06-10-2021, 01:24 PM
(06-06-2021, 07:09 AM)the_bertrum Wrote:(06-04-2021, 05:55 PM)WuBai Wrote: They are the same ones that think all bottled water tastes exactly the same because it is all H2O.
Well since most bottled waters make a virtue of the the mineral content, anyone thinking they are "just H2O" needs to do a little reading.
As for how the bits get to the DAC altering the sound, well I'm in the "bits are bits" camp, but that is simply because I've never heard a difference and no one has explained to me the mechanism at play that could make such a difference.
The_Bertrum,
Nobody has explained the mechanism at play because nobody actually knows. There is so much when it comes to electricity and 'sound quality' which is already a subjective thing that has not been studied at an institutional level. Unfortunately I don't think there are multi million dollar grants made available for this stuff, because if there was some poor college kid would have to listen to Keith Don't Go ten thousand times in endless rounds of double blind tests and would probably jump off the building to end his suffering.
I ran a test yesterday on my USBridge Signature. I ordered Allo's EMMC which is an EMMC module with 64GB of memory attached to a SD Card reader. EMMC is faster than the SD Card and it cost me $100 to have it shipped from India. I loaded Moode onto it and plugged it in and played music through Wifi. Guess what? No difference in sound quality. None. I just wasted $100. Now, if I was falling for placebo and wanting to lie to myself, wouldn't my mind just magically 'hear' a difference to justify the $100 I spend on the experiment?
So then I transferred a very high res copy of Take Five to the SD Card and went back and forth playing it from my Synology NAS via Wifi and then playing it directly from the SD Card. The SD Card version sounded calmer and more nuanced. The Wifi sounded absolutely great, don't get me wrong but when I quickly switched back and forth between the two I found the Wifi sounded a bit louder like there was some extra energy in the music that was very faint. I listened many times, and was the difference huge? No, not at all. I would say maybe 5% difference and the only way I could even hear it is by going back and forth directly and quickly. So at the end, Wifi and SD Card are both great options and there is almost no difference between them, but I can't say there is 100% no difference between them.
Do I know why there was a slight difference between the sound coming from the spinning hard drive of my NAS to my router to another routher via wifi then to my dongle attacked to my Allo versus running straight from the EMMC SD card? No. I would assume that it is due to the transfer but have no idea why or how.
While I am 100% in the bits and bits camp, I must remain open to the fact that I don't know everything and there is still much left to learn. That is all I am saying and I think that is the essence of science, the constant discovery and experimentation. Sometimes it leads to crazy things which I don't believe in, like placing $500 magnets somewhere in the room and claiming "Oh, I hear so much more air in the recording" but sometimes it leads to actual discoveries where small incremental changes can be heard.
But at the end of the day, it looks like there are still some 'minerals' in the signal path that we still don't know how to fully account for that make some difference, however small. Just keep an open mind and enjoy the experimenting process, it is the best part of this hobby in my opinion. But if everything sounds the same to you, then in some ways I envy you!
Allen
