What other fields besides high-end audio are susceptible to 'woo'?

Factual Questions
101

Having spent altogether much too mush time in the past fighting audiodfool woo I have a few thoughts on the matter of woo in general. I find the silliness tends to fall into a range of camps, not all of them are what I would call “woo”, but certainly count as foolishness, or just plain fraud.

Woo whereby real scientific results that did something useful is misapplied and used to justify stupid ideas.
An example in audio is negative feedback in amplifiers. Build an amplifier with negative feedback that doesn’t have the slew rate on its output devices to maintain the demand gain over the needed bandwidth and you get into trouble, and the amplifier will distort horridly in some circumstances. The science tells you how to design an amplifier to avoid this problem. The woo became “negative feedback is to be avoided at all costs.” So you have an entire genre of supposedly zero negative feedback amplifiers. They sure sound different, but it isn’t because they are quantifiably more accurate.

**Woo with real science misapplied. This usually comes in by over-promoting a second or third order effect that is real, but is simply so miniscule that it is in the noise. **
Skin effect in speaker cables is a good example. Skin effect is a real thing. You can calculate the skin effect for your speaker cables, and you can get a number for the frequency dependant attenuation. But it is so utterly miniscule that you would be hard pressed to measure it in even the best of circumstances. But it is sagely quoted by audiofools and charlatans as a driving reason for insane cables.

Woo from quoting real science totally incorrectly.
You can be sure that the moment you see the word “quantum” you are in this arena. Quantum Purifiers is a favourite. Purveyors act as if they have deep knowledge of physics unattainable by mere mortals, and you simply have to believe that their product does what it claims. And its quantum, so it must be true. Green markers probably belong here. The phrase “not even wrong” might be usefully employed.

Woo from made up psuedo-science.
Shatki stones, Mpingo discs. Stuff that is supposed to work due to a whole load of made up words that sounds impressive or otherwise bamboozles the potential audiofool client.

Woo from alternative science. Little short of religion.
Crystals, water filled speaker cables, stuff that realigns the spiritual component of the sound, etc etc.

Woo from gut-feel or belief in personal intuition above all else.
People who just dream something up because it feels right to them. They refuse to have their faith in their personal correctness challenged no matter what the evidence. Intuition rules over all else.

Woo from anti-establishment politics.
Not so much in audio - although there is a bit. In many areas of life we see people who feel somehow powerless or are kicking back at a perceived power hierarchy, and they latch onto non-scientific or pseudo-scientific, or just plain woo, justifications for taking stance that is basically little more than kicking back at the man. Clearly medicine and health are one of the most fertile feeding grounds for this. The anti-vaccination crowd are clearly based upon such beginnings. Obviously this cut across a great deal of the above.

Woo from outright fraud.
Deliberate willfull misrepresentation of something. A different problem to any of the above. Lies masquerading as real science.
Of course you get overlaps, and the above isn’t going to be complete. But you get the idea.

102

That’s a nice synopsis, Francis.

103

It’s a very nice synopsis. I can apply most or all of those to medical woo without change:

Woo whereby real scientific results that did something useful is misapplied and used to justify stupid ideas: This comes up when early studies are taken too seriously and applied too broadly. For example, resveratrol is known to help plants heal injuries. Its evidence of helping humans is shaky at best. Using it as an excuse to drink wine is entirely understandable, but, still, bullshit.

Woo with real science misapplied. This usually comes in by over-promoting a second or third order effect that is real, but is simply so minuscule that it is in the noise: Vitamin supplements probably fall here for most generally healthy people. Most people don’t need supplementation. Having extra vitamins in your system doesn’t help. It probably won’t hurt, unless you have a major surplus, but all a surplus of vitamin C does, for example, is make your urine slightly more expensive.

Woo from quoting real science totally incorrectly: Yes, quantum bullshit exists in alt-med, too.

Woo from made up pseudoscience: Homeopathy. Osteopathy. Chiropractic. Things that were taken seriously in the 19th Century, perhaps, but which are known to be bunk now.

Woo from alternative science. Little short of religion: Traditional Chinese Medicine. Reiki. Anything with the word “Qi” or “Chi” in it. Herbal medicine falls here, too.

Woo from gut-feel or belief in personal intuition above all else: A cross-cutting concern, something common to most if not all of the little sub-fields. Especially if it’s on Facebook or “mommy blogs” or similar.

Woo from anti-establishment politics: A very common sales tactic: “They don’t want you to know this stuff! The AMA is suppressing it! The MDs are all in on it together! Western science is racist! Buy this now!” Ignored is the fact people from every ethnic and cultural background have contributed to “Western” science, so calling it “Western” is, itself, insultingly racist.

Woo from outright fraud: Supplement makers know damned well the FDA would drive them out of business, that their pills are useless at best and probably dangerous, and they’re damn glad their friends in Congress can keep them going.

104

That claim, of course, has not been scientifically tested, so it may be even more woo itself.

(I’ve never heard of any audio comparisons done with the listeners’ heads in a clamp vs. without. Not to mention the difficulty of building a double-blind head-clamp.)

The thing is, while there is a lot of woo in audio, what is not woo is the fact that there are vast differences in the quality of different speakers and headphones. You don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Most people have no idea how good a stereo system can sound. The speakers are the biggest factor, followed by the room acoustics, as well as the recording quality but the listener can’t control that.

Most people would be astonished by the sound quality you can get from the right pair of bookshelf speakers in the $300-600 range. Of course, if you want deep bass, high output, and surround sound, the costs increase to several thousand dollars.

105

Nobody has ever disputed that there are differences between different speakers and headphones, so maybe there’s also the woo of “misdirection.”

106

Ethan is mostly on the side of the angels, but he doesn’t come to these arguments with totally clean hands. He has a business selling acoustic treatments for rooms. So he has a habit of of making lots of claims about room acoustic effects as being the only thing that matters. No doubt, room acoustics are insanely underappreciated and critical. But they are not all there is to the issue. Ethan has done a few other tests and "proofs’ over the years claiming to show that other parts of an acoustic chain were transparent, and has made a few technical blunders whilst doing so.

There is real science done of acoustics as it relates to sound recording and reproduction. But it isn’t an easy thing to do, and the results are only applicable in a limited range past the scope of the experiments. Most science is done directed at professional audio - cinema sound being the big one now. The Harman company has done a lot. But there is little doubt that when it comes to domestic audio a lot is still to be done. It is hard to go past “Sound Reproduction: Loudspeakers and Rooms By Floyd E. Toole” if you want a start on the science. Floyd is pretty much the elder statesman of the art.

107

I attended karate classes with a wonderful guy who attempted to use some moves we learned in class to disarm a mugger who pointed a gun at him. Poor Phil got shot through the heart and was killed instantly. Perhaps it would have happened even if he hadn’t tried a disarming move, but our school lost most of its students and closed.

108

Well, that’s just terrible.

Anyone (outside maybe Special Forces or police, and I doubt police would be quite so stupid) who says their unarmed combat techniques can work against a combatant armed with a firearm is a fraud. Firearms caught on among militaries for a reason, and it wasn’t because the brass didn’t think their troops had enough to carry. As the old ad copy said: “God created men, but Sam Colt made them equal.”

Anyway, that’s one place my skepticism comes from, in addition to the obviously woo-infested “spiritual” crap like the punch that makes the other guy’s heart explode through some blatantly non-physical mechanism. I’m willing to believe there are people out there teaching non-police civilians techniques which will even up the odds in a bar fight or similar, particularly against someone substantially drunker than you are, but once the knives and pool cues come out, the safe bet is to run.

109

Beyond that, the main thing I’ve always read about chain lube wasn’t that the more expensive ones were somehow more lubricating and made you pedal faster, but that they were better at lubricating and preventing wear (the dreaded “chain stretch”).

Combine that with a desire to not frequently do chain maintenance, and you have a fertile ground for the latest dry/semi-dry/wet lubes for various conditions guaranteed not to attract dirt and be slicker than snot on a doorknob within the chain.

Truth be told, the best option would probably just be to get a missing link/master link and pop your chain regularly, clean it well with solvent, and lube it with some kind of relatively inexpensive light machine oil.

After all, bike chains don’t experience high temperatures at all, don’t have anything approaching extreme pressure conditions, and really are only challenged as far as being out in the open and exposed to all manner of crud during operation.

As far as motor oil goes, I don’t know if I’d call it woo, so much as I’d call it the latter-day argument about how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. On one oil-centric bulletin board I occasionally read, they get all wonky about esoteric specifications on oils that already far exceed the manufacturers’ specs. It’s that “hobbyist mentality” that makes these guys try and find the perfect oil, when in fact with modern engines and oils, you can more than likely run the cheapest oil you can find that meets the specs and change it according to the recommended interval and have the engine outlast the rest of the car. Using the latest super-duper synthetic oil is maybe going to have your engine running for 400,000 miles instead of 300,000 miles. Great, but who really runs their car that long?

110

I’m aware of high-end audio woo, stuff like monster cables and people posting DR results of the latest releases, but…

I recently upgraded to a modest 5.1 SACD/DVD-A capable system with good speakers and I have to say some of those “high end” discs sound absolutely amazing. I’m listening to the Blu-ray of Hypnotic Eye right now and it sounds like I’m there in the studio with them. I can hear the vocals and every instrument in the mix clearly and cleanly. The “normal” stereo version seems dull and a bit bland in comparison. I just wish I could crank it up some more without getting complaints from the neighbors.

111

I’ve used wax-type dry lubes for years. The big advantage is that besides dirt not sticking and grinding down the chain, it’s also much cleaner when you fix a flat. No sticky gunk on the hands.
On the handcycle, the chainrings are less than a foot from my chest and wet lubes fling off onto my shirts and ruin them.

112

[quote=“gregorio, post:4, topic:801057”]

Cycling. Like electronics where you pay more to get less (electronics=smaller, cycling=lighter). Sometimes you pay more, to get . . . nothing.

One example, chain lube:

[INDENT]"The Johns Hopkins engineers made another interesting discovery when they looked at the role of lubricants. The team purchased three popular products used to “grease” a bicycle chain: a wax-based lubricant, a synthetic oil and a “dry” lithium-based spray lubricant. In lab tests comparing the three products, there was no significant difference in energy efficiency. “Then we removed any lubricant from the chain and ran the test again,” Spicer recalls. "We were surprised to find that the efficiency was essentially the same…

While I’m the first to admit that the biking industry sometimes has fairly dubious products, I cannot think of products that fully qualify as ‘woo’. Sure, entire lines of consumer products built are built on barely perceptible/highly individualistic gains (Di2, biopace, ceramic rollers), but using the wrong chain lube, like wd40, over other types can attract tons of dirt. Not good for a regular rider.

The stuff they want to sell you as energy bars/gels while out riding… that’s a totally different story.

113

I think any hobby that involves equipment will be subject to woo, for a couple of reasons.

  1. The practitioners are really, really interested in the subject and want to explore any way of increasing the areas they can study. Everyone knows that the major interest in the extreme hi-fi world is not in listening to music, but in setting up the system in the first place (or continually tinkering with the set-up). Cycling - can be much the same. Vintage and classic cars - almost entirely about the set-up, rather than what the actual car is for (driving).

  2. The suppliers of that equipment are really, really interested in making you spend more money, and will invent all sorts of crap to grab the hobbyists attention. And the hobbyists will pay attention (because it’s their hobby - particularly in the setting up of the system), and so some will spend money. Some will spend lots.

There’s a wonderful anecdote by Stephen Potter about a keen fly-fisherman in the highlands of Scotland, who sits in his lodge performing calculations relating to the weather, stream flow rate, probable age of fish, age of fisherman, distance from nearest active tractor, percentage of solid deposits in stream etc, and works our exactly which fly, rod and line to use. He then provides detailed instructions to the gillie and leaves him to catch the fish.

114

The thing to be very conscious of when comparing both BluRay and SACD to ordinary CD formats is that no only have the new disks got a higher information bandwidth, but they will have been remastered. It is very unlikely that you are really comparing like with like in terms of the source material.

Conventional 16/44.1 CD sits on the ragged edge of human perception. There is no wiggle room, but it gets pretty much to the limits of what a human can resolve. (In order to do so you need noise shaped dither - but any proper mastering has done this for decades.)

SACD is a weird beast. If you actually record something with the DSD process you can’t do anything with it. You can’t remix it in anything but the most simple ways. So what happens is it gets converted to 24/96 or something similar, mixed and back converted. Which is a bit of a white lie about the “purity” of the process.

High data bandwidths like 24/96 and so on are way better than human perception, but they provide the mixing engineer with a huge margin to work with, and they may well feel the freedom to drop the amount of level compression used, and generally leave things more alone, which is usually a good thing.

For a company releasing the same recording on multiple formats there is some pressure to mix and master the releases differently, if only to address perceptions in the marketplace. Done right the conventional CD should be very very close to the high-res version. But don’t assume differences are just down to the format.

115

Pro timetriallists run coated chains nowadays to mitigate very small drivetrain losses, and this has filtered down to the rank and file athlete. My mate just sent his chain off to be waxed for next season (to some general piss-taking from his clubmates, it has to be said), but he’s v close to sub 20 min for 10 miles so is legitimately in the game of saving 5 W here and there. For the rest of us, it does sound a bit silly - although that never stopped any tester from spending money on their bike tbh.

116

As someone who enjoys games on my PC, I have long suspected there is a lot of woo around gaming performance. I’m not super knowledgeable in this area, but beyond a good graphics card, a reasonably well-performing hard drive, and adequate memory, what else do you really need?

What made me think about this was trying to explain mechanical keyboards to a friend of mine. Now, there are obvious measurable and specific differences in switch types, I switched from cherry MX red to cherry MX speed switches because the reds were killing my hands when I typed. It makes logical sense that different switch types are going to affect typing fatigue, depending on your typing style. But these keyboards are marketed predominantly toward gamers, not typists. And they are expensive. The one I bought yesterday with the cherry MX speed switches was $181.00 (for what it’s worth, it is immediately and already my favorite thing ever.)

So as I attempted to justify the new purchase to my friend, using jargon phrases such as ‘‘actuation point,’’ I thought distinctly: “I sound like I’m full of shit.” Is there really going to be a hugely measurable difference in gaming performance between the reds and speeds? I haven’t given it a gaming test run yet, but I very much doubt it.

The sheer abundance of crap marketed toward gamers, with claims of performance superiority over products that seem more or less the same, makes me wonder. (I see Wallaby caught on before I did.)

117

Pet stuff. Rich people will pay crazy for useless shit for Muffy.

118

Oh, I remember those! - and the repeated cycle of 'all the others are fake but this one is for real, honest!
I recall one wacky compression proposal that was supposed to be able to compress absurd volumes of data losslessly by representing it as a collection of printed shapes on a single sheet of paper that would survive photocopying and faxing. (sort of like a 2D barcode, but supposedly able to send gigabytes of data over a fax line in the time it takes to fax a page.

119

Or for Muffy herself: Cloning Now An Option For Pet Owners.

To be fair, this may not be woo.

120

Glad to be able to reminisce with someone. :slight_smile:

In case anyone else wants to read more about compression snakeoil, there’s some interesting (albeit dated) coverage in the comp.compression FAQ. That document covers some of the common claims made by purveyors of compression woo, along with explanations of why they are woo.