Yeah, it is very hard to master in native dsd. I’m just here for the mastering and the other dxd lol
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Made me chuckle a bit. But yeah there’s nothing that drives me up the wall as much as cable related myths. More so when it relates to digital transfer and error correction being in place. USB Cables, optical or RJ45’s costing a metric fuckton for 50cm of cable.
Pro-tip: It doesn’t do shit. The data is being corrected for errors, always ensuring you get the exact same data as you sent. Any errors would make the package being sent again until successful. Faults would result in audio clipping or simply not getting any audio at all. So as long as your cable is properly shielded, protected and secured firmly, it doesn’t matter if you’re using a $5 one or a $5000 one. Save yourself the money and put your money where it’s worth instead. Like a better amp, speakers, headphones or whatever else you had plans to upgrade.
Anyways, on to the memorabilia.
Denon used to have this Denon Link cable (The Cable™) which is basically just a Cat6 they use as an interconnect, priced at a whopping $500. Any Cat6 would work, yet there were people defending this. Worst offenders were often found in the Head-Fi sections where they were also trying to peddle their own garden hoses filled with magic dust (metal shavings), claiming it had some Amazing Properties™ that just revolutionized the sound. The drama there used to be amazing when someone bought a cable only to cut it up and show the insides to the rest of the sceptical crowd. Laughs were had amongst claims hailing defamation and showing off company secrets.
Sadly I don’t have a link for this one, but this also takes me back to the infamous wooden knob someone tried to push on Head-Fi, also for $500 (must be a magic number?). It “opened up the highs” to new brilliant heights. Really makes you think. 
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This is a fallacy I see portrayed by a lot of individuals who have never been in hifi and don’t know about DSD. Native DSD is a bit-stream that cannot be corrected by its very nature. It relies on the density of bits so a 1 flipping to a 0 would result in a slightly different waveform being output. Unlike PCM this wouldn’t sound distorted, it would just sound different. DSD cannot be corrected as it is a continuous stream that fills up a buffer. There is no ‘chuck’ or ‘block’ to verify.
Manuel, a guy who spent over a year verifying audio blocks for PCM tells me of the kinds of errors that can arise with standard USB cables.
Maybe you misstook my post as critique against the format because of the previous posters being on that topic? I’m not arguing against DSD though, I’m calling bullshit on products like Denon Link, wooden knobs, magical dust garden hose interconnects etc, that’s where my beef is and I think people should stay away from products that basically do bugger all.
I’ll give it to you that I’m not that well read on DSD as a format, or how / if error correction works on it. In my defense, my anecdotes were from a time where DSD wasn’t even a thing outside of SACD. So what you say is probably true in regards for DSD, I need to read up more on it.
Hahaha, by the gods
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I think the Phillips and Sony engineers who developed the red book CD standard and settled on 44.1/16Bit all those years ago probably did their job too well. 44.1/16 basically took digital audio as far as it needed to go, that was brilliant for consumers but the industry has been looking for a way to persuade the market to upgrade to a “better” format for years. Unless you want surround sound (and I would love to see much more multi-channel music) then there really isn’t any reason to go beyond 44.1/16. I have quite a few multi-channel “pure audio” blu-ray discs of classical music and the multi-channel experience is excellent, however if listening to the two channel high-res stereo versions provided by the same discs I can discern no difference from the regular CDs they were bundled with.
What hi-res music streaming/downloads might offer (might) is better masters that undo the damage done by re-mastering and optimising new releases for car audio and BT speakers and which have been strangled by over compression. In that case the value of high-res would not be the higher frequency and/or bit depth but use of good quality masters in preference to some of the truly awful masters that have been released.
I think one issue with digital audio is that some approach it as being like analogue, when it isn’t. In the vinyl era tweaking was necessary, cartridges and tone arms etc needed to be set up, vibration isolation wasn’t just snake oil and things like phono stages made a real difference. Digital audio changed all that but I think some parts of the industry and hobby were desperate to try and develop new digital tweaking, or alternatively went more and more off the rails with things like cables, cable lifters, magic rocks etc.
If all the above marks me as an objective type, and I do value measurement and objective evaluation, I’m also of the view that over obsessing about measurement is unhelpful and that measurement in itself will not tell you whether or not you like a pair of headphones, for example. Measurements can verify manufacturer claims and indicate tuning etc, but we all have our own preferences which are no more right or wrong than anybody else’s. And I fear that obsessing over particular metrics can drive unfortunate behaviours and become misleading, and can result ina culture of over optimising products for a single metric which might not mean that much.
Audio gear is about music, if you like the sound of something and it allows you to enjoy music then really that is what matters. I believe in the old adage of buy what you like and like what you buy. If people like audio jewellery then I see nothing wrong with that as long as it is honestly sold as audio jewellery, what I object to about a lot of the snake oil type products is that they are marketed and sold under false pretences of improving sound quality, which is dishonest. And it is not all snake oil. For example cables have to be the right gauge for the load they carry, good quality connectors which give a tight fit and resist oxidation, good stress relief etc all make for a better cable, but they won’t change the sound. And you don’t have to pay much for well made high quality cable.
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Found this to be illuminating from Grover Neville’s review of the Zen DAC on (of all places) InnerFi (https://www.innerfidelity.com/content/ifi-zendac-review):
More power does not determine a system’s volume - that is in fact determined by gain. A lower powered amp will actually sound louder than a higher powered one if it has more gain at a given input. Power is more important in determining what the maximum current or voltage a device can swing into a transducer when hit with musical peaks as well as how loud waveforms are. So, think of power as being a rough indicator of how dynamic a system can be, and gain as determining its relative loudness when listening. I’m grossly oversimplifying and all the electrical engineers are squirming, but I think you get the point.
He later elaborates that raw power can be needed for bass control and of-course for genuinely power-hungry headphones.
I think this is what’s referred to as headroom.
Interesting. Grover says that power is the max current or voltage a device can deliver to a headphone to handle musical peaks. My crude understanding is that headroom means having more power than is needed even for typical peak loads at your current listening level, given the music and equipment you’re using. Does that work for you?
Sure. I’m not technically informed enough to provide definitives, so yeah, that sounds good.
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This is really simple.
Basically amps amplify both current and voltage separately, and the combination is stated power number. But the limits are independent.
Voltage makes things louder, but everything has to obey Ohm’s law V=IR for a given resistance (load). So if the amp can’t reach the current for the given load, it will result in less voltage than the voltage gain of the amp would indicate.
Basically at low impedances amps are current limited and at higher impedances they are voltage limited.
That’s why when you look at the quoted power for an amp at various loads, you see a section where it’s obviously linear and then it dropping off at either end (if the manufacturers bother listing outside the linear range).
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Penetrating the fog ever so slightly. But there is still this concept of headroom. Let’s say the DAC is asking the amp at a certain moment to deliver a quantitiy of current and voltage that are within the amp’s linear range. Does it matter whether the amp is at the low or the high end of that linear range at that moment? Is there something to this effortlessness thing?
Depends.
Basically the amp has to be able to draw additional power when it’s demanded, that involves everything being able to deliver the extra power. So for example how fast the rectifier in the PSU can respond to the additional power draw matters. It’s why amps with Valve rectifiers sound different than amps with solid state rectifiers even though they aren’ directly in the audio path.
If your running near an amps limits with nominal variation, the odds are transients will push it over, but your amplifying a line level signal so you shouldn’t see massive spike of power draw. And if your inside the linear region, the only thing really having to react is the PSU.
Class A amps have less of an issue with this because they are always on, so power draw doesn’t vary in quite the same way.
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That’s really helpful. Thanks for providing a non-dumbed-down answer to both questions.