Moode 6 sound quality

[Miss Sissy Princess]

maybe, but it would take some very careful research and testing for me to buy that.

And it would take some very careful research and testing for me to buy your moOde-sounds-better conclusion.

Basically what you are saying then is that no matter what, people will often hear improvements with any change, regardless of their expectation about the change.

I neither wrote nor implied any such thing.  I explained how the brain "often" incorrectly perceives an improvement when it fails to hear an expected degradation -- even in cases where there is no difference.

This is inconsistent with my personal experience, and I have seen no emperical evidence to back it up.

What "empirical evidence" do you have that moOde "sounds much better than either Volumio or piCore"?  Using blind testing, what was your accuracy in identifying moOde, rather than those competing products, as being the source?  "Much better" should be easy to pick out in blind testing.  

And if it were true, we would all hear that a $20 DAC sounds better than a $2000 DAC. Makes no sense...

I have no idea of how you arrived at that conclusion based on what I wrote.

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I suspect that you did not read the article for which I provided a link.

Excerpts from that article:

HEAR WRONG: Just like with taste and vision, our hearing is heavily and involuntarily filtered. Only around 0.001% of what we hear makes it to our conscious awareness. This is hardwired into us for survival. We would go crazy from sensory overload if this filtering didn’t take place 24/7. Studies show you can play the identical track, on identical equipment, two different times, and the odds are good people will hear significant differences if they’re expecting a difference. This is called expectation bias and it’s the brain “helpfully” filtering your hearing to match your expectations—just like wine tasting. I reference the auditory work of James Johnston and more in the Tech Section. (photo: JustinStolle CC)

THINK YOU’RE EXEMPT FROM HEARING BIAS? People who have made a career of studying the human auditory system have yet to encounter anyone who can overcome their sensory bias. If you have any doubt I challenge you to watch this video and try to overcome your listening bias. If you can’t reliably do it here with a single syllable, even when you know the exact problem, it’s safe to say you don’t have a chance with the much greater complexity of music and a wide range of expectations:

• McGurk Effect Video – A 3 minute BBC non-technical BBC video that allows anyone to experience how our brains involuntarily filter what we hear based on other information. (courtesy BBC TWO).
  

THE TIME FACTOR: Our brains are like leaky sieves when it comes to auditory details. We can’t possibly remember the massive amount of data contained in even one song (roughly equivalent to one million words!). So, here again, our brains out of necessity heavily filter what we remember. The students in the sight example above thought they had accurate memories of the thief but they turned out to be very wrong. The science shows our audio memory starts to degrade after just 0.2 seconds. So if switching from Gear A to Gear B requires more than a fraction of a second you’re losing more information. The longer the gap, the more you forget and the more bias distorts what you do remember.

WHAT WE HEAR: Neurologists, brain experts, hearing experts, and audio experts, all agree the human hearing system, by necessity, discards around 99.99% of what arrives at our ears. Our “reptile brain” is actively involved determining what gets discarded. For example when you’re listening to someone at a noisy restaurant, the brain does its best to deliver just their voice. And, multiple studies demonstrate, when you’re listening to audio gear the brain also does its best to filter your hearing in the way it thinks you most want. If you’re expecting Gear A to sound different from Gear B the brain filters each differently so you indeed hear a difference even when there isn’t one. This auditory issue has many names. I generally call it “Subjective Bias” but it’s what’s behind “Expectation Bias”, “The Placebo Effect”, and “Confirmation Bias”. I highly recommend the book Brain Rules by John Medina and there are more resources in the Tech Section.

Just as our vision is prone to being fooled, so is our hearing.  That's why measurements and blind testing are so important.