Update: Was just doing some listening during the "magic hours". You know, usually late at night extending into the crack of dawn. For me, those hours extend into 11am. I just picked up on a significant difference between the SFD-1 and the Reference 7 that I was unable to detect during my initial listening, which took place in the afternoon might I add. I will start from the beginning. This morning I decided to do some more listening with the Reference 7 to see if anything might have changed. I decided to switch the dithering on due to a certain person insisting I was cutting the fidelity in half by leaving it off. The oversampling was left at 8x. This time around I didn't listen to any of my usual reference tracks. Rather, I left the cd in which was playing from the previous night. To The Secrets & Knowledge by Number One Gun. I was expecting to hear what I heard before, very subtle differences. From the very start I noticed something didn't seem right, or at least not the way I remembered it sounding when I was listening with the SFD-1. I just kept listening anyway. Track 8 came up which is an instrumental. The beginning of the track features 3 strings being plucked separately in intervals from an electric guitar. The very first pluck, I noticed something was definitely different. I had to play it back again to make sure I wasn't imagining things. Sure enough, it didn't even sound like an electric guitar, it sounded acoustic until the rythm picks up and more strings are plucked. I noticed that I was hearing only the start of the note of each pluck, with little decay, and it sounded thin and mechanical. I immediately switched to the SFD-1 to see if I would hear the same thing.
