Anybody want a laugh?

Its very rare for Ted to have anything that’s not a) incredibly effective and b) good value for money. My system is treated with HFT, ECT and PHT, all of which bear some similarity to the new ART. https://highend-electronics.com/products/synergistic-research-acoustic-art Which stands for Analogue Room Treatment, an unfortunate (or perhaps intended?) acronym that makes people think its all for show. If I know Ted nothing could be further from the truth.

The joke here is a bunch of guys on a site dedicated to audiophiles are doing nothing but cracking wise and heaping derision on.... audiophiles. The ones who aren’t- me and mahgister- also happen to be the ones with actual experience with a wide range of tweaks. Hmmm.

On the slim chance anyone actually interested in improving their audio is reading this thread, it looks to me like the technical explanation to this ART thing is dither. Look it up. Noise added to a signal actually improves human perception of clarity and detail, but only when the noise is randomized a particular way. Anyone truly interested can look this up and learn that’s how dither works, and its been in standard use in video for many years now.

The principle in sound should be obvious and clear but only to thinking audiophiles so let me explain. All sound waves in a room reflect and form modes and standing waves. Traditional acoustic treatments work by damping (reducing, attenuating) depending on the size, shape, location and mechanical properties of the damping material. Simplifying immensely, the bigger and thicker the lower the affected frequency. Its real easy to overdamp a room using these traditional old-school methods. Been there. Done that.

HFT are much more high tech. Even one of these tiny little dots makes a difference that can be heard. A whole set of them makes your speakers disappear. More sets on the walls and you start to get reviews like you will read on my system page. The beauty of these things is unlike GIK type panels they do not alter the fundamental acoustic signature of the room. What they do instead is greatly improve clarity of detail resulting in a much more lifelike 3D sound. Pretty remarkable for a handful of little peanut M&M size doo-dads.

So to me, being an educated, open-minded audiophile who listens to ideas as much as to music, and thinks deep and hard about both, it seems Ted has come up with an even more powerful means of breaking up standing waves allowing us to hear details more clearly. Sounds to me like this ART thing is no laughing matter. More likely it is just one more on a long list of success stories and one I will be keeping an eye on.

Then you don’t know anywhere near as much as you think you do.

This argument is chock full of flaws.

My argument is that the other equipment that will connect on either end of something like this switch, and indeed the internal solder points inside this switch are not capable of producing an improvement, so dropping this “link” in the middle of a dirty chain won’t do anything.

The biggest flaw is its a false understanding of what components do. They do not improve anything. The best a perfect component can do is perfectly pass the signal. Any departure from the signal is by definition distortion. Therefore as a matter of simple logic no component ever can make anything better. The very best components merely do the least harm.

The next flaw is in thinking that it can’t matter because all the other components are flawed. Well, of course they are flawed! A high end audio system is like looking through a window of a thousand panes of glass. Each component is a pane of glass. Some are clear, some tinted green, some flat some distorted, some clean, some dirty, some tinted scratched up curved and smeared with gook. No matter how many or how bad still if you can remove any one of those panes and replace it with one that’s nice and clear and clean, well for sure that is an improvement.

This also shows why the "weakest link" argument is faulty. The weakest link is a great way of looking at what to do next, to get the most bang for your audiophile buck. But the fact of the matter is you could replace your strongest link and get just as much improvement. (But it will cost more, which is why this is not a great idea.) Because it is just like the window panes, and instead of replacing the dirtiest most scratched up one you replace the cleanest clearest one. But as long as its replaced with one even cleaner and clearer it will still be an improvement.

Improvement, to be clear, in the sense of being not as bad. The fundamental error is in thinking these things actually make things better, when in truth all they are doing is making things less bad.

We can only wonder. Did anyone bother to read the ad? Caps, resistors, etc this is all the same quality parts upgrades as are standard and known to work in all sorts of components. The laugh is you guys apparently are unaware of this. Which if this was on any other site it would be funny. Ho ho, the ignorant rubes don’t get that sound quality matters. That you are laughing about audiophiles on a site specifically meant for audiophiles is sad to borderline tragic.