Most hobbyists waste a lot of money. I have spent thousands on equipment for my cameras. I don't use it that much but when I use it, it makes me happy. Most people waste a lot of money on their cars. They could achieve the same results with a cheaper car but somehow it's worth it. Add to that watches, phones, clothing and many other things.
In a blind test, could you tell the difference between photos taken with that equipment and photos taken with less expensive equipment?
Most audiophiles can't do measurably better than 50% on an ABX test. That test is more about audio compression than cable quality, but there is a lot of superstition in audio.
Yes. I have Nikons and Lumix cameras and I can tell you the difference between the outputs from small sensors to larger sensors and full frame, and iPhone and phone camera output.
For audio it is more difficult. I used to work at a signal processor manufacturer (high end audio gear, clever chaps, I was merely a software man) where the guy was convinced he could hear the difference between 24bit WAVs and 320kbps MP3s. He was deluding himself. He was partly deaf and sitting 5 metres away from him in an office I could hear his earbuds blasting music all day long.
I can hear when clipping and resonances are introduced, and also hear terrible guitar cabinets and bad tubes in guitar amps, but that's because I have been playing bass and guitar for 30+ years and have very sensitive hearing. I detest heavy compression. You can feel your ears shutting down.
Yeah there's definitely a lot of things that can go wrong, especially in a live hardware chain.
But with the software, what a lot of even pro DJs and sound guys don't seem to realize is that modern compression codecs are damn good. They represent the cumulative efforts of so many of the smartest audio nerds obsessing over it for decades.
> In a blind test, could you tell the difference between photos taken with that equipment and photos taken with less expensive equipment?
I can't speak for the OP, but I can certainly tell the difference between photos taken with my different camera gear. I have an iPhone, a Fuji T3, and a Nikon D810 to compare against.
The Nikon is 10 years old and still a lot sharper than the other ones, despite them all being years newer than the Nikon. In challenging conditions (wet, low light, etc.) the difference is even more noticeable.
For example, a picture like that one would be difficult to take on a phone because of the snow. First of all wet fingers would make using the phone nearly impossible. Even if it didn't, there's a good chance the focus would be off due to the snow in the foreground. And the sharpness of the Nikon blows the other cameras away. In the linked photo, do a 1:1 zoom of the fire department logo above/leftleft of the front wheel and you can read the text, including the small "EMS", "Colorado", etc. around the border. Phones just won't get that detail. And that's an old camera.
Besides the image quality, the DSLR is just easier and more comfortable to use once I learned the controls. There are no dumb menus and touch screens and I can adjust settings and take pictures with big mittens on even when it's wet/snowy/raining. Meanwhile, my iPhone is completely unusable with wet fingers.
I use my phone to take pictures most of the time, but if I'm going out intentionally to take pictures, I always take a real camera.
Here you are comparing a decent bluetooth speaker to a pretty good wireless active speaker to a hifi setup. I think the original comment about audiophiles is them wasting money on upgrading the hifi setup with all kinds of audio cabling, bi-wiring, etc.
That would be similar to upgrading to that one tiny bit sharper lens which otherwise has the same aperture etc.
Yes that's more accurate. And it's about measurability. Even with that tiny bit sharper lens, you can probably point to an actual measurable difference in the photos. Whether that makes them "better" remains subjective.
Audio is a weird world where everyone lives in their own experience and the externally measurable things often don't really translate to the visceral experience. So everyone kinda comes up with their own tribal knowledge that's often more superstition than science, and a lot of people just tend to assume they need "the best" in lossless files and analog whatever and gold-plated this and that.
There is a critical difference with audiophiles: they suffer from a superstitious belief that their expensive cables and so forth actually make their systems sound better.
I was going to post the exact first sentence you posted word for word and talk about my wasteful hobbies ... I do have project car hobbies and latest addiction is "gpu collection"
I've spent thousands on my PC, including a number of components that are overkill for any actual need I have. It would still be noteworthy (and I'd personally feel aggrieved) if comparative testing showed my overpriced fans are just as loud as any or my overpriced cooling system has indistinguishable thermal performance from the stock cooler.
Having worked little bit on the music production side of things, I always find it funny how much some people spend for a couple of feet of a high-end cables at home, just to listen to records that have been made in studios where the signals went through dozens or hundreds of feet of standard run-of-the-mill cabling.
Interesting tests. As a musician myself, you run into no end of snobbery on equipment as if your instrument was made of magical timber.
I do have 2 identical Warwick FNA Jazzman 5s, and bizarrely they do not sound the same at all, so there's some effect from the material? But the most affect is from the strings themselves (steels vs nickels). The most important thing is how they feel to play (in addition to not sounding like mud).
These articles are no fun anymore, because it's almost impossible to find anybody to take the other end of the claim, that there's any perceptible difference in sound quality from high-end cables. Every audiophile forum I could find talking about this video all said the same thing: "no shit, of course, everyone knows this already".
It’s true, but somehow there still seems to be a market for those things to keep existing. Which to me is also interesting, that everyone knows there’s no point but people still buy them
Presumably the people who buy them aren't talking about audiophile stuff online. My bet would be that they're generally people who buy ludicrously expensive components, and are then told they need to get the matching cables to get the most out of it.
I've been an audiophile for a few years during early twenties because it was fun to check out new and used equipment every weekend in the store I frequented, listened to various great music, and read reviews in various magazines. I had enough disposable income to afford a nice set of highly regarded yet less hyped brands, and even once helped out set up a set with a pricetag of a good house.
Life changed and eventually gave up on the hobby while still being drawn to music and the technology behind audio. Then a "golden" kick out the door of one employer meant I could build the speaker set I had in mind based on Siegfried Linkwitz's knowledge. The total cost for the speakers was about 2000,- but it did take between 2000 and 3000 for a fully active setup with two subwoofer towers and two 3.5 way main towers, all open baffle.
I have never heard a more perfect three-dimensional soundstage before and after, and it still sounds like the artists are actually playing in the livingroom even from other parts of the house. This was kind of Siegfried's message about good sound, the speakers are what make it (electronics are more than good enough at low prices) as long as they're made on scientific grounds, and not another heavy set of hyped monkey coffins. I have reached my audiophile end goal without forking over a fortune. Also fun, I came across one of the only two or three Yamaha CD-1 players made for Europe back then as a trade-in, one rarity I kept as souvenir of those early years. ;-)
Yeah, the Linkwitz stuff seems relatively affordable to me, yet based on actual science instead of audiophile voodoo. Building one of those is definitely on my list (to replace the early 90s monkey coffins I inherited). 3000€ for a hobby is a bit much at once, but considering it can bring joy for decades that's actually quite cheap.
Though IIRC his original design used active XO with op amps (after all he's the L in LR filter) instead of going the DSP route with IIR/FIR (which IIUC wasn't a good option back when he was alive). Did his successors modernize that aspect of the design?
Electronics too! While there are measurable differences there are no audible differences between fancy DACs and the $10 dongle Apple sells, for prerecorded music at least. You had to pay thousands to get this kind of performance in the late 90's. https://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/lightning-adapter-audio-qu...
If you want good sound you can still spend money on big speakers and room treatments though. Physics.
Disagree - Buying because you like the style or the exclusivity is not the same as buying because you have the false belief that the more expensive thing works better when it doesn't
Someone who spends $10k on a watch doesn't believe it tells better time than their iPhone
Someone who spends $10k on their digital CD player believes the digits it's sending to their digital amp are some how magically different than the digits from a $20 digital CD player. They're the same digits, delivered at exactly the same speed. Bit for bit identical.
I used to receive a catalog every quarter for an audiophile magazine. They sold some very very expensive gold plated toslink cables. The gold planting was supposed to be for superior conductivity.
Toslink is an optical audio format, and a pair of fishing line would've even worked identical quality.
For some, tis not about Quality but about Control. "If x y z happens I feel safe/in control". Changing anything about it = unsafe/the sky may fall.
Same logic scales up to social level if you notice what large groups burn cash on. The only way to reduce the cash burn is to give them something else to do that makes them feel safe and in control. Which is not for the faint of heart.
People who want fancy cables didn't necessarily waste money buying what they wanted just because they sound the same. People who spent time testing if the basic laws of phisics work in a $7 cable almost certainly did.
It's comparing cables, which everyone with some experience knows they make no difference.
I expected something more substantial, like a comparison of different IEM price tiers, or a comparison of different DAC chips, or something else that actually matters.
I have been mulling starting a high end audio gear company. The rationale is, making something worthy of spending on, because it's something you love- is the authentic experience. If I can make something that will still be liquid at some reduced depreciation in 10-20 years, that's an honest product. I used to be a writer for luxury media as well, and there is an extremely rare ability in luxury to make it actually real as opposed to merely vulgar and expensive.
These articles are a bit like saying scientists find expensive watches do not tell time in any appreciably better way, yet even technical founders who should "know better," are still wearing them with a t-shirt and flip flops after their exit. The economics of high end audio make more sense as an analogy to jewelry or art.
After volatility, haircuts, cap gains and other risk, there are so few productive assets to invest relatively small amounts in, where a store of value that depreciates less than inflation and purchasing power is a desirable thing.
If you love music, it's a way to build a shrine to it. Arguably, the real problem is consumer gear that simulates the experience of something valuable that won't end up in a landfill, but its just crap you throw away when you move house.
Also, speakers can be different between people since we can all hear a little different.
Same goes for microphones, not all microphones are tuned for the same way, so what sounds great and clear could be a little different in a person's case and still be valid.
I like Tom's hardware, but the thought did creep to my mind if I'd be directed to a commissioned product link.
in a previous life I went to school and qualified as an audio engineer, in Ottowa, which was then a hotbed of audio startups due to the ability to use the facilities at the NRC for testing and development, and there is most definitly certain characteristics that can be found in conductors, but no one at that time was suggesting that these were at the audible level, especialy for the very short lengths used in home or club systems.
But on the other hand if you had a 300 mile long coil of wire bieng used in an anolog delay line, then perfection was barely good enough.
Primary concern was shielding, and noise from power supplys, and generaly power supplys are still a huge source of noise.
Consensus was to eliminate anything not needed from the signal path, and take care in creating a noise (buzz) free listening environment, with good spatial seperation.
Major gear would have NO controls on the power amp, carefull ,carefull, everything in the preamp, cause it will launch your smoking speaker cones out where diagnosing the issue will be easy.
If it makes you happy, is it really wasted? People waste money on a lot of shit they don't need, but if they're financially responsible and not going into debt and becoming homeless, who's to say they shouldn't be buying overpriced audio gear? If people stopped spending their disposable income on stuff they don't need to survive, the economy would collapse.
There a difference between overpriced and snake oil. If you claim that your cables "gives the breath-taking experience of ‘being there’ thanks to the purity of its conductors and their precise geometry" your firmly into the snake oil territory. If you sell an amp with hand picked components to achieve 0.001% THD at 100w on a 4KHz test tone, it's probably overkill and overpriced but unlike the cables it's not fraud adjacent.
It is a negative as it is creating a market for deception, by paying for it they are giving money to people who specialize in deception who otherwise would have to do something else. These people will continue improving their abilities to take advantage of the borderline credulous who would have otherwise gone unexploited.
Perhaps in the best case it is less bad than what other things they would have spent it on.
I think misleading claims should be headed off with strong consumer protections. The predatory entrants in this industry should be shut down, leaving the others who do make expensive gear but actually put effort into proper engineering rigour, testing, and marketing that accurately represent the properties of their goods.
It's not the same. Someone buying expensive fashion/watch etc generally knows it's not functionally better. They're buy because they like the style or as a signal to show of wealth.
Someone buying cables like those in the article falsely believes the cables do a better job. They don't. Other things related to audiophiles are subjective. You can like the sound of a tube amp and decide to spend on it. That's fine. No deception. But there's a long list of things many audiophiles are decieved on.
If there's some audiophile out there who loves the luxurious look and feel of their RCA cables, by all means let them enjoy it. My sense is that most people view this as a utilitarian aspect of their setup and believe they're getting some benefit in performance or QC for their money. If they're not, they'd be happier spending the money on improving the looks of the parts people actually see.
Neither of those specifications seem all that large or ridiculous. You've been able to buy those specs on a Mac since the late Intel days and there's some popular activities and common career paths which quickly butt into the limits of both.
I can tell the difference between the high-end computer stuff and the bargain models that 'do the same thing'. I expect many here can, just like audiophiles can tell the difference.
First, a favorite hobby to bring down the experts that make you feel inferior by saying there is no difference. 'My kid could paint abstract art.' You see I am not inferior in my understanding and maybe capacity; no, it's all a lie. It's kind of like sour grapes - very convenient to one's ego. (It also a way to shut oneself off from learning and seeing the most beautiful, valuable things in the world.)
Second, when people find one study that confirms what they want (red wine is good for you!), it becomes among the highest impact research in history.
Third, in domains where I have expertise, I can tell the difference when people without expertise insist there is none. In domains where I lacked expertise then gained it, I saw my perception change. I was blind but now I see.
Fourth, in art particularly, including in music, it is the emotional and unconcious that matter most. Those are the mediums where art mostly operates and the differences between mundane, good, and extraordinary usually are not in great strokes but in the smallest nuances. Lots of people can paint sunflowers; the details of Van Gogh's brush strokes are transformative. Like in business: the first 90% takes 10% of the time; the next 9.9999% takes 90% of the time, and the last 0.0001% takes 1,000% of the time.
It's a shame isn't it, because I define it as someone who listens carefully and is critical in sonic arrangement on recordings, relative to the recording medium and playback equipment.
It always seems to be used disparagingly or as a slur and perhaps some of it is deserved: I used to work with a guy who had a Naim CD player and would talk about how it had some balancing system for no jitter during data transfer from the laser read process, but was obviously clueless on the error-correction inherent in CDs anyway, making this mechanism redundant for the most part. He seemed to think it made the CDs sound better when in reality the original recording engineer, the mixing engineer, the mastering engineer and the pressing plant played more of a part that any of the CD player nonsense; I think he also used gold-plated cables, as if electrons somehow degraded when passed along copper wires...
Utter nonsense. As for me, I just learned to listen critically and identify mixing artefacts and compression oddities etc. which are more apparent on non-lowend audio equipment. Bluetooth speakers are the worst because they use acoustic coupling for harmonic reproduction and just generally sound unbalanced and bad.
Most hobbyists waste a lot of money. I have spent thousands on equipment for my cameras. I don't use it that much but when I use it, it makes me happy. Most people waste a lot of money on their cars. They could achieve the same results with a cheaper car but somehow it's worth it. Add to that watches, phones, clothing and many other things.
In a blind test, could you tell the difference between photos taken with that equipment and photos taken with less expensive equipment?
Most audiophiles can't do measurably better than 50% on an ABX test. That test is more about audio compression than cable quality, but there is a lot of superstition in audio.
Yes. I have Nikons and Lumix cameras and I can tell you the difference between the outputs from small sensors to larger sensors and full frame, and iPhone and phone camera output.
For audio it is more difficult. I used to work at a signal processor manufacturer (high end audio gear, clever chaps, I was merely a software man) where the guy was convinced he could hear the difference between 24bit WAVs and 320kbps MP3s. He was deluding himself. He was partly deaf and sitting 5 metres away from him in an office I could hear his earbuds blasting music all day long.
I can hear when clipping and resonances are introduced, and also hear terrible guitar cabinets and bad tubes in guitar amps, but that's because I have been playing bass and guitar for 30+ years and have very sensitive hearing. I detest heavy compression. You can feel your ears shutting down.
Yeah there's definitely a lot of things that can go wrong, especially in a live hardware chain.
But with the software, what a lot of even pro DJs and sound guys don't seem to realize is that modern compression codecs are damn good. They represent the cumulative efforts of so many of the smartest audio nerds obsessing over it for decades.
> In a blind test, could you tell the difference between photos taken with that equipment and photos taken with less expensive equipment?
I can't speak for the OP, but I can certainly tell the difference between photos taken with my different camera gear. I have an iPhone, a Fuji T3, and a Nikon D810 to compare against.
The Nikon is 10 years old and still a lot sharper than the other ones, despite them all being years newer than the Nikon. In challenging conditions (wet, low light, etc.) the difference is even more noticeable.
https://photos.smugmug.com/Snowy-Davidson-Mesa-Ride/i-wGFDt5...
For example, a picture like that one would be difficult to take on a phone because of the snow. First of all wet fingers would make using the phone nearly impossible. Even if it didn't, there's a good chance the focus would be off due to the snow in the foreground. And the sharpness of the Nikon blows the other cameras away. In the linked photo, do a 1:1 zoom of the fire department logo above/leftleft of the front wheel and you can read the text, including the small "EMS", "Colorado", etc. around the border. Phones just won't get that detail. And that's an old camera.
Besides the image quality, the DSLR is just easier and more comfortable to use once I learned the controls. There are no dumb menus and touch screens and I can adjust settings and take pictures with big mittens on even when it's wet/snowy/raining. Meanwhile, my iPhone is completely unusable with wet fingers.
I use my phone to take pictures most of the time, but if I'm going out intentionally to take pictures, I always take a real camera.
Here you are comparing a decent bluetooth speaker to a pretty good wireless active speaker to a hifi setup. I think the original comment about audiophiles is them wasting money on upgrading the hifi setup with all kinds of audio cabling, bi-wiring, etc.
That would be similar to upgrading to that one tiny bit sharper lens which otherwise has the same aperture etc.
Yes that's more accurate. And it's about measurability. Even with that tiny bit sharper lens, you can probably point to an actual measurable difference in the photos. Whether that makes them "better" remains subjective.
Audio is a weird world where everyone lives in their own experience and the externally measurable things often don't really translate to the visceral experience. So everyone kinda comes up with their own tribal knowledge that's often more superstition than science, and a lot of people just tend to assume they need "the best" in lossless files and analog whatever and gold-plated this and that.
There is a critical difference with audiophiles: they suffer from a superstitious belief that their expensive cables and so forth actually make their systems sound better.
I was going to post the exact first sentence you posted word for word and talk about my wasteful hobbies ... I do have project car hobbies and latest addiction is "gpu collection"
Is it a waste if it makes you happy?
I've spent thousands on my PC, including a number of components that are overkill for any actual need I have. It would still be noteworthy (and I'd personally feel aggrieved) if comparative testing showed my overpriced fans are just as loud as any or my overpriced cooling system has indistinguishable thermal performance from the stock cooler.
Having worked little bit on the music production side of things, I always find it funny how much some people spend for a couple of feet of a high-end cables at home, just to listen to records that have been made in studios where the signals went through dozens or hundreds of feet of standard run-of-the-mill cabling.
I think the point is to reproduce the sound of those hundreds of feet of standard run-of-the-mill cabling as faithfully as possible ;)
If this is appealing to you, check out this guy who ran a much more systematic set of experiments on even more sacred and sensitive targets:
Tested: Where Does The Tone Come From In An Electric Guitar? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n02tImce3AE
Tested: Where Does The Tone Come From In A Guitar Amplifier? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcBEOcPtlYk
Interesting tests. As a musician myself, you run into no end of snobbery on equipment as if your instrument was made of magical timber.
I do have 2 identical Warwick FNA Jazzman 5s, and bizarrely they do not sound the same at all, so there's some effect from the material? But the most affect is from the strings themselves (steels vs nickels). The most important thing is how they feel to play (in addition to not sounding like mud).
These articles are no fun anymore, because it's almost impossible to find anybody to take the other end of the claim, that there's any perceptible difference in sound quality from high-end cables. Every audiophile forum I could find talking about this video all said the same thing: "no shit, of course, everyone knows this already".
It’s true, but somehow there still seems to be a market for those things to keep existing. Which to me is also interesting, that everyone knows there’s no point but people still buy them
Presumably the people who buy them aren't talking about audiophile stuff online. My bet would be that they're generally people who buy ludicrously expensive components, and are then told they need to get the matching cables to get the most out of it.
Right. If you are dropping $60K on a stereo, you don't really care if the cables are $4K.
I've been an audiophile for a few years during early twenties because it was fun to check out new and used equipment every weekend in the store I frequented, listened to various great music, and read reviews in various magazines. I had enough disposable income to afford a nice set of highly regarded yet less hyped brands, and even once helped out set up a set with a pricetag of a good house.
Life changed and eventually gave up on the hobby while still being drawn to music and the technology behind audio. Then a "golden" kick out the door of one employer meant I could build the speaker set I had in mind based on Siegfried Linkwitz's knowledge. The total cost for the speakers was about 2000,- but it did take between 2000 and 3000 for a fully active setup with two subwoofer towers and two 3.5 way main towers, all open baffle.
I have never heard a more perfect three-dimensional soundstage before and after, and it still sounds like the artists are actually playing in the livingroom even from other parts of the house. This was kind of Siegfried's message about good sound, the speakers are what make it (electronics are more than good enough at low prices) as long as they're made on scientific grounds, and not another heavy set of hyped monkey coffins. I have reached my audiophile end goal without forking over a fortune. Also fun, I came across one of the only two or three Yamaha CD-1 players made for Europe back then as a trade-in, one rarity I kept as souvenir of those early years. ;-)
Yeah, the Linkwitz stuff seems relatively affordable to me, yet based on actual science instead of audiophile voodoo. Building one of those is definitely on my list (to replace the early 90s monkey coffins I inherited). 3000€ for a hobby is a bit much at once, but considering it can bring joy for decades that's actually quite cheap.
Though IIRC his original design used active XO with op amps (after all he's the L in LR filter) instead of going the DSP route with IIR/FIR (which IIUC wasn't a good option back when he was alive). Did his successors modernize that aspect of the design?
> build the speaker set I had in mind based on Siegfried Linkwitz's knowledge > sounds like the artists are actually playing in the livingroom
I'd eagerly read a write-up of what you did.
This has been known for decades, how many audiophiles are still buying this stuff?
Far as we know, the world has not run out of suckers.
Yes! Spotify is making a fortune streaming awful quality audio!
Tom's Hardware also had an article not long ago about there being no audible difference between a fancy cable and a trough of mud https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47015987
Electronics too! While there are measurable differences there are no audible differences between fancy DACs and the $10 dongle Apple sells, for prerecorded music at least. You had to pay thousands to get this kind of performance in the late 90's. https://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/lightning-adapter-audio-qu...
If you want good sound you can still spend money on big speakers and room treatments though. Physics.
The same could be said of almost all luxury goods.
Disagree - Buying because you like the style or the exclusivity is not the same as buying because you have the false belief that the more expensive thing works better when it doesn't
Someone who spends $10k on a watch doesn't believe it tells better time than their iPhone
Someone who spends $10k on their digital CD player believes the digits it's sending to their digital amp are some how magically different than the digits from a $20 digital CD player. They're the same digits, delivered at exactly the same speed. Bit for bit identical.
I used to receive a catalog every quarter for an audiophile magazine. They sold some very very expensive gold plated toslink cables. The gold planting was supposed to be for superior conductivity.
Toslink is an optical audio format, and a pair of fishing line would've even worked identical quality.
For some, tis not about Quality but about Control. "If x y z happens I feel safe/in control". Changing anything about it = unsafe/the sky may fall.
Same logic scales up to social level if you notice what large groups burn cash on. The only way to reduce the cash burn is to give them something else to do that makes them feel safe and in control. Which is not for the faint of heart.
People who want fancy cables didn't necessarily waste money buying what they wanted just because they sound the same. People who spent time testing if the basic laws of phisics work in a $7 cable almost certainly did.
To be an audiophile you need (really) the fololwing:
3-way stereo in closed box (not a phase inverter)
a few valves
power and output transformers
non-class D sound source (bobbin or vinyl)
All of this is not expencive at all. What is expencive - a library of the music you really wish to re-listen.
I'm sorry but this article is just clickbait.
It's comparing cables, which everyone with some experience knows they make no difference.
I expected something more substantial, like a comparison of different IEM price tiers, or a comparison of different DAC chips, or something else that actually matters.
I have been mulling starting a high end audio gear company. The rationale is, making something worthy of spending on, because it's something you love- is the authentic experience. If I can make something that will still be liquid at some reduced depreciation in 10-20 years, that's an honest product. I used to be a writer for luxury media as well, and there is an extremely rare ability in luxury to make it actually real as opposed to merely vulgar and expensive.
These articles are a bit like saying scientists find expensive watches do not tell time in any appreciably better way, yet even technical founders who should "know better," are still wearing them with a t-shirt and flip flops after their exit. The economics of high end audio make more sense as an analogy to jewelry or art.
After volatility, haircuts, cap gains and other risk, there are so few productive assets to invest relatively small amounts in, where a store of value that depreciates less than inflation and purchasing power is a desirable thing.
If you love music, it's a way to build a shrine to it. Arguably, the real problem is consumer gear that simulates the experience of something valuable that won't end up in a landfill, but its just crap you throw away when you move house.
Seems like rich people are wasteful with their spending.
Hobbies can be this way.
Also, speakers can be different between people since we can all hear a little different.
Same goes for microphones, not all microphones are tuned for the same way, so what sounds great and clear could be a little different in a person's case and still be valid.
I like Tom's hardware, but the thought did creep to my mind if I'd be directed to a commissioned product link.
in a previous life I went to school and qualified as an audio engineer, in Ottowa, which was then a hotbed of audio startups due to the ability to use the facilities at the NRC for testing and development, and there is most definitly certain characteristics that can be found in conductors, but no one at that time was suggesting that these were at the audible level, especialy for the very short lengths used in home or club systems. But on the other hand if you had a 300 mile long coil of wire bieng used in an anolog delay line, then perfection was barely good enough. Primary concern was shielding, and noise from power supplys, and generaly power supplys are still a huge source of noise. Consensus was to eliminate anything not needed from the signal path, and take care in creating a noise (buzz) free listening environment, with good spatial seperation. Major gear would have NO controls on the power amp, carefull ,carefull, everything in the preamp, cause it will launch your smoking speaker cones out where diagnosing the issue will be easy.
If it makes you happy, is it really wasted? People waste money on a lot of shit they don't need, but if they're financially responsible and not going into debt and becoming homeless, who's to say they shouldn't be buying overpriced audio gear? If people stopped spending their disposable income on stuff they don't need to survive, the economy would collapse.
There a difference between overpriced and snake oil. If you claim that your cables "gives the breath-taking experience of ‘being there’ thanks to the purity of its conductors and their precise geometry" your firmly into the snake oil territory. If you sell an amp with hand picked components to achieve 0.001% THD at 100w on a 4KHz test tone, it's probably overkill and overpriced but unlike the cables it's not fraud adjacent.
It is a negative as it is creating a market for deception, by paying for it they are giving money to people who specialize in deception who otherwise would have to do something else. These people will continue improving their abilities to take advantage of the borderline credulous who would have otherwise gone unexploited.
Perhaps in the best case it is less bad than what other things they would have spent it on.
100%
It's wrong to encourage and profit from fraud or magical thinking.
I think misleading claims should be headed off with strong consumer protections. The predatory entrants in this industry should be shut down, leaving the others who do make expensive gear but actually put effort into proper engineering rigour, testing, and marketing that accurately represent the properties of their goods.
[flagged]
It's not the same. Someone buying expensive fashion/watch etc generally knows it's not functionally better. They're buy because they like the style or as a signal to show of wealth.
Someone buying cables like those in the article falsely believes the cables do a better job. They don't. Other things related to audiophiles are subjective. You can like the sound of a tube amp and decide to spend on it. That's fine. No deception. But there's a long list of things many audiophiles are decieved on.
What is a level of bad in "economy collapse" statement?
Buying snake oil is not financially responsible though. Being able to afford it doesn't change that.
Society would probably be better off if this money was otherwise spent on infrastructure projects, public research, etc.
If there's some audiophile out there who loves the luxurious look and feel of their RCA cables, by all means let them enjoy it. My sense is that most people view this as a utilitarian aspect of their setup and believe they're getting some benefit in performance or QC for their money. If they're not, they'd be happier spending the money on improving the looks of the parts people actually see.
Nobody spends money - or time - on unnecessary computer hardware or software.
Except the people who buy a 4TB Macbook with 64GB RAM "just in case they may need it"
Neither of those specifications seem all that large or ridiculous. You've been able to buy those specs on a Mac since the late Intel days and there's some popular activities and common career paths which quickly butt into the limits of both.
Forgot the /s
I can tell the difference between the high-end computer stuff and the bargain models that 'do the same thing'. I expect many here can, just like audiophiles can tell the difference.
Is it a waste?
> just like audiophiles can tell the difference
This whole thread is based on the tested idea that they cannot.
I've heard that; I'm skeptical:
First, a favorite hobby to bring down the experts that make you feel inferior by saying there is no difference. 'My kid could paint abstract art.' You see I am not inferior in my understanding and maybe capacity; no, it's all a lie. It's kind of like sour grapes - very convenient to one's ego. (It also a way to shut oneself off from learning and seeing the most beautiful, valuable things in the world.)
Second, when people find one study that confirms what they want (red wine is good for you!), it becomes among the highest impact research in history.
Third, in domains where I have expertise, I can tell the difference when people without expertise insist there is none. In domains where I lacked expertise then gained it, I saw my perception change. I was blind but now I see.
Fourth, in art particularly, including in music, it is the emotional and unconcious that matter most. Those are the mediums where art mostly operates and the differences between mundane, good, and extraordinary usually are not in great strokes but in the smallest nuances. Lots of people can paint sunflowers; the details of Van Gogh's brush strokes are transformative. Like in business: the first 90% takes 10% of the time; the next 9.9999% takes 90% of the time, and the last 0.0001% takes 1,000% of the time.
I mean: "audiophile" is a word defined as "person who wastes money on audio equipment".
It's a shame isn't it, because I define it as someone who listens carefully and is critical in sonic arrangement on recordings, relative to the recording medium and playback equipment.
It always seems to be used disparagingly or as a slur and perhaps some of it is deserved: I used to work with a guy who had a Naim CD player and would talk about how it had some balancing system for no jitter during data transfer from the laser read process, but was obviously clueless on the error-correction inherent in CDs anyway, making this mechanism redundant for the most part. He seemed to think it made the CDs sound better when in reality the original recording engineer, the mixing engineer, the mastering engineer and the pressing plant played more of a part that any of the CD player nonsense; I think he also used gold-plated cables, as if electrons somehow degraded when passed along copper wires...
Utter nonsense. As for me, I just learned to listen critically and identify mixing artefacts and compression oddities etc. which are more apparent on non-lowend audio equipment. Bluetooth speakers are the worst because they use acoustic coupling for harmonic reproduction and just generally sound unbalanced and bad.
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To your point:
https://www.engadget.com/2008-03-03-audiophiles-cant-tell-th...
Observing the color of your comment, you hurt the feelings of many audiophiles. Feelings matter more than facts these days.