IKEA Aptitlig: A juicy cheap upgrade.

How is my post any less serious or valid than any other in the thread? It has just about as much scientific basis behind it as any other suggested 'mod' posted in here. I really don't appreciate this extremist mindset where you can make any claim you want as long as it makes 'sense' to you and dismiss any sort of criticism or questioning of it as dismissal and/or being closed-minded.

I mean at the very least you should seek to possibly do some valid experimentation and see if there's some sort of measurable difference instead of 'oh I can hear a difference therefore it's true, you should go spend money to confirm it yourself'? Maybe send some of those cutting boards to Tyll to slip under his amplifiers next time he measures them.

/rant

 

While I get the point in your post and I fundamentally agree I can't help thinking there's some kind of disparity of treatment treatment here.
I know what I'm talking about is not measureable, or at least I have no freaking idea how to measure it. I am a total noob in a lot of areas, including measures.
I don't feel I'm being an extremist. I'm not denying someone could not hear the difference. I'd like the same favor in return. Could you accept we hear a difference without me proving it scientifically? I don't want to bring any divine verb or announce the second coming here. And most of all... not profiting from it at all.
I just wanted to provide an input for experimenting.
While I see a lot of people here assessing tubes sound explaining why e.g. a nos tlk is very detailed or a mullard is very warm and laid back, I don't see many people asking them to send that tube to Tyll to be measured in order to provide scientific basis to that statement.

You got me asking a question... and even if you could measure it, what would conclude? Should it measure better would you be rush to ikea to buy a pile of board? Should it measure worse would you lead a crusade against bamboo producers? And should it measure equal would you dismiss the wholy story thinking there's no diffrence in sound? And should it measure only different (e.g. improving something and worsening something else) how could you tell if this difference is for the best or the worst?

Based on measures we should all have the same best measuring amp. But we don't. Same with Dacs. Can you tell by measure which one is the best dac? Can you do that with speakers?
When you read someone talking about sinergies between dac\amp\hp do you need measurable proof of that statement?
Or you just accept it as a preference of the writer?

Lastly I wanna quote something from Papa Nelson (whose threshold gear are one of the things I most appreciate in this world):

I apologize If it could look like I want to antagonize you. It's not. You got me thinking and I thank you for that. And I apologize again for my terrible english too

 

Hi @ultrabike
I am open to the possibility that what I experienced is bias, I'm aware of that.
I acknowledge there are several opinions, I quoted Pass just to back up my opinion than measurement often don't tell all the sides of the story.
I don't wanna draw parallels beetween dac\amp and cutboard, my point was you can't measure every single piece of sound difference.

I don't know if I gave you the impression of me thinking there's no "correlation between audio characterization and audio performance appreciation", or "that folks don't know what they are doing when designing audio equipment". Probably my lousy english. Of course I think they are related and I really would never suggest someone don't know what is doing engineering audio gear.

Again my whole point is that measure don't tell a lot of things. It could be me but I don't know how to predict the sound of an amp based on specs, graphs and measure.
We need to listen cause certain characterization of the sound, though they have been foreseen in projectation by the designer, are not clearly shown in measurement.
If sound signature of an amp doesn't emerge from measurement, is it possible that something changes a quality of the amp's sound and again it doesn't show up in measurement? That is my question.
And I accept the possibility that this whole post is generated by my ignorance in the matter. In that case I'd be glad to learn more.

 

Identifying a sound signature based on measurements is a different story to quantifying sonic changes from tweaks or mods. Amplifiers measure differently and you can definitely attribute that to them sounding different. Whereas if a modification doesn't change any measurement of the piece of equipment then maybe it can be attributed to confirmation biases. I mean, since you know you've applied the tweak, you're going to be assuming there IS a change.

Plus that doesn't even get into the audibility of differences in measurements, but that's another can of worms we can keep closed.

Yup, this is a huge one. These tweaks are always positive ones that always have sonic benefits, nobody ever says 'wow this made it sound worse'. Or maybe my view on this is biased because praiseeverything-fi is the only place I occasionally look at that is full of discussion on this 'side' of audio.

 

I think that the skeptic thesis, to summarize so far, is that it is unlikely that there is a measurable difference when using cutting blocks w/SS gear. ie this is a different point than saying we can't predict the best amp based on measurements, because at least amps _do_ measure differently.

So this is indeed a slightly different argument than the typical subjectivist/objectivist. In those arguments, the objectivist acknowledges that things measure differently but doesn't believe the minute differences measured are audibly significant. Whereas In this case the argument is that the cutting blocks probably won't measure differently, and that this puts us firmly in wu-wu land.

 

The crystal matter would be a good start for a technical discussion on dacs and vibrations. Of course the other things you mentioned have preminant importance.

My doubt is for example how come different dacs with flat FR up to millions Khz (I'm exaggerating) could be perceived as bass shy or bass heavy?
I'm incline to think that we could tell something from measurements if we perform the right measurement. If we perceive a difference there must be a way to point it out scientifically. I just don't know how to get that "relationship between the perceived performance and the measurement/spec" and If I understand what you wrote, neither do you. So until someone writes he is able to predict the sound of an amp by measurement that sound like a postulate to me.

Again we miss the relationship IMHO. Amplifiers sound different. Amplifier measure different. We have these two data but do we have the key to solve the equation? If someone claims to be able to relate sound and measurements should I believe he also has no need to hear a given amp to assess the sound?
And yes... maybe I want too much expecting specs to reveal the sound signature... but there's gotta be a correlation. And if there's any correlation predictable, why are we looking at those specs?
I'm in a serious danger to bite more than I can chewso I'll stop here.

As I said I'm open to the confirmation bias hypothesis, I just don't feel myself pushed to dismiss the the whole story as bias just because I can't show you a measurement. Please note that I also don't want to go down the ultrasubjectivist way to justify what I (believe to) hear. I'm looking for an answer too, but I haven't found a logical argument to drop this beyond those telling me "It's all in your head".

 

Don't care what skeptics might think but this is awesome for sure:


http://www.seconds.de/der-ikea-plattenspieler/

 

Lol... No, I'm an hi-end guy, I'd rather buy this for 13.240 $
It has 2 boards, It's gotta be definitely better!



http://www.ecoustics.com/products/legno-turntable-montegiro-germany/

...and to overdo it I'll put 2 499$ boards under it! Screw vibrations!

http://6moons.com/audioreviews/levelaudio/1.html

 

This is for skeptics who think their dacs are virtually immune from effects of physical vibration, this is straight from the horse's mouth(they make crystal clock oscillators for a living, so I reckon they know their stuff):

http://www.wenzel.com/documents/vibration.html

 

Sorry but those turntables are all useless without the following: