The audio industry is filled with snake oil salesmen. Unfortunately our brain modifies lot of information that we smell and hear (not sure about sight) and we think what we hear and smell is real. Let us recount our own experience of falling prey to snake oil. My first one was with cables and later I found that it was all to do with capacitance. The cables that sounded better were cables with very low capacitance. Now I make my own cables using twisted pairs from ethernet cables costing fraction of the cost of well known cables. With home made cables I get better performance than cables more than 20x cost of home made cables. I will soon post a DIY cable tester in the DIY section that one can use to select a good audio cable.
But the one which I want to recount today is my experence with USB regen from uptone audio. It is a fact that the USB ports in a computer are noisy and it affects audio performance. There are gushing reviews how it improves the sound, the veil comes off, etc, etc. So I purchased a USB regen device. To my dismay, it did zilch. I have a fairly resolving system. I can distinguish between mp3, flac, dsd and hi-res audio samples easily. So my hearing isn't a problem. But adding the USB regen did nothing to improve the sound. It is only today I discovered that it actually does nothing.
What is your favourite snake oil that you applied on yourself?
@buzzaro This is similar to what you were recounting about the special low noise ssd
But the one which I want to recount today is my experence with USB regen from uptone audio. It is a fact that the USB ports in a computer are noisy and it affects audio performance. There are gushing reviews how it improves the sound, the veil comes off, etc, etc. So I purchased a USB regen device. To my dismay, it did zilch. I have a fairly resolving system. I can distinguish between mp3, flac, dsd and hi-res audio samples easily. So my hearing isn't a problem. But adding the USB regen did nothing to improve the sound. It is only today I discovered that it actually does nothing.
Uptone ISO Regen Review and Measurements
In the last few years the floodgates have opened to all manner of digital audio tweaks. One of the ones in vogue now is "cleaning" the USB data bus. It makes "intuitive sense" with USB being connected to a noisy computer which conveys that noise to the DAC and hence, damages the sound...
www.audiosciencereview.com
What is your favourite snake oil that you applied on yourself?
@buzzaro This is similar to what you were recounting about the special low noise ssd
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