I know there are people out there that think cables affect sound, which is much worse, but there really is no response to something like that, but just to smile and nod. But what about people who talk about DACS as if they were headphone drivers or speakers, and talk about the SOUNDSTAGE, IMAGING, and MIDRANGE of a DAC? I actually don't know what to say to people to not be rude. If you try explaining that a DAC isn't something that actually changes the sound, they accuse you of having "a hard-on for measurements", as if it were the measurements themselves that tell you that DACs don't have a sound. What they don't get though, is that even if we had no equipment to measure distortion or other aspects of sound, still would not have a sound to them. So you try explaining by telling them that when you listen to different DACs using the same headphone and amp, that you cannot tell the difference. "You can't tell the difference between DACS????" "There must be something wrong with your system. You don't have revealing enough upstream and downstream equipment. Either that you haven't "learned" to tell the difference between them." Then you explain that in double-blind studies people are not able to tell the difference between Dacs any better than someone picking random answers. And their response is that the differences are "subtle", and them and other audiophiles who have spent time practicing and learning how to listen properly can hear a difference. "That doesn't sound like a very good way of testing that. Just taking a random group of people who know nothing about audio equipment and asking them to try to find the difference between DACs? Those people haven't yet learned to know the difference!" Then you ask them how they know that they actually hear the difference and it isn't just placebo. ETC.
The problem is that this isn't even an uncommon view. I would say that people who understand there isn't a difference between decently engineered dac (except perhaps small amounts of distortion in the lower end ones that may or may not be audible). Most audiophiles think there is at least a subtle difference between DACS and don't realize that saying the DACS sound different is like saying the portion of a DVD player that takes the 0s and 1s that are read off the disk and converts them into video can make the same DVD "look different" on the same exact TV. It's incredible, but if you want to be friends with audiophiles or even post on an audiophile board, you either have to pretend you agree or somehow remain silent when people talk about this stuff. Like "ohh have you heard the utopias in the chord hugo?? it really makes the mids stand out, but its a warmer dac". The main problem is actually that there is a confusion. They think that we mean that what makes a DAC "objectively good" is a TRANSPARENT DAC, and that we first define a good dac as a transparent DAC and then say that the measurements prove that the DAC is transparent, and therefore it is the better DAC. They think there are other dacs that are not transparent, but rather, color the sound in a good way, and therefore "measure worse" but sound better. This is nothing but a huge confusion. If that were how dacs worked, then I would actually agree with them. What matters most is how something sounds. However that is literally not what DACS do. DACs by nature do not have a sound signature. Saying a DAC has a sound signature is like saying a cable has a sound signature (well I guess if it is a really ****** dac it can have a sound signature of "fuzzy" or whatever dac distortion is, but you get the picture). Problem is, I don't think there will ever be an easy way to educate audiophiles about this, and so the only remedy will be like who the hell knows?
