Audiophile snakeoil: The Next Generation?

[Thebobo]

That website is notorious for deadpan audiophile humor. It's like the onion.

I'm surprised you guys didn't know this.

They went through a lot of work to do so if so....

All those links for ~1K cables http://www.enjoythemusic.com/magazine/equipment/1201/acousticzen.htm

 

[Ichinisan]

I'm going to email martin.c@colloms.com to thank him for the laughs.

 

[Eug]

NAIM just released a new series of speaker cables and interconnects...

1x stereo interconnect: $4500
1x 3m speaker cable: $2700

NAIM also believes that your furniture can improve the sound quality...

I remember talking to a guy who mentioned he spent $1200 on interconnects. He honestly wasn't sure if they'd help or not, so he thought better safe than sorry and succumbed to the salesman's suggestion to buy them.

After the fact he came to me and asked if that was a good idea. All I could say to him was that since he was using them in wall, it's better to get good cables rather than crappy one. I didn't have the heart to tell him that "good" cables may have a cost him a couple of hundred in total, as opposed to $20 total for crappy ones.

 

[brianmanahan]

All I know is that if I store my 64kbps MP3s on Western Digital hard drives, they sound better than when I used to store them on Seagate hard drives.

this made me lol in a room full of people!

how embarassing

 

[GTaudiophile]

I have listened to speaker/dac/pre/amp/power/cable combinations that easily cost $300K for the entire setup. They can make you feel like being on stage with the musician. I have also HEARD the difference in regards to noise floor between a $1000 Nordost power cable and a $20K Nordost power cable. The difference is there. And for a majority of these high-end audiophiles who are actually rich gearheads more than anything else, the price of admission is worth it.

The rule of thumb is to 'invest' the most in your speakers. Amplification should be of equal or lesser value than the speakers.

 

[IronWing]

I have listened to speaker/dac/pre/amp/power/cable combinations that easily cost $300 for the entire setup. They can make you feel like being on stage with the musician.

I must confess that my audio setup broke the $300 barrier.

 

[Ichinisan]

Oh. This thread.

 

[Ichinisan]

I have listened to speaker/dac/pre/amp/power/cable combinations that easily cost $300K for the entire setup. They can make you feel like being on stage with the musician. I have also HEARD the difference in regards to noise floor between a $1000 Nordost power cable and a $20K Nordost power cable. The difference is there. And for a majority of these high-end audiophiles who are actually rich gearheads more than anything else, the price of admission is worth it.

The rule of thumb is to 'invest' the most in your speakers. Amplification should be of equal or lesser value than the speakers.

I never thought you were claiming (without any sense of shame) to be an "audiophile." I always thought your username was some kind of car pun. :hmm:

 

[moonbogg]

It does sound better coming off an SSD compared to spinner drives. When by passing the RAM, the bass trails behind your mother as she sprints to the

 

[Black Octagon]

Does this mean that Monster will start marketing their own "audiophile-grade" storage media now?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Does this mean that Monster will start marketing their own "audiophile-grade" storage media now?

It's been done. (Audio grade CD-R media.)

 

[Eug]

It's been done. (Audio grade CD-R media.)

You could also buy green markers to mark on CDs make the CDs shine better. Or else ring stickers to make CDs balance better.

I have to say, it seems a lot of audiophiles are frickin morons.

 

[jagec]

I have also HEARD the difference in regards to noise floor between a $1000 Nordost power cable and a $20K Nordost power cable.

This was a fully blinded and instrumented test, I'm sure, otherwise you wouldn't have bothered making such a claim.:whiste:

 

[GagHalfrunt]

I have listened to speaker/dac/pre/amp/power/cable combinations that easily cost $300K for the entire setup. They can make you feel like being on stage with the musician. I have also HEARD the difference in regards to noise floor between a $1000 Nordost power cable and a $20K Nordost power cable. The difference is there. And for a majority of these high-end audiophiles who are actually rich gearheads more than anything else, the price of admission is worth it.

Funny how such claims fall flat 100% of the time when subjected to legitimate double blind testing. If "the difference is there" is seems that someone should be able to HEAR the difference without seeing the components and that's never the case.

Please, for the benefit of all of those of us who are living lives of utter torture listening to setups that don't cost $300K, point me to any real, scientific double blind test of audiophile gear that doesn't make audiophiles look like a bunch of whackadoodles.

 

[smackababy]

This was a fully blinded and instrumented test, I'm sure, otherwise you wouldn't have bothered making such a claim.:whiste:

I have yet to see any tests done using something other than a person "claiming". Why are there no instruments used to determine the levels at which sounds being played and registered in the range of human hearing?

 

[GagHalfrunt]

I have yet to see any tests done using something other than a person "claiming". Why are there no instruments used to determine the levels at which sounds being played and registered in the range of human hearing?

When the instruments fail audiophiles claim that they have ears superior to instruments and that they can pick out nuances that the equipment can't measure. The real question is why do you even need instruments? The instruments themselves don't have a bias. The audiophiles are the ones who claim they can hear a difference, why can't ANY of them prove it? Not a single audiophile has EVER managed to back up his claims in actual scientific testing.

 

[SAWYER]

"Not a single audiophile has EVER managed to back up his claims in actual scientific testing."

Double LOL if this is indeed true

 

[bradly1101]

Some 1's are better than other 1's, but the zeros all sound the same.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Real music is listened to on spindle hard drives. That's where you get the best sound. This SSD digital crap just ruins the music!

Nothing beats a proper hifi raid setup with 5400rpm drives. You don't really want to go any faster than that though or it might throw in some high frequency harmonics into the sound.

 

[smackababy]

Real music is listened to on spindle hard drives. That's where you get the best sound. This SSD digital crap just ruins the music!

Nothing beats a proper hifi raid setup with 5400rpm drives. You don't really want to go any faster than that though or it might throw in some high frequency harmonics into the sound.

No variable speed drives either. You don't want it spinning up and down messing with the frequencies.

 

[GagHalfrunt]

"Not a single audiophile has EVER managed to back up his claims in actual scientific testing."

Double LOL if this is indeed true

There was a really well known editor of some audiophile rag that got his ass kicked up, down and sideways when challenged to put his claims to the test. After making himself look like the biggest idiot on Earth he wrote an article about how being forced to listen to components without seeing them or knowing anything about them introduced variables into the testing that skewed the results and that the only way to get a true result is to be allowed to see what you're testing.

The truly rabid are now writing really incredible articles to explain why double blind testing works for everything on Earth except audio. It's like listening to the Alien guy on the History Channel only like 10,000 times more delusional.

Some 1's are better than other 1's, but the zeros all sound the same.

Bullshit! My zeroes are better than your zeroes and if you can't hear the difference you're not one of us. One of us. Gooble gobble, Gooble gobble. One of us. One of us.

 

[tynopik]

It's been done. (Audio grade CD-R media.)

those simply had an mpaa tax pre-paid on them

which made it legal to pirate music . . .

 

[smackababy]

Bullshit! My zeroes are better than your zeroes and if you can't hear the difference you're not one of us. One of us. Gooble gobble, Gooble gobble. One of us. One of us.

This reference is falling on far too many deaf ears. I can't understand why hipsters haven't put Todd Browning's Freaks into a cultural resurgence. Especially, with American Horror Story being popular.

 

[Eug]

BTW, I haven't done double blinded testing either, by I did some MP3 testing at various bitrates with various decoders. I found that I could not consistently tell the difference with my own mid-end stereo equipment between a CD and 256 Kbps Fraunhofer iTunes MP3 encodes. There might have been occasional clues, but it was very hard to identify those consistently. 128 Kbps was easy to tell apart, at least on some material though. So, from that era, I have an awful lot of 256 Kbps encodes. Then when AAC became more popular, I found that the sweet spot for me was 192 Kbps AAC. So, the rest of my music collection was encoded at 192 Kbps AAC.

One thing I've also noticed during that testing period is sometime in the last 15 years, surround-like effects in some pop songs started to become much more common. Audio salespeople started using this to their advantage, by only playing this type of music with cheap speakers. Some undereducated buyers would marvel at the music's "presence" even with these small speaker systems.

Meanwhile, my friend's brother had a system worth 5 digit $, but I just shook my head because he was still living at his parents' place, with the entire system in his smallish bedroom. He played some SACD for me on that system, and I kept on telling him I was unimpressed.

 

[GagHalfrunt]

This reference is falling on far too many deaf ears. I can't understand why hipsters haven't put Todd Browning's Freaks into a cultural resurgence. Especially, with American Horror Story being popular.

Yeah, I understand that 99% of the readers won't get it. That just makes it better for the 1% that do.