MATT NEWPORT: My name is Matt Newport. I’m the owner and chief engineer at Black Lion Audio. We modify audio equipment, primarily digital audio interfaces.

This system, it’s made by a Dutch company, or a Danish company, excuse me, called RE, and it’s their model 204 audio analyzer. And basically what it does is it measures things like distortion, dynamic range, signal-to-noise ratio, all the basic things that you see in just a group of specs that you might see published on the back of whatever piece of equipment, whatever box.

Amusingly enough, this was actually designed for General Motors’ AC Delco department for -- They would use it for car stereos.

Initially, what I bought it for was to measure distortion in whatever systems .that we were working on and whatever end result, and amusingly I just -- I don’t really ever use it. I found that my ear is just a lot better way to go, and I think that there’s a lot of other designers out there who would agree with me on that [LAUGHING] amusingly enough.

So, I think to a degree we have a bit too much of an obsession with certain specs because you could say, “Well, this particular device has a signal-to-noise ratio and distortion of -110 dB,” but that really tell you anything other than how much distortion it has. I mean you could have two devices that have similar specs that sound completely different. So, you know, you may want to look at the frequency response, you may want to look at how does it, you know, what’s the mid-band look like? Does it attenuate this at this frequency? I just feel like there’s a lot of aspects to audio that we haven’t developed equipment that really accurately tests.