No it is not a surprise. This experiment should show me if I  can hear the noise of my amplifier.
At full gain I hear the noise of my DAC. I guess this cannot be reduced without a new design?

Do you mean in the digital domain or how is the analog signal destroyed independently from SNR?

That is impressive. Is see my approach as the first step to what you have already achieved. I like the simplicity of the concept of low gain amp, volume poti and not to high efficiency speakers. I am glad to be informed by all of you, so amplifier noise is on my list now too.

Well, lets say I have nothing against better sound quality. At the moment there are so many things I can try (the noise problem beeing one of them). It is a lot of fun!

Greetings
Adrian

I just made a comparison between the noise of my AudioNET Amp1 V2 and my Linnenberg Amp 2S. If the volume poti is turned down, with the AudioNET amp I still hear noise from the speakers, if I have my ear in about 20 cm away from it. In the same configuration the Linnenberg is totally silent. This is the first time I realised there can be such a difference of amplifier noise. My 90db/w speakers are quite new to me and I always used speakers with low sensitivity so I would correct my statement. If the speakers have a sensitivity about 80db/w, amp noise can be neglected but from 90db/w up, definitely not.

Greetings

If feared you will tell this, so I used the word "general" before my statement That is an impressive performance and interesting to know it is possible.

Yes it is. In general most of the noise you hear comes from the source and not the amp itself. The noise of the source is amplified by the amp in relation to the gain value.
That is why the list from mani...
...could be misleading because the gain of the amps is not known. So you do not know how much the noise from source is amplified and hence you cannot say anything about the general quality of the amps. I do not know how much the noise of the amp itself playes a role with 115db speaker but from what I have experienced with normal speakers it can be totally neglegted.

Hi Mani,

the first thing you should look at is an amplifier with low gain, because the gain defines how strong your amp will amplifiy the noise of your dac. Especially with the ultra high efficiency of your horns I would exclude anything above ~25db. 15-20db could be a good value to look for. The noise of the amp itself is normally no problem.
My personal way to get noise down is to have speakers with not so high efficiency (90db) an amp with low gain (21db) and a volume poti. With my poti fully opened I can hear a noise up to 30cm distance "ear to speaker". If I set the poti to listening levels the noise is so low I just can hear it with my ear directly at the membrane. "Hearing" is in a way exaggerated because I have to try very hard to hear it at all, it is more I imagine there must be a noise and maybe "yes" there semes to be something. (I have not made any earthing tweaks)

Greetings
Adrian

+1. Thanks Mani, sounds interesting.

I found the effect of peak extension music dependend. On tracks with high compression it can do wonders creating a 3D soundstage but with good recorded tracks it adds too much hardness.

PS.: I think DSD is worth playing with. It could be a way out of the reclocking and oversampling problem for a lot more people than just the NOS1 owners.
One could use XXHE to convert PCM to DSD in realt ime, much better than JRiver does and so provide high quality music playback without ringing and so on for everyone having a DSD DAC.
JRiver can convert PCM to DSD but the improvement doesn't compensate the loss in quality by using JRiver. I gues this could be done much better...

I have a DAC that can stream and convert DSD (DoP). At the moment I have no good sounding software that can stream DSD. I use JRiver to do so but the problem is, it still sounds like JRiver. Plus, I do not have much records because I just started to show interest in DSD and to be honest, I already lost interest because of the player problem. PCM over a decend software player still sounds better than DSD over JRiver. So XXHE supporting DSD (DoP) would be very welcome indeed.

Looking for specs and for how many transformers or technical things are build inside any Hifi equipment can help to find a "direction" in that you can go but you will never be able to say from specs if it sounds good (a simple truth). Maybe you can say something will certainly sound bad from some specs but who knows? I had a Reference 7 DAC from Audio GD (8 PCM 1704, 3 RCore Transformers, discrete output stage...). It was a nice DAC and for me back then an improvement in sound. But at the moment I listen to a DAC with only one dac chip, only one transformer, it is tiny, only cinch out ... and it plays in another world than the Ref 7. I suggest looking for a dac you can listen to at home and compare to what you have. Or visit a dealer and bring your dac to compare. You will be much happier that way.

My 2 cents: Getting rid of my active pre (tube) was the right thing to do. It lowered the noise floor a lot and increased the level of detail but it also sounded flatter. I thought the flatter sound was because of removing the tubes from the signal chain but I was wrong on that.
After removing my pre I bought new and much better speakers and then a very good amplifier. Both I would call, within some limitations "state of the art". Still, I was not really happy with the sound. On some day I was and on some day I was not.
Also my system sounded worse in aspects of naturalness and 3D soundstaging than less expensive and less elaborated systems. I had no peace on my mind because of that and thought: WHY? WHY is my system not totally better than these systems? I also tried some components from theses systems in direct comparison to mine. None of the components was better. There was no reasonable explaination for me, except the one thing I could point out: These system use an analoge volume control. Finally I did some experiments with analog volume control vs. digital volume control.
For example I tried a DAC with an implemeted, selected alps poti. If I turned up the poti fully and used 40db of digital attenuation. The sound got flatter and less natural. AHA!
I tried the same with another DAC and a TVC (Transformer Volume Control). Same result!
Every time I tried and made a comparison the result was the same. Even some high quality pre amps can show some advantages in 3D soundstaging and naturalness over a properly implemented digital volume control. A good thing to do, seems to have an analoge volume control directly build in the DAC and have it "buffered" to avoid high frequency cut offs.
After using a good implemented analog volume control, I do not "suffer" from day to day sound differences any more. Maybe they are there but the sound gets not so much affected by these "daily variations". It sounds good every day. But the sound is defnitly not filtered to death. I can hear better than ever differences made in the digital domain.

Greetings
Adrian

I would say, for most people it is no problem using the standard parameter set and just listen to xx. A lot of people enjoy playing around, so if you throw out functions they wont be happy. But I think there are a lot of functions and beeing away one year from following the progress, I got the impression there are too many variables involved. Maybe we could start to sort out some functions, that do not improve the soundquality. We could start to elect the top five "best functions" and the top five "never used functions". By discussing the results we could start to throw things out or build in functions by standard, which are never used or just have no serious impact to sound quality.

An Example: Lets say in comparison to arc pred and peak ext, nearly everything can be neglegted. The next strong influence may be done by the processor schemes (does anybody uses an other scheme than 3?)  and memory management. Then comes Q1 and now Q5.

Please keep in mind, I haven't tested all of the new stuff and I do not say throw everything out except what I mentioned in my example but I think there are a lot of old functions that could be removed to keep the mind free and make it easier to make progress with the new functions.

I send you two files. It is the second track I have in the playlist when the skipping begins. After that, every tracks will only play some seconds (~20s) as I just found out.

It happens in unattended mode.

I had a lot of problems with earlier versions and things like this happend. But since 9z8.3 and 9z9bx I have no problems anymore, except this one. I think this is SFS related because it disapears when I increase SFS.

The prolem occures upto now only with 320 kbit mp3 but with different albums. Increasing SFS from 12 to 120 "solved" the problem again. I couldn't provoke this error with lower bitrates but I do not say that this cannot happen. For that, the test time was to short.

I will try some more mp3.