The “revealing system” argument is often just elitist smoke and mirrors. It assumes that expensive gear equals objective truth—which simply isn’t how perception or audio works. Reality does need to explain itself when it contradicts basic principles of electronics and psychoacoustics. Claiming “you can hear any change” in a system worth a small fortune doesn’t make it universally true—it just highlights how expectation bias scales with the price tag. Sound differences between servers in a properly configured system are negligible to nonexistent, or there must be something very seriously wrong with how your equipment has been designed. The rest is imagination wrapped in luxury branding.
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Elitist, truth, and smoke and mirrors sound more like prejudices than good reasoning. My point is that in a revealing system (good or bad) you can hear the differences among servers very clearly. Just go to a good dealer and ask him/her to show you…
What is a bad revealing system?
You mean, ask someone who wants to sell you something?
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I’ve visited quite a few well-regarded hi-fi dealers over the years, and one thing that consistently stands out is how often there’s a surprising lack of real technical knowledge, even among the so-called “top-tier” shops. More often than not, it’s just a lot of polished marketing talk on repeat aimed at making a sale.
It’s a highly commercial industry, and nothing drives sales more effectively than creating the illusion of a “personal connection.” Once a customer feels understood, it’s easy to sell them something they may not actually need, sometimes to the tune of thousands of dollars.
I know the business quite well from the inside, and I can tell you: there’s a lot of snake oil out there. Some of it is so over the top that even dealers laugh about it behind the scenes, but if it sells, most won’t think twice, offcoarse they are very happy to demonstrate it to you but it always comes pairted with a long introduction. It is excatly that introduction that creates a lot of perception bias and most customers are dying to hear a difference because they want to be in this exclusive “highend” club. But at the same time, the expectation bias is so strong that no one would ever admit that they don’t hear a difference. And if there is the tiniest difference it is always, and I mean always highly over exaggerated. That how our mind works. To not fall into this trao is the hardest part, it took me years and years of being 100% honoust to myself. I work as a sound engineer and I get payed for real resuslts, not for imaginary results, and believe me, there are far many more imaginary differences than real differences in audio land.
Personally, I have tried no less than five core computers and all I can tell is that in each and every system I used them in there is no audible difference, just none. If there is then there is something seriously wrong with how your equipment is designed.
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Dear Nyquist,
I might agree with several of your comments.
I am only trying to tell what I found out personally and with close associates. I am not trying to sell you anything. I also have engineering background, I’m a DSP engineer (former now), I presented papers at AES, and I am trying to do as serious experiments as I can. If my comments are not useful to you, just disregard them, don’t try do discredit me with vague generalities and industry critisizam, it does not make sense. If you ever come to Argentina, let me know and I’d gladly invite you my home to listen. Until then I am out of this discussion. Good luck!
Please share an AES article on the topic of the impact of servers on sound quality.
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I published many years ago in the AES, way way before our current experiments with servers, data cables, data switches, impulsive noise, electromagnetic interference, power supplies and so on. I’m far away from an academic paper now. My guess is that there are way too many variables to formalize an hypothesis. I am trying to understand it first, and it is not easy. It is mostly doing experiments with what we have at hand and can get. What I believe now is that digital signals are far more fragile than analog ones. I always thought it was the other way around. I also believe that digital audio is on its infancy and that most manufacturers (even more the general public) don’t know much about it.
In that case, you’re in no danger of being discredited, as no credit is due. It’s just “vague generalities” and marketing.
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So why does the Internet work, why can we save files and open them without issues decades later, why can we send files, money, crypto signatures around the world, even perform remote surgery and many other things we take for granted because they are so reliable?
Or even simpler, why can I send you a number with a binary size of 700 MB over the internet, and if I call it a random number (or a photo, or whatever) you will receive the exact same bits in 1000 of 1000 repetitions, but if I call the number a representation of Beethoven‘s 5th it becomes awfully fragile and needs audiophile servers to be correctly transmitted?
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I can give you more specific insights:
Say you’re in the western hemisphere (e.g. Argentina) and you download a movie from a server located in Europe. That transfers billions of bits across thousands of miles, using digital signals, at a speed much much higher than that of live audio streaming. Yet, none of those bits is lost or corrupted. Can you explain how on earth you call that fragile? Now imagine you do the same thing with analog. Say you have a tape deck or a turntable in Europe and a speaker in the western hemisphere; what expectation would you have of the sound quality?
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Why? Others have mentioned the logical fallacy of your statement - the internet wouldn’t work if this was the case - so what has led you to this seemingly counterintuitive conclusion?
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We all known Spotify wipes the floor with Roon when it comes to sound quality 
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I’d convert it to digital first, then stream it, then convert back to analog 
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Thank you very much for your contribution to the forum and our knowledge! Impressive… 
One thing worth considering imho. Banking is digital, end to end. Audio has a conversion stage of digital to analog. Thousands of different voltage levels. If the device is being taxed then those voltage signals (although regulated) may be affected.
And if the bits are the same, the tax is the same, all else being equal.
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Agreed but digital waveforms from different sources may be cleaner and well formed. The analysis of the badly formed bits may tax the system in some marginally designed dacs. Perhaps…
Once and for all: the bits used in the D/A conversion come from a buffer or shift register inside the DAC, never directly from the bus, so there’s no more “digital waveform” from any source at that point, only the internally regulated voltage rail.
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If we can choose how marginally designed the DAC is, then all bets are off, of course. Normally, all of the data is buffered every step of the way.
The circuit that reads and interprets the digital waveform off the cable eventually changes the state („off“ or „on“) of transistor switches in a buffer memory, and a separate circuit reads these switch states in the buffer memory and, in response, changes the state of other transistor switches. The wave form on the incoming cable is removed by many isolation steps from the eventual DAC chips.
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Indeed. But this discussion appeared to be about different “servers”, e.g. Roon & Audirvana. These are dealing solely with digital data. So issues relating to DACs, etc (and all traditional analogue audio equipment), don’t apply.
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