MQN testing/experimentation thread

[Aleg]

JC

3D effect is depth of soundstage. Obtaining a good wide and deep soundstage is part of the ultimate goal of reproducing the live event from a musical recording.

Where you listening again with head/earphones or did you finally switch to speakers?
Headphones will never reproduce a recording in a good way.

Cheers

Aleg.

[jesuscheung]

JC

3D effect is depth of soundstage. Obtaining a good wide and deep soundstage is part of the ultimate goal of reproducing the live event from a musical recording.

Where you listening again with head/earphones or did you finally switch to speakers?
Headphones will never reproduce a recording in a good way.

Cheers

Aleg.

you don't have to repeat yourself so many times. i heard you. doesn't your wife find you annoying? lol

i have tried it on speakers. doesn't sound good to me. if you like it, use it.

[Aleg]

JC

3D effect is depth of soundstage. Obtaining a good wide and deep soundstage is part of the ultimate goal of reproducing the live event from a musical recording.

Where you listening again with head/earphones or did you finally switch to speakers?
Headphones will never reproduce a recording in a good way.

Cheers

Aleg.

you don't have to repeat yourself so many times. i heard you. doesn't your wife find you annoying? lol

i have tried it on speakers. doesn't sound good to me. if you like it, use it.

Sometimes; LOL

But then, you shouldn't be saying that something is good or wrong; but only what you like or not like.

Good/wrong assumes you are judging against a generally accepted norm; which IMHO you don't.

When you like or do not like something, you are judging against a personal preference and when you stated that preference other people can see if they have that same preference or not and put your opinions in perspective of their own preferences.

I'm not being unfriendly, but people are all too easily taking personal opinions for thruth when words as good and wrong are used, while all the time it is often just a matter of personal preference of the person making the statements.

Also I think you should state what your hifi-kit is you are using for doing your tests. Different setups should be judged differently for their outcome.

Cheers

Aleg

[nige2000]

think its fair to say the sound differs a lot between headphones and speakers.
i used to a pretest an odd version of mqn on the headphones, which got increasingly difficult, now i can only test on speakers to display substantial difference between versions.

newer mqn probably sounds slightly worse on headphones than some older ones
but fantastic on speakers

[jesuscheung]

just saying. i have tested the 3D MQn versions of on 555, 580. 555 is a 3D headphone. it is not accurate like speakers , but MQn should sound good at least. doesn't sound right to me. also, if MQn doesn't sound great on 580, there is an issue, coz the whole world uses 580.

[jkeny]

Agreed headphones are not for reproducing a realistic illusion of a sound stage. Good for picking up details & amplitude/frequency differences but I think a lot of the real bones of MQN lies in the realism effect that it portrays.

Having said that I can hear some small difference between 1024 SD & SB,SW versions using simple in-ear headphones plugged into my laptop's analogue out.

I would be grateful if some people looked over the measurements using the analysed output files?
There are so many ways of looking at these plots & second, third set of eyes & brains would help.
I can provide them & the viewing software if required.

[jkeny]

I know this paper has been referenced here before & it is product orientated to Nordost cables & Vertex products but do some of the ideas/graphs/measurements look familiar?
http://nordostnew.sysdemo.co.uk/default ... rement.pdf

I'm of the opinion that the measurement technique I'm using can possibly be used in the same way to test some of the ideas on cables/vibration! Maybe even used to verify whether this test works?

[jkeny]

Further plots - this time using the Ciunas DAC rather than the analogue outs of the laptop.
Everything else the same, laptop, Zoom recorder, software, test file

First Foobar:


And MQN:


The Y-axis scale of these plots are the same as the previous plots out of the laptop's analogue out
These plots show a significant reduction in the timing slippage from a max of 90 mS on the previous plots to about 15mS on these plots & it's a more horizontal line (as a result). In other words not only is the latency significantly lower across the full frequency range but the timing slippage is more constant across the frequency range (a more horizontal line).

The ideal plot would be a horizontal line without any fluctuations as per the ideal plot but maybe above the zero point.

[jkeny]

Zooming in the same trend continues with the MQN plot being slightly lower than Foobar.
It's harder to say if the MQN plot has less fluctuations or if they are individually smaller?

Foobar:


MQN-1024-SD


So are these small shifts in the overall slope of the line an indicator of better timing & hence better sound?
Big change in slope between laptop analogue out Vs Ciunas = big improvement in sound
Small change in lowering of the slope between Foobar Vs MQN = smaller improvement in sound?

Would be interested in testing other DACs, etc to test the premise.

The issue with this is that the change from Foobar to MQN is a small drop of about 0.2microsecond in the slope. This low a level of differential timing differences isn't reported as significant in psychoacoustic studies. The lower level reported in the research papers is 1.5mS but AFAIK, this is using headphones, not speakers. I think we all agree that speakers reveal more of the audible differences between the MQN versions & therefore speakers are maybe more revealing? (The research papers are using h/phones to eliminate the obvious difficulty of using speakers but in so doing maybe are also eliminating some of the psychoacoustic effects.

[LowOrbit]

Good work John, interesting results.

As you say, the differences are there but are an order of magnitude smaller than one might reasonably need to claim cause and effect.

I have made a first pass at comparative sampling of the dac output using music files and looking for differences. It is proving harder than anticipated to get consistent data from Audacity, so I won't be drawn at this stage. But I have a test setup, and can capture data. A small start, and I need more time to get to grips with the methodology and techniques.

Mark