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RE: Your conclusion doesn't follow from your measurements.

"In fact, it's not clear at all what your measurements show, as far as audibility is concerned."

Maybe not - after all it's just a blog post; how can I show you or anyone what the numbers represent qualitatively?

But I do believe they correlate because I've heard enough during the course of testing that show me better gear does give me better numbers (to put it simply). Some of the results are clearly beyond hearing capacity and beyond the needs of any musical performance.

Lower noise floor, better dynamic range, lower THD, cleaner J-test results IMO do direct my decision making around the best configuration for my listening with line level devices. For examples, listening by itself I do not believe would have allowed me to realize that the LSB for the 2008 MacBook DAC was never going to be bit-perfect with 16-bit input.

Also, for relatively straight forward line level devices, I see no need for expensive pro measurement equipment as a hobbyist. Time and again, what I'm using is good enough to differentiate gear that otherwise sound very close. Since manufacturers rarely publish detailed measurements, nor many reviewers seem to take the time either, why not a hobbyist give it a try and (hopefully) show others how to also do it for themselves? Everyone has a choice to accept the findings or not. It's not like there's any great mystery surrounding the electrical output from a 2-channel DAC!

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Archimago's Musings: A 'more objective' audiophile blog.


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