A/B test at Lasareath's

shack

Stuff matters.

treitz3

Whoops, I didn't mean to kill the thread. Taking wrench back out of discussion now.

Carry on.......

sucks2beme

Face wrote: »

Did you have your coffee yet?
I agree with most of your points.

No! Rotten day, glad it's over. Music time.

phipiper10

sucks2beme wrote: »

Apple has a plan, and it means you
won't be playing anything on hardware other than Mac. And the industry has
a plan that will be all about "digital rights management".

As a side note -
DRM is failing and will be a thing of the past shortly more companies offereng tunes with no DRM. And thus Apple will lose market share as record companies will be bailing out on them.

Serendipity

So now I see - different CDP's do make a difference, and even different transports can affect the sound.

RuSsMaN

Absolutley - you're screwed now.

Next thing you know you'll be **** deep in a cable debate.

m00npie

RuSsMaN wrote: »

Absolutley - you're screwed now.

Next thing you know you'll be **** deep in a cable debate.

We started on that debate, but then it got quickly dropped.

F1nut

Sal, you are going to wear out that disc.

Yashu

1.0.1.0.1.0.1.0.1.0.1.0.1.0.1.0.1.0 <-- going to sound better
1..0.1.0..1..0.1.0..1..0.1..0..1.0..1 <-- going to sound worse

Jitter is real, my friend. More than just ones and zeros.

EDITING:

To explain deeper, imagine trying to use data points to create a vector curve, if you move those points even a little, the whole curve can fly out of whack... now this is on a very micro scale... but it can, and will, affect the overall perception of the wave (there is more to it than "out of whack" but lets just say that the DAC depends on exact sample locations to create a correct wave, and it is very possible for a slight mistake causing the construction of unintended waveform), and at the HF where a couple data points are all that may matter, things can go completely crazy. When you lower jitter, people hear both a sweeter top end (less jaggies caused by these skewed points), and a tighter bottom end (much "bass" contains an attack with quite a bit of HF material, leading back to previous point), and the overall presentation is less fatiguing in general. There has been much written on the subject, but there is more than one type of jitter, and it is why every transport sounds different, albeit, to what degree, depends on how the DAC is designed.

RuSsMaN

I find it funny that some people think little on/offs 1's/0's flow down said cable.

Don't get me wrong, I used to think that way too. It's just funny once you actually delve into the digital signal, and what is read, the medium it is sent over, the error checking, jitter, etc etc......

Cheers,
Russ

Yashu

I was making an example. To explain how redbook digital works would take volumes of paper. You are just trying to be snarky now, Russ.

I was trying to explain how jitter plays a role in transport differences. The signal itself, it actually truly is binary, ones and zeros, ons and offs, whatever, short light and longer light, (really, it is short pits and long pits, but whatever). The interesting thing is, there are very few (if any?) standalone CD players that can account for the full error correction parity that is built into the redbook standard in real-time. (This is why I prefer PC audio... it can take hours to rip some CDs to the full error correction level), but the thing is, the TRANSPORT really is just a raw digital signal. The error correction and whatnot is not done by the transport, it is done by the DAC, minus some basic sync clocking.

hearingimpared

m00npie wrote: »

We started on that debate, but then it got quickly dropped.

Yeah the naysayers were posting someone else's tests and experience rather than their own.

hearingimpared

RuSsMaN wrote: »

I find it funny that some people think little on/offs 1's/0's flow down said cable.

Don't get me wrong, I used to think that way too. It's just funny once you actually delve into the digital signal, and what is read, the medium it is sent over, the error checking, jitter, etc etc......

Cheers,
Russ

I told you they think there is a Morse Code key in the transport. . . dot dot dot!

Serendipity

Haha, I finally got it figured out...

Yashu

It's more like dot dot dash dot. Short and long pits.

Digital is strange because the CD didn't have to be digital to be an optical disc. Laserdisc, remember those? They are optical discs, but with analog audio and video (with a digital track for surroundsound, but for stereo, it was analog). The video was analog, not digital like DVD.

I always thought it would have been nice to have gone that route, laser read, optical analog. The disc was huge because of the video component, but if it was just an audio disc, it could have been smaller, and with the DVD level of scale, imagine what we could do. It would be like the advantage of vinyl, but with the ease of a CD. The reason the CD is digital PCM is not for our benefit, it is for the benefit of the studios.

CDs are digital short and long pits with parity for error correction. Some DACs are fast 1bit and convert in real time, some DACs are 20bit or so, and they convert the audio in larger chunks, both applying oversampling, anti-aliasing, filtering, and then you have the non-OS DACs that come closer to analog by directly converting the samples into vector curves, no questions asked.

What would be nice, is an optical disc that is true analog, like the laserdisc. Best of both worlds.

Systems

Yashu wrote: »

The error correction and whatnot is not done by the transport, it is done by the DAC,

Nope,it (error correction and laser control) is done by the main processor chip preceeding the D/A stage.
If you have a schematic of a player take a look.

Serendipity

Again, thanks for the info!

Yashu

Sigh... I was talking about the transport. Literally, the laser pickup before any correction is done. The transport handles clock syncing, of course, though, otherwise the DAC would not get a lock. I am not talking about S/pdif output. The S/pdif output is already a decoded and converted bitstream.

My point in all of this, is that jitter is much more of an issue than many would assume. There can be all forms of jitter from the transport itself, to the s/pdif out, and so on. The data on the disc is just short and long pits with parity built in. It is data stored in a similar fashion to a hard drive, still binary, but, like a HD, it is read and converted into a usable data stream that is *supposed* to be transparent to whatever is using the data. The disc can have some missing data and there will be enough to construct a correct signal.

The digital to analog conversion is where everything gets complicated. Music is linear, and proper conversion relies on perfect timing (DACs and CDPs usually don't have a bunch of cache memory), whereas your HD and CPU can do what it needs to do and still open your Word document, or play a video/music (by buffering to RAM).

*IF* the CD, or whatever disc format is to remain something that audiophiles are supposed to be interested in, I think they should go to a form of buffering/caching, having the disc being read as fast as possible and any error correction applied on it's own time, instead of in real-time. Reading the disc in real-time these days seems almost... completely unnecessary.

lightman1

I like shiny CD's. They're pretty in the sunshine.

danger boy

lightman1 wrote: »

I like shiny CD's. They're pretty in the sunshine.

you see people sometimes have CD's hanging from their rear view mirrors. how come they never have a laser disc's hanging from their rear view mirrors? it's bigger and would reflect more light in the sunshine

cfrizz

:eek: Yikes! Too much analysis. So long as all those dots & dashes get translated into my favorite music I couldn't care less!:D I'm with Al on this one.

Those Sony players are beautiful!:)

SKsolutions

Useless snippet: Optical analog has been used in film projection and movie houses since the dawn synchronized movie audio.

rskarvan

Thank goodness that Monarchy makes a DIP to fix all these jitter issues!!!

lightman1

I got the jitters..it's cold outside. ...---... ...---... ...---...