Based on my experience, I wholly disagree. Cable/switch etc changes are small tweaks at best vs say, a change in speakers, amps, adding room treatments and some other things.
I’ve A/Bd enough cables and such over the years to feel confident in my statement on value about that.
The EtherREGEN is pure audiphoolery and snake-oil:
These products are being manufactured and sold to solve problems which don’t exist.
The noise levels being “addressed” (or rather they aren’t because it objectively does nothing) are so low that to hear them within a piece of music, you would have to play it so loudly, your ears would bleed. Ear drum rupture and deafness would occur before the noise became audible.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again - human hearing is pretty poor in the scheme of things. We have a limited range from around 20Hz to 20kHz at birth and the upper frequency limit dwindles rapidly with age. We have a maximum dynamic range of around 70dB between perceived silence and hearing damage.
If a $25,000 audio analyser that can measure noise levels down to ~ - 140dB can’t detect a difference, then we sure as heck can’t hear the difference. To convince ourselves otherwise is foolish.
Save your $ for something worthwhile…
I was there (ASR site) taking a full risk to expose myself to a Dunning-Kruger effect!
The high-end audio industry is insidiously incestuous. The review publishers need a constant stream of new high end products to write new copy to keep their readership interested. They have to shower praise on products to maintain their advertising revenue and to keep the stream of new product coming their way. No manufacturer is going to give a piece of equipment to a reviewer to have it panned. Also, if a publication pans their product, they will swiftly pull their advertising from that publication. So everything gets praised one way or another. The more high-end, the more praise it would seem…
Listening comparisons are never done blind, at least never properly, level-matched, A/B/X double blind. Everything is subjective and dressed up with hyperbole.
ASR is objective - source equipment and speakers are measured by how they objectively and accurately render the source material.
If that’s not your taste and you like coloured sound, then fine. But coloured sound isn’t better than accurate sound, it’s different. A bit like adding ketchup to the food served in a 2-Michelin Star restaurant.
Science has proven time and time again (by measurement) that the differences between digital sources, DACs, cables and amplifiers (provided they are all well designed) are inaudible and this is backed up by blind listening tests.
The hi-fi industry eschews proper blind listening tests and objective measurements, because if it embraced them, it would have to admit that there’s little to no difference between a decent $300 piece of equipment and a $10,000 piece of equipment.
Products advertised as removing noise, jitter, improving mains borne noise and improving the quality of a digital data stream are the worst of the worst.
They’re peddling snake-oil, veiled in pseudo-scientific oratory and fleecing the uninformed, relieving them of their hard-earned.
And like cult leaders, they create believers and followers, whose faith is so strong, they decry the objective science laid before them…
Well said, and well written. And that really should be the last word on the topic … but I suspect not 
Some of your points have some truth. Of course marketing comes into play as with all products around us, there ist no such thing like absolute objectivity. And there are silly prices out there, no question.
But I fear you probably haven’t ever heard a good equipment properly setup yet, otherwise you would have heard something that your ‘no difference’ cheap equipment never will be able to produce.
Your main conclusion is wrong, as science can measure some things but our brain is much more complex and can distinguish differences we are not able to measure yet, obviously.
So hooking on science status as the only judgement does not only hinder you to get to another level of musical enjoyment, but is also historically a big failure your ‘objectively’ science constantly evolves, finds new things, and renders things from the past wrong or just half right. Our presence is the past of the future, also in science.
Happy listening!
NOA
Thank God for good samaritans standing up to the big Evil of high-end audio industry!! 
Do you have any other examples other than audio based ones?
Are there properly conducted experiments demonstrating that humans can hear differences in sound that can’t be measured? If so, I’d be interested to read about them.
These properly experiments would be based on the science status and would probably reflect what you want to read. As far as I know there is no measurement yet that can read out our brain while listening to music and render the differences of different equipment.
I can only stare in wonders about the ignorance of people trying to convince others that they do not hear what they hear, that it shall be wrong and just snake oil or whatever, because it cannot be measured or experienced by themselves, for whatever reason, I don’t know. It’s just ridiculous.
By the way, I’m not ignoring science or measurements, it can be very helpful, but it’s just half the way.
Cheers
NOA
Yep, definitely. Einstein challenged Newtonian mechanics. Copernicus championed heliocentrism. Louis Pasteur overturned the theory that disease arose from ‘spontaneous generation’. Science is littered with - for want of a better word - progress. Theories are discarded, superseded by ones with superior explanatory power.
To put this back in context: I’m unaware of any specific deficits regarding the science of ears, hearing and so on.
As for …
They do, I’m absolutely convinced that people do hear a difference when they invest a sizeable portion of their disposable income to buy the latest hifi gadget, but there are numerous explanations as to why (cognitive bias, expectation bias, and so on).
So what’s your theoretical take on how best to describe the other half?
You are wasting your time. Let me waste a bit of my time, this one last time.
It is a fact doctrinaire measurists peddle their ideology across forums and social media groups. Although relatively small in number, they make an awful lot of noise.
Two things these people never question are speakers, and room. You don’t see anyone calling them “snake oil” (well, except for those who say buy cheap china drivers on eBay and build your own speakers).
It turns out the speaker has more measured distortion than any other component in the chain and for them, low distortion is the holy grail - because it is measurable.
The next preoccupation for the measurists is an in-room flat frequency response, again measurable.
Ultimately for them, the speakers are not the most important component but the interaction between speakers and room.
Systems with digital active room correction sound disembodied and unnatural because the human brain can filter out to some degree natural room effects but if the result measures perfect it is perfect, even if your ears and brain tell you to scream otherwise.
Trust your ears because even in the highly unlikely and theoretical event that they are wrong, they are your ears in your room with your music.
Music is a series of events also taking place simultaneously. The chronological and spatial cues are essential to your making sense of it.
It is not an exercise in staring with your ears at aural wallpaper.
Seems like, unfortunately. Thanks and I guess lesson finally learned. Will not waste my time on this group anymore.
Happy listening again!
NOA
Have no fear. I’ve heard systems that cost more than my house and frankly, I wasn’t that impressed. I had a dealer once demo me a fully active system that he claimed presented the music in a way that only an active system could — that system cost somewhere north of £100,000. It sounded good, but not £100,000 good…
I bought a second hand CD player from a dealer a few years back — he demo’d a £13k two box CD player into £20k of amplification driving £8k of speakers. Pretty good, but my current setup easy matches it.
Where’s your evidence that my main conclusion is wrong? Differences, obviously? Have you joined the cult of audiphoolery? It doesn’t matter what our brains can do - our ears are the limiting factor. The quality of the recording equipment is irrelevant if the mic is second rate.
I enjoy music, no I love music. I’ve enjoyed live performances at the Wiener Staatsoper and the Royal Albert Hall to give but two examples. The acoustics in those venues are nothing short of superb. The equipment they use is standard industrial stuff - microphones, cables, mixing desk, amplifiers, speakers. The same stuff used in the studios that the music you listen to on your high end audio system is recorded on. Yet those performances made the hairs on my arms stand on end.
All too often, people forget that this is really just about the music…
What is the consensus on using optical ethernet in place of a network switch such as the Ether Regen or Silent Angle. Incorporating a small run of optical ethernet before your streamer, even when using a specialty device like the Sonore optical unit, is cheaper than any of the audiophile switches. If you add in the cost of a good power supply and high end ethernet cables you could be spending hundreds more compared to incorporating optical ethernet to achieve the same basic result, which is to completely galvanically isolate the streamer/end point from any electrical current traveling along the copper ethernet set up. Yes? So if you hear a difference with an audiophile switch, it should be the same or even better with optical ethernet? What about to the objectivists in this thread? Is optical and using an audiophile switch the same thing and will have no affect? Please note that this question is not implying any objective or subjective opinions or facts. I am asking everyone how optical would play into a system based on your experiences with copper ethernet. Thanks
From my experience I can tell you that using an optical connection between my two switches made the best result so far in my setup. I found out to be important that the optical cable is long (I use a 7m cable because 1m sounded awful - same model).
My other gear does not have optical ports so I cannot try this without additional converters.
I also think there is no principle what’s sounding better or worse, it is rather system dependent and needs to be tried.
Cheers
NOA
Hmmm… I thought the microphone was one of the components comprising the recording equipment, no?
Oh please… these folks are now going to start killing themselves 
Do tell… what is is your system?
How do you measure tonality / timbre? How about soundstage, depth and height? Attack & decay? Layering? Serious question
I completely disagree. You can’t compensate a bad speaker with room correction. Speakers are about more than frequency response. It’s about driver integration, which is a function of driver response and its interaction with the crossover slope and phase, it’s about power response, on axis frequency response and horizontal and vertical dispersion plus its interaction with the room. Floor bounce, early reflection, room nodes, diffraction, comb filtering. DSP is no substitute for crappy design. And yes, the ear can tell the difference between a bad speaker that’s been DSP corrected and a good speaker. Whilst the ear is limited in what it can hear, it’s very discerning about the timing of what it hears.
That doesn’t mean the ear can tell the difference between an “audiophile” network switch and a standard network switch where there is no difference.
This stuff makes me laugh out loud. Audio barely requires 100Base-T network capability. Yet nowadays, networks operate quite happily at 100 to 400 times this data rate - 10Gbit/s and 40Gbit/s being the two main standards.
My Roon Core connects to the rest of the network via a 20Gbit/s IEEE 802.3ad LAG over OM3 multi-mode fibre. It’s fibre. It’s galvanically isolated, free from noise, ground loops etc. etc. Does it sound any different than when connected by Gbit copper?
No! Why? Because networks work via TCP/IP. Data is sent in packets and each packet is sent and received and verified by checksum. TCP/IP incorporates error checking and correction. Digital audio streaming over TCP/IP is pure data - 1s and 0s. There’s no noise, there’s no jitter…
The technical explanation for this I would like to hear.