[bzzzt]

>Generally all of these "debates" come down to people who think math > circuitry. All real designs are imperfect trade-offs. They all have issues, and arguing as if converters are perfect when they never are, and the imperfections can be benched objectively, is... not very scientific.

There is one purely objective benchmark: a true blind test. You can believe if something is different or not, but if nobody's capably of hearing the difference, does it matter?

[Applejinx]

You're missing a few words. To be correct you would have to have said 'if nobody's capable of hearing the difference every single time beyond a statistical doubt, does it matter?'

You can say that and be correct, while also sounding a little more silly than perhaps you'd like.

edit: rather than go even harder, I'm instead going to suggest it's perfectly fine to care about things you don't hear every single time, but still like or dislike :)

My pet example is sand in the lettuce for a salad. If you dislike that particular cronch against your teeth while eating salad, it has a spectacular ability to ruin your enjoyment of your salad, even though you don't perceive it every single time. Digital distortions are like that for some of us, things like wow and flutter and vinyl surface noise are like that for others. People vary. (which is also why not to generalize about what 'people can hear')

[bzzzt]

Oh, I care about audio quality a lot more than most people, but not into 'magic cable' territory.

There's no reason you can't gather statistics about a representative part of the population. It doesn't make sense to make the entire world pay for better audio because some guy somewhere might be a bit more sensitive and he thinks it ruins everything.

I don't know if such a person exists, but especially in the 'magic' audio territory there's a big amount of bullsh*t going on. There's a reason the James Randi price was never claimed.

There's a huge difference between digital 'distortions' caused by sampling at CD quality and things like tape flutter which most people can actually hear. Even then, some people like the imperfections like vinyl or tape artifacts. Some people even prefer MP3 compressed music.