- Mar 11, 2011
- 23
- 0
- 0
first of all; to WHF staff, my post is certainly not a rant on your efforts. in fact your reviews are quite free (as much as I can remember) from such, let's call it, "fairy-tale reviewing" you can come across with other mags or, more justly, with specific journalists.
here's the story. today I bought a hi-fi mag on a whim. I don't do it too often but today I felt like flipping through some pages. anyway, in this particular issue there was a multi test comparing some 10 DACs. what annoyed me so much in this article was the reviewers impressions in the lines of; "this DAC has slightly highlighted higher midrange", or "that DAC lacks some filing in lower midrange", or "this DAC has slightly rolled off high frequency"... I'm wondering, how on earth could anybody in their right mind and knowing anything about hi-fi be writing such rubbish? and more so, could consider themselves hi-fi experts/ gurus? I mean, if this guy was shown freq response graphs of any of those DAC he would definitely see that they are ruler flat. I've seen too many tech reports on digital sources performance to think otherwise. it's always ruler flat within audio band (with maybe a fraction of dB of attenuation around 19k Hz due to anti aliasing filtering kicking in, in case of 16 bit material).
well, I'm not trying to say that by all this that "all digital sound the same" (there are of course other factors in place than just freq response) but I think such "experts" should not be allowed publishing in any self-respected mag. it's simply wrong and misleading.
here's the story. today I bought a hi-fi mag on a whim. I don't do it too often but today I felt like flipping through some pages. anyway, in this particular issue there was a multi test comparing some 10 DACs. what annoyed me so much in this article was the reviewers impressions in the lines of; "this DAC has slightly highlighted higher midrange", or "that DAC lacks some filing in lower midrange", or "this DAC has slightly rolled off high frequency"... I'm wondering, how on earth could anybody in their right mind and knowing anything about hi-fi be writing such rubbish? and more so, could consider themselves hi-fi experts/ gurus? I mean, if this guy was shown freq response graphs of any of those DAC he would definitely see that they are ruler flat. I've seen too many tech reports on digital sources performance to think otherwise. it's always ruler flat within audio band (with maybe a fraction of dB of attenuation around 19k Hz due to anti aliasing filtering kicking in, in case of 16 bit material).
well, I'm not trying to say that by all this that "all digital sound the same" (there are of course other factors in place than just freq response) but I think such "experts" should not be allowed publishing in any self-respected mag. it's simply wrong and misleading.