My take on the review.
RW says he
did not read the review at the start of the vid.
He is lying though as further down when something in the comments and review itself was mentioned
he knew directly what a specific measurement was about. This includes the hassle about the
-300dB thingy.
About the -300dB thingy. What's funny is that RW explains the dither (which cannot be turned off) and is at 24 bit level (has to be for 24 bit capable DACs) so that noise will be far, far, far, far bigger than the 'computed -300dB signal level changes.
He still claims he can 'somehow and inexplicable' hear this. Not even counting the random noise in the electronics, (recording and reproduction as well as acoustic noise in a room and headphone). He can 'hear' it because he KNOWS what signal he is listening to.|
What RW or some golden eared listener should do is a blind test and get a really high score on that. Will never happen.
The -300dB matters claim by RW is bogus ... of course ... he or some of his followers should prove it (using DCA stealth obviously).
About
tonality. I think
RW is completely correct on this. Tonality is frequency response AND time response related.
Not only FR and not only time response.
What would be really interesting to see if RW's circuit is really that much better is the following setup.
requires the Hugo2 + M-scaler and regular DAC (which does not have the
D70s incompatibility issue)
That D70s issue was NOT mentioned in the video which is odd. RW did clearly state that the M-scaler
should only be used on Chord DACs (why mention this when he did not read the review and comments? Why not read such a review anyway as the designer ?)
Anyway... record the analog output with music and compare the output of the regular DAC vs upsampled using M-scaler vs upsampled using SW and have those files scrutinized by
@pkane .
Maybe the A20d ?? would be great to test this with the M-scaler but sadly probably won't do much more than 192kHz at best with SPDIF or Toslink.
Too much work would be going into that so is probably not going to happen. It could clearly show the 'timing' thing difference. Thinking about this... phase shifts would be shown as amplitude differences (
@pkane ?)
Amir... you and all other ASR members (aside from Chord owners obviously).... you guys are
not listening. You only look at plots. It must be so as RW tells you it is so.
Default line of thinking in the audiophool community.
It's funny how recordings in 44.1 are 'perfect' (despite real world ADC, filtering, DSP, mastering) and can only be correctly reproduced with a RWA filter and all other DACs can not. But... RW made a recording himself and witnessed first hand what the challenges of mic placement and listener position as well as 2 different room effects are.
So yeah... recording matters but just like the MQA story... it can be brought back to what originally was ..
In the end I agree about the tonality thing RW touched and suspect most ASR members know this.
That said.. this is more of a transducer/acoustics issue than the electronics IMHO.
Freely admitting that RW filter response despite the steep roll-off is very 'sharp' and arguably better than what most other DACs produce.
Audibility needs testing (possible with 192kHz and higher capable DACs or DSD) perhaps.
Would 'complete' the set of measurements if the impulse response (and or square waves) were measured by
@amirm but requires a lot of extra effort ?