[Audio_Empire[_2_]]

In article ,
Andrew Haley wrote:

Audio_Empire wrote:
In article ,
Andrew Haley wrote:

Double-blind testing works for everything else, as far as I know. I'm
not going to accept any special pleading (sans really good evidence)
that it may not be applicable to audio. How would you prove such a
thing, anyway?

I don't pretend to know. How do you prove that it DOES work for
audio? Since it usually returns a null result, I'd say such
overwhelmingly one-sided results indicates one of two things: either
everything does sound the same (which my experience tells me is
extremely unlikely), or DBTs aren't good at uncovering differences
in audio gear unless they are extremely gross differences. We
certainly know which of those two outcomes the "strict objectivists"
believe in, but how do we prove which is the real answer?

We can't. It's one of the basic assumptions of the scientific method
that any truth about nature can be discovered by means of systematic
observation and experimentation. (This is the assumption that, for
example, bacteria don't behave differently when they are being
observed in the laboratory from the rest of the time.) Without this
assumption there can be no science.

While that's obvious, the assumption that this methodology extends to
audio where we are dealing with people's perceptions rather than on hard,
repeatable results (such as mixing zinc with hydrochloric acid releases
hydrogen - every time!), is, in my opinion, perhaps an assumption too far.

Here's the thing. I suspect that you could build a specific DAC
decoder box, and swap out the D/A chips in the circuit all day
(Burr-Brown for Audio Devices, for SaberDACs, for Wolfson, etc.) and
all of them would sound, essentially, the same. But there are so
many different ways to design the circuit, even the D/A converter
part - Single DACs in switching mode, separate stereo D/A chips,
differential D/A chips, even dual differential chips and even custom
designs like dCS ring-DACs and MSB Ladder DACs, that there are BOUND
to be differences between the various schemes.

Sure, but audible ones? There's the rub. There's only one way to
find out...

yes, audible ones. Bass performance and soundstage performance are
two performance parameters that I contend are (a) easy to hear in
prolonged listening tests and (b) are greatly affected by design decisions
about DAC configuration, filter design, power supply design, and analog
stage design. And I agree that there is only one way to find out, and I have
my doubts that it's traditional DBT.

Make no mistake here. I've not heard a DAC that sounds "bad" since the
early days of CD (Sony CD-101, anybody?) In fact, sitting here in my home
office listening to streaming radio through my desktop audio system, I'm
using a no-name Chinese 24-bit/192KHz USB DAC that sold for less
than $50 on E-bay, and even though it doesn't sound anywhere near as
good as my DragonFly, it's certainly good enough for the task at hand.
Through my current desktop speakers (Napa Acoustic NA-208s) the music
sounds FINE. BTW, through this system, both the DragonFly and the $50
Chinese DACare indistinguishable, one from another. But on my main
stereo system in my living room, there are vast differences in imaging and
bass performance. The cheap spread doesn't have the depth and it is a
lightweight in the bass performance, but neither of these is very important
in a computer desktop system which has little bass below 55 Hz and to which
pinpoint imaging is just not a priority.