Topping and SMSL with ASR Punking Us on DACs?

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...e-signature-dac-a-waste-of-money.36833/page-6

Things are definitely starting to heat up with some of the die hard ASR "DAC has no sound" army start confronting with Thor!!!! And surprisingly Thor has a few supporters there on the thread supporting the Zen DAC 2 and Zen Signature one.....

 

After reading through that I don’t get which Ifi DAC Thor recommends.
He said he designed the Ifi I DSD pro but also said that there is a software issue which lead to all the issues in stereophiles measurements.

im confused

 

It’s confusing to follow because Thor is constantly under attack by many different asr members. So he is responding to like 10-12 different members’ attack at the same time

so my understanding is the ifi idsd pro that he designed is still the best dac he designed at ifi. There was some software/firmware issue in the prototype/review sample being sent to JA at stereophile for review that significantly deteriorated the measurement numbers, otherwise the ifi pro should have measured much better…… these software/firmware issues have since been resolved.

 

Ah so that’s weird that stereophile didn’t revisit as they usually do when things go wrong.

too bad it’s so darn expensive.

thanks

and yeah the people at ASR are ridiculous, well most of them

 

Yup let’s leave Thor’s comments alone how much is true. You are simply not allowed to say I preferred dac A over dac B because I like the sound better because they won’t allow people to say dacs have a sound and can sound different …

 

If that site truly believes DACs all sound the same then why all the fuss over SINAD?

 

Y'know, anything worse than 115dB of SINAD miiight be discernable, and we want to be triple-doubly sure, right? How else can you enjoy music if you hear noise when nothing's playing?

And plus, it's about being state-of-the art! Pushing the boundaries! Raising the bottom line!

 

I'm on the fence as to whether I might appreciate being able to live in a place where the noise floor is so far down low that my circulatory system might well be masking it. On the one hand that'd be cool, but on the other there's a reason people feel an ineffable sense of disquiet (lmao pun) sitting in sensory deprivation tanks.

 

Wait until ASR puts an analyzer on the "silent" parts of their recordings and hears the accumulation of 50 or 60hz mains hum (sometimes both on the same record), tape hiss, high noise-floor cool gear, and dither. Some of these records have 8 to 12-bits of data on them.

 

The more SINAD DACs have the more the same they sound

 

First, he starts saying that the noise floor modulation is at inaudible levels, but then at 7:25 onward he keeps bitching about it? The dude is mentally insane

 

Good grief, Thor is running circles around them folks. Does he post here?

 

I wish he does, pretty sure he won’t get the same hostile treatment here. I have loads of questions for him but I won’t register for ASR just to ask those questions

 

That's ASR in a nutshell. The whole site is about bitching about inaudible distortion metrics.

 

Amir likes to share measurements except those from his most recent hearing screening.

Is there a way for him to test how much SINAD he can hear? Kinda like any of the blind tests available on this site. Donate a dollar to ASR per SINAD Amir achieves.

 

Has anyone ever tried measuring SINAD using anything else but canned sine waves? I am always suspicious of the assumption that if a device is able to reproduce a fairly simple tone perfectly, then it MUST be able to reproduce a much more complex set of tones equally as perfectly. Theoretically, it should work this way, but I am hoping that someone has actually tested this hypothesis.

It just strikes me as extremely likely that some of these devices are ummm...optimized to perform well with these well-known specific testing frequencies and sine waves.

 

Seems fairly straightforward (although I don't know the AP's capabilities). Feed a song through it and have it measure the output of a DAC/amp.

 

The Volkswagen school of testing. Build in test detection: if this is a test then emit fewer toxins, else let rip.

 

Exactly, it's not like it has never been done before. I am not saying that these companies are doing that, but whenever you become fixated on one very static and specific type of test to determine the performance of a device, you expose yourself to this risk. And, even if no one is deliberately cheating the system, we have already seen the negative consequences of this obsession with hitting the highest SINAD figure - lack of reliability, premature failures and insane price increases.

 

i personally do not believe that obsession with hitting the highest SINAD or ASR members obsession of chasing after getting the highest SINAD numbers have anything to do with the lack of reliability, premature failures, (insane price increases maybe)

Its more to do with the mentality of these manufacturers when it comes to reliability, premature failures, that simply have that mentality of "who cares about reliability and failure, you only paid this little for a so called "SOTA" measured devices". If it breaks, no one will bother to ship it back to China for warranty anyway.

If it so happens a headphone amp exploded you turn deaf because of that, tough luck. You should have paid more for more reliable amp