Audio Science Review Review

And the advertised chip is not the one inside the units, this Is an epic fail...the ones inside the units costs 1/3 than the advertised, what In the royal f...

 

Imagine the outrage Amir would drum up if Schiit advertised they were using opamp X and were found to be using opamp Y which is a third of the cost. And yet here it’s radio silence…

 

From that same thread:

I read a few pages of that thread. Some of their major contributors are downplaying the issue since at -100db it's likely inaudible and on one hand they're kinda right but at the same time it'd be pretty nice if they had the same energy when discussing manufacturers Amir doesn't shill.

 

Have we now reached an era in which Head-Fi moderation feels hands-off and easygoing — and its general membership well-informed and open-minded — in comparison to another popular audio forum? I think I saw some threads on HF over the last few months where references to other forums were not instantly deleted on the spot! I haven’t seen links to other forums, mind you, but let’s not go crazy here.

 

Yet if inaudibility comes up when discussing the relative merits of units that measure 0.0000001 rather than 0.0000003, those same people argue that because a unit can be engineered to achieve the smaller number, all engineering should be aiming at that number; and that the design with the smaller number is superior purely because of that. If they weren't such f'ing hypocrites, they'd apply the same philosophy to a design with (relatively) huge channel imbalances in distortion - whether it's there when playing music or not.

Leaving aside - in this example and who knows how many more - the manufacturer's evident lies about the components used.

It's been said even here that ASR's measurements, if viewed without fundamentalist fervor, can be useful general guides to how a product behaves. I can't subscribe to that. IMO all they do is promote a bullshit race-to-the-bottom philosophy, and they're so incomplete and often so inappropriate or downright careless (speakers, headphones) that they can be interpreted or promoted by the non-expert or shill as the one-and-only Objective (in the debased definition of the term that's used in this context) Truth.

 

Additionally the units sent to Amir appear to be cherry picked given that people in that thread were unable to reproduce his test results.

 

If inaudible issues at -100db really didn’t matter to that group, ASR wouldn’t exist.

 

I don’t mind manufacturers changing parts, but if they’re advertising a certain part and they change that specific part, they should be alerting people to that change.

 

Obtaining a good review with cherry picked units and then switching to cheaper parts after it becomes popular sounds about right. This all stinks.

 

Yet they sound different. The OPAs are more “voiced” as always and need special synergy to sound truly normal that non legendary manufacturers aren’t going to do.

 

It's unfortunate that Jude is the only guy with enough sway in the headphone community to do this but he lacks testicles so it will never happen.

 

Stuff like this is why it is so important to have transparent measurement protocols and standards. And for consumer products it is much better to test random samples bought from a regular sales outlet (or at least loaned from a source unlikely to be selecting a hand picked testing sample).

For example ASR have gotten into a bit of a hole in the past because they weren't allowing for thermal changes, that wouldn't happen if it was clear what period of warm up and the state of equipment when tested was clear. Measurement is not just about buying a fancy tool, far from it.

 

Wait, they test vaccines?

 

ASR?

 

That’s exactly the existential issue that ASRers seems to be struggling with right now.



The dilemma:




It also looks like it’s even worse than initially reported. Well into the “do not recommend” Schiit multibit range. The horror!



To think that hundreds of ASRers, including Amir, have been listening to DACs with third harmonics into the -70dB range and not once noticed! That should prompt some self-reflection, but it won’t.

 

Who will try to contact SMSL (reference screenshot upthread)? If it’s a random ASR member, I’m not sure this is being taken all that seriously.