The sound quality from DACs - is it all the same?

Unless they can statistically prove over a larger population that it sounds better, it don’t mean jack

I highly doubt people buy their audio gear to statistically prove (satisfy) the mass population. I have a strong feeling they buy them to satisfy themselves. Not other people. There may be exception.

Believing anything someone or some company subjectively says without going through this kind of statistical scrutiny is akin to believing in get-rich-quick schemes

Again, I don’t think people blindly listen to what a company subjectively says. There may be exceptions. I have a strong feeling people buy their audio gear based on what they like and enjoy. Personal preferences. Commensurate with their budget / money outlay they can afford. Who cares about "Statistical scrutiny", and not sure whether the masses or a large group of "sample population" needs to have any impact on individual people’s decision to buy their personal audio gear.

@ghdprentice

Companies that produce really high end equipment are not unaware or stumbling around. They don’t play with blind tests any more than the top birders in the world need to refer to google to make sure of the correct identification of a sparrow.

I totally agree. They know what they are doing, and huge part of that is marketing their story. They know better than to try to compete in a lower cost market even if they could make products with their house sound for a significantly lower price. It would be as futile as if Ferrari tried to try to compete in the sub $30k new family car market. They don’t know how to do it. It ain’t easy at all! They could possibly team up with Toyota, but that would just tarnish their brand image, even if it turned out to be an excellent family car. The people who buy Ferraris don’t want to see the label on every low end sedan and mini van everywhere. The people who don’t typically buy Ferraris aren’t going to care much about that label. Making a car analogy is somewhat weak because a fast Ferrari easily has measurably better performance than a sub $30k family sedan. With audio equipment the "performance" as it might be measured typically doesn't correlate much with the price. So it's paying for taste, just like paying for styling on a Ferrari compared to some cheaper car someone has hot rodded so it's crazy fast. High end exotic cars typically get their special looks by having small amounts of internal usable space compared to the size of the car. Any practical design cannot look the same. 

I highly doubt people buy their audio gear to statistically prove (satisfy) the mass population.

Well, that's not the point I was making, but they should use statistical information to filter their own decision-making process. And studies like Toole and Olive's show the likelihood of what the typical human prefers. I'm first going to assume I'm a typical human before I assume I'm an atypical one and flounder around testing atypical equipment. Likewise, with electronic equipment I'd rather start from a neutral base and determine what adjustments to neutral I prefer. That's why humans use common baselines for just about everything.

@jssmith 

Unless they can statistically prove over a larger population that it sounds better, it don't mean jack. The ultimate approach in audio so far has been Floyd and Olive's at Harman, where they can predict with 0.86 correlation coefficient which speaker listeners will prefer in blind listening tests. And when bass extension is similar, that number goes up to 0.996. Believing anything someone or some company subjectively says without going through this kind of statistical scrutiny is akin to believing in get-rich-quick schemes. Unfortunately, the human psyche is built to want to believe in these kinds of schemes.

The exploitation of human frailty is often the marketers goal.

On the other hand folks like Floyd Toole, Sean Olive and more recently Amir Majidimehr at ASR have done some good work in ushering in a new era of measurement based "statistical scrutiny" for which an increasing number of peoplebseem to be grateful.

@cd318, the difficult part is getting the people who know how to implement audio reproduction to accept that "perfect" does not mean "good sound", and the people who don't implement audio (but think they do) to accept the other side actually knows what they are doing.

My background is in solid state physics and material sciences. If you need someone to build a battery for you from scratch I am your guy. My background and tools I have access to could allow me to completely simulate an acoustic absorber, but I still hired an acoustic engineer to design my listening room. I could literally build a transistor from scratch, but I trusted the engineers who designed my electronics know what they are doing since that is not what I specialize in. I am an innate skeptic, but my experience and others demonstrated knowledge leads me to believe those who can demonstrate real expertise as opposed to those who claim it by virtue of simply using something.