I was using a Dell GX110 until December, very solid and utterly stable PIII-based machine - maybe 2 crashes/hangs in 18 months?. I did have some fun getting the M-audio DIO2448 to work properly (had to re-install W2K as 'standard PC', disabling ACPI).

It was pretty good for audio I though, and I enjoyed it a lot, which was the general idea in the first place..

In December I bought a new case (12cm fans for quiet) and an Asus mother-board (chosen for it's excellent configurability. particularly regarding IRQ's) and transplanted all the hardware from the Dell - the PIII (1.4), DIMMs, Seagate HD's, expansion cards, PSU, the lot.

Music is still via the DIO 2448 > proper 75 ohm coax > Audio Alchemy Dac-in-the-Box. It should sound the same, you'd have thought.Well it doesn't - it's better by an 'order of magnitude'.

It's clearer, sweeter, has deeper and better bass and most importantly - stereo-imaging is SO much better - voices and instuments are placed between the speakers instead of splattered vaguely across the space between them. This is not placebo, 2 friends who are neither computer-geeks or 'audiophiles' noticed it immediately.

How come? the only hardware that's changed is, in effect, the mother-board. The inference has to be that something wasn't right with the Dell, but it's hard to know what that might be.

Here's my guess. The DIO 2448 is able to produce a an SPDIF data-stream with * less jitter * on the Asus mobo, and the DAC is thanking me for it with sweeter sound. All the inprovements I can hear have been attributed to jitter-reduction in a PCM / SPDIF feed, particularly in regard to stereo imaging.

It would be rather difficult (to say the least) for me to ABX what I'm claiming, but given the improvement is real, I can think of no other explanation for it.

ciao,
R.

You have put for a statement concerning subjective sound quality, but you have not provided any objective support. Please see TOS #8 before making further such statements.


If you don't want to ABX, think of some other way to offer objective support.

It is possible that the new machine gives the card a better power supply; however I would first suspect other factors, such as the hopefully reduced noise of the new computer. BTW that's an old DAC you've got. You may find you benefit from replacing it and the sound card with an EMU 0404

Hi - it's the same PSU as the Dell (Nexus, well regarded) but yes, possibly the mobo's regulation is better.

And yes, it's an old DAC but so what? Quality is quality, and I think the science was pretty well understood by the mid 90's when it was designed and made.

Besides, it's *multi-bit*, and I prefer the sound. I'm of the opinion that 'bit-stream' was nothing more than a way of reducing manufacturing costs.

I've just finished listeining to Stereolabs's 'Dots And Loops', those female vox hanging in space just send me.

ciao
R.

Strewth. I'd hoped I could just make an observation without being jumped on perfunctiorily.

Tell you what, shall I get an affadavit signed by those who have listened to my rig and agreed they hear what I hear?

I'm not selling anything, trolling, spamming, whatever.

As an aside, jitter is possibly becoming less of an issue as newer serial buses supercede SPDIF, but many are still connecting PC's into outboard DACS and surround-receivers, so I thought this might of interest to them.

R.

edit; typo's

Just a thought. That DAC was good for its time and price.

I think that youn are probably joking here, but even if you weren't this would not constitute proof on this forum. Nine out of ten audiophiles believe that replacing the power cables on there amps will give them better sound. Whether these nine hypothetical audiophiles sign an affadavit or not, 99 out of 100 HAers will still think they are idiots, I don't mean any offence to you here, your situation is a fair bit more plausible .

thanks, I appreciate at least being given a hearing.

But really, the thing that I'm revelling in is the imaging (part of some overall magic wrought - TOS violation?).

It's not a subtle change - it's still startling and I find I'm looking up from reading as a voice suddenly appears from nowhere while a recording I've heard many times is playing.

ciao,
R.

The placebo effect can be a powerful thing. I myself have fallen victim to it before. Before I joined HA.org I heard about Musepack and Vorbis and used both from time to time, Musepack at --insane and Vorbis at -q 8. At the time I was sure that Musepack sounded much better than Vorbis. In fact for a while I was thinking that the Musepack files on my computer were the best sounding audio in the world, I was sure that the sound was more detailed and had greater presence than anything else out there. This came to a crashing halt one day when I scoffed at the sound my friends stereo was putting out I said something like "Hey Dan your songs sound like shit you should use Musepack instead of mp3!" it turned out, at that moment that he had a CD on. Henceforth I came down from the clouds a bit and realized that, despite the fact I was thinking of myself as a hardcore audiophile, the Musepack files on my computer were of worse quality then CDs and CDs were so common, everyone used them . After that I joined HA.org and the rest is history. Now I know that I can't even here the difference between Vorbis -q 8 and the original WAV, but back then I would have told you that there was a huge difference between Musepack --insane and Vorbis and that the difference was obvious . This may not be what is happening to you but I hope that it helps you understand why you need definitive proof and why we can't even take your word for it if you say that the difference is "startling".

Apologies for the very non-objective stuff which follows. I'm afraid I cannot back it up with ABX tests....

I came to the conclusion a long time ago that the thing which has the most profound effect on what we hear when listening to audio systems is the state of the listener. (I'm not talking about whether you're drunk!).

All manner of non-aural factors can genuinely affect what the listener hears inside his/her head. For example, my CD player is an exquisite piece of furniture (both visually and when handling it), and that makes me feel good about it. I know that the signal it puts out is pretty much the same as any other decent CD player, but the fact is that it sounds better to me even though the soundfield generated is little or no different. Call it placebo or self-delusion if you like, but the fact remains that the enjoyment one gets from listening to music is not solely determined by the actual airborne vibrations.

Here's another example. Several years ago I was listening to an LP in the dark (Carla Bley "Live", if that's important), and at some point the band appeared in my living room. By that I mean to say that the aural experience I was perceiving sounded exactly as if real musicians were there. The soundfield was holographic; I felt as if I could walk over and touch the trombone player. I have never experienced anything like it before or since. There is no way that the system happened to perform an order of magnitude better on just that one day, so it must have been down to my personal mood/receptiveness/whatever.

Maybe RockFan is currently experiencing some sort of inner satisfaction with his new PC that makes him generally happier about things, resulting in a more receptive mode of listening.

<reality mode>
And there's always those quieter case fans to factor into the equation, of course.
</reality mode>

I can believe that. A while ago I built a new headphone amp on the bench, listened for an hour and congratulated myself on how great it sounded. Only after getting over that warm fuzzy feeling did I realize something was wrong. I plugged it into the scope and realised it was putting out a very distorted wave - about 1% third harmonic distortion one one channel. That "new stuff" feeling can hide some horrible shortcomings.

That's the one. The limit on SNR and dynamic range in most domestic settings is ambient noise. Considering quieter fans can drop the noise floor 10dB (or even more) it's likely to make a huge difference.

A couple of good points in thge last 2 posts.

I agree with cliveb about the state-of-being of the listener - occasionally I can't have music playing - it's just irritating and distracting noise, other times Rage Against The Machine can send me to sleep. But to an extent that goes without saying - it's another aspect of the subjectiveness of the experience. (But can you prove it?).

One thing that is certain is that the new setup works with all Foobar output options (except for a glitch between tracks using ASIO), the Dell would only reproduce high-frequency test tones (>8KHz) cleanly using kernel-streaming. All the others would have clicks and pops which were presumably the result of dropouts.

So as as I said, something is allowing the DIO 2448 to work better on the Asus.

And it plays music better. Much better. No Placebo - period.

On a general note, there's a philosophical nub to all this to'ing and fro'ing - it seems to me that a great deal is accepted as 'received wisdom' or defacto, with no proof, (least of all in the form of a positive ABX result), even here at HA. Much as get from reading the discussions here, it get's a little tiresome seeing the "you have no proof" catchall used to arbitrarily dismiss as simple a statement, or statemants, as I made in my original post.

If a professional violinist says that his Stradivarius sounds better than any of his dozens of violins (which many will, I'm sure), are you going to ask him to ABX them?

ciao,
R.

I would ask at once. It would be difficult to design a proper blind test; a machine must (a human plays differently) play again and again the two violins, always in the same way...
It would be satisfying to see many of them can't ABX their Stradivarius.

But how the hell could RockFan ABX his claim ? He can't have the same soundcard connected to the different motherboards at the same time, thus it's not possible.
As for the friends: If they didn't knew that you've changed anything and they claimed sound is better without any clue that it should be better: Then it's a valid proof, but probably this wasn't the case.

Possibly the difference is really there. If I was you, RockFan, I'd check if the new SPIDF output is bit-truely; if the old one also was, I could be sure it's a placebo.
But I can think of hardware or software which is systematically distroying bit-output --say, causing audible distortions...

I'd call internal noise. I went external, as even the standby Santa Cruz sounded horrible, and I cal still here blitt noise quite clearly if the music isn't loud.

Some mobos and video cards, in conjuction with power supplies, can cause a lot of interference that gets into the signal going to the speakers. As far as I know, there's no real way to tell what components will or will not have these issues. I think my next card will be USB/FW, nicely shieled itself, and half-way across the room . Sometimes it can be heard through some older cards (with little amps on them, usually, like old sound blasters) from across the house, even.

It could also be, through some strange thing, transferring over the coax more accurately. Clock jitter shouldn't do it, but who knows what else? I've had stranger problems fixed by nothing but newer hardware .

While you need to watch out for TOS 8 (really, why not make that one TOS 1 just due to popularity? ), what you experienced probably is real, without ABXing (and no BAXing to be done, else it would be interesting to see results, even if it could only be single-blind).

oops, dp.

Sounds like you didn't realize the whole issue. The signal is always in digital form; every analog equipment including the DAC wasn't changed. Having a digital stream, small interferences are irrelevant.

Something to think on;

I've 'serviced' many a hifi for 'technophobic' friends and relatives over the years.

This might involve cleaning all the interconnects, cleaning the CD-lens, cleaning the CD-clamp (to make sure discs run flat), servicing cassette-transports, LP-players, possibly replacing a 'shoe-lace' type interconnects with cheap OFC ones, blutaking speakers to their stands, etc.

Each and every tweak might make an incremental improvement to the system, but one too small to be ABX'ed.

But cumulatively, the before-and-after comaprison can (and has been) dramatic.

How on Earth could this be be proven with an blind test? It can't of course.

So, since I can't prove there was an improvment, should I therefore not have bothered?

R.

Lol, I don't think he would use dozens of violins, and if he did, he wouldn't let any of them near a "machine" let alone his Stradivarius!

I just like the idea of such a blind test. Blinds tests are unknown, at least not very common among professional classical artists. Thus it is very likely they're suffering from a huge placebo amount.
It doesn't need to be a machine; maybe a friend and good violin player of the artist plays the two violins, a Stradivarius and the next best, many times, while toggling between them. Artist is wearing a blindfold and must decide.
If he refuses to face this test, I am allowed to call him arrogant, cowardly and ignorant.

What absolutely gobsmacking hubris!

R.

Since you can't, you shouldn't have.

If you can think of one or two examples of such "received wisdom," please tell us right away. If the wisdom is valid, we'll tell you right away. If it isn't, we all will have the chance to learn something new.

If you can't think of one or two examples, let alone "a great deal," I don't know what to say.

For heaven's sake, I think he will find you ignorant. Violins are hugely different. You can't talk about the "next best" either. There isn't an ideal that violin makers try to attain. Many of the great violinists have preferred to use Stradivariuses; others Guarneris, in addition to others that they also use. They know very well the sound they are and want to produce. Violins also feel very different to play.

I don't understand your comment, it's even not in the dictionary. If you direct to a non-native English speaker like me, please bother to use primitive English.
Anyway, many people in the classical and jazz scope tend to believe their music is the only real one. My answer is mentioned above.

Do you want to say a blind test is irrelevant, since the differences in sound between the violins are so large ? Then it's only a matter of taste, of course.

Isn't placebo effect due to prior expectations one has that A will sound better or worse than B? It's just that I doubt RF seriously had some prior expectation of higher sound quality just by replacing the MB. I mean, I would never expect to hear a difference if I were to replace my MB. How many people would? Are there MBs marketed toward audiophiles?

Also, I agree that ABX testing is important, but I've seen before on this board people say they didn't bother to ABX because the difference is so obvious, and them not get called out like this. And how could this be ABX'ed anyway, without asking RF to buy an entire duplicate system in addition to the new MB?

If you're referring to my post, where I suggested the possibility of RF's being in a more receptive frame of mind, I wasn't suggesting a genuine placebo (in the sense that he was expecting it). Rather, I was trying to point out that if you're feeling some kind of "inner calm", then this changes the way you hear things, and that RF's nice new PC might well have put in to such a mental state.

Re. motherboards aimed at audiophiles: you aren't going to believe this, but someone brought out a mobo with onboard sound that had a valve (tube) output stage about a year or so back! I think it was Asus or Abit. (Or maybe it was an April Fool and I was had :-).

Hi Singaiya - this is exactly so, and I should have emphasized it in the first place.

I simply wanted big, quiet fans, and 1) couldn't afford a new machine 2) am aware of the fact that recent multi-GHz PC's are almost impossible to cool quietly with fans. The improvement in the music was a very pleasant surprise indeed.


ciao,
R.

edit - typos a-go-go

I'm sorry if I presumed upon your English Precisionist, but 'hubris' is in any dictionary, and is in fact a Greek word.

I'm afraid I have to say that I think it was an appropriate one to use, and you should look it up, and next time ponder a little longer before making such exasperating comments as the ones regarding violinists and their instruments.

R.

Rockfan said that your self-assurance would veritably cause smacking of mouths, to paraphrase the whole phrase.

erm, again I think I forgot to allow for the internationalism of the 'net'.

'Gobsmacking' is an English colloquialism that means 'astounding', nothing to do with violence.

R.

Ok, a quick summing up; I have always assumed the HA exists as a resource for people trying to find the best way of playing recorded music without getting bamboozled by the hifi-industry, and where appropriate to expose some of the fallacies of 'high-end' audio, and even professional audio.

Perhaps 'transparency' and 'accuracy' can be quantified objectively, but for me one thing is certain - the kind of accuracy required by say, professional recording engineers or producers to monitor live feeds or mixes is *expensive*, no two ways about it.

Here, we're trying, for example, to choose the right hardware such as PC souncards, and get them to work optimally.

I posted on the subject of the PC I just built, because I hadn't suspected that the previous machine was *not* working optimally (sorry to harp on, but's it's obvious to anyone who's listened before and after).

I had to surmise that one can't assume (as I would have done) that certain things can be taken as 'much of a muchness' - in this case PC motherboards.

It 's all served as a reminder that the best approach to achieving that 'perfect setup' ("if perfection were achievable, it wouldn't be worth having", Japanese saying) is to be as methodical as possible.

If I'd suspected how much better a PC audio setup was capable of sounding without knowing specifcally what could be improved, I could easily have run around wasting a lot of time and money.


R.

PS - I still can't think of a better explanation than reduced jitter from the DIO2448's SPDIF-out, whatever the actual cause of that. RF interfence was suggested earlier, but if you think about it, the reason this would degrade the sound would by inducing jitter, wouldn't it?

Interestingly, the new case (Compucase 6A19) is certified for some standard or other of RF shielding, which is accomplished by using stainless spring-connectors on all the case panel edges. So maybe it isn't the motherboard, but the case (groan).

Oh yes, no April fool - even I (!) was slightly skeptical when I heard about it.

Some people do actually believe music sounds better through a vacuum.

Have to say, I wouldn't mind owning a nice valve-amp, though.

R.

http://www.pcplus.co.uk/reviews/default.as...subsectionid=42

http://www.pons.de/
Click Online-Wörterbuch (=dictionary), then choose "Engl. -> D" (=English to German), enter "hubris" and click "los" (=start)...You'll get a message informing you that nothing has been found. (pons.de is the dictionary I usually use.)

Well, maybe I don't know much about violins and their players; but I don't regret my comment and still call it a good one. It is very hard to convince me in any way...