is not supportive evidence. It's just another example of audiophile hearsay - just like SHM burn-in itself.
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Post by Hitters June 10, 2012 (24 of 29)
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danfaz said:
"Second listen (yes, this could be just my imagination) things really openned up."
This expression is quite typical on audiophiles: open-up.
Impossible to discuss about it as it is such a subjective experience.
Rendering of detail, bass extension, delicate highs, yes, we can discuss about these.
But when an audiophile says: "things really opened-up", what can you say?
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Post by stvnharr June 10, 2012 (25 of 29)
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Hitters said:
This expression is quite typical on audiophiles: open-up.
Impossible to discuss about it as it is such a subjective experience.
Rendering of detail, bass extension, delicate highs, yes, we can discuss about these.
But when an audiophile says: things really opened-up", what can you say?
Lovely post Juan!
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Post by Nagraboy June 10, 2012 (26 of 29)
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Hitters said:
This expression is quite typical on audiophiles: open-up.
Impossible to discuss about it as it is such a subjective experience.
Rendering of detail, bass extension, delicate highs, yes, we can discuss about these.
But when an audiophile says: things really opened-up", what can you say?
I'm sure there's a joke about 'opening another can of worms' somewhere in here...
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Post by Hitters June 10, 2012 (27 of 29)
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stvnharr said:
Lovely post Juan!
Thank you, Steven. I really mean what I wrote.
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Post by SnaggS June 10, 2012 (28 of 29)
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Fitzcaraldo215 said:
I think this is really about computer audio in general. The problem is that a general purpose PC or MAC has a myriad of processes going on, unseen in the background, starting with anti virus, but there are many more. Some sophisticated computer audiophiles have methods for "quieting" or eliminating many of these. In any case, the computing resources required during playback, especially involving the unpacking of lossless codecs, can cause contention for those limited resources. The bits still come out perfect, but their timing may have been subtly altered in waiting for the necesssary resources to become available, with sonic consequences. We are probably talking 10's or 100's of picoseconds, but with music, that may be crucial. It is just another form of potential playback jitter or subtle timing issues. Uncompressed data requires less computing resources, so it may be less susceptible.
I don't want to be rude, but there is no need for inference or guesses, everything is documented, and anybody who wants to can go and have a read.
A good article on how CD Audio works (as opposed to CD Data).
http://home.btconnect.com/geffers/cd.html
Poster above is correct in there is one level less data correction. There is still a fair bit of correction though, so unless your CD is scratched, there shouldn't be any errors. I used to have a DAC that had an error counter on it, after years of use I never saw it go from "0".
In the olden days, DAC's used to be tied to the rate at which data arrived at their input. Modern dacs are asynchronous and have two clocks, and avoid this problem. Older CD players also didn't implement the 2nd level of Audio error correction and were thus more susceptible to errors. This was 20 years ago, and articles written then don't apply now.
The general purpose PC has multiple processors etc and streaming music etc is buffered (thats why you get a short delay when switching tracks, changing volume etc). There is no reason for any PC to have trouble decoding audio. Its no different from the PC in the studio on which the music was recorded.
When Apples introduced CoreAudio they completely overhauled how audio is managed in the OS and have the lowest latency of any OS. One of the reason's they're popular with musicians. Windows is not as robust and has higher latency, but for playback, you'll either hear gaps in the music or you won't.
This latency is really only a concern for the musicians themselves, particularly singers who hear their own voice conducted through the bones in their head and then through headphones/monitor speakers.
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Post by jackan June 12, 2012 (29 of 29)
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SnaggS said:
This latency is really only a concern for the musicians themselves, particularly singers who hear their own voice conducted through the bones in their head and then through headphones/monitor speakers.
Topic Swerve! Topic Swerve!
Latency is also a problem with external timing as well.
Such as keeping time with the rest of the group.
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