Do media players have a sound?

[fas42]

the differences always seem to be heard in sound stage, micro dynamics, air around the instruments, musicality....ie: the same descriptors used to talk about every unmeasurable audiophile phenomenon ever recorded on a discussion board.

(Here we go again ...)

I would propose these phenomena are measurable, it is just that people DON'T go to the lengths necessary to measure them. The standard techniques, I guarantee will NEVER measure them because they are measuring the wrong things, that is, not the things that ARE causing the differences. I just commented on another thread about the AP 2700 audio tester, "the best you can get", that its capabilities out of the box are no better than anything else out there, just a bit more accurate at it. This device could actually do a pretty good job, but you would have have go to quite some lengths to do it, using other people's test methods, or devising some of your own. Just playing with it as it comes would be pretty useless ...

If someone worked at at a bit, using this gizmo I am sure you would get meaningful results. The trick is, whether anyone is going to do it or not ...

Frank

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

(Here we go again ...)

I would propose these phenomena are measurable, it is just that people DON'T go to the lengths necessary to measure them. The standard techniques, I guarantee will NEVER measure them because they are measuring the wrong things, that is, not the things that ARE causing the differences. I just commented on another thread about the AP 2700 audio tester, "the best you can get", that its capabilities out of the box are no better than anything else out there, just a bit more accurate at it. This device could actually do a pretty good job, but you would have have go to quite some lengths to do it, using other people's test methods, or devising some of your own. Just playing with it as it comes would be pretty useless ...

If someone worked at at a bit, using this gizmo I am sure you would get meaningful results. The trick is, whether anyone is going to do it or not ...

Frank

Really, Frank? You think you could measure sound stage, microdynamics, air around instruments and musicality? Really? I think you could measure channel separation, noise floor, transient response, volume before clipping, on and off axis FR, dispersion patterns, distortion levels, treble extension....and these are the things that might...maybe...be responsible for sound stage, microdynamics, air around instruments and musicality. But those fluffy little terms themselves? You'll have to get them consistently defined first. Good luck with that.

Tim

 

[fas42]

distortion levels,

That is what I'm after, I'll measure that; all the rest are pretty irrelevant. The device that has lower levels of that will have more of those fluffy things happening properly. It's as simple as that ...

Frank

 

[Bruce B]

One thing that is really bizarre is that a famous engineer said he could pick out tracks that were mastered on our Pyramix vs. our SADiE and Sonoma systems.

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

That is what I'm after, I'll measure that; all the rest are pretty irrelevant. The device that has lower levels of that will have more of those fluffy things happening properly. It's as simple as that ...

Frank

No, it's not. Unless you have a rather unique and expansive definition of "distortion" you'll be missing a lot.

Tim

 

[Orb]

...... Let's think, for a minute, about a high-res recording downloaded from a site like HDTracks. Just to get from that site to your computer, that file will be broken up into chunks (packets) which will pass through several different types of digital connections, multiple pieces of server and router hardware, each with their own software, then finally through your local area network, high and low level system software and drivers, and thence to your hard drive. And yet, the data in that file is guaranteed to be perfect to essentially infinite certainty (if that weren't true, the entire modern world would collapse pretty much instantaneously).

Not disagreeing with anything said but just expanding upon this.
What is important to note is the difference between send and discard, and ensure correctly (guaranteed) sent transmissions.

This is a critical point as this is dependant upon both the protocol used and application, however downloading data is always guaranteed delivery meaning the network protocols ensure there is no network errors in transmission with additional error correction provided by the application (example FTPm browsing-HTML).
But, audio or media streaming is mostly done without error correction to ensure that overheads do not delay a packet received and to ensure efficiency.
The downside is that there is not usually a retransmit and any error correction has to be handled by the application, this is compounded though by realtime streaming/playing which reduces error correction to large problems and not intermittant small music (packet) loss.

So downloading the hi-rez file to play on the local PC will be done like data and so will have error correction-guaranteed, but streaming the same file from the site to a music-browser-application on the PC usually will not.

Cheers
Orb

 

[fas42]

Unless you have a rather unique and expansive definition of "distortion" you'll be missing a lot.

From Wikipedia: "A distortion is the alteration of the original shape (or other characteristic) of an object, image, sound, waveform".

Good enough for me: next you have to decide at what level it's audible, since there is ALWAYS distortion. Beyond that again, you can rate various forms of distortion in terms of their unpleasantness, simple example: 2nd order a lot more acceptable than 9th, at the same level, etc, etc, etc. The you beaut distortion analysers dump the whole lot in one basket, THD, which tells sweet FA about what it sounds like ...

Hence there has to a huge improvement in the way components are measured, and reported upon ...

Frank

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

From Wikipedia: "A distortion is the alteration of the original shape (or other characteristic) of an object, image, sound, waveform".

Good enough for me: next you have to decide at what level it's audible, since there is ALWAYS distortion. Beyond that again, you can rate various forms of distortion in terms of their unpleasantness, simple example: 2nd order a lot more acceptable than 9th, at the same level, etc, etc, etc. The you beaut distortion analysers dump the whole lot in one basket, THD, which tells sweet FA about what it sounds like ...

Hence there has to a huge improvement in the way components are measured, and reported upon ...

Frank

But not good enough for me. "Sound stage" is a function, first and foremost, of imaging, which is a function of the mix -- panning of instruments, eq, natural and electronic spatial effects, relative volume levels, how they're impacted by the ability of the speakers to slowly ease or suddenly blast the loud out of the relative quiet (noise floor), altered, again, by the dispersion characteristics of the drivers and the boxes (or lack thereof) then altered even more by the room itself. None of that, except for the frequency response variations in the room (which is utterly unaffected by your tweaking methodology) is "distortion."

And that's just sound stage.

Tim

 

[Vincent Kars]

 

[FrantzM]

View attachment 1388

OT


Previous attachment by Vincent should be a sticky to be used by moderators ...

OT

 

[Scott Borduin]

Not disagreeing with anything said but just expanding upon this.
What is important to note is the difference between send and discard, and ensure correctly (guaranteed) sent transmissions.

This is a critical point as this is dependant upon both the protocol used and application, however downloading data is always guaranteed delivery meaning the network protocols ensure there is no network errors in transmission with additional error correction provided by the application (example FTPm browsing-HTML).
But, audio or media streaming is mostly done without error correction to ensure that overheads do not delay a packet received and to ensure efficiency.
The downside is that there is not usually a retransmit and any error correction has to be handled by the application, this is compounded though by realtime streaming/playing which reduces error correction to large problems and not intermittant small music (packet) loss.

So downloading the hi-rez file to play on the local PC will be done like data and so will have error correction-guaranteed, but streaming the same file from the site to a music-browser-application on the PC usually will not.

Cheers
Orb

Just to be clear, we're talking here about streaming music services such as Pandora, Rhapsody, or Last.FM, correct? In my limited understanding, you're right about this, although I think that, in terms of audio quality, the issue with these services is the level of compression (bitrate) rather than data transmission per se.

Inside a PC, failure to accurately transfer data to the soundcard bus would be the conceptual equivalent of failure to accurately transfer data from memory or hard drive, i.e. indicative of catastrophic hardware failure.

 

[FrantzM]

Hi

At the core of all this .. if a sample misses one or a two bits once in a while can we hear that? I understand and share the audiophile obsession with getting everything bit perfect yet I am not sure we are able to reliably perceive such small differences ...

 

[Vincent Kars]

if a sample misses one or a two bits once in a while can we hear that?

We are used to it.
Are we?
Yes, a transport and a separate DAC connected using SPDIF over a wire is using a unidirectional protocol without error correction and as a consequence without a retry.
Brrrrr…..

 

[Orb]

Just to be clear, we're talking here about streaming music services such as Pandora, Rhapsody, or Last.FM, correct? In my limited understanding, you're right about this, although I think that, in terms of audio quality, the issue with these services is the level of compression (bitrate) rather than data transmission per se.

Inside a PC, failure to accurately transfer data to the soundcard bus would be the conceptual equivalent of failure to accurately transfer data from memory or hard drive, i.e. indicative of catastrophic hardware failure.

Those but it also applies to other applications/streaming technologies as well.
And sure like I said I was not disagreeing with you, just expanding that people understand that not all data transmissions are equal; usually differentiate it easily by TCP or UDP; the type of appliction error controls for say streaming is more limited in what it can control-manage.

Compression is a greater concern I agree, but then if you start to suffer QoS rate limiting/dropped packets at a certain threshold it will start to become an audio-video problem.
At the moment I would say it is rarely an issue (unless quirky local wifi use and setup), but it can be and it would impact audio/video streaming more than data orientated applications such as browsing/transferring a file,etc.
Most streaming audio-video related applictions and services would be classified as connectionless netwok (shown in below link).
Inside a PC that is a different type of issue as you say due to not relying on the lower levels of the OSI Layers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osi_layer

Cheers
Orb

 

[Vincent Kars]

Is there any data transmission inside a PC not using error correction?

 

[fas42]

Vincent, beautifully done graphic, but, sorry, I believe my bit is on topic.

The topic is "Do media players have a sound" ...

If they don't have a sound, that is, every player sounds identically to the next, then they themselves produce no distortion, or identical distortion to each other.

If they DO have a sound, that is, one media player sounds different from another, then one player is distorting the signal compared to another, or in a different way, OR the manner in which it is replaying the track is causing electronics along the way to misbehave to some degree, adding to the "sound", also known as distortion ...

Frank

 

[Orb]

Is there any data transmission inside a PC not using error correction?

Nah, as it is technically not transmitting data.
The architecure-definitions of OSI or systems communications do not apply within the operating system or its hardware, such as data from USB stick or hard disk to system memory-OS Service-application.
Keeping it simple, only when it has to access a network and transmit/receive via ethernet or wlan do we see that it is possible for error prone transmissions as mentioned above, this seems to apply even for Airplay (uses multiple sockets for management app-to-server/synch/etc but UDP for streaming unless current online tech docs are wrong).

Apologies for not making that clear with my earlier comment but it can be pretty complex if going into any more detail.
If any questions happy to answer them.

Still hopefully this shows the differences; processing and listening on a local machine, downloading the whole audio file, streaming audio file to be processed by another device (e.g streamed to laptop from a server or stream from laptop to another device such as the Linn Digital Stream Player).

Cheers
Orb

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

Vincent, beautifully done graphic, but, sorry, I believe my bit is on topic.

The topic is "Do media players have a sound" ...

If they don't have a sound, that is, every player sounds identically to the next, then they themselves produce no distortion, or identical distortion to each other.

If they DO have a sound, that is, one media player sounds different from another, then one player is distorting the signal compared to another, or in a different way, OR the manner in which it is replaying the track is causing electronics along the way to misbehave to some degree, adding to the "sound", also known as distortion ...

Frank

And I was just pointing out that Frank was wrong. Which is always on topic....

Tim

 

[fas42]

And I was just pointing out that Frank was wrong. Which is always on topic....

It's good to know in this difficult, difficult world that there are some people who are always right, and some who are always wrong ...

Sorry, OT.

Frank

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

It's good to know in this difficult, difficult world that there are some people who are always right, and some who are always wrong ...

Sorry, OT.

Frank

Oh no, not always right, but always amused. And thread drift is a time-honored internet tradition.

Tim