I've got Steve's Synchro-mesh reclocker and cables and I have to say I find it annoying when people insist that he's got to be marketing the placebo effect when he's politely putting the data in front of you. And inviting you to check it for yourself.
If you don't want to look at it, that's fine, but before you question his motives I think it's polite to point out that he's recommending an optical cable that he doesn't make, and in other threads he's recommending a whole ethernet rig that consists mostly of stuff made by other vendors like Wireworld. I'm particularly impressed that the guy only sells results he can prove empirically (he put it in his name!) and his biggest flaw in my opinion is that he is too polite to point that out when he could.
Let me share with you this experiment I just did. My DAC, an Aesthetix Romulus, has a CD player in it. I put in a CD and press play, and I cue up that same track on Tidal via Sonos, which everybody knows is a lo-fi piece of garbage. I have the Sonos wired into my DAC via Steve's reclocker and cables.
I cue everything up so I can switch between the CD and the Sonos source playing the same track. The added clarity and detail via Steve's rig is easy, obvious to hear. It just sounds better. It could be, of course, that the CD player or CD or whatever just sucks so much that it makes the bits here in the same room sound worse than bits coming from California. It could be placebo effect, of course.
The simpler explanation, which is that the bits going to the DAC are the same, but the Empirical rig is just dealing with jitter better. And if we think of each link in the digital chain as adding or reducing jitter, we're closer to understanding why it sounds the way it does.
I'm an idiot and whatever is wrong about this should reflect on me and not him. Obviously I'm a fan of his work and I think we can learn a little bit from him. But that's just me.
--Matthew