Sorry for the delay in results, this has proved to be quite a hard nut to crack (and I've not cracked it yet)...
Firstly, the earlier distortion results I posted earlier are NOT representative, what I should have noted is that of course the old volume law and the new are different. This means that for a given SB indicated volume the old and the new volume laws represent a different attenuation. An inherent problem of doing the volume in the digital domain is that you will always worsen the S/N and the THD figures as you lower the gain, since the noise floor is a constant, nominally. Since the gain changes with the old law are finer steps at the top end, it gives rise to lower distortion figures for a given indicated volume. So to that end I re-ran results for Server version 6.1.1 / FW15, 6.2.1 / FW28 and 6.5b1 / FW28. Since few if any of the data points correlate (i.e. for a given SB indicated volume, each Server versions gives different attenuation results, albeit slight for the latter versions) it's hard to compare results, one has to interpolate between values, which isn't ideal. To that end measurement at present is inconclusive. If the issue is as supposed, which the math would seem to support, there should be dynamic range gains with the patched version, but at present I'm struggling to resolve that through measurement. After some hours spent trying, I gave up and settled back for an hour or so in front of the HiFi and did some listening, connecting the SB2 to 6.2.1 and 6.5b1 in turn. The benefit of the patched version is clearly audible to me, as it has been to others, the obvious effect being that the unpatched code has a harsher, sound to the treble end (cymbals being obviously less detailed with a harder sound) along with a loss of ambient, low level information throughout the mix. You can hear this on the decay of cymbals, for example, where the decay of the sound is a longer event on the patched code as if the noise floor is lower. It's also noticeable in the sense of acoustic surrounding a good recording (be it genuinely live artifacts from room ambience, or artificially added echo, at the mixing desk) where the unpatched code sounds 'flat' as if the information below a certain level has been gated out. I'm open to suggestions for a test technique to reveal what I can hear, but at present it's Ears:1, Test Equipment:0 :( Andy. -- Andrew L. Weekes ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Andrew L. Weekes's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=573 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18439 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
