Rebutting "All DACs Sound the Same"

Wait wait wait... let's back up a second. Can we expand on how burgers are solved? Inquiring minds want need to know.

 

What's amazing to me is that a lot of the people who contest that DACs could sound different ought be well within means to determine that for themselves.

I'm a transducer + amp-first person, but I do opine that if you're taking the pursuit of "better" sound seriously then you at least need a competent DAC to build upon so that you're not bottlenecking your downstream with nonexistent headstage, limp macrodynamics, smeared detail, or abhorrently ice pick-y treble.

The same can be applied to building an analogue system, IMO, but if you're coming in from that side of the hobby then you've got even LESS room to argue that minutiae matter. One of the more compelling arguments against my ever getting into vinyl pending an astonishing windfall was this thread by @bazelio some time ago; seeing how the smallest changes could influence sound to that great a degree helped me come to the conclusion that, while I might like looking at the art on records and really enjoy perusing liner notes, I would be ruining myself trying to eke out every iota of performance there.

Got a bit sidetracked. Just had coffee.

I was going to say that while there ARE discernible differences going from entry-level DACs to higher-tier ones, those are very often more a matter of refinement than massive changes; I haven't heard their very latest stuff but you can definitely, with some practise, tell the difference between how something from Schiit presents a sonic tapestry that's appreciably different from how iFi might, or how the convenience DACs from budget interfaces like the Arturia Minifuse 2 or Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 just sound wholly unpleasant by comparison to discrete audio nerd equipment (keeping in mind that these are all more or less within the same price range, give or take a few McDonald's burgers in cost).

This is a point that's been hammered in so much that the wall's just got a hole in it by now but modern "budget" stuff is still ludicrously good compared to how things were not all that long ago both in terms of amps and DACs (here's no argument that headphones are maturing as well, but that's usually at the higher echelons with hardly any trickle-down to more affordable designs IMO), so sure unless you're REALLY keen on putting a system with a very specific sound together there's no real incentive to spend more money. Doesn't mean the differences aren't there, merely that it's harder to care past a certain threshold. Diminishing returns in the audio hobby are very much a real thing, and while that's something often-repeated, I feel like people forget what that actually means sometimes: the improvements are still there, just harder to discern and increasingly expensive to obtain.

"Perfect audio reproduction" and what can realistically be obtained are asymptotical lines.

 

Naw, the output from DACs can sounds different from each other (the DAC itself just sits there and make no noise, 'cept for Schiit DACs that click . technically, all DACs sound the same; the sound of a box sitting on a table!

Now let's talk about which hard drive you have in your NAS in the other room, the switches and routers and ethernet cables, the plugs you have plugged the power cords into, and how far off the ground your power cords are placed!

 

...and the light dimmer in the kitchen set at 66.6% causing intermittent flavoring to the sound of said DAC.

 

I want a snake-oil burger!

 

I don't understand this question. How can people be so stupid and deaf? Of course dacs sound different. You don't even need fancy measurement equipment. The test is so simple all you need is 5 seconds of your time and your knuckles to knock on top of each dac to tell that they sound nothing alike.

 

I wonder whether the fact that he's admitted to listening to things at SPLs that would shatter cinderblocks WITHOUT DISCOMFORT might have anything to do with that? Still wouldn't explain how you're supposed to be able to evaluate staging and imaging with a single speaker (I know I keep harping on about that last bit but illusory staging is one of my biggest considerations when building a headphone system so I'm genuinely baffled by that still).

 

Rebutting?

Butt properly in the first place to avoid the need.

At most, give a quick check before the bad winter weather, but, really, rebutting should not be needed.

 

The immaturity (in general) of a lot of this objectivist-subjectivist sparring baffles me. I can get sometimes going after people or companies you think are spreading misinformation, but seriously, who cares if somebody doesn’t see eye-to-eye with you; if somebody wants to spend their money how they want to? By and large, I think encouraging curiosity and making one’s own findings is a good way to go.

If somebody's happy with what they got, more power to them.

 

I don't buy these kinds of claims. I believe these people are either lying or literally have a mental block in the form of "all DACs sound the same", which is stopping them from recognizing the differences. Because besides maybe some high frequency shit, I believe everyone hears the same things. Human hearing is pretty damn consistent across people.

 

Hearing is like tasting. It can be trained to be better at perceiving what is heard. So humans may generally hear the same things, perceiving what they hear is all across the board.

 

I find claims like this mind-blowing to me, because I have very little confidence that I have ever heard a difference between DACs personally, short of really egregious terribleness.

I'm not dogmatic on the idea that therefore nobody else could (or even the idea that I couldn't if I tried real hard with some clearer guidance on what I'm listening for), but when people make such strong claims as this, it's hard to take it face value. Either you really are hearing something very different than what I've heard, which is possible, or (given the obvious, well-known problems with sighted listening), you're hearing differences that wouldn't exist so clearly in a blind test.

 

I think it depends on the DACs in question. Which have you heard? Some DACs do some very similar, but this doesn't mean all DACs sound the same.

And BTW: "really egregious terribleness" would count as a difference.

 

Keep in mind, I'm specifically talking about hobbyists who make it their business to sample or buy all kinds of different DACs (making a mockery of their claim in the first place, since they are listening to different DACs at all...like why listen if there's no difference anyway?), and claim there is no audible difference between say a cheap Topping DAC and an Yggdrasil A2. I just don't buy alot of these claims, and feel these people are locked into an agenda based ideology that cannot entertain the idea that different designed gear can sound different. Like they're protecting buyers (and themselves) from snake oil, but making the mistake of lumping every DAC with different topologies into the camp of snake oil outright.

 

So the very first time I bought a DAC it was a Benchmark DAC-1, which was going to replace the built-in DAC on a Squeezebox. I plugged it in all excitedly, and then swapped on the preamp between the output from the Benchmark and from the Squeezebox... and literally could not hear any difference. I spent a while doing that before resignedly just boxing the Benchmark back up and sending it back (one of two audio things I ever returned -- the other being DT-880 headphones that I hated).

On the "egregious terribleness" front, the next time I bought a DAC was a Headroom Micro DAC that I plugged into a computer. Comparing it to the computer's DAC was easy, because it didn't buzz when I moved the mouse. But I feel like "not subject to the EMF hellscape of a computer's interior" is an easy thing to explain for even the most hardened skeptic (and obviously that would have shown up in trivial measurements).

RIght now, I'm running an OG Bifrost Multibit. When I replaced the Micro DAC with that, I waffled back and forth about whether I could hear a difference: Sometimes I thought I could, other times I thought I was imagining it. In the end, I believed weakly that I could hear a difference, and quit comparing because I wanted something that looked right with the Schiit amp that I had, and it didn't really matter if it was actually better anyway. (I did believe pretty strongly that I could hear the difference between that and the analog out of a Chromecast Audio on the "egregious terribleness" side, but even that wasn't level-matched, so wouldn't satisfy a skeptic.)

Like I say, I'm not dogmatic on the idea that there can't be differences between identical-measuring DACs -- in fact, to be clear, I think there are: @purr1n and others have done blind tests where they've consistently been able to identify the results. But the people who do blind tests rarely end up at 100% correct, and usually talk about how challenging it was to find the narrow differences, so I do feel pretty strongly that the people who can't hear the differences are being honest about it.

 

I can believe both versions of this for different people... or for the same person at different times.

On one hand, the biggest sonic difference/improvement I remember hearing from a single component swap was Modi 3+ to original flavor Bifrost 2. Yes, bigger than any of the headphone swaps I've done (directly, anyway, I'm sure ZMF Eikon versus airplane earbuds would be bigger if I actually compared them). Or amp changes.

On the other hand, at some point I went back to the Modi 3+ to try and understand the differences. Going back the other way, it took a while living with it for me (maybe a week or two) to -really- hear and be bothered by the difference. There was a while where I'm confident I wouldn't have passed any hearing test, blind or otherwise, to tell them apart. Given all the chatter about the AKM Velvet Sound stuff a while ago, some people might take this as an admission of deafness.

Lots of stuff (other gear, frame of mind, etc) might make the differences hard to hear, or maybe get us to talk ourselves out of it. And we know it goes the other way, too, with people wanting to think something sounds better because they like the person who made it, or because otherwise they'd feel really silly about spending $500,000 on solid gold monoblocks.

 

It baffles me too. Mostly because it never really happens.

What does happen is that self-named "objectivists" complain about their definition of subjectivists. And self-named "subjectivists" complain about their definition of objectivists.

It's all straw. Straw men arguing over straw ideas.

 

Nah, I've seen both sides gleefully embrace the most extreme views ascribed to them by their opponents. There are definitely reasonable people, but the loudest people on both sides really do hold their caricature views.