There is just no snake oil and rigging here for many reasons…
First of all it doesn't work: These guys would be out of business in a month, if they sell something that does not work at home, word would get out quick and there would be no more sales.
Also the sale is not done before it is installed at home: Most guys here don't sell products but go home and make sure that what they do in shop is repeated at home where rigging and faking is impossible.
Seems like you have lots more bandits in US than here?????
My experience is that digital playback systems have a long way to go and …. I don't recall once listening to music through a streamer where I was 100% convinced it is genuine, there are just too many audible flaws with a digital playback chain from a streamer…. The grand piano is not really genuinely like a piano, artifacts in voices that should not be there and some symthetic artifacts that can be just plain annoying.
Without exception, the best music I heard was always through CD players and Vinyl, a CD player shpuld not be better than a streamer but somehow my best experiences have always been with physical media...
Theoretically doing cleanups in the digital domain should not make a difference, but what if it does and what if it can be proved with blind testing?
I am after the same as you guys… I just want good music and I don't want to break the bank in that process; I am doing my best to get there without throwing money out the window. If you look at my profile I believe you will see no snake oil products anywhere. I am very serious about what I do and if I do hear an audible difference with things I want to find out and see how I can apply this at home J
I also tried wool socks but I can't hear any audible difference
I did not mean to imply in the least that you are prone to buying snake oil products. Rather that the salesman may have involved "snake-oil style trickery" by getting the sound to improve through something that is going on which you cannot see.
Generally, if I (as the salesman) can convince a customer that something sounds better in my shop, that customer will believe it is an improvement in their home. If they don't perceive as dramatic of a difference at home, they might think their system (or room) is not so revealing of the improvement as the gear in the shop (which is often high end). We are, indeed prone to expectation bias - I know I am!
I guess the thing that makes me suspicious is that you walked into the shop and listened to the set up and it sounded
decidedly bad! Why is that? What audio store prominently displays gear that would make you want to stop listening to it? What is it about their products in that system that gave it a bad sound until these four maintenance steps were performed? And, if each of the four steps provided clear improvement, we would expect the aggregate of the 4 steps to be huge!
As you described it, I gather that the gear in their shop sounded noticeably worse than your system at home (ever) does! You would assume that they must have used these devices within the last few days since the owner presented it as one of the steps in preparing for a demonstration. However, if you have never used these devices, why doesn't your system at home sound like total crap?
Because this type of decay of sound quality is so foreign to my experience, I am suspicious that they deliberately compromised the sound quality so they could make incremental improvements which they could present as being associated with the anti-stat, demagnetizer, etc.
There is nothing like step-wise making bad sound into good sound quality to lead a person to believe they are hearing especially great sound!
I do believe the USA is more conducive to greed and deceit (for money) than many countries, but unless you can prove to me there are no sales of AudioQuest Cables in your country, I am slow to believe there is no room for deceit among businesses in your country!
