[castleofargh]

The BIG difference is that what bigshot claims is almost always in agreement with the science (so it is NOT "sans-proof") and on those relatively rare occasions when it isn't in agreement with the science then I or someone else pick him up on it, request some reliable evidence and refute his claim if he doesn't provide it. You get exactly the same courtesy, however, you are "picked up on it" far more often because you contradict the science far more often!

I disagree. bigshot's punchlines and straight to the point attitude result in him making many claims about things being inaudible/irrelevant for humans. many of his claims are an overreach compared to the available data or can be disproved by the available data.

no matter the topic, the fundamental disagreement will be on what to do with the exceptions. <=== !!!!!!!!!!!!!?
often the topic itself is going to be about the exceptions or the absolute limits where they may or may not occur. the typical stand around here is that exceptions are only exceptions and don't change the statistical answer significantly leaning toward a clear result. and this would be fine if the many statements about inaudible stuff were clearly presented as statistical statements under clear conditions. but stuff like "jitter is inaudible", and "all DACs sound the same", are not it! at the very least, when presented that way, those statements are not in agreement with science. because science will see the exception as evidence disproving the statement. or at the very least, demonstrating that the model is incomplete and fails to describe all the present conditions. either way, science would demand a modification of the statement. which is sort of what Keith is aiming for, even if he sometimes has a roundabout/I want to believe, way of presenting the need to modify the statement.

while bigshot typically will argue that the exception is not something that should happen, or that it would happen with gears he would call defective(most likely, so would I). and while we all understand the rhetoric here, and we all sort of agree(including Keith) in practice that the stuff said to be inaudible are probably not going to be and are very unlikely to ever matter to a random audio enjoying his music, from a strict scientific position, discarding those exceptions, that's just bigshot manipulating the data so that his conclusion can hold.
I've had this discussion almost as many times as Keith, and we're all sick of it, but something has to give. you guys either make a statement along with the specific criteria for it to be true(perfectly fine conditional truth). or you stop making those big global claims and start talking in term of statistical confidence that something will happen. then we're all on the side of science.

@bigshot. IMO, you should make a detailed post, stating how when you discuss relevant or significance, you mean at an audible level for a non mutant human listening casually to fairly typical music at safe listening level, etc. and list for DACs, amps, cables, what you wouldn't accept as a valid sample for any test regarding your statements(and maybe why). do something like this once, add what you come up with as you think about it, and add this in your signature with a warning that the link lists the conditions for your statements. so you don't have to keep explaining what you meant when you didn't specify those and someone didn't read your mind or knew you well enough.
I usually suggest that to the troubling subjectivists, telling people to add in their sig that all their claims are based on subjective experience, or just to have a little "IMO" as a warning for anybody who actually cares about reality. but it might save you and others a lot of time and avoid many more conflicts if you had something like that in your sig, serving as default parameters when you can't be bothered to list them along with your statements(and maybe if you do a good job, it might become the go to reference for more people).

 

[bigshot]

I disagree. bigshot's punchlines and straight to the point attitude result in him making many claims about things being inaudible/irrelevant for humans. many of his claims are an overreach compared to the available data or can be disproved by the available data.

Which ones? Jitter? Noise below -50dB under music? Super audible frequencies? Crosstalk in digital audio? Differences between lossless and high data rate lossy? Differences between 16/44.1 and 24/96? Difference between cables? Differences between typical DACs and solid state amps?

Wow! I tried to read your suggestion at the end there twice, but that sentence was too long to fit in my tiny brain! Is there any way to say that shorter?

 

[castleofargh]

Which ones? Jitter? Noise below -50dB under music? Super audible frequencies? Crosstalk in digital audio? Differences between lossless and high data rate lossy? Differences between 16/44.1 and 24/96? Difference between cables? Differences between typical DACs and solid state amps?

anything said in such a general way that we can find or manufacture a counter example within the boundaries of your statement, thus disproving your claim.

Wow! I tried to read your suggestion at the end there twice, but that sentence was too long to fit in my tiny brain! Is there any way to say that shorter?

lol, sorry. and that's why I'm not offering to do such a post myself ^_^. my suggestion is for a link to a post that lists all your implied circumstances surrounding your statements. as they're pretty consistent(music listening, normal level, standard spec and playback chain arrangement, typical quality consumer device...), doing it clearly once could then be recycled many more times afterward. pretty much anytime you make those black and white statements without bothering to detail a clear context where that statement applies.

 

[bigshot]

Heh heh! OK. I don't like to overcomplicate things. I just answer the question they're actually asking. I let you guys handle all the footnotes!

 

[gregorio]

[1] I'm still waiting to see a list of the "countless tests" that you and BigShot are privy to... but the rest of us are not. (And please make sure they meet his requirements for "a real test and not just anecdotal evidence".)
[2] I actually believe that you may have conducted some tests to confirm this yourself....
[3] However, your assertion is false..... about the metals.
[3a] I simply asserted that, under some circumstances, when you bang two blocks of metal together, you get a fission explosion.
[3b] Oddly, yet again, in one sentence you accuse me of being absurd, but in the next sentence you concede that I'm technically correct....
[3c] And I don't at all disagree with you that the circumstances required for that result would be relatively uncommon.
[3d] And, yes, as it turns out, in most cases, unless you bang them together quite violently, and hold them together for a short period of time, all you'll likely get is a loud noise and a fatal case of radiation poisoning.

1. The obvious question is; why are you "still waiting to see"? There are several published papers/studies (that have been mentioned/listed) which have been available for years, in fact up to 45 years. How many more decades are you going to "wait to see"? There's absolutely nothing we can do about your selective blindness! Which brings us back to the accusation made many pages ago, just because you haven't seen (and/or are otherwise ignorant of) the reliable evidence, does not mean that everyone else (including science) is just as ignorant. That's just a favoured audiophile fallacy! How many times?

2. I have, quite extensively and pretty well controlled tests at that but even so, as I don't have them available to post/publish, I don't expect anyone to take my word for it. If the scientific papers are not enough for you and you want individual, published controlled tests, then I'm sure HA has many of them. With all that reliable evidence against jitter being audible (and in fact at least a magnitude or so below audibility), now it's your turn to provide some reliable evidence that it is audible (under the obvious conditions of recorded music and reasonable playback levels). And just in case there's any confusion, banging two pieces of plutonium together in a recording studio and a pig sitting next to you on a plane does not constitute reliable evidence that jitter is audible!

3. No it's not!
3a. Which is a false assertion (within a nonsense hypothetical)!
3b. You ARE being absurd and no I didn't.
3c. "Relatively uncommon"? The first recording studio was built in 1929 and since then several hundred thousand have been built, in all that time can you name just one single occasion where two blocks of plutonium have been hit together in a recording studio? Is this as "relatively uncommon" as flying pigs? In the audiophile marketing BS dictionary does "Relatively uncommon" = "Never in human history"?
3d. So you agree that your assertion was false! Because by your own admission you will in fact just get a loud noise rather than a "nuclear explosion", unless you have conditions which can't be met! And they can't be met because you wouldn't just get a loud noise and a fatal dose of radiation, you'd also get a great deal of heat. So how are you going to "hold them together for a short period of time" if your hands have melted? Maybe we could enlist the help of a couple of asbestos encased flying pigs to hold them together for us? Surely that's not too absurd by your standards of absurdity is it?

[1] I disagree. bigshot's punchlines and straight to the point attitude result in him making many claims about things being inaudible/irrelevant for humans. many of his claims are an overreach compared to the available data or can be disproved by the available data.
[1a] no matter the topic, the fundamental disagreement will be on what to do with the exceptions. <=== !!!!!!!!!!!!!?

Really castle?

1. Can you give an example of such "available data" in relation to the current topic (jitter audibility)? And by "available data" I obviously mean "reliable evidence" not audiophile marketing/anecdotes.
1a. What exceptions, can you provide some? ... Actually, I can provide one, the Julian Dunn paper, which lists jitter audibility figures (in the "worst case scenario") far lower than any of the other papers and potentially just about within what some of the worst performing consumer equipment might exhibit. However, the paper assumes a peak level of 120dBSPL, a noise floor of 0dBSPL and no audio masking. In other words, our "exception" would be a listener in a top class anechoic chamber, with better than the best reproduction chain and who isn't human (IE. Some being who doesn't exhibit the human hearing traits of threshold shift and audio masking)! So at best, that's a "hypothetical exception", not an actual exception.

As is so often the case, it's all about just flogging the same old dead horses for marketing purposes. Jitter has been done to death, science has done it, pro music/sound engineers did it to death 20 odd years ago, other serious/science audio sites have done it to death and it's even already been done to death here in this sub-forum. The most memorable that I recall was "Jitter Correlation to Audibility", which was memorable because it was at a time when we still had several professionally knowledgeable contributors (who hadn't yet been "run off" by the audiophile BS trolls)!

G

 

[Sgt. Ear Ache]

well now let's be clear...Keith is looking for research that meets or exceeds his high standards of evidenciary credibility. He requires science that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that there isn't a Tibetan monk or a Soviet super soldier out there who can hear the sound of a footstep a kilometre away. Until that is provided, jitter will continue to be a significant concern addressed solely by the application of many many dollars.

 

[KeithEmo]

1a.
Again, I can't seem to find any of those published studies....
- Where they tested the audibility of various quantities of different types of jitter (different frequencies, waveforms, spectra, correlated and non-correlated to the data)
- Where they started with sample content known to initially have very low levels of jitter
(If you're going to test the audibility of various sorts of jitter, you must start with samples that have very low and precisely known amounts of jitter, then add measured amounts.
Therefore, you've got to start with carefully prepared samples with known and extremely small amounts of jitter... and you must document this in your test results.
The few tests I've seen published seem to have shown that "large amounts of very specific types of jitter are inaudible when added to normally produced commercial content".
While interesting, from a consumer perspective, that does not at all answer the larger question.)
- Where the samples were listened to on gear that was tested and confirmed to be able to convey the difference
(In this case, for example, we would need to confirm that the loudspeakers they used to perform the tests could accurately reproduce those jitter sidebands.
The obvious way to document this is by including analyses of the test signals used - including the output of the speakers in the actual test venue.
In ANY experiment about whether something can be detected the first step is to confirm that it is actually present at the point where it is being tested.
Alternately, if proof were found that no existing speaker could reproduce those sidebands, then the test would be proven to be both unnecessary and impossible to perform...
At least for now. That would give us a null result - and not a final provable negative result.)

However, when I've looked, all I can find are a few tests, from back in the early days of CDs, where it was shown that content sourced from CDs, and from old analog master tapes, both containing unknown flaws of various types, and then played using one or two specific DACs, amplifiers, and speakers, didn't sound noticeably different, to a relatively small group of listeners, when large quantities of one specific type of jitter were added. I couldn't find any that properly documented the test signals they used, or that used a significantly wide variety of DACs, amplifiers, and speakers, of known, sufficiently adequate, and properly documented performance.

3c. I'm sure that the (former) occupants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, before the end of WW II, will be pleased to know that they just imagined being incinerated "because banging two blocks of metal together DOESN'T produce a nuclear explosion". Conversely, all of the folks whose homes are currently being provided with electricity provided by nuclear power plants will be saddened to know that they've been running on "snake oil" all these years. (I would prefer to state the matter CORRECTLY AND ACCURATELY and say that: "Banging two blocks of certain metals together, in specific ways, under some circumstances, in fact CAN produce a nuclear explosion. However, because the metals involved are rare and expensive, and the conditions required are difficult to produce, most of us probably don't have to worry about it.")

3d.
MY assertion was that "SOMETIMES, when you bang two bricks of metal together, you get a nuclear explosion"....
It has been widely shown, in many books on both history and physics, that what I said is in fact true.
I'm also quite certain you will not find a single source of proof that the statement is incorrect.... (although pre-atomic-era textbooks may neglect to mention it).

Note that, if you'd said: "It happens so rarely that most of will never have to worry about it" I wouldn't argue with you at all.

It's also worth noting that "figuring out how to hold the blocks of metal together long enough" did turn out to be a tricky problem.
(However, we did eventually figure out how to do so... at least well enough to prove the point.

1. The obvious question is; why are you "still waiting to see"? There are several published papers/studies (that have been mentioned/listed) which have been available for years, in fact up to 45 years. How many more decades are you going to "wait to see"? There's absolutely nothing we can do about your selective blindness! Which brings us back to the accusation made many pages ago, just because you haven't seen (and/or are otherwise ignorant of) the reliable evidence, does not mean that everyone else (including science) is just as ignorant. That's just a favoured audiophile fallacy! How many times?

2. I have, quite extensively and pretty well controlled tests at that but even so, as I don't have them available to post/publish, I don't expect anyone to take my word for it. If the scientific papers are not enough for you and you want individual, published controlled tests, then I'm sure HA has many of them. With all that reliable evidence against jitter being audible (and in fact at least a magnitude or so below audibility), now it's your turn to provide some reliable evidence that it is audible (under the obvious conditions of recorded music and reasonable playback levels). And just in case there's any confusion, banging two pieces of plutonium together in a recording studio and a pig sitting next to you on a plane does not constitute reliable evidence that jitter is audible!

3. No it's not!
3a. Which is a false assertion (within a nonsense hypothetical)!
3b. You ARE being absurd and no I didn't.
3c. "Relatively uncommon"? The first recording studio was built in 1929 and since then several hundred thousand have been built, in all that time can you name just one single occasion where two blocks of plutonium have been hit together in a recording studio? Is this as "relatively uncommon" as flying pigs? In the audiophile marketing BS dictionary does "Relatively uncommon" = "Never in human history"?
3d. So you agree that your assertion was false! Because by your own admission you will in fact just get a loud noise rather than a "nuclear explosion", unless you have conditions which can't be met! And they can't be met because you wouldn't just get a loud noise and a fatal dose of radiation, you'd also get a great deal of heat. So how are you going to "hold them together for a short period of time" if your hands have melted? Maybe we could enlist the help of a couple of asbestos encased flying pigs to hold them together for us? Surely that's not too absurd by your standards of absurdity is it?



Really castle?

1. Can you give an example of such "available data" in relation to the current topic (jitter audibility)? And by "available data" I obviously mean "reliable evidence" not audiophile marketing/anecdotes.
1a. What exceptions, can you provide some? ... Actually, I can provide one, the Julian Dunn paper, which lists jitter audibility figures (in the "worst case scenario") far lower than any of the other papers and potentially just about within what some of the worst performing consumer equipment might exhibit. However, the paper assumes a peak level of 120dBSPL, a noise floor of 0dBSPL and no audio masking. In other words, our "exception" would be a listener in a top class anechoic chamber, with better than the best reproduction chain and who isn't human (IE. Some being who doesn't exhibit the human hearing traits of threshold shift and audio masking)! So at best, that's a "hypothetical exception", not an actual exception.

As is so often the case, it's all about just flogging the same old dead horses for marketing purposes. Jitter has been done to death, science has done it, pro music/sound engineers did it to death 20 odd years ago, other serious/science audio sites have done it to death and it's even already been done to death here in this sub-forum. The most memorable that I recall was "Jitter Correlation to Audibility", which was memorable because it was at a time when we still had several professionally knowledgeable contributors (who hadn't yet been "run off" by the audiophile BS trolls)!

G

 

[Sgt. Ear Ache]

1a.
Again, I can't seem to find any of those published studies....
- Where they tested the audibility of various quantities of different types of jitter (different frequencies, waveforms, spectra, correlated and non-correlated to the data)
- Where they started with sample content known to initially have very low levels of jitter
(If you're going to test the audibility of various sorts of jitter, you must start with samples that have very low and precisely known amounts of jitter, then add measured amounts.
Therefore, you've got to start with carefully prepared samples with known and extremely small amounts of jitter... and you must document this in your test results.
The few tests I've seen published seem to have shown that "large amounts of very specific types of jitter are inaudible when added to normally produced commercial content".
While interesting, from a consumer perspective, that does not at all answer the larger question.)
- Where the samples were listened to on gear that was tested and confirmed to be able to convey the difference
(In this case, for example, we would need to confirm that the loudspeakers they used to perform the tests could accurately reproduce those jitter sidebands.
The obvious way to document this is by including analyses of the test signals used - including the output of the speakers in the actual test venue.
In ANY experiment about whether something can be detected the first step is to confirm that it is actually present at the point where it is being tested.
Alternately, if proof were found that no existing speaker could reproduce those sidebands, then the test would be proven to be both unnecessary and impossible to perform...
At least for now. That would give us a null result - and not a final provable negative result.)

However, when I've looked, all I can find are a few tests, from back in the early days of CDs, where it was shown that content sourced from CDs, and from old analog master tapes, both containing unknown flaws of various types, and then played using one or two specific DACs, amplifiers, and speakers, didn't sound noticeably different, to a relatively small group of listeners, when large quantities of one specific type of jitter were added. I couldn't find any that properly documented the test signals they used, or that used a significantly wide variety of DACs, amplifiers, and speakers, of known, sufficiently adequate, and properly documented performance.

3c. I'm sure that the (former) occupants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, before the end of WW II, will be pleased to know that they just imagined being incinerated "because banging two blocks of metal together DOESN'T produce a nuclear explosion". Conversely, all of the folks whose homes are currently being provided with electricity provided by nuclear power plants will be saddened to know that they've been running on "snake oil" all these years. (I would prefer to state the matter CORRECTLY AND ACCURATELY and say that: "Banging two blocks of certain metals together, in specific ways, under some circumstances, in fact CAN produce a nuclear explosion. However, because the metals involved are rare and expensive, and the conditions required are difficult to produce, most of us probably don't have to worry about it.")

3d.
MY assertion was that "SOMETIMES, when you bang two bricks of metal together, you get a nuclear explosion"....
It has been widely shown, in many books on both history and physics, that what I said is in fact true.
I'm also quite certain you will not find a single source of proof that the statement is incorrect.... (although pre-atomic-era textbooks may neglect to mention it).

Note that, if you'd said: "It happens so rarely that most of will never have to worry about it" I wouldn't argue with you at all.

It's also worth noting that "figuring out how to hold the blocks of metal together long enough" did turn out to be a tricky problem.
(However, we did eventually figure out how to do so... at least well enough to prove the point.

Hop in the way back machine to two posts above your previous post...

 

[KeithEmo]

Well... yes... since this is supposed to be a SCIENCE forum that IS what I expect (evidence with no credibility isn't evidence at all).
(I expect statements like: "Most people don't hear a significant difference" from Consumer Reports or my favorite marketing trade mag... )

Let's assume I assert that: "Sometimes, when you bang two bricks of metal together, you get a nuclear explosion".....
I would expect that, in a science forum, this might provoke a discussion about the conditions under which this happens, or the metals you need to use, or how pure they have to be.
Instead, the reply I get is: "Chumley banged two blocks of aluminum together a dozen times and they didn't explode. See... we've proven conclusively that you're making stuff up."
(I have nothing against that information, since it does add at least a few data points, but don't try and tell me that what happens with aluminum, or what happens with the paperweights on your desk, can be generalized to prove what happens with all metals.)

On the subject of jitter....

I DON'T KNOW what levels of jitter are audible....
I suspect that the amount that would be audible will depend on the waveform, frequency, and amount of data-correlation involved (many other folks seem to suspect the same thing)....
I also suspect that how audible it is will depend on the content it is associated with....
I also suspect that how audible it will be will depend on your other equipment....
And I an quite convinced that this has NOT been explored and tested in exhaustive detail....

And, yes, I am interested in "How much jitter people are likely to notice when playing typical commercially produced CDs"...
But I am ALSO interested, from a purely scientific perspective, in what levels are audible under absolute optimum conditions...

I would expect 1000 Hz sine wave jitter to be far more audible than 0.1 Hz sine wave jitter.
And I would also expect both to be more audible with a 3 kHz test tone than with a 20 Hz test tone.
And I would expect 20 Hz square wave jitter to be more audible than 20 Hz sine wave jitter.
I would also expect that various combinations may be more of less audible than others.
And I suspect that data-correlated jitter more audible than random jitter (which many people claim to be the case).

And, yes, I would really like to see someone run those tests instead of just guessing....

Here at Emotiva, where I work, we've made several different DAC models... and we often acquire competitors products to listen to.
I've also personally owned a few dozen DACs over the years.
And, yes, everyone I know here is quite convinced that we often hear small differences between them.
Often between products whose major specifications are so similar we would not expect to hear differences.
And, since we are a product manufacturer, and not a university, or a research laboratory, we often have neither the time nor the budget to figure out exactly why.
However, to me, that suggests that "we don't know everything yet" and "we probably could use some more research on the subject"...

well now let's be clear...Keith is looking for research that meets or exceeds his high standards of evidenciary credibility. He requires science that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that there isn't a Tibetan monk or a Soviet super soldier out there who can hear the sound of a footstep a kilometre away. Until that is provided, jitter will continue to be a significant concern addressed solely by the application of many many dollars.

 

[KeithEmo]

Indeed....

And, as someone said, it just goes around and around....

We have an old AES paper that, based on analysis alone, suggests that "sine wave jitter at certain frequencies as low as 20 picoseconds" may be audible....
And another old paper, describing a test run under rather questionable conditions, showing that, under those conditions, several tens of NANOSECONDS (or even thousands of NS) of a different sort of jitter proved to not be audible....
And another test, with even more "unspecifieds", run by Stereophile, that seems to set that number at 120 picoseconds.

The problem is that, taken in total, this all seems to back up what I said....
Which is that we don't have enough detailed information to reach any reliable general conclusions....

It's also worth noting that J-test, which was mentioned several times in that thread, and is widely quoted, DOES NOT measure internal jitter directly, and DOES NOT apply jitter directly to the input to see how a particular DAC responds to it. What J-test does is to apply a very specific input data signal that is known to cause the input circuits of many DACs to produce jitter (a sort of "torture test"). It then measures the jitter sidebands that result at the output. While this produces interesting and useful information - it does NOT specifically provide a direct indication of either how much internal jitter a DAC has or of how sensitive it is to specific amounts of jitter present on the input signal. (For example, it fails to differentiate how much jitter is generated due to the test signal, how much jitter is inherent in later circuitry, and how much is removed down the line by other circuitry...)

Hop in the way back machine to two posts above your previous post...

 

[bigshot]

The standards get higher if the evidence doesn't seem to be going his way. And any question, regardless of how left field and poorly documented, is a valid reason to throw up our hands and assume that the high end audio salesmen must be right. This isn't a matter of knowing the truth, it's admitting the truth.

 

[Sgt. Ear Ache]

The standards get higher if the evidence doesn't seem to be going his way. And any question, regardless of how left field and poorly documented, is a valid reason to throw up our hands and assume that the high end audio salesmen must be right. This isn't a matter of knowing the truth, it's admitting the truth.

Yeah, it's pretty annoying. When it comes to disproving audiophile snake-oil mythology, he has ridiculously stringent,. highly specific, constantly increasing requirements for evidence. However, when asked to provide any proof of said myths, he has no requirements whatsoever. It's just "hey, you haven't disproved it (up to ridiculous standards set by him) so..."

 

[KeithEmo]

BigShot....

I'm afraid that's true for all of us - to a degree.
If there are a variety of options, we all tend to be more willing to trust evidence which agrees with our preconceived beliefs, and to distrust evidence that disagrees with them... that's just human nature.
(Do you prefer the test that showed that 10 NS of jitter is inaudible - or the AES paper that concluded that, under some circumstances, amounts as low as 20 PS might be audible?)

The catch here is that you are usually the one making the wide generalizations... which puts most of the burden on you.
You may think that it's "obvious" that "all DACs sound the same unless they're broken" - but not everyone agrees with your opinion on that subject.
However there is no question that it is a far reaching generalization.
(One reason most scientists avoid such wide generalizations, unless they're looking for press coverage, is that they are so difficult to prove, and so easy to effectively challenge.)

In this case, you seem to be asserting, in the form of a positive claim of fact, that jitter below some known level is INAUDIBLE - to every human being on the planet, under every possible circumstance, now and forever.
That's a pretty far reaching claim - and so calls for some pretty conclusive, credible, and overwhelming proof.
(However, when I look, I can't even find a general agreement about what that level might be, and every test seems to offer a different choice there.)

Since I never claimed that any specific amount of jitter, of any specific type, is audible, I have nothing to prove.
I merely claim that the proof you've provided is inadequate to justify such a far-reaching claim.
(And, in real science, if I find one legitimate flaw in your data, or the experiment that produced it, then it cannot be considered to be conclusive, and more testing is indicated.)

There is a qualitative difference between statistical claims like "most people say they don't hear a difference"....
And absolute generalized claims like "no human being currently alive can hear it"....
(The former may in fact be more useful to many people - especially in the context of a consumer product.)
(But the latter does require a much higher standard of proof.)

The standards get higher if the evidence doesn't seem to be going his way.

 

[Sgt. Ear Ache]

Nobody here is making the claim that ALL jitter is inaudible. You know that very clearly. We are making the claim (backed up by every study presented so far) that jitter at levels found in basically ALL modern dacs is inaudible.

 

[KeithEmo]

You forgot to finish that last sentence....
"Hey, if you haven't actually disproved it, then it's just possible that it may be true after all."

I have equally stringent expectations of proof for anything you wish to state as an absolute fact.

And, if that proof doesn't exist, I'm not going to lie and pretend that it does...
I'd rather be honest and say: "I've never seen anything that supports that claim" or "According to a lot of established science that doesn't seem to make sense".
That way, if I've missed something, or turn out to be wrong, I haven't also become a liar.

I'm actually inclined to agree with BigShot about most of this stuff...
A lot of it is snake oil, a lot of it is probably honest but misguided superstition, and a lot of it is probably the result of expectation bias...
However, I'm also willing to admit that this is my educated opinion on the subject...
And I'm also willing to admit that neither I nor anyone else knows everything about everything...
(And, as a result, a tiny portion of it probably has some basis in truth, and that may even include a few things that I personally don't believe.)

In real science, actively proving something, or failing to do so, are both relatively common...
(And, quite often, when something is not proven, we agree to provisionally assume that it isn't true.)
However, actually DISPROVING things is very often much more difficult, and often just plain impossible.

Yeah, it's pretty annoying. When it comes to disproving audiophile snake-oil mythology, he has ridiculously stringent,. highly specific, constantly increasing requirements for evidence. However, when asked to provide any proof of said myths, he has no requirements whatsoever. It's just "hey, you haven't disproved it (up to ridiculous standards set by him) so..."