Alright, I’ll take your word on it for now. However, as you mentioned, you were using headphones, which is a completely different scenario, on top of that they’re among the lowest distortion options available.
Taking these outlier factors into account;
- Extremely low distortion headphones
- Much better than average hearing
- A trained listener
-you must also acknowledge that this isn't a concern necessarily relevant for the average enthusiast who listens to speakers in a room.
The Marantz in question would with all likelihood be perfectly transparent to such listeners, as suggested by listening test results.
With that in mind, it’s also important to recognize that 0.0x% THD+N is far from "complete trash."
Sure, as I said.... it depends on the resolution of the speakers and the source material. Some modern day speakers really have quite low distortion.
However I would love to actually test one of these receivers with the speakers I just purchased, because I think I would be able to hear the difference especially with violin related songs.
I have a playlist on Spotify (also Tidal) with a collection of songs that all have different specific elements and tones in the songs, or very low background microdetails which is part of where these differences are heard with higher than normal distortion. Remember that the base distortion is multiplied for every tone. So if you start with high distortion; you can lose alot of accuracy very quickly.
So I can agree that there are likely many scenarios where people don't notice the distortion, mainly due to source material, quality of speakers, and lack of trained listening to details. So technically speaking; the performance of such a 62 SINAD Amp would be sufficient in those scenarios.
I just say that in the world of Hi-Fi; we should be using products with a better resolution as such products do exist and are quite affordable today (maybe not in an AVR, but I am not certain about that market).
Properly controlled and blind right?
Because otherwise - the two events of hearing differences, and seeing measured differences might be (and quite likely are) completely unrelated.
AVR's are used with speakers. And consequently distortion from them becomes much less audible as it is masked by the much higher distortion from the speakers.
Yes, I did controlled and blind with level matched settings from the different sources.
The interesting thing is that once I identified differences and told people what to listen for in a song; they were mostly also able to pick out the differences also while blind.
Sometimes the differences were so big that we could tell the difference even purposely playing with the level in an inverse manner. These details and such are the easiest to pick out on higher frequency tones. They are the ones which are distorted first and the most.
So songs with a well recorded higher note Cymbal, Piano, Violin.... even flute (as in the extremely well recorded album "Night Passages" by Martin Frost) there are parts of songs where in specific a difference can be heard, with microdetails lost (or an entire note being flattened, depending on the severity of the distortion).
In my normal listening though... 90+ SINAD with under 0.4db Linearity deficiency is "fine" usually until I encounter a "problem song" and that usually sends me on a testing spree. So practically speaking; as I work I listen to all devices which have over 105db SINAD, so I don't have to adjust my volume knob 99% of the time (unless I get into a song and start jamming out and turn it up
)!
www.klippel.de
