. And I know, I know, I'm sure you guys have heard all this before and when it comes to these equipment differences....prove it, right? Maybe it hasn't been done so much because it's not always the easiest thing to test? You need a pretty willing tester to make sure it is rigorous, do you not?
Equipment takes effort to test. I do hope people pouring money into audio equipment learn sooner rather than later what makes a difference in the audio chain. And the industry will certainly not sponsor tests which will hurt their sales. The piece of equipment that shows ready differences is the piece of equipment that introduces distortion orders of magnitude greater than DACS and amplifiers — the speakers.
It’s easy to ABX test different qualities of digital music files.
I read of someone who was expert and differentiating high quality MP3s from lossless files. This was a person with known measurable hearing loss at certain frequencies, and he could do it because he had an unusual ability to detect artifacts that normal ears could not hear.