Clearly that is not true. Your ears cannot judge anything, it’s your brain that does the judging, not your ears. Apart from the obvious fact that your assertion is wrong according to basic anatomy and neuroscience, it’s also problematic because the brain is subject to biases which can/will affect that judgement and you’ve even actually detailed the source of such a bias (what you’ve read)! The problem with what you’ve read is another example of audiophiles being easily manipulated due to their lack of understanding/appreciation of “scale”.
“Putting extra links in the audio chain” (analogue audio chain) will always affect/degrade the analogue signal but the scale of degradation is minuscule, too small to even be resolved into sound, let alone be audible. So “no” it will not “always degrade the sound slightly” (unless of course it’s defective)! This is one of those audiophile myths that originated in the recording side of the equation: When we’re recording, we try to avoid unnecessary additional links/connections because there’s already a lot of connections, cable runs are relatively long and most importantly, the signal is likely to be amplified by 100 - 1,000 times before it even reaches the consumers’ speaker/HP amplifiers and therefore any effect/degradation will also be amplified 100 - 1,000 times. Think about recording an electric guitar for example; we’ve got the two connections out of the guitar into the guitar amp, two more out of the guitar amp to the cab, two more out of the mic (in front of the cab) and into the stage box, two more from the stage box into the mic pre amp and then all that “degradation” is amplified dozens of times and then two more from the mic pre-amp into the ADC, not to mention the typical 1-4 “pedal” effects each with another two connections. On top of that back in the analogue days, you’d have analogue connections to the tape recorder and then after recording; two more connections out of the tape recorder into the mixing desk, probably dozens more within the desk itself, connecting all the EQ, compression, sends and returns, sub-busses, bantam patchbays, back out to a recorder again and then on to a mastering engineer to add all their connections to, from and within their mixing desks. If each of these numerous connections did “always degrade the sound slightly” (but audibly) how could we ever have delivered analogue recordings to consumers that contained anything other than mush that’s so hideously degraded it’s unrecognisable?
I hate to break it to you but digital connections don’t carry any sound (or even an analogue signal that will be transduced into sound)! Therefore it is literally impossible to “tweak”/“fine tune the sound” with a digital connection, which is pretty much the reason why digital audio was invented in the first place! How many hundreds/thousands of digital connections do you think digital data has to travel through to get half way round the world from say an Apple or Spotify server to your DAC and if each of them arbitrarily tweaked/fine tuned the sound, how would there be anything recognisable left? Come on, try to use your brain, at least a little!
Do you have any shred of reliable evidence to support that claim? And as you apparently don’t seem to know, audiophile marketing is NOT reliable evidence, it’s marketing. “There’s a sucker born every minute” is a phrase from the mid 19th century commonly attributed to P.T. Barnum, I know your username is “theveterans” but you really should try to catch up with the 1800’s, if not the C21st!
G
what an absolutely shocking ripoff. What the hell is Au-S? Are they mixing gold and sulfur? Or is it gold plated silver and since no one at the company has anything approaching a degree in any sciences they branded it “Au-S”? Do you think that’s weird that the company selling you a $3000 wire doesn’t know what the chemical symbol for silver is?
