Rebutting "All DACs Sound the Same"

I would say we're talking about two different things. Perceiving and hearing. Someone can hear the same sound but perceive it in different ways, which is perfectly valid and I'm not claiming otherwise... but they are still hearing the same thing as the next person... the original sound is what it is and doesn't change because someone else is listening to it. And I do think different gear either enhances or truncates certain things and those can be heard. I don't think the perception thing is related to what objectivists are claiming though, which is that all DACs sound the same. They are calling into question the very idea of perception itself, since they are not acknowledging perceptual differences exist which would therefore render their "all DACs sound the same" argument moot.

 

I'm sceptical about that

It is very possible that the horrible effect was not that of EMF, but was a symptom of DPC latency. Your audio gets held up while the mouse signal (or the video of the mouse pointer moving) is processed. DPC latency can cause buzzes, clicks, drop-outs etc etc. It is hell to deal with.

/technical aside.

 

I always laugh when I hear that some minor tweak, like changing the rack the solid state equipment sits on or a power cable or magic dots in on the wall, cause a difference that is "night and day different" or "not subtle". Those change, at best are extremely subtle or non-existent.

I've A/B tested many headphone amps and a few DACS, and it's very rarely I don't have to listen very closely to discern differences. I'm also pretty sure any differences I hear are measurable, mostly because they have to be pretty obvious for me to hear them. For my 60 year old untrained years, things like attack and transients and sound stage and layering and plankton and emotion all elude me. The first time I heard a difference with DACs was when I A/B tested the OG Modi against the OG Bifrost MultiBit. The Bifrost Multibit sounded a little warmer to me, and I liked that. To me, it was extremely subtle and if I were not side by side testing, I probably wouldn't care. My hearing isn't too bad; I can hear up to about 16.5kHz. There is no way I would be able to discern differences between DACs without very concentrated A/B testing.

I pretty much believe one's ability to listen as a trusted audiophile comes down to very sensitive hearing, ear training, and something in the brain that allow one to process the incoming data better than others (call it artistic talent or insanity, often synonymous). Like fox news, I have no facts to back this up, but I feel it's true *

So, to many people, it's quite possible there is no difference between well implemented DACs, but a few that have sensitive ears and are trained to listen for very specific things, there might be a difference. For them the difference might be night and day, but for normal people, the difference may be potato vs. potato.

For Russians, DAC is potato. (Colbert joke)

And the dress is blue. Any other interpretation is incorrect!


* not as much political humor as a statement I have actually heard on Fox many times.

 

What, you have resources that show hearing is pretty damned inconsistent across people?? That's difficult to believe considering human DNA...

 

Do you have a source that human DNA says that humans have consistent hearing?

Anyway, the reason I brought this up and was so sure there were real, measurable differences between high end and low end DACs, is because at one point I had a Modi+, Modi Multibit 1, Geshelli J2, and a Bifrost 2/64 all hooked up to a switcher, level matched, and I heard definite differences between all of them. And the ones which I heard the most differences between wasn't the Modi+ and the Bifrost, at either end of the price spectrum, but the J2 and everything else. I wrote about my experiences on the Hifiguides forum, how it felt like the J2 rewired my brain for a day so I was hearing extra reverb everywhere, even on music in stores I went to far away from the DAC. I seem to be very sensitive to treble and my favorite headphones tend to have an "n" shaped sound signature. The J2 just had more treble and it felt "harsh" to me in a way that was similar to how the Atom DAC sounded to me when I A/B'd it with the Modi Multibit back when I first got that. And you could tell that the Schiit stuff was tuned by the same people, though all three Schiit DACs still sounded different to me, with the Bifrost having extra stage and texture compared to the others. (Though nothing like you get from say a tube amp, these are still pretty minor changes, I admit.)

When I see someone say "all DACs sound the same" and suggest that I'm not really hearing the things I clearly heard when I flipped between them on the switcher and it's all in my imagination, I feel like I'm being gaslit. You didn't hear it, it's all in your mind, it doesn't matter how consistent it is, I can see that the linearity of your DACs is the same within the limits of human hearing so you couldn't possibly hear what you heard, and I won't believe you heard it unless you can scientifically prove it in a peer reviewed study and even then I'm sure the study is flawed in some way.

Like the objectivists paint the subjectivists as believers in homeopathy, as fanatical believers in something that can't possibly exist, but to me their the ones denying the evidence of the senses. Every time I see one of them say something along the lines of "you can't believe your lying ears" I feel like I'm spiraling into some Descartian void where we're living in an elaborate simulation or something. Like the existence of optical illusions doesn't prove we can't see things.

 

Look, I get that reaction, but you need to get past it -- not automatically accepting that they sound the same, I mean, but being willing to question that what you heard is real. It is a real, legitimate, heavily-documented thing that sight influences hearing to a huge degree. "Well, that doesn't apply to me" isn't sensible.

You don't have to go nuts with it, you're not out to prove anything to anyone else, but if you want to be confident that you're hearing real things, I'd argue that it really is worth proving it to yourself by doing a blind test somehow.

Or you don't have to, up to you, but if you're an intellectually honest person, you'll frame all your purely-sighted perceptions as provisional and maybe-wrong, because the most you can say about them is "I think this is what I heard, but I'm not sure."

(I know this is annoying, I know nobody likes doubting their own senses. And I also know I'm a total hypocrite on this, because even though I know that it applies to headphones, I always feel like the differences there are too big for me to be imagining them, so I handwave like it doesn't. But.)

 

“Cannot hear a difference” exists on a much larger scale, too. The rest of my family all claim that there’s even no difference at all between my headphone rig and a 20€ BT headphone. Of course, the only evidence they ever collected was listening on my rig for a few minutes without direct comparison to the BT headphone, just from memory.

I think that many from the objectivist camp are actually on this exact level. They learned their audio knowledge in bubbles like ASR and never bothered to listen to or much less buy a more expensive DAC, because why should they? Everybody knows that wouldn’t make a difference, anyway.

On the other hand, looking at it honestly, the minute differences some audiophiles pay thousands of dollars for are a bit ridiculous, too.

In the end, my personal take is that listening to music has a lot to do with feeling. This means on the one hand that very small differences can alter the ways how I perceive music. “More enganging”—I personally do know this category exists for me, but it’s hard to translate all (!) of its aspects to something I can describe tonally (some aspects are easy). On the other hand, I’m perfectly sure that there are aspects to my feeling when listening to music that don’t have anything to do with the sound. Like owning more expensive gear that looks and feels more solid, for example.

But then again, why not? If it helps improve the feeling, it helps. It might be delusional, but it still makes me happy. So in the end, I don’t care much about the question if I would hear that minuscule difference in a blind test. There are some differences I think I heard (cables, streamers) where I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t. But still, the feeling that I think I heard a small difference makes them worthwhile. Only up to a certain amount of money I spend, but that limit is different for everyone.

 

I think it's also important to consider background noise and the brightness of your room when listening for differences.

I would say more than 40 percent of what I enjoy so much about good gear I can't hear at all during the day with the AC on and light in my eyes.

I only critically listen in the evening / night when everyone else is asleep (the air is turned off) and the room is pitch black.

All the super small, tiny details get me going!

 

Look, in general, hearing works the same way across the species. Our ears all have the same construction. There is a frequency range that we hear. We have similar thresholds for what is too quiet and too loud. Hearing in the human species is quite consistent. It's the perception of what we hear that varies wildly. Aspects of perception can be emotional or psychological such as what we like and don't like or what is soothing and what grates on us. What we hear can be affected positively or negatively based on our emotional and psychological state. Then there are technical aspects of hearing that can be trained and improved upon by education and practice.

 

Even if we limit the term "hearing" to the sound wave hitting your ear drum, there's still some variance involved with it:
https://www.superbestaudiofriends.o...-hear-different-thread.2535/page-2#post-67954

 

Would you agree to this interpretation? ...

It is the digital processing that happens in our brains that varies wildly.

People talk a lot about listening, and critical listening. They don't talk much about what actually happens inside themselves in their physical and psychological brain setup.

 

One way for me to feel empathy towards the subject is parallel to colour blindness.
While I possess eagle like sharpness in vision, the colour diversity of the World is weak from my perspective - pointed out to me by other people. I can not discern many shades of yellow and green.
Another one is scent: my wife can smell stuff from other side of the house that is under my nose and I know nothing about it.

 

Source? Why do you believe this?

 

Do.... do you all have the exact same pinnae and state of spiral ganglion neuron health and I'm just the outlier????? Are y'all taking neurotrophin-3????

 

The weakness in sweeping statements like this is that you need only one counterexample to disprove the entire claim.

I personally think that the mere existence of DACs with configurable FIR filters is sufficient evidence to rebut it, or at least make it extremely unlikely that all DACs sound the same.

I've actually been in an argument over this on the HF sound science forum, where I tried to establish these points:

1. Different FIR filter configurations result in different measured impulse responses.
2. At least some of these filter presets sound audibly different from each other.
3. With configurable FIR filters, it's highly likely that at least some implementations will sound audibly different.

1. As an example, I picked the popular ES9218P chip that's in my LG V30 smartphone and measured its filter setttings:

Spoiler: Animated GIF

2. So we've established that filter presets measure differently, but how about the sound? I'll spare you the entire argument on HF and will quote just one snippet here:

(Source: https://www.head-fi.org/threads/testing-audiophile-claims-and-myths.486598/page-1041#post-17055303)

That's from a professional sound engineer and main objectivist on the HF sound science forum. He basically admits that at least some filter presets may sound audibly different from each other.

3. Now with the argument having come this far, all that's left for objectivists is to claim that all implementations of the FIR filter are using the same preset:

To which my answer would be:

(Source: https://www.head-fi.org/threads/testing-audiophile-claims-and-myths.486598/page-1041#post-17055468)

 

This is a bit off-topic, but I wanted to address the "All humans hear the same" or whatever. It's easy to have an idea that seems right, but not all of those ideas actually work in real life.

It takes a lot of work to actually investigate whether we all tend to experience things the same, or how similarly we do.

That's work I didn't do.

But, here I am with 45 seconds of googling! Thanks, pubmed, you're the best!

Anyhoo, the answer is we've known for a long time that people don't hear the same. There is a lot of variability for things like hearing threshold, even before hearing damage comes in.

Here's a study I found which points out that men tend to have greater variability, across a number of traits (and not just male humans, but male mammals), and studies that with respect to hearing threshold measures with the idea that activation of the X chromosome can explain some of the data.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36114557/

So, there's a whole research literature on this and no, we don't all have the same threshold, and, if you take more than 45 seconds, you'll probably find a lot more (you can start with the references at the end of the study I mention).

 

Out of the DACs/interfaces I have used over past twenty years, I can't, now, say for sure which might have been different. Except for one: it made me feel like I was being punched in the ears.

So butted, rebutted and QED.

 

Look at this crap at post #623 and #624. He makes the claim that damping the plastic housing parts on the HD600, and any headphone, where there are no vents, makes no sound difference at all, yet he doesn’t even bother to measure the distortion, only FR response.

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...nnheiser-hd600-review-headphone.23233/page-32

 

Ok so I'm not actually reading any of the essays here, I'm just here to make jokes... but giving this whole thing 30 seconds of thought I feel like the whole sh'bang is partly human nature wanting to exert control. It twings some endorphin poppin' part of my brain to believe that I am able to change the nature of sound itself, that my ears are better than some gizmo machine, blah blah. It simultaneously lets me handle my fear of change with my desire for control and gives me the most convenient way to tell myself what I want to hear, literally and figuratively.