I see where you're coming from and I don’t want to get caught up in semantics, but to be honest, 'gets out of the way of the music' isn’t entirely clear. How colorless can music be? How can we ever know if we’ve truly heard it that way?
This isn’t difficult to ascertain when performing comparisons. Does the switch make a piano
or drum or voice sound more or less like the real thing? Super easy to determine if that has been the objective all along when assembling a system.
Your phrasing suggests 'removing elements' from the conditioned signal to get back to the original sound quality (by adding a QSA Ethernet cable), while others here may see it as adding something to get closer to the desired outcome—perhaps achieving 'transparency' or 'neutrality' (if that's the goal).
I was simply pointing out that the disagreement could have to do with semantics as people may have different meanings when they apply the term “colored”. That was confirmed.
I then shared how I tend to look at things, which perhaps avoids the term “colored” by saying if something gets in the way of the music it should be avoided. A coloration is one way a component or cable can get in the way of the music. There are others too.
Ultimately, we're discussing the best switch—one that alters noise in a way we appreciate, much like the DAC, streamer, and cables we use.
My goals are best met with the switch that best gets out of the way of the music. How it does that, doesn’t matter to me. I just want to hear voices and instruments soundimg more like the real thing.
That said, this thread is about audiophile switches, and we seem to agree that a switch can’t be judged in isolation—no audio device can. The key is understanding how it interacts with cables, power, and connected gear.
I am not sure my understanding mattered all that much in my determination of which switch sounded best when we did the validation experiments described in
this post. Keith linked to a post from Jeremy who was also present. Quoting Jeremy:
“
One thing I have always appreciated about Ken's system across its many evolutions (a handful of which I've been privy to) is that his focus on timing and precision makes it an excellent lens to experience music through. When you plug something new into his system, it's very 'what you hear is what you get' -- not that it's perfect (no system is), but that the relative strengths of whatever gear or cabling you insert are evident in some form. In other words,
it doesn't take effort to hear a difference when there's a difference to be heard.”
That, I think, resulted from my “gets out of the way of the music” approach. Interactions can still matter, but probably far less than from following the approach of balancing interactions that many others follow where a component or cable is chosen because it helps arrive at the balance they desire. Interactions are far more influential with that approach. For example, if one selected an Ethernet cable to bring more bass, to balance out a switch that robbed from the bass, swapping to another switch might also require selecting a different Ethernet cable. But if the Ethernet cable was selected because it did the best job of making a pianist sound real, it will make more evident how well a switch change helps or harms that.
