Years ago, I ran across the claim that replacing the resistors and capacitors in an amplifier with better ones couldn’t improve the sound.
Unless the original parts were defective, the argument went, changing them was a waste of time and money. A cap's a cap, a resistor's a resistor. As long as the values are the same, you'll hear no difference.
Yee haw.
Now, the fellow making the argument was smart, experienced, and technically knowledgeable. He correctly pointed out that different parts suit different jobs and that a competent designer should know which to use.
No argument there.
But then we get to the part that has always driven me crazy: the leap from electrically appropriate to sonically identical.
Place a thirty-four-cent electrolytic capacitor in the signal path of a high-performance preamp. Then replace it with a ten-dollar film-and-foil Rel Cap of the same value.
If those two parts sound the same, we’ve been wasting a pile of money for decades.
They don’t.
We use expensive parts because we can hear what they do. Not everywhere in a circuit, and not without regard for the design. Parts are not seasoning to be sprinkled indiscriminately into an amplifier by an enthusiastic audiophile armed with a soldering iron.
But in the right place, the difference can be obvious.
A schematic tells us what a part does.
It doesn’t always tell us what that part sounds like doing it.
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