sine

I see now that my choice of words (educated opinion vs. opinion) is problematic and opens up a bottomless can of philosophical considerations, which divert from the intention of my original question. I agree that the perception of audio can't be solely meassured by engineering means, hence there is the field of psychoacoustics. Nevertheless psychological phenomena related to the listening experience could be scientifically measured, and I'd wish more effort would be made to do so (and to publish the findings), so we can get a grasp of the magnitude these effect(s) can have on us (e.g. by ABX tests [1]). Thank you @Savolax for the reference to the conversation about the ethernet cards [2] - that's the kind of assessment I'd fancy as a starting point. On that page I also came across a network switch test by the author [3]. It amazed me that although one supposedly importent parameter (jitter) technically got worse after attaching an external clock source (which is supposed to be an enhancement), it was claimed that the overall listening experience of the owners of such setups was elevated. Now I've factual reason to belief that jitter may be overrated. Although it sounds silly but Wikipedia's list of cognitive biases [4] seems to be a treasure trove of potential enhancement ideas for the audiophile listening experience ;) and I have no problem with that - just because I have factual knowledge about what a rainbow is doesn't deminish the magic seeing one, or does it? Wouldn't it be nice if we as a community could resort to a set of testing protocols to account for all these factors, and to enable us to compare and peer review our findings? After all doesn't we all seek the most bang for our bucks? I think dividing the community in 'objectivists' and 'subjectivists' is an oversimplification of the matter and misses the point, since psychoacoustics [5] transcends the domains of acoustics, biology, electronic engineering, psychology, physics, physiology, and computer science. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABX_test [2] https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/64138-best-ethernet-cards-for-streaming/page/7/#comments [3] https://www.open-end-music.com/forum/privatforen/thomas-michael-rudolph-tmr/651284-messungen-von-ethernet-infrastruktur-switches-nur-lesen/page3#post659024 [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoacoustics

Dear audiophile community! It seems to be quite the business to sell specialized networking hardware (cables, switches & routers, data stream cleaners) for the audiophile minded. I also noticed that this topic seems to divide the community. Unfortunately I find it very hard to build my own educated opinion because most of the postings, blogs, vlogs etc. are opinion based and lack any scientific method to quantify the change in the audio signal and thereby attempt to really proof their point, instead of preaching. If there is a difference then it should be measurable, shouldn't it? So where are these reproducible tests and measurements and proofs? Kind regards sine