I watched this earlier, and I get the general impression Steve isn’t a huge fan of the more neutral ‘analytical’ type of sound… as he didn’t seem particularly excited by it. Seems to really like the Denafrips R2R stuff a lot though. lol
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Yeah, as a fan of both colored sound you get with R2R stuff and ‘Neutral’ things like Neve or Chord I can see why some people dislike it. I hate to use the term “Musical” but when there is that little something in a colored sound, it adds like… Idfk… It can make you forget you’re listening to a recording I guess
so I get why Steve might dislike very neutral if it doesnt have that undercurrent that makes it musical.
Edit: Is it me or is talking audiophile terms like pulling teeth sometimes lol. Just can’t get used to it.
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I think the distortions that certain technologies such as R2R and tubes create help to mask any timing errors/jitter that occur in digital to analog. I believe that’s what makes them more ‘pleasant’ sounding. My two cents.
Probably true, I’m just impressed at how well my r2r creates a space compared to other dacs
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IMO… I think “clean” vs “saturated” would be better alternatives to “analytical” vs “musical”…
Because I mean nobody would really associate ‘enjoyment’ with ‘analytical’… but I think ‘clean’ and ‘saturated’ deliver pretty similar connotations.
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Though I haven’t listened to either r2r, or tubes, I’m pretty sure I’d really enjoy the sound. I’ll probably add a tube amp after my next purchase (dac). I wasn’t knocking either in any way. Whatever adds to your music enjoyment I’m for.
Fortunately, I’m more than content with the RNHP for now.
Edit: I received a Dragonfly Cobalt for Christmas and I’m really enjoying the resolution of the Sabre chipset. It’s actually making me lean towards saving longer for the Matrix X-Sabre Pro.
I don’t think it’s distortion that’s inferring a sense of space from components.
I suspect it has to do with transient/impulse response, but that’s hard to explain in amps or DAC’s and it certainly happens there, so maybe it has to do with phase shifts between frequencies.
I don’t like saturated as a term, because it has a specific meaning in amplifier design, and audio in general which is not what is being heard here.
The wet and dry terms used for tube amps is better, but still suffers from if you’ve never heard it, it’s meaningless issue.
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I don’t think that the distortion was inferring the sense of space, was just commenting that I think the benefits of r2r are recreating a better sense of space, sorry about the confusion. Just think that while there might be more harmonic distortion than some sigma delta designs it’s well worth it
Saturated just means ‘filled out’ really (Ant not to be confused with oversaturated)… it’s a term used in my work too… that has nothing to do with audio at all. I’m sure it has terms in electrical engineering. IMO it describes pretty well what I hear just in general going from a solid-state to a tube amp.
I agree pretty much anything past about 80dB is largely irrelevant, older recordings that were originally mixed on tape didn’t have a noise floor anything like that good.
And most of us don’t listen in an anechoic chamber.
I think beyond the obvious gross harmonic distortion in some tube amps, we’re just not measuring the right things to understand some of the subtleties of what we hear.
Well it’s more that measurements aren’t really made for us. We are not machines, we can’t correlate measurements to an accurate depiction of sound if we have no reference with the actual thing being measured. Also measurements = no fun allowed typically lol
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I personally find it pretty fascinating (fun) to try and figure out what makes a particularly type of sound ‘enjoyable’ to people. What I don’t believe is that X measurement is automatically “better” or “best”. It’s just a number at the end of the day.
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Yeah, I just don’t like the approach of showing measurements and saying “here, this is good because it measures well, now figure it out and disregard stuff that doesn’t measure as well as this.” Also if you have no experience with a product yet you recommend it based on measurements, you will be missing a fair bit and it might not be the best for the use case even if it measures well. There are just so many other factors than basic fr or specs measurements. I mean it’s essentially just hearsay at that point. Use measurements to compliment your experiences, not measurements to supplement experience
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yeah, this I can 100% go with. =)
A good example of measurements not reinforcing good sound quality would be the Airist R2R. It doesn’t measure very well, but most who’ve heard it really enjoy its sound.
Now that I have a turntable… I’m kind of super interested in the Phono preamp. lmao… one day…
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Not yet, but soon lol
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I really like the Fidelice design aesthetic. That’s a nice little pre-amp.
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Torq’ s review of the RNDAC.
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