Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners DAC: computer Soundcard vs CD Player?

Can we please have this fight in just one thread? :-)

Personally, I'd like to have someone explain to me in as straight as possible terms why and how (electronically) the $1500 players are so far superior to $100 players that us mere mortal poor bastards cannot possibly ever hear good sound.

In other words, we've heard from engineers (albiet second and third hand, in the case of JohnK, who has linked to many articles) on one side, but not the other. Give me graphs correlated with charts of human hearing tolerances and limits.

As for that last sentence, why not? Is music something so mystical we cannot hope to understand it with science? Or is it a collection of waves interpreted by the sacks of neurons in our heads?

Well, that got a bit out of hand. I apologize for flaming people... you just got my dander up a bit, Saturn!

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Robert Harley Stereophile

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Again - flowery prose aside about the struggle to find ying and yang between components, that elusive aural feng shui, audio nirvana... if face to face I'd like to reiterate to Mr. Harley that in the matter of digital datastreams, as we are discussing here, they exist in two states - correct and errored. On a redbook compact disc, there is stored digital waveform information. 44,100 times a second, the amplitude of a frequency is polled, turned into a number between 0 and (2^16-1) 65535. The job of a CD-P is to read these numbers, and pass them along as either a light pulse from a blinking LED (TOSlink) or as electric current pulse (SPDIF). If the stream of data matches, the signal is correct, if the stream of data does not match the source, the signal is incorrect.

As far as musicality/colouration/distortion goes - if the data stream is flawed (deviates from the data written on the CD) - I believe we all can agree that it was coloured by the CD-P. The objectivists would be absolutely correct in saying "yes, since the CD-P did not send the datastream verbatim, it has, in fact, coloured the sound" and not get an argument from any rational man.

If the CD-P sends the exact same data as is written on the CD, then no, even an objectivist would say "no, this component has not coloured this sound", but at the same time, this sound would match precisely the sound had the datastream come from computer memory, a cheap CD-P, punch cards, or any other source. Anyone that would argue that an identical bitstream from different sources would sound at all different is turning this into a faith-based religion and should wait for the next iteration of Hale-Bop, mix the Nembutal with the pudding and wash it down with a bottle of Smirnoff. Like Marshall Applewhite, I'm sure Mr. Harley would make the castration optional.

Bren R.

Ken I'm always peachy. Thats my personality.

As for the rest of you ... enjoy your you budget Axioms. Enjoy your budget multichangers. You won't miss what you never heard or felt. And they say people who have high end gear are the snobs and are close minded. This is my last post on the matter.

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And they say people who have high end gear are the snobs and are close minded.

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That is without a doubt the most accurate comment I have heard in days. I agree with you once again Saturn! Getting kinda scary!

Saturn

Looks like you're living quite happily in your own little la-la-land....eheh. I can not help but laughing at people like you.

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Looks like you're living quite happily in your own little la-la-land....eheh. I can not help but laughing at people like you.

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No reason to take it down to that level. Do you happen to own a CD player worth anything that proves him wrong?

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But have you actually done any of these tests using some of the high end gear.

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You should watch where you go with that tact Saturn.
Bren uses PRO level equipment per his day job. Things that would put your 'high end' items in a garbage bin if comparing according to the rules of the audiophile idea of 'quality'.

Actually NH, all this can be tested (the 'high end' vs 'low quality') items in double blind tests.
Some have already been done by Axiom and some results reported here by Alan. Other stuff was researched at the NRC in Ottawa and written up in science journals by Dr. Floyd Toole back in the 80s for which Ian and Alan both played a part. ABX has also done some tests.
The interesting thing is that regardless of the outcome, the audiophiles still scream "it can't be". These ideas have already been re-hashed and presented in a science light, but until people are personally ready to accept the results, they will never succumb to the ideas.
Think of it like 3 doctors telling a person they have cancer and it was checked 5 times, but the patient still refuses to believe. Typically it is called a denial stage but more out of fear rather than from the ideal of a crushed and long held belief.
In a simple term, audio is a religion to many.

Closed minded or perhaps others call it 'objectivity'.
Shooting down a layman's hypothesis on sound quality is anything but closed minded. It is simply an elimination of incorrect conclusions based on flaws in testing methodology.
Didn't anyone pay attention in their science classes???

This really breaks my heart Saturn.