2. digital
  3. 180276-149317

Things I don‘t know

Digital is very much an emerging transmission form and there are a few questions where I simply don‘t know.

1. In the digital domain it is very easy to shift polarity of recordings and the effects are very audible. Yet few devices offer the capability even in very high end systems. Conversely it seems a standard feature on software for computer based systems. This matters greatly since probably half of all recordings are made out of polarity.

2. In digital accurate clocking is of paramount importance to achieve good leading and trailing edge definition as well as spatial rendition. Yet few Dacs even in high end devices and even fewer streamers or switches offer 10m clock interfaces.

3. Even small RFI/EMI or ground level intrusions are very detrimental to accurate D/A conversion. Yet most Dacs still don‘t provide galvanic isolation on their inputs and often claim to address the issue with error correction in the digital domain. Do designers simply not know better?

4. Recent advances in Class D amplification seem to point the way; yet there seems to be no consensus on optimal sample frequency nor power supply design for these devices.

Finally, while rare exceptions like @atmasphere see their task as clarifying and educating on the issues, the vast majority of designers either don‘t make the effort or just go about shilling their widgets.

While I am sure that this is only the beginning of a list of digital issues worth discussing,the usefulness of Audiogon Fora rests precisely on elaboborating and clarifying on all issues immanent in this new approach to things and in most instances the issues don‘t at all relate to issues discussed purely in the analogue domain.

antigrunge2

Showing 1 response by gs5556

gs5556
1,209 posts
 

You have to look at this from a market point of view. Do the engineers at Toyota not know how to design a vehicle that rides like a Rolls Royce or a performs like a  Ferrari SF90? Whether they do or not is irrelevant because the market cannot bear millions of those cars on the supply side, so we are forced to compromise to a price point to sell to a wider market. Making more Ferraris would put pressure to lower prices to compete, yet the lower prices would preclude production of those cars.

Same applies to audio. Only a few manufacturers can compete to a very select buyer who demand the best. But sometimes, a Schiit Audio comes along and offers digital players for less than three grand that competes with (or even beats) these kilobuck digital players, but the audiophile community judges them by the price tag. "It sounds good for the money" is usually the dismissive review.

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