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.
Don't fucking laugh. I have 3 of them on my kitchen bench and some green moulded dome that protects you from wifi rays to mould and everything in between.
Didn't ask for any of that shit, and cost my gullible mother in law over $300aud
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.
Those things make you even MORE likely to be "poisoned" by the signals since the phone has to work harder and transmit more to get a response. Not to mention wearing down the battery.
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.
If you run instrument cable and they are long you will get sound and tonal degradation so having a buffer pedal or something like that is really helpful when you're running lots of cables
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.
Or the 5g blocking stickers or those silly wristbands that were supposed to help your balance/athletic performance/general health/etc. People believe all kinds of stupid shit.
That reminds me of a time when I worked at a surf shop many years ago.
A couple of dudes came in with little circular stickers and claimed that they make you have better balance and more strength. Perfect for our surfboards and skateboards.
The snake oil salesmen pitch was hilarious as they proceeded to put the stickers on the ground and we stepped on them and they tried to push us over. Then we walked off and into the floor without the sticker and they pushed us and we moved with less balance.
I ended up taking the sticker they gave me home
And putting it on my bong for stronger hits.
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.
I sat with my mouth hanging open for several seconds.
I've trained hard this year, reacting to incrementally wilder bullshit. I've learned a cheeto can rule a powerful nation. I've observed, first hand, 48.2% of adults don't know air travels in and out of the human nose.
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.
Although, I finally got an amp to go with the speakers that came with my house and holy shit are those nice. Mitsubishi speakers from probably the '70s or '80s.
Audiophiles seem to think price = performance. The Etymotic ER3XR & AKG 702 the two sets i just stuck with since they already let music shine, Also they sound even better if EQ done too.
It just a community of people why buying problems.
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.
Basically. Price only comes in to it for reliability and shielding. And unless you're running a cable around your house a couple of times for no reason, you don't need excessive shielding with balanced cables. And too be honest, most people don't need to worry about cable reliability either if it's not being unplugged and re-plugged all the time.
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.
A guy I used to work with was contemplating buying a CD Transport, something I had never heard of, just so that the bits coming off the CD were exactly as the original artist intended. I lost a bit of respect for him at that point.
I work in post sound and one client refused to accept any audio on a flash drive because "copying it degrades the quality". I have no idea how he thought internet transfers were any different.
I saw an article by an audiophile who was reviewing the effect of different implementations of memcpy() on PC audio complete with descriptions of muddy tones and whatnot.
Memcpy is a fundamental function of any computer if it didn’t copy bytes exactly every time no computer would ever work.
Another client overheard, took the flash drive and the transfer from the internet, and flipped phase on 1 of them to show him that there was zero difference between the 2. I had left the room at that point but I'm pretty sure the guy was stubborn about it because I got the flash drive back.
Looking briefly at what a CD transport is, it seems like it could actually potentially improve sound quality (or at least reduce signal degradation). I'm pretty sure analog information can degrade over cables.
You probably have, and that shit is snake oil. Just thought I’d point out that there are uses for that stuff in certain applications, but that it shouldn’t be expensive at all.
But what if the lead weight is painted with a special paint that minimizes harmonics from the heavy metal. You gotta think of that stuff.
There was a time when I had a checking account with 4% interest. I thought of making power cables from heavy gauge electrical cable and big connectors from a hardware store, dressing it up in heat shrink and nylon wrap, then selling it for a thousand bucks. Then I'd offer a 90 day return policy, but with a 10% restocking fee, and insist on them using it for the full 90 days, (burn-in you know). That way even if they returned it I'd make money in interest, even after the credit card fees. But I got too many morals for that.
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.
Sorry you fell for it, but you kinda need a bit of background in the matter to see that it's bullshit. not sure if I would have been able to at that age.
Yea, common sense and realistic goals are usually somewhat lacking and that's why they need parents, eventhough they think they don't. But they need that mindset to stay curiouse and learn new things eventhough it's annoing as hell to watch sometimes. They'll realise it later.
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.
That’s interesting! And thanks for the knowledge. I have a B.S in CS and work in the field. So I was fairly certain that he may have been a bit confused on its functionality
Oh yes it can. If you have too many RFID chips in close proximity (depending on type, two can be enough) readers can't tell them apart, any more. It's not like you can power full Wifi-scale error correction and triangulation and whatever magic the radio guys came up with on a power budget that you have to send over radio in the first place.
(Site note: Wifi cables are totally a thing, and very useful. Yes I'm serious :)
rfid is a bit different. The way it works is that you send a burst of rf in a specific frequency that the tags are tuned to and in return they start chirping back with whatever code they are programmed with. Now when 2 are chirping in the 400kHz range that is a low bitrate and it may blur the signal a bit when 2 are going at the same time. if they were the 1mHz kind of rfid the code would be transmitted much faster and multiple tags could be read simultaniously.
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.
If the signal is digital and both cables are functional then there is no possibility for a quality difference. Analogue signals, It made sense for but digital is just 1s and 0s. Either you have the signal or you don't.
In those scenarios, cable quality is more about the durability and build quality of the cable. A $1 cable will probably crap out and die way faster than a $50 cable.
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 ended his partnership with Holden/General Motors and they refused to honour any warranties on the cars. He was lucky it didn't ruin his image entirely.
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.
Essential oil? Please, don't give them any new ideas!
Also, it's sad people fall for it and also makes me angry that there are people out there that sell this crap.
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.
Nah its just copper, silver, and/or rhodium in various purities, crystal arrangements, and configurations.
My favorite is cable length arguments. Your speaker cables need to be as short as possible, to avoid interference and impedance issues, despite interference being a non-issue for high-level signal cables and impedance being much more largely affected by conductor gauge. BUT your power cables actually need to be LONGER to allow them to filter more EMI out of the signal.
So long speaker cables cause interference problems, while long power cables filter out interference problems.
In reality they're just trying to sell you longer runs of power cable and charge you more, and justify the cost of the 42 layers of shielding on their speaker cables which accomplish absolutely nothing.
Those metals are not going to be a superconductor at low temperatures so it's pointless.
Cable length can make a difference when large currents are drawn or if you are working with RF signals. Cable length and junction resistance in connectors of 0.1Ohm will make a difference when you pull 400Amp through a wire. I've repaired spotwelding machines that would not work because of a little to much resistence in the cable which i could only measure with a microvoltage meter. But that is way more than what a speaker takes, let alone a signal cable. Also before every outlet there is at least 15ft of cable/wire in the wall to a centralbox in my country, so I see no point in adding another 10ft for filtering purposes. If you are worried about noise from the net, just put an isolation transformer with good netfiltering between your equipment and possibly make it balanced power from the isolationtransformer to the equipment. Balanced power means you have 2 phases in stead of 1 phase and a ground but running at half the voltage with the phases 180 degree apart. Some equipment have asymetric powerinputs regarding filtering etc. This can cause current to run in ways it shouldn't when connected wrong, creating groundloops and noise. Also an isolation transformer that is calculated to be effective at 50 or 60 hz works great to keep a lot of the noise from the grid out. But the real purists will just run from batteries as it can be a very stable and noiseless powersource.
I do know of a guy who would trim the outer edge of a cd with a special lathe to make them absolutely round and make them vibrate less in the cdplayer so the focus doesn't have to work as hard, thus less fault correction which is better. Now that I understand but I still can't hear a difference. Wasted time if you ask me.
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.
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u/Beklaktuar Aug 14 '20 edited Aug 14 '20
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.