I find myself furiously in agreement with Barfle and AR Surround in that you must when listening if possible use stuff you are very familiar with (or at least include that in your selections) and if you can minimize any form of distortion well if its cost achievable then lets do it! This in fact has formed the basis of everything we have done in Involve. I can assure everyone that every chunk of software / hardware and new concepts have all been rigorously time synchronized A/B compared to see if we made things worse or better or neutral. Sometimes we did not hear any improvement but we left it in as we felt there was some theoretical advantage.
So when it comes down to the 16 bit/ 44kHz compared to 24 bit/ 96 kHz debate we naturally favored the higher resolution devices as it was cost effective, is better and it stops negative market connotations- hey I am honest.
I can honestly say I am obsessive in this area and from a young age. I have always ensured in the blind A/B 's that I or my test monkey had no idea which one it is , often I would rotate/ not label and confuse the A/B switch in doing these tests. In the test I did with the Philips CD 204 it was with music I was very familiar with. I listened to the top end, bottom end, in between, on quiet passage, transient stuff and all sorts of material and in the end I could not hear any difference to the high end $10K machine. I repeated this with 2 other victims with the same end result. Not saying that someone could not pick it and I confess I am not good at distortion perception (Bitch is great at it), however I am very perceptive to image matters.
I remember many years ago there was a hifi fad to mark the outside edge of CD's with a green ink marker, hifi nuts were convinced it made a considerable improvement, I tried it out on time sych A/ B and found exactly zero. I think in audio its a badge of honour to say you can hear the subtle difference and there is a feeling of failure if you do not and as such its easier to agree with the group view ........Hey I did a year of psychology before 2 engineering degrees as I was too young at 15 to enter the engineering course and I studied group personality, interesting subject! As for moron reviewers picking up subtle effect at bass frequencies on some CD player or magic cable- forget it they are wankers.
I remember years ago TDK did a challenge to pay a heap of money to anyone who could pick the difference between the original CD source and that recorded on a Nakamichi dragon cassette on Dolby C. Many people rolled up convinced they were taking the money home and the result was -
no one got better than statistical chance!!!! Now remember the cassette on Dolby C would have had a SN ratio of 70 dB and distortion of say 1 %. I can confirm this myself as I became frustrated with clicks and pops on vinyl, plus the microphonics -yes the platter feedback is as much as - 15 dB down (I tested it). So I would upon getting a new record immediately enact electrical silence in the house turning off fridges etc, turn off speakers, use record clamp on a heavy platter Technics 120 turntable, SME ARM with an ADC ZLM cartridge and record it on my Nakamichi ZX7 with HIGHCOM noise reduction. I can assure you on A/ B testing I could not tell the difference to the Vinyl - with STAX headphones.
Similarly I remember the Australian skeptics society made a challenge to water diviners throughout Australia and the world to give $10,000 prize (back in the 80's I think) if anyone could detect which underground parallel water pipe out of 10 possibilities had water flowing in it. Lots of contestants rolled up most saying it would be easy and many had great reputations. The result was no one did better than random chance!! You must be so careful. I must confess I am a massive skeptic on many matters and I make myself unpopular on stuff like homeopathy, acupuncture, chiropractic and I just know many of the QQ members now hate me!
Vinyl sounds great and I would be the first to agree that it can be as good, if not better than CD in some instances but as mentioned previously it has lots of issues for example:
1 Tangential tracking error distortion (I remember doing the math and working out the theoretical best spot for my tone arm)
2 Self microphonics from stylus within the vinyl (say -20 db)
3 Microphonics from the speaker to platter - - 15dB
4 Cartridge distortion between 1 - 5% refer
Cartridge tests
Yet 16 bit distortion at around 0.0015% dominates the above say 1-5% level???
How about speakers (They are by far the worst offender but not for the reasons you have been taught), they typically have distortion between 0.5 - 3%. One common factor I use a lot is psychoaccoustic masking where the quieter sound or noise is masked by the louder sound - for example on cassettes you hear the hiss on quiet passages but not on the loud bits. So human hearing must pick up this 0.0015% is a sea of other distortion of say up to 5% , that's interesting. Having said that I have heard subtle amplifier distortion- I suspect in a band or area different to where the speakers/ cartridge/ cassette were distorting.
Having said that I published elsewhere in QQ our ex Nakamichi dragon electrostatic actually achieve 0.06% distortion across the whole frequency range- but that's not the reason it sounded great.
While I am at it did you know that the whole - you cannot directionalise bass below 80- Hz is bullshit! We did comprehensive tests years ago and found that on band limited pink noise and music with ultra low distortion woofers subjects could directionise right down to 35 Hz. On pure sine wave tone it was different, people had no idea where the woofer was all the way up to 800 Hz. It turns out that we initially for say 15 seconds percieve where the woofer is but then the brain cuts in and fools you to believing the sound is integrated with the music!! So much for the Lucas/ Dolby lie.
Hey back to quad- did you know that when all 4 speakers are putting out sound sinchronised transient in similar (even different) frequency bands the listener cannot pick where the directions of sound is. It turns out the brain can only directionalise one sound at a time! Its one of the holes we crawl under and why discrete is overrated ....now I know you guys hate me.
Nigh Nigh time for me down under
