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NOS doesn't mean you have to fail to provide the required reconstruction filter. Though it seems to be used synonymously throughout this thread :).

Reconstruction filters, wasn't that where He Who Shall Not Be Named started his game with Pink Triangle DACs?

OS makes a more ideal reconstruction filter easier and is exactly the same sampling theorem as NOS so why the big deal?

I wonder at the wisdom of removing the reconstruction filter, but perhaps in the right system context (the rest of an AN system?) provides a sort of reconstruction filter so regardless of how much you "like" the look of the stair case steps in the output of their DACs, how much is actually reproduced after the pre-amp, the amp, the speakers? It will add distortion no doubt, but perhaps mostly more pleasing harmonics that in context are neither here nor there?

I also wonder at the wisdom of all the noise shaping antics modern DACs get up to, to measure better than the next DAC.

I love how AN DACs sound, I hate the idea of no reconstruction filter and leaving it up to the rest of the system ... recipe for incompatabilities and varied performance.
 
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I was going to tell you my true story featuring Bryston and the AN OTO which has a completely different ending to Richard Austen's above, but then I saw the OP's original question and decided not to.
 
Indeed - noise floor is one of least important measurements of performance and barely relevant to sound quality provided it is adequate. A typical listening room has a background noise level of 50dB and a quiet room around 40dB. If you're listening at 80-90dB SPL then that's only 40-50dB above the room noise floor. This is why Vinyl and tape are perfectly adequate.
Even with lowly cassette (OK I have a 3-head NAK which helps) the s/n of 60dB of a good type 2 tape is more than adequate to listen at loud levels and not notice any hiss even between tracks from the seating position, with no Dolby NR. Indeed I suspect the reason most people deride cassette is the over use of Dolby NR to "fix" the perceived problem of tape hiss which just causes its own artefacts.
On many CD's from old analogue masters you can often hear the background tape hiss from the original recording so having 120dB SNR in the playback system is somewhat moot!

My best tape deck was the Pioneer CTS-709 a nice 3 head deck that I regret selling. I made tapes (always without Dolby). The problem was, I felt, that the NR would cut down some noise but seemed to also cut out part of the music, ambiance and oddly the dynamics. I remember a fellow with a famous deck - might have been Nakamichi - who said the same thing.

With speakers, a reviewer from Stereophile noted comparing the Audio Note E to a Quad ESL that listening to the Quad was like looking out a beautiful view through the cleanest sliding glass doors in the world. The AN-E was like opening the doors and going out onto the deck experiencing the view but also breathing in some smog.

I'll take 95% of the music with 5% distortion/colouration/resonance over the alternate of 80% of the music and 0.01% distortion/colouration/resonance.

There is no perfection in audio - so everyone is forced to choose which sorts of problems and weaknesses they can best live with.

In audio, from my 30 years experience of what I see audiophiles do it sort of goes something like this for Audiophiles.

SS/Narrow baffle speakers >>> SS Wide baffle speaker or panels >>>> Class A PP tube amplifier or class A SS amplifier with wide baffle speakers or panels >>>> SE or SET amplifiers with High-Efficiency speakers or Horns. With CD players - everyone owned an oversampling/upsampling CD player - they owned the Sony/Denon/ Pioneer/ Marantz players of the time - I had the CD 67SE. Then they might move to the units that were well reviewed like the Rega Planets, Naims, Cambridge Audio CD 6 in my case, or Cal Labs or Wadia or Merdian or ARC or "oops a Theta Data universal" And then after buying a dozen of these mediocrities and trying one great measuring CD player after another - and moaning that it doesn't sound like music - they give a whirl to NOS. Some are better than others of course like anything else.

NR suppresses the music you want to hear - it does suppress some noise - but the cost is too high. Maybe a better tape deck would have convinced me but back in 1991 the CTS 709 was Pioneer's top deck -- it was a Pioneer Elite in disguise - ie the guts are the same as the Elite version, but the latter had rosewood side panels and perhaps a copper chassis (not a small improvement) but a massive price increase. My McDonald's job couldn't allow me to afford a better Nakamichi or the Dragon.
 
The second hand market is no arbiter of a product's quality it simply shows that people chop and change kit, there's no broad indication of reasoning behind the purchase or sale.

AN and DCS are at opposite ends of the market one invests in digital design and advanced production and manufacturing the other spends their money on esoteric parts, materials and hand assembly. DCS is all about the math, AN most certainly aren't.

There's no reason why an individual listener 'should' prefer better measurements over worse, and certainly not once sighted bias is and retailer showmanship is factored into a demo. That on average people trend towards the more neutral measuring kit en masses under blinded test conditions tells you nothing about the taste of outliers.

Coming up with a vaguely technology valid sounding reason as to why a subset of people seem to like a fundamentally broken implementation of cd playback is nothing more than conjecture. Here's a difference, people must like it because of that difference, that's not how science works, that's not how you remove confounding variables from a comparison and identify what people are actually responding to.

Yes, the problem with reading the blind tests is that when they are conducted by Harmon - a company selling speakers - this is what is called a "conflict of interest" and when has any reviewer who references a Harmon speaker ever remotely mentioned a conflict of interest. Then when Martin Colloms of Ho-Fi Critic or Hi-Fi Choice does a line-level matched test - gee the results are quite different! Martin Colloms had a group of lead designers from top audio companies come in and listen to SS amplifiers in the $3000 range and the guys who designed these amps all chose a $100 used low feedback Radford tube amplifier.

I think it is easier to sell the math - let's face it no one auditions as much anymore - they buy audio like they buy a PC or laptop - look at the numbers i7 is better than i5 and more pixels on the printer is better etc. My DAC has an ESS Sabre 9016 but that is obsolete as it has been replaced 3 times since then with ES9033Q so it MUST be better.

I remember back in the day when Burr-Brown was all the rage - does your CD player use Burr-Brown? They're THE best - I saw the price sheet the most expensive one was $2.47 retail. So a manufacturer probably paid a whole lot less Most were well under $2.

The chips cost diddly. The upper manufacturers are trying them all - some companies want to sell something that will impress Stereophile - and thus the measurements readers. Companies like AN can make stuff they think sounds better because no measurements person is going near a tube amp let alone a SET amp. So they're never getting ANY of those consumers anyway. On another forum, one guy won't even try the stuff on principle - he read that tubes measure poorly so it's a sealed done deal for him. What can you do - you can't argue with people like that so don't.

I live in Hong Kong and Audiophile dream city where I can go to a building and listen to gear on 17 floors - one floor will have YG Acoustics and Constellation and Kharma and Vivid Audio with Kondo and Edge and Soulution. The next will have ATC, Rogue, Line magnetic, Melody, the next will Have Nola Reference grand and Avantgarde and VTL and Ypsilon and the million-dollar Clearaudio turntable and top VPI, the nest will have Harbeths, Sugden, Tannoy, JBL the next will be Analog Domain, Shindo, MBL, Revel, Magepan with Triode Labs, Cayin, Trenner and Freidl, -- it just goes on and on.

And all of their engineers who graduated from university and know all the math make a CHOICE as to go with the measured performance and to veer off it because it just sounds better.

John Curl recently noted the same thing on a youtube video. He said he made a terrific measuring loudspeaker - by technical standards it was great. Yet he didn't like the sound - no good. He went back to amplifiers.

Lastly, most auditions aren't "fair" ( I don't even mean DBT fair) I just mean even subjectively fair. If I listen to dCS on a Bricasti amp through B&W speakers - I am not necessarily hearing the dCS - the sound of the room let's say is bad. Well, if I have only heard this all once - how do I know what is to blame? Maybe the dCS is being messed up but the speakers/room or amp (or all of the above). Maybe it's the dCS that is ruining things and the amp and speakers are just passing the badness forward.
 
I've read a lot of the Harman stuff and short of the amps chosen, or the room beneficailly matching the speakers they design there's no real bias at play.

Sure some of the speakers might be out of their comfort zone in terms of temperature at the levels they were driven at, or amps not working well with certain driver/xo pairings due to impedance swings at play, but they're not using the tests to sell the speakers, they are genuinely striving to build up an accurate database of the correlation between measured sound and user preference, so that they can then design speakers that match that unspoken customer requirement.

Sure, having the story benefits their marketing, but it doesn't feel like a cynical tail wagging the dog exercise.

I could be totally wring and they're marketing genius, but nothing they propose conflicts greatly with other third party studies. So I give them a pass.

I don't know the test that MC did. Was it all blinded and amps all run under clipping, level matched?
 
With speakers, a reviewer from Stereophile noted comparing the Audio Note E to a Quad ESL that listening to the Quad was like looking out a beautiful view through the cleanest sliding glass doors in the world. The AN-E was like opening the doors and going out onto the deck experiencing the view but also breathing in some smog.

There should be a Booker prize for audio reviewers. They're extemelly creative at wrinting nonsense.
 
Its a good analogy and one that's easily understood by those that have listened to both speakers, the Booker prize is for Books, not audio reviews, clue is in the title ;/
I think Richards posts above are a good summation of the hobby.
 
sorry for distraction of the topic flow, has anyone compared AN DAC4 or DAC5 with stuff like lampizator amber2 or amber 3 or higher models?
 
Could someone provide a reference for the Stereophile sliding door/deck AN Quad comparison review?
 
Could someone provide a reference for the Stereophile sliding door/deck AN Quad comparison review?
It was a comment on a forum to me not in a review.

As I recall it was a conversation around dynamics - The Quad is crystal clear but it doesn't have a dynamic sound. I used to joke about panels that if you want dynamic bass you need a dynamic driver and Martin Logan proved the point by adding a dynamic woofer because the panels were incapable of generating in-room pressure.

Having said that I am not dumping on the Quads because what they do great they do exceptionally well. My dealer carried them for ages and I always loved the sparkling clarity but as I also listen to AC/DC and given they were 5 figures - it just wasn't going to happen for me.

As my fellow writer noted when he covered the AN E "Most noticeable was the ability of the 8” driver to create pressure gradients within the listening room which were noted as density changes in the air of the room. I have heard few large systems capable of doing this as effectively as these drivers when corner loaded. I should also note that the bass was not ”one note” or overblown." https://www.dagogo.com/2010-ces-coverage-9/

Albeit I have heard them sound one-note and overblown. So it is position/room dependent. Either way, they can "shake you all night long" while the Quads of the world won't even ruffle the sheets. I doubt Quad guys are too worried because it's unlikely they buy these speakers for AC/DC.

There is nothing perfect - The AN E is an all-rounder and as I have noted in the past - it does everything quite well but it is not "elite" in any one domain. A single driver or ESL has a purity that is unmatched, a large horn has a dynamic (especially macro-dynamics) that are usually unmatched. Some speakers have more bass and can play louder, and the Acapella Plasma Ion Tweeter can be jaw-dropping. Although I would argue that while these speakers may get 10/10s in various sonic areas they often come with some 3/10 in other areas while the AN E is 8/10 everywhere. If you listen to all genres the AN-E will be better BUT if you are just a jazz guy or just a hard rock guy - I might be looking at single drivers or horns instead. The AN-E is somewhat in the DeVore 0/96 and Harbeth 40.2 kind of thing - neither of these is state of audio art in any area.

Like most of this stuff, it comes down to what weakness you can live with and the room interaction. Jack Roberts, former reviewer on our staff - greatly preferred the Audio Note J speaker to the E. Bob Neil a former review for Positive Feedback liked the AN Digital so much that he stopped reviewing and became a dealer - he prefers the AN K the most. It's a sealed driver so it has some inherent advantages.

Not long back I was auditioning ATC speakers in the $50,000US range and Bricasti amplifiers and ridiculously expensive CD player (I forget which). The dealer was playing a remastered Beatles Track - and it was fine - I put on a few mainstream CDs - The Outfield 'Play Deep', Loreen McKennitt "The Muse", Some Guns N Roses. It was basically unplayable. So thin and bright and I guess Hi-Fi. People love this stuff - the gear is popular and it sells and I am sure it measures spectacular. The weakness I perceive is so fundamentally large that it's a no-go. To another person they love it, don't hear the problems I hear, or they perceive it as a strength, not a weakness.


The Martin Colloms article is here https://www.stereophile.com/reference/70/index.html
 
That’s a pretty snobby statement, do people with more money & higher end systems know more?

I really like Tron gear BTW & have a lot of respect for GT Audio.

Well of coarse yes.

Peter’s first system was £500 and over the years upgraded to a £5000 system.

Paul’s first system was £500 and over the years upgraded to a £500k system.

It’s not snobbery to say that Paul is in a position to comment on a £500k system. Whereas Peter is in no position to comment and has no idea what systems from £5k to £500k can achieve and sound like in his room etc.

Yes he possibly may have heard systems at shows or in dealers, but that isn’t the same and you’re not gaining the experience and knowledge going up the ladder step by step..
 
Well of coarse yes.

Peter’s first system was £500 and over the years upgraded to a £5000 system.

Paul’s first system was £500 and over the years upgraded to a £500k system.

It’s not snobbery to say that Paul is in a position to comment on a £500k system. Whereas Peter is in no position to comment and has no idea what systems from £5k to £500k can achieve and sound like in his room etc.

Yes he possibly may have heard systems at shows or in dealers, but that isn’t the same and you’re not gaining the experience and knowledge going up the ladder step by step..
It's nonsense though isn't it? The fictional person with the £500k system will have confirmation bias off the scale & probably just likes listening to 'Jazz at the pawn shop', the guy with the £5k system may just really enjoy what he has.

I've had systems at home between £20-40K in terms of RRP, the one I am currently enjoying is right at the bottom of that range. Is my opinion now worth less?
 
Measurements schmesurements!

The two best DACs I've owned are from Audio Note and Chord. Very different approaches, slightly different deliveries, but what they had in common IME was to remove an artificial smear from the sound - however faint - compared to more mainstream ones. That to me is the biggest killer in digital, and doesn't seem related to measurements.
 
"Most noticeable was the ability of the 8” driver to create pressure gradients within the listening room which were noted as density changes in the air of the room. I have heard few large systems capable of doing this as effectively as these drivers when corner loaded. I should also note that the bass was not ”one note” or overblown."

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The fictional person with the £500k system will have confirmation bias off the scale & probably just likes listening to 'Jazz at the pawn shop'

Whereas the person who thinks this clearly has never met anyone who has such a system.

It always strikes me as odd that people talking about confirmation bias only seem to think it works one way.
 


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