Moved Audio Quest cable to my DAC. WOW

Hi Mr Curious

AQ cable is  1 meter length,  Don't remember the model but cost about $150 . Again middle of the line is my method. DAC is a D90SE. 

My comment was concentrated on power cables and not type of equipment. 

Everyone has their favorite brands and preferences and I don't want to go there.

It’s a curse having an electrical engineering background.

I thank my Dad for having a real HiFi in the 50’s rather than some piece of furniture w a radio. Lenco transcription turntable, Bogen tube amp and a University CoAx in a box bigger than I was.

And a Mom who sang and played piano.

And as military brat, I got to hear lots of live, unamplified music in parades and concerts.

The Bogen had playback curve selector to match the label. Finding the best sound for the label was my first tweaking experience, about age 5 😎

I knew great sound long before I was an engineer.

Good engineering requires verification and replication. All too often ’improvements’ have untested secondary causes. Or specific to a particular instance.

ieales

Lack of rigor and confirmation bias accounts for most of what the untrained hear

It seems there’s no shortage today of those who want to tell us what we see and hear. Politicians have become its most recent practitioners, literally telling us to heed them above all else.

I simply don’t believe that more than half of what I see and hear is illusion. That doesn’t mean we aren’t all vulnerable to illusion because, of course, we all are. But to believe we should dismiss more than half our observations about the world we live in is absurd.

I'm not saying it's illusion but that the ascription is not necessarily the proximate cause.

In the case of the power cord / DAC there are innumerable other factors that can account for the SQ change claim.

Having designed and built professional recording equipment, I was ever on the alert not to be fooled by randomness.