PS Audio Noise Harvester

ExtremeSkeptic said:
I don't use analog outputs of soundcard, I use digital output.
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Huh?

They infect the power supply even if they use different lines. Nothing is perfect.
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Back to the virus analogy? It is a poor one.

I haven't read anything about it. Half a year ago I added more harddrives into my computer and posted in a forum that it sounded edgy, but they laughed and said it didn't matter. So I didn't believe it. But later when my system was more revealing I heard it clearer than ever before. It gave me a reason to experiment with it and there is no doubt that everything I heard was true. I learned to write everything down into my logs no matter how silly they are.
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It is clear; I question whether you CAN read.

I accidentally found that ambient temperature matters too, so I have started writing down the temperature into my logs. There are probably many more variables that I don't know about.
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There are probably many more FACTS you don't know about, but that hasn't stopped you yet.
 
slyjoe said:
Huh?
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I'm using spdif output of EMU0404 soundcard. I use Nordost Valhalla digital cable ($1954) between soundcard ($99) and Benchmark DAC1 ($975).

slyjoe said:
Back to the virus analogy? It is a poor one.
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That's what the skeptic said before he got infected himself because he didn't think it was possible.

slyjoe said:
It is clear; I question whether you CAN read.
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I'm able to read this thread, so I don't see why there is anything to question.

slyjoe said:
There are probably many more FACTS you don't know about, but that hasn't stopped you yet.
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I'm not interested in knowing facts about incomplete things.
 
Wow.... so you spent almost $2,000 on a S/PDIF cable? That is a level of idiocy beyond my comprension. You're talking about square waves! PCM audio! Unless you've got enough noise being picked up to make the input of the DAC-1 not be able to tell between 0 and 1, you just wasted two grand. Not to mention you're clocking the DAC-1 off an EMU card. What kind of stupidity is that? You're begging for jitter there.
 
Yes, but digital devices have to have a master/slave sync relationship. If there's only 1 S/PDIF cable, the sending device has to be the clock master.

The DAC-1 has certain jitter-reduction technologies employed, but S/PDIF (be it over a Toslink optical connection or an RCA connection) is still not a very good means of establishing sync. It WILL work, for sure. But it will not be quite as tight as if the system had a work clock connection with either a high quality master clock feeding everyone or the DAC-1 as the master.
 
AudioFreak said:
Yes, but digital devices have to have a master/slave sync relationship. If there's only 1 S/PDIF cable, the sending device has to be the clock master.

The DAC-1 has certain jitter-reduction technologies employed, but S/PDIF (be it over a Toslink optical connection or an RCA connection) is still not a very good means of establishing sync. It WILL work, for sure. But it will not be quite as tight as if the system had a work clock connection with either a high quality master clock feeding everyone or the DAC-1 as the master.
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Mmmmfff. OK, this is interesting; the hammering of the poor audiophool isn't, but this is.

Digital signals have an inherent clock: the leading edge of a transition from 1 to 0. The format used in SPDIF is biphase mark encoding, or BMC. This guarantees that there will be a transition in every bit. 1s have two transitions; 0s have only one. Transmission is from a sender to a receiver; the connection is not bidirectional (i.e., this is a simplex transmission line, not duplex). The clock from the sender is therefore the only clock possible; the receiver cannot send a clock back to the sender. The receiver must detect the inherent clock in the signal and synchronize to it. It is immaterial in this format which side has the master clock; that is a separate issue. The transmission hardware must have a clock, and that clock must be accurate; the reception hardware must have a PLL, and that PLL must accurately acquire the clock frequency from the signal, and sync to it, so that the BMC can be correctly decoded into a stream of 0s and 1s. Slight jitter (less than half a bit frame) will make no difference in the quality of the transmission.

SPDIF data is framed; that is, it's not just a bit stream, it's a stream of packets, and if you miss a clock, you will corrupt an entire frame. Each frame also contains parity information, so if a frame is corrupt, it will most likely be detected and discarded. In other words, if you have clock jitter on the S/PDIF interface, you will most likely not receive any sound output.

When people talk about "clock jitter," they are talking about the clock used by a digitizer, an ADC plus some other hardware. That is a completely different matter than the clock on a TOSlink cable.
 
Schneibster said:
When people talk about "clock jitter," they are talking about the clock used by a digitizer, an ADC plus some other hardware. That is a completely different matter than the clock on a TOSlink cable.
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Jitter is the main thing that my audiophile friend loves to talk about when it comes to CDs.

Paul

:) :) :)
 
AudioFreak said:
Wow.... so you spent almost $2,000 on a S/PDIF cable? That is a level of idiocy beyond my comprension. You're talking about square waves! PCM audio! Unless you've got enough noise being picked up to make the input of the DAC-1 not be able to tell between 0 and 1, you just wasted two grand. Not to mention you're clocking the DAC-1 off an EMU card. What kind of stupidity is that? You're begging for jitter there.
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Yes, the jealous skeptics make meaningless attacks to make them feel better about themselves.

I like the sound of jitter, that's why I'm using Valhalla to color the sound. Sound without jitter sounds dull and boring.

AudioFreak said:
Yes, but digital devices have to have a master/slave sync relationship. If there's only 1 S/PDIF cable, the sending device has to be the clock master.

The DAC-1 has certain jitter-reduction technologies employed, but S/PDIF (be it over a Toslink optical connection or an RCA connection) is still not a very good means of establishing sync. It WILL work, for sure. But it will not be quite as tight as if the system had a work clock connection with either a high quality master clock feeding everyone or the DAC-1 as the master.
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High-end DACs with word clock input still sound worse than DAC1. I don't care about how much the input jitter is because the overall performance will be the same, the only difference the transport makes is that it either makes it smoother or edgier. It doesn't open up new worlds of detail like when tweaking the DAC and amp.

It is weird with the skeptics who care about the source of the signal. My reference albums are still mp3 because it's good enough to hear the differences from tweaks. DAC and amp are what gives the true improvements in sound. I don't care about if the transport and DAC are synced properly because I like the sound of jitter, it gives the illusion of blacker background. As long as the brightness isn't fatiguing it is fine. With Nordost Valhalla digital cable it is little smoother and it has a similar coloration as Feet of Silence under the computer case but it has more detail. Cheap Toslink cable also sounds good as long as the edginess isn't fatiguing, I used that for 2 years. But lately after I fixed some problems in my system I have got fatigue, Nordost Valhalla digital cable reduced the problem, but Magix levitation feet and ERS Paper made bigger differences than the cable. 1 vs 6 harddrives makes a smaller difference than the cable. Nordost Valhalla digital cable should be the last upgrade, but I already have one left over that I had used with my 10 times more expensive CD transport.

Having the computer levitating on top of Magix and wrapping everything in ERS Paper is the way to go, but it isn't as important as tweaking the DAC and amp.
 
Paulhoff said:
See ES, this would be something found in BOOKS.

Paul

:) :) :)
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That's the problem, the skeptic reads books instead of uses his own ears to listen. They have a very limited way of thinking, it's either on or off for them, either it works or it doesn't. But they don't realize there are infinite combinations in between. Timing of data is infinite. The waveform that comes out from the speakers is infinite. There are many ways to color the sound.
When a skeptic thinks of interference he thinks the component stops working. Then he believes that just because it is working the interference doesn't do anything. They are sitting there and listening to distorted waveforms because they don't know any better.
 
Paulhoff said:
Jitter is the main thing that my audiophile friend loves to talk about when it comes to CDs.

Paul

:) :) :)
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A competently manufactured and recorded CD, played on a competently designed player, should NEVER suffer from clock jitter. I had a private conversation about this, and I'll say what I said there: if the PLL can't lock, that's what you get when you try to have an audio engineer design digital equipment. It's perfectly straightforward if you do it right; try to shave a nickel off here and there and it'll turn into a mess. Tell your friend to buy a new CD player, made by a company that doesn't play games with its equipment. If he's getting clock jitter, it's because it's a piece of crap, period.
 
Paulhoff said:
You are so silly, Mr. Banned.

Paul

:) :) :)
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I can't see why being banned has anything to do with it. The moderator at head-fi has $50k magic boxes without any tweaks. He doesn't like it when I get better sound with something cheaper. Even a battery powered $200k system sounds worse because it doesn't have Valhalla coloration. I like the sound of Valhalla because it makes it sound more transparent than real life itself, as long as you cut them to pieces and modify them. More low-level detail is what I like, I don't care how neutral it is. I don't like the Noise Harvester much because it doesn't add coloration, it makes everything too heavy which makes the transient speed appear slower. Valhalla makes everything thinner and faster, I have modified the Valhallas thinner and now I get crazy speed. Valhalla + 192kbps mp3 is a great match because Valhalla compensates for the smearing.
 
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How in the world can the cable over which you're sending a digital signal color the sound? It's on or off. Nothing else.
 
Schneibster said:
Mmmmfff. OK, this is interesting; the hammering of the poor audiophool isn't, but this is.

Digital signals have an inherent clock: the leading edge of a transition from 1 to 0. The format used in SPDIF is biphase mark encoding, or BMC. This guarantees that there will be a transition in every bit. 1s have two transitions; 0s have only one. Transmission is from a sender to a receiver; the connection is not bidirectional (i.e., this is a simplex transmission line, not duplex). The clock from the sender is therefore the only clock possible; the receiver cannot send a clock back to the sender. The receiver must detect the inherent clock in the signal and synchronize to it. It is immaterial in this format which side has the master clock; that is a separate issue. The transmission hardware must have a clock, and that clock must be accurate; the reception hardware must have a PLL, and that PLL must accurately acquire the clock frequency from the signal, and sync to it, so that the BMC can be correctly decoded into a stream of 0s and 1s. Slight jitter (less than half a bit frame) will make no difference in the quality of the transmission.

SPDIF data is framed; that is, it's not just a bit stream, it's a stream of packets, and if you miss a clock, you will corrupt an entire frame. Each frame also contains parity information, so if a frame is corrupt, it will most likely be detected and discarded. In other words, if you have clock jitter on the S/PDIF interface, you will most likely not receive any sound output.

When people talk about "clock jitter," they are talking about the clock used by a digitizer, an ADC plus some other hardware. That is a completely different matter than the clock on a TOSlink cable.
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I'm used to referring to these things with synchronizing multiple ADCs, as I've got 8 channels of A/D in one unit, 8 channels of A/D in another (sent via Toslink cable over ADAT Optical protocol), and two more of A/D vis S/PDIF (through an RCA connection). Thus, I have 3 units to sync together. And there can be an audible difference when running off of one clock vs. another.

I'm familiar with Phase Lock Loops, the packets in S/PDIF (and the failed anti-piracy packets in the data stream). These things concern me mostly in a recording aspect. I'm not into this woo woo audiophile junk. There IS legitimate audiophile gear out there, but this is not any of it. And ES here is obviously not an audiophile if he thinks his digital cables are coloring the sound of his MP3's.

I've never met an audiophile who enjoyed listening to MP3's on their home system. It just doesn't happen. That's like Richard Dawkins taking communion. It's just not right.
 
AudioFreak said:
I'm used to referring to these things with synchronizing multiple ADCs, as I've got 8 channels of A/D in one unit, 8 channels of A/D in another (sent via Toslink cable over ADAT Optical protocol), and two more of A/D vis S/PDIF (through an RCA connection). Thus, I have 3 units to sync together. And there can be an audible difference when running off of one clock vs. another.
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Absolutely. You're varying the sample time; you'll also find you're varying the differential sample time between the units by choosing different clocks- the speed of light is a foot per nanosecond. My advice is, you're on the right track with the single clock distributed, rather than any of the device clocks- now make sure the cables are the same length. Make sure that clock is rock solid. Now all you have to do is keep track of mike placement- if you can duplicate that, you can duplicate the session.

AudioFreak said:
I'm familiar with Phase Lock Loops, the packets in S/PDIF (and the failed anti-piracy packets in the data stream). These things concern me mostly in a recording aspect. I'm not into this woo woo audiophile junk. There IS legitimate audiophile gear out there, but this is not any of it. And ES here is obviously not an audiophile if he thinks his digital cables are coloring the sound of his MP3's.
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I do some recording myself, and it's got NOTHING to do with what the audiophools do. There are legitimate audiophiles out there, and equipment that caters to them. A perfect example of the difference between audiophool and audiophile is the recent tube amp rage. This is absolutely ridiculous. Guitars respond better under certain circumstances to tube amps, as do other instruments. The type of distortion that an amp must necessarily inject is better off without the really high-order harmonics. The response time on a transistor will allow those harmonics through- but a tube damps them. And they don't sound good. So the audiophools hear that the guitarists are all using tube amps, and all of a sudden guys are making $10k tube preamps and selling them to the audiophools. There is absolutely no point in putting any digital source through a tube amp. If it's so bad you need the filtering tubes provide, it's not audiophile-grade equipment, simple as that.

Of course you could make a transistor guitar amp that would sound as good as any tube amp out there- but tubes do it for free. Why bother? Just get a couple 12AX7s and a couple 6L6s and move on. Now, if you're playing a CD, plain and simple what you want is perfect reproduction. Nothing more, no "coloring," none of that horsepucky. So you get a competently designed transistor amp, and that's the end of it. Put your money in the speakers.

AudioFreak said:
I've never met an audiophile who enjoyed listening to MP3's on their home system. It just doesn't happen. That's like Richard Dawkins taking communion. It's just not right.
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No joke. It's like enjoying all the pops and stuff from an LP. Only reason I kept them around was I was too cheap to replace them with CDs, and some of them you can't get. MP3s? Waste of time. It's a lossy compression format. Yes, you can hear the difference, if you know what to listen for- and a real audiophile does. An audiophool? Not a chance. They like the "color" or the "ultimate spatial imaging" or one of the catchphrases they've latched onto and never really understood the underlying meaning of.
 
Schneibster said:
....If he's getting clock jitter, it's because it's a piece of crap, period.
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Schneibster
I understand all this, but my friend being a so-called audiophile nut, is like ES is about his dumb paper, both of them will not read the right books on the subject. I have a book that just came in at the library titled, Real world digital audio, by Peter Kirn, that I will be reading. I also can't get him to understand at a CD has more information than vinyl, and vinyl is not unlimited in its information because it is so-called analog.

Thanks for writing here, and the same to everyone else, ES has bad ideas about audio equipment and like many other so-called audiophile a very poor understand of a DBT, and science in general.

Paul

:) :) :)
 
AudioFreak said:
How in the world can the cable over which you're sending a digital signal color the sound? It's on or off. Nothing else.
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This is one of the things I go around and around with my friend, he just doesn't get it, he thinks analog and he does understand all the stages that the information goes thru before it gets to the DAC.

Paul

:) :) :)
 
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