Well, what I understood from the article, was that they were trying to evaluate the progress made by digital audio equipment. The comparison with analogue was pointless, as their reference systems "After the first moments of listening, people unanimously agreed that it was no needing to fill-in any score sheet what so ever.". In other words, the difference was way too high.
The most interesting conclusions, for me, are : 3. DIGITAL technology all these years didn't make much progress and various algorithms or oversampling or other tricks applied to the digital design didn't fool the audiophile's brain after all. The 15 year old Wadia was sonically almost equal to «State of the Art» equally priced designs of today. This proves my statement in my introductory notes that red book has hit the roof... ... 7. Nevertheless, If somebody wants to stick to the classical red book CD player, given the research made by A.C.A.'s Secretary testing various digital players in his wonderful system... within the price tag of 10,000 Euro retail (ic and p.c included) you may find the BEST digital out there and retail above that for a digital is a WASTE OF MONEY. On the other hand, you may get the same quality with much less than that, spent for an analogue source... 8. As far as HD or musical servers (sic!), some of the material that we listened was very good in comparison with the red book, but most of them sounded a bit cold and clinically dead, with no breathing. Time will tell if laptops will be accepted by audiophiles as an alternative sound reproduction source along their wondering road to music nirvana, or it is a clever history repetition of 1981 when CD was lounged... I don't agree on ALL of that, but most audiophiles consider most of it to be true. Me too. -- Themis SB3 - North Star dac 192 - Denon 3808 - Sonus Faber Grand Piano Domus ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Themis's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=14700 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=53355
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