[welwynnick]

Its not a two-man campaign by Axe79 and myself to corrupt every free-thinking person on the net, we are simply agreeing with the majority of people who have compared player and amp decoding where they have the facility to do that. Of course some of the anecdotal accounts are not reliable because people don't level-match properly, and I'm well aware of that. Which is why I DID level match to within 0.5dB - as close as I could get it with the SC886 - and is why I DID do blind testing to back up my own observations. I only came to this thread once I had done that, because I knew what the reaction would be.

Notwithstanding all that, even though the rest of the World are doing comparisons that might not be scientific by your chosen standards, it doesn't mean that the results are wrong. They're not - bitstreaming does sound better in certain systems, and just because somebody cannot hear any difference does not mean that there isn't a difference.

However, it could be that with some combinations of player and amplifier, the digital audio replay architecture may be similar with both schemes, and there could be no reason for them to sound different. What I do know now is that with the Onkyo amp that I used, there was a difference, and from what I hear elsewhere from reliable sources there are differences with many other amplifiers as well.

I've put a great deal of effort into performing accurate and reliable comparisons over two weeks to reach this conclusion, and if you care to look around, you will see that I am being taken seriously.

regards, Nick