My First DAC! With FOUR important digital filtering options and audio demonstrations [iFi Go Bar]
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- Опубліковано 16 бер 2024
- I explore the several digital filtering options and other features of the iFi Audio GO Bar DAC / headphone amp. With audio demonstrations. Ft. Betty, Debbie, and Audio Phil.
Product page - ifi-audio.com/products/go-bar/
Purchase link - amzn.to/3TFbF9t
DAVID MELLOR'S MUSIC
David Mellor's music on Bandcamp - davidmellor.bandcamp.com/
David Mellor's music on Spotify - open.spotify.com/artist/6OkaD...
Available on all good streaming services
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Disclaimer: Videos on this channel may include affiliate links and may feature software that has been received free of charge with an NFR (not for resale) licence, equipment that has been loaned or donated by a manufacturer or distributer, or equipment that has been bought for less than full retail price.
You take to this like a DAC to water 😊
The Audio Phil clip at the end was gold! Great vid
Turning a digital signal to analogue, applying a filter, then turning it back to digital so we could all listen to it through our DACs turning it back to analogue, applying yet another filter on it. 😀
The tonal quality of the snare drum changes in the sections of the sample which threw me off in comparisons, with the snare having more snap and clarity in the “Ripe fruit ‘round the Yorkshire pudding tree” section.
My sony jb 930 minidisc recorder has a truly excellent 3 mode digital filtering, some say the dacs inside these recorders are the best on the planet.
Best unboxing ever! Love your videos and nice song by the way.
Could I please have a cutting from your Yorkshire Pudding Tree? Would like to chuck out the useless ficus and plant that instead…does it grow the beef and all the trimmings as well?
I love the unboxing subtitles 😅
Speling sumtimes not so gud.
The music made me hungry.
Size matters. I like the bigger hole and the bigger plug. (and the bigger sound)
I've been using a comparible "DAC", the Dragonfly Cobalt for a couple of years and have been extremely pleased with it. This Go Bar unit looks very similar with a few snob features added in. Thanks for the product heads up.
Got a Dragonfly Red myself. Bypasses the horrible and uneditable soundcard. No bells or whistles, just good sound.
Having a chilled out evening listening to The Forbidden Planetoid. Very nice! 🎧 💯👏😃
I have an Hidiz s9 pro. The 2.5mm balance out is nice.
"It's nice to have nice things, and sometimes it's worth the cost to have sheer niceness."
That's actually a good quote right there. It's kind of like having a meal at a fancy restaurant or having a high-end smartphone. It doesn't have to make perfect sense or serve a practical purpose, so as long as its enjoyable.
Also, I can't say I'm an audiophile (more just an enjoyer of high-end equipment and how they work) but it seems to me like XSpace separates the left and right channels a bit, and adds a very slight bit of reverb to the music. It took some serious flipping back and forth to notice it though, so it certainly isn't great.
If you’re old enough to remember tone controls on amplifiers, those filters may be reassuringly irrelevant.
Even more, a loudness control.
I have no clue what filter my Sanskrit 2 has but I like it. Same goes for my Hidizs S9 Pro dongle dac/amp.
The bit perfect compared to the standard; the standard emphasised the vocal more. The minimised was between the BP and Standard.
XBase definitely boosted base and the XSpace added a bit of echo or reverb to the vocal.
I'm only listening on my tv speakers, but I can still hear that.
i tried alot alot in terms of IIR vs FIR eq and reconstruction filters and while it wasnt obvious at all at first i became quite sensitive to the changes it makes
specially minimum phase sounds always a bit like high frequency get lost/eq'ed down like 0,5 to 1 db where linear phase sounds more "direct" in terms of high frequency, they all are there with full output but also a bit more muddy because of preringing i imagine
FIR equalizer is definitely the way to go IF you dont overdue your eq... else the preringing becomes noticable, if you can eq in a way that the phaseshift is still minimal than with FIR eq you get perfect linear phase with really minimal preringing which is the best of both world imo
i could also hear on the gibbs transient filter that it indeed does kind of improve transients and attack
Listening to my first dac was like I had never really heard the song before. It was like there was twice as much music in a song I heard 100 times before. It surely helped that I was listening with studio monitor headphones.
I just began testing a new portable dac/amp in preparation of handcrafting a hardware project requested by top level representation. Using the Fiio KA13 for development purposes. Very flat response and the channel separation are 2 aspects that stand out immediately. Testing an audio source pass-through setup witb my HiFi rig also.
Negatives are with sonic character, and the musicality seems lacking.
This is just as noticeable when using my older AKG Y50BT headset. Kind of like overly sterile. Thanks for this video! BTW Gibbs transient optimized stands out as a clear winner to my ears.
I once had Beijing Duck
all sounds have a harsh "S" which is mostly a signal for bad dATA compression .but the first runof teh yorkshire p t still sounds relatively ok with vital snares.
Enjoy your music...
Some more stuff👍.. I was interested in you mentioning the vid/digital thing and Decca studios.. a couple of things 1: Decca.. did you work there? In 1982/3 I bought a KM54 and Km53 form one of the specialist studio dealers, there was Trad and one either REW or RWS (1 was in Charring Cross, the other Watford.. or was it Luton.. ) with DECCA beautifully engraved.. I still have the KM54, but sold the 53 after a few months for 10X.. today would be more like 200X.. ;-)) second, this sounds like early mid 1980's.. Did the vid/digi tape stuff (more ) come from Ian J at HHB? Memories of past life lol! (BTW.. your style and humor always has me LOL with you.. very entertaining.. and informative).Phill's got it.. He understands.. I like Phill.
The mention of Decca reminds me of their Deram ceramic cartridge which was highly regarded back in the day.😊
The xspace was the only demo where there was something noticeably different. I cant explain what it is, but it also wasnt pleasant. It didnt sound much like there was space added as much as it sounded slightly more recessed kinda like a bad crossfeed or someone trying to make a bad surround plugin, except only 2 channels being used.
I enjoy your videos.
Mr. Pete------->
aging hippie
I don't know how you hear anything with those ears of yours. They don't stick out nearly as far as mine, and I can hardly hear a thing. My left ears does stick out a bit more than my right. Should I use a DAC or try to real my left ear in a bit with some blu-tac?
Does it have Bluetooth and EQ? The BTR7 has both.
For me, the DAC contained in my CD player Technics SL-P230 (year 1988), with only 4x oversampling technology, is still the best. I never heard a CD player with the same clear and detailed sound, with all the instruments so well separated. I compared it with other CD players of the same and quite higher price class (but not ultra high-end) in the '90s. It sounds better even than a Technics SL-PG400A, and maybe even slightly better than the SABRE 9016K2M DAC in my SoundblasterX AE5 soundcard, which is many generations ahead.
Probably all the audible difference between DACs is given only by the quality of the analog section after the DAC. A difference in a capacitor or in a transistor in the signal amplifier/impedance adaption section makes all the audible difference.
Too bad that the CD player can't be used as external DAC accepting as input the output from my PC set at 16bit/44,1 kHz. If it could, I would use it as DAC for everything.
A stupid question. Why do DACs need a low pass filter at the output, if all the frequencies above 20 kHz have been already removed by the filter before the A/D conversion?
The purpose of the capacitor at the output should be only to connect the samplings smoothly between each others. It acts also as low pass filter, but it is not its main purpose there.
Great cabling can do wonders for OLEDs.
I plan to bi-cable. One for the luma, one for the chroma.
The iPhone converter and the GO bar both have onboard amplifiers - not just DACs. It might be interesting to compare the amps and their effect on audio quality.
It would be tricky to do that because the comparison would be between the combinations of DAC+amp. I'd guess though that the most likely differences would be in the amp, in the the output voltage and current-capability. Also the output impedance because that has the potential to affect the frequency balance as heard by the listener.
I think all these demos of your music, was just an underhand way of boosting sales of your music.....
I mean, I really need to know what "I Saw the Bird" is all about.....really clever, dude...
You’re not wrong. But the plain fact is it’s just easier. No copyright to worry about.
@@AudioMasterclass I know, just having a bit of fun 😁
I like fun. That’s why I’ll be releasing an album of my irritating unboxing music soon.
Yarkshire puddings, Mmmmm and no I can never tell the difference. I vote for Gibbs though because I think it has to do with high frequency's like whats his face from the Bee Gee's or was that toothpaste, not sure but fun video...cheers.
Technical reason for balanced output for Headphones:
The Best DAC output amplifier reaches 130dB of Signal to Noise/Distortion. which leaves the last 2-3 digits of a 24 bit signal berried in DAC own noise.
A true differential DAC will include at least 2 DACs (the 2nd one is for the inverted signal). There is I even a 4 parallel DACs output topology (PS audio).
This will improve the SNR by 3 dB, which makes the Audiophiles as well as the Sales people very happy.
Is this what my LG phone's quad DAC was?
PS, my current Sony phone doesn't tell me how many DACs it has for it's headphone jack, so I assume just one.
@@martineyles Ahh yes, my LG V20 had an ESS Sabre Quad DAC irrc. That phone was great for audio.
@@SamHocking My V30 was great until the headphone jack broke.
@@martineylesone would hope it had 2, Left & Right. Although some early digital audio formats would use a single DAC time shared between L&R, eg PCMF1, where the single DAC was running at 88.2kHz & resulted in the digital audio channels being time shifted by Half a sample. Conversion to pro audio formats (eg PCM1610 or AES3) required correction for the half sample offset.
Using DACs years before it was used in Audio in electronics test equipment with 18 decimal places accuracy
I am your typical Ph.D audiophiles who knows what to listen for (due to design experience and it gets progressively softer from that of bit perfect. Only because I know what these filters attempt to do very subtly. They should have had no filtering which actually sound the best, I guess the setting you would chose yourself, The are very detectable. I enjoy your presentations To be really be pissing on commensal dacs is simple, In Hewlett Packard we designed DAC orders of magnitude better than die mediocre crap fed into the sound equipment types, Actual measurement grade DACS predating audio dacs by a decade or more and with mediocre performance firm those intended for test anb measurement equipment
My gear budget is $110 dac, $220 preamp, $450 amp and $3500 speakers, give or take.
I recently purchased an iFi headphone amplifier and I was BITTERLY disappointed by the build quality. :(
Use 2 pairs of spec’s, as per Steve (Repair Shop) Fletcher💡
Sometimes I use three.
18:04 does nothing but bring out the Spotify compression artifacts. I usually just leave those alone as it would then sound unnatural
I think the selectable digital filtering is related to MQA, as I gather one of the features it's meant to have is matching its output to the type of filtering used for the input (even if they don't know what it was), and this is partially acheived by selecting different filters for the output. If you're listening to MQA material you shouldn't be able to switch between the filters because MQA is doing it dynamically, but as the chip has the facility to do this switching, they might as well make some of those options available for non-MQA material. My LG phone had very similar settings, which I also couldn't reliably tell the difference between.
As for what is correct, I think that Audio Phil accidentally chose the right option (though I did apprecaite the wit), as despite opinions voiced by MQA types, I gather it doesn't mess with the phase, though perhaps that is less important than I have been led to believe. As for preringing, I think it does (sort of) occur in the analogue domain - imagine a cymbal roll, where the cymbal gets louder as you hit it multiple times before dying away after you stop hitting it. That's effectively eqiuvalent to pre-ringing and post ringing in solids, with a fixed time delay. It isn't really pre-ringing, but more delayed peaking, and I think the pre-ringing in a linear phase DAC is also just a delay to excite the output fully rather that true pre-ringing.
Problem is no one wanted it in the end, millions of pounds spent on it finally sold for 100k to Lenbrook
@@Chunksville I think the problem with MQA is that it was designed to make money and deceive people, not to sound good.
An example of the deception - They highlighted research that we could detect phase differences smaller than the sampling rate of CD, and said their system provided higher sampling rates and maintained phase information. They didn't mention (and Bob Stuart must have known based on his credentials, so he was deceiving people, or deceiving himself) that CDs also maintain phase information at a much finer level than the sampling rate, because the levels of the samples vary slightly if you shift the phase.
No one wanted it because they couldn't see the benefits (because there weren't any for listeners - only for people selling MQA licences)
Does it sound any better than the dac built into your average CD or DVD player?
If you use directional cable made on a Tuesday..it will.
@@karlos543 Has to be full moon though.
I'm an Audiophile, i've tested many DAC's, from cheap Advance acoustics, NAD M51, Audio research dac 8 just to name a few, I eneded with an old 18bit Audio note from 1998, now modified with new Audio note oil capacitors and a pair of Siemen cca tubes from 1961.
I laughed when you skipped on MQA ha ha.
With my ultra sonic hearing i could hear slight variations in your demo song.
Audio Phil, makes me laugh every time.
My Wadia Digital 2000 decoding computer does not have any filters on the output
yes i did, bit perfect to standard no, from standard to minimum phase yes, and, minimum phase to gibbs yes. however, in the long run as a casual listener i will be nonchalant to all of these as this will "affect" my psychoacoustic and i will be desensitize to any of those filters (or to any dac/amp/iem/hp) and in the end, i will just enjoy my music, nothing more nothing less.
My $9.49 DAC bought from Amazon on sale sounds just as good. I think I will take a pass.
Just spent an enjoyable time listening to your back catalogue. The YPT song sounds much better direct from Amazon Music through my desk top solution of Fosi Q4 DAC and low end Sennheisers. Txt Me also a highlight. Always enjoy your content, more power (or watts) to you.
Thank you for listening. There's a lot more music to come.
Who remembers Audio Alchemy’s first DAC? DDE 1.0
A big bottleneck here is the sound quality of Spotify files. They max out at 256 or less, at least in the US
Dear Mr. Mellor, most of my music listening these days is via my phone. Said phone includes a DtAC. However, I decided to spend £100 on an external DAC, with no buttons or filters or bass boost! Have I wasted 100 GBP? What do you think? I use an iPhone, and a pair of Shure IEMs that were awarded Best Buy by What Hifi. What do you think Mr. Mellor? Thank you for this video!
I listen through my phone and £9 Apple adapter, as they call it. My enjoyment level is just fine.
Enjoyed.
Why do I feel hungry though?
You need a pie. I recommend a pie.
Okay, I’m not young, but I heard a difference. I have to wonder how UA-cam formatting alters the audio.
Should have gotten a Qudelix 5k. Then you would have enjoyed wireless Bluetooth, 20 band PEQ and tons of other features for 1/3 of the price.
Now I know what it does, I'm not sure I need it at all.
Thankfully, I can wait to get home to listen seriously to music. $300 for that is not going to happen. It should be called iFu. I have music in my car, at my work and at home. It's nice to disconnect sometimes or the anticipation for the home system at the end of the day dwindles significantly.
Bit perfect is best, minimum phase sounded ok - everything else not good - ithe x space is like an old Yamaha and turning on concert hall etc. standard was particularly bad - narrow and stuffy sounding.
I have an FiiO JadeAudio KA3. These DACs cannot accept phone calls.
A benefit then!
Pre ringing - you like the product reviewed prior to host announcing the price. Post ringing - host mentions the price roasted in goose fat
Post ringing is where my retention statistics drop off a cliff after I mention the price.
Never had any need for seperate DAC. Why ?
It must have been 15 years ago by now, when I brought my unrestored Philips CD100 with me to visit a close relative, because we wanted to make a rare comparison between this CD-player and a High End super expensive Sony SCD-1 with Super Audio CD cabability.
Both machines were fed into the expensive Sony TA-E1/TA-N1 pre- and power amplifier (standard RCA/Phono cables for the CD100) and then to a pair of DALI Euphonia 4 speakers.
The scene was set for a thrilling experience.
Well. The Philips CD100 had to have 20 minutes to warm up and stabilize (expanding the dry solder joints enough to not cause any trouble along the way), but with a large glass of beer in our hands, we were absolutel ready.
Two identical CD's were placed in each player and the first minute was spend to carefully synchronize the tracks, but then.........shock and awe. Shock and awe.
As the first A-B comparisons along the first selected track played out, we were both stunned and amazed.
There were literally no difference between these two CD-machines.
Yeah, if we squeezed our faces into disfigurement and listened as intense as our physical bodies allowed us to do, we could both point out, that the Philips CD100 was the tiniest possible perceptible bit brighter in the precense area (mid tone).
I guess it must have been below 0.5dB, because we really stretched our senses to the limit here.
In disbelief we tried other pairs of identicale CD's. Same thing.
So we stood there with our beers. Haven't touched our glasses during the heat of this test. Totally forgotten all about it. So, hey, yeah..... and down the remaining three quarter full glasses went.
And......as the alcohol passed from our digestive systems and into the blood stream, we experienced that the slight difference between the machines also disappeared.
So by now, there was simply no difference at all. Nope.
I think it's called being gobsmacked.
We looked like marble statues as we stood there and smiled. "This can't be happening".
And that settled it for me: 14-bit TDA1540 4x oversampling is perfectly fine.
It proves another very important thing. The speakers are the most important thing.
You can hook anything up to a high quality set of speakers and it will sound absolutely fine.
Even the cheap black plastic fake-"HiFi-systems" from the 80's, that were molded to look like seperate units, but were not, will sound awesome and quite spectacular through high quality speakers, though the volume wouldn't be as high as desired.
Shame with such shite speakers on that Sony system, no wonder you could hardly hear any difference.
For being the pinnacle of human evolution and to bring your hard earned level of experience to the desk, I have to express my most humble gratitude.
To be alive during such times keeps me wondering of just how lucky we all must be to have you around, teaching all of us, the importance of being personally degrading and simultaneously combining that with unfounded claims. How do you manage ?
It's just such a relief to have the deeply rooted convintion pushed aside and eliminated so rapidly of anyones narrow and underdeveloped vocabulary being a true reflection of what they actually contain inside.
That brings so much value for all to appreciate.
In awe, I bow.
🦆
This has left me traumatized.
I can understand that. Anyone previously unaware of different filters now has more to worry about.
Hahaha. Good answer.
XSpace is silly.
being dyslexic myself, the ifi was seen as iffy.. sry..
Yes perhaps they should have thought of that.
Dsd is great, if you can get actual native Dsd files. If. I repeat. If. In the case that you can, it is superior to pcm. I like the tachyon joke. For the filters, the phrase 'filtering' is used. This does not define the actual filter, like, 'low pass filter, low latency', 'fast filter phase compensation', or whatever.. Without that definition of the actual filter used, as opposed to its implementation protocol, I can't understand it properly in terms of how it will sound. Of course, I can just try them all. Anyway I heard the demo of the filters and they seem gimmicky, not proper filters. Yes I can hear a difference, but I also have perfect pitch. And these were not real filters, don't know what they were. Goes back to my point. That the type of filter was not defined. I agree most wouldn't hear a difference. You are not supposed to hear a proper filter, the result should be greater coherence, less noise, and more musicality.
You know PHD stands for "Push here Dummy."
£329? Hmmm
I dunno, seems a bit iFi
Interesting song. I doubt it will ever get to number one. Don't give up your day job. Mull of Kintyre was much better.
After literally hundreds of McCartney jokes in the comments in my channel I once again learned how to laugh.
@@AudioMasterclass no I'm being serious. Mull of Kintyre is a much better song.
You're comparing my music with Paul's biggest hit? Best compliment I've had this decade.@@dangerzone007
@@AudioMasterclass maybe add some black pudding to the lyrics
Black pudding is one element of my 10-piece full English breakfast.@@dangerzone007
Nope Audiophile can hear even at your age we know how to extract the most of a well engineered recording.
Just like a Brit wants one lump twoa real Audiophile can discern what missing.
DSD shoud me your favorite no filtering required after that it's mor complicated then tou can putt on UA-cam in 15 minutes.
Remember digital artifacts occur above 22,000 Hertz and effect no you have to play that Flute that goes to 50,000 Hertz to show the difference
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliasing
@@AudioMasterclassI will be brief, Unfortunately articles bookend the problem without providing solutions we now know works best!! That particular IFI product has some limitations that will never allow full performance. Starting point reference Rob Watts from CHORD.
There are some simple ways to extract Superior digital audio but there require a few more circuits not mentioned.
Filling the air with a lot of technical jargon won't make good detail rich realistic soundstage! But the right things in the right order will
Why do even well educated professionals keep coming up with this pre- and post-ringing nonsense?!
Let's go back to the basics: If your signal is bandwidth limited to half of the sampling frequency, the signal can be perfectly reconstructed from its samples. Limiting bandwidth has been a level zero requirement in the music production process since the the first digital recordings so this criteria is met. If you have whatever ringing in your source material, it is reproduced as such. No ringing in the source signal, no ringing at the DAC output either.
I can tell you where this "ringing problem" comes from. When CD was introduced in the 1980's by Philips and SONY, they developed their own technology based on the same CD standard. Initially, SONY had 16 bit DACs and they added a high-order analogue filter to limit output at 20kHz. Philips had 14 bit DACs only, but they wanted to achieve the same noise levels in their specs for obvious reasons, so they made a signal processing trick with 4x oversampling and applying a digital filter before the DAC. Later they both licensed their technology to other manufacturers. When you purchased a unit from a 3rd party brand, it was not clear what was inside. The easiest way to check this was testing the response to an impulse step signal. Symmetrical response indicated Philips-type FIR filters, asymmetrical (with post-ringing) indicated analogue or IIR-type digital filters. This is the same today, except that high-order analogue filters are no longer used. (Linear phase filter is always FIR.)
No one really cared about the audibility of this ringing, because the impulse step is an artificial signal that is not bandwidth limited. In fact, it has infinite theoretical bandwidth, which is not acceptable in real digital music content.
At least it was like that until the early 2000's, when some audio charlatans tried to find some way to promote their technically incorrect "NOS" DAC implementations, or fancy high-res coding schemes they created to collect royalty. They scared the hell out of audiophiles by showing these diagrams, and convinced them that their products somehow "cure" this phenomenon.
Not a surprise that very little or no difference can be heard between various filters in the same DAC. They behave very similarly up to 15-16kHz anyway, there can be differences above that, but none of them creates ringing with properly produced materials.
Never understood the point of balanced headphones. For starters, the drivers are balanced by definition (both conductors terminate in the _same_ impedance, i.e. the voice coil).
Any difference in the output impedance of the amp for the signal vs. the impedance to ground is insufficient to cause noise at the typical 8 to 300 Ohm load impedances and signal levels involved in headphones. If you do pickup noise that would indicate a rather poor ground topology on the output of the amp, or a dirty connector. Balanced connections for a 10kOhm or higher input impedance makes much more sense, i.e. component interconnects. The only use I could see for a balanced headphone connection is to get an extra 6db of signal level as David already mentioned.
I have a followup video on this coming soon. Such excitement.