check this guy out! :) Drew Daniels*

For your sake, Danny, I hope Mr. Daniels ignores your invitation (I hope you at least phrased it respectfully). While I don't know him personally, I do know his reputation and it is not that of some zealot hammering out anti-technology rants from a 10-by-12 shack in the Montana wilds, he's been around the audio block many, many times. It is equally true that I do not know you personally, but I suspect that Mr. Daniels possesses the knowledge and experience to debate from at least as solid a position that you do. Especially, in light of the epistemological ambiguity such a debate would involve. It might be safer to let him continue to believe what he wants to believe than to call him out.

Ultimately, it is a question of results. Is there anyone here familiar with Mr. Daniels' recordings that could offer an informed opinion as to whether he knows what he is doing or not?

 

I find it particularly interesting, perhaps even humorous that someone would make bold claims as to the quality of his recordings and then ridicule the very essence of these recordings, the playback chain. I dont doubt for a minute that Drew has formed his strong opinions of audio equipment; looking at his extensive and broad history of his professional career he must know something to have held the positions he has had...

As to him accepting or rejecting the challenge... I thought it would be fun to have a "roundtable" discussion a'la TAS... to hear different opinions and viewpoints. PS: stay tuned for the big discussion coming up at the Stereophile show... now THAT should be great fun!

 

I find this thread very interesting an have several comments:

1. I am surprised that Mr D. Danials is so critical of expensive gear (such as a $26K TT) given that he was associated with JBL which my younger days was some of the most expensive gear on the market. I assume he thought it sounded better than the cheaper gear.

2. As to whether or not cables and power cords make a difference I rely on my own ears and people who I believe are more qualified than I am to judge such matters. I own conrad-johnson tube gear. My P-12's have an ordinary power cord hard soldered to the transformer because the folks at c-j could hear the difference when they used a connectible power cord (I hope Mr. Danials can see the similarities between a company like c-j and the JBL of old). In the recent Stereophile review of the c-j ACT-2 preamp, Lew Johnson himself says the ACT-2 has a special power cord that he wishes he could say does not matter, but in fact, the folks at c-j found the preamp sounded best with that cord.

3. I think there are three things that we all need to remember when it comes to audio gear and tweaks:

a. There are charlatans and idiots out there selling things that just do not work. Case in point, given what I have learned from first hand research on low level contact resistance, I find it very hard to believe that putting any type of organic goo on an electrical contact will improve it.

b. There is audio gear out there that does work that is simply way over priced. Greed is universal, why does anyone think that audio should be exempt.

c. The law of diminishing returns applies to audio as it does everywhere else. I do not have a $26K TT, however, I have an $8K TT. It is a VPI TNT-HR. I bought it after they had been in production for 3 years. It is SN 175! Think of all the R&D that went into the TT, VPI has to recoup that money and they probably had to do it in 200 units or less.

4. Robin L, your post on entropy really started me thinking. I have never considered the effects of a transducer in a non-reversible process. (If you drove the microphone instead of having the microphone drive the recording device it is doubtful you would retrieve the original sound.) I have gotten out some of my basic text on thermodynamics and am giving them another read.

 

"Lew Johnson himself says the ACT-2 has a special power cord that he wishes he could say does not matter, but in fact, the folks at c-j found the preamp sounded best with that cord"

Did Johnson say why it mattered and how thet came to that conclusion?

WVK

 

Can I come over and play my records?

 

WVK, They auditioned a number of them and this one sounded the best (i.e. their ears). People should understand that this comes as a blow to the folks at c-j, they tried to design a power supply that did NOT depend on power cord choice. What can I say.

 

Lee, You are welcome anytime you are in the area.

 

Hope I'm not giving the impression of greater knowledge than I possess. But I have long held a fantasy of the development of a microphone that does not have a diaphragm consisting of a plastic membrane that produces electrical change from changes in atmospheric pressure , but some sort of means of registering that change without the membrane---simply detecting the change and by virtue of tossing out the plastic, remove the resonances of the plastic. I remember in a previous post remarking that, due to improvements in in the recording chain, in particular the wider bandwidth and lower noise floor of DSD and Hi-Rez PCM, the next big step would be improvements in microphone technology. As Peter McGrath points out, there's a step up from those beloved Neumanns right now. I know that Ion-Plasma speakers have been made in the past, but it seems to me that this technology would make more sense with smaller transducers---like microphones.

 

Right, if you can hear a difference but you can't measure it, you're measuring the wrong thing.

 

Thank You Robin,

I've been saying this for decades.

 

Corrollary: if you can hear a difference but can't decide which is better, the difference doesn't matter.

 

True. I didn't mean to give the impression I was disagreeing with you. Perfect example: tube amplification. It measures worse than solid state but sounds better. Ergo, the wrong thing is being measured. Or to be more precise: something important is not being measured.

 

For years, there were these wars of watts, battles to see whose amplifier had the greatest output in terms of watts into a static load. Now we hear, the first watt is the most important. There was all this talk about the importance of "THD", total harmonic distortion. Now we know that even order distortion products are benign compared to odd order distortion products. When they came up with the Redbook standard everyone was talking about the signal to noise ratio of digital media vs. the signal to noise ratio of analog media. But what turned out to be more important was the integrity of the signal as it met the noise floor. Analog tape's signal continued a good 40 db below the noise floor. Digital's just stopped at the noise floor.
After saying "It measures well, it must be perfect", these folks went back to the drawing board and identified the meaningful elements of distortion. But not before putting up a long, stupid fight.

 

What attitude? He's opinionated, sure, but so is everyone here. I think a lot of what he points out is that a lot of those items aren't worth the money - regardless of what they do or don't do.


Most telling in my mind is the statement "no clipped mastering".

 

Right on all counts. You can only measure what you're already looking for and know how to measure. Quite different from listening and saying "it doesn't quite sound right."

 

I think that science would be keenly interested in a "something that can be heard but not measured phenomena". Can you provide such an example?

WVK

 

I will try to give you an example, but I am not sure this is a good one. Our SACD player wakes up in either CD or SACD mode depending on what was last played on it. So if you last played a CD and then played a hybrid SACD, the machine will play the CD layer of the hybrid unless you manually set it to SACD. My wife plays more CD's than I do. She always forgets to change the setting when she plays a hybrid SACD. I will come in the room and before I am close enough to see the setting on the player, I will say "the music sounds flat". I do not mean flat in frequency response but flat like 2D, there is no depth to the stereo image. I go over to the player and every time (I am batting 1000) the player is playing the CD layer. So I hear something when SACD's are played that gives more depth to the stereo image, it makes it 3D. But I do not have a clue what about SACD does that, so how can I measure it? I can speculate that it might be due to the higher amount of audio data in the SACD compared to CD, or it could be due to the more gentle aliasing filters used on SACD preserving more of the original phase information in the music so I get better auditory spacial clues from the SACD, but until someone figures out what it is about SACD that allows us to hear a more 3D sound, I have no idea what to measure or if it can be measured.

 

ALP,

Here are some more audio phenomena that science cannot measure:

1. Soundstage capability.
2. Correct tonality of instruments.

Here are some examples where science eventually found out but audiophiles discovered first by critical listening:

1. Jitter (time based distortion) in different CD players. 90s.
2. Lack of sonics in amplifiers with very low THD. 70s and 80s.
3. Vibration isolation methods. 90s.
4. MLSSA speaker waterfall plots. 2000s. Difficulty in capturing simultaneous events in speaker response. Very good article in HiFi News and RR as well.

Any scientist will recognize the limits of science at any given point in time.

 

Excellent points!

though your last one, "Any scientist will recognize the limits of science at any given point in time." is more of a wishfull thought than reality I am afraid...

 

Thanks Danny...I'm not really against science-in fact I love it!

I just believe it is arrogant and ill-informed to think it can explain such a complex phenomena as sound.

I might add the following to the first list:

3. Transient capture improvements from higher sampling rates.

 

Lee, As a Ph.D. physicist I can assure you that science does an excellent job of explaining sound, by which I mean the propagation of pressure waves through a medium (gas, liquid or solid). What science has only begun to scratch the surface on is how our human brains interpret those sound waves when they impinge on our ears.

 

My player is like that too. I hate when it defaults to redbook!! It is so obvious. 16/44.1 just does not cut it, and the anti-aliasing filters in my player are lousy too, so the phasing issues from the filter make the high end just lovely sounding Good filters are still very expensive, and the thing has to be relatively steep. The Nyquist limit for redbook CD is 22,050 Hz, so the filter probably starts at 20,000 Hz and goes down from there. It is nice when you can get that filter further away from the audible range. Since SACD is not PCM, it is Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) does Nyquist still come into play? If it did, the Nyquist limit of SACD would be 1,411,200 Hz, and I doubt that anything that high even exists in our audio chain other than interference from video systems. If there is an anti-aliasing filter it is probably for intended to eliminate aliasing caused by interference, and it is obviously well out of the audible range, and it can be a less aggressive slope, therefore making causing less phase distortion.

 

Can you be a bit more specific about who "these folks" are who said "It measures well it must be perfect"? I've never heard anyone make that claim.

 

Remember the 70's, and the THD wars? Sure, those early solid state amps and preamps measured great, but since they used loads of negitive feedback to acheive this, they sounded horrible.

 

Joe, the answer is yes, you still have to have an anti-aliasing filter. Digitization is digitization no matter what frequency you do it at or how many bits you use, you have to block everything that is more than 1/2 the digitization frequency or you will get aliasing. You are right, for SACD it is a very high frequency, well above 20 KHz.