And we have members who do not believe you have had or heard things you actually did have, owned, and heard, so they attack them because they spent more money than you did.
We also have a population who clearly does not understand the fundamental laws of physics. That's OK as they don't teach that in Marketing. They DO in engineering which mystifies me how some claiming to be engineers don't have the slightest clue.
An example is suggesting the direction a cable was extruded has any bearing on an AC signal transmission. Micro diodes? OK, RG-59 is good to about 50 MHz. What harmonics do you think it is filtering in audio? I run about 100 feet of RG-6 and manage to get perfectly fine HD TV OTA. Can you measure the rectification you claim to exist? How high is it in relation to the DC leakage in the driving or receiving stage? This is a case of marketing taking an actual but insignificant property and advertising to folks without the technical background to know it is total BS. So, do they hear a difference? Sometimes. Placebo is very strong, so enjoy your mono-crystal-silver-air-core-directional-skin effect, cables.
There is a lot we don't know, a lot we know but don't measure, and a lot we don't know how out brain interprets it, yet we have those who insist they hear things that violate the laws pf physics in this universe rather than what we don't understand. There are plenty of real problems looking for innovation.
There has been tremendous innovation in class D amplifiers, DACs, A2Ds, switching supplies, and DSP. A lot of work has been done improving linear supplies to get the artifacts down to modern DAC noise levels. A year ago I had never heard a class D amp I could stand, now I am looking to buy a Purify based amp. I was waiting for the AMT patents to run out, but as of yet, every AMT driver I have heard is terrible. I give them time to innovate. There has been some significant analog circuit innovations recently allowing commodity priced units with classical measurements we never dreamed of 10 years ago. Think of the progression from OP-1, 741, Tlo72, Ne5558, to the current TI amps. Lots in IEMs and cans.
I will repeat my direct experience: Some interconnect cables do sound different. Three classes of cables. Those so cheap they are not properly shielded and in some instances can pick up interference. The second class are the esoteric snake oil that actually degrade some aspect of the signal to show a difference. They seem to have a very large positive effect on the owners ego. Fortunately there is the third large class of perfectly good cables. They all sound the same as they don't degrade the signal. Many boutique cables are in group three, just fine, only overpriced BS advertising to invoke the placebo magic improvement to the purchaser.
To the "believers"" No cable can improve the signal it is carrying. It can't add actual depth or detail. It just can't. Not in this universe. At best it does not degrade it or add distortions. Fortunately, that is easy.
