All good then. Now you know.
No, I don’t “know”. I listen to music a lot. I am very choosy about the gear I buy and I am always bargain hunting on a budget. I am not an engineer but I understand science theory and experimental design and have built speakers and rebuilt them and rebuilt them again, and have assembled a number of cables with different basic components. I optimize selection of parts based certain assumptions, some rudimentary measurements, and ultimately by ear. I am aware of the possibility of bias, but when I am working with different components that all cost roughly the same, there is no expectation that one combination of parts will sound better or worse than another. I build em, I measure em, and I listen.
I also have recent experience with seven different DACs in my systems. At least three of them have been measured and reviewed by Amir here: a standing panther with a soccer ball, and two sitting panthers. One of the sitting panther DACs sounds pretty good, until I replace it with the other sitting panther or the soccer ball panther DACs, both of which I like listening to better. My preference for those DACs is stable and independent of the weather, what I ate recently, how much sleep I had the night before, or whether I am happy, mad or sad. This perceived difference is repeatable. All three of these DACs would be considered audibly transparent by ASR convention as I understand it (SINAD >=89). So why do I like those two DACs better? I have not tried some of the new crop of very inexpensive DACs that have ridiculously good measurements, but I plan to so I can compare them with the DACs I already have that I really like.
I have read multiple posts in this thread about how difficult well executed blind listening tests are, and I believe it. I have read about attempts to measure listener sensitivity to changes in hifi gear, and I have not been bowled over with their overall design - because quality work with human subjects is hard. For evaluating subtle effects of different hifi gear, it might require particular rigor: quality power supply, electronics and transducers, a good listening environment, careful positioning of the listener in that environment (sweet spot), careful level matching, time to acclimate to the sound of the system and the components, and replication over multiple days to average a subject’s observations, and finally sampling multiple subjects. I recently conducted a blind test of some cables with another music lover, and sitting in the listening sweet spot they could easily discern the difference between several different wires (without knowing anything about the wires or their relative costs), and they had specific preferences. In this case, my sighted observations matched their blind observations. I am older and do not pretend to have golden ears, but I find it difficult to believe others cannot hear repeatable differences between different DACs or other quality components of dramatically different designs that all measure reasonably well (speakers excluded because I think/hope there is no disagreement that transducers of different design should sound different).
So, no, I don’t “know”. It would be wonderful if someone could post links to the studies mentioned but not cited in this thread done with human subjects and statistical and design rigor that fail to reject the null hypothesis that there is no perception of difference in high quality stereo systems between different DACs of radically different designs that meet instrument measured performance standards considered “transparent” to human hearing.
Thanks much,
kn
Never mind the constant brain washing and peer pressure of the audiophile community. Leaving a cult is never easy.
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