adamdea;578505 Wrote: 
> . -If you look at John Atkinson's measurements of a sine wave in dac
> reviews, a good unit will make a sinewave that looks like (er) a
> sinewave in 24 bits. But in 16 bits even the best players can only make
> a squiggly thing half way between a squarewave and a sine wave. This is
> clear in the touch review but even clearer in the Transporter review.
> The cause of this as I understand it is the limited range of sample
> values in the 16 bit file.  
> 
> An analog system it seems to me may still make a very finely textured
> range of sounds above a noisy background. I think it is very confusing
> and probably inaccurate to measure the noise floor of an analog system
> relative to max, convert that into bits and then treat that figure as
> being the equivalent bit depth of the analog system for all purposes.
> (I think that this is because in the analog system the smallest value
> which can be given is not also the smallest incremental value-ie
> dynamic range does not equal precision. I do hope this is correct]

I missed this post.
The stepped Sine wave is meaningless and does not translate into
anything audible - this is part of the over-arching mega-myth of
digital, which we've now discussed at some length in this thread.

Information theory. Whoever first drew that wretched jagged sine wave
diagram and used it to to try and explain the quantization effect of
sampling was an idiot and continues to cause threads like this to
exist!.

A -90dB sine wave is just "not there" in normal music. I'd like to hear
JA's justification of why he thinks this is meaningful?



And, no, it's not meaningless to look at the SNR of any system, digital
or analogue. Ultimately this does determine the effective resolution -
ie what you can actually hear.


-- 
Phil Leigh

You want to see the signal path BEFORE it gets onto a CD/vinyl...it
ain't what you'd call minimal...
Touch(wired/XP) - TACT 2.2X (Linear PSU) + Good Vibrations S/W - MF
Triplethreat(Audiocom full mods) - Linn 5103 - Aktiv 5.1 system (6x
LK140's, ESPEK/TRIKAN/KATAN/SEIZMIK 10.5), Pekin Tuner, Townsend
Supertweeters, Blue Jeans Digital,Kimber Speaker & Chord Interconnect
cables
Kitchen Boom, Outdoors: SB Radio, Harmony One remote for everything.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=82050

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