@GoldenOne - Do you believe that DACs have a 'sound'? I ask because your approach to investigating MQA detailed in this thread is presented as being quite scientific and 'objective' in tone, however in your review of the
Soncoz SGD1, you use a lot of 'subjective' terms like 'resolving', 'clinical' and 'cold' to describe the 'sound' of DACs.
Yes I do.
And I understand that on this forum it probably won't be a particularly popular opinion.
I sit a bit in the middle between objectivist and subjectivist.
Hardcore subjectivists who think objective performance doesn't matter are wrong. And I do not believe there is almost ever a reason for buying an objectively BAD product, other than some edge cases where you explicitly want something very coloured.
Schiit bifrost 2 is a good example. It doesn't do great objectively, and subjectively it IS a very coloured dac. But I also found it to be great fun. Warm and slammy and very enjoyable for some genres. But wouldn't choose it as a main DAC as its certainly not 'neutral'.
But I do personally feel that some objectivists make unfair assumptions. Many of the assumptions about what is/isn't audible have surprisingly little evidence behind them. Sometimes only one study, potentially with questionable methodology or subjects used.
I do feel that objective performance is perhaps MORE important than some assume. And that some products with objective performance in a given area well beyond what some may consider "inaudible" can be a benefit.
Hell there is even evidence suggesting that human hearing beats the Fourier uncertainty principle:
https://phys.org/news/2013-02-human-fourier-uncertainty-principle.html#:~:text=The Fourier uncertainty principle states,required to represent the sound.
I've done assisted double-blind tests and have been able to tell the difference between DACs, and even DDC's to statistically significant results (I'll probably do a video on this in future cause I think it could be useful to some).
So this implies either I have golden ear hearing, which I don't believe to be the case, i'm sure i'm quite average though perhaps with the benefit of having a younger ear, or some statistics such as Jitter need more extensive testing to get a truly conclusive idea of what the threshold of audibility is.
A bit of a common issue I find with many studies is that the subjects are not experienced listeners.
I don't think it's unfair to assume that someone who is a mastering engineer, musician, or audiophile, would have better audibility thresholds than the average person. In fact the above article on the Fourier uncertainty principle demonstrates this. Musicians consistently outperformed everyone else in the test.
So I guess in summary. I'd consider myself an objectivist, but I think many other objectivists expectation-bias themselves into being unable to hear a difference between two given devices because they don't expect that X level of the metric they're testing for would be audible.
An ABX test CAN be used to prove a difference exists. But it cannot be used to prove a negative, that one does not exist.
. The only flaw i could find was your stance on so called apodizing filters , the "pre ringing" does not actually happen with music signals it's visible with test signals. It's a common misconception i think our friend Måns @mansr can explain this better than me.
