Restricted Listening Tests?, Restricted bandwidth and high-end DAC's Options

[dbmcclain]

Hi All,

I have been doing a lot of web research on high-end DAC's. Just ordered a Lavry DA11 to see some things for myself. But of the top 3 that I have found -- Mytek, Lavry, and Benchmark, I hear consistent comments about how much they open up the soundstage, compared to lesser systems like my MOTU 828 and Ultralights.

I do research into full-spectrum musical hearing correction for musicians and audiophiles. Many of us have lost portions of our hearing due to a variety of factors -- industrial noise, illness, misspent youth...

I wonder if anyone has tried an audio shootout among these high end converters using explicitly restricted bandwidth, say a steep lowpass filter at 10 kHz. For those with hearing impairment, there isn't much to be done about losses above 10 kHz. So apart from my anticpated comparison between a Lavry DA11 and the MOTU 828mk3, I would be interested to hear the impressions from avid, careful, listeners under conditions of restricted bandwidth playback. Can any difference be detected? or do you really need the "air" above 10 kHz to realize the differences so often noted for low-jitter accurate playback systems?

- DM

[skamp]

OP: the default hypothesis here is that all DACs that aren't defective by design, sound the same and are all transparent, even if they measure more or less differently, beyond audibility.
Also, graphs (or pretty much any kind of measurement) aren't accepted here as an indicator of sound quality, because while they may show physical (real) differences, they don't say anything about the audibility of measured attributes.