This is where the shortest, digital, chain comes into realization…
Take $11,000. I’ll spend 10 of it on some Genelec’s, the other $1000 on a Pi 4 and DAC. Using what I’ve seen in others setups they would spend about $3K on speakers and rest on what are essentially gimmicks and never come close to what I’m proposing.
What about viewing? Why can’t audiophile Ethernet cables make your video and picture reproduction better?
I wouldn’t go there. Video is an entirely different thing, and analogies between audio and video are usually wrong.
How so? Why couldn’t video be improved?
It can be improved, but so can the performance of dishwashers.
This is a point I strongly and non compromising have to disagree. I don’t want an instrument, nothing musical. Nothing non-fatiguing. All I want is a pure and sober, brutal high FIDELITY reproducing apparatus. If that comes at the price of being at times hard to listen to - so be it. I want it to reproduce the recorded track as good as it gets. Certainly not as comforting to my ears as any freaking tacky tube amp can screw sound. If I want to listen to an instrument beside this I’d buy a guitar and would start practicing.
All this audiophile hogwash makes me mad. It’s Hi-Fi. When High-End comes in it’s where the ■■ starts.
To sum it up: it’s mainly about experience.
Measurements and currently known methods won’t meet the level of vast experience.
And it’s exactly that what is sadly missing in discussions like here, or also the willingness to learn more. Fun to see this even directly written in the previously linked blog entry.
It’s like somebody saying: I cannot imagine something more tasty than McDonald’s - and in the same sentence mentioning I actually haven’t tried much different stuff, I could do it but it won’t anyway be any better than McDonald’s.
Please, not a food analogy! Or at least make it about some other chain. Any other chain.
Haha well it just fits perfectly. But sure you can replace it with any other chain. It’s just a metaphor 
I like car analogies. I see sensible measurement objectivists driving with Toyota or Skoda telling people driving expensive premium brand cars how their reasonably priced car with low repair costs goes from 0-100 in same 7,9 seconds and has better milage than the BMW or Mercedes Benz so it must be equally good.
I don’t like car analogies because they are cars and not data networking gear.
But you might realize what we hear/perceive is not „a datasheet“. That’s when it comes to the overall perceived experience an analogy like cars, food etc is a good indicator.
And as I mentioned it’s ok when some say after experiencing / comparing they preferred the one or the other.
But as this thread perfectly shows the vast majority just based their „argument“ from what others wrote or told them etc. and sadly the never experience themself firsthand.
Nope
Digital Graphics (photo or video) and digital sound are same in therms of packet transport via Ethernet/router GPU and Monitor/display are your converter and DAC
Game over
You obviously prefer an unmusical DAC. Is your dislike of euphony the reason that you don’t trust your ears?
I simply don’t want reproduction gear do their own stuff. Just amplify the signal as truthfully as possible does the job perfectly for me.
Apart from that a myriad of audio gear selling marketing wizards as well as print (dinosaur times) and online reviewer need to justify their mere existence on a daily bases. Competition is rough. This is how we end up digesting BS of the kinds of ‘musical’, ‘non fatiguing’, ‘holographic’. This is repeated until the last of the targeted customers finally gives in and parrots this nonsense.
Yep, those photons emitting from you monitor are analog.
I’m with Bernd on this one. I don’t want my DAC or any other component in the chain adding anything that’s not already in the recording.
I have a very neutral chain and very well designed, low dostortion speakers. If a recording sounds bad, it’s a bad recording. I’m not going to mess with the chain to make stuff smoother, more musical or whatever…
I think the main reason that the vast majority of the objectivist-leaning participants in this thread choose not to trust their ears is because they’re perfectly happy to accept the fact that ears are inherently untrustworthy (and by ‘ears’ I mean auditory perception). It’s this point, as much as any other, that I find so frustrating about these discussions - that some people insist, despite all the evidence, that their hearing is so foolproof that nothing else matters.
Since when are transparent as in not-colouring-the-sound and musical antonyms? One should aim for the best of all possible worlds: have a DAC that is both tansparent and musical.
Here’s an analogy – there are lots of pianists that are extremely talented from a technical point of view, yet never manage the make the music sound right (for whatever reason, too fast, too much attack, too much/little legato, too loud, …). Or take Rubinstein – his interpretations of Chopin are exceptional, yet, by his own admission, there were technically more competent players out there. In terms of musicality, however, they couldn’t hold up a candle to Rubinstein.
Or take Friedrich Gulda, a technically superb player, and outstanding in the classical repertoire, thought that he should also play jazz. Well, he did, but, as he came to realise, he never managed to rival the great jazz players. He lacked swing, he said. So his jazz interpretations weren’t as musical as that of technically less gifted players.
How do you measure musicality?
Perhaps all this depends on what kind of music you listen to. With classical music, it’s easy to hear if your hifi system comes close to an actual live performance. That’s my yardstick. How natural does it sound? = how live does it sound? With music that uses electric instruments, etc. the live sound can’t serve as a gauge, as there’s so much electrical circuitry involved in the very production of the sound the you’d need the same equipment as the recording studio to get an idea of what it sounded like live. And concerts of that kind of music rarely have great sound. That’s not their point.
So with classical music at least, unless a DAC gives me a natural sound (again: as close as possible to the real sound of a concert event) it won’t be worth my time of day. Transparency, I want to add, is just one of the parameters that go into a great sounding DAC. So to make everything depend on the transparency value, well … maybe it works for certain kinds of music.
Either it’s a transparent representation of the live performance (as in accurate, exactly as recorded, and so on), or it’s not. If it’s something other than the actual recording - “more euphonic”, or however you want to put it - it’s further away from the “actual live performance”. You can’t have it both ways.