Thumbs up and Subscribed! Fantastic review: well structured, thoughtful, and honest. Flawless audio, lighting, and camera work as well. Do you do your own production?
You raised some interesting questions that, if we're being honest with ourselves, I'm sure most head-fi'ers have also pondered. How much CAN we actually hear? What do we actually perceive and how much is placebo? This comes up a lot for me when thinking about the topics of bit rate / depth, and cable quality, and to a lesser degree sound stage, since the perception of 3D space is something that literally generated by our brain's own software. Anyone that's ever played with some good optical illusions knows how much of what we see / think we see is based on context and assumptions and post-process that our brain does; not the actual light coming into our eyes.
But then this gets back to the greater questions of, if it feels real to us, and we enjoy it, does it matter how "real" it is?
I also wondered the same thing about how the IDSD pro would play in the the product line with the ICAN pro. I can't help but feel skeptical / cynical in places where it seem like a company might have a very strong incentive to "nerf" a feature in one product to prevent it from competing with another product from the same line. Its like when GM sold both the Camaro and Corvette, but they where careful to always hold the Camaro back just enough that it wasn't a real threat Vette sales.
But, with their philosophy of checking every possible check-box (including some that didnt exist in the market before), it would be very odd to see a flagship dac from IFI that DIDNT also have at least SOME form of HP amp. It would also be odd if that AMP didnt sound fantastic. But then that get's to the very real issue of destroying sales for the still-fairly-new ICAN pro... so making the IDSD's amp sound good, but just lack the power and features of the ICAN is an interesting decision and walking a thin line of trying to make everyone happy:t still gives new customers a good justification for owning both while also not pissing off existing ICAN owners.
However, there also might be a very practical reason for holding back some of the power from the IDSD's amp: heat, form factor, isolation. Powerful amps (even SS ones) generate a lot of heat. My GS-X mk2 actually creates a noticeable small updraft from all the heat that it puts off. Also, many of the very, very best amps, both SS and tube, physically separate the power and amplification stages. The GSX also does this and each half is actually bigger than the ICAN. So considering what the ICAN can do; it's already a remarkably compact design. Trying to pack an ICAN (or even micro BL's) amount of juice into the same form factor just might not have been possible without compromising something else like noise or longevity of components due to heat.
