Before I started Purité Audio almost twenty years ago now, I believed everything that I read in the Hi-Fi press and everything that a retailer told me.
Why would I have reason to doubt them?
I bought silver cables because I thought there was a small but worthwhile improvement,( my wife quite soon became unwilling to sit and listen while I switched cables).
I had a separate radial installed for the hi-fi, I regularly 'upgraded' equipment searching for that just out of reach audio Nirvana.
After PA started we regularly started to receive shipments of multiple units, we were distributing Weiss and M2Tech, reselling Benchmark and later RME having identical units made it really straightforward to compare anything.
Two identical units just change the mains lead ( for example) on one and remain unsighted while someone ( long suffering spouse in my case) switched between them.
I began to discuss sound reproduction with proper (honest/integrity) engineers, particularly 'audibility' what the ear can hear and what the ear cannot, ie, just how much distortion does a component have to add before it becomes audible and thus can be distinguished from a truly transparent component .
One of these engineers and a friend Serge Auckland suggested to me that the only really valid way to compare components was to level match to within .1dB with a milli volt meter and compare unsighted.
This was a hoo-haw but also revelatory.
The first comparison I made was between a Benchmark DAC2 and a very expensive Weiss Medea? DAC.
Level matched and compared unsighted I just couldn't tell them apart.
In retrospect I realise now that I was comparing two fine measuring components and that there shouldn't be any audible difference between them.
Components had been measured, John Atkinson for Stereophile, but it was Amir at Audio Science Review that really explained for me how measurements actually correlated to audibility.
I cant recommend ASR highly enough, if you really want to learn and stop being taken for a sap by the hi-fi industry then ASR is where you begin.
Despite everything I had read and believed it turns out that the human ear is not the ultimate measuring device and that the ear and our brains are pretty easily fooled.
Cognitive bias is hugely important yet rarely ( never in fact ) mentioned by the Hi-Fi press.
My point is that without any technical background within a very short period I learnt that loudspeakers and their interaction with the room have a huge contribution to sound quality and there will be no improvement in sound quality between two properly engineered dacs and certainly not between two fit for purpose cables.
So manufacturers and retailers who sell for example expensive boutique cables are they simply charlatans who laugh behind your back once you have left congratulating themselves on another profitable sale to a gullible fool or do they really believe that those cables actually do improve sound quality?
If they do really believe then why i all those years of retail have they then not bothered to conduct one unsighted comparison between two cables?
Charlatans or merely incompetent?
Keith
Nothing whatsoever to do with this article but Ascilab are about to launch, below is their A6B ( rear view) Ascilab are the very antithesis of snake oil, superb measurements, outstanding value for money and great measurements means great sound.
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