"Audiophile Grade" Ethernet Switches - The new generation

[David A]

@David A It seems that you are being inconsistent and arguably somewhat disingenuous in dismissing the ASR review as "pseudoscience" while not applying similar tests to the claims made by UpTone.  Forgive me if you've already dismissed them on this forum, in which case I missed it.

To use your analogy: UpTone claim (1) that there are (evil) unicorns, and (2) that they have a unicorn-slayer.  They have neither demonstrated the existence of unicorns, their evil nature, nor their successful slaying.  In the words of the old joke, the ER is yellow paint for the elephants' feet.

Joking aside, the ASR review did measure exactly the things (viz. jitter and noise) which UpTone claims the ER is meant to remove, and in two different cases objectively determined that jitter and noise were below extremely low thresholds whether the ER was present or a standard "non-audiophile" switch.  Agreed, that does not prove that unicorns don't exist, but it is (at least one step towards) evidence that if they do exist they are rare enough to make no observable difference.  From any pragmatic point of view that's the same thing.  Do you live your life concerned about the possibility of meeting a unicorn, since it has not been proved that they don't exist?

None of that matters to anyone who would like to try an ER and see whether they hear differences in their system, of course.  I might try one myself, who knows.  But if we're going to have a discussion about the philosophy or standard of science let's apply it equally to both sides of the discussion.

Not inconsistent or disingenuous. The argument cuts both ways.

A claims X but does not provide proof and cannot provide proof. B says he has conducted tests and his tests don't show X therefore B claims that X does not exist. That is basically the situation we have here.

Well, just because A cannot provide a proof for X does not mean that X isn't true. On the other hand, just because B's tests don't show X doesn't prove that X isn't true. What we have here are 2 people making opposing claims and neither has provided a proof for their specific claim. We simply don't know which claim is true.

You can listen for yourself and you will either hear a difference or not hear a difference. If you hear a difference and like it you can buy the product but you may have been mistaken and actually did not hear a difference for some reason (there's lots of reasons you can make mistakes) so you find out you wasted your money. On the other hand you may  not hear a difference so you don't buy  the products and you find out later that there is a difference and you made the wrong choice. When there is no evidence either way, neither side can be certain that they're right and the other side is wrong. Both sides tend to get it right on some occasions and to get it wrong on other occasions. Neither side is infallible. 

There have been times when I thought I heard a difference with some product and decided later that I hadn't and had been mistaken. There have also been times when I thought there wasn't a difference and I found out later that there was and that I was mistaken. There's 2 ways to get it wrong on things like this and I've got it wrong in both ways at different times. I've also got it right in both ways on other things at different times. If you don't have conclusive evidence that a claim is true then you also usually don't have conclusive evidence that it isn't true and in that situation, with 2 people making opposing claims, the only thing that is certain is that one of them is wrong but you have no way of telling for certain which one is wrong and which one is right.

Uptone certainly haven't shown that the etherRegen does what they claim but the tests in that review do not show that it doesn't do what it's claimed to do. All they show is that the tests which were conducted don't show that it makes a difference but they don't, and can't, show that a difference won't be found by some other test. On the other hand Uptone can't show that there is some other test which will show a difference so none of us have any way of proving conclusively that it works as claimed or that it doesn't work as claimed. We get to pick which side we want to stand on and whichever side we pick we may be wrong because there is no proof one way or the other at this stage.