I’ll bet any knowledgeable audiophile will pay big money for a passively aged system like that.
You could likely even convince them it’s a good investment if they don’t actually use it.
So, are my Klipsch speakers a waste? I bought them after a lot of advice, one aspect of which was the fact they weren’t varnished or coated – allowing the wood to somehow produce a better sound. They’re now 40 years old and I’m sure I can’t tell one way of another about the coatings, so I stained them to match the cabinets in the den.
Help me fight (my) ignorance here: Is there an audiophile market for records that are pressed early in the production run? How do the record companies determine when the tooling has to be replaced?
(Now if I could only find a good copy of “Cohen at the Telephone”.)
You’re a monster.
You’ve completely ruined the secondary primary sub-acoustic harmonics.
But I can fix that with those really expensive cables… right?
Don’t be ridiculous. You have irrevocably damaged the physical integrity of the cabinet.
You need these really expensive harmonically tuned rubber pucks to place on top of the speaker.
Make sure the rubber is sourced from the province of Grão-Pará. It has the structure to generate Planck length waveforms to support quantum tunneling of whatever the song was about.
For some reason this came across my newsfeed this evening.
Solid Snake-Oil Storage: This SSD Is Aimed at Audiophiles
Supposedly, the drive can increase audio quality and give you real 3D sound along with an experience that only comes from vinyl recordings, …
The developer claims to have designed and built the device from the ground up in close collaboration with an unnamed SSD controller manufacturer. The pictured device has a Realtek SSD controller, a company better known for its sound processors even though it began making SSD controllers a few years ago.
$12,000? At a bare minimum, it would have to be able to give me a blowjob.
1200 of them.
Not our business if someone wants to buy superconducting cables and a rubidium clock, but what about the out-and-out frauds? How do we put them out of business (+ punitive fines)?
Fraudulently doing what? They’re not making any claims about measurable outcomes. Just woo like ‘timbral purity.’
I don’t know if it’s been said yet, but:
Q: " What could a phonograph do to be worth $12000?"
A: Get someone to spend $12,000 on a phonograph
Misleading and deceptive conduct? In another thread
A popular brand of ibuprofen in Australia recently came out with packaging that said “Back pain” or “Headaches”. I suppose they figured people with back pain or a headache would buy it since it was more specific and presumably more effective than ordinary ibuprofen sold by competitors. But it was just plain ol’ ibuprofen. The manufacturer got fined $6M dollars for engaging in misleading and deceptive conduct.
I have Sonos components throughout my house. I don’t use any physical media everything is streamed via WiFi. It sounds fantastic to me. And no cables at all! (Do power cables count?)
Wireless components like Bluetooth dongles and wireless speakers are super-useful. Depending on the quality of the devices and how they are set up, no question they sound good, but (before experimentation) I would not claim that they have absolutely no measurable effect, compared to audio cables, when hooked up to something like an expensive phonograph, even if in most cases a person would not be able to hear it.
A measurable effect? No question.
An average person can hear the difference in a highly specialized audio room while sitting still? Probably.
In my boomy (plaster walls and hardwood floor) house while walking around doing things and there is noise from the neighborhood and the heater is on sometimes? No way.
When I was in college, I was a budding audiophile on a not-even-beer budget. I used to hang out at the audio stores around campus (remember when such things existed?). One time, a friend and I went downtown, and stoped in to the high-end auto store (Opus One? I can’t remember). The salesman was demonstrating the vast sonic difference achieved with a “spindle clamp,” to a gentleman who must have be close to 70. He did a number of A-B demonstrations, and each time said something like “can you hear the “air” and increased channel separation the clamp provides?” The customer agreed each time. My friend and I looked at each other, and suppressed a laugh - we couldn’t hear any difference, and we were probably 50 years younger…
(The same audio store had a pair of Hill Plasmatronics Type V’s, which, I have to say, had the most amazing high-end of any speaker I had ever heard. But, not only were they fabulously expensive, they were also expensive to run, and were not great for your health…)
That’s called ‘priming’. If I play some random noise and say, “What do you hear?”, chances are that you’ll say you hear nothing but noise. But if I say, “Can you hear ‘Satan’ in the background?” many people will say yes - and believe it. Our brains are great at finding patterns if we are told to look for them.
If the salesman had just played the AB and said “What do you hear differently between them?”, I guarantee the old gent would not have said, “I hear more ‘air’ and channel separation”.
And if he wasn’t told which AB switch position represented the ‘good’ setup, there’s a 50/50 chance he wouldn’t even have chosen it as the best one.
From Ruthless People.