Recent content by Mark W

You're lucky. DACs that measure surprisingly well are available for as little as $10. For me, my diy dac cost about $2,500 to build. I designed parts of it, and other people with their own specialization designed other parts. People are amazed by the natural textures and tones, and the depth...

Hi quality in terms of SINAD? And, not as bad sounding as many people found the ubiquitous Hyperstream II dacs to be? Surprising how many people still feel a really good implementation of TDA1541A hasn't been bettered. In fact that's what one of the guys, who not too long ago did a lot of design...

There are various systems for figuring out where to place speakers. Most of the require moving the speakers around to find the best spots (which is obviously more complicated when they are to be ceiling or wall mounted). It also depends on what the speaker positioning goal is. Is it to get the...

One of the problems we have when evaluating very nonlinear circuits such as sigma delta dacs is that modulator behavior is not always easily understood from looking at typical FFT measurements. For instance, its possible for a dac to reproduce a periodic-steady-state (PSS) sine wave in a way...

A properly designed dac using galvanically isolated Asynchronous USB is as good as it gets. Bit perfect, extremely low phase noise, etc. To get the same performance with SPDIF is more difficult, it requires FIFO buffering at the dac end. Native DSD is not possible. DoP encoded DSD can work at...

You have not provided enough information about your hearing and the non-dac parts of your system to give you an accurate answer to your question. Regarding your hearing, if you are married it is likely that even in the old days of telephone sound quality earlier in your life, you might have...

Its that we somehow muddle though life getting some things right and other things wrong. We sometimes judge audio gear wrong, cars wrong, people wrong, etc. Other times we do better. In other words its not that we 100% of time fool ourselves with audio, yet are perfectly rational in all other...

Of course they do, and they do so in all aspects of life. There is overwhelming evidence of human dis-rationality and misperception. Yet, we may choose a CD, a car, a mate or anything else using a brain that couldn't function at all without biases and mental heuristics. That's how biological...

Amusing story, but what does it really show? It shows that experiments can be devised to demonstrate that people can be fooled. So, can experiments be devised to show what people can hear when the intent is not to fool them? Of course the answer is, yes. Some food for thought: JBL uses a panel...