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The Quest For A Clean SW Signal


Bossobass Dave

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Well guys I just got another major disappointment in the world of electronics.

 

So I bought a PS4 about a week ago and had been using it for Netflix, I finally tried a BR disc and no dice. WTH? Tried a dvd...Black screen. This continues for a while with me getting further aggravated with this brand new piece of equipment. I go online and do a search. Lo and behold there are tons of complaints all over the internet about it. Apparently the damn things won't play video discs unless you switch sources 5x, change some special settings and do a short river dance. I tried every "fix" on the net and none of them worked. The damn thing won't play any video disc I have. It black screens. If I switch video sources like 3 to 5x it will work. This is a brand new unit of what should be one of Sony's flagship money makers. Sony is behind the BR format to begin with! WTF Sony!? How could you screw this up? Did they think "No one actually watches DVD's or BR's on these." "It won't be a big deal."?

 

My 2 PS3's have been tanks from the day I got them and other than the occasional system update annoyance have been trouble free.

I guess that's what I get for assuming that they would get it right with what amounts to their most popular, statement product. WTF. I am pretty sure that I read that it doesn't support 3d BR or CD's either. Really? My PS3 will play almost any disc I put in there but the brand spanking new replacement PS4 with all the new bells and whistles shits the bed when asked to play a frigging DVD of the Lion King?

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I was equivalently pissed that the new xbox won't do 360 games. I didn't buy one due to this exact reason. I am sure there are plenty others that did the same as well....

 

I didn't get one because ...consoles. Ugh! :P

 

Hey don't judge me man!

 

I'm more disappointed in you for it being a dvd. :D:P

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The damn thing won't play any video disc I have. It black screens. If I switch video sources like 3 to 5x it will work. This is a brand new unit of what should be one of Sony's flagship money makers. Sony is behind the BR format to begin with! WTF Sony!? How could you screw this up? Did they think "No one actually watches DVD's or BR's on these." "It won't be a big deal."?

It has got to be that or a "We'll fix it later with firmware, hurry up and push it out" story.  Just insane.  I called Sony's US support team before for a pair of defective studio headphones and got hung up on 3 times by some of Sony's staff who were as chipper as DMV employees, it was a real blast.  Everything seems to be built down to a price these days that makes the equipment almost immediately worthless. 

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I'm more disappointed in you for it being a dvd. :D:P

 

Hey I still have a few DVD's floating around. Mostly kids stuff or movies that are obscure and not on BR. That just happened to be the DVD I grabbed to try after 2 or 3 BR discs didn't work. I still have a VCR. Yeah! That's right.

 

You would think the PS4 thing would be fixed with a firmware update but there are posts about the issue from 2013 on through today about it.

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I use my PS4 as my bluray player connected to my Sherbourn which is notorious for handshake issues and it's never done that to me. All my friends that have one use theirs for blurays too and no problems. Gotta be a lemon man. Take that pos back and get another one.

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If that is the case it could be a common failure or something like that.  My buddie repairs cell phones and he mentioned that the 2nd most common problem with the portable devices he repairs are the charging ports solder joints giving out.  Maybe it's a dodgy contact on the HDMI. 

 

Nah, on second thought I think Ricci is right and it "Shit the bed".  :D

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hey, Brandon...

 

Have you seen this guy Nalthien posting on the 7702 limiting output?

 

http://www.avsforum.com/forum/113-subwoofers-bass-transducers/1939305-psa-v1500-vs-s3000i-my-big-room-challenge-11.html#post33312385

 

Dunno if you or anyone else with a 7702 can verify his problem or if it's just his 7702, but I would sure like to get to the bottom of his issue before pulling the trigger.

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Hey, Brandon...

 

Have you seen this guy Nalthien posting on the 7702 limiting output?

 

http://www.avsforum.com/forum/113-subwoofers-bass-transducers/1939305-psa-v1500-vs-s3000i-my-big-room-challenge-11.html#post33312385

 

Dunno if you or anyone else with a 7702 can verify his problem or if it's just his 7702, but I would sure like to get to the bottom of his issue before pulling the trigger.

 

 

Yep, ive been offering up some suggestions the last two days. I dont know, but I feel like he is doing something wrong. I have personally read +120dB on my ratshack meter and have seen no compression on higher level sweeps but I plan to double check this over the next couple of nights. 

 

Should also be noted that the DTS:X announcement came out today and as we all anticipated, the 8802 is the only one that will receive the update sometime this summer...Bummer....

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Welcome the to the QC Dept of the new millenia: informed customers.  No need to actually test units before shipping, your customers will either be too ignorant to know anything is wrong, or the knowledgeable ones will QC it for you and then you'll have to find a firmware fix....Voila!  Your company can lay off its QC staff in its near entirety, and your bottom line goes up.

 

JSS

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Ugh.  The trouble is that many of these vendors may not have a suitable portal for customers to actually fix those bugs.  That's about what I've heard as far as D&M are concerned, which doesn't give me much hope for getting the likely left-channel pre-ring bug fixed.  That reminds me, I still have the unpleasant task of actually isolating the problem to the AVR.  It's unpleasant because I can't see behind my AVR at all.  I end up using the picture in the manual to figure out where each connector is, and then feeling around to find the correct to find where the cable goes.

 

Because pre-ring artifacts like this are almost always digital and because the problem appears in my measurements from before I installed my OpenDRC-ANs (yes folks, saving measurements taken over time is worth it!), I'm already pretty convinced it's the AVR.  Hmm.  Maybe it will go away if I run the AVR in "pure direct" mode, which is supposed to disengage all the digital processing and send the input straight to the DACs.  Maybe later today.

 

Edit: My Denon AVR is fine.  I surprisingly isolated the problem to the speaker.  The weird thing is that the measured IR exhibits pre-ringing, but that's impossible for a passive speaker to do, so whatever the speaker is doing is actually causing the sine sweep measurement technique to give incorrect results.  I will have to think carefully about how this can happen and if there's any way to avoid measurements being thrown off like this.

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Here's a zoom of my front left and front right impulse responses overlaid to demonstrate what I'm seeing:

post-1549-0-06613100-1428627775_thumb.png

 

In both responses, there is some noise before the sound of the impulse arrives, but note that the left speaker also has an oscillating signal.  Here's what the frequency response looks like (1/48th octave smoothing) when I window only part of the response that appears before the peak:

 

post-1549-0-69233800-1428628334_thumb.png

 

In these frequency response plots, I should see a relatively smooth response, related the noise floor of my measurements.  Notice the problem?  As a consequence, I actually have a significant aberration the in frequency response of my left speaker in that region that's relatively consistent at all my seats.  It's a digital artifact because analog equipment like speakers won't start producing sound in anticipation of signal that hasn't happened yet.  A digital filter, on the other hand, can do this.

 

Edit: not the AVR

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If you suspect your AVR of fuckery, why are you relying on mic'd response? Focus on that thing with some loop thru - square waves, frequency response, THD numbers at problematic frequencies, phase response graphs and get to the bottom of it.

 

By the way, what AVR is this? What is your mic and interface/soundcard you use for tests like this?

 

Regarding the OP, in your previous experience with gear can you vouch for a piece that passes the WCS test?

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If you suspect your AVR of fuckery, why are you relying on mic'd response?  Focus on that thing with some loop thru - square waves, frequency response, THD numbers at problematic frequencies, phase response graphs and get to the bottom of it. 

 

By the way, what AVR is this?  What is your mic and interface/soundcard you use for tests like this? 

 

As regards the OP, in your previous experience with gear can you vouch for a piece that passes the WCS test?

I don't currently have loop-back measurement capability, and in this case, it appears I don't need it.  I thought there was a problem with my left channel tweeter until I saw the pre-ringing in the impulse.  As I said, passive speakers cannot possibly have pre-ringing.  If it weren't for that tell-tale sign, I would definitely need a loop-back measurement to see that it was not a problem in my speaker.

 

This is a Denon-3313CI AVR measured with a UMIK-1.  I would not be surprised if this problem appears on other Denon and Marantz receivers as well.  The problem is isolated to the left channel and was present before I added OpenDRC-AN processing.  That points at the AVR.  I intend to confirm the AVR is at fault by seeing if it disappears with a switch to "Pure Direct" mode, and if that fails, by swapping the left and right pre-outs and confirming that it moves to the right speaker.

 

I can't speak for whether or not this AVR passes maxmercy's WCS test.  This issue is independent of that, but may still be relevant to some.  It's also relevant to the bigger issue of bugs in AVR/processor DSP implementations and the ability to get vendors to do something about them.

 

One more note: going by my historical measurements, I believe the bug was introduced in a new firmware version released some time last year.

 

Edit: not the AVR

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Edit: My Denon AVR is fine.  I surprisingly isolated the problem to the speaker.  The weird thing is that the measured IR exhibits pre-ringing, but that's impossible for a passive speaker to do, so whatever the speaker is doing is actually causing the sine sweep measurement technique to give incorrect results.  I will have to think carefully about how this can happen and if there's any way to avoid measurements being thrown off like this.

 

Umm... what?

 

 

I don't currently have loop-back measurement capability, and in this case, it appears I don't need it.  I thought there was a problem with my left channel tweeter until I saw the pre-ringing in the impulse.  As I said, passive speakers cannot possibly have pre-ringing.

 

Umm... what's this now?

 

This is a Denon-3313CI AVR measured with a UMIK-1.  I would not be surprised if this problem appears on other Denon and Marantz receivers as well.

 

One more note: going by my historical measurements, I believe the bug was introduced in a new firmware version released some time last year.

 

Your historical measurements have left you confused.   Maybe you weren't focusing on the most beneficial kind of measurements.  ;)

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Your historical measurements have left you confused.   Maybe you weren't focusing on the most beneficial kind of measurements.  ;)

I'm somewhat confused to be seeing in a speaker's response.  The only suitable explanation is that the speaker is behaving very non-linearly in that region of frequencies, and while the sine sweep measurement method is very robust against harmonic distortion, the non-linearity exhibited here is different and is making my measurements in that range unreliable.  What it is that happened last year that made my speaker start to misbehave is another question.  For now, I'm not too concerned because the sound quality impact is actually quite minimal, and the tweeter will be easy and inexpensive to replace in any case.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Bossobass,

 

Does the Oppo have the clipping problem you discovered through the HDMI outputs too?  Or just the analog outputs?  We are doing a home theater crawl in KC this coming weekend, and a friend is gong to let me borrow his Oppo 103 to play some mkv and m2ts media clips directly off my network share, vs using a disk.

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When using the Oppo with Hdmi out to a reciever I guess you would want the reciever do do the decoding.

So set the Oppo to passthrough/bitstream and it will not touch the audio stream, and won't cause any issues with clipping etc.

 

However, having a BDP which costs a shitload of money with very nice analogue audio outputs and using HDMI bitstream seems like a waste of money to me.

If one doesn't care much of the build quality and such of the Oppo which I'm guessing is top notch...

This is why it is so sad with this clipping issue, it has very high quality analogue outputs which are rendered almost useless as soon as bass redirection is activated, very sad indeed...

 

Virtually any BDP should handle HDMI bitstream correctly as it is not supposed to do anything with the audio other than simply passing it in encoded form out the HDMI port down to the next device downstream for decoding there...

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