Thank you for the link.
Just to make my position clear, I do NOT believe that the DACs, in general, have readily audible differences. BUT the reason I think it's safe to say that is NOT based on measurements, per se, but rather based on quite a few blind listening experiment.
That being said, I'm a little concerned that you've used a post on an internet forum as your "reference" for why you believe you can rely solely on measurements to determine whether two DACS will sound identical But as before, I'll humor you.
1) In the post you linked, the forum poster/author attempted to establish that the dynamic range measurement required to establish transparency was -96dbfs. The poster pointed out that the Benchmark DAC1 USB does NOT meet the -96dbfs criterion. So solely based on the DR measurements of the Benchmark DAC1 USB, would you be saying that it is NOT transparent? If not how do you reconcile this?
2) In the post you linked, the forum poster/author attempted to establish that the frequency response deviations of +/- 0.5dB are not audible, and HIS reference for this was another internet poster named "NwAvGuy" who gave an online opinion. Is this level of evidence (internet poster quoting another internet poster) really compelling to you? (I mean it's better than tiktok, but c'mon).
...and I'm just getting warmed up here.
Well let's be clear on that. So far, there have been quite a few descriptions of blind listening tests where listeners were unable to distinguish between the tested DACs. And again, this is why it's probably safe to assume that similarly designed DACs with similar measurements are also audibly indistinguishable. HOWEVER, what these listening tests do NOT do is establish which individual measurements and at which specific thresholds will guarantee inaudibility. What these experiments DO do is create an experience base, by which we can say that "these groups of DACs were all audibly transparent in listening tests, and these were the measured characteristics of each of them" and make an assumption (it's an assumption because it has not been empirically proven), that other DACs that have similar measurements are also audibly transparent. But it's still an assumption. The measurements don't prove anything, they are simply a heuristic shortcut for us to assume that a DAC is transparent without having to perform the laborious blind listening tests. And that's how applied science works.
As an aside, let me politely remind folks that sometimes engineers get it wrong when it comes to interpreting how audio equipment will "sound" based on measurements - and this was the case where the prominent and respected audio engineers in the late 90's insisted that flat sound power FR was most desirable FR curve in loudspeakers. As a friendly reminder, the Harman group (i.e. Olive) proved them all incorrect in 2004, and they did this not with more measurements, and not with insisting that everyone needed to read the textbooks again, but with an elegant experiment that relied on human subjects reporting their subjective listener impressions. The Harman group effectively demonstrated that: a) sometimes engineers interpret measurements incorrectly because of false assumptions, and b) blinded, controlled listening tests by human beings are still the gold standard if you want to know about how sound quality is perceived.
In other words, there is a role to subjective listening impressions, and measurements do not trump everything else.
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