In reply to:

But "audibly flawless" and actually flawless can be worlds apart.

This is not a thumb in the eye to the "brand name IC snobs", but rather an educational post for those who don't understand quite what we're talking about when we say audibly and just how good CD playback is, no matter WHAT chip is used.

I'd prepared 3 sample wave files, listen to them on your home stereo, burn them to a CD, loop them, do whatever you want to to compare them. If someone can tell me which is which after listening (and no cheating, don't go using a spectrum analyzer or other equipment, just your ears!) I'll send you out a golden ear trophy.

The three files are (in no particular order) - all are just shy of 6 seconds in length:

Album cut - exactly as the line appears on the album - I used the song Tender Feet by Liza May Johnson, a Christian Contemporary artist, as it's pretty listenable to anyone's ears (rather than say, Argh, F***, Kill by the Dayglo Abortions) and is a good master recording.
Elevated analog noise floor - this one will probably come back to bite me in the arse. I've mixed in a false "noise floor" at 21dB below program audio (to give you an idea how loud that is, most HTIB would perform about 50ish in S/N ratio, this is a LOT louder than that - every 3dB is twice as loud!)
Extreme jitter errors - I've falsely put 6 jitter errors (at maximum points) into the waveform (that is, single samples inverted - the biggest possible error) that equals almost one 16-bit jitter error a second. This is a ludicrous amount, even a cheap player without a 1-bit DAC with a dusty lens might exhibit at most 10 in an entire song, here you have 6 in a 6 second clip.

Listen for yourself - if you can pick out all three (hopefully at least the noise floor one) and which is which, congratulations, you hear a LOT better than the rest of the world.

And no, there are no tricks here, I'm as curious as anyone, so I've made sure that I've far overcompensated and used some worst-case examples. These are really as I say they are, no trick questions where I uploaded the same clip 3 times or anything.

Here they are:
Clip 1
Clip 2
Clip 3

Bren R.