Is ACSS Really Nonsense? (In The Name of Necessity)

Marv've mentioned ACSS on HF, below are from his posts there. May we have a more insightful perspective about this (in)famous ACSS?

QUOTE: Never said ACSS was BS. Just said the effects of ACSS are insignificant in the larger scheme of things, along with speshal USB to i2s, silver wiring, magnetic rocks, mods with boutique parts, femto-clocks, EMI shielding, some of the stuff I use myself.

Point is that I would easily take Yggdrasil -> XLR -> Master 9 rather than AGD Master 7 -> ACSS -> AGD Master 9 for the sake of ACSS. Yes, ACSS makes a slight difference, but it tends to make people huff-and-puff and get all OCD about it. I could imagine people get all stressed out about the overarching need to keep the ACSS and stick with a far far inferior DAC (or any piece of equipment less complementary to the rest of the chain) just to maintain the ACSS "awesomeness", even if the overall system sonics would be inferior.

At worst, one ends up trapped in a manufacturers' ecosystem, be it Krell, or AGD for fear of losing ACSS's speshalness. There's a lot of great stuff out there that doesn't use ACSS. I've heard the ACSS stuff. I wouldn't say it's necessarily better, I'd say it sounds different; similar in vein to feeding DACs up-sampled Redbook.

When a piece of equipment is so overwhelmingly superior, ACSS, speshal USB to i2s, silver wiring, magnetic rocks, mods with boutique parts, femto-clocks, EMI shielding - none that of that crap matters. Heck, if even is piece of equipment simply superior, none of that crap matters.

The TOTL AGD stuff, especially the DACs, has slowly crept up in price. AGD is no longer the deal it used to be. The price of the predecessor to the Master 7, the Ref 1 was silly for just over a grand a few years ago. The most expensive parts in the Master 7 are the PCM1704 chips, the price of which is set by Texas instruments.

ACSS = essentially a gimmick. It matters a tiny bit, but overall implementation of the gear in question will trump interconnect method. ACSS was nonsense that Krell cooked up and AGD adopted to keep customers staying in the same family of products for pheer of "Oh no, it doesn't have ACSS. The interconnect distortion will make things worse music!" Yeah right. I've known way too many people who've gotten worked up on the ACSS / Krell current output thing and stuck with it far too long.

 

I agree with pretty much everything you've said but if you have both an Audio GD DAC and Amp with ACSS you'd have to spend quite a bit on inter-connects to equal the sound of the $20 Audio-GD ACSS cables (especially single ended). Would it keep me from buying a DAC or Amp I really wanted just to keep ACSS - NO.

Of course the Audio GD gear has both the ACSS and standard connections so even if you start with ACSS you have the option to mix and match later.

 

It is not like ACSS is the only way of interconnection on Krell/audio-gd products. It is just an additional mean of connection for bypassing the output and input buffers of two connecting devices. No one is ever "stuck" with ACSS and can choose to use XLR and RCA connections any time. Saying people are fooled to stuck with ACSS gimmick makes as much sense as saying people are stuck with AES connection when they always have BNC/RCA/Toslink connections to choose from.

ACSS is not about having additional effect, it is about to have NO effect of output/input buffers and impedance matching.

 

ACSS is like a baby version of the SE to XLR, if all else is equal. Something like SE<<<<XLR<ACSS.

 

ACSS matters about as much as the difference between a good cable and a better cable. You probably won't notice a difference without golden ears, perfect source material, and everything else optimized in your setup.

I've tried a Reference 5 -> Roc using ACSS, XLR, and RCA.

The ACSS was indistinguishable to me from XLR and better than RCA.

The knowledge that ACSS did fewer conversions made me happy and I had the cables, so I used them.

It's also a reason I like my Audio-GD Master-11. It's all-in-one and I love the sound, so I can believe that it is superior to something identical as a stack than as a single unit because less is having to go through cables and such. But I probably couldn't actually tell the difference in reality.