It’s just like garbage flowing in a stream or leaves blowing in a city. They tend to accumulate in certain areas where the conditions are juuuuust right. lol
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I have studied enough about networking, down to encoding schemes on the wire and how data is collected and transferred through the registers, to be absolutely convinced there is no possible difference in sound between network routers and switches.
Here’s the tricky thing though. If you swap out your cheapo switch for a high end audiophile switch with super duper linear power supplies and galvanic isolation, you will probably perceive a difference. I probably would, too. The only difference is that I’m willing to admit that the difference is not due to anything that would have any audible effect, but a psychological one. There isn’t anything really wrong with exploiting psychological effects to improve your listening experience, but the buyer should be aware that that’s what they’re paying for.
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Often time in people discussing something become desensitized to what’s actually being said by other people and we wind up talking past each other. Your statement above is 100% correct. But it doesn’t take into consideration everything that’s been said about isolation, quality power and shielding as being contributing factors in makeing something actually sound good. It’s what I said previously about having folks say that we’re simply hearing things that aren’t there.
If you can argue the science of your original statement and I do agree that statement is 100% true. You can’t simply dismiss the science about noise and better isolation and better power in a world where it’s so prevalent especially in the environment computers sit in.
Now, is it the first thing someone should address is buying a $2k audio switch? By all means no. But there are a lot of people that will tell you that there is improvement and they hear it. Whether it’s an EtherRegen or the Network Acoustics Mouon Pro or various other popular solutions out there and you can’t say that they don’t work at least in a scientific way if you 1) haven’t tried them or 2) haven’t at least looked at what’s actually being addressed. Which is not networking issues in the protocol and physical connection getting packets from point a to point b. But preventing noise from getting into a very expensive network streamer or bridge or dac.
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I wish they didn’t make a difference. It would make me and a few other people I know who have gone this route sound less crazy but here we are.
It seems like there is more and more evidence from people who have no reason to really believe that there is a difference compared to people who are just hand waving saying that there should be absolutely no difference. It would be nice to know why networking data is so perfect that timing differences and noise will never get introduced to system rather than talking about your credentials and saying that it shouldn’t. AFAIK, nobody has spent decades studying the affects of networking in an audio setting, just in a network setting. Any error correction goes out the door if USB is introduced back into the chain which many streamers output USB.
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So many things that I wish didn’t make a difference over the last 20 years of audio, and it would have saved me so much time, effort, forum reading, and cash.
Power cords. Power conditioning. Grounding. Fuses and outlets. Damn that stuff.
Tubes, especially rectifiers. Damn tube adapters.
Signal cables.
Isolation tweaks.
FWIW I do believe in placebo effects, and I see it at work routinely.
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Our network is secure and our applications do not have vulnerabilities.
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Difficult topic to break down with much credence, our experiences vary. It is particularly difficult because i have sat next to individuals listening to the same equipment and we have had wildly different opinions as to the quality of the sound.
I absolutely appreciate the level of passion and the opposing opinions the thread brings forth though 
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Any discussion where folks propose that audible differences people report are just psychoacoustics always makes me think there is a massive opportunity for starting a workshop or some kind of pyramid scheme where we teach people how to Jedi mind-trick themselves into thinking their stereo system sounds better. 
I do 100% think there are definitely physiological reasons that would effect your hearing and or musical enjoyment on any given day.
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Very well said, ill stay here enjoying my locally loaded library and eliminate the need of worrying about most of this. I do want to get rid of the mesh module in the room (needed for the pc, laptop, and streamer control) but that would mean running a 200ft long backhaul cable to the mesh point so i can shut off it’s Wifi. Ill stick with any noise it introduces to any of my pieces for the convenience.
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Heck, give me a few hours and my same rig sounds way different at the end of a listening session than it did at the start.
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I find that if i have a graph of the frequency response of my speakers + the SINAD measurement of my amp and DAC open while listening to music, musical enjoyment increased by 500%
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Would it be bourbon or beer influenced
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Being sick and sleepy induced
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Well you deserve a drink for having the energy to get in some music sessions, I’d be on the couch snoring and making my own music
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If you’ve got a coax cable in the walls, you can look at MoCA adapters. They’re a godsend for situations just like that IF you happen to have unused cable TV coax in the wall.
There’s also background noise from a city or traffic, the state of your electrical grid at that point in time, your neighbor downstairs using a microwave oven, the weather affecting your mood. So it doesn’t have to be just psychological. I just wish that whatever it was that gave me the placebo effect when things I’m hearing sounded better, gave me that effect all the time so I would never have to drop another dime into gear. lol
The maryjane always makes my system sound like twice the price.
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People genuinely perceive a difference in components and tweaks. That doesn’t mean there is any objective difference in the sound.
Here’s a revealing study. There are a variety of these kinds of studies but they all point to the same general fact:
The main conclusion is that when subjects are asked to judge the audio quality of an audiovisual stimulus, the video quality will contribute significantly to the subjectively perceived audio quality."
Your perception literally changes based on other stimuli. If video quality can affect the perceived sound of an audiovisual experience, so can the aesthetics of a piece of audio gear and the expectation bias created by glowing reviews and scientific-sounding marketing prose.
Unless a sound comparison is being conducted in a well-controlled, blind experiment, there really isn’t much value in subjective reports of perceived sound quality. Anybody who thinks they’re “objective” enough to be immune to these effects is just fooling themselves.
Here’s the most revealing experiment I ever conducted. I bought new speaker cables. They sounded better. When I did a blind test, I couldn’t tell them apart. After the test, as soon as I could see which cable was being used, I perceived the difference again, even though I knew full well I couldn’t really hear any difference.
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This is anecdotal.
When I switched speaker cables from basic Kimber Kables 8 to a pair of Omega Mikro flat copper ribbon cable, I could hear the sound stage expand about three feet up and out. The frequency range extended towards the high end quite a bit, there is no way in hell I’d ever confuse the two.
And not that I’d have to be looking at it.
My experience is also anecdotal, so it doesn’t mean anything to anyone but me. But if we apply this same scenario to power cables, digital cables, interconnects. The same thing applies. What is and what isn’t real and meaningful? If you can’t choose correctly 100% of the time? What if someone can choose correctly 60% of the time over 100 tests? Statistically that’s significant, is that acceptable?
What if someone can tell the difference in something someone else says there shouldn’t be a difference? Do they change their mind or what happens then? That’s why I try to live in the if I can hear it that’s all the proof I need. Because there’s a lot of voodoo in the hobby good and bad. If it was all physiological or placebo and we wanted to believe in improvements, then we should believe EVERYTHING is an improvement because we spend a lot of money on it. But that’s not been the case in my personal audio journey.
On one hand you have someone that is saying they hear a difference and on the other hand you have someone saying they technically shouldn’t be able to because humans are easily fallible.
Someone in this hobby isn’t a typical human to begin with.
A penguin mother can tell the difference in the cries of her chick on a beach with ten thousand other chicks crying. That’s a lot of capability in listening.
The question of studies has been had a lot and it’s only going to be taken on by a collegiate environment or a vendor or government study. A vendor is probably going to have the least amount of initiative.
There are people that simply listen better than others. US Navy Submariners tracking Russian subs are actually screened for their particular abilities to hear and interpret what they hear better than others.
The LOFARgram representation of acoustics in black, gray and white with an operator trained and adapted to interpreting that display was the critical link in the system. Experienced operators that could detect subtle differences and with practice could detect faint signatures of targets were vital to detection. It was even found that color blindness could be an advantage. It was soon apparent that the Navy’s practice of short term tours and transfer out of the system was a problem. Commander Ocean Systems Atlantic launched an effort in 1964 to create a rating peculiar to SOSUS and allow personnel to remain within the community. It took five years for Bureau of Personnel to create the rating of Ocean Technician [OT]. That bureau did not do the same for officers thus forcing those with experience to either leave for new duties or leave the Navy. Some did so and remained in the system as civil service or contractor personnel.[10]
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While there is merit in this, it gets overstated.
I don’t really read psychology studies any more but when I was interested specifically in cables I did.
Blind tests of audiophile gear in research commonly shows no definitive preference in A/B testing whether DAC’s or Cables. The exceptions being where they specifically select “trained listeners”, then the results are very different. Now what constitutes a trained listener is never really given.
The same is true for preferences, “trained listeners” exhibit different preferences for frequency response for example.
Look at all the research around absolute phase, which a lot of audiophiles have difficulty hearing, and whether it’s audible, they recently determined that every hair in the ear has 2 nerves attached to it, and so you can determine the direction of motion, i.e. delineate leading edge from trailing (read phase).
Placebo is definitively a thing, the issue I have is jumping to the conclusion what someone states is placebo, and claiming someone else can’t perceive something. Usually because the explanation doesn’t hold water, rather than exploring the space to determine if a different factor is at play.
There have been several times where I’ve been convinced something would not have an effect, only to hear distinct differences even though I can’t justify the mechanism by which these differences are occurring. Power cables being the big one.
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Interesting video that references papers written in the 60s and 70s that describe some of the perils of A/B testing by the likes of Harwood (from Harbeth) and the influence of your auditory system:
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Yeah, I’m not too inclined to put a whole lot of effort into this argument, but I will stand by this:
There is no real mechanism for the data to “sound” different as it travels across the network from your drive to your DAC. Unless something is catastrophically wrong, those bits will arrive on time without any loss. All the protocol stacks going through all the layers in the OSI model are orders of magnitude more robust than what our audio demands are.
If you’re concerned about electronic noise traversing copper cables (the likelihood that this would somehow bleed into your audio signal could only be facilitated by some astonishingly bad circuit design, but whatever), I guess you can use WiFi or Fiber.
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