Audirvana Studio Review: Optimizing Sound Quality Through Software

[Agoldnear]

@mhsmit

The Benchmark DAC3’s price alone is approximately 2/3 the cost of the entire Yamaha receiver, which demonstrates the different priorities - Benchmark putting all their resources into stereo music playback, while Yamaha creates an excellent multi-purpose device with surround channels and DSP that balances many different requirements.

It only shows the difference in the economy of scale not priorities…

The ESS chipsets are virtually identical except for sample-rate support…
You didn’t connect the RX-A8A directly to your mono-blocks from the pre-amp outputs and you employed the UltraRendu and the IsoRegen in the Benchmark system and not in the RX-A8A setup… Very difficult to remove the subjective bias in this audition… Definitely far from definitive… It is one observation limited by the implementation. I think you can do a better blind test and give us something less biased.

The Dishonesty of Sighted Listening Tests