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A plea to the community: Would someone out there with access to some lab-grade test gear and a true reference DAC perform a legitimate head-to-head among JPlay and the other music players? I will admit that I am a JPlay believer (please don't hate). And I am bothered that there seems to be no measurable proof of its effectiveness. (And please spare me the speech about how something does not need to be measurable to be significant.) I have read some very thoughtful and clever experiments posted online that ultimately cannot demonstrate a measurable difference between, for instance, JPlay and JRiver. But I am left unconvinced because the test gear itself always seems inadequate. The last one I read was a very well-designed experiment with a write up from a guy who was obviously very smart, but the measurements were captured using a PC sound card with a specified -89dB noise floor on its ADC. Don't get me wrong, I realize this is a pretty tall order. Assuming a difference does actually exist, I would expect capturing that difference would require a system with incredible resolution and repeatability. But I have read online reviews from individual contributors that featured extremely expensive gear from Audio Precision, Rohde & Schwarz... my assumption is they had access to these assets at work (which is awesome). So, would someone with one of these $100k analyzers sitting around the office sneak a reference DAC into their lab and perform a rigorous after-hours experiment just to satisfy the curiosity of the audio community? If your boss catches you, you are welcome to throw "a2x024" under the bus...

Greetings folks, I am ready to step into the world of DRC and this is my first foray into anything that require measurements. I am looking at either of a Behringer ecm8000 or the umik-1 usb and plan to follow the steps described here: Creating a DRC Room Correction Filter for your Squeezebox. Basic steps involve measuring L speaker with mic with R line-out from amp into R channel input of soundcard/mixer for the reference channel, then swapping L and R mic/card. I looked up the behringer 302usb and 502usb and it looks to be the most convenient. But I dont know how to use it. I've never used any kind of recording gear before and wondering where to plug the mic and rca-out of amp on it. The mixer has a dedicated mic input socket and separate L+R input pairs. So do I plug in the mic into the mic socket and the rca-out from amp into the R-in of one inputs? Or do I plug the mic into the L input and the rca-out of amp into the R input? Also do you have any recommendations for any other mixer/soundcard hardware that is external and will work with linux without drivers (or has linux drivers for ubuntu)? The whole investment is going to be a one time usage only (or every time I move house once in a few years). Once I am done with it after a week of fiddling with generating FIR files it will stowed away, so I need something cheap that will not auto-sample and allow L+R inputs separately for measurements. If I buy the umik-1 or any usb based mic, I dont know how I will input the other reference channel from Amp, unless there is a cheap external usb box that will work with one usb on mic and another on the usb soundcard. (I hope arecord or Audacity will work with two usb inputs for recording)? Thanks for all your advise. G0bble