I feel a little compelled to chime in here. The thread originated by someone asking a legitimate question about the product. And since AVA doesn’t post specs, the question seems valid. (Don’t get me wrong, posting specs about traditional analog HiFi may be a fruitless practice, as other manufacturers bend or outright break the measurement standards to make their products jump off the page. As such, posting honest specs in a sea of lies may not be the best practice.)
But there’s a world of difference between analog and digital HiFi. And developments in DAC over the past decade have been significant; the chips of yesteryear simply do not compare to the chips of today. In a very real sense, DACs are partially subject to Moore’s Law (and other issues associated with rapid technological advancement).
So as far as DACs go, I (myself) would prefer to see specifications--as it increasingly becomes an issue of mathematics rather than audiophile tweaks. (Or, at the very least, a list of the digital components used in the product in the “D” part of the DAC.) Instead, we’re given nothing but meaningless rhetoric and our own blind faith. ("A multibit oversampling design was used...” or “our uniquely pure digital design...” What do these phrases actually mean? Multibit simply means >1 bit. Anything less than 8 bit oversampling will leave significant problems relative to harmonic distortion; so if “multibit” is less than “8 bit”--I am not impressed. And anything that reads binary code, by default, is going to be digital.) And other questions, such as HDCD compatibility, are left totally unanswered.
I guess my point is that, at least with chip-based digital technologies like DACs, specs and (chip) components mean something. And while the 30 day AVA HiFi return policy is certainly very nice--the irrefutable laws of math and physics are such that honest numbers on a page can be very revealing toward describing the performance of a DAC, just as it would any other computer.
This isn’t written to be read as negative relative to AVA HiFi; it’s his company, and he can market his products as he chooses. Rather, this is more of an indictment on the entire HiFi industry that seemingly ignores math, physics and science in lieu of meaningless soap-opera like drivel found on the pages of *insert pretty much any HiFi magazine here*.
/Rant
