AB Testing Experiences

That post was ignorant level 1. Our whole concept of tone balance is tied to volume. Change the volume, our perceived tone balance changes and no amount of listening experience will ever change that. Increasing volume also brings out detail that can be lost at lower volumes again changing our perception and appreciation of the music. Nothing in listening experience will change that either.

Wish there was better info on the inner workings of the expensive audio boxes.  Some of the info out there is helpful.  Specs are plentiful but really are not helpful but needed.

of course the quality of workmanship may not be of value as it may not matter much in some areas within the box.  Although there are basics that need to be better emphasized by the quality providers.  This great work is being shortchanged by the marketeers, who should be working closely with the designers and creators.  So much to offer about a product that never reaches the buyer.  

It’s hard to do truly blind listening.  I have two SACD players in my system, and Oppo 105 and a Sony 5400 ES.  I have a Bryston DAC3 with 4 HDMI inputs, and both players output DSD over HDMI.  I have several SACDs where I have wound up with multiple copies, and recently spent some time comparing the two players, switching between HDMI inputs on the DAC.  Not truly a blind test, and the HDMI hand off isn’t instantaneous either.  I have also switched between one of the HDMI inputs and the Coax input that I use for the streamer and the usb for the PC, comparing rips of CDs, and again it isn’t blind.  I enlisted my wife to change inputs at one point, and she was nice enough to cooperate, but she was clearly bored, and it also led to the question on her part “Since they all sound the same to me,why do you need all of these different boxes?”  so heed my experience and don’t go there

cd318
Surprised that you can’t hear much of a difference between SACD and mp3.  I listen primarily to Classical and the differences between mp3 and Redbook are pretty overwhelming, let alone mp3 and SACD.  I do notice that when I play pop mp3 sounds pretty decent.  In fact I don’t own any pop recordings, I just Bluetooth them from my phone via Qobuz.

Simply putting a tube buffer with a pot in a tape monitor circuit is revealing how little most of this stuff matters to "sound.."  In the end it's not "listening" so much as toe tapping. Like Darren Myers sez. Involvement with the music is the only objective.