Shadorne -
"but the shootout suggests large and earth
shaking differences in performance from
several extremely expensive and extremely
high quality players"...
The results of both sessions, particularly the blinded comparisons do not suggest this at all. There were audible differences and these differences were certainly noticeable enough for each voter to confidently select which player he preferred in the four pairing conducted. As noticeable as these differences were, they were not night and day differences and certainly not large and earth shaking.
"I read the conclusion again...it attributes
all the qualities of the audio at the listening
session to the CD source (as if nothing else
influenced the sound; speakers, music selection,
room acoustics, amp, listener preferences...)"
Now you know why we asked the voters to give their simultaneous votes in the form of simple show of hands. Asking them to provide commentary leads to other issues and I addressed this in detail in my first post on this thread. It can also lead to misinterpretations or inconsistent conclusions on the part of forum members.
Certainly the downstream components in the system used have a certain sonic character, but this was consistent across all players. It is interesting to note that there was not an instance when a voter said that one player was thinner or warmer than another suggesting that tonality is not really the area of greatest discernable difference between these players. Having no tonality issues across two very different systems is a compliment to the designers of each of the players we evaluated.
If I would have had the chance to speak to Pete prior to his initial post I would have asked him to simply report the results and refrain from giving his personal assessment. Water under the bridge...
Instead of trying to get an understanding of Pete's assessments I can only attempt to steer you to focus more on the overall voting results on day 1 and day two. Please see my response to Essentialaudio and at the end of this post I attempted to summarize what this all means.
"but the shootout suggests large and earth
shaking differences in performance from
several extremely expensive and extremely
high quality players"...
The results of both sessions, particularly the blinded comparisons do not suggest this at all. There were audible differences and these differences were certainly noticeable enough for each voter to confidently select which player he preferred in the four pairing conducted. As noticeable as these differences were, they were not night and day differences and certainly not large and earth shaking.
"I read the conclusion again...it attributes
all the qualities of the audio at the listening
session to the CD source (as if nothing else
influenced the sound; speakers, music selection,
room acoustics, amp, listener preferences...)"
Now you know why we asked the voters to give their simultaneous votes in the form of simple show of hands. Asking them to provide commentary leads to other issues and I addressed this in detail in my first post on this thread. It can also lead to misinterpretations or inconsistent conclusions on the part of forum members.
Certainly the downstream components in the system used have a certain sonic character, but this was consistent across all players. It is interesting to note that there was not an instance when a voter said that one player was thinner or warmer than another suggesting that tonality is not really the area of greatest discernable difference between these players. Having no tonality issues across two very different systems is a compliment to the designers of each of the players we evaluated.
If I would have had the chance to speak to Pete prior to his initial post I would have asked him to simply report the results and refrain from giving his personal assessment. Water under the bridge...
Instead of trying to get an understanding of Pete's assessments I can only attempt to steer you to focus more on the overall voting results on day 1 and day two. Please see my response to Essentialaudio and at the end of this post I attempted to summarize what this all means.