Is the dynamic range of CD sufficient?
- Thread starter Al M.
- Start date
I won't talk for tomelex, BUT I'm pretty sure I knew what he meant when he posted ( and you didn't??). Amps don't add signal ( although i guess they could and most times do, subtract signal), so adding dynamics isn't of course possible. A better ability to portray the original event is the best that we can do in our electronics.
No, really I don't which is why I asked Tom to clarify his statement. Your conjecture of what Tom really meant to say may or may not be correct. He may really think that SE amps add dynamics to the music.
I would say SET's slightly compress dynamics, and often listeners hear gentle compression as increased dynamics instead. But the guy who said it can clarify what he meant. And yes, adding such things is a lack of fidelity though it might sound better because of it.
If for example the Trinity DAC has one of those super-accurate clocks as I read somewhere on the thread about that DAC, then this should be somehow measurable in its performance, I would think.
Al M,
Accuracy is not an important aspect for DAC clocks, the important aspect is phase noise. In other words, the clock periods should be precise, not accurate. But as different DAC topologies and implementations have different sensitivities to clock noise, its direct comparison is misleading. But clock performance is an excellent marketing point!
None of the DAC's Stereophile has measured (using pretty consistent methodology) reach theoretical "perfection". Moreover, although the correlation is not absolute, the better sounding DACs also have the best measurements (the dcs Vivaldi being the best so far), and generally speaking the less expensive DACs which measure closest to the best also sound closest to the best. So saying something like "the measured differences don't correlate to the sound" may work with DAC's under $1000 (a somewhat arbitrary number chosen by me), but when you get closer to the SOTA there is surprisingly good correlation using only pretty standard measurements. To me that says current implementation of theory is imperfect; YMMV.
Well, if you look at how Stereophile measures, most measurements are into 100,000 ohms, some into 600 ohms. Thermal noise into the former is a limiter of how close to theoretical perfection you get. Things like the dCS get within about 10 db of it mostly. But so do the latest Benchmark and Electrocompaniet for two much less expensive examples. The latter two measure better in a few ways, and not quite up the dCS in a couple ways. But right there with it, and also not more than a couple handful of decibels from perfection in the analog realm. All three get basically 20 bit performance. Even their distortion values are down around that noise level or very close. So these three are right there at everything you could theoretically expect given the impedance involved. There isn't much further one can go in terms of measured accuracy.
How close to identical would these sound is something I could only guess without hearing them myself.
How close to identical would these sound is something I could only guess without hearing them myself.
To get back to this:
Would there be examples back in 2000 that measured as well as either the dCS Vivaldi or the latest Benchmark and Electrocompaniet?
Maybe not that far back, but the original Benchmark came out in 2005? And even then it was over-engineered; it measured better than was required to get its transparency. I won't make any arguments about CD players as I don't use one. But look at what we're comparing here, at the very top of the performance heap -- dcs, whose least expensive, single box solution is $11k, whose TOTL stack sells for nearly $90k, and Benchmark Media, who will sell you its equal in a DAC for less than $1000, add in a remarkably transparent pre for another $800.
What is wrong with this picture?
Tim
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There seem to be only two logical possibilities:
a) the dCS Vivaldi and the Benchmark sound the same in a double blind test
or
b) while the measurements we make are relevant, they do not tell the whole story -- we don't know yet how to measure all which is important, and which does make an audible difference
I have written about the measurement problem before:
Perhaps we don't or can't always perform all the measurements that are relevant to music reproduction. Frequency and distortion responses measured on sine waves, for example, while certainly relevant, may not be a sufficient read-out for the behaviour of gear on music with its complex signals and transients.
As a scientist (a biochemist) I am critically aware of the measurement problem -- that we sometimes don't measure, or don't know how to measure, the stuff that's really important. In a biological context, for example, it is much easier to measure single components, e.g., enzymes, of a system, than it is to measure their behaviour in a complex system as a whole. Yet a kinetic read-out of an enzyme may not tell you the real story about its behaviour, when other cumulative factors like location, diffusion, modulation by modification, and interaction with other proteins decide on its ultimate behaviour in the cell.
Spectral, whose gear measures great by any conventional standard and who are considered a reference for solid-state amps, have for example pointed out that it is important that nothing in the signal pathway retains 'heat memory', which would distort the behaviour of the transistors on quiet passages after loud and complex transients. That they have successfully tackled the problem to a large extent appears to be an important reason that their amps sound so clean and "fast". Yet this kind of thing is not one typically measured by audio engineers.
Sure. But the heat memory effect *can* and *has* been measured.
The problem is that we have a lot of unsubstantiated claims flying about, and when they are questioned, the answer is "we can't measure everything".
Just because we can't measure everything doesn't mean we shouldn't try to measure things. If people feel there is some effect we can't currently measure, the first step is to verify that the effect really exists. Despite all the shortcomings, double-blind, controlled ABX is still the best tool we have for determining if a difference exists at all (ABX is useless for determining which one is *better* - that is a different issue). Once we establish the effect exists, we can (and should) try to devise methods for measuring it.
I'm not a hardcore a) guy. I'm willing to accept, even in this incredibly mature industry, that there are things that cannot be measured, though if they cannot, I have to wonder how they work on and refine these attributes in development consistently. Certainly there are often things that aren't measured, though in the case of the Benchmark, that component has been pretty severely scrutinized on a wide variety of benches sympathetic and otherwise. I think the differences, if audible at all, are very, very small and I'd have little hesitation in putting money on blind listening tests revealing no consistent differentiation. But even if I lost that money, given the measurements and the evident inability to measure the differences that are audible, those differences would have to, by definition, be subjective, which leads me back to my question:
Two DACs that are for all practical purposes and by all objective measures, equal. So close in performance that if there is an audible difference it is, by definition, a matter of taste: $1k vs. $11K. What's wrong with this picture?
Tim
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Benchmark DAC2 (no preamp) costs $1800, for starters. And it doesn't really measure as well as the dcs (which costs $35k, I think), just close. And if we're already at perfection in digital processing, why should any of that matter? Why not the Cambridge DACMagic at $500? Why not the DAC (which also does DSD) in a Denon AVR?
FWIW, at least one long-time LP proponent, Jeff Dorgay of ToneAudio, has posted that he often prefers the sound of the Vivaldi stack to his megabuck LP setup.
FWIW, at least one long-time LP proponent, Jeff Dorgay of ToneAudio, has posted that he often prefers the sound of the Vivaldi stack to his megabuck LP setup.
As in Tim's reply logic will not win out. As with religion, politics, etc biases and preferences are to strong even with valid data. The data will just be ignored.
The Benchmarks at $1800 - $1995, street (I just did an Amazon search) are the ones with the pre, remote and headphone amp. The straight DAC is $995. And the closest comparable product I could find from dcs was a single box, dac-only for $11k. But really, the details of those numbers don't matter a bit. $1k vs $11k, $2k vs $35k...it doesn't change the question.
What was reported here is that the Benchmark measures a bit better than the dcs on some counts, the dcs a bit better on others. Another moot point, given that they are both sufficiently over-engineered that the differences in their measurements are almost certainly inaudible and either is very likely to be the most transparent component in any system.
I'm quite comfortable labeling the objective differences between the two a moot point. Do they sound the same? Maybe not, but given the data I'm also pretty comfortable saying any differences are going to be subjective ones, not a matter of one being superior to the other. Nobody's going to run sufficient DBT tests of these two products, and even if they did anyone who disagreed with the findings would find fault with the results anyway, so let's boil this down:
Given all of the above, it would take very strenuous mental gymnastics to come to a conclusion other than that these two products are, at the very least, very closely comparable. So again, I ask the question:
$1k vs $11k or $2k vs $35k, what, on earth, is wrong with this picture?
A bit of a straw man there: I didn't say anything about digital perfection, but actually, I suspect that there are quite a few DACS out there at substantially less than the price of a Benchmark that would be indistinguishable from a Benchmark. I know of at least one I've tested myself.
It's not worth much to me personally, as I'm not a lover of the colorations of vinyl and would probably prefer any good digital system, but YMMV.
Tim
Al M.,
If we were playing Topfschlagen, I would be saying HOT at this moment.
Can I tell you I find curious that most people are prepared to accept they do not understand it all when they debate sound quality, but once it involves bits almost everyone is an expert. It looks so simple ...
BTW, I also could have said HOT sometime ago when you referred to Spectral, but I was absent minded. And perhaps it could be used against my point!
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