The sound quality from DACs - is it all the same?

@nonoise Then you obviously don't understand the concept of confirmation bias, nor I suspect cognitive dissonance either.

@thyname 

The gear itself is meaningless to me

🙄 Obviously. For those who think everything sounds the same.

Where did I say everything sounds the same? As a matter of fact, in my first statement of this thread I explained how DAC manufacturers can purposefully make a DAC sound different.

My main source currently is Amazon Music HD via an Echo wirelessly 

Yup

Is this a put-down by status statement, or are you admitting you don't know how digital transmission works? Just a rhetorical question.

Your cousin brother is mostly correct and ASR just reports the measurements - good or bad. We know what distortion is audible from measurements. If it doesn't pass that threshold then by definition it is inaudible. Measurements will show that. I don't know of any DACs today that have audible distortion. Almost all DACS use the same digital conversion chip. And the formula for analog conversion is also well-established. As a former software engineer I can tell you that conversions are always done by using a well-established formula. Otherwise, they're just plain wrong. There's no magic to it.

However, some DAC makers purposefully make their DACs inaccurate. If you read the book Schiit Happened, Schiit actually tweaked their analog conversion programming after listening to the output through headphones, which is purely subjective. This shows up on measurements.

Personally, I use an SMSL Sanskrit 10th MK II because it has the best measurements for the lowest price.

@asctim 

Sounds great according to them.

+1

Unless they can statistically prove over a larger population that it sounds better, it don't mean jack. The ultimate approach in audio so far has been Floyd and Olive's at Harman, where they can predict with 0.86 correlation coefficient which speaker listeners will prefer in blind listening tests. And when bass extension is similar, that number goes up to 0.996. Believing anything someone or some company subjectively says without going through this kind of statistical scrutiny is akin to believing in get-rich-quick schemes. Unfortunately, the human psyche is built to want to believe in these kinds of schemes.

I highly doubt people buy their audio gear to statistically prove (satisfy) the mass population.

Well, that's not the point I was making, but they should use statistical information to filter their own decision-making process. And studies like Toole and Olive's show the likelihood of what the typical human prefers. I'm first going to assume I'm a typical human before I assume I'm an atypical one and flounder around testing atypical equipment. Likewise, with electronic equipment I'd rather start from a neutral base and determine what adjustments to neutral I prefer. That's why humans use common baselines for just about everything.

@cd318 

On the other hand folks like Floyd Toole, Sean Olive and more recently Amir Majidimehr at ASR have done some good work in ushering in a new era of measurement based "statistical scrutiny" for which an increasing number of peoplebseem to be grateful.

And Erin's Audio Corner and Audioholics.

After all, when looking at performance cars which information would you rather have when starting your research, "goes fast, handles great, stops good" or "707HP@5800RPM; 0-60 in 3.8 secs; 1.3 lateral g-force; 70-0 in 128 ft."?

@stuartk 

I prefer to not let myself be influenced by others confirmation and cognitive biases.

I don't consider gear a hobby. I consider achieving the best sound at an acceptable cost/benefit ratio a hobby. The gear itself is meaningless to me. In fact, the less gear, the better. My main source currently is Amazon Music HD via an Echo wirelessly straight into a preamp, so no CDs, LPs or hardware streamers.

Knowing how to read graphs, and understanding through measurements what is audible to the human ear and what is not allows me to "filter" gear before wasting my time with it. I don't consider it time well-spent to listen to something that measurements show obviously won't sound any different to my human ears.

@stuartk 

What if there are two dozen cars that go fast, handle great, and stop good? You gonna waste your time test driving all of them? Or does it make more sense to filter them first?

Plus, there's way more than two dozen choices when it comes to audio components.