Forget cables as snakeoil. There's a new snake King in town.

@jderson

I think your analogy is pretty good about chefs and how they tweak thing.   But it does beg the question as to whether we want perfection or just what’s to our taste.

Ultimately the limit is the recording.  And no cable, amplifier, speaker or DAC can be any better than the recording itself.  They may change the sound of the recording, but they can’t fix it.

As to your last point, While you can measure a lot about sound, you can't measure what you hear, so it leads to a lot of subjectivity (and arguments).   I have a setup that I love, but there are some days when it doesn't sound quite right.  Nothing has really changed except my brain.  So that's why I'd rather spend money on music rather than trying to change phantoms in my equipment.

If only this was the case. There would be no need to purchase any amp over $1000. Anyone who has been messing around with audio for a while knows, almost everything makes a difference. 

As someone who repairs vintage amps, they all sound different. Say I have 2 identical amps. I recap one with brand X caps, the other with brand Y caps. Guess what? They will sound different!  Even changing a couple electrolyte caps, to a film caps will change how the amp sounds. 

Yes, every amp will sound different. You can even put a scope on the output and they have different sign waves. 

Anyone with a Class D amp knows you can change the sound of the amp with just swapping out the power supply. People who have measured the output of the amps with different power supplies have recorded differences. 

These are facts based with measuring before and after, plus using ears that can also measure the difference. Think is someone can't understand measurements, or have good ears, then more power to them, as they can get cheap $100 class d amps and be happy. 

I agree tomrk ! 
 

I'm just addressing the fact that things definitely sound different!  I’m not even sure perfection is attainable?  Obviously perfection is different for everyone!  

The WAVAC 833A SET costs $480,000, and it has less than $2000 in parts to build one yourself. Lundahl coupling transformers and the biggest Hammond SE transformer are more robust than anything you can get with a near half-million-dollar pair of monoblocks. You can also use polypropylene power supply capacitors instead of electrolytic capacitors for better ESR and freedom from the way higher Voltage electrolytics go to hell after a few years of their limited shelf life.  

This makes me suspicious of high price audio such as speaker cables costing over $20,000 and are advertised with bad physics such as concern over skin effect that makes less than a hundredth of a decibel difference in frequency response at 20 kHz.   

To clarify what they had said, since you're generalizing, they stated objective facts that human hearing cannot discern differences in SINAD scores above the mid-70's. Couple that to the fact that we don't live in 1973, and even today's low end amplifiers found in AVRs have SINAD scores well above that range. We all know tube amps and some other specialty amps purposefully change the sound slightly, but that is few and far between. You could compare a $10,000 DAC and one in some big box store AVR and almost nobody would be able to tell the difference. People fall victim to confirmation bias and priming, so their opinions get skewed before they even hear anything. Human nature. But that doesn't change the science of sound or of human hearing.