This is what you're really saying.
We've got gene splicing inside cells going on every day, cell phone coverage of the whole planet, MRI that detects every abnormality in a person's head, radar that tells us the location and intensity of tornados before they hit, GPS that delivers artillery shells to within the area of a car tire, satellites that give us pictures of Mars and the outer planets, all by virtue of measurements done by electronic instruments, but when it comes to audio, measurements done by electronic instruments are inferior to someone's ear, right?
Have I got that right?
Jim
No. I'm saying that the measurement isn't a linear indication of conversion quality.
We agree on some things...
- ADC quality does not determine overall quality of the output material. (Unless a very poor converter is used on material that demands high quality conversion, e.g. a poor computer based soundcard with unbalanced cables for classical etc)
- The differences are small, or at least not large.
- People with lots of time in the game tend to cluster around a couple vendors and share similar sentiments about their sound qualities and determine given their large budgets that such investments are prudent.
So a lot of people will stick on points 1 & 2. And this is understandable. For people who are perfectly content with 1 & 2, there really is no reason to care about the measurement at all really. The higher the number, the more sure you can be all is well and at the very least the engineering is good. But truth be told, if the number isn't in the pits, send it through and move on. $\channel or features guide you to salvation.
It's really point number 3 that people have trouble with, myself included. I just never really bought the idea that these people were being bamboozled. But I also don't think these people would really disagree with points 1 & 2 that much. They might say they feel the investment is worth it and it helps their material, but in the scope of things I think if you craft the argument to them well enough they'd probably concede and agree especially given the fact that lots of people have put money on the table for A\B testing over the years. Now I'm not a huge fan of that anyways because that in itself is a marketing gimmick, but I think it is at least compelling enough for everyone to agree the differences are not large.
But what small differences there are, can be important. I see this with guitar amps. You can do back to back blind tests with high gain amps and it's pretty much just as hard to tell apart amps that play very very different and mix very different as well. Truth be told, these amps to players and listeners alike are different, but a\b testing in general just doesn't work well for this. Comes back to the Pepsi challenge bit and all that. It comes down to the fact that a lot of music production is a game of inches, really. But so is great food and a lot of things in life, tldr the details matter. It's just how much does it matter to what person?
So back to measurement. Am I saying measurement is bad? No. What I'm saying is I think this measurement is more like a binary thing. Put mathematically, I would say it is something like "is said ADC conversion at least Median - 1SD?" And if the answer is yes, you can be assured it will meet requirements 1 & 2. But where I think the measurement falls apart is for people in point #3.
That I think is much more about implementation, gain staging, etc etc. And again, very small differences at the margin here, but I reject the idea that this is merely a bunch of rich guys who are too dumb to realize they're being bamboozled. Instead I think that viewpoint is hubris on the part of underfunded, not particularily motivated engineers or amatuers who simply aren't interested in taking their craft to the bleeding edge. I am not saying people who are unwilling to go this deep are unmotivated. I am saying this point in specific is not a motivation of theirs. And so really, why bother discussing the issue with that engineer? On that point, many studio owners and engineers don't even care about the end product all that much. It is really only a small group of engineers and producers who are fanatical and take things to the very edge that become known for this. People who will try hundreds of mic and cabinet combinations. Spend weeks trying different chains in the drum room etc. It's a different mindset from the person who is bothered by anyone not satisfied at point 1 & 2.
Also, I think many of them have a form of intellectual paranoia, ever worried they might make a bad decision because of some bias, even though the only thing they can really lose in that arrangement is some money until you sell said item and maybe confidence in your judgement. Not really all that big of a deal, but some of these people on these forums treat it like their life would end if they made a decision based on their intuition or less than scrupulus scientific method. At the end of the day, I don't think this is as big as a deal as people make it out to be. Making a decision using your own methodology is not obsolete, just frowned upon in these and similar forums.
Basically I think people are more reliant on these specific measurements and more intellectually paranoid than people in slot 3 are willing to make a subjective decision, and again, I think not through error, just because a lack of a better measurement exists.
Science or scientists often try to quantify subjectively appealing traits and eventually do manage to isolate the things that people find appealing. But often in these niche concerns, such an investigation would be unprofitable. If the way we all achieved erections was by way of "musical ADC conversion," make no mistake, we'd have all the measurements available possible.
Frankly I think the insistence that people are entirely bound by whatever measurements are available and if they use any decision authority on their own they are "idiots" or they are destined to fall for their own biases or audiophiles (pajorative) reeks of intellectual insecurity. So long as everyone is motivated to understand truth and does not willingly reject any attempt to quantify these subjective things, I fail to see the issue.
And in fact, let me personalize this even more. For me, that is Motu828ES in standalone mode doing ADAT vs Burl B2 vs Crane Song HEDD. So let's call it $10 a channel vs $2000 vs $1000 a channel. But wait, not that simple. Crane Song comes with a plugin built in I can't use because I don't use ProTools. I don't want to switch to protools. Don't want to buy a license or a computer built for it etc. Too complicated to compare apples to apples, so let's use the B2... Well.. that has a nice trafo on it people's ears seem to like, and a really high quality attenuator for gain staging... Zuul is $650, and you can get an 1176 for $300 these days... So that's about the same cost as the HEDD.... The closest claim I could outright make 1:1 would be something like a UA2192, which is just a straight up nice chipset converter. And even the stingy guys on this forum agree and very much like the chipset, the famous AK5394.
So really... the argument isn't even anymore about some "huge waste of money to audio quakery" or anything like that, it's just simply a cost\channel issue. Top shelf whisky vs Jim Beam. Put even more on point, I am more warm to the idea of a DAC using a chipset many people are fond of, of an implementation people tend to believe in, that many have a subjective opinion on, than I am interested in the raw SINAR at this point. I don't think that is controversial, honestly.