Testing Equipment
Posted on | May 27, 2008 |
So, keeping on with my DAC testing post, I’ll clarify a bit why I listened to what I did for testing. First, I don’t have a lot of free time (despite what you may think by seeing daily blog posts), so I wanted to compare the Devilsound DAC against my RME/Lavry DAC in an hour or so.
There are many people who take the technical route when testing, using tone generators and graphic analyzers. This stuff can be very helpful and revealing, but (IMO) is best as a backup to verify what you believe you’re hearing.
I think that using what you would consider to be a great recording can be as revealing and useful as any test. Simply because there are many things that test well but don’t sound so great. Conversely, there are a lot of things that sound good but don’t technically test well.
The middle ground is to use musical tests like what you’ll find on the Stereophile Test CD series, which include sounds organically generated but produce a sort of test-like result in their ability to show system’s flaws by exposing their limitations.
Yet while real-life tests can reveal what electronically generated test have a harder time at, real music in a real space is the only thing that has depth and dimension that can be compared from instrument to instrument: like how timpani and cellos play against each other, and how glockenspiel notes will decay after they’ve been struck. And our ears are much more sensitive to these things since we’ve heard them before.
So, for this reason, with a short amount of time to devote to comparitivie listening, I put on David Chesky’s Area 31. I’m sure there are other tests that can reveal different things, but an amazing recording of world-class musicians in a great concert hall gives one a sense of musical realism that, as a package, is hard to beat.
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From Ohm to Om reflects the opinions of mastering engineer Paul Abbott, owner of San Diego's ZenMastering.
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