Audio Science Review Discussion

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761

I absolutely agree, but according to my experience not only the lack of room treatment (resulting in a level of reflexions at the listening position being significantly too high) and the increasingly problematic fashion of pretty empty, high RT60 rooms are contributing to that dilemma to have either a downward-tilted overall response (and ´lame´, ´dull´ sound lacking treble details) or an annoying, harsh sound (due to reflexions and uneven reproduction of direct and indirect sound). The constantly and significantly increasing directivity index of many speakers is contributing to that much more. That is particularly the case with slim speakers combining small or average midrange drivers with waveguide-loaded tweeters, horn tweeters and alike. It seems to be tempting for many developers to opt for an increasing directivity index towards higher frequencies to avoid annoying hiss, harshness and dominant reflexions in the area 2-8K. But that is a solution that comes at a significant cost resulting in many cases in a dull reverb and subjectively lame, murmuring reproduction lacking transient perception, directness and treble detail.

I did not come up with this example to take over their choices as a consumer. It was rather a proof that seriously down-to-earth engineers and acoustic experts rely on subjective sound quality evaluation of speakers, do reliable group experiments and base their choices on rather subjective and non-determinable aspects of reproduction (such as transparency, localization, ambience, depth-of-field, detail resolution, bass character and alike).

I can say from own, vast experience, that this pro/broadcast method of finding a perfect speaker setup in a room is even more attractive for home listeners the more tempting the acoustical environment is.

What recording engineers prefer and what consumers like the most, is according to my experience pretty close to each other. Recording engineers tend to listen at lower SPL (and want full transparency and resolution at these levels) compared to home consumers, while the latter are more attracted by dominant and kicking bass. But despite from these little differences they have surprisingly similar preferences.

The dynamic range between the noise floor in a typical residential building and the desired max SPL for living room reproduction. I personally cannot imagine such a situation in which a 150Hz tone, -115dB below reference signal, is audible.

I do not see a point in ´absolutely silent response´ if the noise originating from the system is anyways several 10dB below audibility or the noisefloor in the room. In my understanding it increasingly looks like measurements and excellent results on a solely technical level are regarded to be goals completely separated from the audio performance. I would not condemn that approach, but it is in my understanding not anyhow useful when it comes to choosing a device for best audio experience and best sound quality.

Some highenders are said to aim for the purest copper imaginable in their wires. One has 99.999% OFC, another 99.99999%, giving a subjective feeling of ultimate purity (and maybe ´cleaner sound´?). Isn’t that a similar fetish-like approach like focussing on measurements and different specs far beyond audibility?

´Can´ or ´will´? Did you measure any noise above the threshold being most likely audible under home conditions, or not? ´Indicate poor design´ is a bit of a thin base for pretty defeating verdicts like ´underperforming´.

I have no objections to measurements in general and affordable products offering good performance in particular. On the other hand I do not see a point in throwing that much time and effort onto measurements of DACs and digital equipment when differences resulting from these specs are that much below the threshold of being clearly audible, while other, clearly audible and sound-defining aspects are neglected and overlooked. As it is the case with certain aspects of loudspeakers and how they interact with the room.

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762

There’s more to it than this.

Here’s some interesting discussion by none other than Floyd Toole himself:

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763

Thanks for the interesting link. It read it already some time before.

In my strongly (actively and passively) treated man cave and a smooth RT60 with 0,25 s over the complete audible freqency spectrum I do not care about the Harman target curve. I do not like it and it makes no sense here.

In our relatively poor treated living room, where my wife is queen, things are different. Here we use Audyssey with its reference curve. But I am still not a fan of this target curve. It is some kind of bad medicine. You always decrease (some at least) direct and diffuse sound.

I read somewhere in the past that there are two kind of music listeners. There are „overtone listeners“ and „fundamental ton listeners“. I think the belonging to one of this groups decides whether one likes the Harman target curve or not. And there is of course the directivity of the speaker that matters a lot.

764

What? Who? Where? I think you’re arguing about a straw man here.

Where? Applicable to what? What are you arguing about here?

The Harman curve is about headphones, isn’t it? For instance, this Sean Olive article. Why are we talking about speakers with respect to it?

Don’t keep us in suspense.

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765

Mytek Brooklyn Bridge II was one of the most listened to pieces at recent Canjam for example, also appreciated at Florida Show and anybody interested can listen to it at Axpona. It sounds significantly superior, the DAC has more resolution (significantly better chipset), the sound is more musical with deeper bass extension and better transients due to linear power supply. In comparison Eversolo sounds thin, has less detail and smaller soundstage and less dynamic bass and dryer midrange. BB2 is a different class of sound than Eversolo. It’s a significant step up. The fact that the measurements are different at that very low level of -120dB shows that it’s not the the amount of THD, but the type of distortion that matter for the perception of the actual sound. Again , any noise generated by computer is very very low at -120dB. Brooklyn Bridge II is a great sounding unique all in one product with many advantages over Eversolo, the main being it can be the hard of a larger powerful Roon setup. And it has a great sounding 4 channel headphone amp too. Yes you can look at the graphs, but before you make a final judgement: listen , there is no excuse no to do this. Anybody here having an opinion without listening should not be speaking and how this or anything else sounds like. As for the 2nd harmonic Amir seems to be the only person in audio world who doesn’t like it. That’s fine, but it is an opinion and preference. You can clearly hear its impact when turning the HAT ™ on. With 2nd harmonic boosted by 12dB general sound quality stays the same, same soundstage , same resolution, it just get a bit more groovy. It’s subjectively a better and more enjoyable sound for many.

M

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766

That statement has no meaning. SPL noise numbers are without any value. Our hearing is not linear. You must know the spectrum of the noise to determine its perceptual audibility. On top of that, every room is different. Some of us have dedicated, ultra quiet room. Others live in a noisy city apartment. Comprehensive survey of rooms were performed in peer reviewed research showing the variation and how there are rooms that are completely silent to our ears. I cover that in my video here:

Also, keep in mind that good portion of my audience is headphone listeners. Many headphones and especially IEMs block huge amount of room noise and are sensitive enough to pick up the slightest amount of noise in the audio chain. For this reason, I test headphone amps at just 50 millivolts of output and show this ranking:

Even state of the art headphone amps struggle to clear the noise floor of 16 bit content. You need to get to 90s in that graph to have totally inaudible noise floor for most sensitive IEMs. Yet there are amps that deliver just 50 to 60 dB.

But again, I showed you a direct quote from stereophile reviewer that complained about noise from Mytek Bridge II clearly indicating that less than good engineering is going on here.

All this said, no, I am not worried about just power supply noise at those levels. They will be below threshold of hearing in low frequencies.

What? How am I supposed to determine the spectrum of noise in everyone’s home? My job is to find you equipment where this question becomes moot. And do so with you saving a ton of money. You want to pay huge amount of money more than that to get less performant gear? Be my guest. My measurements give you that information as well.

I didn’t like it because after 6 months and counting, you couldn’t be bothered to fix a simple bug in setting the correct value in the ESS DAC filter setting. 6 months! Did you not listen to the different filters? Likely you picked one that you made default that “sounded best.” Right? Yet, none of those changes in the UI were reflected in the device and hence the sound it produced!!! You were shown the same thing in stereophile review. So please don’t tell me what your ears tell you. Your eyes and brain are clearly overriding that and leading you to completely false conclusions.

If you didn’t have the bug, I would have said that while the engineering is not great, the functionality was good, the looks were good and so I would not be opposed to people buying it. But that there are much cheaper ways to get there with better fidelity.

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767

The point is that you found some very early or broken unit that clearly had an old firmware and when you discovered that filter is stuck on default you did not call to ask us to ask about a firmware fix or another unit. Instead you published this creating an impression that there is something wrong with the design rather than a simple software bug that does happen occasionally in every software driven equipment especially when it’s just released. BTW the default filter is actually the minimum phase slow apodizing with ideal impulse response and minimum smear. This filter actually sounds the best (but oops, you didn’t listen).
ASR, in turn, keeps recommending steep 100dB/octave filters because they measure best. Unfortunately they also sound the worse (artificial and synthetic).

I just don’t understand why do you have to ran this forum in this way where you imposing your opinions and your will on unwilling participants without our consent. Had you started like every other normal reviewer by calling the manufacturer you want to review, getting a unit from them, learning what they have to say and then taking all this into account, it could have been a win win for everybody. Instead ASR is now a very unhealthy environment that no manufacturer wants to touch with a 12 foot poll and now I’m being advised to just stop this pointless discussion where we both simply have different opinions on the subject of audio and looks like we may never agree. BTW, I tend to speak my mind, am I the only product designer that publicly engaged in dispute with ASR? Ooff I’m exhausted.

For you any distortion is bad, for me some distortions are good, you say you can measure “the sound”, I say some elements of what we hear can’t be easily measured, you say switching power supply is better, I say linear toroid is better, you say CD sounds better than the 1/2 " 30 IPS tape master, I say the opposite, you think 2nd harmonic is bad, I say it may be good in some dose, you say a DAC today has to have 130dB Sinad, I say Sinad is not the main and only thing, you say phase shift doesn’t matter, I say time smear does matter - it seems like we will just never agree on these topics because we think about audio differently. Your choice of the “best” equipment (max Sinad) is a clinical dry sounding collection of amps and dacs that I know, have heard/tested for many years and they are described as such in many other reviews. But I do appreciate the sound of many high end pieces you criticized and trashed. We just simply have different opinions on what constitutes good sound and this is completely fine.

One day we could try the ultimate test: battle of the sound systems- you put together yours and I put together Mytek playback system and we’ll see what people prefer. That would be a fair resolution of this debate - graphs and numbers mean little as evidence no matter how hard you try because it is about ears. The evidence will be what people hear and say sound better.

Quote from AM:

“While the above is shameful status of how badly the high-end audio market gone off the rails”

You are free to voice your opinion and built the system you think is the best , recommend it to your audience, sure no problem with that. But please don’t use your giant megaphone (I don’t have one) to try to “save” industry or the audiophiles just because you think that they should be preaching your religion instead of their own.

Quote from AH:

“In 1985 Hifi Choice already wrote about the Pioneer A-80 that measured extremely well on distortion, noise etc: “In a sense, this amplifier continues to show how weak the correlation is between conventional measurement and subjective sound quality. Lacking in depth, lige and ambience, the A80 was a sonic disappointed and cannot be recommended.”
Already in 1985! Have some people fallen asleep the last 40 years?”

Exactly. Things were gauged by measurements then in the early days of the 70’s and 80’s because we had things to learn but then as the industry matured equipment designers realized that these numbers were pretty useless to asses the actual sound and so the high end boutique market with variety of sound flavors gradually appeared. Class A, Class A/B, Class D, feedback, no feedback, tubes, horns, you name it - everything with some kind of distortion that worked or not for a given person. It’s not that they were not measured during the design, but rather, the measurements in hifi equipment was not the goal anymore and hence the listening experience became the main gauge.

Now after 50 years ASR thinks they reinvented a “brand new” shiny wheel and wants to sell it to us again so all of us to go back to the one and only measurement mold of Sinad so all DACs can sound exactly like a Topping.

This, thanks God, is no going to happen as we will continue tinkering and building bizarre things to forward this beautiful hobby ahead, despite Amir’s AP armed with Sinad ideology looming large on the horizon.

M

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768

The problem is when you don’t measure - you might find that at different input signal levels the 2nd harmonic and 3rd harmonic swap in being most dominant, as signal level reduces…

I’ve measured DACs and seen this

Nobody seems to talk about it, probably because they never checked it

So the generic comment that 2nd harmonic is good makes sense if you change level and now 3rd harmonic dominates

Good reason to aim for all harmonics to be as low as possible

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769

Wow, I come back after a few weeks away and your perspective is still wildly incoherent!

  1. You should send Amir a fixed version with a few notes on how to turn the HAT feature off.

  2. No one is imposing their will on unwilling participants. Don’t look at ASR if you are not willing. Others do the same: I implooooooore you.

  3. You make a wild range of assertions about the sounds of harmonics and the dry, clinical quality of certain high-measuring DACs and with no evidence to back up the claim. Still. It just keeps getting claimed, over and over again.

  4. You want to do a battle of the sound systems to prove a preference, but haven’t yet done a blind A/B to prove any of your listening quality claims.

  5. I do, however, like a diversity of audio equipment and design philosophies like you, but also want to understand how transparent, low-noise, non-distorting, well-implemented with proper filter selection, and exceptional each one is. Personally, I may choose sometimes based on aesthetics and features even when the product measures less well than competitors.

In any case, I highly recommend refining your products and your communications strategy instead of this oddly ineffective approach you are currently using.

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770

Michal, OK, you’ve now regurgitated this text from @Arjan_H. And then you say, “Exactly.” But what exactly do you think it proves, or demonstrates? So some reviewer in Hifi Choice used his ears and thought the Pioneer A-80 was to blame for what he perceived as a lack of “depth”, and – well, I don’t know what “lige” is – and a lack of “ambience”. So what? These are typical subjective perceptual reviewer wiggle words which have no definition. And what do the other reviews of the A-80 say? Was it widely hated? By itself, this text means nothing.

I suppose that’s the key issue. What someone thinks “the listening experience” is. Or should be. And that’s a personal preference choice.

The people who want all their gear to “measure well” are looking for an accurate rendition of the recording they’ve decided to listen to. The folks running things like tube amps and the like, the “euphonic distortion” crowd, are looking for zoom-wowie effects, probably for particular pieces of music. So, really, I think we’re all agreed that the “listening experience” should be the main goal.

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771

A minor addition at the end of both those sentences would be, " and believe they’ve found it. I’m beginning to think it’s not about right or wrong, but just what you like that (you think) you hear.

772

From my review: " That [Stereophile] review was in September of last year. I checked my sample and firmware was up to date yet this bug remains. "

In all this time, you haven’t really read the review to see things like this. And what is wrong with you contacting me post review, showing me your measurements contrary to mine, and offering a new sample? You thought posting here, arguing about “sound” is better plan?

Stereophile reviewed a sample you sent them, right? How come the filter bug was there as well? How can you not have tested such a simple thing? Answer: you don’t measure. You don’t look for problems. You keep using your ear even though it is not capable of perceiving such filter settings so you ship the product broken.

You say a lot of things. Not one of them is backed by any independent proof. No research. No controlled listening tests. Nothing. You also misstate my position.

I haven’t told you switching power supplies are better. I test plenty of DACs with linear power supplies which perform far better than your product. What I have said is that I don’t care what you use. Measure it and make sure you are not going backward in performance when you go from switching to linear supply. Don’t go by lay intuition and audiophile speak that linear power supply is better. Measurements conclusively show that you have gone backwards here.

As to tape, it has hiss. If you don’t hear it, then you must have a loud AC next to you or something. CD is therefore superior in this regard.

You keep talking about SINAD. Yes, your product produced dismal performance in that department especially when considering its price. But I didn’t stop there. I ran a full suite of measurements where your box produced lower than expected performance. Jitter test for example is not SINAD. You did poorly here as well:

Notice the large increase in THD+N at sample rate of 48 kHz. That is because of the broken filter you have selected. The rise is due to out of band signal not being attenuated per sampling theorem. You are pumping ultrasonics into the audio system and you say that sounds better? Really?

Even at higher sampling rate where that becomes a non-issue, you have more broadband noise and distortion than the reference $99 DAC in dashed blue. How do you sell this with straight face? By claiming again that these tests don’t exist?

How about linearity?

That exponential rise says that measurement is dominated by power supply noise. Again, this is not SINAD.

In a controlled test, your customers wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between your $5,000 product and a $99 DAC if the rest of components are the same. But you are not going to go there. You want people to listen with their eyes, not ears.

My voice carries far because it is built on solid foundation of audio science, engineering and objective evaluation of audio gear. No one is listening to me just because I made claims like you are without proof points. For your part, your backers are confused audiophiles and subjective reviewers who don’t know that their brain is making stuff up that their ear did not deliver.

You mean in the crowded market where there are thousands of DAC offerings for example, you realized that making up a marketing story lets you differentiate your product and then charge huge sums of money for it. Higher end audiophiles and reviewers with no idea of how unreliable their hearing is, believed it and the market shifted. Now it is shifting back when the curtain is removed and we see that for all the extra money you spend, you get less objective performance. And those claims of extra fidelity are not worth the bits used to store them on your company web server. Now we are going through the protest phase. And pleading to be believed phase.

Meanwhile your competition is taking notice and upping their game. They can still tell the stories if they want. But but also properly delivering on objective performance, they get the people who follow audio science/engineering to buy from them as well. Everyone wins.

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773

Any discussions with you end up with righteous monologues about your obsession with your crazy mission to save the hifi industry. You can’t even agree to disagree. A professional conversation with you is impossible. Let’s see what results you get 5 years from now going down this path.

M

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774

Ah, yes, cryptic prognostications and foreboding! One day, maybe not today, but soon, and for the rest of your life, you will regret having measured stuff. We will all be naked and afraid, with only a collection of exceptional audio equipment to listen to. Crawling supplicants with brilliantly voiced IEMs stuck in our ears like silver drachmas, we will realize that we are like a tone-row composer on his deathbed…it was all a tragic mistake! Bring back distortion! Bring back noise! Bring back filter implementation errors and all the uninformed choices that the consumer once had for inferior technology. Not just vinyl: scratched vinyl. Not just tape: old, melted cassettes turned back to life with a ballpoint pen shaft. Not FM: foxhole AM.

A professional conversation with you is oxymoronic.

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775

To be fair: The Topping D70 Pro SABRE ( and other models) offers 7 filters and a so called „Valve Mode“. I am pretty sure everyone will find something to suit there taste here.

I just do not know if everyone has the courage to test a different filter than number 3. :wink:

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776

In this case it is known as you have measured it: mainly 2 peaks @100Hz and @150Hz, maximum -115b below reference signal level.

You can choose any realistic room in a home environment and analyze the noisefloor spectrum. Set a reasonable max. level for 0dB and tell me please if the remaining humming is above the thresholds of audibility or not.

Thanks. So we agree on one thing that this seemingly inferior SNR of -115dB is not relevant when it comes to audibility.

I would like to have an honest estimation of what ´less performant´ actually means when you publish measurements, including the remark if that particular one is most likely not to be audible. Simply because if it is not audible, I personally would dismiss terms like ´less performant´ or ´underperforming´ and find them highly misleading.

I personally find both approaches legitimate, but similarly misleading, unrealistic and contradictive to my own vast experience when it comes to the quality of music reproduction.

The ´euphonic approach´ might lead to more obvious flaws in reproduction and it is absolutely nothing for me personally, but it is at least an honest view.

The ´measures well = accurate rendition´ approach I could accept in case the following aspects are fully implemented:

  • being aware of and relying on listening tests for reproduction quality aspects which cannot be measured/technically evaluated, such as transparency, resolution, localization, depth-of-field, ambience/reverb, bass character, dynamics.
  • honestly accepting and adding any conclusions which measurements are NOT audible and refraining from drawing any conclusions from these (such as SNR below audibility, THD below audibility, step response, in-room-overall frequency response and alike)
  • focussing on all available measurements and technical evaluation methods that are most likely to influence the actual sound quality, including those which are complicated to measure or complicated to optimize in a system (examples: everything related to room acoustic, group delay <100Hz, time- and direction-related issues, directivity index over a broad midrange/treble band and a lot more).

If these 3 points are neglected, I see a risk of publishing measurements and basing verdicts solely on them easily becoming misleading. This is pretty ironic as chasing for records in irrelevant or misleading measurements seems to be a similarly absurd phenomenon as the ´purity cult´ of esoteric highenders while the ´team measurements first´ was always claiming to counter esoteric beliefs by the power of science and technical knowledge. Discussing why -115dB of noisefloor is ´underperforming´ compared to -130dB, insisting on 99.9999% OFC wires instead of 99.99%, claiming that PCM352 sounds always better than PCM96, putting cables on little feet to avoid them touching the floor, counting inaudible spikes in the spectrum and THD way below 0.1% @10K - where is the difference between these different nonsensical beliefs and dancing around golden spec calfs?

To be honest, I find that very sad. I started my journey to hi-fi in times when esoteric high end craziness and arrogance was omnipresent while scientific approach and technical knowledge were widely ignored and dismissed. Lots of gear was crazily flawed and sounded terrible, you could not warn people enough to not throw out their money. An institution like ASR and more people basing their estimations on science and technical expertise would have been highly appreciated some 25years ago.

Today, most of gear, especially digital components, is meeting high standards and there is almost no need for such broad apodictic warnings (exempt from things like loudspeaker choice, room acoustics and room correction which are funnily met with little to no doubt). But it seems that with a delay of 25 years, the old verbal trench wars are arising again.

Nothing would be more needed today than learning from each other and finding an approach to better music reproduction. I can tell from own intense and decades-long experience, that both sides would find out surprising things.

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777

What? I have always said that once you achieve total noise+distortion that is less than -115 dB, then you have provable inaudibility. There is no one asking for -130 dB, nor is that achievable. I would happily recommend a DAC that produced sum total of noise and distortion that is at -115 dB. That is not what we have here with Mytek Bridge II. We are talking sum total of noise+distortion landing at just -98 dB per SINAD:

Here is how a $15 Samsung phone dongle performed:

I don’t care what your view of audibility is. The designer of Mytek is claiming 40 years of experience yet can’t keep sum total of noise and distortion to be lower than a $15 dongle?

We are 45 years past the introduction of CD’s 16 bit format which means -96 dBFS noise floor. I don’t know how anyone making any DAC can say with the straight face they have done good engineering when they can hardly clear this hurdle let alone any catering to high res music.

You also are forgetting that we need headroom for DSP correction both for speaker/headphone and the room. This will cost you dynamic range.

That is totally backward. The high-end audio companies have made a mockery of audio performance. They destroy the fidelity of the audio pipeline and then ask you to pay 10 to 100 times more money for the privilege of it! Here is a $7,000 DAC by PS Audio:

SINAD of just 75 dB with distortion spike not at “-115 dB” you claimed but at -80 db!!! Crappiest first generation CD players would run circles around this DAC.

Here is a $10,000 DAC:

Granted, it has DSP but look at the harmonic spray there. Compare that to this $80 DAC:

Fully achieving transparency. If I had not measured, how the heck would you know that this DAC is something you should look at? And that the Weiss DAC is highly overpriced?

Here is a $7,500 optical player:

It underperforms that $80 DAC for heaven’s sake. The need for measurements has never been more important than it is now. People sell $100,000 DACs for heaven’s sake. There never was such excesses in the past.

That makes zero sense. What on earth you want me to learn from the other camp? That faulty listening tests are good? That price is proportional with performance? That empty claims are valid because they all repeat it?

You want to buy blind, be my guest. I and tens and thousands of other audiophiles want to optimize our budget and put the money where it is needed. We do that by measuring and understanding the science and engineering as it applies to them.

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778

Iam still not quite sure what you are saying. Are you suggesting rather than use spinorama to shortlist speakers we get a group of engineers/accoustic engineers to work out what speakers we use at home??

By the way, what you suggest is not how any recording engineers I know work.

Can you share a speaker or speakers you think we should use at home?

779

Which part of that would you describe as clearly negatively audible under home conditions and why? -98dB of THD to the reference signal translates to roughly 0.0015% of nonlinear distortion. From my understanding there is zero scientific evidence that is is recognizably audible as distortion. Or could you proof otherwise?

You have made that clear already. Thing is that most of people I talk to being in the market for hi-fi gear care for audibility and best sound. If you want to propagate buying decisions based on measurements instead which we are both agreeing on are inaudible, be my guest. But do not expect anyone to take this more seriously than people aiming for 99.9999% OFC wires or putting their cables on little feet to avoid them touching the floor.

So it is some matter of personal offense and revenge instead of honest consumer advice? In this case i cannot help.

So what? People are allowed to make a free choice of buying that gear or not. As far as you do not have a valid point about inherent audible flaws, I see absolutely no reason in issuing warnings or insulting people’s gear may be be overpriced in your eyes but nevertheless doing what it should. That’s in my understanding valid to most of digital components today and the majority of amplifiers.

What makes me sad is that at the same time inaudible specs of DACs are discussed, people are struggling with real acoustic disappointments, major flaws of hi-fi gear and confusion about making the right decision. I am talking about how loudspeakers and rooms are interacting with each other. My advice would be: if you want to save people from disappointing hi-fi decisions, focus on these aspects, do relevant measurements and educate them. There is really a demand for that while nowaday´s loudspeakers and rooms are becoming in the majority increasingly incompatible with each other and misinformation about room correction is everywhere.

First and foremost to accept which aspects of hi-fi reproduction are not measurable or determinable. You do not have to listen to high end electronic manufacturers or audiophiles, talk to leading pro-audio loudspeaker designers, room acoustic specialists or recording engineers instead.

Secondly to accept which major misconceptions and flaws of loudspeakers (speaking of directivity index) and room correction systems are still pretty common although there are technical solutions to these problems. You claim to apply science and engineering on the question what defines good sound, but when reading some of your reviews (KEF, Genelec and alike) it occurred to me you seem to avoid the real deals and focussing on completely irrelevant aspects instead in your reviews of DACs and alike.

Thirdly I sincerely recommend to talk to hi-fi users and music lovers in the real world. There is a lot to understand about what people really want and what their actual problems are. I cannot count how many times I have heard people complaining about booming bass, annoying, harsh hissing and no center localization. Never I have heard anyone whining about ´Help me, my DAC produces an unbearable amount of 0.0015% of THD!´ or ´PS induced noisefloor of -110dB is so annoying that I cannot listen to music anymore!´. These are simply not existing problems out there.

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780

Nonsense gets somehow overwhelming in this thread. A manufacturer tries to sell his idea of needed distortions, so that his crapy product attracts some buyers. That “hiigh-end” market is nothing but crap, full of charlatans. I am happy ASR exists and takes that junk apart.

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