Yes, some will laugh at their own folly. I would llike to see you prove this statement: "You certainly can measure a change in distortion when passive parts are replaced!" Show us the beef! Where are your graphs? Show us the volumes of statements from other high end audio designers who have tested this and show graphs.....please.......I have NEVER in my entire life heard of any high end audio designer, engineer, manufacturer say this except for you. If this statement were true then every time a manufacturer made the sound better by upgrading the jacks, fuses, wires, resistors, damping of parts, capacitors, power supplies, power supply parts, etc. into infinity.....they would state it.....and they would show graphs to prove it. They would say. We found a better cap.....we replaced our super last years cap with a new one and not only does it sound better but the distortion went down .001 percent of distortion. But no one has ever said this....because you CANNOT measure the distortion of most parts.
A Furutech AC inlet sounds better than the one you use. If you replaced yours with a Furutech would your amp measure better? (By the way, the Furutech ones with Rodium plating sound different from the ones with gold plating....same with their NCF technology.....do they measure differently? does Furutech claim such?). Removing the steel hardware on your power supply transformer and raising it off the chassis improves the sound. Can you measure that? I listened to three different brands of tiny .1 percent nichrome surface mount resistors that all looked the same and all of them had slightly magnetic end caps. This was a 75 ohm resistor on the output of a Crystek clock. One brand sounded much better than the others. Did that change the measurements of the Oppo I was modding? Hardly.
If you are using junk parts....like bad electolytics, ceramics, very inductive resistors and put them in a sensitive place then not only will the device sound bad but it will measure worse than using a better made part. But what high end manufacturer uses junk ceramics as a feedback or coupling cap? The knowledge on caps and their sound and distortion was first published in Audio Magazine by Marsh and Jung back in 1980....I am sure you remember that. That article changed what high end manufacturers did. They realized that bad dialectric caps sounded bad.....so they all changed to film caps and the high end electrolytic caps market (Elna, Blackgate, etc.) started. Conrad Johnson started using all film caps in their power supply (no electrolytics whatsoever). However, every brand of super high end film caps sounds different (including all the various models from the same company). For instance....Clarity cap makes many models of film caps. They claim the better ones "sound better". There is no mention of lower distortion measurements on their site. If they could measure lower distortion....they would brag about it....obviously.
Ralph, I wish you the best.....but if you are going to sit all by yourself on that tiny branch and saw away......well, eventually.....you fall.
Here is an article about using really bad parts in portable audio devices......yes, those seriously bad parts can be measured.......However, we cannot measure the parts that are used in high end audio......unless you are Ralph....he must have super sensitive test equipment no manufacturer of better sounding parts has.
