[Aivaras]

Originally Posted by MattGray

I disagree, take a mix which has completely electronic based instruments for example. Often programmed hi-hats can sound quite bright & too piercing. On a converter that smears transients they may sound more acceptable to the ear but on a detailed converter it could be far less forgiving because it would retain the transient detail & reveal the true source to sound very glaring. (...)

There isn’t really room for disagreement here as I wasn’t formulating generic truths, just stating my personal experience. Yours seems to different, and I respect that.

Still, I’d like to clarify my intention as to the meaning of “pleasure” in my post. I wasn’t talking about consumer gratification. I meant a form of pleasure some get from experiencing a reproduction system as ever improving and approximating life - all those sounds and noises we hear outside of our studios. That life can be unpalatable, but the pleasure of tasting it as it is for some actually does constitute a very special kind of pleasure. So in your example with electronic hi-hats, when employing a converter of superior temporal precision, it’s a great pleasure to experience how overly bright and piercing those high-hats are, and it’s a great displeasure to hear them smeared by a more “forgiving” converter because the ear has been trained to discriminate these things and actually has formed a distaste for “slackened” or “loosened” transients.

Originally Posted by MattGray

(...) or perhaps its an opportunity to deal with it with usual mastering techniques & keep the more detailed converter in play. At least you've revealed the problem, it's then up to you how to fix it. (...)

For me that is the soundest approach, otherwise, audio signal conversion is turned into another sound-shaping processor, don’t we have enough of these already?

Originally Posted by MattGray

Don't forget when you're listening to the original mixes in my test files you're listening to it through your DA converter... so its being colored in some way so how can you really know what that source is really supposed to sound like? Which DA has the 'truest' sound of the source?

Thank you for your kind reminder. No, I don’t forget. Listening is reaching for the source, not owning it. So reflection upon it can still be meaningful even without having or being the source.

In the case of judging the “truthfulness” of transients in this particular converter shoot-out, how do I know which converter is the closest to the intention of the artist or the mixing engineer in his or her room? Well, I don’t, but my real-life experience tells me that it is much easier to transition from a clean transient to a smeared one, but not vice versa. In other words, if you have a smeared transient, even the most accurate converter will not turn it into a clean one, at best, it will accurately render it as smeared. This experience of mine is likely not universal, but I hope it forms at least some rational ground to direct my inconclusive reflection in this interesting and fruitful experiment you have generously set up for us.