Completely digital audio systems ?

D

Defcon

Audioholic
I remember reading about some high end custom audio systems (we're talking $400k and up) which was designed as follows - all sound and signals were sent using ethernet cables so it remained in the digital domain. The speakers were powered. All processing and correction was done digitally as well.

Such a system has some very obvious advantages - maximum efficiency and no signal loss because everything is just a digital 0/1 right till the end. Processing is done on a regular PC and can be extremely powerful and customizable since its just software, vs buying special pre/pros. Powered speakers have some well known advantages as well w.r.t crossovers/amps being built in and the whole setup can be controlled digitally via a web interface.

Anyone remember the name? I'm sure there must be more than one. I wish an affordable system like this for regular people was made.
 
D

Drunkpenguin

Audioholic Chief
Isnt it still analog when it hits the speaker tho? The only difference would be the location of the amp.
 
D

Defcon

Audioholic
There is very little signal loss compared to a typical system. You can send the digital signal across the world (its just a network) with no loss in quality. There's no need for powerful amps as the final conversion is done only in the speaker.

I'm no expert, what I read was the audio processing is also more powerful in this design.
 
lovinthehd

lovinthehd

Audioholic Jedi
The amp power is that required by the speaker. What speakers have such sufficient amps/digital capabilities as you're thinking about? I've read somewhat about the Lyngdorf "digital" amps which apparently keep the signal digital longer up til final output stage (IIRC)....not sure if their speakers are active with DAC on board or not, tho. Haven't seen much on "digital" amps otherwise.

There is very little signal loss compared to a typical system. You can send the digital signal across the world (its just a network) with no loss in quality. There's no need for powerful amps as the final conversion is done only in the speaker.

I'm no expert, what I read was the audio processing is also more powerful in this design.
 
AcuDefTechGuy

AcuDefTechGuy

Audioholic Jedi
At the end of the day, does it really matter to your ANALOG EARS how long the signal stayed digital?

Does it matter if you could get the SNR to be 100dB vs 1,000dB?

Does it matter if you could get the THD to be 0.01% vs 0.0000001%?
 
D

Defcon

Audioholic
At the end of the day, does it really matter to your ANALOG EARS how long the signal stayed digital?

Does it matter if you could get the SNR to be 100dB vs 1,000dB?

Does it matter if you could get the THD to be 0.01% vs 0.0000001%?
Audibly, maybe not. But it does matter if you can get a more efficient system thats more reliable - e.g. high sensitivity speakers don't need separates or lot of power. Digital = lossless = good.
 
John Parks

John Parks

Audioholic Samurai
Here are three examples of keeping the signal digital and letting the speaker itself decode and amplify it: https://darko.audio/2018/05/children-of-the-revolution-kii-genelec-kef/

1542391262398.png


The LS50 Wireless intrigues me as it supposedly sounds better than the standard LS50 (I have not had a chance to demo). If I had the money, I would certainly like to check out the Kii Three.

About 20 years ago, I was able to demo an all digital Meridian system and the top of the line DSP speakers (+/- $40K) were very impressive.
 
mtrycrafts

mtrycrafts

Seriously, I have no life.
At the end of the day, does it really matter to your ANALOG EARS how long the signal stayed digital?

Does it matter if you could get the SNR to be 100dB vs 1,000dB?

Does it matter if you could get the THD to be 0.01% vs 0.0000001%?
I can certainly see the difference between those numbers. :D
 
AcuDefTechGuy

AcuDefTechGuy

Audioholic Jedi
Audibly, maybe not. But it does matter if you can get a more efficient system thats more reliable - e.g. high sensitivity speakers don't need separates or lot of power. Digital = lossless = good.
Stuffing electronics, amps, DSP inside speakers will only make the speaker less reliable.

It’s like cramming more stuffs inside the chassis of an AVR.

Why do people hate the fact that AVRs have too much stuffs inside them, then turn around and want to put more stuffs inside speakers? :eek:

Isn’t that double standard?

There is a good reason why some speakers have a 10 YR warranty, but the electronics inside the speakers only have a 3 YR warranty.
 
D

Defcon

Audioholic
Stuffing electronics, amps, DSP inside speakers will only make the speaker less reliable.

It’s like cramming more stuffs inside the chassis of an AVR.

Why do people hate the fact that AVRs have too much stuffs inside them, then turn around and want to put more stuffs inside speakers? :eek:

Isn’t that double standard?

There is a good reason why some speakers have a 10 YR warranty, but the electronics inside the speakers only have a 3 YR warranty.
This makes no sense so I want to understand what you are trying to say.

A digital source is best - for audio and video - can we agree on this? At some point this needs to go thru a DAC to get an analog waveform. This can happen inside your player, AVR, or the speaker.

An active speaker has many advantages - they are well documented in many places.

So the best combination is digital signal fed to speakers which then can convert it, apply crossover etc. Its not more stuff, its doing it at the point where it makes the most sense.
 
AcuDefTechGuy

AcuDefTechGuy

Audioholic Jedi
This makes no sense so I want to understand what you are trying to say.

A digital source is best - for audio and video - can we agree on this? At some point this needs to go thru a DAC to get an analog waveform. This can happen inside your player, AVR, or the speaker.

An active speaker has many advantages - they are well documented in many places.

So the best combination is digital signal fed to speakers which then can convert it, apply crossover etc. Its not more stuff, its doing it at the point where it makes the most sense.
1. So if some electronics become defective in your speakers, you like the idea of shipping your 200-pound 60x15x12-inch speakers for repair?

2. Do you realize that companies may offer up to 10YR warranty for the speaker itself, but only 3 year warranty for the electronics inside the speakers?

3. You don’t realize that adding amps and DSP/EQ inside your speakers is stuffing more things inside your speakers? If your speakers don’t have any amps, EQ, DSP inside them, you realize that they have less parts, right?

Speakers that have amps, EQ, DSP, and other electronics inside them also have many disadvantages, which have also been documented in many places.

If active speakers are so much better, why are there so very few of them?

Why aren’t most speaker engineers and designers creating active speakers with amps, EQ, and DSP inside them?

I guess the majority of the speaker designers and engineers just don’t understand.
 
D

Defcon

Audioholic
The disadvantages of active speakers, which you pointed out, outweigh the pros, all things considered. Paradigm etc do make active speakers for the consumer market and I'm sure they dont sell as well, and of course they are common in the pro world.

The audio world is full of dogma and snake oil the more higher up you go, which is why people buy full range towers and vinyl and 2ch systems with horrendously expensive monoblocks/tube amps, fancy cables and low efficiency speakers vs digital audio, dedicated subs, high sensitivity and proper system design.

The high end caters to this audiophile market who care more for looks/status vs actual sound quality. I'm talking about how you can get the highest possible fidelity and sound quality/efficiency.
 
Mikado463

Mikado463

Audioholic Spartan
At the end of the day, does it really matter to your ANALOG EARS how long the signal stayed digital?
in theory if there was a corruption of the signal after conversion to analog then perhaps the longer it remained in the digital domain the better ?
 
KenM10759

KenM10759

Audioholic Samurai
Here are three examples of keeping the signal digital and letting the speaker itself decode and amplify it: https://darko.audio/2018/05/children-of-the-revolution-kii-genelec-kef/

The LS50 Wireless intrigues me as it supposedly sounds better than the standard LS50 (I have not had a chance to demo). If I had the money, I would certainly like to check out the Kii Three.

About 20 years ago, I was able to demo an all digital Meridian system and the top of the line DSP speakers (+/- $40K) were very impressive.
Keep your eyes open. There's a banner running on KEFDirect.com about a "Black Friday" sale to run between 11/22 and 11/30, and LS50 Wireless is on the list. I expect to see them drop well under $2k (list is $2,200 a pair) for that week.
 
Mikado463

Mikado463

Audioholic Spartan
The audio world is full of dogma and snake oil the more higher up you go, which is why people buy full range towers and vinyl and 2ch systems with horrendously expensive monoblocks/tube amps, fancy cables and low efficiency speakers vs digital audio, dedicated subs, high sensitivity and proper system design.
not completely true or accurate but I do agree the laws of diminishing returns does set in at some point

The high end caters to this audiophile market who care more for looks/status vs actual sound quality. I'm talking about how you can get the highest possible fidelity and sound quality/efficiency.
again, not necessarily true but I get your point
 
P

pewternhrata

Audioholic Chief
This makes no sense so I want to understand what you are trying to say.

A digital source is best - for audio and video - can we agree on this? At some point this needs to go thru a DAC to get an analog waveform. This can happen inside your player, AVR, or the speaker.

An active speaker has many advantages - they are well documented in many places.

So the best combination is digital signal fed to speakers which then can convert it, apply crossover etc. Its not more stuff, its doing it at the point where it makes the most sense.
Have to disagree with digital is best, example, CD cuts. You can have aad add and ddd. First letter is the recording (analog or digital) second is the mix, 3rd is transfer (will always be digital on a cd) take the same CD aad vs ddd, and no it's not magical night and day difference, but the aad will sound more 'true' or 'natural'
 
mtrycrafts

mtrycrafts

Seriously, I have no life.
...
A digital source is best - for audio and video - can we agree on this? At some point this needs to go thru a DAC to get an analog waveform. This can happen inside your player, AVR, or the speaker.
....
Yes, the further you can do digital the better.
But, after the dac, you still need perhaps a preamp and certainly a power amp. Speakers run on power amps.
 
Johnny2Bad

Johnny2Bad

Audioholic Chief
It's been done (many times). BRM ("Meridian")* probably being the best example ... the system they offered in the late 1990's was digital right to the individual loudspeaker driver, and employed proprietary switch mode amplifiers in the speaker enclosure that accepted a digital signal. They've offered products such as a $USD 20,000.00 DVD player.

Digital State-Of-The-Art is expensive, and depreciates rapidly and to a low bottom limit (5~10% after 5~10 years). That is much higher than audio equipment in general , at least up to today. You can barely or even cannot give away those Meridian systems today, let alone sell them to recover some of your investment.

You had better prefer a digital ecosystem, because you are basically saying goodbye to analog aside from the original performance and your listening, which are analog and always will be, forcing the two language translations (A-D and D-A).

That's not to say you can't use, say, terrestrial radio as a source, but you are inserting additional ADDA steps that are un-neccessary with the pure digital two-translation signal flow you have essentially embraced with your choice.

Translations from one "language" to another introduce errors that a system that avoids such translations does not have to deal with. Whether that is a problem or not is specific to the situation but it can never be perfect, the very best that can be achieved is "good enough to not matter", and that may or may not be achievable.

Further complicating matters is there are likely to be moving goalposts ... for example the vacuum state amplifiers of the 1970's were equaled by transistor amplifiers of the 1970's in ways that satisfied most audio enthusiasts, but the vacuum state amplifiers of 2018 are not those of the 1970's. So the goalposts have moved.

Because Digital involves a state change (aka language translation) it too must be able to continue to improve to equal the analog of 2018 and the analog of the future versus the analog of 1983 (the first CDs) or the analog of 1977 (the first all-digital recording chains suitable for quality audio). This should not be confused with potentially artificial tech advancements (eg THX certification, or MQA audio) which exist mostly to drive new sales. They may, or may not, be actual improvements, but they do serve to make existing digital ecosystems obsolescent.

I think that anyone new to Audio is well advised to consider an all-digital signal path, as it offers advantages likely to appeal to those new to audio, in particular compact size, low cost (hardware; the software is expensive as all rents are) and convenience.

I think digital of 2018 has reached the same point that the transistor electronics of the 1970's reached ... for most people, the value is there (by that I mean consumer level gear offers better Sound Quality than they need, at a reasonable cost).

But nobody is going to be looking to buy your iPod Classic in 30 years, unlike the 1970's MacIntosh Amplifier, which actually has a chance to be a collector's item in 2048, so don't expect your all-digital choice up to the loudspeaker driver to be the lowest cost approach. If you get tired of replacing your throwaway digital gear, analog might still be an option many years from now.

* Meridian invented encoding/decoding technology used in DVD-Audio, Dolby TrueHD and Blu-Ray, and they are also the developers of MQA.

Note:
obsolescent: surpassed by newer technology
obsolete: made useless by existing technology

There is a significant difference between the two, and they are often used incorrectly. We might be seeing the advent of electric vehicles making internal combustion vehicles obsolescent, ironically after IC vehicles made EV's obsolescent 90 years ago. Neither is obsolete as they both still are effective.

Similarly, the iPhone that was introduced in 2007, (the same year the iPod Classic 6th Gen was introduced) is obsolete ... it won't even make a phone call in most parts of the world as the cell network tech it supports no longer exists. The 6th Gen iPod, on the other hand, is obsolescent ... you can duplicate it's function with a modern phone, but it still works just fine, and in many ways superior to a modern cellphone, as far as listening to stored music goes. It is not obsolete simply because it hasn't been manufactured for 4 years; or because it's not a cellphone itself, that's not what obsolete means.
 
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D

Defcon

Audioholic
in theory if there was a corruption of the signal after conversion to analog then perhaps the longer it remained in the digital domain the better ?
Exactly. A digital signal is IMPOSSIBLE to corrupt. This is why computers work and why we are using the Internet. An analog signal by definition is IMPOSSIBLE not to corrupt to some degree.

Besides this, there is huge inefficiency in any digital->analog conversion be it DAC or speakers. The more you can delay this, the better.
 
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