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nope, I was told that good ears hear waveform differences caused by patterns of couple of pico-seconds deviations
I'd be interested in anything scientific you've found that indicates this as it would be incredibly interesting to read. However, the more important part of what I was saying was not whether or not you can perceive the difference but that the tiny difference we're talking about is so small, it's present on everything silicon based and you aren't going to find a better solution. As such, I'm skeptical of claims to hearing improvements when the other solutions would carry the same jitter and that jitter would be so small as to be insignificant compared to everything else in the design of your system.
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but femto, I pull my hat off, that's what, fractions of inches for light in this time ;-) You guys must have fun, sounds
bleeding edge.
Our products below 200 femto seconds are all Silicon Germanium based and definitely cool. It would be a lot more fun if the telecomm and networking markets would rebound as they're about the only people on the planet that actually care about this level of precision.
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so, not sure I follow here, so if you say that I reconstruct something around 10kHz with 10 microsec clock (that's 1e-6 if I'm correct) (which means I'll need at least 20kHz samples to do it anyway decent, that's 1/20*1e3 = 0.5 msec = 500 micro seconds so 1 microsecond clock jitter could be already 0.2% difference on the timescale). Could we hear that one ?
I don't think I'm nearly qualified enough in human perception measurement to answer at what percentage of the original signal the human ear begins to perceive the difference. On that, I default to the only scientific information as to what people can and can't hear that has been presented in this thread, Alan Lofft's experience with the Canadian research center. If the general consensus from that PURELY scientific community was that it isn't perceptible I'd tend to believe them above someone trying to sell me their product...
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Could we hear that one ? My experience with image processing (was a hobby long time ago) suggests to me that just couple of those are surely not to be heard but if such difference happens in a predictable pattern like jitter on another pattern (like music material) I can easily imagine we are able to tell recognize it's going on in an incredibly exact fashion
The problem is that the levels of jitter you're talking about are on the same scale as the process deviations in silicon ICs. The only way you're going to eliminate that jitter is with a significantly more expensive technology (the SiGe we use is a good example, GaAs is another as is InPh). Syncing anything together in this fashion won't help you simply because that synchronized clock signal will still have the same levels of jitter as its an inherent result using silicon based tehnologies.
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I don't understand why there is a claim around that sync'ing the clocks between the transport and the pre-amp should buy me anything.
That's because those claims don't make sense. I assume it's just creative marketing.
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The clocks are
independent and there is a buffer inbetween so the effect should be zero, is that what you say ?
Yep. More importantly, your synchronized clock signal won't be carrying any less clock jitter as jitter is in everything. Hell, even spacetime has jitter.
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I just bought 190$ silver interconnects. Just for the kicks ;-)
I bet they look pretty cool, too. I figure if you've already spent a few grand on your hardware, a couple hundred on wires isn't that big of a deal if just to have something that "fits" in the over all budget and aesthetics.
That doesn't mean it will result in any improvement as a digital interconnect serves no purpose but to carry a high or low signal. The only possible source of distortion is if it occurs to such a phenomenal degree that highs look like lows or vice versa and it happens so often that the receiver has to issue too many requests for a re-transmission of the datastream while that piece of information is supposed to be played. If you have this happening in your system, you have larger problems than the wires.
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agreed even more. If you want to see something in the audio-visual space that makes your jaw _drop_ look up the work that's going on in
language acquisition. There is a video done in canada or US (some woman I forgot the name off, she's a big shot in children language
development world, Patricia something) where a face is saying a sound [one of the anchor sounds of english language, like 'ka'] and the sound playing does
another key sound like 'ba'. When you close you eyes you hear 'ba', when you open them and see the face you hear yet a completely different
anchor sound, 'fa' or something like
that. It's below conciousness, you can't influence it and the effect is very distinct. As to why, they don't know ;-), obviously the sound we hear
is being modified in the brain by the visual circuitry before it even goes to the cerebreum. So yes, we warp reality unbelievably.
That's actually REALLY cool. If you happen to come across a link about it, please send it my way. I'd love to read more about that.
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yepp, I wish I would do double-blind-testing but frankly, I'm too lazy for that and probably rather spend $1K on clock sync to see whether I _believe_ it improved the sound.
Much more fun that way, I'm dealing with commercial, analytical, exact, unforgiving science every day at my job, this is a hobby and it should be a little voodo ;-)
As a fellow scientist, I can DEFINITELY understand that. I just wish I had your budget to play!
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Having fought that problem for a long time in my life (and still doing so) I extrapolate that you're a very knowledgable individual who cares very deeply
about his work or area of expertise and who considers 'truth' as
seen by you overriding any social norms which are of course just 'agreements' and not hard axioms (albeit going into greeks I realized
that moral and ethics are basically axioms that allow society and therefore not different from axioms that hold math together. Even deeper here,
I assume you are familiar with Goedel and Wittgenstein and the conclusion I had to draw from their work [one mathematical, the other philosophical]
that math is as arbitrary and unprovable system as society with contradictions being the nature of the beast in the deepest meaning of its sense ;-).
On more tactical terms, telling people straight on they have no clue what they talk about seldom furthers your cause as isn't lack of modesty as isn't
the claim to be the bearer of the truth. I tend to either patiently explain over and over or walk away from forums like that when I tense up and feel
that 'there are too many nuts' or when I feel the competitive edge coming up. And yes, electronic mediums warp things to the worse also often ;-)
Understood. I think a larger problem for me is actually that my home on the internet, as it were, is much the exact opposite of this place. Proveable information is respected above all else there and a strong analytical argument is absolutely required. Factual statements that are justified with proof are all that the group really permits in debate which is why I run into so many troubles here where the opposite seems true.
I suppose that's a natural result of the current state of A/V.
Regards,
Semi
