[castleofargh]

Me? I am just saying DACs sound different. Their analog output stage works similar to a preamplifier. If you are capable to hear difference between preamps you should hear difference between DACs, even if it uses the same DAC chip, as explained in the above PS Audio video.

As for the source conversion with the component video cables, it produces a more theater-like experience. Who wants to see a movie with sport-like feel in the pictures? It simply doesn't match the creator intent.

The matter of DACs sounding different isn't about the possibility of sounding different. It's about making sure the difference is something you notice with your ears instead of your eyes. If you don't believe that can be a problem, you're wrong and probably should go read a bunch of things about psychological biases, and why the scientific method is usually needed to assert objective facts. Then maybe come back and we can discuss the sound of DACs again.
I don't agree with @bigshot or anybody with a tendency to declare all DACs audibly transparent and audibly the same. I don't like absolutism. I like it even less on a statement nobody can hope to verify(i.e. Testing all DACs).
But in term of weighting wrongness, I'd still take his voluntary generalization over most empty claims of audible difference based on ignorance and the utter inability to conduct an actual listening test.


About the PSA video: anybody who can dumb down something so I can understand it, while limiting the number of faults due to oversimplification to a minimum, is a hero in my eyes. The man in the video is not one such person(it's the nicest way I can put it).


As to your analog video cable and creator intent... That's BS. It all has been explained to you. You're forcing a D to A conversion and then an A to D conversion inside the TV. Then argue about visual stuff that have nothing to do with using a digital input and all to do with your TV and whatever crappy enhancements you left active in it(plus I'm guessing no calibration whatsoever). Again, as it seems clear that lack of knowledge is what drives most of your posts, I suggest you get yourself some help to calibrate your TV. Maybe get some old school Spears and Munsil video(do they still make those?). If your TV is modern and high tech enough, maybe you can calibrate it with the stuff usually used for computer monitors. I have some old Spyder sensor thingy that served me well for my monitors, but my TV is too cheap/old for that so instead the calibration is a PITA .
Even you wouldn't agree with you if you had the experience of using a properly calibrated and properly set TV.

 

[bigshot]

I am just saying DACs sound different. Their analog output stage works similar to a preamplifier. If you are capable to hear difference between preamps you should hear difference between DACs, even if it uses the same DAC chip

Your mistake is that you are assuming that different designs sound different. But if a piece of audio equipment is designed to operate transparently, it doesn't matter what design it uses to achieve that. Human ears won't hear any difference. I have been searching for an amp or DAC or player that isn't audibly transparent for a long time, and no one has ever been able to suggest one to me. People have pointed to specs, showing one thing measures better than another, but those measurements are usually an order of magnitude beyond the range of human hearing. I've done controlled tests of a wide range of equipment from a $40 Walmart DVD player all the way up to an Oppo HA-1 and I can't hear a difference in any of it. With casual listening I *think* I hear a difference, but when I rack them up in a level matched, direct switched blind test, all those differences disappear. I'm subject to expectation bias and perceptual error just like every other human on the face of this globe.

The problem is that you are too intellectually lazy to go to the trouble to verify your subjective impressions. It's fine if you want to go along based on your own personal bias and perceptual error, but that only applies to you. Your advice is useless to anyone else. You don't want to listen to any fact that doesn't validate your bias, and you're even less motivated to get off your ass and do any kind of controlled listening to verify your imagination, so I don't see you changing your mind anytime soon. So I'll just sum up by saying...

You don't know what you're talking about. Prove you can hear a difference objectively or I won't believe you. I don't trust your guesses about how things compare.

EDIT: Oh! And you know even less about analogue vs digital technology. (and that's saying something!)

 

[ScareDe2]

Should I perform scientific tests under strict control and read more books, or just pick the DAC that sounds best to my ears ?

You're forcing a D to A conversion and then an A to D conversion inside the TV

It's rape, but it is getting closer to the motion and colors that a movie should have. Of course I already have tested all the other options on my two TVs.

Maybe good news here: https://www.howtogeek.com/509211/what-is-filmmaker-mode-and-why-will-you-want-it/
I will consider going back to laserdisk before sending my wallet in this new rabbit hole though.

 

[bigshot]

Should I perform scientific tests under strict control and read more books, or just pick the DAC that sounds best to my ears ?

Should you do research into the design and manufacture of a car before buying one, or should you just pick one in a color you like?

Feel free to be as intellectually lazy as you want. Go ahead and operate entirely based on your subjective feelings. It's fine with me. Just don't expect other people to listen to your advice because your subjective impressions only apply to you. They mean jack diddly to me. I listen to advice and opinions of people who back them up with facts and actual knowledge of the subject.

By the way, analogue video is 29.95 fps interlaced to 24 fps. That isn't "filmmaker mode". You can only get "filmmaker mode" with HDMI cabling and a progressive signal. (You don't know what any of this means though, so just go ahead and pretend your old CRT Sony monitor is what "filmmakers intend".)

You could probably learn a few things in this forum if you asked the right questions and listened. You're chatting with people who are sound engineers and film makers, in case you weren't aware of it.

 

[castleofargh]

Should I perform scientific tests under strict control and read more books, or just pick the DAC that sounds best to my ears ?

To play music and enjoy it, you should absolutely just pick whatever you like. To argue about objective facts with other people, some controlled experiments or knowledge about those conducted by others, would do a lot better than your subjective preferences and instinctive ideas to defend them.
To answer different questions we have to consider different approaches.

 

[ScareDe2]

Where is the objective experiment proving that all DACs sound the same?

 

[bigshot]

You can’t prove they all sound the same. But you can prove they sound different if they actually do. Get to it, champ. I’ve tested a lot of equipment and I can’t find one. Neither can a lot of other people here who do controlled testing. It’s up to people who hear a difference to prove it isn’t just expectation bias.

 

[ScareDe2]

Different capacitors produce different sound :

 

[ScareDe2]

You can’t prove they all sound the same. But you can prove they sound different if they actually do. Get to it, champ. I've tested a lot of equipment and I can’t find one. Neither can a lot of other people here who do controlled testing. It’s up to people who hear a difference to prove it isn’t just expectation bias.

There was this guy who was tube rolling his amplifier and he could no more hear a difference, his tubes all sounded the same. Maybe it has to do with the brain blurring the difference after binding extended experiment. You need to take a pause at some point and let all your senses dive into the poetry of the music.

 

[bigshot]

Brain blurring.

 

[Davesrose]

Please, for the love of god....ScareDe2 has proven either to be a troll or someone who doesn't want to have any intellectual discourse: after several pages of folks reasoning about audio and video processing, he's still going on about "poetry" and analog always being better because reasons. Myself, I'm very knowledgable about video production and have stated how current digital UHD standards are superior for aligning cinema standards towards home video. If we do want to dredge some kind of discourse about audio DACs from this....for me, I find a lot of problems when someone wants to make generalizations how a DAC chip sounds. On forums such as this, I have seen there are stereotypes of certain brands sounding brighter than others....but how can a DAC chip have sound? It's within an integrated circuit that needs other components for amplification to headphone or loudspeaker. I find it gets more muddled, as folks talk about their MacBooks, DAPs, etc as source. I have found sources can sound differently because it's not a straight chain from a DAC chip to analog stage. In the case of using a computer, for example, you're playing off a software player that's invariably adding more DSPs or EQs. I have both Macs and PCs. I notice all my PCs have Windows 10, which now adds some Dolgy Atmos as default (for advertisement of Dolby I assume).

 

[Davesrose]

I have some old Spyder sensor thingy that served me well for my monitors, but my TV is too cheap/old for that so instead the calibration is a PITA .
Even you wouldn't agree with you if you had the experience of using a properly calibrated and properly set TV.

I have a color calibrator for photography, and also supports HDR (so have also used it for my OLED TV). I've also paid for some high end HDR and Dolby Vision test patterns to fine tune contrast and color balance for each mode. I'm anal like that. But you can still get 95% there just by doing some basic color settings. If your TV is old, you may not have a color filter setting.....but I think this video is really a great basic setup for calibrating a monitor (and you can find the SMPTE pattern easily on youtube)

 

[bigshot]

I used that Spears and Munsel’s Blu-ray Disc to calibrate my projector. The funny thing is that it came out almost exactly the detects!

 

[castleofargh]

I have a color calibrator for photography, and also supports HDR (so have also used it for my OLED TV). I've also paid for some high end HDR and Dolby Vision test patterns to fine tune contrast and color balance for each mode. I'm anal like that.

From this I'm getting that you also didn't know the superior fidelity of PAL/SECAM.
Sarcasm aside, it's just a video version of the "vinyl is more accurate than digital" delusion. I can't say if it's absolute ignorance of what is going on under the hood. Or if maybe they've gone so deep into their own subjective world that anytime they read "analog", it can only mean real original stuff to them(despite how the term never carried such meaning).

Maybe Captain America was only one out of thousands of guys that got unfrozen, and they have yet to get up to date with modern tech? I'm considering all possibilities.

 

[taffy2207]

This has been on my mind for some time.

When Bats Fart, do they perforate their own eardrums?

Lockdown has given me way too much time to think, it seems