Yeah, they probably had to change when they put out stuff that measures a lot better for the ASR crowd. Kind of hard to market your well measuring stuff as such, while selling the rest with pure BS. I rather like their current approach of "This was our goal, we think this meets our goal, if you want something else from us, great, if you don't want anything from us, that's fine too."
Let’s start, with this premisse that they don’t sound the same. Now can there be an argument that CDs were mixed and mastered trough converters of the cd era, not the high res 384 k 24 bits oversampling one that may objectively reproduce with “higher fidelity” but higher fidelity than what? if unperfect fidelity was what the mastering engineer was hearing?
the standard measurements we use are actually pretty basic and don't represent all the sound qualities exhibited by equipment designed to play music, there is a false assumption that some have about any (or all) DACs, that they are perfectly replaying the music from a digital recording, very few of us are aware of the inner workings of the conversion topology and the filters deployed by some of the designers that have significant and notable effects on the tone and realism on playback, and are not the same, and some do not sound the same, so much so that some DACs have higher audible fidelity to the original performance that was recorded and none of the standard measurements we use will really show that, very high SINAD for example will not guarantee realism because it does not describe the signal conversion qualities, just the ratio of signal strength to spurious noise and whether the signal is distorted, but not the quality of the conversion of the signal to begin with, which is impacted by the type of DAC circuit and the filtering used on the signal. A lot of DS DACs do sound pretty much the same, differentiated perhaps by higher SINAD measurements but sound the same. Then there are some DACs out there that do sound different but you have to actually get those DACs and listen and compare for yourself otherwise you are just reading their specs and making (false) assumptions that DAC audio is all tuned and processed the same in all DACs.
I just like a bigger volume knob. and if it's heavier, it holds down the peeling veneer on my nightstand better.
Functionally, the main one is that you can mute the preouts with a switch now. so if you have both monitors and headphones, you don't have to turn off the monitors when not using them.
In my DAC reviews, I show filter characteristics. That aside, I measure digital bits getting fully converted to analog. Everything in the DAC is used to do that. Indeed the DAC doesn't know the difference between a test signal or "music." They are all varying digital bits that it converts to equivalent analog values. The device could not be more "dumb" and straightforward than this.
That's less nonsense than saying you can hear -85 db levels of noise.
But does the device handle a 1 kHz tone the same way it handles a complex set of musical signals?
It does. It doesn't know the difference. There is no intelligence in a DAC.
How is this hype? They are literally telling you to try their products and hear them for yourself. If they feel their dacs sound holographic and the competition doesn't, how does that distinguish MB from DS ads that say their dacs do exactly the same thing? You seem to be taking issue with the fact that Schiit produces ad copy. You understand these are money making enterprises, not non-profit academic institutions, do you not?
Do you hear a difference between a Modi 2 with usb and a Aries or a $1000 perfectly measuring ds? The reason I ask is because if measurements are below a certain level you describe the device as subpar. But if you can't hear a difference, what is the shortcoming?
What's wrong with saying "to my eyes the [incorrect] calculations are more correct?" If your eyes distort what they see in the opposite direction of what the calculator miscalculates, you have a correct result.
Do you understand that producers mix and master for the equipment you have, not the equipment which is accurate?
USB-C is absolutely more future proof, in 5 years time there probably won't be much else of older connectors still present on devices.
There it is
......in direct contrast with "not the equipment which is accurate?". Or is a "revealing" set-up not an "accurate" one?
So. much. broscience. Like sorry you're using a lot of pretty words but is there anything to back up the things you say? Do you have an electrical engineering or signal processing background? Or can you quote any literature about the things you claim?
'Nice sounding' audio almost always has deliberate flaws or colourations built in - and then you start to find every recording tends to sound equally 'nice' and there's little to no differentiation between recordings or productions - that's when alarm bells start to ring for me if not others.
