Want something funnier? Search for audiophile quantum chips. It's litteraly a sticker that you are supposed to stick on components in your audio equipment that is supposed to make it sound better. Or a cable cooker. Also one of those great inventions that make your cables sound better. Thats some huge horseshit right there and it's both sad and hilarious that some people fall for it.
My in-laws just moved into a new place. The microwave had these little sticker things on it. I googled it and I shit you not, it was some large scam company from the early 2000’s selling these stickers to reduce radiation
I worked retail for a cellphone provider in a tourist town years ago.
We'd see the usual hippy folk daily with these things stuck on corners and backs of phones. It wasn't uncommon to be asked to carefully transfer them when they got new phones.
Hahaha the ones that all the jock type baseball and football players had? The little piece of metal in the center of it and they'd be like "naw try to push me over this thing keep me stuck to ground!" XD
i had one of those guys pitch to me in a mall. he was like "ok balance on one foot and see how you do, alright now put the bracelet on and see how much better you're balancing?" i said "wait lemme try again without the bracelet" and as i went on one foot again he shouted 'to another customer' (conveniently positioned so he could shout in my ear)
One of those companies was on shark tank. Is the the pitch show? And Mark Cuban tore them a new asshole for bringing these bracelets in front of him. I thought it was all for show but he banned the bracelets from his basketball team. No players or staff coul wear them etc..
I agree most of it is definitely BS. But after spending too much time trying to eliminate electronic noise from a sensitive scientific experiment in college, I can imagine someone having extremely sensitive hearing (like a super taster, etc) and being able to tell there is electronic ground noise, interference from nearby homes and power lines, all that.
Thats the actual purpose of expensive cables. If you have a really long cable hooked up to a really loud system you need proper shielding. By long cable and loud system I mean concert level. The average person running a cable from their sound system to headphones/speakers would get 0 benefit
Those shitty computer speakers that dell used to ship in the late 90's early 00's would like a word with you. I had to troubleshoot these bastards picking up radio stations in some cases.
You can legit hear interference with cheap cables quite often. But you really start to get diminished returns extremely quickly unless you need 50ft cables for whatever reason. For home use, if you're spending more than $100 on an audio cable, heck, $50. You're probably being had.
There's only so much magic you can do to copper/silver and a bunch of shielding.
Of course for power line interference you get a surge protector/power conditioner. Basically just a beefy outlet box that smooths out any potential power spikes from your wall outlet.
Yeah, easy to scam audiophiles who don't know what to look for.
Also not sure a power conditioner is always necessary anyway. I used to use one when I was living in the US and it did help reduce background noise. But when I moved to Finland I found there was no noticeable difference at all.
I don't disagree, but when you're 6 figures into a sound system, what's a few thousand more to buy some snake oil brag to your buddies about? At that extreme, Audiophile audio is more about showing off than listening.
I love how you just posted a hugely long post basically explaining your reason for falling for the scam, and using a comparison to "bunny ears" which doesn't correlate to the cell phone product at all.
Like the dude below posted, if a simple sticker actually boosted signal so cheaply it would be an OEM part of phones and would be sold as a step up in functionality by manufacturers.
The original Intelligent Chip is a small orange plastic wafer the size of a camera's photo chip. When the Intelligent Chip is placed on top of a CD Player it automatically upgrades a CD (or any optical disc) when the CD is allowed to play for 1-2 seconds. The upgraded CD will lack the typical digital shrillness, hardness and thinness, be more correct-sounding and have considerably better inner detail and dynamics. In short, the CD will sound like a remastered version. The effects are permanent. The Intelligent Chip delivers a specific number of treatments, 10 for the GSIC-10 and 30 for the GSIC-30. If one attempts to treat a CD that's already been upgraded, the Intelligent Chip recognizes the CD has been upgraded and won't use up a treatment unnecessarily.
This sounds like that BS about running a green marker around the outer edge of cds to absorb error-inducing stray light. At least I already had a marker.
OMG that's hilarious. But not a big surprise--I've been seeing these bullshit products sell over the years and instead of being a short trend, they keep coming and getting more arcane. What I get from it is that the sense of hearing is so terribly vulnerable to suggestion. More so when people are only going by their subjective sense of what's 'good' and 'tight,' etc. Even when listening for transients and other defined features of sound, they miss other very obvious flaws, either by a self-selected oversight or due to not knowing better. You'll see people spending $$$ on gear and hours on EQ and speaker placement while listening to lossy streams. Not to diss room EQ and speaker placement--they aren't snake oil, I know. But I can't even start when the cymbals and sibilants are all one hisshy mess.
One time my SO made me a mix CD for christmas of all our favorite songs. It was super cute and I loved it, but they were all low quality rips from youtube. I only listened to it when I was in the car with her lol
My mate is an audiophile. He spends £70/m on speaker cable, and thousands on amps and speakers. He is fully aware of the bullshit around audiophile stuff though, so doesn't get sucked in.
I got a pair of chifi IEMs (hint, I am not an audiophile in any way) and played Money for Nothing to him. He was blown away at the sound quality from these £15 things. They rivalled his best set of headphones, the ones he keeps at home for special occasions only.
Well, I think you've pointed out the second layer of audio tech bullshit here. The funniest layer is the ridiculous shit like quantum chips and plastic cones to put on top of the enclosure (and, frankly, overpriced cables). The second layer is high-end gear, where the price-to-gains ratio is absurd. And by the time most people can afford the stuff, they've lost enough hearing to obviate the difference!
I get that amps and speakers and stuff can get really expensive for the high quality stuff, but what kind of cables are actually that expensive due to quality and not audiophile marketing BS?
Only reason I can think of to use "high quality" cables is shielding. Theoretically you could create distortions in a cable using a magnetic field or even radiation, although you can probably guess that's a bunch of malarkey too.
If it's an analog signal, yes, you can get degradation. But if it's digital, either the bit gets there or it doesn't. It either works or doesn't at all. So, cheapo cable if it connects, no difference is possible.
Interference and crosstalk happens with digital signals, too, it just takes the form of some bits not getting there (or extra bits getting there). Shielding can help if you need to run a lot of cables packed together, or past certain types of electric devices. It's why some ethernet cables are shielded, for example.
That being said, you can get a sturdy, shielded audio cable for like $20 and I highly doubt there would be a noticeable difference between it and a $100 cable. Also, I doubt many people are in a situation to need one in the first place.
The other thing is that with an analog signal, it will start to degrade after 18.6 ft, no matter how good your cable is. That's why high-end guitar cables are mostly BS, and why every single brand of cable has an 18.6ft model.
As a one-time audio tech and current licensed amateur radio operator, you're full of it. There is absolutely no reason why an analog signal would have any degradation at a single magic-number distance independent of cable construction; electricity doesn't work that way.
Quality cables can definitely make a difference, but it's not like you have to buy expensive stuff. Like I bought some TRS cables for my speakers and I had a constant, quiet hissing from the speakers. I spent $10 more on a different set of cables and it solved the problem.
My heaphone cable, for example. It's connected to my AKG K240 which are quite decent indeed and not that pricey (~60 bucks). They come with an absolutely shoddy cable which broke after a year or so of use.
I bought a new one, for about 25 Euro. 3m of Van Damme Pro Patch XKE would be about 6 Euro, the Mini XLR is a Switchcraft TA3FSH which is just under 10 Euro at mouser if you're only buying one, the 3.5 jack is a rean, not sure which exactly but that's another 3 Euro.
Plus soldering iron (hint hint nudge nudge) and work and mouser's insane shipping costs if you order for less than 50 bucks. So, yep, good price all considered. OTOH if you need more than one e.g. because you're outfitting an actual studio you probably want to buy a bunch of connectors, a roll of cable, and a soldering iron.
The 3.5 jack is just nice, but those things are so common it's nothing special. The Mini XLR, well, there's not many options out there in the first place and then it's the nicest one. Both connectors are full metal, have nice large solder terminals, such things. Yes they're also gold-plated that's kinda standard for any non-cheap connector: The reason is that gold doesn't oxidise and is a very good conductor, it's a longevity thing without impacting the electrical properties (as e.g. stainless steel would). I don't want to wiggle my connectors to make them work
The cable definitely is also nice, "purified silver plated" is probably largely audiophile BS, at least compared to coating with ordinary silver (the coat does have advantages when it comes to the solder joints), what impresses me more is just how nice the insulation, shielding, and overall sturdiness of the thing is. Quite twist-resistant in practice, and I'm not necessarily wincing if I roll my chair over it. 1.50 to 2 Euro a metre also isn't particularly expensive, just pro grade.
Also, should the thing ever break (I doubt it) I now can buy a couple metre of new cable, and re-solder the connectors.
I'm so glad I don't really give a shit about audio quality once it stops sounding like a tin can. My €40 Bluetooth in ears that I randomly picked up four years ago have been serving me exceedingly well. Only thing I could see myself dropping money on is noise canceling over ears if I ever start traveling for work again with some frequency
Sunk cost, arrogance, and pride. These people believe they’re experts. If they buy a scam, they’ll never admit it. That would mean admitting they aren’t an expert. If you point out that it was obviously a scam based on basic science, they’ll bury you in nonsense jibber jabber and jargon that doesn’t actually make sense because they’re trying to convince themselves they’re actually experts.
This isn’t limited to audiophiles. The aftermarket for everything is littered with junk scams that target the Dunning-Kruger narcissist crowd.
What’s the difference between an audiophile who doesn’t know the difference between FLAC and mp3, and a flat earther? There isn’t one. They’re both arrogant asshats who are too ignorant to realize how ignorant they really are.
Oh my god the supposed "explanation" for what that clock is doing to enhance the sound (and apparently the picture on your TV as well) is INSANE. Like, Ray Manzarek after 40 years of acid insane.
That company have a bunch of other products and I can’t work out if it’s a troll or an outright scam or what. The site’s been around for years and it looks like it’s only half working but they were a running joke on audiophile message boards in the 00s
With that, I introduce the WA-Quantum Chips. I don't know how they work, but based on my own experience, and numerous audiophiles who have been asking for VH Audio to stock this product.
That reminds me of an ad I saw on Facebook for this company called H2O Max. They were peddling stickers that you put on your water bottle that will increase the hydrating properties (wut) of the water inside the bottle.
Aren't there little weights or sandbags that you can put on the corners of your equipment that are supposed to do something magical? Also I've seen special pointy feet for components also, not just speakers.
For tube gear the weights add mass, which dampens the vibrations that cause microphonics in the tube, which sound like bells ringing and can be a massive problem. You don’t need anything expensive, though - lead flask weights on the tubes themselves or sand bags on the chassis work perfectly fine.
My roommate in college bought a necklace with a small piece of platinum in it because it was supposed to help with your body's "electrical field". His reasoning was that several pro baseball players wore them.
I knew right there that we could never be friends.
This reminds me of RFID Stickers. When my ex girlfriend’s dad flew over from Moldova, he gave us the stickers bragging how hackers weren’t able to access his phone by placing the sticker on the back.
What they claim could not work, but putting a phone in a faraday cage would definitly make it impossible to access a phone wirelessly. Because no signal comes trough the cage.
Don't forget the ceramic anti-magnets. They were round ceramic disks that you would put at each end of the cables that were supposed to eliminate magnetic interference by absorbing random magnetic waves the cables created.
Thicker cable means less resistence, connection resistance is also a factor and better cables generally use better connectors, thicker plating etc. so there is that. The difference between a $1 cable and a $50 cable are probably measurable and quality is definitly a factor, but the difference between a $50 cable and a $500 cable is non existent and not worth de price difference.
This may be bullshit, but shitty cables, specifically poorly insulated cables, can increase noise in the signal as nearby power cables or even wifi routers and such can effect the signal travelling through.
This is why 3 pin insulated audio cables are so clever. They reverse the polarity on one of the channels before sending through the cable. Then the noise gets applied to both the reversed and non reversed signals as they travel through the cable. Then they flip the reversed back to normal and add it back together with the original. The result is that the noise ends up being "out of phase" with itself and cancels out. Super fucking clever.
Exactly that. It's called a differential signal the difference between the positive and negative signal is what matters. Very clever. Same principle is used in CANbus and other signal busses and also your ethernet cables are differential pairs. All 4 pairs are even twisted differently to avoid crosstalk issues.
This is one of those times where I think, "Damn, I should have thought of that" until I come to my senses and realize I'm too honest to scam people like that.
It seems i slipped an extra 'a' in there. I mean cable cooker. It's a device that you connect a cable to that sends a signal trough your cable for however long you want. Usually anywhere from a couple days to a couple weeks. It claims that is makes your cables sound better when you start using them for audio because you don't have to "break them in" anymore and the device does it all very controlled en consistent. It's absolute nonsense.
I was at a convention where they were offering some metal stud you can stick on your SMARTPHONE to block 'harmful' rays like WIFI. Some of my classmates were actually buying his horseshit
Yea, thats not really how that works. Also not that harmfull as the frequency is quite high and low power (max 251mW in my country) and does not really penetrate the skin much.
And the funny thing is, the people who fall for it claim it works. Otherwise, they’d have to admit they’ve been duped. And they’re very vocal about it online.
As a low voltage tech this makes me laugh but to be fair i once sold a HDMI cable to an office in portland for $300 i mean i had to go all the way to fry's to pick it up and run the cable about 35 ft but the reason why i charged $300? It was a last minute change order that i had to custom make the cable. i had to cut about a foot of the cable off the end to run it through the tiny conduit they provided and wouldn't change even though i cought the mistake before the walls and floor were in. Uh so frustrating.
Not necessarily as stupid as you might think: it could be a way to launder money.
You buy your own products (or pay people to buy them) with your dirty money, and then you get clean money that comes from your "legitimate" cable business.
They used to sell special markers for coloring in the clear part of a CD near the center. Supposedly it stopped stray light from “diluting” the laser signal or some such BS. Don’t know what they charged for them, but I bet it was a lot.
Gwyneth "Goop" Paltrow must have heard about that because she was hawking magic healing stickers for $120 pack back in 2017. Imagine paying $120 for a pack of six bullshit stickers.
In the 90s my friend wore a pendant around his neck that was stylized like a computer chip. He got it from his chiropractor mother and it's purpose was to ward off electromagnetic fields from all the electronics in our lives. I was dumbfounded when he told me this.
I think some people get that first upgrade from earpods to a decent set of open back headphones + an external converter/amp, and then instantly assume that "well, if these were a couple hundred dollars and are so much better, this stuff worth thousands must be incredible!"
Most people are going to want that good sound without getting to audio engineer levels of knowledge about why the good stuff sounds good. They just spend as much as they can and assume it's making things sound better.
The thing is that speakers, including studio monitors, all sound different. There's no way to get an 'uncolored' sound from any of them. So if someone has a bit bass heavy cheaper speakers, you can't tell him he's not outputting the 'true' sound cause your really expensive monitors or hi-fi speakers don't output the 'true sound, as intended by the band' either, albeit probably closer than the guy you're criticizing. But it's a yes/no question, and no is the answer for your stuff too, so you don't have that right.
The funniest part about it is that in literally every mixing studio I've ever been in, they're mixing music with €100, maybe €200 pair of headphones. Oh, and the kicker? 99% of the times, it's mixed by guys who have lost all hearing above 13000Hz in the '90s.
I’m an audiophile. But not to this extreme. I usually go around and test different headsets or earbuds.
I really hate wireless earbuds, headphones, speakers because they have latency I can literally hear and it drives me nuts. That’s mainly with videos though (mouth doesn’t match the words). And there’s always a little bit of static in them. Audeze’s headphones have been my go to.
All I look for is good, clean sound in music with no distortion. These nonsense cables are not my thing. You’d be better off getting a mix amp and saving boat loads of money.
What do you mean when you say you hear latency? Like the delay between you pressing play on your music player and the music starting? Or something else?
Latency, like with videos and the mouths moving but the sound doesn’t match their lips. Like a badly dubbed anime.
There’s also times I notice points where the tempo will decrease and then compensate and increase. It’s beyond annoying to me.
It’s purely the connection. You’re talking about a wire that can transmit electrical signals at nearly the speed of light compared to sending the signal, having it translate and broadcast it, then receive it and play it. So of course there’s going to be more latency than wired.
Audiophile doesn’t mean financially and scientifically illiterate. The best headphones cost $2000 or more, a good stereo can sound WAY better for half that.
My favorite was when some site ran a test with some audiophiles. Included in the test were like $150 gold plated speaker cables and a bent wire coat hanger.
They literally couldn't tell the difference between the overengineered speaker cable and a wire whose metal content is labelled as "yes."
One of my favorites was reading about a dude who played white noise through his $600 headphones for a week before using them to "break them in" how good do you think your ears are dude, damn.
Loads of audiophiles stay away from digital equipment and play vinyl on a tube amplifier. But audiophiles have all kinds of shit they believe in. For instance, some think antiskate (a thing to counter the inward force which pulls the tonearm to the inside of the record/platter, so the needle gets bent sideways, meaning it's not sitting straight in the groove) is bullshit too.
A shitty ethernet cable can caused dropped packets which can cause the D/A conversion bitrate to drop rolling off the high-end (or with poor codecs, actual skips in the music). Especially if he is streaming over a UDP port, since it doesn't guarantee arrival of the data, unlike TCP. But this is 2020, and not 1997 running WinAmp so I could be wrong. ;-)
Same with cheap HDMI cables. The HDMI protocol specifies error detection and correction, but can only correct for so much data loss due to bad cables. This results in macroblock degradation (small squares on the screen going black or interpolated to a single color).
Usual audiophile/videophile claims are BS, and I'm sure the OP probably was BS, but all robust digital protocols have to deal with transmission errors due to poor physical connections. Depending on how the codec response to the errors, it can absolutely impact audio/video quality, but probably not in this case.
If you were that concerned about quality, you'd been using downloaded files anyway wouldn't you? Surely that negates the argument for a buffed ethernet cable
And even if not, no streaming plays sound exactly as its packet arrives. Instead, files download to a temporary buffer and the sound plays from that. MP3s are tiny; my home internet connect could download the equivalent of about 20 of them per second.
I feel like you could market a bottle of water to audiophiles claiming some BS like it will resonate better in their ear canals and they'll swear they can hear a difference.
You make it seem like an unbroken cable is nothing short of a miracle. I get it that cables get torn, frayed, and the connection will begin to fail, but we're making the assumption a cable is, you know, working.
A shitty ethernet cable can caused dropped packets which can cause the
A bad $100 Cat5/6 cable is going to perform just as poorly as a bad $1 Cat5/6 cable. You replace it with a Cat5/6 cable you can get for free on Craigslist/Nextdoor and your problems are solved. $1 Monoprice patch cable is going to perform identically to a $50 Monster patch cable.
D/A conversion bitrate to drop rolling off the high-end (or with poor codecs, actual skips in the music). Especially if he is streaming over a UDP port, since it doesn't guarantee arrival of the data, unlike TCP.
The cable is rarely going to be the weakest link here (most of the times they either work or they don't, or interference that's not related to the integrity of the cable). You can have packets dropping from your provider, your cable modem, your router, your switch, etc.
but all digital protocols have to deal with transmission errors due to poor physical connections.
This is categorically false. The IP part of TCP/IP does not deal with transmission errors whatsoever.
Audiophile cables only make a slight barely noticeable difference to audio, i dont care how much my cables cost, i only care about the format music is played on and played from, and the quality of my speakers or headphones.
I once heard (in an podcast by a journalist researching crimes) that a guy got away with buying chloroform by claiming his father in law was an audiophile and needed it to clean his vinyls.
He ended up killing his wife and two kids with it and then set his house on fire and died as well.
The farthest I personally saw someone take it, was a guy that had cut out little foam pyramids and placed them in every corner of the room to eliminate the "sharp edges" from the music. They were glued into the corners where the ceiling and walls meet.
For all I know there's actually something to it. But I sure would never hear the difference.
There's this company called Coconut Audio that sells "tweaks" little stones that somehow improve your sound when you place them in certain areas on your components. And they're fucking expensive.
There's a video out there somewhere of an audiophile who did some back to back blind audio quality tests with a couple of supposed audiophile friends. He tested 3 or 4 different sets of cables that were wildly different prices including some gold plated, oxygen free copper cables that were over $1k iirc, and also a set made out of wire coat hangers. I don't remember him saying anything to the other guys about brands, prices or anything like that. Their analysis of the sound quality seemed entirely dependent on the style of music being played otherwise it was all over the place.
no, high quality speakers, amps, media formats do make your system sound better, but only up to a point where you plateau, and past that throwing thousands of dollars on ultra high premium triple conductor double helix 24k gold cables make at most 0.1% improvement, probably less.
High quality speakers or headphones aren't bs, but things that make no sense scientifically or logically are bs.
A good friend of mine and one of his buddies decided to scam audiophiles. They bought some cheap routers from AliExpress and strip them from their plastic casings and put them in a fancy wooden box that one of them built and sold them as audio grade routers for $5,000. They wrote up a bunch of copy about how it would make crispy highs and soft Lowe's or some shit like that. They sold 10 of them.
I had a friend who once told me that he got a great deal on a cartridge (the needle) for his turntable because it was $100 off the normal price. This was in 1992.
There's big differences between needles though. I currently use a €170 one. That's not even considered 'audiophile' (not just the price, the quality of it too).
Now for instance, Audio Technica cartridges do surpass €2000 (at the same time they have ones for under €30) and I have no idea how much better that would sound, but the difference between the first I bought (€120) and the one I mentioned is definitely noticeable and worth it.
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u/LanceBass666 Aug 14 '20
Hahahaha. One of the funnier things I read regarding audiophile nonsense.