The Border Patrol DAC - Maybe linearity in a DAC is bad ... Spitballing

From the Stereophile review, a rebuttal from the first reviewer:

In order to answer that question, I have purchased and studied at least 80 genuine (analogue) “master tapes” taken directly from the archives of RCA. Many of them I played back on the exact Ampex machines they were recorded on (which I also purchased). Virtually all of them sounded VERY “pleasing good” and therefore, by your definition, must ALSO have sounded accurate good. In truth, I can’t remember hearing too many bad sounding master tapes.

For my reviews I always use high-res “master” files supplied to me by the recordist for that purpose. When I finished my BP/BM comparison, I told JA about my own “alarming audiophile episode” with Macy Gray’s HDTracks album “Stripped,” wherein the BP DAC reproduced pretty much exactly what I heard sitting behind the binaural head at the former church in Greenpoint and the Benchmark DAC3 which did not even get close. It conspicuously stripped away a huge amounts of what I and David Chesky know is on the recording.

I use Chesky recording sessions to review headphones because I can compare what I hear live to the sound coming off the so-called “mike feed.” The Border Patrol DAC reproduced the church walls, the reverb, the positions on the floor where the musicians were standing, and all the subtle breathiness of Macy Gray’s voice. With the Benchmark, the majority of that information (which is definitely on the master file and appears via David’s $100K MSB DAC and via my Holo Spring DAC) disappeared !!! Your neutral DAC “stripped” away information that is unquestionably on the master file. Not to mention the BM DAC made it sound hard cold and harmonically threadbare. I call this subtractive distortion. Did you measure any of that?  

I use Chesky recording sessions to review headphones because I can compare what I hear live to the sound coming off the so-called “mike feed.” The Border Patrol DAC reproduced the church walls, the reverb, the positions on the floor where the musicians were standing, and all the subtle breathiness of Macy Gray’s voice. 

These "meters vs. ears" discussions always remind me of the film-to- video evolution of the early seventies. I owned a well established film/video studio in Manhattan. I always got a kick out of the debates between the film directors and the video engineers. The video eng. would point to his monitors and scopes and prove the image was “picture perfect” in hue and luminence. “And you can see the threads on the buttons of his shirt!” And the director would scream “no-one can walk into a dimly lit room, open a window blind to sunshine, then crawl under a bed and not have a single shadow on them! The video eng. relished the technology and the film director looked for realism and emotion. I admit I like the dancing needles on McIntosh gear but, I find my enjoyment with the listening and pay little attention to the meter readings.