Blindjim, you have accused me of a few things, and with no justification. What is it you have to hide? The statement that bits is bits does say it all. Timing of those bits is critical to great sound and I am surprised there are still people that don't get that.
Let's take just one of your accusations - that I am biased towards Macs. I have owned computers since the first PC in 1980 and the first Mac I purchased was about six months ago I think. I am typing this post on a PC, because I like it better than the Mac. I have always very much disliked Macs as I am an old DOS-head who knows how to wring every last bit of performance out of a PC and I am pretty ignorant when it comes to Macs. Those are facts. The only reason why I have a Mac in the house is that I had just spent months comparing different PC builds, file format and software player combinations, including the cMP builds, and then tried a bog standard Mac and was utterly surprised to hear what a Mac could do without breaking a sweat. Not anywhere near perfect but detail resolution, dynamics and PRAT were superior to any iteration of PC I had tried to date. So much so that it was screamingly obvious that the Mac had something very important going for it. That fairly standard Mac did in fact suffer a bit of glare compared with the PC and so I set out to see what could be done to remove it.
This is a forum Blindjim - a place where people state their opinions without the need to state their scientific evidence, or have to repeatedly say IMO ad nauseum. Your attack of me for stating my opinion says a lot about you buddy. Your accusations of bias and some percuniary motive show you up for what you are. No I don't sell Macs. Do you accuse everyone that has an opinion that is different to yours of being a vendor of what they like?
I stated my opinion on my conclusions about what sounded best to me following man months of effort to try just about everything I could. You stated your opinion, not about equipment, but of me. Where do you get the right to do that Blindjim. You don't know me or anything about me. Search my posts and you will see I have declared my interest as a designer and marketer of cables. I refrain from commenting on cables in any way that might be a conflict of interest. I do not have anything to do with any computer audio products. At one point I looked at doing that but have decided against it - so I feel I should be allowed to post my opinions without personal attacks.
Lets just take one last point from your rant. You state you disagree with me that we should attempt to create a sound system in its own right. I believe that deciding an USB device should perform well on anyone's PC is counter to just about anything else audiophiles seem to agree on, therefore I use a Mac for music (only) and PCs for everything else. Your position is that that is unreasonable. Do you, Blidjim, insist that your speakers should be good plant stands too, use your DVD player as a CD transport because they jolly well should be able to do both jobs, insist on a teflon coating on your amps so that the fried eggs don't stick? So why insist that computer audio should be dumbed down to run on your workhorse, general purpose PC?
