Musetec (LKS) MH-DA005 DAC

I’m genuinely curious why there are some audiophiles that don’t like to hold companies to account for their marketing?

If you want to enjoy music, the key is to audition in your home, in your listening environment and with your set of gears and ears. There is no substitute, no matter what.

I agree that listening is important. For example, Revel Speakers uses extensive measurements in their product development but only release products when they come out on top of double blind listening tests against the competition. Personally, I want gear that sounds good *and* is well engineered. Call me a perfectionist if you will. This is the purpose of having equipment measured. I’d like to know whether I’m being sold a bill of goods or buying state of the art.

Frankly, I don’t understand the animosity towards @toddk31. The way I see it, he did the community a favor by purchasing a retail unit and sending it in for measurements. What might a publication receive? A special ’review sample’ that may not be indicative of the true performance you’re getting. The same goes for ASR / Amir. He measures gear that is often overlooked by the big publications and he makes all of this data available free of charge. Sure, the members of his forum can be downright nasty, but no more so than how someone here would react to an ’objectivist’ stance.

Now, I think the bigger question should be: after reading about how great this DAC sounds, the measurements show significant amounts of jitter on the digital interfaces (AES / USB). I bet none of those reviews ever mentioned anything about the effects of said jitter on the DAC's performance. Why is it that the knee-jerk reaction to less than stellar measurements is to simply throw out this tenet of audiophile wisdom?

As was said earlier if a DAC with poor test results sounded good then that's ASR completely discredited.

@lordmelton

This is completely missing the point. If something measures poorly but has no audible problems, then maybe the problem is below the threshold of audibility. In other words, even though the Musetec has a jitter-prone digital interface, you can't detect it via listening.

This is why scientists and engineers measure. They attempt to correlate observable, quantifiable data with perception. This is the fundamental misunderstanding I see in audio today on this particular issue - the blind listening tests and the measurements are performed so we know what is an audible phenomena. If the phenomena happens to be a problem, then we can find ways to fix it to advance the state of the art.

This is why blind listening tests are important. It removes the bias that sighted listening introduces and makes our judgments about changes in sound quality more consistent and reliable.

Now that we have repeatable, verifiable measurements and reliable observations from blind listening, we can start to make connections between the two. We can understand how changes in frequency response affect subjective appraisals of sound quality. We can quantify at what level of distortion we can call an amp audibly 'transparent'.

This is not to say that measurements are the be all, end all. But in my experience, using measurements makes it much, much easier to obtain the sound that you want. It gives you a target to shoot for instead of wandering around in the dark. It helps you make better decisions about what gear to buy and how to use it instead of being whipsawed by the flavor of the month or contradictory audiophile 'wisdom'.

In any case, apologies for further derailing this thread. I highly encourage any audiophile halfway interested in learning more to visit the following:

Audio Check - Audio Tests - Blind Tests

Let's Listen to Jitter Effects

Objective Loudspeaker Measurements to Predict Subjective Preferences?