Man, it's no wonder people like to mess with audiophiles. It's all of the people responsible for this stuff who make every guy who likes nice audio gear look like a tool. There is a lot to dig into with different gear. Every transducer sounds different and excels at different things. There are all kinds of different speaker and headphone designs that can give you a different experience with the music. Same with different amplifier topologies. Different ones bring different transducers to life in different ways. Just as no transducer is perfectly accurate, different amps add/omit certain things. Meaning there are different balances you can strike depending on what engages you more to the music. There's some real ingenuity that goes into designing a really good discreet amp. And what they get from the DAC can change the sound, too... you can get slightly different tonal qualities to the overall sound, with a range of different presentations.
I feel like this should be intuitive. You remember hearing at least two, if not many more things, that sounded completely different. I can't remember ever hearing two systems that sounded the same. So at the very least there are plenty of obvious things that can be done to change the sound. I think people just get a little desperate trying to pull out answers and it leads to a lot of funny ideas.
The thing with audio is... psychoacoustics, when it comes to people experiencing music on any kind of home systems, still aren't that well understood. We have a lot of ways to measure things, to compare one thing to another and extrapolate, but it's much harder to directly tie that info with what we actually experience. Much of it still just is subjective. It's unavoidable. A lot of the more prideless companies take advantage of this by making a lot of pseudo-scientific claims, interspersed with measurements that actually are not definitive, so as to appear on the bleeding edge. The other side of this is internet marketing. There is a lot of favoritism of certain types of products. There is definitely a lot of borderline shilling, and probably more that goes unseen... a lot is done to sort of 'steer' the mindshare towards certain products and ways of doing things. A lot of people don't even realize how often they actually mimic the vernacular of the ad-pieces and flowery reviews they read... they basically regurgitate them to each other. That language makes them sound like they know what they're talking about, but they don't know a lot about how things actually work. Most audiophile communities exist to sell gear, essentially. It's been like this for a long time... since way before the internet, even. The flex factor is definitely a part. It's something people like to flex, and in flexing it, serve their overlords well by making other flexers agitated
Tubes are a good microcosm. People go gaga for certain tubes... sometimes as old as 60 years. At first those tubes are cheap, but as soon as it's sniffed out, the finite supply drops until they cost more than the amps they go in... like hundreds of dollars for an old vacuum tube. And maybe you need 4 of those matched. There will be many other good, cheap, yet mostly untouched tubes out there that are just as good, but the $300 tube will still be the favored one. Somewhere along the line people get duped into thinking the price of the tube dictates the quality... because quality is in high demand (common marketing strategy for audiophile companies... they want you to buy their rare, expensive boutique items.) But really it's just the tube is more in demand. People's thinking tends to skew in these directions when they get a little too embedded in the things they've read and learned through the related media.
I still think that if you're shopping for $$$$ cables to make your super-expensive setup sound perfect, it might be easier to just admit that you don't fully like the sound of it and stop trying to make it what you want by throwing more money at it. You could take that same money and by new speakers, headphones, amp, DAC, whatever and do a lot more to change the sound. Or at least admit to yourself that you have more money than you know how to deal with
Anything else is sort of a waste of time and money, unless some other important part of the chain is actually broken or really shitty.
This gook is sort of a lesser version of that. I still think you should just stahhhhp and admit to yourself that you're not fully into what you got and save your pennies for something new, instead of throwing crap like this at it periodically. Quit being silly.
And then there is the knee-jerk camp on the other side, who truly feel that measurements are everything. They insist everything sounds the same and favor DACs and amps with boasting really low THD and good SINAD, for maximum accuracy or whatever, even if they actually sound like ass. That is possible... I have heard great measuring stuff that actually sounds immediately, like completely intuitively terrible. You know right away "Oh wow for $150 this sounds like SHIT. What's wrong with it?!"
It's all a bunch of bullshit... just a cult mindset. There is some mysticism to how we experience music. Nobody quite knows how that magic works on us. I can say from passing stuff around and going to demos, that different gear does sound different. Without a doubt there is a huge variation. Nobody really knows exactly why that is, but most people know when they're enjoying music drastically more, or when it is unpleasant to them. Anybody trying to tell you what makes music sound good and why while also trying to talk you into a purchase is either lying or ignorant. The only thing they can say is how they liked the sound, and try to describe what they liked about it. There are still some things you can look for, and actually knowing the science that IS there (like how the engineering itself works - not what it 'does' to the sound) can keep you from buying inconsequential crap at a huge mark-up. That's why at the end of the day it's better to find a way to try things out than go to some forum, article, or review guru. You can pick up some things there... it's just that if that's all ya got, you may wind-up misled. The more mystical side of things is the fun part... just discovering how things sound first hand. People overthink that so badly sometimes. Making gear and setting up systems are both a lot like cooking.
I've always had hi-fi stuff as a side hobby. I probably would never buy this, even if I didn't know it was kinda BS. Every couple of years I make some changes to a system, without spending batshit insane money. It can be pretty fun if you like to listen to a lot of music. It makes sense to be more actively invested (time/resource-wise) in things you spend a lot of time doing. You game a lot, you build a more particular rig. Like movies, you put time and care into a home theater setup. It's just another layer to the experiences you have with something you really like. Best advice I can give to people is to not mind what they read online too much. The best way is to either find a dealer where you can try gear, or make your way out to a trade show, where you can demo everything under the sun and maybe learn a little. Don't get so stuck in your head that you buy over engineered cables and goop for your plugs.
Yeah, solder and shrink wrap (when practical) is great!
And of course, old ears just aren't as discerning as they used to be. If I were 45 years younger and had a little deeper pockets, I would definitely be around a 2.5 on your scale because not only do I have the technical understanding of electronics and the recording and reproduction process, I know how to actually sit down, listen with purpose, and discern those tiny nuances between different speakers, phono cartridges, and other devices.
