Topping and SMSL with ASR Punking Us on DACs?

Discussion in 'Digital: DACs, USB converters, decrapifiers' started by purr1n, Oct 23, 2022.

  1. Pancakes

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    One of my favorites....

    6AE06D8A-EC6B-4DB0-A561-3B5845BF0858.jpeg
     
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  2. Hark01

    Hark01 New

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    Yes, they have.

    Serge Smirnoff made a method called "df metric". It is using a sequence of test signals from the simple 1kHz sine, over triangle and square waves to samples of real music to overkill (white noise), measuring and calculating the difference and weighting the score.

    http://soundexpert.org/documents/10179/11017/se-audio-metric.pdf


    Yes, that hypothesis has been tested and yes, your suspicions are correct. There are many DACs that are good at reproducing sine waves but not so good at reproducing complex signals and vice versa. E.g. something like Mojo 2 is not much different from Apple dongle when measuring 1kHz sine wave but when comparing more complex signals, the results are very different.

    Apple dongle:
    https://www.hypethesonics.com/dapstiv3p3/[df33]Apple-A1749.webp

    Chord Mojo 2:
    https://www.hypethesonics.com/dapstiv3p3/[df33]Chord-Mojo2.webp
     
  3. dericchan1

    dericchan1 Facebook Friend

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    Thanks and now I am curious to see how a Topping or SMSL dac performs at reproducing complex signals and vice. I suspect they probably fair pretty well as most of their dacs sound signature are pretty detailed, analytical but cold/harsh
     
  4. Hark01

    Hark01 New

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    Yeah, it would be interesting to see the measurements. Currently, I didn't see Toppings or SMSLs measured with the method.

    Adequate ADC for measuring the "df metric" can be built for about $400. I hope we'll see more data in the time to come. The method is miles ahead of the SINAD approach.
     
  5. Psalmanazar

    Psalmanazar Most improved member; A+

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    He's an idiot. The noise floor is being modulated on his recordings from volume modulation whether faders being moved or compression.
     
  6. insidious meme

    insidious meme Ambivalent Kumquat

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    I think Thor woke up one day and chose violence.

    Seems like he would take a look at this place and think "These guys figured much of it out, no need for me to drop in."
     
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  8. WoodyLuvr

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  9. Thad E Ginathom

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    The man's mad, or both.

    There's music playing
    /facts.

    Heck, do away with the music! Just have some dials or on-screen graphs.

    I wonder how he rates his lovers? Oh wait, hard to measure love. Sex partners.
     
  10. JK47

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  11. bigjako

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    I'm genuinely confused why this only seems to apply with audio (science). Other industries that center on senses - food, perfume, art, even TVs - don't have these militant objectivists coming in and telling people that their personal experience is all a lie and that these graphs are actually the truth.

    You don't have people claiming that the Alfredo sauce at Spago is objectively the same as at Olive Garden because they both use milk, eggs, and cheese and are identical on the mass spectrometer.

    Where else do people dismiss personal experience so viciously? It's knee-jerk to assume that they have low hearing ceilings and just want to scream at everyone with a higher ceiling that they're fooling themselves, but I have no other explanation. They're like a small-dick dude at an orgy, screaming that size doesn't matter.
     
  12. SoupRKnowva

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    I think the difference is that when it comes to measurements, in audio, as a whole we know enough to be dangerous. as in there are things we know how to measure, even if we dont always know how to correlate those measurements to perceived sound quality. But the problem is that we dont know what all even needs to be measured.

    But, some people latch onto the measurements that we do have, and act superior to everyone else, even though those measurements may not mean or show what they think they do.


    In the case of something like food or perfume, im not sure there even are measurements people can make that have any relation at all to perceived quality? maybe I'm wrong on that.

    I guess in a nutshell the difference is there is a group of people that think audio is completely objective, whereas that doesn't exist for those other hobbies.



    as an aside, I would argue that this isn't the case for TVs. TVs are basically completely objective, its just a matter of choosing the right tradeoffs for your preferences, budget, or environment as no tv technology is best at everything.
     
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    Last edited: Jan 21, 2023
  13. Pancakes

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    Because music has a much higher emotional effect than food or TVs or whatever. The objectivists are just as emotionally effected as the subjectivists.

    However, the objectivists require order in their world view to feel comfortable. Order comes from data, measurements, etc.

    The subjectivists are more tolerant of some unknowns/mystery/etc. without that causing stress/anxiety/whatever.

    And, since it's all emotion based, it becomes religion for both sides. Many wars have been fought on the basis of religion.
     
  14. Wilewarer

    Wilewarer Almost "Made"

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    It doesn't help that for audio, our hearing only lets us listen to one thing at a time, so you can't possibly do a direct side-by-side subjective comparison of anything without at least having to worry about your memory playing tricks. For aesthetic pursuits relying on vision, you can actually do that, so something like a TV really doesn't have this problem.

    Monitors and TVs are a good example of where the various measurements people take correlate a lot more cleanly with experience than they do with audio. But there still have at times been people who try to claim none of it matters. For a while it was a big thing to claim that refresh rate doesn't matter because of limitations of the human eye! I suspect I hear that a lot less now because more people have high refresh rate monitors and fast computers, so they can see for themselves.
     
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  15. JK47

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    So you've never tried interrupting a women's afternoon "program" (soap opera) while she eats her snack..
     
  16. Pancakes

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    Nope. All the women I've been with were working during that time.
     
  17. YMO

    YMO Chief Fun Officer

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    I got better taste than you brah.
     
  18. weicheheck

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    I would like to add that if you think about the kinds of people that get deep into the headphones space, a lot of them spend very large amounts of time at their desks on a computer, with gear that inherently isolates them from the rest of the world.

    I would argue the headphone community as a whole likely has a lot more poorly socialized people than the alternative hobbies mentioned above. The kind of people that get most their human interaction from the internet on places like Twitter and Reddit.

    Since these sorts of social media sites have inherently been skewed to amplify controversy for the sake of engagement, the people who primarily get their social interactions this way tend to be far more reactive and argumentative than people who go outside and speak to people more face to face.

    That may lead to more polarization in the community as these people in general may be hard to get along with and to top it off some of them have acquired religious level beliefs in this objective audio ideology.

    So the headphones community may be like a microcosm of the polarization that can occur from excessive internet consumption.


    It reminds me of the South Park episode where Cartman goes 1,000 years into the future and everyone is atheist, but they are still fighting wars over what they should call their atheist alliances.
     
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  19. JK47

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  20. Pancakes

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