> And in those edge cases where you can audibly hear the distortion and noise, it would be worth getting a lower noise source. —-> For all other cases it doesn’t matter <—-

Dissent in the interest of knowledge and in common hobby with all of you:

Purportedly. Or if it sounds good, you can embrace it. Whoa, what is this sourcery? (Sorcery) “Get you a topping DAC amp and it’s the best it will ever sound.” Maybe. It depends?

Just as the prevailing notion for years and often still is that lossy 320 kbps doesn’t matter vs FLAC for most listeners is purported… since, usually drawing false conclusions from fact based datasets provides the easy false consensus to win arguments with zero honest discussion en masse and sustained in a tick tock manner of forum discourse over time.

Very similar and same are not synonymous. With the tendency to exclude all cases that buck the tailored talking point that “none of this matters… “audibly” and for anything within the constraints to make it easy to defend, at that - is a convenient way to dominate the conversations on the internet at large. Forever. Perceptually is a better term here, and all listeners are not the same. Perception is not consistent, changing the parameters of the listening changes the outcomes.

plain and simply, though close in sound quality, the atom amp is not identical to an O2. For me and my hardware. Not for all potential listeners that don’t demonstrate ability to discern fine differences between mostly alike signals on blind tests with statistics will notice anything at all.

Considering this to be based only in placebo or bias is the easy and quick surefire way to discount and nullify any anecdotes that are, for an individual, assessments that are actually based in reality. “Prove it!” Is the cry. Since the social psychology of forums has perpetuated this type of discourse and made it worse with downvote and upvote buttons.

There is no IRL universal comparator hardware rig like with for music files at ABX.digitalfeed.net to allow swaths of hobbbyists to “test” in a consistent and rigorous manner to even find out.

It is the MO of this subreddit to approve and support tests of something like a D10 and a Modi DAC that do not find any difference. Despite that the methodology is so poor, why bother. Even the best posters’ methodology that mention they did notice something almost always gets dinged for their levels matching or whatever can be used to discount the test, no matter how well people try.

So unless we can have everyone that tries to look into have not only a perfect method with blind or double blind testing proctor, along with a dummy load and a high precision multimeter or an analyzer with an o-scope and levels displays to whatever factor is needed to match the voltages/power levels precisely, then also have seamless and silent instantaneously but blindly controlled switching, that has to be totally non destructive to the signal to try this out at a large enough scale to even matter statistically and remain consistently rigorous; what are we even doing? One or five songs on one day is not a meaningful test. People that pass lossy vs FLAC tests can fail with a couple mistakes despite accurately reporting what they heard.

People that are of the mind that none of it matters need not even actually try to pass the test. Click no difference. Click. While people that do notice fine differences in other tests would have to listen and pick carefully. Why bother to try to prove to people that won’t believe you anyway and will bury even the best and most rigorous testing with the tides of text in a matter of three days. Fail and they mock you. Pass, for real, they mock you. It couldn’t be so, I don’t notice anything type reasoning in what is on an individual listener/music/hardware basis a variable equation.

if this is the demand of the pro “mildly different sound profiles exist” camp but not of the “none of it matters” camp this isn’t good science. Especially if we restrict and exclude all these verifiably different scenarios in place of a mindset which is limiting the consideration to hardware that is supposed to be “transparent” and act on a “very similar is equivalent to same” assumption with the demand of proof on the opposite side, it creates a lazy and uninformed majority to defend all this. One that also demonizes anyone who demonstrates why it matters, even with amps that if you look at the SINAD, most would say it’s all transparent and same = same. It depends on a lot of factors.