Transparent is probably the most well defined buzzword in audio actually. But that’s not saying much

Yeah it sounds fuckin weird in the sort of situation you’d want to use albeit, but you do you

Well they do have a track record of shamelessly (and I mean that in the truest sense of the word) ripping off old designs… “neither an homage nor a collaboration… the patents are expired”

On the one hand, it’s understandable; there’s a lot of snake oil in the industry and there are some pretty sensible-sounding rebuttals to expensive cables (“what about the cables inside the amp?”). For that reason, people don’t trust anything that can’t be demonstrated with an A/B blind test, even though they have their own demonstrable problems and are almost never conducted on/by people who would have the faintest clue what to listen for.

But there’s a difference between healthy skepticism and the r/headphones equivalent of an arrogant 14-year-old atheist who denies our understanding of solid state physics and human hearing and instead spouts “hurr durr can’t tell the difference on MY chi-fi IEMs!” every time someone mentions any part of the audio chain that isn’t headphones. Some kind of middle ground of “cables theoretically make a difference but you shouldn’t lose sleep over it unless you’re picking up some serious interference” would go a long way, but Reddit is incapable of nuance.