Filburt

My point is that the standard crop of measurements don't seem to really get entirely at what makes one thing sound different from another nor provide a holistic account for high performance. I'm not talking out of my ass; I measure everything I work on so it's not like I have zero practical experience with this. My point in reference to 0.001% THD+N was simply that significantly above that almost certainly shouldn't be regarded as high performance, irrespective of whether one believes it's below the threshold of audibility. Aside from that, I kind of feel like I'm being perceived in this conversation as ignorant and that you're here to lecture rather than have a real discussion. I'm not new to test and measurement and audio engineering, am familiar with psychoacoustics, and know empirical methodology. I was trying to give you some helpful suggestions based on my experience trying to quantify sound quality. It is true that non-linearities typically show up in more than one measurement but they aren't generally single-source, which introduces confounds when testing for one thing or another, and this problem is aggrivated further by some types being transient and input-dependent. So, I've found that the standard battery doesn't appear holistic relative to perceived sound quality, even amongst devices which are allegedly below the audible threshold of distortion per standard tests.

You should probably also be explicit about that being relative to price and class. With modern devices, even 0.001% THD+N isn't exactly superlative performance considering the spec on a Sabre32 is an order of magnitude better. I get better than 0.001% on my Assemblage 2.6 and it's over 10 years old. The other thing is, there is more to sound quality than THD1K, CCIF, and SMPTE. I've at least found that in my own design work. Even sweeps don't really tell the whole story, although doing a frequency sweep followed by several amplitude sweeps can be helpful. If you're really serious about this stuff, you should start working on tweaking designs or doing a few of your own, measuring them, tweaking them, etc. Depending on your level of ear training and experience you may find that the generalizations about audibility made in your reviews may be too broad.

"Used within its limitations"? "Many realize"? Maybe this is a "know your audience" problem more than anything else. Plenty of people realize that quality doesn't scale with price and that there is some seriously underperforming expensive gear out there. I think the review would be more helpful to be very upfront and frank about the relative performance and acknowledge its limitations more. I'm not sure what you take to be conveyed by this review, but to me it gives the impression that, if I were to take it at face value, this is a rather high performance device in a broad sense. The measurements don't back up such a claim, though, and knowing those parts and what the schematic of this thing probably looks like including parts selection, I'm pretty skeptical about going beyond saying it's good for the price and a solid offering in this class of devices.

I appreciate your reviews from the perspective that you provide measurements, and that you do seem genuinely interested in contributing to the audio community. However, I find that there is a tendency in these reviews to overpraise the performance. I would not call this an audiophile-class device based on your measurements. It's not terrible, but it's nothing particularly impressive in broad terms (which is what calling something 'audiophile-class' implicitly concerns). For the price, it looks like a decent device relative to at least one of its peers but this is not an engineering triumph in terms of quantitative performance.

Beats?

Taking a quick peek it at least resembles what I would expect a hiface + extra I/O and psu stuff would look like but I'm not sure.

Is there any indication that the Evo is different architecturally from the hiface on the USB interface side? When I read the m2tech site it doesn't exactly sound like it is but I can't really tell. Would have been nice if McGowan had given more detail.

So this is interesting - http://www.psaudio.com/ps/forum/viewthread/854/

They can't hear you over the Ultra Linear, Class AB.

Uh...I guess the WM8740/41, and AK4396/7 are decent. You can use an ESS Sabre in v-out mode which may be better than the other four due to the filter and modulator design but I've never tried it. I'm not a big fan of voltage output dacs for applications where you don't need that specific functionality as they're uniformly lower performance than what can be obtained with current output dacs.

Well, overall output stage design (as opposed to just the tubes) is likely the determinative factor. This product doesn't seem very interesting to me from a performance or design standpoint.

1793 is BB's performance grade voltage output dac. It's OK; nothing amazing. Then again, with a distortion spec that high on the final output, I'm not sure how much it matters.

I think that's a reasonable take, although solutions which appear to utilize something based on standard UMS protocol (what I understand the "no drivers" solutions to be?) seem to experience the fewest problems. Aside from that, I think in general people worry too much about jitter. In terms of audibility, I think analog output stage design makes a bigger difference and that's where a lot of products are lacking (including USB DACs).

You can get periodic drift/pull behavior with DPLLs because accuracy is bounded by its resolution. So, it drifts until it passes a boundary, then snaps back. With that said, I'm used to seeing a somewhat different behavior than is depicted (and at a lower magnitude), so it could be a combination of factors that is producing this effect. Could also be, as you said, a problem with the host.

I just glanced at this real quick but it sort of looks like there's a digital PLL and the resolution stinks and so you get that periodic behavior.

I don't think they're antiquated technologically when looking at the driver design but I know the physical build isn't for everyone. I've used a lot of headphones over the past several years for listening tests. There are some suitable headphones for this purpose other than the 701, but many are considerably more expensive (especially when factoring in amplification). I'm not sure you're really gaining anything by writing them off.

HD800 is good for this purpose but, in my experience, I find the K701 to be comparable in terms of adequacy for this task. Not a fan of the Denon for this sort of thing although I thought it sounded OKish when I last heard it.

Good grief, this review is absurdly long. Like classic head-fi reviews, it contains a plethora of history and reminiscing on the part of the writer that is largely irrelevant to the issue at hand. When writing a review, always ask yourself this question: "I am thinking about purchasing _______, what do I need to know?" I get that people might wonder about the full size vs IEM issue, but it can be disposed of within a single sentence. The fit and finish can be done in one to two; one sentence is enough for the initial impressions issue. Start with "they are phenomenal", give some basic information about what you tried them with, and then a short overview of the strengths/weaknesses. Highlight, quickly, any notable features that are truly germane. Cap it off with your justification for not giving detailed analysis across genres. The fact that you felt the need to end the review by hoping that people enjoy reading it as much as you enjoyed writing it should be illuminating. Also, welcome to head-case

Happy Birthday!

Would have been neat to meet CEETEE and see Frank again. Also would have liked to try the Neko D100.

Yeah, I had hoped to make it. Just didn't work out, unfortunately.

I might make it. Not sure yet.

Hi. I'm curious...what's the IMD like on the D100. Say, CCIF (19/20, 1:1) and SMPTE (60/7K, 4:1)? Also, how about 20-20KHz THD+N w/ higher BW, say like 80k so we can see the third harmonic above 6.6K?