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He's certainly quite candid about his sighted listening impressions and misuse/lack of use of a DBT when he attempts to sell his products to the technically uninformed on head-fi and elsewhere. His "vaunted engineer" status is absolutely something he plays up to give his thinly veiled sales...

He's a salesman, not an engineer. Not that an engineer couldn't lie to make money, but he's not designing these products.

Excellent points here. Given what I've seen of ifi prodcuts and the comments of certain ifi designers, I've no doubt there may be actual audible differences amongst all DACs they've produced. More broadly, I'm sure some portion of those claiming to hear differences in DACs truly are differences...

In that case your comments make sense, then. I'd caution you might struggle to have meaningful discussions on this forum while eschewing psychoacoustics completely.

Do you believe there is any possibility, any at all, that the difference you hear is perception and not an actual difference in the sound produced at the transducer? Why even come here to tell us about your personal anecdote in the first place? If you can't admit that possibility you will never...

We see this stance repeated ad nauseum, I'm genuinely curious - do you just not believe the brain is involved in interpreting sound pressure that causes our ear drum to vibrate? Do you just not believe in the host of environmental factors that will affect that interpretation?

Of course you are talking about the unknown, you're claiming to hear a difference even when the output does not measure differently. I would love to see your thesis, and I don't need one of my own to support your own claim. We've been waiting a very long time for a single example of one being...

Let's try another angle, what do you think you've contributed here in helping us all gain a better understanding? At best I can see a statement of "there are unknown unknows that you all don't know". Great, that doesn't help us in understanding if that unknown unknown exists. It seems you've...

From (imo) my favorite genre's pinnacle album and artist:

Absolutely, I understood the statement incorrectly. If high gain setting provides the desired volume, use that. Looks like OP has E30 DAC feeding this.

An amp has one purpose and that's to get your headphones/speakers singing as loud as you could want. If you're not happy with the volume you're getting I think you've answered the question already, and should look for something with more juice ;).

As a qualifier I own this product, but the answer is the same for amplifiers of similar power and output impedance; it can drive most any bookshelf speaker you throw at it just fine. It goes far louder than I could ever want with tower speakers dipping into 3-4ohms at ~85 sensitivity: I would...

A serious question of sorts, what realistic criticisms are there against testing such as @pma excellently performed that show a direct comparison between the signal at the analogue output of both DACs? What could possibly be left to discover? Throw out the human element in ABX testing and the...

Please read the question this thread is posing, no one cares about your personal "experience" injected at random.

I think this is much more insidious than the standard "golden ear" who lashes with the same tired tropes. Especially now that the same obfuscation is leaking from iFi product threads.

I think you've described a reasonable argument against homework - for many it is simply an act of completion, not learning or re-enforcement of learning. Of course there is a grey area here, rote practice in some areas like math can be essential in gaining proficiencies required for more...

You're in an enviable position, then ;) You enjoy what you have, so no problems there. Then you have an entire world of speakers that excel "technically" to explore, should you choose (maybe you have, and simply like the Totem best; again, no problem).

Of course not, but it's also not a parameter I would 'forget entirely' when making a purchasing decision on a DAC.

It seems to me your very first comment on this DAC has gone well beyond a simple statement of "I like this thing".

No, what is objected: a.) You did what you did and got the results you got - says you. It is nothing but a story, regardless of content, at present. b.) Your results - what results? Again, we have nothing but a story.