Musician Draco R2R DAC

Right, my high frequency hearing doesn't even hit 20kHz at this point (more like 17~18 in the one ear and definitely 17 in the other) but I'm more than happy to accept that needlessly high levels of ultrasonic and infrasonic content is gonna mess with a person's hearing/perception somehow based on evidence and anecdotal experience.

Quick query, why 37Hz and 8.2kHz specifically for the stimulus tones? Also, wait, you're inputting a steady 500Hz into the DAC and its ringing behaviour changes on the fly? That's... curious.

Never thought about using amp and transducer to serve as a hard LPF to dampen DAC noise up high, makes me wonder about how much discrepancy between DAC impressions is attributable to that. Cool. Also makes me wonder what the folks who developed this DAC used to test stuff with.

 

HAHA I knew 37Hz was strangely familiar for some reason! And yep, seconding ~8kHz and above as being a pain point, though lots of folk seem to have more sensitivities lower down circa 5~6kHz. But that's too much data for most to bother actually reading I think

Aye, DC offset makes for an alarming change in recording perception which is why even rudimentary recording software like Audacity automatically compensates therefore automatically when making gain up. Think I mentioned I was spending some time learning more about the other end of the recorded music "hobby", and it's just all sorts of wild seeing how problems with things like absolute polarity are even more annoyingly salient when working with dry recordings, especially for complex things like voice (not that anything recorded in real space isn't by defaults all sorts of amazingly complicated in waveform, but voice is what I'm most familiar with). That said, yeah balanced out seems to be none too bad in terms of absolutes.

This really does remind me of someone on here (memory fails me) who opined that NOS actually sounded more fatiguing to them than OS, which they surmised was on account of the very higher frequencies being left unfiltered. My only experience so far with OS/NOS has been the MMB2 so I'm bowing out of opining too strongly there other than to say NOS actually is less fatiguing to me on that DAC on account of the more sedate treble presentation and less aggressive attack throughout the frequency range.

 

Holo's products (May, Spring, Cyan 2) have an analog filter before the SE & balanced outputs (although I don't know its design), so NOS does not = unfiltered necessarily. Apparently, the Draco has none based on @purr1n measurements...

 

My ESL and word salad is likely showing again, whoops. Just to reiterate I was sharing someone else's surmisings about why NOS appeared to be more fatiguing to them in the long term (whereas I actually find OS on the MMB2 to be more aggressive wholesale, never mind that it does better suit my preferences). Still trying to look for that conversation, it was somewhere on here and the person shared a very pixellated looking YouTube video featuring a piece from a video game soundtrack featuring a woodwind (IIRC) instrument that they found well exhibited that fatigue.

EDIT: Found it, Pillars of Eternity OST thing shared by @/RedFuneral:

https://www.superbestaudiofriends.o...-piety-magni-pi-etc.12827/page-18#post-424871

 

For fun I just now streamed this track (Roon via Qobuz, 44.1/16) through my Cyan 2 at 1x NOS (> Freya +, SE in passive > Freya + in SS mode > Focal Utopia). Despite having this DAC for a week I have not actually bothered to feed it 1x content as I have not like NOS "mush" in the past. I then listened to the track upsampled in Roon to 16x (352.8, linear phase filter). Can't say it made much of a difference. That woodwind sounds very close miced either way - like it is (or about to) overload the mic. In fact, everything on this track sounds harsh (despite it being a slow, laid back vibe). I am willing to blame the recording

edit: Using Roon to resample this 44.1/16 track to DSD x256 helps a bit, but then Roon's DSD conversion always seems to take an "edge" off just a tad... After the track ended Isabelle's Faust w/ the Freiburger Barorchester playing Mendelssohn's 5th came on - now that's music

{crenca's being a snob again}

 

I was just chatting with @ChaChaRealSmooth about how it was weird that I couldn't find any comprehensive comparative measurement suites of the MMB2 in both OS and NOS mode (the AP report on Schiit's page only features one set of measurements, presumably OS, unless my reading comprehension is pooping itself again). Yeesh, if this is supposed to be a more subtle NOS sound than typical I'm afraid to try a proper NOS DAC out! The NOS mode on this is already enough to sway my preferences on things a fair bit (I like OS more-- yes perhaps it's less microdynamically nuanced with less plankton but it suits me better, haha).

Honestly it wasn't a bother to me either, but evidently the NOS mode I have access to isn't a "true" NOS implementation so I'm going to qualify my impressions as being less pertinent here. Rather curious what might have been causing the fatigue on RF's end.

 

Are you asking, or do you already know the answer?

This is the normal behavior of sample and hold converters. They realize what we call a "nearest interpolation", which exhibits this behavior: every tone gets replicated on either side of each multiple of the sampling frequency, unless attenuated by a filter (which always occurs, either intentionally via the use of a band-limiting filter, or simply because no practical system has infinite bandwidth).
If your sampling frequency is 48kHz and your input signal is 1kHz, you will get replicas at 48-1 (47kHz), 48+1 (49kHz), 96-1 (95kHz), 96+1 (97khz), ...
There is some attenuation, as dictated by the sinc envelope (= Fourier transform of a rectangular pulse, which is what sample and hold realizes in the temporal domain). For this example, the first 2 replicas are expected to be ~32dB down from the source tone and then it goes down from there at a much slower rate, just like this plot shows:

 

Hello! For added context I find NOS less fatiguing 99% of the time. The fatigue was in a specific system(pretty sure DAC, amp, and headphones are all 'hot' in same frequency.)

 

You have my sincere apologies, I actually did reread that bit but forgot to amend my statement here. Got sidetracked! Makes perfect sense