extracampine

You should have included the Curious cable and the Sablon cable...think those 2 are supposed to be the best.

Great retrospective and overview. I remember building the CAPS 2 back in the day. Things have moved on a bit since then and it's an evolving field, despite the laws of electronics and acoustics remaining the same. Debates re. high res remain. Physical room treatment and DSP to correct any remaining aberrations are definitely worth exploring. There are a lot of 2-channel purists, and I've not ventured into more channels yet. I wonder if multichannel audio is a better solution? I'd agree with renaming the site to "Computer Audiophile". That is after all what the core of the site is about, and where its roots are. Having "style" in title suggests form over substance; aesthetic over function; superficial focus on current trends as opposed to underlying principles and ultimately audio quality and enjoyment.

No mention of the cheap tactic to almost copy the name of an established brand (Auralic)?

Prove is not the correct word, as you can never prove something 100% - instead you can show something to be highly likely, with good statistical power and small confidence intervals. What exactly you want to show would be up to the person who designs the study. You could aim to show any of those things that you suggest. In terms of our discussion, your first suggestion would fit best - whether the motherboard causes any audible changes for a particular combination of audio components. You raise a good point - ideally you would conduct this study with a few different combinations of audio components, in case there is any spurious result. Well, I wouldn't be so sure. The concept of electrical "noise" is often spoken about on audio forums, yet the evidence seems to suggest that this doesn't audibly affect the SQ. A DBT like we were discussing would answer this question. Yes, very. If a (valid) study is done to find a car that doesn't break down, that would be meaningful. The chances of that car breaking down when you are driving it would be significantly less - but never zero, which links in to my point above about the word "prove". Now you're talking about statistics and statistical power. This depends how certain you want to be on your results. The more people you include in the study, the more powerful it will be and the more valid the results will be. So, again similar to my point about the word "prove", it would highly unlikely be "better for absolutely everyone" - nothing ever is, that is an unrealistic goal. So for example, statistically it might be better for 95 out of 100 people, which is a vast majority when it comes to audio! Well, medications don't just work or not work; it's not as simple as that. They increase or reduce the risk of things from happening. So you could, for example, be taking a medication to reduce your risk of heart attack (e.g. if you were obese and a smoker) - and it might reduce your risk from 70% to 50% - and you could still have a heart attack. But that doesn't mean that the medication hasn't worked; it has still reduced your risk. The question is how certain can we be that it reduces the risk from 70% to 50%. To draw an analogy with audio, if we can be highly certain that a component increases the SQ from 60% to 70%, say (to use some arbitrary measure of SQ) then that information is useful. Yes, isn't that the whole point of this discussion? We require more studies such as DBTs to obtain this reliable information! You may well be right, I've not really looked into that. You'd have to do a DBT... 😂

Interesting discussion. But not necessarily likely to lead to reliable audible differences, hence the need for a DBT to answer that question properly. No, like I said, in any field where it actually matters (take developing medications as an example) there is a need to prove it can happen. It's not bizarre at all. And if you're looking at parting with hundreds or thousands of $ for audio equipment then it's not bizarre either that we would want to know if something is better or not. No, of course not. Individuals are free to do what they like with their own systems. The point is that the fact that you think it sounds better could quite possibly be due to placebo/expectation bias/etc - so other people can not make any conclusions from it. This is fine for you in your own home if you're not bothered about that - but when we're talking about the consumer market and expensive purchases, then many will want reliable information to guide them. I'm not entirely sure on your point; you had said that there had been attempts to do this sort of thing already (DBT) and that the backlash from certain groups (e.g. AES) has been strong. I had countered by saying so what if there is a backlash, it's all in the name of progress. You seem to be agreeing with me on this one.

Well, that's your opinion and not what we were discussing here. We're talking about the objective stance, and double-blind controlled trials. It's just as relevant as any other component is. Indeed, it's $550 of relevance, which is a lot to some. And whether "all the things that can matter" actually do matter, well, you'd have to do some double blind controlled trials to see if they do..... Back to the "it's difficult" argument.... It's not prohibitively difficult - you just get 2 systems that are the same, except for the mobo, and compare them - in a controlled way in keeping with the trial protocol of course. I'm not sure what you mean by this. When we have the results of the trial, either they are statistically significant, or they are not. So we have an answer to our question either way. Yes, all throughout history there have been backlashes to progress. When it was first suggested that our Earth is not at the centre of the universe, there was a backlash. So what? A single experiment will yield results on what it was designed to show, if done properly. That is all we are talking about here. If there are people with an "attitude" (presumably who don't understand scientific trials), that would be their problem. And of course, like in other fields, these trials would be repeated, and other trials would be done, to build up an "evidence base".

You're making a very large assumption here....that the mobo variation makes a statistically significant detectable difference. I don't think that it would, but that is what the test would be set up to do. Second, you say "this would deeply disturb those of an objectivist bent". It wouldn't deeply disturb them - the whole point of a double blind trial is to provide objective evidence - where there is a difference, or not. And if someone can find out what is causing that difference, then that's a win-win isn't it! The fact remains, that when the results matter, this is how it is done. You can't argue with that. So if we really want to find out the answers, this is how, no matter how cumbersome to set up and how much certain audio manufacturers wouldn't like it.

This made me lol....I know that one of course, and it's what I based my comment on....the "joke" in my case is just as stated! Regarding the debate between measurements and what people can hear, I agree with the above poster that the double-blind controlled trial is the only way to answer the question truthfully. It's how it's done in other fields where the results really matter. I think saying that it is difficult to do is a cop-out. It would be easy, for example, to have a hifi setup with 2 source components, one with a standard mobo and one with this one. You could then easily switch source and listen for any differences. You would need a certain number of listeners ("n") to make the results statistically significant. If someone would set up a website, start doing this sort of thing and publishing the results, I think it would be very popular indeed!

Interesting to see a motherboard coming from SOtM. Their focus had previously been on separating the source component/PC (e.g. a Roon Rock) and the "endpoint" - e.g. using an SOtM SMS-200. As these two components have quite different requirements, there seems to be some sense in this - and this appears to have been the prevailing approach in the audiophile community. Having the source and endpoint separated by ethernet cable seems to negate the need for an "audiophile" motherboard in the source PC. Or am I missing something? If you just had one machine which acted as both source and endpoint (e.g. a CAPS), then maybe there might be some use in it....

How does it compare to Audiolense? Also, can't you just sent the recorded log sweep file to them, and they'll do the work for you and send you back a convolver?

Thanks for your reply Chris, and yes I am sure that my interpretation was not the meaning you had intended. It was just the flavour I got from the name and quite possibly what some other perhaps more outside observers might glean from it also. I can see however how the original name ComputerAudiophile was starting to sound a little dated, as these days with the emergence of all manner of network audio devices the computer no longer holds the pivotal role that it once did, say in the era of the CAPS v1 developments! Perhaps the word "digital" might be more apt than "computer" these days.....DigitalAudiophile....hmmm....certainly doesn't rhyme very well....

The problem here is the use of the term "style". This term serves to make our hobby sound superficial, image-oriented and somewhat ostentatious. The obvious connotation is to fashion - image-obsessed and transient. The use of this term here would seem to undermine the purpose of this site - taking the focus away from an approach based in science, electronics or computers and reinforcing the image of audiophiles being concerned with "style over substance".

It's still running fine now. Only change is I have switched to a different DAC so added an SoTM tx-usbexp card.

I've not frequented this site as much recently and am therefore a little out of the loop - but why was the name changed from Computeraudiophile to Audiophilestyle? I think I prefer the former as it is a clearer description of the site.

Still trying to work out if this is tongue in cheek or not....?