Steve Deckert
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A RANT ABOUT THAT
Also, for me todays experience proved that the giant leap in sound quality was a happy accident of getting just the right digital planetary alignment and not anything that has been done with the gear used for playback necessarily.
This is just a shuddering reminder of how we only hear our systems sound as good as the weakest link in the audio chain permits. In this case that was the source, and not even the source, but the computers running it... actually not even the computers, but the operating systems and the software.
The difference in sound was literally like going back in time a week, when digital was always not analog. If anyone had read the prior nights ramblings at the beginning of this thread and then come in tonight and heard the PC before the checkbox was checked, they would have been crushed as their ears told them I was on drugs and all hyperbole. That's really kind of scary when you think about it. The magic of Decware is that it's real.
How many people even know how to get inside the settings on a PC and adjust the sample and bit rates, and so on. How many guys would see 192kHz on the face plate and not think that's a good thing. How many more would choose 44K over 192K because they knew that was the native rate of the steam?
The DAC is up sampling to DSD, so it's either up sampling from 44K to DSD or from 192K to DSD, it doesn't care. But you can be certain that a piece of dedicated hardware is going to be far better at up sampling than your computer. It's a fact. This is also why I have always had reservations about the many popular software programs to play your music. Some even when you think you have disabled all the bells and whistles and are at a bit perfect output are actually still going through the buss and the sound is still being effected.
Once nice feature of this DAC, is that it will also play files from your computer network server and stream directly from the internet. Both of these options let the hardware in the DAC do everything. The computer is only serving up digital files, not trying to play them.
The only drawback to this is the limitations of the particular app that is used to control it from either a smart phone or tablet.
Again, I have to contrast the difference in sound I heard tonight. Sound A before the correct settings sounded like everyday ho hum digital. Sound B sounded like someone just brought in a pair of speakers that cost ten times more, and the same for the amplifiers. So using that math, you could say that a fair amount of people who have speakers that cost ten times more, and have the great amplifiers may only being hearing it sound half as good as it could. I've seen it so many times I've lost count, and I've done it to myself so many times I've lost count.
IF someone had the idea to toss up a laptop during the fest and run TIDAL on it, and repeat my exact experience, there is no way anyone would have thought to look into the settings because music was playing, it sounded fine, it sounded good... just like another ho hum audio show. All would have thought the speakers and amps which rate a solid 10 out of 10, were actually models that rated a solid 5 out of 10... and while it still may have been better than some were used to, it is an audio sin to chain your stereo to a tree.
It's just scary how easy it is to make an extraordinary and exceptional pair of speakers drop to their knees and pretend to be a pair of Polk Audio towers.
If we look at the audio chain, the speakers are about 3 or 4 links in the chain. There is the driver(s), cabinet, crossover and how it's all setup. The amplifier is about 3 or 4 links as well. It's links are the output transformer, the output tube, the input tube and the overall design and execution.
If you use a preamp it's about the same as the amplifier as far as links in the chain. A turntable would add about 4 more links... mainly the cartridge, the tonearm, the table, the how it's all setup.
Each cable in your system is one link. So if we add it all up it's not really that long of a chain. Then comes digital. We replace the 4 links of the turntable with a solid state output stage made from Opamps.
An Opamp has 27 transistors in it. Then there are the processors in the DAC chip itself which count in the millions, then there is the software, each line of assembled code, the computer itself by it's very nature is millions of links in the chain if not billions.
So you have a nice clean short audio chain that is about a foot long, and somehow we let them persuade us to buy a chain that is 912 miles in length to add to the end of it and give that a listen.
Digital has never been bad, but the delivery systems have always sucked. Plastic CD's that read errors in a different sector every time it's played and the spinning transports... you had to spend 30 grand to get it right while the rest of us suffered.
Then the computer replaced the transport but came with it's own host of problems. Then asynchronous USB finally happened and jitter dropped drastically, but again, so many ways to botch it that despite how good many think they have it sounding it's only because they haven't heard what it actually could sound like if an alien popped into your room and just fixed everything.
We'll get there, the progress has been tremendous but success in how good your stereo sounds is proportional to how many different ways you've been able to configure and test it. Adding the infinite potential of variables a computer brings to the mix diminishes the trustworthiness of the data.
Nevertheless here I sit so traumatized by computers over the past 37 years that even when in a state of audio bliss because the music is so good I still have to bitch about it. ; )
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