*censor
My bias is towards truth. There are others, on this thread, whose bias is towards ripping gullible people off.
I don't have a system. I have too many systems. Because I have the same disease that everyone else here has
My main office has a pure sine wave AC->DC->AC filter feeding an Ares II into a WA5-LE with a half a dozen different cans, but mostly using the Ether C's balanced. Where I am now, I'm using a portable FLAC DAC with balanced output into some cheaper 1060c planars (bass heavy fun) or custom Laylas (blocking out the rest of the world).
I love beautiful cables and crazy nice gear, just like the next person. And I generally don't mind spending too much to get some desired result, aesthetic or otherwise. And it absolutely makes things sound better, because I want it to. My typical A/B test is A="I don't have what I want, it sounds flat or awful" and B="I have what I want, it sounds awesome".
Sure, we already know that people will hear the same exact sound in different ways based on their expectations. I don't doubt that people hear different things if the test is not blind A/B. I don't see anything wrong with that. As I've said before, the important thing is enjoyment. But misleading people on purpose to take their money is wrong, so I don't mind speaking up when I see that happening.
I wish I could do real blind A/B tests, but I can not. (I suppose I could buy the equipment to do so, but I just don't want to.) I like doing my A/B tests by myself, and letting my various biases screw up the results to my own liking. There's nothing wrong with bias, and there's nothing wrong with buying fancy toys that one does not really need. But there is something wrong about being dishonest about something in order to swindle people out of money, so I tend to say something when I see that.
A fitting question. Trust me, though, it will sound better if the cables look better. I have personally tested this over and over and it's clearly true. Even if scientifically there is absolutely no difference in the sound.
Yeah, no. It is possible with USB 1.0, maybe, if the bitstream is at the limit of the USB throughput and the clock is real-time, but since USB 2.0 (or maybe SS, I can't remember), this is impossible. Scientifically impossible.
So, to recap, yes, it was actually possible 25 years ago (1996) that USB could lose data and a DAC would have to fudge the analog output accordingly. Modern USB basically has no way (other than, in theory, emulating the deprecated protocols for old times' sake) to have this happen.
Yeah, no. It's not that this is theoretically impossible;
it is theoretically possible. However, no one builds equipment in a manner that would allow it to happen.
No one.
^
this!
Correct. This is all covered by the IEEE 802 specs. Not a problem at all. Absolutely zero influence on the data. And any of this so-called electrical noise is 100% filtered out of the data. It
is possible that a network card could experience such a substantial amount of noise that it would cause a ripple on e.g. the 5v rail, but that would probably be enough "noise" to fry everything in your PC and the entire room. Furthermore, the designs have gotten far more reliable over time, such that flaws that could theoretically be measured 30 years ago (back when we were using 10-base-2 or 300kb token ring) simply don't exist anymore. I can remember when a vacuum cleaner could mess up a network backup, for example.
Wrong. There is no logical or scientific basis for this claim.
I can hear my phone when it is sending/receiving data. For example, in the middle of the night, the iOS does some various scheduled daemon activities, and it wakes me up with the little bits of buzzing
inside of its radio and what not. Almost no one besides me can hear it, but it's clearly audible to me, and annoying. (My daughter, also a musician, can hear it as well.) Wireless modems are noisy. Both in terms of their electromagnetic abuses and in terms of the resonance noise that they can create. (I'm not a physicist; I'm not good at explaining what's going on here, because I don't fully understand it.)
An IEM is basically a big antenna with a super efficient means of turning electromagnetic signals into sound. It is super believable to me that your IEMs are picking up interference from your WIFI, and it is even conceivable (albeit unlikely) that your DAC is picking up interference from your WIFI. Your DAC power supply can also, in theory, be affected by substantial electromagnetic noise, although power supplies are supposed to filter that out, and DACs are supposed to filter out noise from their power supplies. So, I would guess that the noise that you hear is coming from the IEMs themselves, caused by the WIFI signals. Just like some people can listen to the radio via silver fillings in their mouths:
https://mythbusters.fandom.com/wiki/Tooth_Fillings_Radio_Myth
You are using words that I know the meanings of, but you are putting them together in ways that I do not recognize. Also, when someone says "I don't feel the need to share papers or proofs", that's usually a dead giveaway that they are spouting nonsense. If you are not spouting nonsense, please take the time to translate what you were thinking into a sentence that an electrical engineer could recognize. Thank you.