BudgetAudiophile

The hard truth of it is, the vast majority of people are in reality cloth-eared gits. This is regardless of their level of personal interest in audio quality. Yes, this statement certainly also includes you, whoever is reading it. Your ears and brain are the bottleneck here. Sorry, you actually objectively suck at this. It's biology; too bad you weren't born a rabbit or a dog.

Double blind studies have proven again and again that the products hawked by unscrupulous vendors to audiophiles make no discernible difference whatsoever to listeners, and even a superficial level of knowledge in the laws of physics and/or reality illustrates that the claims they make are usually also impossible.

Further, it is trivially easy to observe that the vast majority of people, possibly everyone, can be fooled into believing that an audio system sounds "better" than before by, without the listener's knowledge, making no changes to the system whatsoever between listening test A and B other than to turn the volume dial up one notch.

Try it on your audiophile friends. Just turn up the volume, fiddle around behind the stack, and claim you installed some expensive crystal or other geegaw. Reveal to them what you actually did only after they've already made up a dozen wine-snob style descriptors about how they thought the "soundstage" or the "brightness" or the "jitter" or whatever the hell was changed. It's a laugh and a half every time.