Archimago's Musings: Terms & Conditions, Privacy Policy

Sites need to comply with General Data Protection and Regulation (GPDR) policies if there are visitors from the EU, so for transparency, here are some broad Terms and Conditions as well as Privacy Policy statements for this blog as we enter 2024.

Basically this: I trust we're here to learn, enjoy the hobby, debate sometimes, as generally anonymous participants, acting like decent persons online. The purpose here is not to sell stuff or make money even though I don't mind getting a little "tip" if folks buy stuff for example off Amazon links or if the ads work out for you. I have no interest in soliciting funding from anyone such as with Patreon and the like; my day job pays just fine.

Be mindful that public comments are public so don't say anything private unless you want it known broadly. No doubt in the days ahead there will be all kinds of bots and increasingly sophisticated autonomous agents reviewing the information and scraping the data. Consider how this might have an impact on you and the comments made.

Cookies and IP addresses are sent to browsers routinely so feel free to decline sharing cookies, use "incognito" browser mode, perhaps connect through a VPN if you don't want to be tracked especially on a public network (here's one I use). Google Analytics, AdSense, maybe a widget on the blog might use some of the cookie or IP info.

If you're responding to one of my surveys, blind tests, or contacting me by E-mail, unless you choose to do so, I will not have any need for your private information unless we get to know each other or plan to meet up, etc.

Otherwise, Happy 2024! May your life be free from scammers, spammers, identity hackers, snake-oil salesmen, and general crooks in the coming years! Peace.😌

Merry Christmas & Happy 2024! A year in review, final MQA sales, and have a very Spatial Christmas. 🎅

Hey everyone, I want to post a holiday greeting and retrospective as we end off 2023 and as I wander off for some R&R down south. This has been an interesting year I think in the world of audio. In my journeys through audiophilia, it's the year I'll remember as one of continued evolution in the fidelity of various components and further maturation of technologies available to consumers at very reasonable prices - specifically amplifiers.

2023 also marks the point of crossing 10M hits to this blog according to Google's analytics which is I think a significant numerical milestone. Not bad I think given my pace of sub-weekly posts, dealing primarily with topics that attract a relatively small group of hobbyists. While some of these technically-oriented articles probably are a bit beyond the interest of many audiophiles, I do hope that in time, the "average" hobbyist will see them as presenting some foundational knowledge that we should all know about the technologies we buy, and expressing a worldview that those who assess the audiophile hobby more objectively would tend to focus on.

Let's have a little recap of some articles and ideas shared over the last 12 months...

MUSINGS: On the duplicity of hi-fi audio anti-measurers? The John DeVore example.

The Hall of Measurement Devices.

"When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be." --- Lord Kelvin, Popular Lectures and Addresses vol. 1 (1889) ‘Electrical Units of Measurement’, delivered 3 May 1883

"What is measured, improves." --- Peter Drucker (from The Effective Executive) 

"When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported back, the rate of improvement accelerates." --- Karl Pearson

A longstanding debate over the years in the audiophile pursuit sadly is that of whether measurements are important in audio. Obviously, to me, and I think the vast majority of the world, the answer is "Of course it does!". One does not need to be a scientist of Lord Kelvin's stature or a statistician like Pearson, or a management consultant like Drucker to see the wisdom of such a basic idea which probably is one of the founding principles giving rise to our modern technologically sophisticated world.

Can you think of a single technological pursuit where the use of measurement instruments of some sort isn't beneficial to help gauge the effectiveness, efficiency, or value of a device which has been invented, produced, or manufactured? Is this not doubly important if that devices is supposedly built to a high "standard", reportedly made with quality and care? Typically at a higher cost like the things of "high end" audio?

Well, apparently, there are supposedly respected people in the audiophile world, designers even, who seem to think otherwise about the importance of measurements...

Do bit-perfect digital sources affect a USB DAC's sound quality? [2023 Edition - phone, Raspberry Pi, MiniPC, laptop]

In the image above, we see embedded some pictures of contemporary, expensive (>US$10k) digital audio devices. Each one of these are just streaming or server boxes that can take data over your network or internal storage and pass them along to a DAC with no actual conversion. Typically, these "high end" audiophile products (for example some featured here) are not asked to perform DSP, thus passing the data in a "bit-perfect" fashion. Furthermore, these expensive devices do not include an internal CD/DVD/SACD/BluRay mechanical reader. They're basically computers with hard drives or SSD storage and software to index and manage your music library. You'll typically be connecting them to your favourite external DAC most popularly through USB although proprietary interfaces (eg. Wadax's optical), ethernet, S/PDIF coax/optical, and i2S could be other options.

The other day, a family member was in need of a replacement phone so I gave them my Huawei P30 Pro which I've been using since 2019 and got a Google Pixel 8 Pro. After transferring the apps and data over, I figured I'd try to see if USB Audio Player PRO on the Pixel 8 Pro would work with the very high resolution Sabaj A20d 2022 DAC (ES9038PRO converter) which the Huawei phone previously did not. It worked, reminding me that Android USB hardware and drivers can result in different levels of USB DAC compatibility.

With the phone connected to the DAC, and given that it has been awhile since I've put together a "shootout", let's see if there's any evidence now in the 2020's of potentially audible differences between source devices playing to a very high-resolution USB DAC. Not that I have a $10k streamer lying around here, but a $1000 phone could be different from a sub-$100 Raspberry Pi, right? 😉

[FYI: years ago, I did a test similar to this using various mostly S/PDIF outputs connected to the same ASUS Essence One DAC.]

Let's look at some data.

MUSINGS: Beyond "High Resolution" recordings. Into "Immersive" and "High Reality" content.

The other day, I was reading this interesting article about someone upgrading his computer gaming gear to the latest and greatest, only to find that it ultimately made no meaningful difference for today's games that he's playing. No surprise? (As discussed a couple months back, I upgraded to the nVidia RTX 4090 but not for gaming.)

As tech hobbyists, it's important not just to be aware of what we could buy, but more importantly, what is it that buying the hardware would achieve.

Human sensory systems are not infinite - whether it's the angular resolution of vision, or how many frames per second we need for gaming before it's no longer noticeable (upper limit I've seen maybe 75fps?). So too, there's only so much audio frequency bandwidth or dBs of dynamic range we need to more than saturate our auditory limits.

To me, it's not good enough to just be fed information from the usual magazines or advertisers or reviewers, it's more important to understand what it is that the technology is able to do and by doing so, we understand what we really need, and have a chance to anticipate what we might be looking for ahead instead of being unduly externally influenced.

In this spirit, let's take some time to consider the road ahead. After all these years, where is progress to come from? Let's think about this...

How-To: Resurrecting bad BIOS update with CH341 USB EEPROM Programmer (AMD AM4 motherboard, 1.8V flash example).

Let's do a quickie post this week.

As per the discussions last time, I've been doing some computer upgrades here at home and at one point a few weeks back, I was updating the BIOS on my AM4 MSI X370 SLI Plus motherboard but accidentally disrupted the power in the middle of the flash!

This basically "bricked" the machine because this particular board only has one BIOS bank and there are no facilities to reflash. Since my AMD Ryzen 7 1700 CPU is still a very reasonable 8-core processor that can still be used for many applications these days, I looked for an inexpensive way to fix this BIOS mistake. The solution is the package shown above - a CH341 24 and 25-Series EEPROM Flash Programmer (less than US$15, this item on Amazon Canada).

Why not? 😉 AMD Ryzen 9 5950X Workstation & Ryzen 7 5700X Gaming CPU upgrades. Slowing pace of obsolescence & hardware waste for Windows 11 compatibility?

Although typically I write about audio stuff on these blog pages, not infrequently I'll talk about my computer updates as well. Looking back, this has allowed me to review the journey along the way over the last decade. As we enter into the Christmas season this year, I think this is a good time to be looking at computer parts as prices of things like SSD drives and DRAM in particular seem to be very attractive with DDR4 and DDR5 memory trending down, M.2 SSD likewise appearing to be bottoming over the last 18 months perhaps as the cost of basic necessities (food, housing, gas) have risen and disposable income reduced. I would not be surprised if inflation starts to drop in 2024 while the electronics parts rise in price again.

Who knows exactly what the future brings, but this looks like one of the best time to grab something like a 2TB M.2 SSD or some RAM:

The trend isn't as obvious with CPU prices. However, I upgraded my Workstation computer recently to the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X CPU - 16-cores, 32-threads I found at a decent price. And since it has been ages, I also updated my Gaming PC in the living room for the heck of it to the Ryzen 7 5700X.

MUSINGS: Multichannel mixes are more dynamic than 2-channel, stereo releases. (Going beyond 2-channel stereo legacy.)

Last week, in the Part II review of the Topping PA5II+ amplifier, I talked about a few albums like The Rolling Stones' Hackney Diamonds and the sound quality of the album. For years now, I'm been unhappy with the status quo of ubiquitous Loudness War, dynamic compressed albums. We've even explored using DSP to artificially improve the content for example.

A complaint I have with the Stones album is that the dynamic range of the CD is poor at DR6; and yes, this is an audible limitation. However, if you like this album, I recommend listening to the multichannel/Atmos stream or grabbing the limited edition BluRay import box with 7.1 TrueHD-Atmos mix which is much less compressed, with album dynamics averaging DR12!

[For simplicity, I'll stick with the DR "crest factor" result due to familiarity for many of us. These days we can talk about LUFS, EBU R128, etc. as discussed before as measurements of volume and for normalization. Check out the DR Database for results from many albums.]

In the last few years, I think some of us will have noticed this pattern of much more gentle use of dynamic compression in multichannel content. This is why a few months ago, I suggested that multichannel streaming simply sounds better than standard stereo 2.0 to my ears (this possibility was also suggested back in late 2022 and discussing this Steve Wilson multichannel mix).

Let's have a look at some examples.

Part II: Topping PA5 Mk II Plus (PA5II+) Class D amplifier review. Power, Distortion, the Subjective and on Hi-Res amplification.

I mentioned previously that this is a very unobtrusive amp. With the shipped plastic protector off, notice the low contrast of the lettering with the black front makes it even less obtrusive! This was why I left the plastic protector on to take the photos last time to better show the labels for the switches.

I introduced the Topping PA5 Mk II Plus last time in Part I with some initial measurements. This time let's keep going as we explore the power capabilities of this little audio amplifier, examine playback fidelity, and discuss a bit of the subjective performance.

Unless otherwise specified, these measurements were done with the amplifier connected to standard 4Ω and 8Ω power resistors as load, both channels driven, 20Hz-20kHz bandwidth for distortion measurements, unweighted. The Linear Audio AutoRanger allowed automatic gain/attenuation to keep the signal from getting too "hot". Signal from the AutoRanger is fed to the prototype Cosmos Scaler as a preamp for the E1DA Cosmos ADC operating in mono mode. High resolution signal generator DAC is the SMSL DO100 connected to Intona USB isolator. No special cabling, the 3' female XLR-to-TRS balanced cable was just something decent and generic like this, likewise generic RCA was totally fine. Seriously audiophiles, that's all we need for hi-fi sound quality.

Let's get to it!

Part I: Topping PA5 Mk II Plus (PA5II+) Class D amplifier review. (And RME ADI-2 Remote, "cultural pressure" for subjectivist audiophile reviews to include measurements?)

Over the last few months, I've been exploring the performance of the TI TPA3255 Class D chip amps including the AIYIMA A08 Pro, Fosi Audio TB10D, and AOSHIDA A7. Overall, we've seen very good results from these little amplifiers and I think they represent a level of low-distortion performance at a price point that is very attractive to many hi-fi hobbyists.

Depending on the power supply mated to the amplifier, measurements have been showing low output impedance up to 10kHz typically (<0.2Ω up to 10kHz), something like 80+W into 4Ω with less than 0.1% THD+N, and a -80dB Triple-Tone TD+N result at 1W into 4Ω which is excellent considering the prices of these little amps typically at less than US$150 depending on the features you want like Bluetooth input, VU meter, etc.!

Given the track record of these TI devices so far, this time, let's look at another chip amp which is based on an undisclosed part, not the TPA3255, although I can confirm it is a TI TPA chip. In my discussions with John Yang at Topping, the intent is to allow audiophiles to judge the product based on sound quality merits rather than focus too much on exactly which Class D part was used since the design around the chip is very important. Fair enough, and that's exactly what we aim to do here anyways since even with the previous TPA3255 amps reviewed, there were objective differences to find even if subjectively, differences might not be as noticeable.

I bought this Topping PA5 Mk II Plus (which I'll abbreviate as PA5II+ for simplicity) myself from Amazon, currently around US$325 with the intent to use in my own system. Since I'm interested in "high-fidelity" (not merely "euphonia"), I was interested to see how well this would compete with the DIY Hypex nCore NC252MP we measured a few years back. I like the feature set that it offers. On paper, it should provide the power I need and if the hi-fidelity performance is excellent, it could certainly be a listening "reference" here even though to be honest, I still love the Hypex's capabilities and would have no issue with enjoying the music from the inexpensive TPA3255 devices either.

A Psychoacoustic Rationale for the Subjective Evaluation of Stereophonic Sound Systems by Reviewers and Audiophiles (Ralph Glasgal)

With the discussion of ambiophonics ("ambio") and crosstalk cancellation (XTC) last time, I came across a number of fascinating writings from Ralph Glasgal in the Ambiophonics Facebook group. The one below is one of them I think worth considering that I had not seen before, explicitly written as copyright-free. I've made some mild formatting edits and wording substitutions/additions for clarity as well as emphasis in areas I felt of importance. I trust this mildly edited version retains the full meaning and intent of the original found at the group above. A copy of this has been sent to Mr. Glasgal but I'm not sure if he's reviewing his E-mails or active in audio discussions these days in his 90s.

A Psychoacoustic Rationale for the Subjective Evaluation of Stereophonic Sound Systems by Reviewers and Audiophiles

By Ralph Glasgal, BEP, MSEE, AES, IEEE

glasgal@ambiophonics.org

(original text posted on Facebook - October 15, 2015)

The oft repeated assertion that high end components of stereo systems can only be truly evaluated by listening rather than by measurement or blind A/B testing by listening panels has been argued for decades now. The following text will, I believe, provide a psychoacoustic explanation of why this position is largely correct and not a question of practicing voodoo audio.

Very few audiophiles will want to read what follows since it is rather long, too technical, and not what they are used to reading in Stereophile or The Absolute Sound. But this article is for the record, for discussion forums, and to have it available for future debates. Anybody is free to use or forward this text. It is not copyrighted. Supporting technical references by a variety of authors are available at ambiophonics.org (mirrored).

Stereo Crosstalk Cancellation (XTC): A review by STC. And trying out uBACCH, ambeo.one, and AmbiophonicDSP VST plus Foobar foo_dsp_ambio plugins.

Hey everyone, it has been very busy as expected through September here at the Archimago household. As a result, I haven't been able to spend as much time on the audio hardware hobby (still very much enjoying the music of course!).

Over the years, you might have come across the term "crosstalk cancellation" (XTC) for speaker playback, words like "ambiophonics" or acronyms like "BACCH" may have passed by in your readings (for example great discussion on Reddit). For this blog post, let me ask an outspoken advocate of XTC to join for some guest content to discuss the reasons and techniques, and later on, we'll talk about a few DSPs one could try at home to experiment...

Take it away STC for Part I, I'll be back with STC for Part II, then I'll talk about trying some of the DSP options in Part III:

Part I: An introduction to XTC (by STC)

Crosstalk cancellation is an attempt to deliver stereo sound as it was meant to be played without the interaural crosstalk errors with loudspeakers (see Keele, 1986 for a technical exposition). Many listeners may not realize how much realism their high-end stereo hi-fi system is lacking until they hear a system with crosstalk-cancelled (or XTC for short) playback. It is like comparing a photo of a window with a view to an actual window looking out at the scenery. Or like watching Avatar in 2D versus 3D.

RIP MQA codec? (Yeah. On Lenbrook Group's acquisition of bankrupt MQA Ltd., and SCL6.)

Hey folks, it looks like the saga around MQA never ends, but I think they're just scraping the bottom of the barrel with one last crank of the hype machine with hopes that this is somehow face-saving as well. :-|

So as of yesterday (September 19, 2023) it appears that Canadian brand Lenbrook Group of Companies - NAD, PSB, Bluesound - has acquired the intellectual property for MQA. Let's talk about this.

As We Hear It: On requesting artists/albums to streaming services. (Plus adding more RAM and larger SSD to the computer workstation.)

Hey everyone, life's been very busy so not much time to think or work on audio stuff.

A few weeks back in my discussion of Qobuz in Canada, I said: "I'm curious, has anyone out there contacted their streaming service to request the addition of an artist or album? Were you able to get your requests included?"

Well, I received a number of responses, mostly from folks who were happy that Qobuz or TIDAL were able to oblige with putting their requests up. Here's a very well written one that I thought would be good to share with everyone... It brings up important points especially these days as we transition into more music lovers depending on the services to supply our music. Many, including myself these days are collecting more playlists than actual physical albums or spending the time to download anymore.

MUSINGS: nVidia's GeForce RTX 4090. Power Limited Overclock settings. On technological progress into cognitive domains.

For this post, I thought I'd explore technological progress in the computing space. While I speak mainly about audio topics in these pages, I hope this post gives you an idea of the broader technological progress happening around us.

As per the image above, I've updated my workstation graphics card to a Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4090 Gaming OC. This card is truly a beast, covering 3.5 slots in the computer thanks to the extra vapor cooling chamber. [Related to this card is the slimmer Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4090 WindForce V2 that "just" takes up 3 slots.]

Years ago in 2017, I spoke about my GTX 1080 used in the game machine of that time. Since then, it's obvious that technology has moved forward very substantially! Every couple years has seen a new generation of graphics cards churned out by nVidia typically with AMD following suit and these days Intel making headway with their more budget-friendly ARC line.

With each iteration, we're seeing objective improvements in computational ability and physical characteristics like the shrinkage of the transistor "process" from 16nm for the GTX 1080 down to the 5nm (near limits of silicon) in the RTX 4090 today. With the ability to fit more transistors into a smaller area (higher density), the number of parallel computational cores has increased from 2560 shading cores (also known as CUDA cores) in the GTX 1080 to 16384 units in the RTX 4090, a 6.4x increase in this one metric alone; not to mention the addition of new features like the Tensor cores (high speed, mixed precision, high-dimensional matrix multiplications) released in the RTX 20*0 generation, important in deep-learning tasks.