I know that I'm also just zooming in on one sentence now, but it does after all pretty much sum up your post:
Yes, there are individual hearing abilities, and it's also possible to train your hearing. I think most people here acknowledge that, and if they don't, they should. I'm able to pass ABX tests that my mum can't. You can perhaps pass ABX tests that I can't.
However, as far as I know "full audible transparency" does exist for certain things, since there are things that no one in the entire world would be able to hear, such as for example a nasty artifact in a DAC at -140 dB while music is playing with peaks close to 0 dB, even if the music is really loud.
Where the line is between completely inaudible for everyone, inaudible for most people all of the time, and inaudible for most people most of the time is of course a bit blurry, I acknowledge that.
Just to clarify what I said in an earlier post: DACs with distortion at e.g. -120 dB will be more transparent than an amp with distortion at -60 dB. I was talking about threshold of audibility, so in decibles, and I didn't mean that certain types of products (e.g. DACs or amps) will always be fully audibly transparent. Since it's more likely that an amp changes the frequency response than a DAC does, amps as a category will be less audibly transparent than DACs.
Did you by any chance listen to the two files that someone posted, run through two amplifiers - one with more distortion than the other, and if so could you hear a difference?
Can you hear a difference between dac+amp path with 92dB vs. 78dB SINAD? Quite a lot has been said here about “audibility” of SINAD, or existing/non-existing sound differences between amplifiers or DACs. Quite often we forget to evaluate SINAD of the whole audio chain consisting of a DAC, power...
www.audiosciencereview.com
At xiph.org there's a file which has a 1 kHz tone at -105 dB. When I listened to this I had to turn the volume on my amp almost all the way to the max before I could hear
anything, and all the way to the max to hear it at even quite a low volume.
If I had played music at that volume, my speakers would quite surely have blown up!
I can send you a link to this if you like.
I could not imagine that you, Ken, would in any way be able to hear that tone, or a nasty constant buzzing artifact, if it was inserted at that level under regular music with peaks close to 0 dB.
I've already tried something like this myself, taking a really good recording of Mozart's "Lacrimosa" and mixing it with Dark Funeral, which is fast, pounding black metal, at -80 dB, and I couldn't hear the black metal under the Mozart. If you like, I can send you this.
None of this is meant as a personal attack on you, but unfortunately I find that the people who talk the most about individual hearing abitlities and how they've spent years training their hearing to perfection (and maybe they truly have), and often also say that they don't care how something measures, they only care about how something sounds, are often the ones who are the
least willing to actually listen, and
only listen, and thereby back up their claims with an ABX test - instead prefering to go on and on and on, arguing about how they don't need to prove anything to anyone because they know what they heard, and it was so goddamn obvious - so of course they should be able to ace the ABX test in a few minutes. Yet, they don't.
