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RE: I have to disagree with you in part...

Posted by Tony Lauck (A) on June 23, 2014 at 18:27:16

In Reply to: RE: I have to disagree with you in part... posted by Sprezza Tura on June 23, 2014 at 09:28:30:

I believe if you were to get a good quality ADC and feed it an analog signal and put the resulting digital through your Mytek that you would find that the output would sound remarkably like the input to the ADC. If you haven't done this and haven't actually observed a nice sounding analog signal being reduced to annoying screeches then you are probably ascribing what you don't like to the wrong part of the record-playback chain. There is a lot that can go wrong between musicians and ears.

These kinds of bypass tests are easy to do with tape recorders which nearly always include both record and playback capability. They are not that much more difficult with ADC - DAC loops, but not all audiophiles have a suitable ADC. If you haven't done such a test then you have no basis to ascribe any poor sound to the Mytek.* What you don't like to hear is more likely to be some incompatibility between the recording and other parts of your playback chain, for example your speaker/room/ear interface. Recordings that were made to sound right on a rolled-off playback chain will sound horribly bright on a flat playback chain. Unfortunately, most recordings fit this description, which makes a flat playback chain, however technically "correct", a complete disaster.

The place to fix this is not at the DAC, it's where the problem is likely to exist, namely in the speaker/room interface. Back in the days when it was "high fidelity" and before the "high-end" marketing scam was created there was a fairly simple way to deal with these problems that sufficed to eliminate at least the first order problems: tone controls. However, a bunch of clever scam artists discovered that if you took these away and convinced people that they were bad you could sell endless slightly different components and endless "remasters" of the same recordings by dead musicians, each with slightly different equalization.

Sometimes the problem is just that you are trying to play an excellent recording on a inadequate system and ascribing shrillness to the way our ears work, e.g. the Fletcher–Munson effect. The latest eclassical.com "special of the day" of Petroushka and The Rite of Spring fell into this category. It sounded horribly shrill and thin when played at back hall volume, but when turned up to row 5 volume the recording snapped into focus and sounded realistic. Of course, I have a system that will produce undistorted sound at my listening position at 118 dB, no Quad 57's as I am a fan of Mahler symphonies and not solo harpsichord music. Others on AA have complained that the BIS recordings are shrill and unlistenable.


*If you have the pre-amp version of the Mytek then you can perform analog bypass tests from an analog source and see how the Mytek op-amps are coloring the sound. That would be another way to narrow in on the problem.



Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar

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