I Just Don't Hear It - I wish I did

Maybe it's the word "Mystery" in the name: Marigo Mystery Footers. Women are attracted to that sort of thing.

Replacing the 75 ohm cable - $400.

Buying a new DAC - $3,000.

Attracting women by tweaking your hifi system – priceless!

Wondering what people aren't doing with their weeknights/ends because we're arguing about the benefits/pseudo benefits/degree of benefits/lack of benefits of tweaks. Taking a step back I would venture that this thread has had more impact on our lives then most tweaks will ever have.

I believe tweaks were partly borne out of an audiophile's typically obsessed state of mind with making it 'better'. After all, we've all seemingly accepted that slicing and dicing the point of diminishing returns has somehow become a worthy cause. How many of you have thought about what benefits, if any, an aftermarket power cord would make on say, an electric razor? Would it cut better? Faster? I've thought about things like this, and then I laugh because I've obviously crossed over into crazy audio-geek world -- a "normal" person wouldn't think about these things, just as their reactions are predictably perplexed when I tell them why my cd player is balanced on 3 blocks of wood. But of course we're all audiophiles here, so we won't discuss how abnormal this way of thinking is in the first place.

An interesting experiment to all us tweakers would be to take all the tweaks out of our system (maybe not power cords, for those of you with serious power issues) and see how it sounds. What if you didn't hear any difference? What if you heard a slight difference? What if there was a major difference? It would resolve any doubt as to whether tweaks worked in your system or not.

It saddens be that so many people ascribe their lack of understanding of some of the many phenomena within our world to the nature of the world, itself, and not themselves.
I've grown so tiresome of all those, "I can't understand how, therefore it must not be," arguments.
"I don't understand how this tweak could work, so it doesn't."
"That flies in the face of current theory, so those claims must be false."
If science, herself, were to operate within those parameters, it would never advance.
What hubris! "To me, evolution just doesn't seem possible. So the theory is false."
"I don't see how the world could come to be without a creator, so there must be one."
"I do things for a reason. So, nature does, too."
We live in a world where anthroporphism has run amok,
The world of high-end audio is no different.
If we can't explain it, it must not work.
If we can't reconcile the theory behind something with our own (generally, quite limited) precepts regarding kinetics, or electro-magnetism, or quantum mechanics, or gravitation, or the strong and weak nuclear forces--then we are being conned!
What a bunch of horsesh*t!
Friends, reality doesn't give a f*ck what you think.

A few of the conundrums with which we "audiophiles" are faced are:
1) The varying degrees of our acuity of hearing bear no relationship to our bankbooks.
2) Listening is a learned skill of which most of us have little.
3) I suspect that, ofttimes, the developer of an expensive tweak
a) Doesn't, really, know why it works, so they posit something that may be absurd, or, at best have little to do with anything, and
b) Won't simply admit that the cost of the product has nothing to do with the cost of its manufacture but, rather, with an attempt to recoup the R & D involved in its development.
(This is exactly the same as a pharmaceutical company trying to recoup its investiture it a newly developed product before it must be offered in generic form.)

One sad truth is that many "audiophiles" lack either the faculty, or training, or both, to discern those heightened sonic attributes for which they so often pay so dearly.
It would not surprise me if less than twenty percent of you reading this, now, can hear well enough to discern what those "golden-eared" ones can.
Furthermore, I suspect that very few of the "golden eared" have honed their listening abilities sufficiently to make effective use of what effectively remain naught but latent abilities.
So, many of us are just wasting money, when we tweak.
And many of the rest of us are simply not getting our money's worth.
Though the fault, in both cases, lies, solely, within ourselves and bears no relationship to the genuine efficaciousness of the product, or procedure, in question,

Now, I'm off to play drinking games with Christopher Hitchens and shall see you on the morrow.

When I replaced my MDF shelves with BDR "The Shelf" my wife as well as myself heard the difference and were surprised by the amount of improvement. Less leading edge hash and a blacker background. When I returned the BDR #3 cones under the CDP I didn't like the sound in conjunction with "The Shelf" so I pulled them and now the CDP sits directly on "The Shelf".

One sad truth is that many "audiophiles" lack either the faculty, or training, or both, to discern those heightened sonic attributes for which they so often pay so dearly. It would not surprise me if less than twenty percent of you reading this, now, can hear well enough to discern what those "golden-eared" ones can.
Furthermore, I suspect that very few of the "golden eared" have honed their listening abilities sufficiently to make effective use of what effectively remain naught but latent abilities.

Following your argument, pretty much everybody has no idea what they're hearing, and therefore have no basis to judge if it's truly good or not.

3) I suspect that, ofttimes, the developer of an expensive tweak
a) Doesn't, really, know why it works, so they posit something that may be absurd, or, at best have little to do with anything

And since audio equipment, like tweaks, are created by the same types of people, they must not know what they're doing either. Which makes this whole hobby a joke on itself and its participants.

Can you not apply this argument to most things man made created for fellow man to enjoy? if i buy an expensive sports car and I like going fast, in reality, the expensive sports car is a mass of metal only thought to perform well, but its creator doesn't really know what he's doing and if or why it works. And I only think I'm going fast, in reality I'm not smart enough to know what fast is, and I'm actually probably not going fast at all.

So we have no idea why we like something, and moreover, we're idiots if we think we do. Makes sense, since we're all living in the Matrix anyway.