It isn’t a “physiological effect”, it’s a psychological phenomenon. The point is you can’t decide to “overcome” your expectation bias. You can’t “listen objectively”. In fact, that’s a contradiction in terms. Your example with the metallic plate only shows that our perceptions can change. It doesn’t prove that we can choose not to expect anything.
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Lol…no need to get rid of it, perhaps you might want to look closer to home 
The fact the everyone is is wrong, and believe you are right is quite laughable 
These people crack me up…they demand proof that you can hear differences in your system. Perhaps they should give proof that they couldn’t in theirs!
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So what you are saying is…if you have have evidence, you will definitely hear that there’s a difference? Lol
Dear Yury,
don’t get confused…Switch and Ethernet cable are making a difference. I wish they would not, as it makes my life a lot more complicated.
I started with a 2nd hand Cisco switch that the NAIM community promoted in one of the forums. It did cost me less than 50$ and it really improved my streaming quality. Played with different cables and ended up with a SUPRA cable. Not very expensive either. One day, a friend gave me an AudioQuest Vodka cable and I could not believe the difference. At the end, I got an SOTM switch and a combination of AudiQuest Vodka and a Transparent cable (forget the name).
Of course, you need a well balanced setup and a good room to really hear those changes…so it’s a question or priority. The best Ethernet cable cannot compensate a bad room or bad speakers.
Don’t ask me why those parts do sound better…I have no idea. Jitter, shielding? Who knows? And believe me, I really don’t like that, but accepted it. Try to find a good dealer, who let you try out several options and find out yourself.
Best regards
KH
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Your reading comprehension is astonishing. What I said was that I would be convinced by evidence that what he heard was not merely the result of expectation-bias.
A blind test in which he was able to consistently discern the difference would constitute such evidence.
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As some anger is brewing, let’s just say “make up your own mind” and leave it there.
MQA and cables… every time!
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You’re generalising, there are a handful of you telling the rest of us we’re clueless and you’re unable and unwilling to provide any basis for your assertion other then you’re convinced you’re hearing improvements…“for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”
That is indeed laughable.
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…and you are not doing the same? You are also not providing any proof at all that these do not work in your system
Pot kettle
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There’s ample proof of impossibility, Bill. Ample. All around you. All the time. There’s also a fair and reasonable group of explanations that don’t require rewriting any laws of science as to why you lot might have deluded yourselves into thinking you’re onto something.
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Only in the grossest sense. If they are broken, you won’t hear anything. If they are working properly, they will have no effect one way or the other on the SQ. You don’t need anything special.
You’re going to get a lot of conflicting responses – already have, I see. My advice would be to check the badges, here in the forum, for the various people responding to you, and see if you can figure out which ones might be the most trustworthy on technical topics. You can find a member’s badges by clicking on their name at the top of a post.
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This thread just reminds me of this nonsensical thread from a few months ago: Upgrading SATA cables
Haven’t we all got something better to do? Like listen to some great music, maybe?
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I for one am a non believer. One of the reasons is that I work in IT, networking actually.
What many believers fail to realize is that when music is traveling through the network, it is not music or sound, it is data. Plain and simple. Comparisons to analog cables and sound going through them is useless.
Not only is it data, but it is data wrapped in data. That is called a protocol. There is data that tells the source and destination of the data, the sequence number of the data as not all data fragments follow the same path in a complicated network and the checksum to verify the validity of the data, among other things.
Now ethernet has galvanic isolation by default and wifi obviously as well. I have yet to see an interference in the cable or switch that only affects the payload of each ethernet frame and never the segment header. Even if the payload data was affected in transit, the checksum would have to be affected to match the modified data.
This leads me to believe that the data is transferred flawlessly if there are no problems with the network. Even the cheapest crap can usually do this. If it doesn’t, the end result would not be degradation of sound quality but missing data which would mean silence.
Sure people can worry about interference travelling through a shielded cable to a poorly made device, but the easiest solution is just to use an unshielded one. The twisted geometry of the cable is a really good shield against interference in itself, shielded cables simply aren’t needed in home environments (except for really high speeds of course, but none of you have the that).
I have hard time figuring out at which point the quality of the sound could change.
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Yes, they will make a difference for people with decent ears and for those that will try before give a answer.
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What about data packets in fact being transmitted using a digitally-modulated analogue voltage signal which can be affected by inductance, impedance, capacitance & resultant time variances… what about jitter, inter-frame timing, earth/noise impact on the final analogue stages… and what about listening when things go very much against expectation?
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Sorry, but I have I have no idea what you are refering to. I kinda get the words, but have no idea how they are related to anything.
I mean if the data is affected, why is the frame containing it not affected at all except for the checksum that magically happens to be right all the time?
Also, when streaming, all endpoints use buffering because it just makes sense in case of an unreliable network connection. How do network cables and switches affect the playback of locally buffered content?
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All digital equipment is subject to those factors because voltages, currents, etc. used to represent digital signals are analog quantities. Engineering makes it possible to detect and, where necessary, correct errors. In the case of Ethernet, if an error occurs in transit then it will be detected by means of a CRC and (normally) rejected by either the receiving Ethernet interface hardware or the device driver. When the Ethernet frames carry an audio stream this will be before any audio payload is extracted, and rejecting an errored frame may cause drop-outs (depending on the higher-level protocol). If a drop-out occurs this will be an obvious indication that something is broken, not a subtle change in sound quality.
Exactly, what about it? I’m not sure what you mean by jitter in this context, since the audio data is packetised and the inter-sample time is not contained in the packets (but is mutually agreed between the sender and receiver). Any protocol for streaming audio over a network has to handle the fact that the inter-frame time is variable, which as @Janne_Johansson pointed out is normally done by having a local buffer on the receiving side.
Well, that might be a concern if the DAC is not well-engineered.
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Buffers in ethernet-connected network players/Roon ‘endpoints’ are a requisite to making the equipment work properly.
This makes the whole discussion over network cables and switches irrelevant. The signal either reaches your kit, or it doesn’t. You either hear sound, or you don’t.
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I use audio quest top line Ethernet cables for network/server/computer. Firm believer in cables and interconnects as well. Even use top shelf USB. Some components the improvement was more than others but once you reach where I’m at, how can you not
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and where exactly might that be?
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