the only information i have regarding spatial location is a comparison made by a military radar specialist who found that his attempts at localizing weren't working nearly as well as his own ears during blind tests. i wasn't particularly impressed with his methods, but it's the only test i could fin...

Gorsnak , that'd nicely explain why post-echo is so much easier for me to detect with headphones. for me it's headphones all the way when i want to listen to something intently, whether for testing purposes, transposing a song or just because i love the music (10 years of piano + saxophone + clarin...

You are partly right anyway: on some things (as you note), instruments are much better than human ears, but on others electronics do not approach the human ear's sensitivity to nuance. Now, if you were worried about reproducing music in a way most suited to humans ' fidelity/enjoyment rather than f...

nope, it's because of masking that all psychoacoustic codecs exploit to either highly-quantize or remove frequencies altogether, if neighbouring bands contain enough power. depending on your lower bands, you can often get away with altering > 16khz data by even larger amounts. this isn't new, it's b...

although this debate is winding down, the human ear is not equal to nor more sensitive than electrical instruments. this has been conclusively proven by lossy audio compression testing, where an overwhelming majority of the population can't pick the difference between two signals that differ by 10+ ...

i'd just like to re-iterate that this fan has been working very nicely for me on an xp-90, and now that my new motherboard has pwm controls i can say the fan exhibits no additional noise when pwm or voltage controlled. not bad for a $2.50 ball-bearing fan. at low pwm levels it's effectively silent f...

there isn't really much else for me to say - if my scientific arguments were wrong the best thing to do would be correct them, instead of passing them off as misguided. i'm really trying hard to understand where you're coming from, it's not matching up with any physics i'm familiar with, but i'm not...

those 'passive' 1u and 2u heatsinks are only passive in the sense that there's no fan attached - they still require huge amounts of air to be shifted through them to adequately cool. 1u/2u servers i've stood near created a fearful amount of noise, which was front/back fans forcing air through the ch...

the number of people sampled is low for population testing, but the people involved were presumably high-end audio enthusiasts, and none of them could tell the difference. having 7 involved people all fail to find a difference is more convincing than having no people at all ever bother to do blind t...

i don't understand.. are you saying abx testing is stupid pseudo-science? or that you agree with the test results which say cable is completely irrelevant to audio fidelity? the first would be mind-blowing to say the least, the second would seem to counter what you've been saying.. ah well, back to ...

i personally couldn't care less what people spend their money on - if they want to drape their walls in quarter-inch lead, pour distilled penguin blubber into their car's gas tank every day or mount their pc inside a 24 karat gold pyramid, more power to them. now if someone starts claiming there are...

a few people have emailed them, the responses vary with whatever mood the person on the other end is. email responses have said april, may and june within the space of a couple weeks so who knows when it'll be out. last i heard the board was being used by oems, retail should follow shortly thereafter.

there are real, measureable ways to increase the fidelity of audio equipment. a lot of audiophile (and yes, i'm bunching the realistic, unrealistic and loony audiophiles together here) gear does no such thing. the real, measureably better parts i applaud and am extremely respectful of the engineerin...

Are you just making this up or do you know what you are talking about? The dielectric constant is the ability of a material to pass current--not absorb or store it. I am not sure exactly what you are getting at here... do you? which other physical constant will determine how much a surrounding mate...

uhoh.. OK. Electricity travels through the cables on the floor, some leaches out. This is stored in the carpet as static electricity (the earlier poster who thinks that carpets do not/cannot do this has apparently never shocked himself when crossing a carpeted room in sox, I guess). This electricity...

yep i've seen that thread, but grayskull isn't the easiest person to get information out of :) shuttle made that enthusiast board on a whim, i don't believe there's even been a decision made about whether it'll be released or not. ati is doing a terrible job convincing motherboard manufacturers to g...

a lot of audio gear hardly draws any power at all. my father had some monstrous speakers back in australia and he told me they only actually used 10 watts or so. all the speakers i have in my house right now draw 4 watts max according to my kill-a-watt, regardless of how loud they're turned up. if a...

i recall this debate many times over at hydrogenaudio.org, and the audiophile side always comes out with the bruises. so much of the gear is completely worthless, and so many of the perceived improvements in sound actually take you further from the sound-as-recorded (i.e. you're moving away from sou...

sapphire should be coming out with a 939 matx board with the ATI chipset, sataII and HD audio IIRC sometime also.. if it has good OC options and good onboard vid then i may finally have to go 64 if you're thinking of the sapphire a56 board (939, matx, ati chipset), i emailed them a while back and t...

well, no ac -> dc conversion can be perfectly efficient, some heat is always created. it's possible to get it up to 95% efficiency or so, but that requires extremely expensive parts. if your psu is 80% efficient and you ask 150 watts from it, you'll have 37 watts of heat appearing that you have to d...

i'd just like to remind anyone using this board that a clockgen has been released for it - check the clockgen homepage for the rs480m2 build. since the onboard clock generator is a bit on the crippled side, the highest value you can choose is 220 mhz. regardless, that's a 10% faster machine for free.

heh this is kind of fun jumping back and forth. anyway in the ocforums thread i picked out the best fans i saw during my australian-retailer search. the titan might be a bit risky, but the other fans generally have little motor noise to speak of but will all require undervolting to reach your desire...

just a side note (from another forum), this pc will be used by someone in a bedroom while another person is sleeping, until all hours of the night. we can assume a typical bedroom in australia will be 20 dba or so, which means a fairly serious quieting job is in order, if the tinkerer so desires. an...

i think the problems are more with tsmc (the actual manufacturer) than nvidia (the gpu designer). both nvidia and ati use tsmc to make many (all?) of their gpus, all ati/nvidia do is the design work. their 110nm cards haven't performed as well as a die-shrink normally would (see 6600, x800xl), and i...

i read on another forum that asetek has delayed the release until june as the factory couldn't meet demand. so it probably won't reach retail until july.

i thought that value could only be set in the bios. i just downloaded nibitor 2.1 and it had an option to edit the temperature threshold value, so that may be your only option. use at your own risk, of course

well cool'n'quiet consists of powernow transitions to lower multipliers/voltages, whereas typical operating system idle loops consist of issuing the hlt instruction to instruct the cpu that nothing important is happening. cool'n'quiet transitions and hlt instructions do different things, and while b...

i don't like it, those numbers look too low. is it a written law that all cpu power is delivered from the aux connector? i know some a64 setups work fine (albiet sub-optimally) when it's not connected, so there must be a system in place to draw cpu power from the main atx plug instead of the aux.

if they're the same ceramic bearings that arctic cooling claims to use in many of its vga card silencers, the noise they make is often complained about on this site. arx claims their ceradyna bearing fans are as quiet as sleeve-bearings while lasting much longer and retaining the noise profile. does...

nidec's beta sl fans are some of the most popular for pc silencers in japan - apparently the motor noise is extremely low, and there are a number of models with interesting characteristics. for example, models which don't spin at all, until a thermistor hits 55 degrees or so at which time the fan sp...