Found this thread a week or two back, but it took me a while to find an opportunity to dig through it all, which I wanted to do before jumping in with my own thoughts.
This is a great place to start. I completely agree that both objectivity and subjectivity are important to building understanding. Measurements provide a concrete way to evaluate and compare audio equipment. And subjectivity cannot be dismissed, because music is an art form, and beauty is in the ear of the beholder.
I wouldn’t call measurements flawed so much as limited. The problem is they usually very precisely show you one thing, but never capture the big picture. They cannot. Attempting to define a single measurement that does so becomes so broadly-scoped and poorly defined that you end up with something like Crinacle’s IEM rankings. While I personally find those ranks very useful, they are nevertheless boiling a huge number of factors down to purely subjective letters–good for casual inspection, but hardly the whole story.
Measurements are good as guideposts, but not as dogma, especially if your goal is the pursuit of pure subjective audio pleasure. I think a good analogy would be animation–it’s a medium that seeks to be its own aesthetic rather than live action realism. There’s room for both.
My experience is that the THX amps simply seem to be hyper-revealing, which can reveal other weaknesses in the playback chain. If the amp’s job is to take what is fed into it and make it louder, perhaps the problem is harsh treble coming in from upstream?
I’ve got a number of Astell & Kern DAPs that have biased me towards AKM DAC chips. I started with an AK380 (4490), then moved up to the SP1000 (4497) and heard an undeniable improvement. Meanwhile, my desktop rig at the time was a Topping DX7s (ES9038Q2M). I liked the sound from my DAPs better, at least until I upgraded my DACs to the RME ADI-2 (4493) and D90 (4499).
I’m not sure if it’s filters or some other secret sauce–maybe even placebo at this point–but the AKM DACs sound more refined to me. D90 into 887 is still my favorite reference stack.
I am certainly guilty of this. To me, the Focal Utopia and Stellia from a THX amp are about the pinnacle of clean, detailed, natural sound. I am very much in lust with the depth of detail retrieval from those headphones. More recently, I’ve been enamored with DT 1990s and other Beyers for treble-rich detail, which I don’t find as perfectly done as on the Focal flagships, but which is nevertheless very appealing when combined with the overall presentation of the 1990s, etc.
In any case, I’ve zeroed in on D90 + 887 as “provably audibly transparent” and have used that stack as a way to analyze differences between my various headphones (pushing about 30 pairs now). I feel like this combo puts the DAC and amp as far out of the picture as possible so that the characteristics of various headphones are as plain as I can make them. Therefore, my impressions of the headphones should reflect the headphones themselves and not so much a mix of the headphones and playback chain.
So, anyway, yeah–I roll headphones to change up my sound signature. I find them to be, by far, the biggest variable in the whole playback experience, and I get a lot of mileage out of this.
I wish I could relate better to this sentiment, but so far I just don’t get it.
My first amp was an Aune X1s, followed up shortly with an X7s to complete the stack. Then I got a Little Dot Mk III to figure out what “tube sound” meant. But then I jumped into the 789 and it was like a small quantum leap in detail.
I’ve been able to fully appreciate scaling up in headphones, but amps have been almost a dead-end for me. I really wanted to hear some kind of magic out of the RNHP, but in direct A-B with the 887 it just sounds equally transparent. Which does make it an excellent amp–as good as the THX if more expensive–but I have yet to find any combination of headphones and songs that make anything stand out as a repeatable difference to me.
I’ve also heard some of the high-end SS amps at CANJAM and RMAF, but outside of the closed listening rooms that’s a poor environment to judge an amp very reliably. So I’m left wondering, just what do you get out of a SS amp above $500 or so that you can’t get from a THX amp?
I could see a Phonitor, perhaps, but that would be paying extra for features rather than raw sound quality, discounting the bonus option of playing with crossfeed.
And this is the perfect place to close. I have been hanging out at HiFi Guides because the vibe here is more Generally Cordial Audio Enthusiasts. SBAF is too cliquey for my tastes. It didn’t feel like a friendly place to be a new person learning things, and I’d fully expect a lynching for challenging the groupthink there.