Type of Solder - Can It Make a Difference to the Sound?

[PermO]

 

[pucho812]

There's a fairly high profile mastering engineer who has a favourite brand of hard drive. Not for reliability reasons. For sound reasons. Cognitive bias affects us all...

unless we are thinking of the same mastering engineer, then he is not alone there. I never got it, but Doug Sax used to swear up and down he could hear the difference in hard drives by different manufactures.

 

[user 37518]

unless we are thinking of the same mastering engineer, then he is not alone there. I never got it, but Doug Sax used to swear up and down he could hear the difference in hard drives by different manufactures.

Yeap, I've heard it before, back when Quantegy used to make hard drives, an engineer I know would say that they sounded better and more tape like.... I'll tell you, audio people are the dumbest people

 

[ruffrecords]

This new lead free solder must sound different. It is so susceptible to dry joints that there must be dozens of little rectifiers in the average signal path.

Cheers

Ian

 

[rock soderstrom]

unless we are thinking of the same mastering engineer, then he is not alone there. I never got it, but Doug Sax used to swear up and down he could hear the difference in hard drives by different manufactures.

I am sure that these guys can hear the sound differences of hard disks brands. It was clear to me that I am not alone.

I can hear who is sitting at the control panel in the nearby power plant. Some make audibly better power than the others. No joke!

 

[user 37518]

What amazes me, is that in some listening studies in which they ask participants to listen to something, many times the Audio Engineers are the ones with the worst performance. Which makes me believe, and I am just assuming, that either:

1.- Audio engineers tend to over think or over hear what they are listening to.

2.-Working with sound every day has a toll on hearing, so an audio engineer can mix, master or whatever very well but they don't actually hear perfectly. I have several very succesful audio engineer and musician friends who have severe hearing loss and tinnitus. My ex had a much better hearing than I do, she was like "the food has arrived", I went out of the house and the delivery man was at the street corner, perhaps thats why I am a lousy mix engineer...

In general, I believe women have much much better hearing than men, I don't know if they are better engineers than men, but they can certainly hear things most men cant.

 

[JohnRoberts]

I found that serving in the military was not good for my hearing, but I had a relatively easy tour compared to many.

I do not argue with people about what they say (think?) they hear on the internets. It can't be proved and irritates them, while wasting my time.

JR

 

[user 37518]

I found that serving in the military was not good for my hearing, but I had a relatively easy tour compared to many.

I do not argue with people about what they say (think?) they hear on the internets. It can't be proved and irritates them, while wasting my time.

JR

For me, my left ear had a bad case of ear infection which left me with permanent hearing loss at around 8Khz plus it lovely companion tinnitus, who is always present.

 

[john12ax7]

It is not outside the realm of possibility for hard drives to sound different in real time playback, different CDRs certainly did.

Different wire also sounds different, so it is conceivable solder might as well.

Both, though, are low down on the list of what average people should worry about.

 

[JohnRoberts]

Null tests can prove or disprove if differences exist...

Slight time deviations can compromise nulls, and sound quality.

JR

 

[rock soderstrom]

For me, my left ear had a bad case of ear infection which left me with permanent hearing loss at around 8Khz plus it lovely companion tinnitus, who is always present.

The same here, getting worse every year, unfortunately.

The good thing is, I don't have to think about different sounding HDs anymore.

 

[PermO]

When listening to music there's more going on than just sound, when you listen to a 1KHz testtone, yes, there's just sound, the tonegenerator has no intent, it has no story to tell.
Music is a communiction between people, between the artist and the listener, and the artist has an intent, a story to tell, even if the music is instrumental, there's always a story.
Now the artist and the listener are not in the same room and the listener is not even on the same timeline as the performer, So the recording and playback chain become part of the transmission of the intent, the art.
Yes the sound, we still need the sound, as a carrierwave for the intent, the art.

There is an energy present in art, music, that you will never be able to isolate on a scope.

The carrierwave doesn't even have to be pristine if we take the intent as the norm, it still works...

 

[Matt Nolan]

It is not outside the realm of possibility for hard drives to sound different in real time playback, different CDRs certainly did.

Burning and reading a CDR was a lot more of a hit-and-miss / analogue grey areas operation than HDD storage. If you can show me two CDRs which sound different while both report a zero Bit Error Rate during playback then you might have something. Most likely that something is a really poorly designed CD player.

 

[Matador]

I actually think people who claim to hear differences are sincere, and are hearing differences, it's just not due to the underlying reason claimed. It's well established that the different senses can override each other: just Google the McGurk effect to see it in full force (which shows that vision can override hearing, if the brain is telling our ears what to expect to hear). Just having an EQ up on the screen, with your eyes telling you it's boosting or cutting can be enough to elicit your hearing telling you there are differences. Those claiming being able to hear different HDD's are probably hearing differences, because they are already primed to expect them.



This is why double-blind and null testing is the only real way to reveal differences, because they remove the brain (to the extent possible) from the equation.

 

[JohnRoberts]

I actually think people who claim to hear differences are sincere, and are hearing differences, it's just not due to the underlying reason claimed. It's well established that the different senses can override each other: just Google the McGurk effect to see it in full force (which shows that vision can override hearing, if the brain is telling our ears what to expect to hear). Just having an EQ up on the screen, with your eyes telling you it's boosting or cutting can be enough to elicit your hearing telling you there are differences. Those claiming being able to hear different HDD's are probably hearing differences, because they are already primed to expect them.


This is why double-blind and null testing is the only real way to reveal differences, because they remove the brain (to the extent possible) from the equation.

Lots of people are sincere.

The human brain is a rationalizing machine... It takes in vast amounts of raw data and tries to make sense of it by discarding a lot of it and distilling down what is left that it finds useful. Human hearing is just one of the senses filtered through our brain's rationalization machinery.

A great deal of research has been published about audible illusions and perception (check old AES journals). A smart audio designer uses this knowledge to his/her advantage. Designing dynamics processors offer numerous opportunities to capitalize on the perceptual shifts and biases affecting human hearing.

Double blind tests are the gold standard for proving that differences exist but incredibly difficult to do properly. Few people are willing to invest the time and effort to realize statistical significance. IMO listening tests are of more value to a merchandiser/marketer than a design engineer when we have linear test bench metrics to guide us with repeatable accuracy (unlike our hearing).

JR

PS: This is an old anecdote but on topic. Last century Peavey submitted some AMR studio monitors to a recording magazine's blind listening shoot-out comparing them with other popular studio monitors of the time (Yamaha NS10, etc). The reviewers were SF bay area studio professionals. Reportedly at least one individual withdrew and declined to allow his name to be associated with the shoot-out, after learning that he had preferred the AMR (Peavey) speakers.... how embarrassing. Anyone have doubts about how an unblind listening test would have gone?

 

[john12ax7]

Burning and reading a CDR was a lot more of a hit-and-miss / analogue grey areas operation than HDD storage. If you can show me two CDRs which sound different while both report a zero Bit Error Rate during playback then you might have something. Most likely that something is a really poorly designed CD player.

Two digital sources can have the same identical data but come out different on the analog end. Consider jitter and the effects of induced signals that don't change the bits. Then there are actual bit errors that don't have time to be corrected.

The resultant sound difference, if any, will depend on how the system handles all these.

 

[Matt Nolan]

Two digital sources can have the same identical data but come out different on the analog end. Consider jitter and the effects of induced signals that don't change the bits. Then there are actual bit errors that don't have time to be corrected.

The resultant sound difference, if any, will depend on how the system handles all these.

Jitter should not be influenced by the storage media. If it is your system is terribly designed. The same goes for not having time to correct actual bit errors. That's what buffering is for.

 

[john12ax7]

I have not found computer manufacturers to be at all concerned with the effects on an analog back end. Radar being one of the few exceptions.

 

[user 37518]

I have not found computer manufacturers to be at all concerned with the effects on an analog back end. Radar being one of the few exceptions.

Is the argument "Radar sounds better than any ProTools" is still a thing?

 

[john12ax7]

Is the argument "Radar sounds better than any ProTools" is still a thing?

I don't know, but early Pro Tools did sound rather awful for a variety of reasons.