Timbre, pitch and instrument separation

Perception and sound character

Answers on this topic

• What does Rob mean by 'starting and stopping of notes', timbre variation and 'sense of flow', and what causes them?

Everything he said on this topic (139)

One-line summaries in our words, oldest first. Each link opens the original.

• 2014-06-22Watts re-tests optical vs coax on Hugo, finds optical warmer with better separation, and explains how RF-induced noise floor modulation harms separation and timbre. Head-Fi, Jun 2014
• 2016-01-09Watts says the 400-pound Mojo has more cores than a Pentium, so it better calculates missing information between samples, reproducing timing more faithfully for better timbre, instrument location and musicality. What Hi-Fi? 4:59
• 2016-07-24Watts says Hugo did things he had never heard from digital, especially on piano: each key being pressed and the timbre changing with touch, where before it sounded muddled. Hifistatement 2:46
• 2016-07-24Watts says timing accuracy is important for timbre, and the ear judges bass pitch from the starting transient, citing experiments where removing it made a bass guitar's pitch unidentifiable. Hifistatement 2:12
• 2016-11-10Watts says DAVE's depth comes from preserving small-signal amplitudes, not its -128 dB noise floor; timbre from no noise floor modulation and accurate transient timing; hard USB from non-bit-perfect data. Head-Fi, Nov 2016
• 2017-01-15Watts recounts M scaler development and CES demos, discusses judging the scale of changes, lists gains in timbre, bass pitch and depth, and describes improving stop-band rejection. Head-Fi, Jan 2017
• 2017-10-13Watts says the ear is poor at bass, so a bass guitar's pitch is followed from its initial transient; with the transient removed it becomes a low-frequency lump of noise. miceblue425 8:04
• 2017-10-13Watts concludes that transients are very important for perceiving the pitch of bass. miceblue425 8:45
• 2017-10-13Watts says timbre depends on transients, and that pitch, soundstage, timbre and the starting and stopping of notes all come from transients, which digital audio's frequency-response focus neglects. miceblue425 8:53
• 2017-10-13Watts says every tap-length increase improved sound in the same ways: better bass, instrument separation and focus, soundstage and timbre. miceblue425 23:36
• 2017-10-20Watts says interaural neurons have about 4 microseconds accuracy, far finer than CD, and that transient timing governs perceived starting and stopping of notes, timbre and bass pitch. Hifistatement 1:30
• 2017-10-20Watts says the brain gets bass pitch from the starting transient, so losing it on a bass guitar makes the tune impossible to follow, and timing is crucial. Hifistatement 2:13
• 2017-10-20Watts lists WTA tap lengths (DAC64 a thousand, QBD76 18 thousand, Hugo 26,000, DAVE 164,000) and says each increase improved bass definition, timbre, staging precision and note starts and stops. Hifistatement 0
• 2017-10-20Watts says longer taps improved bass definition, timbre and pitch as usual, but the million-tap M Scaler also opened up depth and soundstage beyond DAVE's. Hifistatement 2:03
• 2018-02-23Watts cites experiments where removing starting transients made trumpet and piano hard to tell apart, saying transients are key to timbre and pitch and the ear is poor at bass. MajorHiFi 5:43
• 2018-02-23Watts says wood blocks are hard to reproduce, an initial dynamic hit followed by timbre, which he notices when Dave drives efficient loudspeakers directly, plus a huge soundstage. Head-Fi, Feb 2018
• 2018-03-16Watts attributes reduced loudest-instrument dominance to no noise floor modulation and the WTA filter, says an M scaler enhances it, and calls dominance a major cause of fatigue. Head-Fi, Mar 2018
• 2018-07-21Watts says the 4 microsecond perception threshold is much finer than CD's 22 microseconds, and that removing a bass guitar's starting transient makes its pitch hard to hear. c w 5:51
• 2018-07-21Watts says the ear is a poor transducer for bass, so the brain calculates bass pitch, and without the transient the bass line cannot be followed. c w 6:33
• 2018-07-21Watts says transients are essential to timbre, citing experiments where removing transients made trumpets and pianos almost impossible to tell apart. c w 6:54
• 2018-07-21Watts lists QBD76 at 18,000 taps, Hugo 1 at 26,000 and Dave at 164,000, saying each increase improved timbre, bass pitch and left-right soundstage. c w 15:36
• 2018-07-21Watts says the M Scaler gives better bass definition, instrument separation and focus, and unexpectedly opens up the soundstage so reverb is heard from different walls. c w 27:48
• 2018-08-10Watts answers 'both', adding that low tap length linear phase filters also sound soft and bloated in the bass, with poor bass pitch discrimination. needs context Head-Fi, Aug 2018
• 2018-09-21Watts says DAC designers can add perceived bass weight through distortion, but this suppresses variation and pitch definition. Head-Fi, Sep 2018
• 2018-11-11Watts explains the M scaler's apparently slower tempo as reduced dominance effect, because 1M-tap WTA cuts program-dependent transient timing errors; 164,000 to 1M taps is very audible. Head-Fi, Nov 2018
• 2018-12-12Watts lists further variations to judge by: space, dynamics, pace and rhythm, instrument separation and power without cross modulation, and the starting and stopping of notes and sharp cracks. Pursuit Perfect System 7:30
• 2018-12-13Watts says psychoacoustic tests show that removing transient information stops listeners following bass pitch or telling a trumpet from a piano, and that digital's problem is reconstructing transient timing. Pursuit Perfect System 3:04
• 2018-12-13Watts says modulated transient timing confuses the brain, degrading bass, timbre, pitch, separation, focus and spatial location, and blames limited processing before starting a tone-burst illustration. Pursuit Perfect System 4:38
• 2018-12-13Watts says instrument separation, focus and timbre are better and note starting and stopping is perceived more accurately, because timing uncertainty is reduced. Pursuit Perfect System 9:54
• 2018-12-13Watts attributes the M Scaler's stronger instrument power without cross-modulation to removing the timing modulation that past and future signal causes in conventional filters, restoring 16-bit accuracy. Pursuit Perfect System 16:26
• 2018-12-13Watts says amplified concerts blur left-right imaging and are poor for judging transparency, but convey immediacy, speed, separation and instrument power, which the M Scaler helps improve. Pursuit Perfect System 23:48
• 2018-12-13Watts says if saxophones sound brighter, detail seems better but timbre variation is worse, a red flag, and that his listening tests usually target a known engineering variable. Pursuit Perfect System 25:55
• 2018-12-16Watts explains output impedance matters for frequency response and back-EMF damping, recounts damping experiments from 35 years ago, and says damping still matters with planar headphones. Head-Fi, Dec 2018
• 2019-04-05Watts lists milestones in reducing the dominance effect: pulse array (1995), WTA with DAC64 (1999), Hugo (2014) and the M scaler (2016). Head-Fi, Apr 2019
• 2019-08-01Watts says better transients make tempo seem faster while less dominance effect makes it seem slower; an M Scaler on Qutest mostly reduces dominance, sounding more measured. Head-Fi, Aug 2019
• 2019-10-14Watts says all his WTA filters include overload headroom for Gibbs and inter-sample overshoot, but the changes observed have many subtle causes affecting instrument separation. needs context Head-Fi, Oct 2019
• 2019-12-19Watts says the brain derives bass pitch from transients' higher harmonics; psychoacoustic tests removing transients make bass lines hard to follow and piano and trumpet hard to distinguish. Passion for Sound 5:28
• 2019-12-19Watts says each increase improved timbre variation, instrument separation, focus and bass definition, and he will keep going until he can no longer hear a change. needs context Passion for Sound 22:50
• 2020-01-02Watts says the 4 microsecond figure comes from neuron probes in anesthetized cats, but nobody knows how the brain separates instruments, which is a different matter. Passion for Sound 2:05
• 2020-01-02Watts says noise rising with a saxophone's level cannot be separated from it by the brain, adding bright noise that makes a warm saxophone sound artificially bright. Passion for Sound 8:07
• 2020-01-02Watts says modulation noise from saxophone and piano is spectrally identical, giving the brain four signals instead of two, merging the instruments and degrading separation and focus. Passion for Sound 8:51
• 2020-01-02Watts says reducing measurable noise floor modulation makes timbre richer, smoother and warmer and separation more solid, and that all DACs other than his create measurable modulation. Passion for Sound 9:36
• 2020-03-27Watts says the M scaler gives a natural sense of flow and less fatigue because loud instruments no longer modulate transient timing, about 10 times more accurate than DAVE alone. Head-Fi, Mar 2020
• 2020-06-25Watts says he assesses designs by how much variation he hears in timbre, tempo, pitch, placement and depth, since we cannot know how recordings were made. Part-Time Audiophile 13:55
• 2021-04-02Watts says ferrites and inductors in the analog path cause level-dependent phase shift and hysteresis that upset transient timing, and a noisy M scaler FPGA inside a DAC is unwise. Head-Fi, Apr 2021
• 2021-05-04Watts says audible changes need a science-based explanation, citing ADC-project sample rate converter tests (aliasing from -200 to below -350 dB) his son heard blind, and M scaler tempo perception. Head-Fi, May 2021
• 2021-09-09Watts says the M Scaler improves tempo, pitch, timbre and separation, while WTA filtering above 16FS has so far only improved clarity, soundstage and starting and stopping of notes. Head-Fi, Sep 2021
• 2022-01-13Watts explains tempo perception depends on note starts and stops; timing modulation harms separation so the loudest instrument dominates; headphone sensitivity is rated at 1mW while volume is voltage. Head-Fi, Jan 2022
• 2022-01-31Watts says noise floor modulation impairs instrument separation and timbre; his DACs including Mojo 2 and Mojo show none measurably, unlike all others; the third factor is transients. Darko.Audio 8:26
• 2022-01-31Watts says conventional filters misjudge what happens between samples, so transients arrive early or late, modulated by past and future instruments, blurring pitch, timbre and separation. Darko.Audio 10:12
• 2022-01-31Watts says transients modulated by other instruments confuse the brain so it cannot separate instruments, and sums up the three factors that differentiate a Chord DAC. Darko.Audio 11:02
• 2022-01-31Watts says inner detail and separation are easier on headphones; he tests timbre variation, separation and focus, and depth, likening depth to hearing a distant cathedral organ. Darko.Audio 31:09
• 2022-03-19Watts lists the variations he wants reproduced (timbre, space, dynamics, pace, separation, instrument power) and says reproduced audio quashes loud instruments and inflates delicate ones. MFG Audio Reviews 3:33
• 2022-03-19Watts says the brain fuses modulated noise with the instrument, so a warm saxophone sounds bright and hard, and noise from two instruments mixes and confuses the brain. MFG Audio Reviews 6:45
• 2022-03-19Watts says noise floor modulation blurs sounds together and makes warm things bright, and is audible well below measurable levels, so he publishes claims about measurable noise floor modulation. MFG Audio Reviews 7:30
• 2022-03-19Watts says the brain perceives bass pitch, left-right location, timbre and note starts from transients, citing psychoacoustic tests where removing transients makes piano and trumpet indistinguishable. MFG Audio Reviews 16:12
• 2022-03-19Watts says transients come out early or late depending on past and future signal, so instruments modulate each other's timing and the brain cannot separate them. MFG Audio Reviews 17:42
• 2022-03-19Watts says more accurate transient reconstruction gives better bass pitch, location, timbre variation, separation and focus, and no listening fatigue, letting him listen for ten hours. MFG Audio Reviews 23:36
• 2022-04-26Watts says pitch, timbre variation, bass definition, instrument separation and focus depend on accurate transient timing, and timing errors confuse the brain and reduce emotional engagement. Audio Force 9:09
• 2022-08-19Watts says timbre perception depends on starting transients, citing tests where piano and trumpet are hard to identify without them, so transients modulated by other instruments degrade timbre. AVstore 32:29
• 2022-08-19Watts introduces instrument separation and focus: live, a sax sounds dark and rich and a trumpet bright, but reproduced audio makes the trumpet less bright and the sax brighter. AVstore 33:23
• 2022-08-19Watts says this muddling of timbre variation is largely due to inaccurate transient reconstruction, and that the loudest instrument dominates so quieter ones are hard to follow. AVstore 34:09
• 2022-08-19Watts says hearing a quiet background instrument and a loud, powerful one as tangible, separate things is really important. AVstore 34:46
• 2022-08-19Watts says inside the filter the trumpet's and sax's transients modulate one another, degrading perception of each instrument, so transient timing reconstruction matters for separation. AVstore 35:11
• 2022-08-19Watts says separation and focus are musically crucial though less obvious than detail, and when the brain struggles to make sense of music the result is listening fatigue. AVstore 36:36
• 2022-09-18Watts says most people hear a substantial A-B difference with the M Scaler, but its real benefits are musical: timbre variation, pitch discrimination and more enjoyment of music. The Source AV 6:06
• 2023-01-24Watts says transducers change sound quantitatively but DAC/amps qualitatively, and musicality comes from portraying variation in dynamics, timbre, note starts and stops, and separation. Head-Fi, Jan 2023
• 2023-02-04Watts says noise floor modulation affects timbre perception, and that emotional involvement depends on variation, in space and in timbre, such as bright and dark instruments heard together. Dusty Audio 29:12
• 2023-02-04Watts says with two instruments the brain cannot assign modulated noise to either, blurring them and degrading instrument separation and focus. Dusty Audio 33:06
• 2023-02-04Watts says psychoacoustic tests show that removing transients makes piano and trumpet hard to tell apart, so transients are used to perceive timbre. Dusty Audio 36:12
• 2023-02-04Watts says bass pitch is perceived from the pluck transient, and going to 1000 taps improved bass pitch, timbre variation and the starting and stopping of notes. Dusty Audio 41:22
• 2023-02-05Watts lists further criteria: timbre variation, variation in space, and whether tiny instruments stay in focus against large ones when the sound gets busy. Soundnews 8:50
• 2023-03-28Watts says degraded transient timing harms timbre variation, separation, focus, pitch and the starting and stopping of notes, noting he used PWM DACs in low-cost chip designs. The Headphone Show 32:45
• 2023-09-19Watts describes a Verilog soft-clip module producing pure second harmonic, saying added second harmonic damages separation and focus and thickens bass, and he dislikes adding distortion. Head-Fi, Sep 2023
• 2023-10-01Watts says warmth involves several factors including timbre variation: rich instruments such as a saxophone should sound rich and soft, bright ones should grab you. The Source AV 29:23
• 2023-10-01Watts says current technology can portray warmth correctly, so a saxophone sounds like a saxophone. The Source AV 30:24
• 2023-12-22Watts posts updated seminar slides on transients and interpolation filters and explains instrument separation and focus as hearing a quiet instrument in the mix. Head-Fi, Dec 2023
• 2024-03-20Watts says noise floor modulation adds noise that tracks the saxophone, which the brain cannot separate from it, so the saxophone's timbre sounds brighter than it should. MFG Audio Reviews 10:02
• 2024-03-20Watts says with saxophone and piano together noise floor modulation adds noise tracking each instrument plus a mixed product, confusing the brain's job of separating sounds into entities. MFG Audio Reviews 10:47
• 2024-03-20Watts says the mixed noise degrades instrument separation and focus, defining focus as a quiet instrument keeping its presence when a loud instrument comes in. MFG Audio Reviews 11:36
• 2024-03-20Watts says with noise floor modulation quiet instruments are swamped by loud ones; with none, quiet instruments stay audible, as with live jazz without a PA. MFG Audio Reviews 12:30
• 2024-03-20Watts says reducing random RF noise improves separation and focus and sounds quite a lot warmer and softer; some prefer noise floor modulation because it sounds etched and artificially enhanced. MFG Audio Reviews 13:01
• 2024-03-20Watts says removing noise floor modulation keeps quiet instruments in focus, giving real transparency, and that it causes listening fatigue after about half an hour as the brain struggles. MFG Audio Reviews 14:45
• 2024-05-16Watts attributes what the interviewer heard to transients: the brain, not the ears, uses transient timing to separate sounds into entities, place them in space and judge timbre. ConvinceMeAudio 4:54
• 2024-05-16Watts says without transients a piano and trumpet sound alike, the brain derives bass pitch from transients because the cochlea cannot, and CD samples are 22 microseconds apart. ConvinceMeAudio 5:36
• 2024-05-16Watts says limited taps make transients shift early or late depending on surrounding transients, so the brain loses separation, timbre, location and the starting and stopping of notes. ConvinceMeAudio 6:51
• 2024-05-16Watts says reconstructed transients come slightly early or late, constantly shifting, which confuses the brain, since it uses transient timing for timbre, pitch, separation and placement. The Speaker Shack 1:10
• 2024-05-16Watts defines focus: keeping track of a quiet instrument as a crescendo builds; normal digital loses it, while with Quartet quiet instruments stay clearer under loud ones. The Speaker Shack 6:27
• 2024-05-16Watts says with that separation powerful instruments hit hard, and a trumpet heard close up live should hit you like an axe. The Speaker Shack 7:14
• 2024-05-16Watts says reproduced audio is poor at instrument power and tracking quiet background players, and Quartet taught him how important timing information is for both. The Speaker Shack 7:31
• 2024-05-17Watts says reducing noise improves sound markedly, and that scaling is about transient timing, which the brain uses to separate instruments, perceive timbre and hear notes start and stop. AVstore 2:08
• 2024-05-17Watts says the result is blurred instruments, less timbre variation, poorer pitch especially in bass, and artificially soft starting and stopping of notes. needs context AVstore 3:43
• 2024-05-17Watts defines musicality as being emotional when listening and says it depends on pitch, starting and stopping of notes, and hearing each instrument separately and in focus. AVstore 4:02
• 2024-07-12Watts cites studies where removing transients made double bass pitch impossible to follow and trumpet and piano hard to tell apart; transients also give tempo and note starts and stops. HIFICLUB 5:53
• 2024-07-12Watts says the original recording is unknowable (microphones, cables, desk, EQ, compression, reverb), so he judges by variation: timbre, instrument separation and focus. HIFICLUB 16:20
• 2024-07-12Watts explains focus as hearing a quiet background instrument when a loud trumpet enters, says good focus reduces listening fatigue, and cites following double bass pitch. HIFICLUB 17:20
• 2024-07-12Watts says the brain cannot separate the modulated noise from the instrument, so a saxophone sounds too bright, and two instruments' noise modulation mixes together. HIFICLUB 32:49
• 2024-07-12Watts says noise floor modulation degrades timbre and the brain's ability to separate instruments, making the brain work harder. HIFICLUB 33:42
• 2024-08-01Watts introduces the interpolation filter's transient accuracy and says the brain uses transient timing to locate and separate instruments, recognize timbre, and hear notes start and stop. Audiophilesdoteu 3:53
• 2024-08-01Watts says transients also set low-frequency pitch; ordinary interpolation filters shift transient timing back and forth, degrading separation, timbre and soundstage, which FPGA power and his WTA filter improve. Audiophilesdoteu 4:40
• 2024-09-29Watts says Quartet reconstructs transient timing more accurately, aiding timbre and instrument separation; digital mis-times transients, only the M Scaler approach recovers them, and it put DAVE in a new game. The Source AV 15:46
• 2025-02-17Watts says filter errors make transients early or late, modulated by other instruments, confusing the brain so separation, timbral variation, location, bass pitch and note starts and stops suffer. audio-2G 6:13
• 2025-02-17Watts says he makes his own recordings and judges improvements by timbre, pitch, separation, focus and soundstage: greater variation, such as bright instruments sounding brighter, signals a fundamental improvement. audio-2G 8:58
• 2025-05-12Watts says timbre perception depends on transients, citing psychoacoustic experiments where removing transients from trumpet and piano made the instruments hard to identify. Audiophile Junkie 1:24
• 2025-09-14Watts says accurate transients remove a mechanical quality and reveal musicians' timing interplay as instruments are better focused; some hear little difference with the M Scaler, others find it essential. The Source AV 16:52
• 2026-03-17Watts says a DAC must rebuild a continuous waveform with accurate transient timing, which improves timbre, separation, location and pitch, but the filters needed enormous processing impossible in the 1980s. ecoustics 2:18
• 2026-03-17Watts says reproduction loses timbre variation, so trumpets sound less bright and saxophones brighter than they should, and instruments cannot be located accurately; he aims to reconstruct the acoustic event. ecoustics 18:08
• 2026-03-17Watts says noise tracking a saxophone makes it sound bright instead of rich and smooth, because the brain cannot separate the distortion from the instrument's timbre. ecoustics 59:38
• 2026-03-17Watts says with piano and saxophone together, intermodulation produces noise mixing both instruments, making it harder for the brain to separate them. ecoustics 1:00:25
• 2026-03-17Watts says reducing RF noise improves timbre and instrument separation, and that noise floor modulation however small damages separation because the brain uses correlation. ecoustics 1:01:20
• 2026-03-24Watts says Blackbird WTA massively improves pitch, timbre, separation and location, especially depth, and a quiet background instrument is no longer swamped when a loud one enters. Audio Force 15:32
• 2026-05-03Watts says the brain uses transient timing to locate instruments left to right, judge depth, form timbre and calculate low-frequency pitch, which the ear resolves poorly. Audio Force 6:04
• 2026-05-03Watts says each doubling of taps halves the error, improving location, separation, timbre and low-frequency pitch, and that emotional engagement with music matters most. Audio Force 9:10
• 2026-05-03Watts says the saxophone then sounds brighter and artificial; timbre is also upset by transient timing, a technically different problem from supply-induced noise floor modulation. Audio Force 11:27
• 2026-05-03Watts says noise floor modulation makes a saxophone brighter, and a saxophone and piano together create joint modulation noise, so the brain cannot separate the two instruments. Audio Force 13:05
• 2026-05-03Watts says noise floor modulation degrades instrument separation and causes listening fatigue, and is perceivable however small, even when impossible to measure. Audio Force 13:50
• 2026-05-03Watts says Quartet (transcribed 'Cortax') has no measurable noise floor modulation while all other DACs, at any price, do, so separation and timbre suffer less with Chord DACs. Audio Force 14:34
• 2026-10-02Watts says the brain uses transient timing to infer bass pitch, locate and separate instruments, and judge timbre; removing transients made a trumpet hard to tell from a piano. HiFi Buys 18:34
• 2026-10-02Watts says much of an instrument's timbre lies in its transients, and introduces sampling theory, proved using a sinc function. HiFi Buys 19:16
• 2026-10-02Watts says upset transient timing degrades instrument separation, timbre, low-frequency pitch and depth, and his goal is the emotional involvement of live unamplified music. HiFi Buys 27:40
• 2026-10-02Watts says emotional testing is the ultimate test but rarely works A/B, so he uses test tracks for specific factors such as timbre variation and soundstage width and depth. HiFi Buys 45:32
• 2026-10-02Watts says for instrument separation he listens for whether a quiet background instrument gets swamped when a loud instrument plays. HiFi Buys 46:18
• 2026-10-02Watts says focus is hearing subtle transient details such as a guitarist's plucking, related to but distinct from instrument separation, and linked with clarity. HiFi Buys 46:47
• 2026-10-02Watts says clarity differs from transparency; he listens for variation in timbre, pitch and tempo, which digital can make sound mechanical and disjointed. HiFi Buys 47:22
• 2026-10-02Watts says a saxophone should sound richer and smoother while bright instruments sound brighter, and distortions can create an artificial, analytical sense of transparency. HiFi Buys 49:43
• 2026-10-02Watts says a saxophone and trumpet each create their own noise floor modulation, so the noise floor becomes a hybrid of both that confuses the brain. HiFi Buys 55:56
• 2026-10-02Watts says this noise floor modulation degrades the ability to discriminate the saxophone and trumpet as separate entities. HiFi Buys 56:43
• 2026-10-02Watts says NFM of a couple of dB on a -160 dB noise floor affects timbre and instrument separation; in listening tests you cannot hear it but you perceive it. HiFi Buys 56:59
• 2026-10-11Watts says an ADC has a DAC in its feedback loop; the surprise was far more accurate pitch of female vocalists than pro ADCs give, which he attributes to aliasing. Distorsiuni Interioare 12:51
• 2026-10-11Watts says aliasing errors are not harmonically related to the signal, confuse the brain's pitch tracking and degrade transient timing; Quartet eliminates aliasing unlike standard pro ADCs. Distorsiuni Interioare 13:35
• 2026-10-14Watts lists his criteria: greater timbre variation (warmer sax, brighter trumpet), more accurate starting and stopping of notes, consistent instrument separation, each attribute assessed independently. Part-Time Audiophile 8:21
• 2026-10-14Watts describes a piano hammer's burst of white noise turning into string vibration as part of the transient, saying much timbre comes from transients, which are psychoacoustically essential. Part-Time Audiophile 17:02
• 2026-10-14Watts says the brain relies on transient timing for low-frequency pitch, left-right and depth location, timbre, and telling whether one or two instruments are playing. Part-Time Audiophile 19:23
• 2026-10-14Watts says degraded transient timing makes timbre, pitch, location and separation hard to perceive, causing listening fatigue and making emotional engagement harder. Part-Time Audiophile 20:12
• 2026-10-14Watts says a delta-sigma ADC is mathematically a DAC with analog integrators, so pulse array benefits apply: lower noise floor modulation, better separation, accuracy to a -301 dB signal. Part-Time Audiophile 54:50
• 2026-10-14Watts says the singer sounds out of tune on one ADC (transcribed 'Pro ADC') but in tune on the pulse array ADC, a pitch error indicating transient timing problems. Part-Time Audiophile 58:34
• 2026-10-17Watts says the female vocalist's pitch reproduction differed greatly: she sounded out of tune on the commercial ADC and in tune on the Quartet ADC. article, Oct 2026
• 2026-10-17Watts says the vocalist's voice and pitch are wrong on the first playback and right on the second, from exactly the same tape. article, Oct 2026
• 2026-10-17Watts lists transient speed, instruments leaping from dense mixes, timbre variation, soundstage, unpicking many instruments, natural flow, and emotion as improvements, noting listener dependence. article, Oct 2026