SolarCetacean
500+ Head-Fier
I think there are a few ways to think about cable rolling and those last-inch upgrades. On one hand, yeah, they're small changes overall. Like going from 99% quality to 99.9% quality. If a stock Susvara is that 99% quality level at $4500 or whatever the market price is, then is it really worth spending $5K for that last sub-1% improvement in quality from a cable?
There's another way to think about it, and that's to think about sound quality as an SLA (service level agreement) for audio enjoyment. That 99% sound quality is your agreed uptime on the service when you're guaranteed to enjoy the audio, while downtime by analogy is when a given system fails to provide enjoyment in the music. A 99% SLA means 3 and a half days of downtime per year, or roughly 15 minutes per day. A 99.9% SLA means less than 9 hours of downtime per year, or only 1.5 minutes per day. A 99.999% SLA means less than 1 second of downtime each day, and only 5 minutes per year. How much are you willing to pay for enjoyment uptime? How important is it that nothing ever takes you out of the zone? In the finance world, some companies spend millions per year maintaining old school, big iron mainframes so that they get those 6 or 7 nines of availability. Others wouldn't notice if their systems went down for an hour each day.
To mangle this analogy further, if you're annoyed by treble sizzle on the Susvara, and at stock (99% quality), the Susvara that sizzle occurs once every 30 seconds in a song, then an upgrade cable that gets you to 99.9% quality reduces the sizzle to once every 5 minutes, enough to get through many songs without annoyance. Of course, this is a very abstract way to view the issue, but that's where the mindset of spending thousands on a cable could be logical. Now the other question is if cable rolling is the best way to get those last few nines of quality as opposed to DAC or amp pairings or EQ or pad rolling, but that's a separate discussion.
There's another way to think about it, and that's to think about sound quality as an SLA (service level agreement) for audio enjoyment. That 99% sound quality is your agreed uptime on the service when you're guaranteed to enjoy the audio, while downtime by analogy is when a given system fails to provide enjoyment in the music. A 99% SLA means 3 and a half days of downtime per year, or roughly 15 minutes per day. A 99.9% SLA means less than 9 hours of downtime per year, or only 1.5 minutes per day. A 99.999% SLA means less than 1 second of downtime each day, and only 5 minutes per year. How much are you willing to pay for enjoyment uptime? How important is it that nothing ever takes you out of the zone? In the finance world, some companies spend millions per year maintaining old school, big iron mainframes so that they get those 6 or 7 nines of availability. Others wouldn't notice if their systems went down for an hour each day.
To mangle this analogy further, if you're annoyed by treble sizzle on the Susvara, and at stock (99% quality), the Susvara that sizzle occurs once every 30 seconds in a song, then an upgrade cable that gets you to 99.9% quality reduces the sizzle to once every 5 minutes, enough to get through many songs without annoyance. Of course, this is a very abstract way to view the issue, but that's where the mindset of spending thousands on a cable could be logical. Now the other question is if cable rolling is the best way to get those last few nines of quality as opposed to DAC or amp pairings or EQ or pad rolling, but that's a separate discussion.