Geoffkait: It was meant to be a funny story on a slimly related note, not really a perfect analogy. You read it slightly wrong though, it was the owner of the distributorship (who employed me - I was one of the salesmen) that visited the breweries periodically and was told this directly by the brewers. (Yes, there really are people with the title 'master brewer' working in breweries - had I stayed in that job longer, I would've also toured a brewery and met one. In fact, some breweries conduct public tours, but I doubt you'll get told the truth about 'ice-brewing' if you go on one.) Anyway, we were in turn told it by him, our boss. He had nothing to gain by being so honest and open about the issue with his sales force, but getting educated in beer was part of our job, and he was an intelligent, approachable guy who knew the official explanations were kind of fuzzy and that there was snickering in the ranks when the stuff was introduced, so he checked into it and gave us the straight dope. It does make more sense to me than the nebulous implications of the ice-beer ad campaigns did. Plus, my grandfather (who was still alive at the time) had been a brewing chemist at a consulting company in that industry for many years, and although he was long retired when ice-beer came out, he concurred that he could devise no scenario in his mind by which ice-brewing (as the method had been described to me, the details of which I've forgotten by now) could make any real difference. As to your question about whether ice-beer tasted different, there were confounding variables - it was not exactly the same recipe as any of the other beers. Which I'm sure was done deliberately, otherwise it would have tasted just like another beer, so it was really just a creative excuse to come out with a different beer with a different marketing angle. (And about whether cryo in high end audio is officially a 'fad' at this point, I don't know that we can define that one either, but I see elements of faddish behavior surrounding it, just like a lot of things in this hobby.)
Anyway, I just finished up installing the Porter Port and am playing the music I listened to last yesterday, Wayne Shorter's "Juju" (RVG ed. Blue Note CD) and Lorraine Ellison's "Stay With Me" (Warner Bros. W7 green label LP)*. Do I hear any differences? Who the hell knows? It's been almost 24 hours and I don't even know what my volume settings from yesterday were. But overall my system sounds about the same, maybe just a tad worse (could be nothing, could be anything, but it's true that the system, after being unplugged while I worked, probably isn't in the same state of warm-up as it was yesterday). This despite that I also polished the contacts of my wall plug and removed the 3-prong adaptor in addition to installing the new outlet and restripping and polishing new bare wire ends inside the box**. Of course the only thing this 'proves' is that I can't detect an overwhelming difference, not that I couldn't hear any improvement at all under different circumstances. But it sure sounds a lot like no improvement at all (does this support the supposed break-in requirement?). We'll see if I suspect any differently over the next few days...
*If you're a fan of Aretha Franklin's late-60's Atlantic work, don't pass up this little-known Jerry Ragavoy-produced gem from the same era should you ever stumble across it (or a reissue). The once-legendary but now almost forgotten title single (not the Faces tune by the same name) has an epic intensity to surpass Tina Turner's "River Deep, Mountain High" and a more magnificent pathos than "Layla".
**What represents an acceptable ground voltage reading across the neutral and ground terminals? I think I'm getting a little over 1v.