Quote:
Originally Posted by Fran Guidry
The comments about all the samples sounding similar is just hilarious to me.
I keep waiting for one of the folks who has heard improvements from switching preamps or a/d to provide level matched same source clips that let the rest of us hear the difference. Please!! It's not _that_ hard and you might learn something as well as instruct the rest of us.
In the meantime I'll stay with the opinion I've developed over ten years or so of fooling with this stuff. Electronics are a lot more consistent than human perception. Audible transparency is relative cheap and easy to achieve in the 21st century and measurements bear this out.
There is a threshold of audibility for noise, distortion, and frequency response variation. If two devices keeps those issues below the threshold of audibility humans can't hear any difference between them. This certainly doesn't prevent the marketing department from demanding that the engineering department improve the numbers so the sales brochure has something to talk about, but it does prevent any audible difference from appearing in the final result.
So, please, could we have some clips demonstrating the difference between a Mackie and a Great River? Between a Great River and a GML? Between a Fireface 400 and Mytek?
One last thought ... if you were a manufacturer of a/d converters and your converter _sounded_ better than others, wouldn't you provide clips that could demonstrate this improvement in double-blind comparisons? I know I would. Can someone point me to a manufacturer who does this?
Fran
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I'm with rick-slo - of course gear makes a difference. For you to insist that it doesn't is just, well, odd to me.
You made me laugh a bit when you suggested that guys like Geoff Tanner, Dan Lavry, or Fred Forssell (to name three high end builders) have "marketing departments"
. These guys are writing most of their own material and *maybe* (if
we're lucky) passing it off to someone else to code the HTML. Are you suggesting guys like that are just making up numbers so that they can convince us that theirs is somehow different than others or better than something else (often indicated by the price!)?
As for why converter companies, preamp companies, amp companies, etc don't do A/B tests with other manufacturers' gear and then host those tests on their websites, I'll take a stab at two reasons:
1) Because taste is subjective - the user may have come to your site to buy your converter but liked the other better. That would make no sense if your "they're all the same" idea is true but I don't agree with you and maybe they don't either.
2) To avoid lawsuits from the manufacturers of the other gear who can say you were disparaging them by intentionally making theirs look bad. Even if you weren't doing that, all that they have to do is threaten you with a lawsuit and poof! You'll take the files down stat!
I'm not a gear manufacturer so this is just speculation.