Considering that basic technical measuring systems (microphones) offer more resolution than any human being can perceive, and the loudspeaker actually being the weak link in the chain, along with the fact that DACs are a solved problem, it’s surprisingly unsurprising that DCS is selling an ugly pile of useless, over-engineered, crazily expensive boxes.
You are making the mistake of conflating electronic measurements with acoustic measurements. If our ears heard RF signals that might be a different question, but at audio frequencies, there are no 3dimensional fields we need to concern ourself with, it is a question of a languidly (in electronics terms anyway) wiggling voltage across two pins. If something of audible interest cannot be measured relatively straightforwardly with modern instrumentation, no one has made a convincing proposal for what this could be in the decades I’ve been reading such discussions. There is of course the question of what kind of small measured differences could still be discerned in a statistically meaningful way, but we're dealing with absolute marginalia here, not the day-and-night differences people wax lyrical about in subjective DAC reviews and which presumably motivate them to drop new-car money on audio converters. There’s simply nowhere for a significant difference to hide. If perhaps you're a musician with some interest in home recording, think about what kind of DSP you'd have to add to alter "soundstage" purely in the signal domain, but without dramatically changing the waveform in a trivially measurable way - personally, I'm at a loss. With DACs you’re not even dealing with the vagaries of difficult loudspeaker loads - they really have pretty simple job.
No it isn’t
Yes, or at best disingenuous.
The thing with a preamp is it is easy to measure precisely what it does to the signal.
1000 x
In general simple electronics don’t do that . But at ASR we seems to assume a sane design of said electronics
Not if it is properly designed. Where properly means "even just barely competent"
Perception happens in our heads, our ears hear.
Likely yes but the Varese has multiple filter options, one of which (F5) starts rolling off around 4Khz and is 1.5dB down at 20Khz.
I don't disagree - but the device does measure superbly well and if you have unlimited amounts of money there's no obstacle to ownership. From that point of view you might as well have the Varese instead of a Topping E30.
Exactly - citation needed.
Yes… but somewhere done the line someone gets told a lie, because surely no-one would pay £400k unless they were told and believed it actually sounded better than any other properly designed dac.
Indeed, but what the science can precisely tell you is whether it is possible for the electronics to influence the sound which with normally engineered electronics is no.
