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

[user 37518]

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

Yes, 20 years ago

P.S. apparently it is still a thing, since they are being sold for more than 6K on e-bay....

 

[john12ax7]

Yes, 20 years ago

Much more recent than that. But it's funny that many are willing to admit that now, but not so much at the time.

 

[Gold]

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.

All true. CD’s can sound different from the source file. It’s all down to the pit geomety on the disk. Some machines will have to work hard to recover the data. When worki g hard they will introduce jitter. If there are any unrecoverable errors all bets are off.

 

[boji]

The question is does the solder media rise to significance compared to all other factors involved.

True, I don't think real world circuits stack up enough serially to make an audible difference, all things considered. It would nonetheless be interesting to hear a test on say, a ton of summed mix bus resistors with different types of solder.

Different wire also sounds different

Hope not in short lengths. Never trusted dupont ribbon wire from ebay, but I used it in some builds in the past.

 

[PermO]

Much more recent than that. But it's funny that many are willing to admit that now, but not so much at the time.

Yup

I think 1995 1996 I was in an audio engineering training, at some point we were introduced to ProTools1, the guy from, I think it was called Digicheck did his marketing talk and it sounded sort of promising .
Well the first session I did I thought this must be april fools day right ? seriously ?
It was one big phasey mess, impossible to get a good result with, it was a complete joke.
In the years after that me and a friend of mine played a game, spotting protools mixes on the radio, you could easyly tell by all the 'swish swish swhish swish' sounds in the top end.
And eveybody kept telling me, no your wrong, it's digital, there can't be anything wrong with digital, you are so used to analog you are not adapted to this higher quality yet, you'll have to get used to it... bla bla bla
Until (years later !) they fixed it,... "yeah there used to be a little bit of an issue with phase" .... oh really ?

100 years of automotive industry made some real progression in quality driving, they have come a long way...

100 years of audio engineering, what has it brought us ? ..exept for better loudspeakers, where is the quality improvement ? .. it's all just quantative, more of the same thing, 4 tracks, 8 tracks, 256 tracks... ect. 1 speaker 2 speakers, 4 speakers, 4 speakers and a sub etc..

You can (if you are very rich) setup an all vintage studio with late 60s / 70s gear and produce an album that is up to par with the rest out there... (yes it will be more expensive)
That's 50 years of engineering ago !



So, you tell me...

 

[user 37518]

100 years of automotive industry made some real progression in quality driving, they have come a long way...

100 years of audio engineering, what has it brought us ? ..exept for better loudspeakers, where is the quality improvement ? .. it's all just quantative, more of the same thing, 4 tracks, 8 tracks, 256 tracks... ect. 1 speaker 2 speakers, 4 speakers, 4 speakers and a sub etc..

You can (if you are very rich) setup an all vintage studio with late 60s / 70s gear and produce an album that is up to par with the rest out there... (yes it will be more expensive)
That's 50 years of engineering ago !


So, you tell me...

Many have said the same thing, JR is one of them, audio is a mature technollogy, a term that basically says "audio is done". Yes there are new plug-ins who innovate and so on, but those are minute differences in the overall picture. Also, the media to record has reached its prime, 44.1KHz 16bits seems to be all that is needed to accurately reproduce sound, which is why formats like Super Audio CD become such a failure, no one really heard any difference that justifies paying the higher price.

I've said this several times before to the people I know, the increase of sound reproduction quality will be through the creation of better loudspeakers or radically different microphones, not better recording formats, unless there is some major shift on how we listen to music, for example an implant directly in the ear or some weird crap like that.

Look at everything that is being sold, all preamps, EQs, compressors are either the standard circuitry or based on a certain model from the old days, people still worship tubes and transformers which are older than dust. There is nothing radically different because, I believe, what is available is as good as it gets.

I know some guys working on the fringe side of audio, like using 40 speakers, multicapsule microphones and stuff like that, interesting but not very useful in my opinion, people barely use a couple of earpods, a living room can barely accurately position a 5.1 system, imagine using 40 speakers, useless..... Plus, even if its possible, people don't want it, why is 5.1 audio not a big hit now? in theory it would provide a more realistic experience than stereo, IMHO the reason is because people do not care, its too much of a hassle having 5 speakers and a sub and listening in a living room.

 

[mjrippe]

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

It was mainly the solder