Discussion is purely academic. There is no need to go personal with shower head nonsense and certainly no need to patronise others by trying to play an expert and belittle their input. If you want to win an argument that has impact, you do it on merit, and not on negative emotion, bullish self-assertion and personal remarks. Please temper your comments. So, there's that.
Now. I am not an expert in the field and I do not need to be, to be able to form or voice an informed view. I have expertise and measurements in front of me and discussion is matter of interpretation of engineering, methodology used, real life usage and market conditions. It's complex. As I said before: "Buyers are at liberty to ignore Amir's findings and that's ok too." If I wanted to buy this particular model, I would actually go for it, as there is nothing shocking or very alarming in his review. Measurements do not look barking mad. Knowing that he is DAC-purist also allows us to have some distance and exercise own judgement.
In fact, Amir placed DAC of this particular Monoprice model in 'Very Good' category. See below. His list of Fair, Very Good and Excellent DACs is ~3/4 of all devices he has ever tested, and ranging 90-123 dB. So, surely, dominant majority of engineers are doing a great job in this respect, both in simple devices and in complex devices, so not only headphone simple DACs. Even in many 'poor' measurements it cannot be said that engineers are "stupid". That comment of yours was baseless.
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Other reasons drove him not to reccomend the unit and he is entitled to voice those reasons, even if we disagree with it. Since when disagreeing with someone's conclusions has become so intolerable? Gene also found shortcomings with A6A unit, but that does not prevent people from buying it, if they wanted to. And it certainly does not make Yamaha fans feel as if they want to cancel or crucify Gene for speaking his mind. We need more people like Gene and Amir to measure devices and expose potential issues and give us more information about products, even if we disagree with some of their conclusions.
Another reason why DAC measurements, expecially in expensive products, need to be top notch is quality assurance and personal experience. It's always good to play some analogies and give more context. Below is the link to two expensive Tesla models. Both have modern infotainment hardware. One model has Intel Atom CPU inside and another model has AMD's Ryzen CPU. If you click on the link below, you will find out that AMD's processor significantly outperforms Intel's CPU in buffering and loading times. Maps and other applications work with both processors, but loading times and processing are much faster with AMD's CPU. Now, if you are happy to wait 15-20 seconds for Maps to show up, you will not pay too much attention to this feature and buy whichever model you prefer for their other features. The same applies to Amir's conclusions. He pays attention to certain features and forms his judgement. You are welcome to disagree with it in respectful manner, as no judgement is ever perfect, however, pouring buckets of BS on him and his work is not going to help audio community in any meanigful way.
The first of Tesla's Model Y Performance units began delivering with AMD chips instead of Intel chips last week, and following the switch, we can see the two chips performing side-by-side. A new video shared on Weibo by @42how_ on Monday shows a Tesla Model 3 with an Intel Atom A3950 chip...
teslanorth.com
