I don't want to beat a dead horse but I'm bugged.

Some Amir disciples come and say no this dac is better than this one,no need to listen to it...

Did you not see why this is ridiculous, to claim that some measures replace all listening, and as ridiculous as saying that some listening replace all measure, in the two cases?

This whole need to label people in camps is an ongoing failure in audio (and society).  To more accurately state what many believe is that if certain measurements are sufficiently good (and they appear to include significant tolerance in those measurements) and there are no system induced issues, then those two devices will sound the same. I have yet to seen that view proved conclusively wrong. I did follow a long thread on ASR where one of the prolific posters found an audible difference between DACs when he listened, but when he measured the units, he found a significant measurement difference. I believe the final conclusion was a software driver issue.

I think I have mentioned I got really into headphones. One popular Youtube reviewer was fully convinced of the difference in audibility of headphone amplifiers that measured the same and he had even convinced himself he was right with AB tests (all with awareness of what he was listening to). He took the challenge expecting he would have no problems telling them apart when he could not see what he was listening to. The result?   They sounded exactly the same.

I had my own revelations many years ago now, thinking that I could easily hear differences between amplifiers, speaker cables, and yes CD players. Then someone forced me to do a listening test without knowing what I was listening to. All those changes I thought I heard disappeared. As opposed to dismissing the tests, I delved into the technical details and realized there was little reason I should hear a difference. I just had not really given it enough thought before.

When I "discovered" the high resistance of the Fidelium cable and was doing Google research, I came upon an article by the much lauded Nelson Pass about speaker cables. His article deals almost exclusively with simple circuit elements, R, L and C. He does discuss a corner condition he experiences but ensures his new designs do not experience that condition. Also he indicated the most common cable issue is dirty connections. Atmasphere also noted a cable difference in a power cord, and my interpretation is this was exclusively a factor of high resistance or simple circuit elements.

When respected scientific research and respected technical users are predominantly in agreement, it is unwise to not give credence to their conclusions, especially if you cannot unequivocally, and as important easily show them to be incorrect.

@mahgister ,

Fundamentally, you are either confusing the situation or confused yourself as it concerns cause and effect.

Our labs are filled with millions of dollars of equipment for exploring cause. If we have a better (or worse) result, we need to know exactly why so we can replicate it or avoid it, or to confirm an intended change happened as expected at the process level.

The effects of those causes, or what the customer or application will experience, can be characterized sufficiently with relatively inexpensive equipment, and in some cases, a $25 multi-meter would be sufficient to demonstrate an effect (not that we use $25 multi-meters).

With odd exception, everything you are posting about is cause. You are spending an inordinate amount of time trying to find potential causes, while ignoring the most important thing is effect. Listening is effect. What happens inside our head is cause. What we hear is effect. Trying to come up with causes without showing a conclusive effect is a thought exercise. Those thought exercises are popular in this community, perhaps because they require little effort, nor do they have to be correct or even relevant. The issue with thought exercises about cause is they are irrelevant if you cannot relate them in some fashion to effect. When we discover an effect, we will go looking for causes. We will dismiss some causes early as they are unable to cause the size of effect measured.

You are doing a thought exercise, based on a thought exercise, guessing at a potential effect, an effect you have no ability to relate to what is likely able to be heard, and attempting to use it to justify an effect that has not even be shown to conclusively occur.

It's time ...

No Pegasus. Would you settle for a unicorn?

Amazing is not the word that came to mind after reading that ...

In another thread, perhaps this thread, @prof clearly differentiates between subjective preferences and subjective impressions.  We are beating a dead horse, because we are ignoring the initial premise of the thread in some unusual, I would say bizarre special pleading that in the framework of the discussion is totally meaningless. It is self indulgent to even bring it up, and is brought up purely to advance a personal belief while ignoring relevance to the topic.

As has been stated too many times in this thread, and others just in the last few weeks. Almost no one doubt personal preference is not a thing and is not important. But as @prof eloquently stated, and I have in less eloquent fashion, that is not at all what we are ultimately discussing. We are discussing whether your personal impressions represent REAL changes in the sound that is being reproduced or are purely the result of the inconsistent nature of the brain to reach the same conclusion based on poor memory, and any number of other inputs including mood, visual inputs, other sensory inputs, etc. that are involved in processing the current environment and reaching an answer. As the weightings of those inputs are so variable over time, and memory so inexact, it is near impossible to reach objective conclusions based on subjective impressions. Hence why the insistence that subjective impressions can only be treated as objective conclusions, if, and only if, you make all attempts to isolate the inputs available in making the subjective impression. The so called blind testing's goal is to remove a variable from the outcome, namely our most critical sensory input, vision. This should be obvious to anyone who tries to compare to items. I won't insult you by saying we need to remove the variable of touch, and I hope you are not smelling or tasting your audio equipment, but the smell of a tube amplifier (from heat effects) if only evident while listening to it, could also impact a test.

I am sure someone will now post multiple paragraphs and multiple posts of unrelated self indulgent material that not only is unrelated but has no value in answering the question above, but I can only control my own actions.

Maybe the problem is not a math problem and that is the difficulty. Maybe it is as simple as realizing that because you are applying a decision based algorithm, something math is poor at representing, that a "solution" simply does not exist in the realm of mathematics. The starting numbers are not "numbers" but representations or placeholders for the set of numbers that will result from applying the algorithm. Every time you make a decision on even/odd, you are throwing away information. That knowledge does not carry to the next step, therefore you can never go backwards, only forwards.

Philosophy OWNS science’s ass. Totally. Irrevocably so. Philosophy and the rigors of logic in complex extremis, is what created, framed.. and gave the playground of existence TO science.

Says "the guy" typing that on his cell phone or computer , developed using hard core science, communicated over the Internet (also hard core science), probability with some RF and optical thrown in (also hard core science). And what does it all have in common? All developed by people who couldn't give a care to philosophy that tries to answer questions that most people could not care less about and even if a philosopher comes up with an "answer" 10 other will disagree and 10000 people totally unaware someone was even thinking about it will still go about moving the world forward. 

Even philosophers debate the death of philosophy and whether it has any meaning let alone value in a world where life's mysteries are one by one decoded and demystified. One thing is true, philosophers don't seem to have intended philosophy to be weaponized as a justification for willful ignorance nor as an excuse for a lack of personal enlightenment and certainly not as a shield to avoid the harsh reality of knowledge.

http://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-death-of-philosophy/9780231147781