So a brief proposal for test structure. Feel free to provide suggestions for alteration.
- I'll do the test at a friend of mine in London's house.
- Dac will feed preamp (holo serene), preamp will feed two amplifiers simultaneously (both balanced) both amplifiers will be connected to a switch, the output of the switch will feed the headphones and an ADI-2 Pro FS R ADC in parallel so that a live recording can be taken to demonstrate there is no channel swapping or vol mismatch. If volume needs to be adjusted it will be done on the preamp itself which will obviously adjust both. I can also play a quick 1khz sine for each run and switch back and forth for a couple seconds to show that the vol is identical.
- Camera 1 will be on my head similar to in my reviews
- Camera 2 will be on the setup itself so that people can see what's being changed there. Interconnects and everything other than the switch will be hidden from my own view so I do not know which is which.
- Between each run I will leave the room, and my friend will use a coin flip app (which will be shown on camera 2) to choose which way around to connect the two amps. (he will always unplug and replug each run even if its the same config as previous run just to ensure the time between runs is even and there is no possible giveaway that nothing was changed)
- I'll pick a handful of tracks I know well ahead of time to use.
- I'll use the switch to flip back and forth between the two amps and choose which I think is the Magnius.
- Will aim to do 30 runs to be thorough, p-value of 0.05 to be considered a pass
- If after all this there is doubt then we can set up a time to repeat the test and have someone from the forum present.
- Everything will be recorded in one continuous take. Final uploaded video to YouTube I'll edit/speed up parts where needed to make it more watchable but will provide a copy of the original raw unedited videos and audio recordings in the description and in here.
I'd prefer to keep my face out of the video itself, but I don't think that affects anything and if we do a 2nd repeat with an observer that will alleviate any concerns anyway.
Dac used will probably be holo may just cause I'm most familiar with it. But dac choice shouldn't matter I don't think.
Amps used will be schiit Magnius with 2nd amp TBD. I'd quite like to use the benchmark AHB2 if
@amirm would be happy with it as it's my daily driver so again I'm quite familiar with it. Not technically a headphone amp but with the sinad and noise floor specs it should be fine.
If not though I can select something else.