Neil McCauley
30-08-2017, 12:21
From the desk of Frank Berryman:
Introduction
You can’t swing a dead cat at an audio show without hitting a couple of dozen new DACs, introduced by both established manufacturers and start-ups, ranging in price from $99 up to the cost of a luxury automobile. The new entrants join the literally hundreds of DACs already available. Virtually all of them can play high resolution PCM audio up to 192KHz/24-bit, and increasingly up to double-DSD as well. In fact, if a new DAC can’t play DSD files, it is commercially dead in the water notwithstanding that, contrary to what some audio journalists and industry pundits would have you believe, there really isn’t very much DSD music available outside of some new recordings from small classical labels and vintage jazz transferred from analog tape.
I am sure that most of you are familiar with the psychological theory advanced by Swarthmore College professor Barry Schwartz known as The Paradox of Choice. In a nutshell, although common sense might lead you to believe that the more choices you have available the better, the hypothesis is that when presented with too many choices a consumer can become paralyzed and unable to make a decision, or the experience becomes so unpleasant that the consumer abandons the project. I know this to be true first hand. For example, a few years ago ......
http://www.hifianswers.com/2017/08/exogal-audio-comet-dac-review/
Introduction
You can’t swing a dead cat at an audio show without hitting a couple of dozen new DACs, introduced by both established manufacturers and start-ups, ranging in price from $99 up to the cost of a luxury automobile. The new entrants join the literally hundreds of DACs already available. Virtually all of them can play high resolution PCM audio up to 192KHz/24-bit, and increasingly up to double-DSD as well. In fact, if a new DAC can’t play DSD files, it is commercially dead in the water notwithstanding that, contrary to what some audio journalists and industry pundits would have you believe, there really isn’t very much DSD music available outside of some new recordings from small classical labels and vintage jazz transferred from analog tape.
I am sure that most of you are familiar with the psychological theory advanced by Swarthmore College professor Barry Schwartz known as The Paradox of Choice. In a nutshell, although common sense might lead you to believe that the more choices you have available the better, the hypothesis is that when presented with too many choices a consumer can become paralyzed and unable to make a decision, or the experience becomes so unpleasant that the consumer abandons the project. I know this to be true first hand. For example, a few years ago ......
http://www.hifianswers.com/2017/08/exogal-audio-comet-dac-review/