[mjosef]

Excellent reading at that link Niteshade.

This

simple theory can actually be tremendously complex when applied to reality

comment was very apt. 

[kyrill]

Yes it does
bookmarked it . I have done biophysics myself and noticed the more you know the less you know how it really works..

[denjo]

That article was seriously humorous or humourously serious! 

For me the following words described my audio experience:

"Half the fun is the spontaneity and surprise."

Spontaneity: when you are gingerly postured behind your hifi rack or speakers at 2:00 am in the morning, with a hoolahoop of cables around your neck when your wife steps into the lounge and asks, "what in hell are you up to!"

Surprise: when the RCA cables that came with your cheap DVD player (which cables you almost thrashed) sounded better than your $XXXX cables!

Best Regards
Dennis

[turkey]

Yes, he was fighting a losing battle.

Is that a fact? Audio Circle community is  about "ears are deaf and what you see ( measurements)  is what you hear?

Test equipment doesn't get tired or out of sorts. It measures what is there and the results are repeatable.

If I give you and your ears a few ounces of neat Scotch, I bet all kinds of things will sound good to you.

Sighted subjective listening "tests" are simply not reliable.

[kyrill]

The sentence: Test equipment doesn't get tired or out of sorts. It measures what is there and the results are repeatable is based on ..bla bla
The red is utterly wrong and therefore the rest of the logical structure in the sentence is suggestive UNLESS you can prove what is measured about "what is there" is perfectly complete. Do you really think anno 2009 mankind  will have NO MORE PROGRESS in scientific development as long as it is about electrical phenomena? I find this NOT a clever and wise assumption but perfectly the opposite to tell it very very friendly.. The fundamentals of electricity comes out of quantum mechanics and NOT what your MM and scope can tell you based on almost 100 years of OLD  knowledge

i rest my case

[turkey]

http://stereophile.com/thinkpieces/165/

Take a look at this. Fits in-really!

It is a rather typical article for that magazine. Of course the fact that they make their money on advertising has nothing to do with their stance on audio products.

[turkey]

The sentence: Test equipment doesn't get tired or out of sorts. It measures what is there and the results are repeatable is based on ..bla bla
The red is utterly wrong and therefore the rest of the logical structure in the sentence is suggestive UNLESS you can prove "what is there" is infinite complete. Do you really think anno 2009 mankind  will have NO MORE PROGRESS in scientific development as long as it is about electrical phenomena? I find this NOT a clever and wise assumption but perfectly the opposite.. The fundamentals of electricity lies  in quantum mechanics and NOT what your MM and scope can tell you based on almost 100 years of OLD  knowledge

i rest my case

Nice job of picking on one facet of what I was saying and then dismissing everything.

[kyrill]

the second part of your post is an open door.
of course when people drink too much or use drugs their experiences gets "distorted" this is known for thousands of years, what do I have to say to that?  Far more untrue  is the first part of the post
ah well   this is part of a dynamic game. Try to open the mind  of the Taliban so they start to respect women and other religions. Now, that would be a real challenge

[turkey]

the second part of your post is an open door.
of course when people drink too much or use drugs their experiences gets "distorted" this is known for thousands of years, what do I have to say to that?  Far more untrue  is the first part of the post
ah well   this is part of a dynamic game. Try to open the mind  of the Taliban so they start to respect women and other religions. Now, that would be a real challenge

The second part of my post points out that, unlike test equipment, sighted subjective listening tests are not reliable due to the influence of many uncontrolled factors - mainly psychological ones.

My mention of Scotch was so that you would be able to see a very obvious example of how our senses can be influenced by things that have nothing to do with the device we are testing.

[*Scotty*]

I'll stick my oar in the water one more time. If you posit that there are now better sounding amplification circuits,DACs or speakers,then at some point in the design process these products were listened to and a decision was reached about their readiness for prime time. That was a was decision based on a subjective listening test involving a value judgment.
To design equipment that is intended to be listened to as its primary function without listening as a part of the design process is a recipe for failure in the market place.
The industry is still trying to grapple with transient dynamic distortion phenomena,how to measure it,how to quantify it and how to minimize its impact on what we hear.
Scotty 

[Ethan Winer]

There is a big difference between jitter in a digital system and speed stability in an analog system.

Yes, and that difference is mainly the speed at which the timing instability occurs.

In digital, it can cause bits to be misread if the clock isn't synched to the data stream -  1's read for 0's, bits skipped causing errors in the word boundaries, etc.

Yes, but in practice this never happens unless something is broken. I use SPDIF and light pipes etc all the time, and I have never once had such problems. Besides, nobody will argue about obvious clicks and pops. The real issue is claims of subtle degradation of clarity and sound stage caused by jitter. This is simply not the case. Digital either works or it doesn't, and in my HT system it works every day all the time using inexpensive consumer grade wires and fiber optic cables.

Every single device inside every single computer passes digital data flawlessly. The motherboard buss to the video card and hard drives, USB and Firewire devices, old-style serial and parallel printer ports, and all the rest. It all works every time, and data is never randomly or mysteriously corrupted by a receiving device confusing the ones and zeros or missing a leading edge transition.

There is a transition period between the 1 and 0 where voltage is in between the 2 values.  At that point when it's read, there is some error allowed where the firmware will simply round.

I don't think this is accurate either. The receiving devices know what sort of voltage levels to expect, and they don't read in-between values. This is easy to prove. Record a digital stream from a CD player or whatever to a hard drive five times in a row, then bit-compare the files. If the files are all the same - and they surely will be - then there was no corruption or mis-reading of ones and zeros.

--Ethan

[Ethan Winer]

To design equipment that is intended to be listened to as its primary function without listening as a part of the design process is a recipe for failure in the market place.

I don't know why this would be the case, though of course someone should listen at some point. I've designed a lot of analog circuits over the years, and they all worked as planned. It's not like I sat there listening while I tweaked component values. Scotty, have you ever designed analog circuits? (Not a rhetorical question, please let me know the answer.) Once someone understands how this stuff works, it is easy to design circuits having good frequency response and low distortion, especially if you use IC op-amps. The more important things designers worry about are ground loops, capacitance from component proximity, power supply rejection, component cost, and other practical issues.

The industry is still trying to grapple with transient dynamic distortion phenomena,how to measure it,how to quantify it and how to minimize its impact on what we hear.

I don't know where you got that either. This is a perfect example of distortion that is revealed by a null test, even if someone doesn't know to look for TIM. With a null test it would show up as very short bursts of static-like noise. I don't know if anyone would hear TIM in a badly designed amplifier circuit, but it could certainly be seen on an oscilloscope long before it's audible.

--Ethan

[Ethan Winer]

It surprises me that you cannot let loose the idea that man cannot measure for what he does not know yet.

It's obvious that you still do not understand what a null test is.

--Ethan

[bpape]

There is a big difference between jitter in a digital system and speed stability in an analog system.

Yes, and that difference is mainly the speed at which the timing instability occurs.

In digital, it can cause bits to be misread if the clock isn't synched to the data stream -  1's read for 0's, bits skipped causing errors in the word boundaries, etc.

Yes, but in practice this never happens unless something is broken. I use SPDIF and light pipes etc all the time, and I have never once had such problems. Besides, nobody will argue about obvious clicks and pops. The real issue is claims of subtle degradation of clarity and sound stage caused by jitter. This is simply not the case. Digital either works or it doesn't, and in my HT system it works every day all the time using inexpensive consumer grade wires and fiber optic cables.

Every single device inside every single computer passes digital data flawlessly. The motherboard buss to the video card and hard drives, USB and Firewire devices, old-style serial and parallel printer ports, and all the rest. It all works every time, and data is never randomly or mysteriously corrupted by a receiving device confusing the ones and zeros or missing a leading edge transition.

There is a transition period between the 1 and 0 where voltage is in between the 2 values.  At that point when it's read, there is some error allowed where the firmware will simply round.

I don't think this is accurate either. The receiving devices know what sort of voltage levels to expect, and they don't read in-between values. This is easy to prove. Record a digital stream from a CD player or whatever to a hard drive five times in a row, then bit-compare the files. If the files are all the same - and they surely will be - then there was no corruption or mis-reading of ones and zeros.

--Ethan

Ethan

The clock causes the read to happen when it thinks it should happen.  Voltages do not instantaneously change from high to low, there is a lag between.  It's not a perfect square wave.  If the read happens during the transition (which is like 1% as long as the duration of the high or low signal), then it gets something between.  The devices receiving data only read WHEN they are told.  They get whatever data is there at that point in time.  They don't look at the data/signal and do any kind of analysis on it to determine if it's a valid thing to read.

For example - if "1" was +5v and "0" was -5v, it will read anything from 3.5 to 5 as a 1.  Anything from -3.5 to -5 as 0.  What does it do when it sees 2V?  0V?  All depends on timing.

As for not ever hearing any degradation, maybe you better try that on something other than those NS-10's 

Bryan

[turkey]

Every single device inside every single computer passes digital data flawlessly. The motherboard buss to the video card and hard drives, USB and Firewire devices, old-style serial and parallel printer ports, and all the rest. It all works every time, and data is never randomly or mysteriously corrupted by a receiving device confusing the ones and zeros or missing a leading edge transition.

This is not really true. That's why mission-critical computers use things like ECC memory, and good data transport systems have error detection and correction built in. It's also why you don't see (or shouldn't see) PC hardware and OSes running critical systems for hospitals or the military, etc.

[Ethan Winer]

Voltages do not instantaneously change from high to low, there is a lag between.  It's not a perfect square wave.

Bryan, I understand all of that perfectly well. It's still not a problem. Again, for anyone who thinks this might be a problem, record a digital stream via SPDIF a few times in a row and compare the data that was read. That, as well as null tests, proves that all of this "lifting a veil" stuff is entirely in the minds of the beholders. Which is why those people are so often opposed to blind testing.

As for not ever hearing any degradation, maybe you better try that on something other than those NS-10's 

I do have a pair of NS10s, but I rarely use them except for an alternate sanity check when mixing. The speakers and other gear in both of my well-treated rooms are very high quality. I'm sure you already knew that.

--Ethan

[Ethan Winer]

That's why mission-critical computers use things like ECC memory, and good data transport systems have error detection and correction built in. It's also why you don't see (or shouldn't see) PC hardware and OSes running critical systems for hospitals or the military, etc.

Well, I don't think even the most avid hi-fi nut would ever consider his rig to be mission critical.

As I said above twice now, it's easy to prove that digital data is not lost or changed. It's also easy to prove that jitter is a non-issue.

--Ethan

[chrisby]

That article was seriously humorous or humourously serious! 

For me the following words described my audio experience:

"Half the fun is the spontaneity and surprise."

Spontaneity: when you are gingerly postured behind your hifi rack or speakers at 2:00 am in the morning, with a hoolahoop of cables around your neck when your wife steps into the lounge and asks, "what in hell are you up to!"

Surprise: when the RCA cables that came with your cheap DVD player (which cables you almost thrashed) sounded better than your $XXXX cables!

Best Regards
Dennis

Dennis,  the big surprise would be if your wife asked "since I'm awake now, when the hell are you going to give me that back massage   ...?"   

[turkey]

That's why mission-critical computers use things like ECC memory, and good data transport systems have error detection and correction built in. It's also why you don't see (or shouldn't see) PC hardware and OSes running critical systems for hospitals or the military, etc.

Well, I don't think even the most avid hi-fi nut would ever consider his rig to be mission critical.

That's irrelevant. I was simply disagreeing with your statement that data transfer in a computer is flawless.

As I said above twice now, it's easy to prove that digital data is not lost or changed. It's also easy to prove that jitter is a non-issue.

--Ethan

I agree with you here. (And did not dispute either point.)

[Ethan Winer]

I was simply disagreeing with your statement that data transfer in a computer is flawless.

Maybe that's why both Windows and Mac OS crashes sometimes?