I gather many sound sciencers love believing that super cheap kit is ‘all that’. Good for them!
It's got nothing to do with love or believing but everything to do with reliable/objective evidence. That's what science is, didn't you know that?
Equipment is made to ‘tiers’, and the equipment expects to find certain common properties in the tier of kit it is associated with.
This is somewhat true but not in the way you seem to falsely believe. In the higher "tiers" what we often find is more esoteric ways of trying to achieve the same thing, with the result that they cost many times more and actually reproduce lower fidelity. In some cases the fidelity is so low in the higher tiers that it's actually audibly lower, although in most cases the audible fidelity is exactly the same as in the cheaper tiers. This isn't necessarily true of all high end gear, particularly with transducers for example but is quite common with DACs and amps.
Putting a great DAC OR a great transport into a chain might not do much, but ‘both together’ and things might actually ‘take off’.
Again, a nonsense, marketing BS driven claim, given that you haven't (and no doubt won't) provide any reliable evidence to support your claim. As a caveat though, if by "
take off" you actually mean 'crash and burn' (as far as audio quality/fidelity is concerned), then yes, there certainly are examples of that in the higher tiers. However, I wouldn't call that a "great" DAC or amp, I'd call it an incompetent, rubbish one!
[1] When designing ‘budget’ parts, the engineers have to make them tolerate all sorts of’ leeway’, [2] it literally makes them unqualified to do ‘high end’ audio quality (that other users experience)
[3] This isn’t placebo, this is basic math and engineering…
1. What "leeway"?
2. We can agree on this to an extent. Some/Many engineers wouldn't be experienced in expensive esoteric designs which either produce LOWER fidelity/audio quality or at their best, achieve the same audible fidelity as their much cheaper counterparts.
3. I wouldn't say it's basic math and engineering but neither is it particularly complex compared to some modern math/engineering. But, as it is all obviously constrained by the math/engineering, if you're hearing something that can't be captured or reproduced by the math/engineering, what's left apart from placebo?
A DAC made for streaming from a great transport doesn’t need to smear it all together.. in the way that the entry level parts often ‘just do’.
And again: Just repeating the same nonsense claim with different wording but without any reliable supporting evidence is NOT science, in fact it's pretty much the opposite of science! Don't you know that? Provide the easily obtainable reliable/objective evidence of this "transient butchery" or "smear it all together" claim OR, your empty claims are nothing more than trolling!
To say that ‘ in the early nineties’ I was doing discrimination experiments and ‘testing on subjects’ regarding a plethora of Psychology theories.. is fair. I haven’t forgotten the very conclusions I pushed for in my submissions ‘back in the day’. Actually tech and psychology are my backgrounds.
This and much of what follows in your post is effectively just "an appeal to authority", that's a serious error of judgement for two reasons:
1. You're not an authority on audio recording and reproduction, you're claiming an education in a different field. There are some here with a much higher claim to authority, with more knowledge and professional credentials in this actual field, who've also probably spent significantly more money than you and have far greater experience than you with high end audio systems/environments. However, that's all irrelevant because ...
2. An "appeal to authority" is a logical fallacy and therefore pretty much the opposite of science and unacceptable here, as anyone with even a fairly rudimentary education should know, let alone someone claiming a tertiary education!
I gather I am not playing by ‘the rules’ of the sound science section if I only post anecdotal discoveries or don’t provide (when demanded by people who are not the OP) for proof of things that will allow them to sell their agenda.
What do you mean "
I gather I am not playing by the rules..."? Even a rudimentary education in science makes clear that anecdotal evidence is not acceptable supporting evidence, how could you not know that with your claimed level of education?
I actually take the ‘science of sound’ really seriously. ...
I do not believe science is wrong.
If that were true, then why are you demonstrating pretty much the exact opposite? Appeals to authority, anecdotal evidence, no reliable supporting evidence, repeating empty claims and marketing BS as fact, and all that just in a single post. It beggars belief!!
I feel that science IS constantly evolving, and this is based on looking to the past to gain insight to ’the future’.
What science is constantly evolving? OK, let's do that and look into the past: 1 + 1 = 2 is probably about the oldest science/math in existence. How has it evolved over the millennia, when did 1 + 1 become something other than 2? When did Ohms law evolve and become wrong or something else? Sure, there are many areas of scientific research that are constantly evolving where scientific knowledge is incomplete but that's not the case with audio, or at least it's irrelevant because all the commercial audio recordings in existence are obviously constrained to the long established, proven, existing science.
I gather that the majority, some of which may have even toyed with the occasional ‘nice piece of kit’ (but seldom in unison with a full rig of matching equipment designed with the same tolerances throughout) will keep defending that budget equipment, that ‘measures well’ is ‘all we need’ and anything more is a ripoff.
That is ONE perspective.
That's the ONLY rational perspective, as digital audio is itself NOTHING other than a single measurement. The only other potential perspective is a wholly irrational one, that relies on digital audio not being digital, an analogue electrical signal not conforming to the physics of analogue electrical signals and on some sort of magic that reproduces what can't and hasn't been recorded to start with.
much of the subjective experiences we get from equipment cannot be easily qualified and hence the OPs question regarding ‘language’ used…
What subjective experience, do you have phono or XLR connectors embedded in your skull? How can you have a subjective experience of an analogue electrical signal or of a string of ones and zeroes? The only subjective experience one can have of say a DAC is of it's visual appearance or of it's marketing, not it's audio performance. What a DAC (or amp) outputs is an analogue electrical signal which is simply a voltage varying over time. What is it you think we don't know about a voltage varying over time? And even if there were something we don't know about or can't measure, how can you hear this something while reproducing a recording, if it's beyond the science to record in the first place?!
None of the above is really that complicated to understand, it should easily be within the grasp of someone claiming a tertiary level of education!
G
