advertisement


Streaming is inferior to redbook CD playback?

Yes speakers make the biggest difference - but it's still garbage in garbage out. So if you change you speakers and notice a big change because you have larger woofers for example - it's still the same shit feeding your new speakers :).

My listening experience with a Grimm Audio MU1 tells me the source is where you get it right first - and then change your speakers. This is my experience of course.
I’ve also been through that but I have a far more modest pre-amp now compared to my previous set up. Digital is so good now that you don’t need to spend thousands upstream.

Vinyl is probably different but we all now that price doesn’t always equal quality.

I think the key difference is the interface between amp & speaker - active speakers go a long way to solving this.

My system has never sounded better.
 
I’ve also been through that but I have a far more modest pre-amp now compared to my previous set up. Digital is so good now that you don’t need to spend thousands upstream.
...

I thought that too ... until I heard the Grimm <<< that digital sounded far better than my digital unfortunately which forced me to re-think my priorities.

I've also listened to further extremes of digital - such as the dCS Rossini with Apex DAC ... and it just keeps getting better!

But I can't afford that lot - it proves a point to me though!
 
Only because you knew which was playing, ( we did discuss this at length before your audition) try it unsighted.
Keith
 
How to make friends and influence people:eek:.

With your brusque and unpleasantly condescending posting (or is it marketing) style, if I was in the market for the DSP laden obselecence-guaranteed gadgets you sell, I would actively seek someone else to buy them from.
 
You need to level match. As far as I know, level matching should be done with a volt meter and the accepted standard is 0.1 db difference at most.
Level matching is overrated IMO. A bad source will be bad regardless of the volume, maybe even worse with high volume. It's not about the bass, soundstage, detail etc those get a bit better higher the volume, it's about the jitter, once you hear it, you cannot unhear it.
To my ears a cd player is the best in this regard, a single box, the signal is kept as short as possible, you may not like the filter or the sound signature of a specific cd player, but certainly there is no significant jitter in it..
 
... it's about the jitter, once you hear it, you cannot unhear it.
To my ears a cd player is the best in this regard, a single box, the signal is kept as short as possible, you may not like the filter or the sound signature of a specific cd player, but certainly there is no significant jitter in it..
Single-box CD players are architecturally right. They normally put the master clock right next to the DAC which is where jitter matters most in digital audio. It's the CD mechanism that depends on the DAC's master clock not vice-versa, and master clocks can have jitter/phase noise low enough that it is unlikely to be audible.

However delivering audio data to a separate DAC over asynchronous USB or Ethernet also means that the clock in the DAC is not dependent on the the data source. That's architecturally just as right as the single-box CD player.

After being architecturally right it's a matter of good engineering. And stopping the CD mechanism's electrical noise and the player's digital processing noise from influencing the DAC clock is no different in principle from stopping noise from the USB or Ethernet interface doing the same in a separate DAC. And the means to do this, so that levels of jitter/phase noise in a separate DAC are unlikely to be audible, have been known for a very long time indeed.

I don't dispute what people hear but IMHO with good quality conventional engineering there's no good reason I have seen for why streaming the same file from an external streaming source should be inferior to red book CD playback in this respect. In normal listening I haven't noticed any difference between audio from my red-book CD player and audio from my streaming source via the player's USB interface. YMMV, of course.
 
Level matching is overrated IMO. A bad source will be bad regardless of the volume, maybe even worse with high volume. It's not about the bass, soundstage, detail etc those get a bit better higher the volume, it's about the jitter, once you hear it, you cannot unhear it.
To my ears a cd player is the best in this regard, a single box, the signal is kept as short as possible, you may not like the filter or the sound signature of a specific cd player, but certainly there is no significant jitter in it..
Unfortunately it is utterly unlikely you have heard the effects of jitter. The need to level match is not a matter of opinion. You are not free to choose your own facts.
 
Why bother with asr, plenty of other sites host identical music files with different levels of jitter emedded. You can test for yourself.

Here's a clue, you can only hear it when it's hundreds of times higher than even modest dacs can deliver.

If you actually knew asr then you'd know that the owner actively promotes just this type of testing.
 
I have played CDs, ripped them as FLAC files, and also streamed the same tracks on TIDAL. There was no perceptible difference between the 3 for me. I did think WAV was better for a while, some years ago, but ate some humble pie when I ABX tested it.
 
I remember posting on ASR, something about a chinese dac sounding awful, and someone replied that I was wrong, I was liking the wrong things?!
I mean WTF? I like vinyl playback, and old cd players, I like what I like. I use my gear for music listening not for masturbating on perfect graphics.
Measurements, sure can help, but that's all.
Communism may be dead, but not enough..

We rip our cds meticulously with eac and accuraterip, put them on a nas or pc, and stream them, and since they are in the uber SSD with no moving parts, they should sound better than the crap cd player collecting dust somewhere in the house.
I admit they sound good enough, and are a lot more convenient than cd or vinyl.
 
No, you posted an opinion about how you feel something sounds ds and people told you that they don't care what you think you hear. ASR isn't interested in opinions from sighted listening , same as hydrogen audio isnt
 
The question people need to ask themselves is ‘why’?
Why would one format be better than another? If the ‘DATA’ stream is the same coming out of a streamer, CD player or PC, if everything else in the chain is the same then how could it sound different?
Simple, it can’t.
Any measurable amount of noise or jitter is proven to be entirely inconsequential.
Even so called ‘Hi-Res’ from the same master has also proven to be entirely indistinguishable from the redbook version.
Unless you buy into the idea that somehow certain cables or components are able to ‘modify’ a data stream with such precision as to be able to modify the frequency response of the audio, I would recommend just using whatever you find most convenient.
Oh and as for dealers; well if they’re the type to err on the side of pseudo science, I would find a different dealer…
 


advertisement


Back
Top