ab initio
500+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- May 1, 2013
- Posts
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I find it strange that seemingly everyone in the audio community except those in this sub-forum accepts that DAPs can easily sound different.
I think you might be misunderstanding some of the arguments here a little. Nobody in this forum believes that DAPs cannot sound different. What many members of this subforum are skeptical of is that every DAP sounds different from every other DAP.
Here is the thing, you are asking questions about why your two DAPs sound different when you haven't yet demonstrated that they actually sound different. The members in this sub forum do not have your gear, so we cannot test and validate your assumption that the two DAPs sound different. Once you can reasonably demonstrate that the DAPs have a different sound signature, then we have eliminated a few of the possible answers to the original question of why the DAPs sound different.
Science is largely a game of process of elimination. The approach here is to answer your question "why do these DAPs sound different" by eliminating the various hypotheses.
Here, we can start a check list to narrow down the answer to your question:
Question:
Why do these DAPs sound different?
Possible answer: The volumes are set differently which is well known to cause perceived differences in sound quality
Possible answer: Sighted listening bias --- It is well known that if people see/feel/sense/think different equipment is playing music that they will tend to hear differences that don't actually exist
Possible answer: Differences in DAP--headphone interaction (things like damping factor, etc.)
Possible answer: Differences in analog circuitry in the headphone amp section (distortion, frequency response, etc)
Possible answer: Differences in the digital circuitry in the DAP (DAC, DSP, clock noise, etc.)
Possible answer: Differences in the DAPs suceptibility to RFI/EMI
Possible answer: Differences in the DAPs power supplies
Possible answer: <any other hypotheses?>
Let's start eliminating things! The first two are the easiest to eliminate without requiring extensive research and an engineering degree
Cheers