My hunch is he has found something that has eluded others, probably much to their chagrin and irritation, and I hear the benefits every day.
Let's talk about what we hear.
I am home sick while working at Microsoft and managing the audio group among others. Someone gave me a file that did not encode well with WMA codec. I go to my team and ask them if we can improve it. They said they had a new psychoacoustics model in the encoder that might. They give me the new encoder and it makes some difference but still the problems remain. I go back to the manager of the team and say we still not there. He said they were a lot of tunable variables and it was still work in progress. I said I am home sick with nothing to do so give me the parameters and I will optimize them.
I get the encoder and it has a dozen or so floating point parameters to mess with. I zoom into a few of them and start encoding and doing before and after testing, all sighted. I optimize the one number and notice that if I changed the fractions, it too would make things better or worse. Make a long story short, during a full week of listening I optimize the values down to 4 or 5 decimal places. Just changing 1.29485 to 1.29484 would change the sound.
I gave my results to my guy and he is very surprised. In the nicest tone he can he says that none of those fractions are used! I say no way. I can hear the difference down to so many decimal places and what I have now is far, far better than what I started with. He says fine and goes away for a day and then sends me two sets of files and asks me which one is better. I tell him one set was a lot worse. He turns around and tells me that was the set that I had "optimized!" Not only did the fractions make no difference but the decimal values were so wrong as to completely screw up the encoder.
He proceeds to give me two new sets of files. I find one set better and he says that was the results of them optimizing the same parameters. This was the time I decide I need to resign from doing the testing for the audio team
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The process PO has followed is just like what I did with the encoder. He had some "idea," built the box and the sound improved to his ears. He makes one and gives it to others and they too hear improvements. So he convinces himself he is on the right track and builds a few more variations, and the more expensive and fancy the components, the better it sounds. So he puts those on sale and positive reports of those materialize too. There is no doubt in my mind that you and others "hear" these improvements.
The issue is that unlike me, you have not had a way to have that assumption validated. And that such validation may show no improvement or as it was in my case a detriment. We have processes and systems in place to do that both subjectively and objectively. We must embrace them to get to the truth to know if we are better off buying an OLED TV or a plywood box for the same price. Anyone who seems harm in this puts more value on their ego being bruised than serving fellow members. More information and validation can't possibly be bad.
And yes, I will evaluate the box when I get it and test any hypothesis people have for why it might make an improvement.
