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Audiophile snakeoil: The Next Generation?

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GagHalfrunt said:
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.
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I HAVE to know that editor's name. Any links? Sounds like a fun read. :biggrin:
 
XLNC said:
I HAVE to know that editor's name. Any links? Sounds like a fun read. :biggrin:
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It was a long time ago, maybe early to mid 90s. I've tried searching for it, but when you use terms like "audiophile reviewer owned" and "audiophile double blind testing fail" there are so many results that it's hard to sort them and find the exact one I remember. I'll keep looking.
 
jagec said:
Any sufficiently advanced troll is indistinguishable from a genuine kook.
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Why yes, it is called Poe's law. Somebody will always mistake it for the real thing without something explicit. We call those people idiots.
 
poofyhairguy said:
Actually I think it is one of those things that gets parodied so much that eventually the parady is more well known than the original is.

Like KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN
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The only thing I've seen reference it lately (and I admit, I missed the South Park one because I'm not a teenage who thinks South Park is funny) was a rerun of Big Bang Theory (which I also don't find funny, but the GF was watching it). She didn't get the reference.
 
smackababy said:
The only thing I've seen reference it lately (and I admit, I missed the South Park one because I'm not a teenage who thinks South Park is funny) was a rerun of Big Bang Theory (which I also don't find funny, but the GF was watching it). She didn't get the reference.
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I saw the South Park and BBT references, but the best one I've seen recently was on The Simpsons. They did it in one of the Treehouse of Horror episodes they air around Halloween, rather than merely aping the "one of us, one of us" chant they did the whole circus backstory with Marge and Homer as Cleopatra and Hercules.
 
GTaudiophile said:
I have also HEARD the difference in regards to noise floor between a $1000 Nordost power cable and a $20K Nordost power cable.
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The irony with audiophiles and their cables is the ones used for actual production aren't that special. You're not going to see gold plated XLRs with special interference dampening insulation and glass cores. They're a small step above run-of-the-mill RCA cables. They might have a fatter wire gauge, might. Usually they just look thicker because the insulation is thicker. Not to improve audio quality, but so they can take more abuse.


Any recording is always going to be limited by the equipment used to produce the master. Spending more than the production studio did on equipment isn't going to change that.

If you care about quality that much, you go to live acoustic performances.
 
IronWing said:
That's ridiculous, strings aren't even shielded and don't get me started on the harmonics of drums stands.
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I'm sure they must make shielded guitar and piano strings, that way they don't interfere with each other. I bet there's a market for that. 😛
 
Sure, it all sounds the same. No difference between a Classe/Focal system and an Insignia system from BestBuy. Enjoy your Bose system-it's the best you can buy.🙂
 
I see that too. If I give someone a part drawing in PDF format, I get much better results than if it's a DXF. The dimensional accuracy of the finished parts is usually ±0.006, versus ±0.012 with DXF. But that really only comes through if I use v1.7 PDFs. v1.5 is more common, but the text has a much warmer quality, almost like it was back when PDFs were encoded using tubes. That will always lead to lower accuracy.

Likewise, RAR files give much better compression when I put them on thumbdrives, versus on a network server. Obviously that's because the computer knows that a thumbdrive is only a small thing with one or two flash chips in it, whereas a network server is a whole large enclosure with multiple hard drives in it, so bigger files can fit in there.


And don't even get me started on the subject of rotation direction of hard drive platters. To get top-notch performance, you have to make sure you're working with the Coriolis Effect.
You might think that SSDs are immune to this, but once electrons are into their little charge-storage cells in Flash, they can start to swirl around. For better performance, tilt them upright. That helps get all the electrons out of the charge traps when a file gets erased.




This naturally all makes sense because of math.







.
 
I think it's possible that there are some people who have exceptionally astute hearing, and may be able to tell the difference between two almost-identical systems.

That said, I do not think it's possible that there are enough of them who also happen to be music lovers to make a profitable business out of making audiophile equipment that costs 50x more than other high-quality equipment.

So my conclusion is that most of these people who claim to be able to tell the difference between a $1000 speaker cable and a $30 speaker cable are delusional. I understand that they WANT to believe, though.
 
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