Kidnap a person with perfect pitch and force them to listen to sine sweeps and pink noise all day?  

1. Burn-In: No 2. Methods of burning-in (if yes, what?): No 3. Termination/interconnects: Maybe gold contacts for termination 4. Power filtering/prep: No 5. Synergy amongst equipment: No 6. Replacement cables/recabling: No 7. Tube amps preferred over solid states: No 8...

Quote: Uh, no. Compression affects dynamic range, not frequency response, and the 16/44 Redbook format has more than enough potential in both of those regards anyways. The problem is with studios releasing albums that are already overcompressed before they're put on CD.

Quote: The Hollywood Records Queen releases.

Quote: You can have a unary language.

Quote: Yes. Sorry

Quote:   Actually audiophiles fared quite poorly in terms of ability to reliably and consistently pick out differences compared against Harman's internal listeners, even though their overall preferences were the same. Unless of course Sean Olive's Harman funding counts him as a 'dubious...

Quote: Nyquist-Shannon would suggest otherwise.

  Quote: But that is not enough in the way of proof. I hate taking people on their word; I'd much rather take them on their evidence. And the valid evidence to demonstrate an audible difference is DBT.

Quote: 500 petaseconds of jitter is not audible?

Quote:   Or even a $30 ($20 after MIR) Asus Xonar DG these days.

Assuming LAME as an encoder, there are a few instances where 320 audibly artifacts and V0 does not, and there are even rarely times when both V0 and 320 artifact but V2 does not. But 320kbps will be better the vast majority of the time.

Quote: Except there have also been DBTs establishing differences between different brands of whisky, as well as between brands of vodka, so the DBTs you mention merely suggest that those particular testers could not tell the difference. However, both the theory behind cables and...

Quote: That really depends on the game though. DICE does some killer 3D mixing for their headphone mode, as does Valve to some extent, but many developers do not, especially for console games where 5.1 -> DH downmix is the best you can get.

Haven't Sean Olive's studies shown that people prefer the same speaker characteristics in blind tests, those characteristics being flat frequency response maintained from on-axis to off-axis listening positions?

  Quote: DH gives an 'outside the head' soundstage experience that I usually only get from binaural recordings and the like, and I sometimes like it when listening to orchestral pieces. I don't have any 5.1 music to try with it; I imagine it would work better with 5.1 signals rather...

Well I seem to have made a blunder. I've apparently been using my motherboard's onboard sound the entire time, which doesn't have an option for Dolby Headphone but rather 'DTS Surround Sensation UltraPC', which gives a very crude effect compared to the Dolby Headphone plugin I occasionally use...

  Quote:   I do not dislike Dolby Headphone unconditionally. I do not like DH on top of something already processed for headphone output. I say blind because Dolby Headphone does not know the locations of each sound in the game environment I do like it for 5.1->headphone output, but I...

Quote:   I hate when people try to debunk arguments with appeals to authority.

Except that's exactly what it is. It's math not magic. I will be testing DH versus stereo headphone output more, but I suspect it won't do much for most stereo signals, especially if said signal has already been processed for headphone output which PC games already do.

The best test I can think of is with the bloodsucker. I'm primarily interested in accuracy of pinpointing the location of a sound, which I suspect to be mostly similar from headphone to headphone. DH is just an all-in-one surround downmix+crossfeed+reverb; I think you're giving it too much credit.

I suppose DH might conceivably help on a console where your game's sound output doesn't have a selectable headphone mode. I guess I'll go through some games and test AD700/HD 280 + DH/no DH + headphone/stereo speaker/surround speaker outputs and see how it adds or detracts from my sense of...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.T.A.L.K.E.R.:_Call_of_Pripyat Fairly popular series among PC gamers.   I'm just looking for a more consistent test. Going off of variable multiplayer performance is one thing, but being able to accurately track the movement of an invisible monster by ear...

What games do you test them in? I haven't found a better test than Call of Pripyat's invisible bloodsuckers.

All DACs have some kind of amp in their circuitry, but dedicated amplifiers are usually more powerful. Some DACs have a powerful enough internal amp that they advertise it as a feature.