You can't help it, can you, Item?
Change your figures to 99.99% of the performance at 20% of the price & I might go along with your argument.
Catering for the people willing to chase the missing 0.01% is a perfectly honourable thing to do.
Doing it by scatter gunning foo, pseudoscience & bullshit in the hope of conning the credulous is not.
Chris
I'm curious: how are you deriving those figures, mathematically? Seems pretty subjective . . .
It's a broad church: we have customers with partial deafness, bat-like hearing, tinnitus, teenagers, 85 year olds, etc. They're all seeking quite different things: some are looking for a particular timbral quality, others resolution; some are hung up on big dynamic range and high sensitivity; others have to have ultra low-noise presentation. They all ascribe different monetary values to chasing those objectives. There are ways to con them, and ways to encourage them to spend responsibly. That's the difference between good and bad dealers.
Pseudo-science is dressing up authentic-looking research or expert opinion to reinforce a particular prejudice. The anti-digital camp has two viewpoints that look a bit scientific:
1) Casual, or partial, measurements don't show up subtle differences that people claim to hear. Therefore, people are stupid.
2) All DACs have noise and jitter rejection/control measures that are claimed to be 100% effective by the manufacturer. Therefore they are.
Mixed up with this is a lot of totally subjective 'I can't hear it' anecdotes, which reporting is accepted one minute as 'evidence' and the next dismissed as 'irrelevant'.
The first objection gets more contentious the more it is scrutinised and takes us into the domain of extremely sophisticated equipment and techniques, as well as neuroscience. No-one here is close to being an authority. So let's not invoke 'science'.
The second objection looks more plausible, but is contradicted by what actually happens, and turns out to be a gross over-simplification promoted by DAC manufacturers.
We have grounds to be biased both ways: among others, we sell Benchmark DACs which are sold on the basis of their 'jitter and noise immunity'. We also sell transports which are sold on the basis of being influential to the performance of the system. I can tell you we make more money from DACs than computers: we (freely) help more people to build their own than ever buy from us, and that's OK.
All not terribly relevant, though: the fact is that many apparently trivial or superficially unlikely factors in the digital domain seem to matter, just as CD transport designers learned decades ago. It's all about the engineering.
No one person fully understands the whole Windows OS code base: it's grown too complicated. We've similarly grown blasé about how complex PC motherboards have become. To rule out interactions between all these components, without the necessary knowledge, really is pseudoscience. Let's politely call it 'overconfidence'.
