I'm very sure that they did not just stick a sound card into a PC to do these measurements. One of the things that Steve told me was that the reason that they needed those guys to do these measurements was that they were doing things that were beyond Vertex's or Nordost's ability to measure.
Did I say I love the Internet? I thought I did
http://www.nordost.com/downloads/New Approaches To Audio Measurement.pdf
"The test rig consisted of the CD player, sat on the top shelf of the
Quadraspire rack and power using a standard IEC AC cord. A bit perfect
copy of a particularly energetic musical passage (on the basis that it’s
exactly this sort of signal that causes hi-? systems most problems) was
made on a PC and then the disc was replayed on the CD player, the
same passage fed from the analogue outputs of the player,
back into
the PC, via a high quality sound card, where it could be compared to
the original data."
As I noted, they would be better off dispensing with the nonsense of sonar, military science, math, etc. This is a simple process of redigitizing the data using the sound card. My original objection remains that there is no control with regards to the capture device. We don't know if the capture PC's analog noise spectrum changed due to unknown factors.
BTW, i don't see them changing contractors. I think the same guy was used at the start. Here is his bio:
http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/gareth-humphreys-jones/4/186/150