SBAF DAC Talk II

I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that when the loudness ramped up in the later 90s, I did think it sounded better, but only because my audio hardware was truly awful at the time. My opinion on that has changed since getting better DACs, but I can’t deny how I felt before I got sucked into this hobby.

 

Shouldn't volume inadequacies of certain tracks/instruments be handled by the mixing engineer or sound engineer?

 

Yes, and he knows that. He talking about the rigid "no compression ever" crowd

 

The only guys that need to worry are the guys that wear nutter pants and are worried about being too masculine.

 

I feel you. I mean, obviously if good sound is out there, I'm going to be going for that option or whatever. However, sometimes the music I want to listen to I literally can't find a good version. Hell sometimes its a shitty quality recording/master AND its 128kbps MP3. Is it ideal? No, but I'd sure as shit rather listen to that than a perfect recording of blue whale mating noises (unless narrated by David Attenborough...in which case sure because he soothes my angry audiophile soul.)

 

Yeah Purrin is correct, I was referring more to the proper "weight" that Priidik has talked about that some DS DACs lacking such as AK4490 based ones and some Cirrus ones (codec chip interfaces that strive for neutrality, old Lynx Aurora, Lynx Hilo somewhat but not really) than a "hollow midrange" like what can be easily experienced through certain transducer. Hollow mids are certainly a thing though but I haven't really experienced through any decent converter. The "weightlessness" is typical artificially decreased bass punch for perceived increase clarity as no bloom or bleed is possible from the upper bass and lower mids into the 200-500 hz region to create mud. Even fatter / warmer AK4490 DACs like Bifrost 4490 and Grace M9XX / M900 have this artificial clarity.

 

You need a bunch of clipped samples in a row to hear digital clipping like poor gain staging or limiting leading to massive clipping like the intro to Somberlain, Californication, Death Magnetic, and Dance of Death. A few red bars here and there in Audacity will not be audible. That's why the red lights on gear need a few clipped samples in a row to go off. On older gear from the 80s and 90s they didn't work too well and it was incredibly easy to get massive clipping upon conversion from what I've heard, seen, and tried myself.

Apple's "Mastered for iTunes" is a f'ing joke. You just limit it to the point where Apple stops bitching so Apple can't take the blame for clipping it to hell with their lossy codec. The actual clipped samples, not the "intersample overs" are still there. You can't get rid of it but it won't come up red to Apple, labels, and pressing plants. Now even ADCs have "clipping masking" buttons and stuff where you can convert it, clip it (some guys actually want clipping on some stuff for more perceived bite and loudness. this is a common pop mastering technique to make the perception of it even louder) and it will then lower it so it won't appear red.

Yep. Many of these "loudness war" master have the same dynamics as past pop: none. Looking at the waveform or dr meter tells you nothing about how it actually sounds. All the forum dwelling cretins buy into that. Often the more compressed remaster is better done and only kills dumb depth effects, tries to turn down the harsh cymbals 3x as loud as every thing else, has a nicer balance of instrumental levels, and better eq.

Yeah so many recordings going back to the late 60s have obvious solid state clipping that any attempt to complain about digital clipping is dumb as hell. Some of this stuff is so bad that it's obvious on beat up old cassettes.

 

Triple post but no. Stop drinking the Steve Hoffman forum loser Kool-Aid. You're just deaf and don't pay attention and have never heard those 80s CDs on a non-mush system. Most of them have no bass, no punch, and tons of upper mid and treble distortion that prevents them from being actually being played loud on any fairly high-fidelity system. Let's not even get into that most early CDs were printed almost unmastered from tapes many generations removed from the original mixdowns so different regional pressings have totally different sounds similar to vinyl but way worse as digital gear was in its infancy. Those esteemed mastering engineers had no idea what the hell to do with the new technology and the very limited gear available. The conversion sucked. Go back to paying 50 bucks to jerk off over original 1984 Led Zeppelin CDs that sound like shit as they were pressed from compact cassette dubs.

 

Psalm’s reference, non-poo CD from the 80s is therefore....?

 

@Psalmanazar, Edit rather than try the ways of psal i am going to waste my time arguing now.

 

Complete rubbish! But, you keep believing all that if you want to.

 

Describe what compressors are you even talking about, Physical (analog), digital, analog vst?! Models?

Some uncompressed sounding music is great, even though you might have less bass.

Some compressed sounding music sound great too , big f'ing surprise everybody.

 

Yeah, some of the 80’s 90’s pop/rock sound extremly bad, overly bright. So does a lot of death metal. Sounds like utter low-fi garbage. Not matter what compressor you use.


Using a $$$$$$ compressor on a shitty rock band track isn't going to fix the core issue. That it sucks balls.

 

Muse - Map of the Problematique

I know this song has a lot of intersample overs
From what I've seen on Reddit, odac is susceptible

http://www.6moons.com/audioreviews2/henry/1.html
"ESS don't make their products available through typical electronic parts distributors. Getting them in low volumes was a big hassle. But what made me choose another chip was the discovery of an internal math bug in the ES9022/9023. A >-1.3dB full-scale square wave played through their chip will generate great amounts of distortion. With modern compressed music, that isn't just a theoretical occurrence. I worked many years with signal conditioning and was able to see what goes on. In technical terms, the internal FIR filter does a 2's complement overflow where a very positive number actually flips around and becomes a very negative number. This occurs before the sigma-delta modulator. A digital limiter or lower gain in the FIR would solve this."

From their testing they found different DACs were susceptible on different levels. It's more a shitty thing the record industry does probably by accident.
If you've got that script on Mac, then all the power to you, you can lower the digital gain by about 3db on that song or whatever.
I don't know if any tool can tell you how often or where they occur in a song, just if it happens.

Realistically I wouldn't tip toe around music in the odd chance it happens. If you hear it in a song then just drop the gain on that song.

Also the Dr meter stuff is usually a pretty poor indicator of the actual quality of the song. You can have some ween crap which just has soft quiet violins and some loud Japanese sounding thing and the album has massive Dr, except all the samples sound compressed af with some really crap eq and compressor useage which makes vocals sound like they have had Botox with just upper harmonics and none of the fundamentals.
Then they'll use that as proof that stax resolves texture better than dynamics.

It really doesn't say much about how natural the samples sound, how the sound engineer tried to recreate a sound stage and loads of other qualities of the recording. I find with really old digital that it sounds like the samples are rolled off at both ends.

In some cases I find that modern artists using a synthesiser hooked up to analogue mixing gear like jan blomqvist a lot more tasteful, even if the Dr is supposedly lower.

 

Sounds like this is a particular problem with sabre dacs, which benchmark uses. For once that some brand does something more than just applying the manufacturer's vanilla implementation, that's actually a good thing.

 

Bro, just stop. You don't have to go full neckbeard.

Not everything from the 80s sounds stereotypical. I played my first CD pressing of Abbey Road that was pressed in Japan at around 83/84. Still my favorite digital version of the album. Even played it at some of the audio clubs around the state, all prefer this disc over the HDTracks version.

Even the early Aja pressing from MCA did used a good tape and had none of those problems above. The biggest offender was Columbia on their US presses once they opened DADC in IN.