Ciunas Audio
Trade: Ciunas Audio
Yes, owl, that IMO is the sound of reduced/eliminated noise floor modulation - it's kinda ironic that this is one of Rob Watt's DACs who is keenly aware of NFM in DACs but seems to ignore it in power supplies. I guess we are all on our own journey in improving audio reproduction & nobody has the full picture because none of us fully understands all the mechanisms underlying auditory perception.
I define NFM as electrical noise when there are fluctuating demands for current (as there are in all devices that involve processing of dynamic signals), the power delivery directly from supercaps & not through a voltage regulator, delivers this current without any fluctuating electrical noise accompanying each pulse of current. I have found with batteries & now supercapacitors that voltage regulators, even the highly regarded ones, seems to suffer from this self generated noise to a greater or lesser extent.
Even though this electrical noise accompanies every sound reproduced (IMO it's like an auditory haze around each sound), it's not something that you are aware of as a distinct audible distortion - until it is removed - then, as you have noticed, owl, the clarity surrounding the deliver of each sound epitomises the saying "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts". This seems to be the nature of auditory perception - when the reproduction of sound is more like what we hear in nature (no auditory halo surrounds sounds in nature & it's from nature that we have built our internally stored auditory model) something clicks into place perceptually - then the reproduced sound becomes more interesting (more realistic) because we now notice the nuances in the reproduction that were always in the recording.
Non-intuitively, this particularly affects digital audio reproduction as digital devices have widely fluctuating dynamic current demands & are also processing very low signal levels. As a result, digital audio reproduction proves to be the most sensitive to this power stability (or lack of). I always say that it is no longer a case of the notes just being in the right place as can often be the case with DA which can often sound lifeless & uninteresting - instead, when the nuances & textures of sounds are more clearly reproduced our attention is captured & a new level of interest is found in the same music we are familiar with.
I define NFM as electrical noise when there are fluctuating demands for current (as there are in all devices that involve processing of dynamic signals), the power delivery directly from supercaps & not through a voltage regulator, delivers this current without any fluctuating electrical noise accompanying each pulse of current. I have found with batteries & now supercapacitors that voltage regulators, even the highly regarded ones, seems to suffer from this self generated noise to a greater or lesser extent.
Even though this electrical noise accompanies every sound reproduced (IMO it's like an auditory haze around each sound), it's not something that you are aware of as a distinct audible distortion - until it is removed - then, as you have noticed, owl, the clarity surrounding the deliver of each sound epitomises the saying "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts". This seems to be the nature of auditory perception - when the reproduction of sound is more like what we hear in nature (no auditory halo surrounds sounds in nature & it's from nature that we have built our internally stored auditory model) something clicks into place perceptually - then the reproduced sound becomes more interesting (more realistic) because we now notice the nuances in the reproduction that were always in the recording.
Non-intuitively, this particularly affects digital audio reproduction as digital devices have widely fluctuating dynamic current demands & are also processing very low signal levels. As a result, digital audio reproduction proves to be the most sensitive to this power stability (or lack of). I always say that it is no longer a case of the notes just being in the right place as can often be the case with DA which can often sound lifeless & uninteresting - instead, when the nuances & textures of sounds are more clearly reproduced our attention is captured & a new level of interest is found in the same music we are familiar with.
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