everyone runs to the forums to tell everyone else how great the new component they bought sounds, show beautiful pictures, and expressed how wonderful their systems sounds because it is easy to put it in words and writing about it, but when you ask the proud audiophiles to share some audio recordings of their wonderful systems to showcase what they have accomplished they will give you a ton of excuses why they cannot or will not. The audio recordings are what they are and there is nowhere to hide.
Op, you’re not the first one — and definitely won’t be the last — to hit a wall on this. Several years ago, there was a big shot on this forum claiming he managed to EQ his system flat down to 20 Hz in-room. I mean perfectly flat, with no roll-off past the 20 Hz mark and beyond. He even showed an SPL diagram. But how could that be physically possible with the moderate speaker system he owned? So I asked him to record and demonstrate the sound. Nope — with all kinds of refusal, denial, and defense, he literally told people to “just take his word for it.”
I understand where this kind of resistance comes from — concerns about recording fidelity, YouTube compression, playback through other speakers, and so on. But in my view, none of these should be real obstacles as long as one can produce a high-fidelity recording.
The key is the quality of the recording. If you use a cellphone, you’ll lose spatial cue information. A simple stereo mic (like XY or ORTF) can capture left and right imaging, but to preserve true spatial cues — including depth and envelopment — you need an array-based microphone setup and technique. To avoid all that hassle and expense while still removing the room from the equation and capturing spatial cue information, recording directly from the DAC output is probably the most practical and economical solution.
So, to summarize and offer some hope to passionate individuals like yourself:
I suggest recording directly from your DAC using a portable recorder such as the Tascam Portacapture X8, which supports up to 32-bit/192 kHz resolution — plenty for high-quality work. You don’t need a separate audio interface or computer, nor do you need to process the recording in a DAW. When posting on YouTube, you can also provide downloadable high-resolution WAV files for those who crave lossless evaluation material.
It may sound like a lot of effort — and it is — but that’s what it takes to earn genuine appreciation from fellow forum members. And in the end how much you gain in return, nothing but the sense of achieving something that you feel passionate about.
