Denafrips paid a fair bit of money to make this review show up in my news feed today:
Denafrips Ares II, Pontus II, Venus II, and Terminator Plus - Hi-Fi Advice
The review reads like it was auto-generated by AI full of audiophile buzzwords - it's nonsense from start to finish without a single measurement across four pages and endless blather about all the amazing differences switching from a $2,000 DAC to a $7,000 DAC can bring. But one part literally made me laugh out loud and elevated this to needing a share:
I'm shocked - SHOCKED - to read that design differences between two devices make a bigger difference than physically placing them one on top of the other. I simply will not believe it!
Also something I continue to find utterly baffling, and is just conclusive evidence that these nutbags have no idea what they're talking about: Flat ethernet cables. They're clearly visible in several shots. Standard ethernet cables are twisted pair, which makes them highly resistant to noise. If you flatten them, you lose that noise rejection (I'm not an electrical engineer but perhaps someone can verify - if you straighten a twisted pair, wouldn't you actually have worse exposure to noise relative to a single wire, since you're now running two conductors on the same circuit in parallel?)
Anyway, try not to have conniptions reading this, but wow. Just insufferable nonsense from beginning to end.