{"id":5176,"date":"2018-03-25T10:56:30","date_gmt":"2018-03-25T08:56:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/?p=5176"},"modified":"2018-05-28T08:32:48","modified_gmt":"2018-05-28T06:32:48","slug":"typical-errors-in-digital-audio-wrapping-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/2018\/03\/25\/typical-errors-in-digital-audio-wrapping-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Typical Errors in Digital Audio: Wrapping up"},"content":{"rendered":"

This “series” of postings was intended to describe some of the errors that I commonly see when I measure and evaluate digital audio systems. All of the examples I’ve shown are taken from measurements of commercially-available hardware and software – they’re not “beta” versions that are in development.<\/p>\n

There are some reasons why I wrote this series that I’d like to make reasonably explicit.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Many of the errors that I’ve described here are significant – but will, in some cases, not be detected by “typical” audio measurements such as frequency response or SNR measurements.\n
      \n
    1. For example, the small clicks caused by skip\/insert artefacts<\/a> will not show up in a SNR or a THD+N measurement due to the fact that the artefacts are so small with respect to the signal. This does not mean that they are not audible. Play a midrange sine tone (say, in the 2 -3 kHz region… nothing too annoying) and listen for clicks.<\/li>\n
    2. As another example, the drifting time clock problems described here<\/a> are not evident as jitter or sampling rate errors at the digital output of the device. These are caused by a clocking problems inside the signal path. So, a simple measurement of the digital output carrier will not, in any way, reveal the significance of the problem inside the system.<\/li>\n
    3. Aliasing artefacts (described here<\/a>) may not show up in a THD measurement (since aliasing artefacts are not Harmonic). They will show up as part of the Noise in a THD+N measurement, but they certainly do not sound like noise, since they are weirdly correlated with the signal. Therefore you cannot sweep them under the rug as “noise”…<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n
    4. Some of the problems with some systems only exist with some combinations of file format \/ sampling rate \/ bit depth, as I showed here<\/a>. So, for example, if you read a test of a streaming system that says “I checked the device\/system using a 44.1 kHz, 16-bit WAV file, and found that its output is bit-perfect” Then this is probably true. However, there is no guarantee whatsoever that this “bit-perfect-ness” will hold for all other sampling rates, bit depths, and file formats.<\/li>\n
    5. Sometimes, if you test a system, it will behave for a while, and then not behave. As we saw in Figure 10 of this posting<\/a>, the first skip-insert error happened exactly 10 seconds after the file started playing. So, if you do a quick sweep that only lasts for 9.5 seconds you’ll think that this system is “bit-perfect” – which is true most of the time – but not all of the time…<\/li>\n
    6. Sometimes, you just don’t get what you’ve paid for<\/a> – although that’s not necessarily the fault of the company you’re paying…<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Unfortunately, the only thing that I have concluded after having done lots of measurements of lots of systems is that, unless you do a full set of measurements on a given system, you don’t really know how it behaves. And, it might not behave the same tomorrow because something in the chain might have had a software update overnight.<\/p>\n

      However, there are two more thing that I’d like to point out (which I’ve already mentioned in one of the postings).<\/p>\n

      Firstly, just because a system has a digital input (or source, say, a file) and a digital output does not guarantee that it’s perfect. These days the weakest links in a digital audio signal path are typically in the signal processing software or the clocking of the devices in the audio chain.<\/p>\n

      Secondly, if you do have a digital audio system or device, and something sounds weird, there’s probably no need to look for the most complicated solution to the problem. Typically, the problem is in a poor implementation of an algorithm somewhere in the system. In other words, there’s no point in arguing over whether your DAC has a 120 dB or a 123 dB SNR if you have a sampling rate converter upstream that is generating aliasing at -60 dB… Don’t spend money “upgrading” your mains cables if your real problem is that audio samples are being left out every half second because your source and your receiver can’t agree on how fast their clocks should run.<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      So, the bad news is that trying to keep track of all of this is complicated at best. More likely impossible.<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n

      On the other hand, if you do have a system that you’re happy with, it’s best to not read anything I wrote and just keep listening to your music…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      This “series” of postings was intended to describe some of the errors that I commonly see when I measure and evaluate digital audio systems. All of the examples I’ve shown are taken from measurements of commercially-available hardware and software – they’re not “beta” versions that are in development. There are some reasons why I wrote […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[33,4,43,19,56,5,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-acoustics","category-audio","category-dsp","category-funny-noises","category-hearing","category-loudspeakers","category-recordings"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p48hIM-1lu","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5176"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5177,"href":"https:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5176\/revisions\/5177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}