Sounds like a feature request… 
I had to mull over this one, James. If a tweak has a measurable, positive effect without an improvement in SQ, it would depend on what the effect would be. If it would prolong my system’s longevity or if it would reduce power consumption (every little bit helps, doesn’t it?) I would consider it. If not, then no. What good is an improvement that doesn’t result in the experience of improvement?
I think I just made up a new koan 
I love equipment reviews! The vocabulary is always so specific: clarity, transparency, sense of control,… All those objective, quantifyable technical terms, what’s not to love?
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You forgot veils, windows, pace and many other howlers. My personal pick for the low point of equipment reviews: “I had the original version of the this piece of equipment in for review two years ago and the Mark I version I’m reviewing now clearly exhibits much more clarity and transparency.” So not only do these reviewers have golden ears but they also aural memory far, far, far beyond anything the rest of us humans enjoy.
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I did a little research here’s what I found:
At 8bits - 16,384 angels or 512 archangels
at 16bit - 32,768 angels or 1,024 archangels
at 24bit - 65,536 angels or 2,048 archangels
and most surprisingly, being that DSD works so well and sounds very good:
at 1bit - 1 angel!
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I mistrust my ears as regards “subtle improvements”. Confirmation bias has been confirmed by testing. It may not feel like I am biased, but consider this:
“Tell me," Wittgenstein asked a friend, “why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?” His friend replied, “Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth.” Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?”
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Picking up from the Wittgenstein query, while I was listening to a hifi system with various tweaks that sounds (to me) inexplicably good, as I was preparing a lecture that included a section on the history of science for an audience of scientists at a major research university, I ran across this quote, which might be apropos. This is from “Spooked,” a review by Adam Gopnik of a book about quantum physics called Spooky Action at a Distance by George Musser, a contributing editor at Scientific American:
The boundary between inexplicable-seeming magical actions and explicable physical phenomena is a fuzzy one. The lunar theory of tides is an instance. Galileo’s objection to it was like Einstein’s to the quantum theory: that the moon working an occult influence on the oceans was obviously magical nonsense. This objection became Newton’s point: occult influences could be understood soberly and would explain the movement of the stars and planets. What was magic became mathematical and then mundane. “Magical” explanations, like spooky action, are constantly being revived and rebuffed, until, at last, they are reinterpreted and accepted. Instead of a neat line between science and magic, then, we see a jumpy, shifting boundary that keeps getting redrawn. It’s like the “Looney Tunes” cartoon where Bugs draws a line in the dirt and dares Yosemite Sam to “just cross over dis line”—and then, when Sam does, Bugs redraws it, over and over, ever backward, until, in the end, Sam steps over a cliff. Real-world demarcations between science and magic … are like Bugs’s: made on the move and as much a trap as a teaching aid. … Historians of the scientific revolution no longer insist on a clean break between science and earlier forms of magic. Where once logical criteria between science and non-science (or pseudo-science) were sought and taken seriously—Karl Popper’s criterion of “falsifiability” was perhaps the most famous, insisting that a sound theory could, in principle, be proved wrong by one test or another—many historians and philosophers of science have come to think that this is a naïve view of how the scientific enterprise actually works. They see a muddle of coercion, old magical ideas, occasional experiment, hushed-up failures—all coming together in a social practice that gets results but rarely follows a definable logic.
It’s kind of like tube rolling. I have a hard time differentiating between brands e.g., RCA and a Sylvania…
If you change the tube type with a appropriate substitute with some differing characteristics, its easier to pick up the change. Subtle change can be as much affected by you as the equipment, since some listening days are better than others based on your own acuity.
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This is a quote that demands careful reading, so my question to you is: do you think this quote validates unproven “improvements” or do you think the opposite?
As to the validity of the quote, well… Poppers criterium for falsifiability still stands, quantum or no quantum. Experiments in quantum physics must be reproducible, otherwise the result of the experiment is null.
That knowledge evolves and that phenomena that were unexplained before now become explained is a given. The quote contains an affirmation thereof: “they are reinterpreted”, where “reinterpreted” does not stand for “it’s magic after all”.
Audio is not a chaos system as far as I am aware.
Debates about science on this forum may be, though.
This is entirely sane and orderly compared to the thread over at Audiogon about COVID19 (Munich Audio Show Cancelled). If you think we have a few wackos here, you ain’t seen nothing like some of the folks there. 5G causing the virus. The virus is genetically engineered. Eat silver. Wow.
Same crowd I suspect…
Hey, have you personally tried eating silver to forestall Covid-19? No? I didn’t think so. Why not try it before you knock it?
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True. I could make everyone happy by buying a $350 silver audiophile fuse and then eating it like a lozenge. Actually I feel healthier already just thinking about it.
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I hope you mean the other end of the fuse! 
Well, when people talk out of their ah-hmm the best way to deliver medication is … you get the idea?
Solid silver is almost completely biologically inert, and ingesting it has no effect on the human tissues. It goes right through. Prolonged exposure to powdered or dissolved silver can cause a permanent blue coloring of tissue though, called argyria. Not harmful, just terrible-looking.
Structured silver is considered to have positive health effects.
True. The one that turns you blue is Collodal Silver. Some people brew their own.