14 ms·

$2,500 Ethernet Switch Effectively Isolates Audiophiles from Cash

128 points by simonjgreen 5y ago

eric__cartman 5y ago
I truly do not understand how some people manage to convince themselves to buy such useless and expensive products. I get spending lots of money on quality DACs, amplifiers, speakers, headphones, etc... But some of the products marketed towards audiophiles are truly ridiculous. What's next? A specially designed CPU and memory to decode "cleaner sounding bits"?
- fartcannon 5y ago
  It's an extreme version of the more expensive is better mentality that made the coffee industry boom in the 90s+ and made Apple a trillion dollar company.
  - xxpor 5y ago
    At least with those things, there's the theoretical possibility that there's a difference though. Why is it so hard to convince people that on the digital side of the equation, there's an objective right or wrong answer, and it's impossible to get any better than an exact copy of the bits?
    - kevinmchugh 5y ago
      Audiophiles aren't concerned with just the signal being reproduced faithfully - it has to happen without side effects. You're talking past each other if you don't address that.
      - tomc1985 5y ago
        But ultimately that means a clean digital pipeline and high quality D/A converters before it hits an actual speaker. The thing is... unless there are unnecessary conversions (making the signal less than bitperfect), there is no point for a lot of the digital side of this
      - jstanley 5y ago
        What kind of side effects are you talking about?
      - ncmncm 5y ago
        Side effects like power consumed from the grid? Heat voided into the room? Gravitational attraction from the heavy case? Money draining from their account? They get all of that.
  - adolph 5y ago
    Coffee is still there: The Weber HG-2 - The $1,650 Hand Grinder https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL65i1XhVec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL65i1XhVec https://weberworkshops.com/products/hg-2 https://weberworkshops.com/products/hg-2
    - durnygbur 5y ago
      hey, juicero at least was electric
      - spookthesunset 5y ago
        > hey, juicero at least was electric But could be bested by simply squeezing the bag with your dirty grubby hands. Juicero is truly one of my favorite companies ever. The whole thing was a massive pile of extravagant hardware whose only reason for existence was to tell you "no, you cannot squeeze this particular bag of juice". It is the quintessential silicon valley echo chamber product. The fact that its founder went on to hawk "raw water" coming from spigots drilled into the hillsides along state highways only makes the story that much better.
    - space_ghost 5y ago
      My wife bought me a $300 coffee grinder for Christmas. As a coffee ...enthusiast?... I'm quite fond of it. Perfectly consistent grid, very quiet electric operation, small footprint. I could argue that $300 was too much for it, but I'm willing to pay a premium for good product. $1,650 would be utterly insane.
      - kejaed 5y ago
        So which one was it? :)
        ezarowny 5y ago
        Probably the Fellow Ode
        space_ghost 5y ago
  - emsy 5y ago
    No, Apple is at least partially successful because it’s a luxury brand. That’s not the same as more expensive=better. The Apple comparison is also dumb because even if you think they’re overpriced, they aren’t priced arbitrarily high and there’s a tangible difference between an Apple product and competitors. Compare that to wine, coffee and audio equipment that fails to be differentiated in blind tests.
    - ForHackernews 5y ago
      > there’s a tangible difference between an Apple product and competitors This seems pretty subjective. iPhone does exactly same things (takes pictures, makes calls, runs apps) as a $50 no-name device running Android. Similarly, a bottle of Two Buck Chuck gets you drunk the same as a $25k Romanée-Conti.
      - hellisothers 5y ago
        Classic “only one metric matters”, by this standard you should only choose food based on how full does it make you which I guess is how we arrived at Soylent
      - anonymousab 5y ago
        > iPhone does exactly same things (takes pictures, makes calls, runs apps) as a $50 no-name device running Android The photo quality on the iPhone will be of objectively higher quality due to the larger, superior lenses. There's simply more light information to work with.
      - kristjansson 5y ago
        And Brainfuck does exactly the same thing as any other programming language.
      - evilduck 5y ago
        If you want to get drunk and that's your only value you place on a drink why even choose wine to compare? You can buy bottom shelf vodka and get more ethanol for your buck than Two Buck Chuck. Hell, vodka is wastefully distilled multiple times, why not just chase bootleg moonshine producers for even less? It all gets you drunk the same so they must be equivalent products.
  - Spivak 5y ago
    The meme that people buy Apple products as status symbols needs to die at some point. If you can name one single other manufacturer making products at the quality of an iPhone but at half the price then you can call them overpriced. I don't normally like to use the "if it was possible someone would have done it by now" argument but there are literally millions of Apple copycats and wannabees and they all suck. Apple's product design and manufacturing is insanely good and can be felt going to any big box store and picking up any laptop. If you don't care about that then of course you'll say they're overpriced because dollars aren't going to places you don't care about. It's why I love my M50x's, they're cheap ass plastic and faux leather because every dollar went into the inside. Look I spent probably eight years deriding iPhones with some stupid sense of techno-superiority with my Android until I actually tried one. They are so much better holy shit, the speed of Safari alone is worth the price of admission.
    - jjulius 5y ago
      You can be both a status symbol and an objectively superior product; they are not mutually exclusive. A laptop can be bought by someone who says, "Ooh, Apple, new, shiny, cool," and the next person to buy the same laptop might say, "This is the objectively better device for my use case."
      - ncmncm 5y ago
        The truth is clear when it costs more but is is objectively worse, yet sells anyway. The most characteristic Apple customer experience is persuading themselves that they can learn to live without the feature deleted in the latest software update.
    - yonaguska 5y ago
      I'm still not an iPhone owner, but I'm close. The presence of a do not disturb physical button on the phone, the UI...with my pixel, it's not always a simple one swipe to the flashlight button. Which is amazingly annoying compared to even older phones. I have since bought a dedicated flashlight.
      - 5y ago
  - Bud 5y ago
    It is in fact not related in any way to coffee or to Apple. Not even remotely. Apple sells products which are, in the main, at very similar price points to its competition, and it has won because it simply. makes. better. products. I'm not sure why there is still delusional thinking about this—apparently the last 20 years have not proven the point well enough?
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      Better products whose keyboards fail routinely? Oh, did they finally fix that? And, replace the bad ones? No? Must we mention monitor stands again? Please.
- grw_ 5y ago
  My guess is that it's a similar social phenomenon to flat-earthers, qanon, etc, in that a group of like-minded people form and customs emerge in which making ever-more outlandish claims are taken as stronger commitment signal to the group. I was reading last week about an 'audiophile ssd' product and I browsed an audiofile forum thread[0], expecting to have a chuckle at users ridiculing it but there's actually 6 pages of people praising it and finding new adjectives to describe the sound it produces. The most popular posts [1] also detail other absurd things they have done to produce a better sound- "I can opt to convert a FLAC to WAV format and play that from RAM, this somehow lowers the perceived noise flow and makes music sound more organic and detailed" [0] https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/62753-nvme-ssd-designed-for-audiophiles/#comments https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/62753-nvme-ssd-desi... [1] https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/62753-nvme-ssd-designed-for-audiophiles/?do=findComment&comment=1155556 https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/62753-nvme-ssd-desi...
  - habeebtc 5y ago
    From folks I know in the audio biz, there is an element of status symbol to it. Or more generally Elitism. If there is much difference between the two, anyways.
    - AndrewUnmuted 5y ago
      I am in audio and routinely sit in 400k+ listening rooms. Those folks would be embarrassed to mention those rooms contained things as goofy as this. It's excessive and unreasonable.
  - gambiting 5y ago
    Jesus Christ that forum thread. Those people really need mental help. Like, how can a mentally stable person write something like: "A system deficit I recognized over the last several months was choral music, couldn't enjoy it when played as I was hearing wrong harmonics, kind of a glaze on the sound with poor word intelligibility regardless of whether the OS resided on Optane or in RAM. Had me agonizing over what could fix it...problem solved using the FEMTO NVMe drive"
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- gitgrump 5y ago
  You ever see how much people spend on AWS to host a basic CRUD web app?
- kubik369 5y ago
  I will just leave this [0] here ... [0] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvme-ssd-for-audiophiles https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvme-ssd-for-audiophiles
  - jagger27 5y ago
    > TLC mode: It sounds like background music, no features and powerless, everything is flattened, lacks extension and density. > pSLC mode: There is a special natural feeling, it becomes more smooth and calm, the thickness is slightly increased, and overall it is more resistant to hearing but still slightly dry." Wow, that's incredible. Mmm yes, I love digitally encoded music to be slightly thicker and resistant to... hearing?
    - pbuzbee 5y ago
      This is why I love audiophile marketing/reviews so much. They make every single equipment "upgrade" sound like a huge change in how the music sounds. Just throw in enough dull and lively sounding adjectives and you can convince the reader that yes, this expensive piece of equipment is EXACTLY what you're missing!
  - pacetherace 5y ago
    One could literally cache all the audio in RAM and not worry about storage characteristics.
    - iggldiggl 5y ago
      Ah, but is that hi-fi audio-grade RAM you're using?
      - duskwuff 5y ago
        Make sure to adjust the memory timings to enhance the soundstage. (Or whatever other ridiculous jargon they'll come up with to elaborate upon the placebo effect.)
- ncann 5y ago
  The most expensive (and ridiculous) thing that I've seen in the audiophile world is the Nordost Odin 2 cable, priced at $20k-$30k per m. I would have thought it was a joke until I saw actual people buying it.
  - larrywright 5y ago
    I wonder if these sorts of things are actually bought individually (as in a consumer decides they should upgrade their audio cables, does the research, and chooses this pricy product) or whether they’re primarily sold as part of large expensive home theater/audio installs. It seems like this would be easier to sell as a line item on an already six figure home theater install (or seven figure house build), rather than individually. But I honestly have no idea.
  - piaste 5y ago
    I recently purchased a used Yamaha SW-45 subwoofer for 30€. I asked the seller if for an extra 10€ he could include the RCA cable, to save me a trip to the nearest mall / Amazon locker. He tried to sell me a 40€ "high quality" cable...
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  > I truly do not understand how some people manage to convince themselves to buy such useless and expensive products. There is a gigantic multi-trillion dollar industry built around convincing people to trade their money for shit they don't need. Advertising and marketing are diseases, and what you're looking at is a severe infection.
- rectang 5y ago
  > I get spending lots of money on quality DACs, amplifiers, speakers, headphones, etc... A/B testing audio reproduction components is extremely difficult. The human perceptual mechanism is a pattern detector, not a fine-grained measurement device — it's impossible to preserve sounds in memory long enough to make a informed distinction, all you have are the impressions the sounds left behind. You can improve with training, allowing you to recognize more patterns and thus capture better impressions, but only to an extent — recalling what something sounded like is still very lossy. Combine that with human status seeking and the placebo effect and you get $2500 audiophile ethernet switches. Source: I was a mastering engineer for a couple of years, and I had to help build a good monitoring environment for the studio. It was hard.
  - piaste 5y ago
    > Combine that with human status seeking and the placebo effect and you get $2500 audiophile ethernet switches. There is a very clear line separating expensive audiophile equipment that might have some hard-to-measure non-placebo benefits, and expensive audiophile equipment that cannot possibly do anything. That line is the digital-analogic conversion. Any piece of equipment operating purely on digital information is either performing very straightforward redundancy checks and error correction, or it's snake oil. Tertium non datur.
    - rectang 5y ago
      For people who don't fully understand or don't trust the rational explanation, it's easy for the placebo effect to create perceptions of differences where no differences whatsoever exist in reality. So in terms of marketing snake oil to suckers, I disagree that a bright line exists between small-but-measurable and not-measurable. The human tendency towards irrationality is very strong, easily capable of swamping small differences. I'll also say that it's not so much the hard-to-measure effects where you need to spend your time when pursuing accurate reproduction. Speakers have much poorer fidelity than anything else in the reproduction chain, and room acoustics matter a great deal (especially having a large enough room with high enough ceilings, to increase the ratio of direct sound coming from the speaker vs. reflected sound). The contributions of these factors are not small but they are are hard to understand, assess, and apply in practice.
- AniseAbyss 5y ago
  People convince themselves of anything. Part of me envies the fools, everything must be magical for them.
- pjc50 5y ago
  Specially designed CPU you say? https://www.cirrus.com/our-technology/audio/hifi/ https://www.cirrus.com/our-technology/audio/hifi/ (The difference is that we're doing clever things with class D amplifiers to get the best sound possible out of a mobile phone, and charge a few dollars per chip. While it's technically a "specially designed CPU", really it's a proprietary DSP with the analogue front end on the same die)
iso1210 5y ago
To be fair I've got some $2500 switches. OK they're layer 3, run routing protocols, have 48 POE ports and dual power supplies, and I still think they're overpriced, but it's fairly standard. A single power supply 5 port unmanaged switch though? Hilarious. Make you you get the right ethernet cables that run in the right direction https://forums.whathifi.com/threads/directional-ethernet-cable.94329/ https://forums.whathifi.com/threads/directional-ethernet-cab... Only £629 for 1.5m cable.
- jaclaz 5y ago
  And remember to straighten them periodically, bends can be very bad for data flow ... Only for the record the historical coat hangers test: https://web.archive.org/web/20081104211239/https://consumerist.com/362926/do-coat-hangers-sound-as-good-monster-cables https://web.archive.org/web/20081104211239/https://consumeri... and a 2019 re-make: https://www.soundguys.com/cable-myths-reviving-the-coathanger-test-23553/ https://www.soundguys.com/cable-myths-reviving-the-coathange...
  - envp 5y ago
    Bits tend to get squashed moving through bends right? Centrifugal force and all that /S
    - jaclaz 5y ago
      Not all bits, the 0's, due to friction on the sides, might be slower, while the 1's are slimmer, but since they have edges they might get stuck in the bends (but on the other hand they are good at cleaning the pipes). Some pseudo-reference, JFYI: https://msfn.org/board/topic/154863-the-meta-sata-pataphysics-of-usb-transfer/ https://msfn.org/board/topic/154863-the-meta-sata-pataphysic...
      - wussboy 5y ago
        I worry sometimes that AWS sometimes runs out of 1s and begins quietly replacing them with lowercase Ls. I can tell the difference, but not everyone can.
iamhamm 5y ago
Maybe I didn't follow this correctly, but I thought it was implying the filtered power supply was improved audio of streamed audio. If so, how could an analog power supply have any impact on the bits in a digital audio stream?
- xxpor 5y ago
  It literally can't, if the thing you comparing against also isn't dropping or corrupting packets. It's a straight up scam.
  - nyanpasu64 5y ago
    When feeding audio over a digital connection to a DAC which takes timing directly from the input stream, bad timing (eg. from optical cables rather than coaxial, and conceivably bad power supplies could cause it too) can lead to sample duration inconsistency and jitter. In the case of a network switch, it's a straight-up scam. Also power supply hum (60hz it higher for switching supplies) can induce interference in the player's output signal. I'd use a filtered power supply for any player, but not necessarily the network switch. ("Ethernet offers galvanic isolation by design. All connections are transformed coupled.")
    - majormajor 5y ago
      For optical cables, is that a PCM-specific thing? Something like Dolby Digital over Optical has to be run through a decoder in a way that seems like "sample duration inconsistency" would either result in total failure to decode parts,or simply be not an issue.
    - stephen_g 5y ago
      Of course (with a few dollars worth of parts) the DAC could pretty easily buffer and re-clock the data stream with a precision clock if you're not worried about adding a tiny delay. I've seen this done in some DACs on the USB stream.
- kevingadd 5y ago
spicybright 5y ago
Is there any actual evidence this cleans the signal at all? Sounds like gold plated HDMI cables to me.... we've already figured out error correction and such for networking, esp. if it's just local connections.
- deelowe 5y ago
  There's nothing to clean. It's digital.
  - spicybright 5y ago
    The only reasonable thing I can think of is they're maxing out the bandwith of the cables (seriously doubt) and cheaper hardware can't keep up as well (crap firmware, too many packet drops from cheap hardware, etc.) But even then, it sounds like a huuuge stretch from my limited IT/networking experience.
sebastien_b 5y ago
Is it made by Monster? (rhetorical)
- hprotagonist 5y ago
  now there’s an eldrich name from the past. can i interest you in some coathangers ive just now artisinally soldered together?
  - LinuxBender 5y ago
    They are sadly still a thing. The local ACE hardware store sells all their power and audio cables.
    - jabroni_salad 5y ago
      Those things have a lifetime warranty. Not uncommon to see them in use by touring musicians and the like. Just get monoprice for home use, though.
      - LinuxBender 5y ago
        I bought one of their power strips out of necessity and had to return it the same day due to a faulty power switch. I ended up going across the road to a farm equipment store that had regular power strips.
      - dhosek 5y ago
        This is true, for things like ¼" instrument cables, there is a big difference between the cheapest cable and something a bit better and you don't need audiophile ears to hear it. The cheap ones will frequently start to generate loud crackling noises after a short time of use. Since the onset is unpredictable, there's some incentive to just spend the money to get the more expensive cable so you don't need to worry about a cable going bad mid-performance.
  - acomjean 5y ago
    I saw that micro center was selling "Monster" branded LED strips and some wall led tiles that looked kind interesting albeit expensive. I just assumed the brand name got bought, but I just assumed overpriced... https://www.microcenter.com/search/search_results.aspx?Ntt=led+strips&Ntk=all&sortby=match&N=4294819304&myStore=true https://www.microcenter.com/search/search_results.aspx?Ntt=l...
rcarmo 5y ago
I’m going to file this under “matters of faith” and not even going to consider the fact that the switch is _nowhere_ involved in turning the bits into sound.
- AniseAbyss 5y ago
  Very wise. "It's Faith I don't have to explain shit" truer words were never spoken by Christ.
arcticbull 5y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't Ethernet signals not just differential, but magnetically isolated? All ethernet signals go through transformers to mitigate noise, ESD and ground loops. [1] [1] http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/Appnotes/VPPD-01740.pdf http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/Appnotes/VPPD-01740.pd...
- stephen_g 5y ago
  Yes, that's correct. As long as the switch isn't horribly non-compliant (such as EMI/EMC issues), and whatever you're plugging the other end into has a properly designed port with proper grounding, there's basically no way it will affect an audio system. The product is complete pseudoscience, and looking at the site of the company that makes it, almost all their other stuff seems to be based on nonsense too.
  - arpa 5y ago
    Hell, even if the switch was incompliant and noisy af, if tcp/ip packets got through, it would not affect audio quality.
    - stephen_g 5y ago
      Yeah, with a bit of distance. I mean like if it's half a meter away from your speaker cables or amplifier, a switch putting out excessive EMI could couple noise in to that over the air. But it will do absolutely nothing to the actual data. EMI can be a real problem especially for things like recording electric guitars, because electric guitar pickups are basically antennas and have to be exposed to be able to pick up the strings.
tdeck 5y ago
Looks like the original review this refers to isn't taking any criticism: > NOTE: We understand that for many, the ability of a switch to "alter" the sound defies what they know and/or understand about networks (cables, switches, protocols, etc.). With that in mind, we are not going to approve comments that attack the review or the reviewer
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  Typical for the esoteric end of the audiophile community. A lot of the nonsense cable reviewers have turned off their comments on their blogs and insist if they can hear a difference then it must be true. Same people also refuse to do any kind of blind testing and attack the process with a vehemence that suggests there is something to hide about these reviews. Which is true, the emperor has no clothes and they are paid to describe them in great detail.
geophile 5y ago
And then there’s this: https://web.archive.org/web/20050721081251/http://www.referenceaudiomods.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=NOB_C37_C https://web.archive.org/web/20050721081251/http://www.refere...
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  I see your audiophile wooden knob and raise you with a literal box of dirt. https://www.entreq.com/products/ground-boxes-17667704 https://www.entreq.com/products/ground-boxes-17667704 Not only is it ridiculous, its potentially dangerous too!
  - yonaguska 5y ago
    Is this real or satire? I couldn't find any links to actually buy the products.
    - mb_72 5y ago
      Looks like they sell via distributors, so they are then another step removed from the con, eg: https://www.audiotherapyuk.com/brands/entreq/entreq-ground-boxes/ https://www.audiotherapyuk.com/brands/entreq/entreq-ground-b...
  - JamesCoyne 5y ago
    This one is even better: https://www.audiotherapyuk.com/product/entreq-infinity-cleanus/ https://www.audiotherapyuk.com/product/entreq-infinity-clean...
smackeyacky 5y ago
Synergistic are notorious for making ridiculous claims about their digital products. There is a cult around digital jitter that has developed and is currently destroying audio forums, its adherents insist they can hear audible jitter effects over digital transmission despite even the worst measurements being well under the audible noise floor. The best thing to do is not engage with them. Synergistic is a flag bearer for this nonsense.
MichaelBurge 5y ago
Don't forget that default memcpy() produces a "hard edge", and if you change your audio player to C++ new it will sound better. https://www.audioasylum.com/forums/pcaudio/messages/11/119979.html https://www.audioasylum.com/forums/pcaudio/messages/11/11997...
- jpm48 5y ago
  wow, this is amazing, I wonder if std::make_unique<audio> would be better as it aligns the bytes as well ;-)
- sidewndr46 5y ago
  That post reads like satire. What is that from?
  - MichaelBurge 5y ago
    I saw it on HN 4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14171749 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14171749
- UnFleshedOne 5y ago
  The site is not called "asylum" for nothing I suppose...
spookthesunset 5y ago
This would have been a much better article if they purchased the device and tore it apart to see what is inside. I mean is it full of generic unlabeled chips salvaged off some other switch? Is it all name brand? How is the circuit board layout? Are you at least getting top of the line components? Also would have been interesting to analyze the audio streams on an oscilloscope to see how "enhanced" (or not enhanced) they were when passed through this switch. Instead this article just looks at a single review. I mean obviously this switch doesn't magically make audio better somehow. But demonstrating why that is would have been both entertaining and provided a good community service. I guess somebody should fork over some cash and ship one of these to AvE, bigclive, or electroboom... at least they'd tear it down.
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  More than likely its an alibaba $5 generic 100mbps switch. Thats what is inside other audiophile switches. The trick here is that nobody is going to toss $2500 at Synergistic just to pull one apart and void the warranty to find out. Quite a clever scam.
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    I mean you are probably right but I'd love the teardown anyway. Maybe you are wrong? Maybe they have custom silicon or at least "name brand" chips? Or maybe it is a shitshow that features the crappiest power supply and salvaged chips with the markings scraped off tossed onto the worst PCB on earth. Maybe it is a hub and not a switch? Who knows? I'd like to know!
    - smackeyacky 5y ago
      Me too. Perhaps we could quietly crowdfund a purchase and ship the item off to be torn down.
  - tdeck 5y ago
    I was going to say, this thing looks incredibly cheap. Like it's cobbled together from a standard enclosure and parts you can buy on AliExpress.
marcodiego 5y ago
I can see one possibility something like this can make a difference: RF and electrical interference/noise. Best thing is: this is measurable. So there should be no need to trust subjective analysis of another audiophile.
- gizmo686 5y ago
  Thats what I was thinking, but even so, it is a weird product. First, Ethernet does not have a ground wire; and ground is the biggest source of electrical interference for analog audio. Second, the Ethernet switch is a really weird place to try an address this. If this is your concern, I assume that you hold every peripheral that plugs into your computer to at least the same standards (especially almost everything else you might plug into it, as most connections attach directly to ground). You also need to deal with all of the noise that components inside your computer can generate. If electrical interference in your analog components are a concern, you are better off spending your money closer to the analog circuit. An electrically isolated sound card with a digital input 100% solves any concern about analog noise in the rest of the system [0]. [0] Unless the noise is so bad that it interferes with the digital computation.
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    I think someone who buys this thing already listens their music inside a Faraday cage anechoic chamber with power from a perfect sine generator a few kilometers away to bar any vibration from affecting the listening experience. Or maybe I'm creative enough to consider designing gear for audiophiles.
    - gizmo686 5y ago
      At that level of paranoia, a special Ethernet switch may be an improvement. I still don't see the benefit over using an optical cable.
globular-toast 5y ago
You should see how much money people in the car enthusiast community spend on "pointless" stuff. What is it about audiophiles in particular that attracts so much ridicule? It's their money, what would you rather they spent it on?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rrdharan 5y ago
  Same reason flat earthers are so irksome - because they cloak themselves in the language of science (physics and optics for flat earthers; signal theory and electrical engineering for audiophile quacks).
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  > It's their money, what would you rather they spent it on? Honestly because in many cases the people that blow their money on this stuff are people like our parents. This stuff is a scam that sucks in good people who aren't the most financially responsible. They rack up a ton of debt on their credit cards thinking they are buying good stuff. And it screws them over and causes grief in the family. I mean yes, everybody in the room is an adult, but the fallout from a family member who is stupidly spending their retirement money on crap like this affects everybody else.
- xbar 5y ago
  As electronics engineers and experts, many of us take issue with fraudulent claims in electronics. Audiophile-market electronics seem to show up as fraudulent more than many others. It has nothing to do with the audiophiles.
deleted 5y ago
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daenz 5y ago
Are audiophiles similar to wine tasters? My understanding is that wine tasters cannot reliably pick an expensive wine by taste alone. Is audio similar to this or is there merit to it?
- dmitriid 5y ago
  There's merit, but only to a point beyond which only magic and unicorns can explain the belief.
- zaphod12 5y ago
  The study that pushed that thought about wine tasting was looking at amateur enthusiasts, not professionals. The top folks can identify, in all common cases, the vineyard that a wine has come from. Some aspects of this are surprisingly straightforward to learn. Smell is an incredibly powerful sense when you train it, but most of us don't. It is not pseudoscience, though you can have a pretty solid debate about whether it's truly a useful skill or not.
  - zimpenfish 5y ago
    Haven't several blind taste tests been done with professional sommeliers where they've failed to pick the "good" wine against the "bad" reliably? Or they've been given the same wine several times and given it different ratings each time?
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      Indeed, even failed to distinguish white from red.
- acomjean 5y ago
  I believe so. I remember when CDs first appeared, we used to makes tapes of them and then A/B test. With Dolby Noise Reduction(C) over speakers nobody could tell the difference and I had young ears back then. The quiet parts of Jazz or classical on newly recorded stuff through headphones there was less hiss, but for rock little difference. But they were always advertising new Xbit Digital to Audio conversions. Even my headphones had a "for digital" sticker on them (Sonys MDR-V6s and I don't think there was anything digital about them...) I think its about feeling you have something special. Of course now we've come full circle and records are the new best sounding thing.. I remember having to clean them and hearing pops and skips... but here we are. but I'm old and my ears are happy with mp3s....
richrichardsson 5y ago
Audiophiles are a strange bunch. Some of them believe drawing around the edge of a CD with a special pen (not just any marker will do you know!) will improve the sound [1]. It's a laughably stupid premise. [1] http://www.audioreview.com/product/accessories/others/audio-prism/cd-stop-light.html http://www.audioreview.com/product/accessories/others/audio-...
- yaantc 5y ago
  To me, it seems like an "analog" cargo cult thing. A lot of audiophiles simply don't get the digital transition. In the old times, the musical signal was analog and any impairment was a degradation. Audiophiles went to great length to avoid this. And they keep on applying this approach to the digital part of a modern system, in completely useless ways. For example, here, it seems they use a marker to prevent light to leak from the side of the CD. I guess it's a misguided way to try to increase the SNR of the laser detector while reading the disc. What they don't get is that the digital part of the system doesn't carry a musical signal. It's information, that is used to reconstruct a musical signal at the DAC. And this information is very robust. As long as it can be reconstructed error free, SNR and the like do not matter. As long as it arrives on time at the DAC (I'm simplifying a bit, but it's easy to get the idea) any previous jitter is irrelevant. If you're an audiophile, keep on caring about the DAC and the analog chain after it. And don't bother too much about the digital part, it's not audio it's IT!
- iso1210 5y ago
  To be fair I did this with ink opaque in the infrared spectrum all over a Justin Bieber CD and the sound was massively improved.
quercusa 5y ago
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29557688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29557688
jakobov 5y ago
Ha ha ha.. it's tcp so Ethernet is irrelevant. Total scam
yawnxyz 5y ago
I'm so confused by expensive gear like this, or gold-plated connectors etc — what's the actual TAM for customers like this that it's worth putting a product like this out there? I can't imagine there are more than.... 50 audiophiles out there that would pay for something like this. Or am I wildly off?
- tw04 5y ago
  You're wildly off. There are billions of people on this planet, there are 10s of thousands of audiophiles who have more money than common sense. https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/ https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/
- FireBeyond 5y ago
  A music lover buys hifi equipment so as to listen to their music collection. An audiophile buys music so as to listen to their hifi equipment.
moedersmooiste 5y ago
Some people around me are wine enthusiasts. I once put a label from an expensive wine on a cheap bottle of wine. That was a fun little experiment that works with switches as well...
Tempest1981 5y ago
Maybe it delays the bits more uniformly. That would be harder to reason about.
qrohlf 5y ago
This particular rabbit-hole of irrationality goes deep; some audiophiles go as far as to have a private power grid connection to improve the "quality" of their music (paywalled WSJ link): https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-gift-for-music-lovers-who-have-it-all-a-personal-utility-pole-1471189463 https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-gift-for-music-lovers-who-hav...
- api 5y ago
  I wonder how much of this crap is just conspicuous consumption. Its pointlessness might be the point.
mortenjorck 5y ago
I used to find these things funny, but now I wonder if the woo-tier audiophile brands aren't taking advantage of mental illness. There's a certain ingrained assumption that the customers for these products are all "rich idiots," and many of them may well fit that archetype, but even so, the line between "can hear the difference between ethernet switches" and "affected by proximity to batteries" feels uncomfortably fuzzy to me.
- cf100clunk 5y ago
  The P.T. Barnum approach will always be with us. There's a speaker born every minute.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  > rich idiots I don't think that is their market. Their market is elderly retired people who don't really know any better. They'll use credit cards to pay for all this and it really messes with family dynamics. At least this is my experience.
  - iso1210 5y ago
    > really messes with family dynamics Spending the inheritance?
    - spookthesunset 5y ago
      Spending their fixed retirement income and racking up debt. Folks who are teetering on the edge of needing their kids to get financial power of attorney.
      - lostcolony 5y ago
        Let's say it actually worked though. I.e., it was just production level audio equipment, rather than woo. Does that make it okay for them to sell it to those on a fixed income? Not defending it, just seems weird to decry it for taking money away from people who can't afford it, when the whole positioning is "makes audio sound better". Decry it simply for the fact it doesn't work, not that people who can't afford it spend money on it.
emptybottle 5y ago
Finally I’ll be able to get audiophile sound when I stream 96k mp3s over the network /s
analog31 5y ago
I have a wild hypothesis about these super expensive audio gadgets: Sure, they're made to be sold, but they also enable the sales of less expensive but still hyperbolic gadgets. I've seen reactions to these devices along the following lines: "I can't believe that a $2500 power cable can possibly produce a benefit, so I went with the $500 power cable instead." Bingo, you just paid $490 more than necessary because the $2500 item created an aspiration in your imagination.
- RedShift1 5y ago
  That's price strategy to make you feel like you've done a good deal and it's absolutely a thing, it happens all the time.
- clairity 5y ago
  that’s not a wild hypothesis, but a commonly used pricing tactic: anchoring. apple does it all the time with the ‘good, better, best’ framing of their product tiers. the ‘best’ tier is to extract surplus from the price insensitive, but also to make the pricing of the ‘better’ tier seem reasonable. the ‘good’ tier is there to capture the price sensitive, and also uses anchoring on the top two tiers to seem reasonable (it’s also highly marked up, but just not quite as much). the trio of prices are usually bunched around the desired average sales price (asp) for the product, and that set of prices work together to create the anchoring effect. anchoring is used everywhere, from bleach to handbags to wine to cars and everything else.
  - klodolph 5y ago
    The "best" tier is also for people who need 64 GB of RAM just to build things, FWIW. Just to pick laptops as an example. I've worked at companies where the build times were long and required gobs of RAM.
    - clairity 5y ago
      yes, that's price segmentation working as intended. companies (i.e., the price insensitive) can afford to spend an extra $1k, even if the markup is otherwise outrageous. it just doesn't matter relative to the long-run productivity gains it affords. that's also why mac pros are in the $10k range, with wheels that cost $500, because that's a drop in the bucket for editing shops relative to the productivity it affords.
marcodiego 5y ago
Analysis of rocks (like stones, not the rolling ones) for audiophiles: http://www.adventuresinhifiaudio.com/26/01/2018/audiophile-r http://www.adventuresinhifiaudio.com/26/01/2018/audiophile-r... "This wasn't a subtle improvement and yet I did a fair few Volcano on, Volcano off comparisons before I could really accept what I was hearing. In all honesty despite hearing the positive effects the Vibradome Blue star had made to my other system I was still shocked and surprised this item could make such a difference by just sitting on the amps case. Its not heavy enough to damp it and yet it was making a difference and a positive one; frankly I don't know how."
mrmattyboy 5y ago
I am wrong in thinking that ethernet is opto-isolated? If that assumption is correct, I assume this negates any electrical effects that a switch could have on interference (ignoring UTP differential pairs and assuming that this is never an issue anyway)? And I assume this switch isn't doing some absolutely insane decoding of some common unencrypted audio protocols to 'improve' audio in any way. As everyone else has already said... what an insane money-grabbing audiophile-abusing product :D
- mindslight 5y ago
  Base-T ethernet is magnetically isolated (transformers), not optically isolated. AFAIK those transformers are generally good for on the order of a few thousand volts of isolation. So they'll fix common ground loops, but I wouldn't rely on them to protect against worst case lightning strikes. For that you want fiber (eg 1000Base-SX), which is intrinsically opto isolated. And yes, most anything from the "audiophile" world on the digital side is hokum - the entire point of digital technology is all-or-nothing error correction. At least it's easy to ignore, unlike having to sift through all the harder-to-falsify hokum in reviews when shopping for analog gear.
  - mrmattyboy 5y ago
    Ah! Thank you for that :) I will have a read - I wonder what interface I was thinking of ¯\_(⊙︿⊙)_/¯ > And yes, most anything from the "audiophile" world on the digital side is hokum - the entire point of digital technology is all-or-nothing error correction. At least it's easy to ignore, unlike having to sift through all the harder-to-falsify hokum in reviews when shopping for analog gear. Haha yeah, indeed! :)
- lylecheatham 5y ago
  Ethernet usually has magnetic isolation through tiny transformers (oftentimes included inside the ethernet PHY IC) to avoid any issues with different ground potentials and such.
  - mrmattyboy 5y ago
MertsA 5y ago
These charlatans sell a $10,000 "Active Ground Block" complete with a 5 day long burn in process. https://www.synergisticresearch.com/power/accessories/galileo-sx-ground-block/ https://www.synergisticresearch.com/power/accessories/galile... Just when I think I've seen the peak of Audiophile stupidity some "entrepreneur" comes along and raises the bar yet again. This isn't even an isolated grounding system, it's just tying a piddly little ground bar to the regular electrical ground through the power cord through some B.S. filters that have no chance of doing anything even remotely useful. I'm amazed that no one involved is being prosecuted for fraud. How is such a substantial chunk of people delusional enough to fall for all this HiFi garbage? It's like finding someone in their 40s who still believes Santa Claus is real. No, your analog Rube Goldberg sound system does not sound better than a half-decent DAC playing an MP3 on $30 headphones, you're just incapable of rational thought.
- xwdv 5y ago
  Often times when people reach the endgame of a hobby the desire to spend more money still lingers. You can make good money selling high priced niche products to these people to satisfy their craving.
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  There are audible differences between HiFi equipment and $30 headphones. Once you get above $300 headphones, that's when it's mostly marketing woo.
  - klodolph 5y ago
    It's not mostly marketing woo. Diminishing returns, yes. Marketing woo, no. When I make a song, I spend a lot of time listening for specific, subtle changes. Like I might be adjusting the EQ of a rhythm guitar in a mix by a couple dB, and trying to balance it with the hi hats. Making those kinds of decisions in a full mix, you'll notice lots of deficiencies in headphones that are supposedly high-quality reference headphones. If you look at measured frequency response for headphones, even high end headphones, you'll see that the frequency response curves can really be all over the place. That's not even considering transient response (where you'd want to look at a waterfall graph). IMO, headphone amps and DACs are where the real marketing woo is.
RedShift1 5y ago
Can someone buy this, open it up and make a video about it? I'm willing to bet money it just has a bog standard Broadcom Ethernet switch chip inside.
- yosito 5y ago
  Sounds like you just volunteered youself to make a video.
  - RedShift1 5y ago
    I don't have 2500 USD for this, sorry...
CountDrewku 5y ago
Just set up a nice sound system and run records or CD's. If you're that into audio, then streaming is still a joke.
Tepix 5y ago
We need more blind A/B tests to unmask this nonsense. c't magazine did one a long time ago comparing audio codecs, back then in 2000 they had the result that 256kbit/s MP3 sometimes sounded better than the original. https://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/Kreuzverhoertest-287592.html https://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/Kreuzverhoertest-287592.html Unfortunately these tests are expensive to do and there is little money in unveiling that a product is not worth the money.
floatingatoll 5y ago
I don’t see any mention of blind subjective A/B testing in this article, which makes me wonder whether TH is familiar with reviewing audio gear. The only sensible rule of audio gear “is this an upgrade in quality” testing of components upstream of speakers and headphones, is that you have to do a blind test with an A/B switch provided to the listener and ask them to decide which sounds better. No such testing is done with this gear, so it’s impossible to support a statement about whether it’s better or worse. And the details of that test setup would be awesome reading, if they did it. It’s probably not better, but let’s prove it. Come on, Toms.
marstall 5y ago
Digital "jitter" is actually a thing that can measurably degrade quality. The DAC clock and the source clock need to be in perfect sync or else the quality of each sample will effectively degrade. Higher end CD transports have a "clock link" that lets you sync their data stream with an outboard DAC. Gets harder with audiophile-level sample rates (24 bit, 192Khz). https://www.thewelltemperedcomputer.com/KB/BitPerfectJitter.htm https://www.thewelltemperedcomputer.com/KB/BitPerfectJitter.... https://blog.teufelaudio.com/jitter/ https://blog.teufelaudio.com/jitter/
- olyjohn 5y ago
  And so what's this have to do with the Ethernet switch? Surely that's the last place you'll encounter errors, is in your own house, on your own hardware that's barely got any traffic running through it. After the audio file has been transmitted through loads of Ethernet switches, routers, fiber, over the public internet, into your shitty ISP, over some old crappy copper lines into your cheap-ass modem... some how the switch in your house is going to make corrections to the data packets and ensure they all get there... give me a break.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - marstall 5y ago
    The issue with jitter is about timing. Remember the endpoint of all of this is a DAC which isn't generally a buffered component - so it needs to process samples in real time. If a packet arrives from the switch a bit late, the DAC doesn't have any leeway to catch up. Jitter makes a measurable difference, even with Ethernet switches - and you'll see those numbers touted by manufacturers (ex: https://nuprimeaudio.com/product/omnia-sw-8/?v=7516fd43adaa https://nuprimeaudio.com/product/omnia-sw-8/?v=7516fd43adaa)
    - klodolph 5y ago
      DACs are often buffered. If you're transporting audio over Ethernet, the packet will contain some number of samples. Those samples have to be buffered. (For example, you might send 128 or 256 samples over Ethernet... obviously, the samples inside the packet are actually getting transmitted as a whole packet, buffered, and then sent to the DAC afterwards.) On top of that, you can synchronize the DAC clock to the clock recovered from the digital signal. For example, I routinely record data (and monitor) from an S/PDIF link. The standard way this works involves clock recovery with a PLL. That way, you only need a stable clock on the DAC--as long as the digital source remains within tolerances, it's fine. Even though S/PDIF transmits digital audio one sample at a time at a fixed rate, you don't need to worry much about jitter. We know it works this way because you can configure the gear to use internal or external synchronization. If you try recording S/PDIF with an internal clock, you get clicks and pops.
yumraj 5y ago
The audio market gets mocked all the time, for good reasons such as this. So, I’m going to draw a parallel with another market which I believe is very similar, IMHO of course, and that is the Espresso market. There are grinders and machines for several $1000s and I’ve been curious if people are indeed able to tell the difference or is it just that it has become a passion/hobby for many.
- zimpenfish 5y ago
  James Hoffman on the YouTubes has a good channel about this where he sometimes does blind taste tests and can pretty reliably tell the good grinder / machine from the bad ones but he is a self-declared "weird coffee person" who basically spends his life brewing coffee etc. (e.g. founded a pretty respectable coffee roasting company in the UK.) https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMb0O2CdPBNi-QqPk5T3gsQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMb0O2CdPBNi-QqPk5T3gsQ
- mjgoeke 5y ago
  I can’t speak for the entire spectrum available. But I have two data points and am shocked at the difference, since I expect none. At home I have a rancilio rocky grinder, bought used, newly replaced burrs. It’s “stepped” so I don’t have much fine tuned flexibility - I’m basically choosing between only two or three steps for espresso. My friend has a Pharos manual grinder. I’ve come over to help his wife adjust the grind several times. I bring the same beans I’ve been using that week as a reference point. I’m always shocked how much better theirs tastes - even far-out-of-optimal shots - ones that are very fast or very slow. On my machine the unpleasant overextracted flavors creep in quickly. I chalk it up to consistency of the grind - and that’s observable. You can pinch grinds up and “smear” them across a white sheet of paper to observe size, and to a lesser extent, variability. I’m still surprised that the grinder affects the espresso more than the espresso machine. Note: the Pharos is a beast and I don’t recommend it unless you like armwrestling as part of you coffee prep every time.
karmakaze 5y ago
Psychoacoustics. It works if you think it works, like placebo (though that works even if you know it doesn't). Just don't double-blind test it--you'll regret it.
bartimus 5y ago
Though what's also ridiculous is how we still didn't manage to have a proper non-proprietary TCP/IP (Or UDP?) A/V protocol where you can just stream anything anywhere. What seems particularly tricky is to achieve perfectly synced streams where you could theoretically stream left/right channels of a stereo signal to different devices (of different brands). Each device would need to report back their effective latencies (including buffers) so that some sort of central controller can orchestrate everything perfectly. Either that or attempt to achieve extreme negligible stable latencies that approach analog accuracy. Please correct me if I'm wrong. I would love to hear the details.
- an-unknown 5y ago
  If you were thinking about e.g. Dante for proprietary protocols, then of course there are non-proprietary protocols too, like e.g. AES67. Alternatively, if you prefer a protocol at a lower level / without IP, then AVB/TSN is another standardized protocol suite. However, AVB/TSN usually requires special hardware support in the network interface cards and switches to assist with QoS and to meet the timing guarantees.
  - bartimus 5y ago
    Thanks, very interesting. I'll be looking into those protocols. Though I suspect these will not allow me to send some A/V stream from my desktop to my phone. Or from my phone to my receiver. Basically a protocol that allows anyone to just send anything from anywhere to any A/V device attached to the network. With regard to AVB/TSN and specialized hardware. Would the $2500 switch from OP's article provide any benefits here?
Brian_K_White 5y ago
http://tandy.wiki/Audiophile_Pricetag http://tandy.wiki/Audiophile_Pricetag

128 points by simonjgreen 5y ago

I truly do not understand how some people manage to convince themselves to buy such useless and expensive products. I get spending lots of money on quality DACs, amplifiers, speakers, headphones, etc... But some of the products marketed towards audiophiles are truly ridiculous. What's next? A specially designed CPU and memory to decode "cleaner sounding bits"?

fartcannon 5y ago
It's an extreme version of the more expensive is better mentality that made the coffee industry boom in the 90s+ and made Apple a trillion dollar company.
- xxpor 5y ago
  At least with those things, there's the theoretical possibility that there's a difference though. Why is it so hard to convince people that on the digital side of the equation, there's an objective right or wrong answer, and it's impossible to get any better than an exact copy of the bits?
  - kevinmchugh 5y ago
    Audiophiles aren't concerned with just the signal being reproduced faithfully - it has to happen without side effects. You're talking past each other if you don't address that.
    - tomc1985 5y ago
      But ultimately that means a clean digital pipeline and high quality D/A converters before it hits an actual speaker. The thing is... unless there are unnecessary conversions (making the signal less than bitperfect), there is no point for a lot of the digital side of this
    - jstanley 5y ago
      What kind of side effects are you talking about?
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      Side effects like power consumed from the grid? Heat voided into the room? Gravitational attraction from the heavy case? Money draining from their account? They get all of that.
- adolph 5y ago
  Coffee is still there: The Weber HG-2 - The $1,650 Hand Grinder https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL65i1XhVec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL65i1XhVec https://weberworkshops.com/products/hg-2 https://weberworkshops.com/products/hg-2
  - durnygbur 5y ago
    hey, juicero at least was electric
    - spookthesunset 5y ago
      > hey, juicero at least was electric But could be bested by simply squeezing the bag with your dirty grubby hands. Juicero is truly one of my favorite companies ever. The whole thing was a massive pile of extravagant hardware whose only reason for existence was to tell you "no, you cannot squeeze this particular bag of juice". It is the quintessential silicon valley echo chamber product. The fact that its founder went on to hawk "raw water" coming from spigots drilled into the hillsides along state highways only makes the story that much better.
  - space_ghost 5y ago
    My wife bought me a $300 coffee grinder for Christmas. As a coffee ...enthusiast?... I'm quite fond of it. Perfectly consistent grid, very quiet electric operation, small footprint. I could argue that $300 was too much for it, but I'm willing to pay a premium for good product. $1,650 would be utterly insane.
    - kejaed 5y ago
      So which one was it? :)
      - ezarowny 5y ago
        Probably the Fellow Ode
      - space_ghost 5y ago
- emsy 5y ago
  No, Apple is at least partially successful because it’s a luxury brand. That’s not the same as more expensive=better. The Apple comparison is also dumb because even if you think they’re overpriced, they aren’t priced arbitrarily high and there’s a tangible difference between an Apple product and competitors. Compare that to wine, coffee and audio equipment that fails to be differentiated in blind tests.
  - ForHackernews 5y ago
    > there’s a tangible difference between an Apple product and competitors This seems pretty subjective. iPhone does exactly same things (takes pictures, makes calls, runs apps) as a $50 no-name device running Android. Similarly, a bottle of Two Buck Chuck gets you drunk the same as a $25k Romanée-Conti.
    - hellisothers 5y ago
      Classic “only one metric matters”, by this standard you should only choose food based on how full does it make you which I guess is how we arrived at Soylent
    - anonymousab 5y ago
      > iPhone does exactly same things (takes pictures, makes calls, runs apps) as a $50 no-name device running Android The photo quality on the iPhone will be of objectively higher quality due to the larger, superior lenses. There's simply more light information to work with.
    - kristjansson 5y ago
      And Brainfuck does exactly the same thing as any other programming language.
    - evilduck 5y ago
      If you want to get drunk and that's your only value you place on a drink why even choose wine to compare? You can buy bottom shelf vodka and get more ethanol for your buck than Two Buck Chuck. Hell, vodka is wastefully distilled multiple times, why not just chase bootleg moonshine producers for even less? It all gets you drunk the same so they must be equivalent products.
- Spivak 5y ago
  The meme that people buy Apple products as status symbols needs to die at some point. If you can name one single other manufacturer making products at the quality of an iPhone but at half the price then you can call them overpriced. I don't normally like to use the "if it was possible someone would have done it by now" argument but there are literally millions of Apple copycats and wannabees and they all suck. Apple's product design and manufacturing is insanely good and can be felt going to any big box store and picking up any laptop. If you don't care about that then of course you'll say they're overpriced because dollars aren't going to places you don't care about. It's why I love my M50x's, they're cheap ass plastic and faux leather because every dollar went into the inside. Look I spent probably eight years deriding iPhones with some stupid sense of techno-superiority with my Android until I actually tried one. They are so much better holy shit, the speed of Safari alone is worth the price of admission.
  - jjulius 5y ago
    You can be both a status symbol and an objectively superior product; they are not mutually exclusive. A laptop can be bought by someone who says, "Ooh, Apple, new, shiny, cool," and the next person to buy the same laptop might say, "This is the objectively better device for my use case."
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      The truth is clear when it costs more but is is objectively worse, yet sells anyway. The most characteristic Apple customer experience is persuading themselves that they can learn to live without the feature deleted in the latest software update.
  - yonaguska 5y ago
    I'm still not an iPhone owner, but I'm close. The presence of a do not disturb physical button on the phone, the UI...with my pixel, it's not always a simple one swipe to the flashlight button. Which is amazingly annoying compared to even older phones. I have since bought a dedicated flashlight.
    - 5y ago
- Bud 5y ago
  It is in fact not related in any way to coffee or to Apple. Not even remotely. Apple sells products which are, in the main, at very similar price points to its competition, and it has won because it simply. makes. better. products. I'm not sure why there is still delusional thinking about this—apparently the last 20 years have not proven the point well enough?
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Better products whose keyboards fail routinely? Oh, did they finally fix that? And, replace the bad ones? No? Must we mention monitor stands again? Please.
grw_ 5y ago
My guess is that it's a similar social phenomenon to flat-earthers, qanon, etc, in that a group of like-minded people form and customs emerge in which making ever-more outlandish claims are taken as stronger commitment signal to the group. I was reading last week about an 'audiophile ssd' product and I browsed an audiofile forum thread[0], expecting to have a chuckle at users ridiculing it but there's actually 6 pages of people praising it and finding new adjectives to describe the sound it produces. The most popular posts [1] also detail other absurd things they have done to produce a better sound- "I can opt to convert a FLAC to WAV format and play that from RAM, this somehow lowers the perceived noise flow and makes music sound more organic and detailed" [0] https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/62753-nvme-ssd-designed-for-audiophiles/#comments https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/62753-nvme-ssd-desi... [1] https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/62753-nvme-ssd-designed-for-audiophiles/?do=findComment&comment=1155556 https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/62753-nvme-ssd-desi...
- habeebtc 5y ago
  From folks I know in the audio biz, there is an element of status symbol to it. Or more generally Elitism. If there is much difference between the two, anyways.
  - AndrewUnmuted 5y ago
    I am in audio and routinely sit in 400k+ listening rooms. Those folks would be embarrassed to mention those rooms contained things as goofy as this. It's excessive and unreasonable.
- gambiting 5y ago
  Jesus Christ that forum thread. Those people really need mental help. Like, how can a mentally stable person write something like: "A system deficit I recognized over the last several months was choral music, couldn't enjoy it when played as I was hearing wrong harmonics, kind of a glaze on the sound with poor word intelligibility regardless of whether the OS resided on Optane or in RAM. Had me agonizing over what could fix it...problem solved using the FEMTO NVMe drive"
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
gitgrump 5y ago
You ever see how much people spend on AWS to host a basic CRUD web app?
kubik369 5y ago
I will just leave this [0] here ... [0] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvme-ssd-for-audiophiles https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvme-ssd-for-audiophiles
- jagger27 5y ago
  > TLC mode: It sounds like background music, no features and powerless, everything is flattened, lacks extension and density. > pSLC mode: There is a special natural feeling, it becomes more smooth and calm, the thickness is slightly increased, and overall it is more resistant to hearing but still slightly dry." Wow, that's incredible. Mmm yes, I love digitally encoded music to be slightly thicker and resistant to... hearing?
  - pbuzbee 5y ago
    This is why I love audiophile marketing/reviews so much. They make every single equipment "upgrade" sound like a huge change in how the music sounds. Just throw in enough dull and lively sounding adjectives and you can convince the reader that yes, this expensive piece of equipment is EXACTLY what you're missing!
- pacetherace 5y ago
  One could literally cache all the audio in RAM and not worry about storage characteristics.
  - iggldiggl 5y ago
    Ah, but is that hi-fi audio-grade RAM you're using?
    - duskwuff 5y ago
      Make sure to adjust the memory timings to enhance the soundstage. (Or whatever other ridiculous jargon they'll come up with to elaborate upon the placebo effect.)
ncann 5y ago
The most expensive (and ridiculous) thing that I've seen in the audiophile world is the Nordost Odin 2 cable, priced at $20k-$30k per m. I would have thought it was a joke until I saw actual people buying it.
- larrywright 5y ago
  I wonder if these sorts of things are actually bought individually (as in a consumer decides they should upgrade their audio cables, does the research, and chooses this pricy product) or whether they’re primarily sold as part of large expensive home theater/audio installs. It seems like this would be easier to sell as a line item on an already six figure home theater install (or seven figure house build), rather than individually. But I honestly have no idea.
- piaste 5y ago
  I recently purchased a used Yamaha SW-45 subwoofer for 30€. I asked the seller if for an extra 10€ he could include the RCA cable, to save me a trip to the nearest mall / Amazon locker. He tried to sell me a 40€ "high quality" cable...
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
> I truly do not understand how some people manage to convince themselves to buy such useless and expensive products. There is a gigantic multi-trillion dollar industry built around convincing people to trade their money for shit they don't need. Advertising and marketing are diseases, and what you're looking at is a severe infection.
rectang 5y ago
> I get spending lots of money on quality DACs, amplifiers, speakers, headphones, etc... A/B testing audio reproduction components is extremely difficult. The human perceptual mechanism is a pattern detector, not a fine-grained measurement device — it's impossible to preserve sounds in memory long enough to make a informed distinction, all you have are the impressions the sounds left behind. You can improve with training, allowing you to recognize more patterns and thus capture better impressions, but only to an extent — recalling what something sounded like is still very lossy. Combine that with human status seeking and the placebo effect and you get $2500 audiophile ethernet switches. Source: I was a mastering engineer for a couple of years, and I had to help build a good monitoring environment for the studio. It was hard.
- piaste 5y ago
  > Combine that with human status seeking and the placebo effect and you get $2500 audiophile ethernet switches. There is a very clear line separating expensive audiophile equipment that might have some hard-to-measure non-placebo benefits, and expensive audiophile equipment that cannot possibly do anything. That line is the digital-analogic conversion. Any piece of equipment operating purely on digital information is either performing very straightforward redundancy checks and error correction, or it's snake oil. Tertium non datur.
  - rectang 5y ago
    For people who don't fully understand or don't trust the rational explanation, it's easy for the placebo effect to create perceptions of differences where no differences whatsoever exist in reality. So in terms of marketing snake oil to suckers, I disagree that a bright line exists between small-but-measurable and not-measurable. The human tendency towards irrationality is very strong, easily capable of swamping small differences. I'll also say that it's not so much the hard-to-measure effects where you need to spend your time when pursuing accurate reproduction. Speakers have much poorer fidelity than anything else in the reproduction chain, and room acoustics matter a great deal (especially having a large enough room with high enough ceilings, to increase the ratio of direct sound coming from the speaker vs. reflected sound). The contributions of these factors are not small but they are are hard to understand, assess, and apply in practice.
AniseAbyss 5y ago
People convince themselves of anything. Part of me envies the fools, everything must be magical for them.
pjc50 5y ago
Specially designed CPU you say? https://www.cirrus.com/our-technology/audio/hifi/ https://www.cirrus.com/our-technology/audio/hifi/ (The difference is that we're doing clever things with class D amplifiers to get the best sound possible out of a mobile phone, and charge a few dollars per chip. While it's technically a "specially designed CPU", really it's a proprietary DSP with the analogue front end on the same die)

iso1210 5y ago

To be fair I've got some $2500 switches. OK they're layer 3, run routing protocols, have 48 POE ports and dual power supplies, and I still think they're overpriced, but it's fairly standard. A single power supply 5 port unmanaged switch though? Hilarious. Make you you get the right ethernet cables that run in the right direction https://forums.whathifi.com/threads/directional-ethernet-cable.94329/ https://forums.whathifi.com/threads/directional-ethernet-cab... Only £629 for 1.5m cable.

jaclaz 5y ago
And remember to straighten them periodically, bends can be very bad for data flow ... Only for the record the historical coat hangers test: https://web.archive.org/web/20081104211239/https://consumerist.com/362926/do-coat-hangers-sound-as-good-monster-cables https://web.archive.org/web/20081104211239/https://consumeri... and a 2019 re-make: https://www.soundguys.com/cable-myths-reviving-the-coathanger-test-23553/ https://www.soundguys.com/cable-myths-reviving-the-coathange...
- envp 5y ago
  Bits tend to get squashed moving through bends right? Centrifugal force and all that /S
  - jaclaz 5y ago
    Not all bits, the 0's, due to friction on the sides, might be slower, while the 1's are slimmer, but since they have edges they might get stuck in the bends (but on the other hand they are good at cleaning the pipes). Some pseudo-reference, JFYI: https://msfn.org/board/topic/154863-the-meta-sata-pataphysics-of-usb-transfer/ https://msfn.org/board/topic/154863-the-meta-sata-pataphysic...
    - wussboy 5y ago
      I worry sometimes that AWS sometimes runs out of 1s and begins quietly replacing them with lowercase Ls. I can tell the difference, but not everyone can.

iamhamm 5y ago

Maybe I didn't follow this correctly, but I thought it was implying the filtered power supply was improved audio of streamed audio. If so, how could an analog power supply have any impact on the bits in a digital audio stream?

xxpor 5y ago
It literally can't, if the thing you comparing against also isn't dropping or corrupting packets. It's a straight up scam.
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  When feeding audio over a digital connection to a DAC which takes timing directly from the input stream, bad timing (eg. from optical cables rather than coaxial, and conceivably bad power supplies could cause it too) can lead to sample duration inconsistency and jitter. In the case of a network switch, it's a straight-up scam. Also power supply hum (60hz it higher for switching supplies) can induce interference in the player's output signal. I'd use a filtered power supply for any player, but not necessarily the network switch. ("Ethernet offers galvanic isolation by design. All connections are transformed coupled.")
  - majormajor 5y ago
    For optical cables, is that a PCM-specific thing? Something like Dolby Digital over Optical has to be run through a decoder in a way that seems like "sample duration inconsistency" would either result in total failure to decode parts,or simply be not an issue.
  - stephen_g 5y ago
    Of course (with a few dollars worth of parts) the DAC could pretty easily buffer and re-clock the data stream with a precision clock if you're not worried about adding a tiny delay. I've seen this done in some DACs on the USB stream.
kevingadd 5y ago

spicybright 5y ago

Is there any actual evidence this cleans the signal at all? Sounds like gold plated HDMI cables to me.... we've already figured out error correction and such for networking, esp. if it's just local connections.

deelowe 5y ago
There's nothing to clean. It's digital.
- spicybright 5y ago
  The only reasonable thing I can think of is they're maxing out the bandwith of the cables (seriously doubt) and cheaper hardware can't keep up as well (crap firmware, too many packet drops from cheap hardware, etc.) But even then, it sounds like a huuuge stretch from my limited IT/networking experience.

sebastien_b 5y ago

Is it made by Monster? (rhetorical)

hprotagonist 5y ago
now there’s an eldrich name from the past. can i interest you in some coathangers ive just now artisinally soldered together?
- LinuxBender 5y ago
  They are sadly still a thing. The local ACE hardware store sells all their power and audio cables.
  - jabroni_salad 5y ago
    Those things have a lifetime warranty. Not uncommon to see them in use by touring musicians and the like. Just get monoprice for home use, though.
    - LinuxBender 5y ago
      I bought one of their power strips out of necessity and had to return it the same day due to a faulty power switch. I ended up going across the road to a farm equipment store that had regular power strips.
    - dhosek 5y ago
      This is true, for things like ¼" instrument cables, there is a big difference between the cheapest cable and something a bit better and you don't need audiophile ears to hear it. The cheap ones will frequently start to generate loud crackling noises after a short time of use. Since the onset is unpredictable, there's some incentive to just spend the money to get the more expensive cable so you don't need to worry about a cable going bad mid-performance.
- acomjean 5y ago
  I saw that micro center was selling "Monster" branded LED strips and some wall led tiles that looked kind interesting albeit expensive. I just assumed the brand name got bought, but I just assumed overpriced... https://www.microcenter.com/search/search_results.aspx?Ntt=led+strips&Ntk=all&sortby=match&N=4294819304&myStore=true https://www.microcenter.com/search/search_results.aspx?Ntt=l...

rcarmo 5y ago

I’m going to file this under “matters of faith” and not even going to consider the fact that the switch is _nowhere_ involved in turning the bits into sound.

AniseAbyss 5y ago
Very wise. "It's Faith I don't have to explain shit" truer words were never spoken by Christ.

arcticbull 5y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't Ethernet signals not just differential, but magnetically isolated? All ethernet signals go through transformers to mitigate noise, ESD and ground loops. [1] [1] http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/Appnotes/VPPD-01740.pdf http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/Appnotes/VPPD-01740.pd...

stephen_g 5y ago
Yes, that's correct. As long as the switch isn't horribly non-compliant (such as EMI/EMC issues), and whatever you're plugging the other end into has a properly designed port with proper grounding, there's basically no way it will affect an audio system. The product is complete pseudoscience, and looking at the site of the company that makes it, almost all their other stuff seems to be based on nonsense too.
- arpa 5y ago
  Hell, even if the switch was incompliant and noisy af, if tcp/ip packets got through, it would not affect audio quality.
  - stephen_g 5y ago
    Yeah, with a bit of distance. I mean like if it's half a meter away from your speaker cables or amplifier, a switch putting out excessive EMI could couple noise in to that over the air. But it will do absolutely nothing to the actual data. EMI can be a real problem especially for things like recording electric guitars, because electric guitar pickups are basically antennas and have to be exposed to be able to pick up the strings.

tdeck 5y ago

Looks like the original review this refers to isn't taking any criticism: > NOTE: We understand that for many, the ability of a switch to "alter" the sound defies what they know and/or understand about networks (cables, switches, protocols, etc.). With that in mind, we are not going to approve comments that attack the review or the reviewer

smackeyacky 5y ago
Typical for the esoteric end of the audiophile community. A lot of the nonsense cable reviewers have turned off their comments on their blogs and insist if they can hear a difference then it must be true. Same people also refuse to do any kind of blind testing and attack the process with a vehemence that suggests there is something to hide about these reviews. Which is true, the emperor has no clothes and they are paid to describe them in great detail.

geophile 5y ago

And then there’s this: https://web.archive.org/web/20050721081251/http://www.referenceaudiomods.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=NOB_C37_C https://web.archive.org/web/20050721081251/http://www.refere...

smackeyacky 5y ago
I see your audiophile wooden knob and raise you with a literal box of dirt. https://www.entreq.com/products/ground-boxes-17667704 https://www.entreq.com/products/ground-boxes-17667704 Not only is it ridiculous, its potentially dangerous too!
- yonaguska 5y ago
  Is this real or satire? I couldn't find any links to actually buy the products.
  - mb_72 5y ago
    Looks like they sell via distributors, so they are then another step removed from the con, eg: https://www.audiotherapyuk.com/brands/entreq/entreq-ground-boxes/ https://www.audiotherapyuk.com/brands/entreq/entreq-ground-b...
- JamesCoyne 5y ago
  This one is even better: https://www.audiotherapyuk.com/product/entreq-infinity-cleanus/ https://www.audiotherapyuk.com/product/entreq-infinity-clean...

smackeyacky 5y ago

Synergistic are notorious for making ridiculous claims about their digital products. There is a cult around digital jitter that has developed and is currently destroying audio forums, its adherents insist they can hear audible jitter effects over digital transmission despite even the worst measurements being well under the audible noise floor. The best thing to do is not engage with them. Synergistic is a flag bearer for this nonsense.

MichaelBurge 5y ago

Don't forget that default memcpy() produces a "hard edge", and if you change your audio player to C++ new it will sound better. https://www.audioasylum.com/forums/pcaudio/messages/11/119979.html https://www.audioasylum.com/forums/pcaudio/messages/11/11997...

jpm48 5y ago
wow, this is amazing, I wonder if std::make_unique<audio> would be better as it aligns the bytes as well ;-)
sidewndr46 5y ago
That post reads like satire. What is that from?
- MichaelBurge 5y ago
  I saw it on HN 4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14171749 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14171749
UnFleshedOne 5y ago
The site is not called "asylum" for nothing I suppose...

spookthesunset 5y ago

This would have been a much better article if they purchased the device and tore it apart to see what is inside. I mean is it full of generic unlabeled chips salvaged off some other switch? Is it all name brand? How is the circuit board layout? Are you at least getting top of the line components? Also would have been interesting to analyze the audio streams on an oscilloscope to see how "enhanced" (or not enhanced) they were when passed through this switch. Instead this article just looks at a single review. I mean obviously this switch doesn't magically make audio better somehow. But demonstrating why that is would have been both entertaining and provided a good community service. I guess somebody should fork over some cash and ship one of these to AvE, bigclive, or electroboom... at least they'd tear it down.

smackeyacky 5y ago
More than likely its an alibaba $5 generic 100mbps switch. Thats what is inside other audiophile switches. The trick here is that nobody is going to toss $2500 at Synergistic just to pull one apart and void the warranty to find out. Quite a clever scam.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  I mean you are probably right but I'd love the teardown anyway. Maybe you are wrong? Maybe they have custom silicon or at least "name brand" chips? Or maybe it is a shitshow that features the crappiest power supply and salvaged chips with the markings scraped off tossed onto the worst PCB on earth. Maybe it is a hub and not a switch? Who knows? I'd like to know!
  - smackeyacky 5y ago
    Me too. Perhaps we could quietly crowdfund a purchase and ship the item off to be torn down.
- tdeck 5y ago
  I was going to say, this thing looks incredibly cheap. Like it's cobbled together from a standard enclosure and parts you can buy on AliExpress.

marcodiego 5y ago

I can see one possibility something like this can make a difference: RF and electrical interference/noise. Best thing is: this is measurable. So there should be no need to trust subjective analysis of another audiophile.

gizmo686 5y ago
Thats what I was thinking, but even so, it is a weird product. First, Ethernet does not have a ground wire; and ground is the biggest source of electrical interference for analog audio. Second, the Ethernet switch is a really weird place to try an address this. If this is your concern, I assume that you hold every peripheral that plugs into your computer to at least the same standards (especially almost everything else you might plug into it, as most connections attach directly to ground). You also need to deal with all of the noise that components inside your computer can generate. If electrical interference in your analog components are a concern, you are better off spending your money closer to the analog circuit. An electrically isolated sound card with a digital input 100% solves any concern about analog noise in the rest of the system [0]. [0] Unless the noise is so bad that it interferes with the digital computation.
- marcodiego 5y ago
  I think someone who buys this thing already listens their music inside a Faraday cage anechoic chamber with power from a perfect sine generator a few kilometers away to bar any vibration from affecting the listening experience. Or maybe I'm creative enough to consider designing gear for audiophiles.
  - gizmo686 5y ago
    At that level of paranoia, a special Ethernet switch may be an improvement. I still don't see the benefit over using an optical cable.

globular-toast 5y ago

You should see how much money people in the car enthusiast community spend on "pointless" stuff. What is it about audiophiles in particular that attracts so much ridicule? It's their money, what would you rather they spent it on?

deleted 5y ago
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rrdharan 5y ago
Same reason flat earthers are so irksome - because they cloak themselves in the language of science (physics and optics for flat earthers; signal theory and electrical engineering for audiophile quacks).
spookthesunset 5y ago
> It's their money, what would you rather they spent it on? Honestly because in many cases the people that blow their money on this stuff are people like our parents. This stuff is a scam that sucks in good people who aren't the most financially responsible. They rack up a ton of debt on their credit cards thinking they are buying good stuff. And it screws them over and causes grief in the family. I mean yes, everybody in the room is an adult, but the fallout from a family member who is stupidly spending their retirement money on crap like this affects everybody else.
xbar 5y ago
As electronics engineers and experts, many of us take issue with fraudulent claims in electronics. Audiophile-market electronics seem to show up as fraudulent more than many others. It has nothing to do with the audiophiles.

deleted 5y ago

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daenz 5y ago

Are audiophiles similar to wine tasters? My understanding is that wine tasters cannot reliably pick an expensive wine by taste alone. Is audio similar to this or is there merit to it?

dmitriid 5y ago
There's merit, but only to a point beyond which only magic and unicorns can explain the belief.
zaphod12 5y ago
The study that pushed that thought about wine tasting was looking at amateur enthusiasts, not professionals. The top folks can identify, in all common cases, the vineyard that a wine has come from. Some aspects of this are surprisingly straightforward to learn. Smell is an incredibly powerful sense when you train it, but most of us don't. It is not pseudoscience, though you can have a pretty solid debate about whether it's truly a useful skill or not.
- zimpenfish 5y ago
  Haven't several blind taste tests been done with professional sommeliers where they've failed to pick the "good" wine against the "bad" reliably? Or they've been given the same wine several times and given it different ratings each time?
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Indeed, even failed to distinguish white from red.
acomjean 5y ago
I believe so. I remember when CDs first appeared, we used to makes tapes of them and then A/B test. With Dolby Noise Reduction(C) over speakers nobody could tell the difference and I had young ears back then. The quiet parts of Jazz or classical on newly recorded stuff through headphones there was less hiss, but for rock little difference. But they were always advertising new Xbit Digital to Audio conversions. Even my headphones had a "for digital" sticker on them (Sonys MDR-V6s and I don't think there was anything digital about them...) I think its about feeling you have something special. Of course now we've come full circle and records are the new best sounding thing.. I remember having to clean them and hearing pops and skips... but here we are. but I'm old and my ears are happy with mp3s....

richrichardsson 5y ago

Audiophiles are a strange bunch. Some of them believe drawing around the edge of a CD with a special pen (not just any marker will do you know!) will improve the sound [1]. It's a laughably stupid premise. [1] http://www.audioreview.com/product/accessories/others/audio-prism/cd-stop-light.html http://www.audioreview.com/product/accessories/others/audio-...

yaantc 5y ago
To me, it seems like an "analog" cargo cult thing. A lot of audiophiles simply don't get the digital transition. In the old times, the musical signal was analog and any impairment was a degradation. Audiophiles went to great length to avoid this. And they keep on applying this approach to the digital part of a modern system, in completely useless ways. For example, here, it seems they use a marker to prevent light to leak from the side of the CD. I guess it's a misguided way to try to increase the SNR of the laser detector while reading the disc. What they don't get is that the digital part of the system doesn't carry a musical signal. It's information, that is used to reconstruct a musical signal at the DAC. And this information is very robust. As long as it can be reconstructed error free, SNR and the like do not matter. As long as it arrives on time at the DAC (I'm simplifying a bit, but it's easy to get the idea) any previous jitter is irrelevant. If you're an audiophile, keep on caring about the DAC and the analog chain after it. And don't bother too much about the digital part, it's not audio it's IT!
iso1210 5y ago
To be fair I did this with ink opaque in the infrared spectrum all over a Justin Bieber CD and the sound was massively improved.

quercusa 5y ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29557688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29557688

jakobov 5y ago

Ha ha ha.. it's tcp so Ethernet is irrelevant. Total scam

yawnxyz 5y ago

I'm so confused by expensive gear like this, or gold-plated connectors etc — what's the actual TAM for customers like this that it's worth putting a product like this out there? I can't imagine there are more than.... 50 audiophiles out there that would pay for something like this. Or am I wildly off?

tw04 5y ago
You're wildly off. There are billions of people on this planet, there are 10s of thousands of audiophiles who have more money than common sense. https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/ https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/
FireBeyond 5y ago
A music lover buys hifi equipment so as to listen to their music collection. An audiophile buys music so as to listen to their hifi equipment.

moedersmooiste 5y ago

Some people around me are wine enthusiasts. I once put a label from an expensive wine on a cheap bottle of wine. That was a fun little experiment that works with switches as well...

Tempest1981 5y ago

Maybe it delays the bits more uniformly. That would be harder to reason about.

qrohlf 5y ago

This particular rabbit-hole of irrationality goes deep; some audiophiles go as far as to have a private power grid connection to improve the "quality" of their music (paywalled WSJ link): https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-gift-for-music-lovers-who-have-it-all-a-personal-utility-pole-1471189463 https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-gift-for-music-lovers-who-hav...

api 5y ago
I wonder how much of this crap is just conspicuous consumption. Its pointlessness might be the point.

mortenjorck 5y ago

I used to find these things funny, but now I wonder if the woo-tier audiophile brands aren't taking advantage of mental illness. There's a certain ingrained assumption that the customers for these products are all "rich idiots," and many of them may well fit that archetype, but even so, the line between "can hear the difference between ethernet switches" and "affected by proximity to batteries" feels uncomfortably fuzzy to me.

cf100clunk 5y ago
The P.T. Barnum approach will always be with us. There's a speaker born every minute.
spookthesunset 5y ago
> rich idiots I don't think that is their market. Their market is elderly retired people who don't really know any better. They'll use credit cards to pay for all this and it really messes with family dynamics. At least this is my experience.
- iso1210 5y ago
  > really messes with family dynamics Spending the inheritance?
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    Spending their fixed retirement income and racking up debt. Folks who are teetering on the edge of needing their kids to get financial power of attorney.
    - lostcolony 5y ago
      Let's say it actually worked though. I.e., it was just production level audio equipment, rather than woo. Does that make it okay for them to sell it to those on a fixed income? Not defending it, just seems weird to decry it for taking money away from people who can't afford it, when the whole positioning is "makes audio sound better". Decry it simply for the fact it doesn't work, not that people who can't afford it spend money on it.

emptybottle 5y ago

Finally I’ll be able to get audiophile sound when I stream 96k mp3s over the network /s

analog31 5y ago

I have a wild hypothesis about these super expensive audio gadgets: Sure, they're made to be sold, but they also enable the sales of less expensive but still hyperbolic gadgets. I've seen reactions to these devices along the following lines: "I can't believe that a $2500 power cable can possibly produce a benefit, so I went with the $500 power cable instead." Bingo, you just paid $490 more than necessary because the $2500 item created an aspiration in your imagination.

RedShift1 5y ago
That's price strategy to make you feel like you've done a good deal and it's absolutely a thing, it happens all the time.
clairity 5y ago
that’s not a wild hypothesis, but a commonly used pricing tactic: anchoring. apple does it all the time with the ‘good, better, best’ framing of their product tiers. the ‘best’ tier is to extract surplus from the price insensitive, but also to make the pricing of the ‘better’ tier seem reasonable. the ‘good’ tier is there to capture the price sensitive, and also uses anchoring on the top two tiers to seem reasonable (it’s also highly marked up, but just not quite as much). the trio of prices are usually bunched around the desired average sales price (asp) for the product, and that set of prices work together to create the anchoring effect. anchoring is used everywhere, from bleach to handbags to wine to cars and everything else.
- klodolph 5y ago
  The "best" tier is also for people who need 64 GB of RAM just to build things, FWIW. Just to pick laptops as an example. I've worked at companies where the build times were long and required gobs of RAM.
  - clairity 5y ago
    yes, that's price segmentation working as intended. companies (i.e., the price insensitive) can afford to spend an extra $1k, even if the markup is otherwise outrageous. it just doesn't matter relative to the long-run productivity gains it affords. that's also why mac pros are in the $10k range, with wheels that cost $500, because that's a drop in the bucket for editing shops relative to the productivity it affords.

marcodiego 5y ago

Analysis of rocks (like stones, not the rolling ones) for audiophiles: http://www.adventuresinhifiaudio.com/26/01/2018/audiophile-r http://www.adventuresinhifiaudio.com/26/01/2018/audiophile-r... "This wasn't a subtle improvement and yet I did a fair few Volcano on, Volcano off comparisons before I could really accept what I was hearing. In all honesty despite hearing the positive effects the Vibradome Blue star had made to my other system I was still shocked and surprised this item could make such a difference by just sitting on the amps case. Its not heavy enough to damp it and yet it was making a difference and a positive one; frankly I don't know how."

mrmattyboy 5y ago

I am wrong in thinking that ethernet is opto-isolated? If that assumption is correct, I assume this negates any electrical effects that a switch could have on interference (ignoring UTP differential pairs and assuming that this is never an issue anyway)? And I assume this switch isn't doing some absolutely insane decoding of some common unencrypted audio protocols to 'improve' audio in any way. As everyone else has already said... what an insane money-grabbing audiophile-abusing product :D

mindslight 5y ago
Base-T ethernet is magnetically isolated (transformers), not optically isolated. AFAIK those transformers are generally good for on the order of a few thousand volts of isolation. So they'll fix common ground loops, but I wouldn't rely on them to protect against worst case lightning strikes. For that you want fiber (eg 1000Base-SX), which is intrinsically opto isolated. And yes, most anything from the "audiophile" world on the digital side is hokum - the entire point of digital technology is all-or-nothing error correction. At least it's easy to ignore, unlike having to sift through all the harder-to-falsify hokum in reviews when shopping for analog gear.
- mrmattyboy 5y ago
  Ah! Thank you for that :) I will have a read - I wonder what interface I was thinking of ¯\_(⊙︿⊙)_/¯ > And yes, most anything from the "audiophile" world on the digital side is hokum - the entire point of digital technology is all-or-nothing error correction. At least it's easy to ignore, unlike having to sift through all the harder-to-falsify hokum in reviews when shopping for analog gear. Haha yeah, indeed! :)
lylecheatham 5y ago
Ethernet usually has magnetic isolation through tiny transformers (oftentimes included inside the ethernet PHY IC) to avoid any issues with different ground potentials and such.
- mrmattyboy 5y ago

MertsA 5y ago

These charlatans sell a $10,000 "Active Ground Block" complete with a 5 day long burn in process. https://www.synergisticresearch.com/power/accessories/galileo-sx-ground-block/ https://www.synergisticresearch.com/power/accessories/galile... Just when I think I've seen the peak of Audiophile stupidity some "entrepreneur" comes along and raises the bar yet again. This isn't even an isolated grounding system, it's just tying a piddly little ground bar to the regular electrical ground through the power cord through some B.S. filters that have no chance of doing anything even remotely useful. I'm amazed that no one involved is being prosecuted for fraud. How is such a substantial chunk of people delusional enough to fall for all this HiFi garbage? It's like finding someone in their 40s who still believes Santa Claus is real. No, your analog Rube Goldberg sound system does not sound better than a half-decent DAC playing an MP3 on $30 headphones, you're just incapable of rational thought.

xwdv 5y ago
Often times when people reach the endgame of a hobby the desire to spend more money still lingers. You can make good money selling high priced niche products to these people to satisfy their craving.
BeFlatXIII 5y ago
There are audible differences between HiFi equipment and $30 headphones. Once you get above $300 headphones, that's when it's mostly marketing woo.
- klodolph 5y ago
  It's not mostly marketing woo. Diminishing returns, yes. Marketing woo, no. When I make a song, I spend a lot of time listening for specific, subtle changes. Like I might be adjusting the EQ of a rhythm guitar in a mix by a couple dB, and trying to balance it with the hi hats. Making those kinds of decisions in a full mix, you'll notice lots of deficiencies in headphones that are supposedly high-quality reference headphones. If you look at measured frequency response for headphones, even high end headphones, you'll see that the frequency response curves can really be all over the place. That's not even considering transient response (where you'd want to look at a waterfall graph). IMO, headphone amps and DACs are where the real marketing woo is.

RedShift1 5y ago

Can someone buy this, open it up and make a video about it? I'm willing to bet money it just has a bog standard Broadcom Ethernet switch chip inside.

yosito 5y ago
Sounds like you just volunteered youself to make a video.
- RedShift1 5y ago
  I don't have 2500 USD for this, sorry...

CountDrewku 5y ago

Just set up a nice sound system and run records or CD's. If you're that into audio, then streaming is still a joke.

Tepix 5y ago

We need more blind A/B tests to unmask this nonsense. c't magazine did one a long time ago comparing audio codecs, back then in 2000 they had the result that 256kbit/s MP3 sometimes sounded better than the original. https://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/Kreuzverhoertest-287592.html https://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/Kreuzverhoertest-287592.html Unfortunately these tests are expensive to do and there is little money in unveiling that a product is not worth the money.

floatingatoll 5y ago

I don’t see any mention of blind subjective A/B testing in this article, which makes me wonder whether TH is familiar with reviewing audio gear. The only sensible rule of audio gear “is this an upgrade in quality” testing of components upstream of speakers and headphones, is that you have to do a blind test with an A/B switch provided to the listener and ask them to decide which sounds better. No such testing is done with this gear, so it’s impossible to support a statement about whether it’s better or worse. And the details of that test setup would be awesome reading, if they did it. It’s probably not better, but let’s prove it. Come on, Toms.

marstall 5y ago

Digital "jitter" is actually a thing that can measurably degrade quality. The DAC clock and the source clock need to be in perfect sync or else the quality of each sample will effectively degrade. Higher end CD transports have a "clock link" that lets you sync their data stream with an outboard DAC. Gets harder with audiophile-level sample rates (24 bit, 192Khz). https://www.thewelltemperedcomputer.com/KB/BitPerfectJitter.htm https://www.thewelltemperedcomputer.com/KB/BitPerfectJitter.... https://blog.teufelaudio.com/jitter/ https://blog.teufelaudio.com/jitter/

olyjohn 5y ago
And so what's this have to do with the Ethernet switch? Surely that's the last place you'll encounter errors, is in your own house, on your own hardware that's barely got any traffic running through it. After the audio file has been transmitted through loads of Ethernet switches, routers, fiber, over the public internet, into your shitty ISP, over some old crappy copper lines into your cheap-ass modem... some how the switch in your house is going to make corrections to the data packets and ensure they all get there... give me a break.
- deleted 5y ago
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- marstall 5y ago
  The issue with jitter is about timing. Remember the endpoint of all of this is a DAC which isn't generally a buffered component - so it needs to process samples in real time. If a packet arrives from the switch a bit late, the DAC doesn't have any leeway to catch up. Jitter makes a measurable difference, even with Ethernet switches - and you'll see those numbers touted by manufacturers (ex: https://nuprimeaudio.com/product/omnia-sw-8/?v=7516fd43adaa https://nuprimeaudio.com/product/omnia-sw-8/?v=7516fd43adaa)
  - klodolph 5y ago
    DACs are often buffered. If you're transporting audio over Ethernet, the packet will contain some number of samples. Those samples have to be buffered. (For example, you might send 128 or 256 samples over Ethernet... obviously, the samples inside the packet are actually getting transmitted as a whole packet, buffered, and then sent to the DAC afterwards.) On top of that, you can synchronize the DAC clock to the clock recovered from the digital signal. For example, I routinely record data (and monitor) from an S/PDIF link. The standard way this works involves clock recovery with a PLL. That way, you only need a stable clock on the DAC--as long as the digital source remains within tolerances, it's fine. Even though S/PDIF transmits digital audio one sample at a time at a fixed rate, you don't need to worry much about jitter. We know it works this way because you can configure the gear to use internal or external synchronization. If you try recording S/PDIF with an internal clock, you get clicks and pops.

yumraj 5y ago

The audio market gets mocked all the time, for good reasons such as this. So, I’m going to draw a parallel with another market which I believe is very similar, IMHO of course, and that is the Espresso market. There are grinders and machines for several $1000s and I’ve been curious if people are indeed able to tell the difference or is it just that it has become a passion/hobby for many.

zimpenfish 5y ago
James Hoffman on the YouTubes has a good channel about this where he sometimes does blind taste tests and can pretty reliably tell the good grinder / machine from the bad ones but he is a self-declared "weird coffee person" who basically spends his life brewing coffee etc. (e.g. founded a pretty respectable coffee roasting company in the UK.) https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMb0O2CdPBNi-QqPk5T3gsQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMb0O2CdPBNi-QqPk5T3gsQ
mjgoeke 5y ago
I can’t speak for the entire spectrum available. But I have two data points and am shocked at the difference, since I expect none. At home I have a rancilio rocky grinder, bought used, newly replaced burrs. It’s “stepped” so I don’t have much fine tuned flexibility - I’m basically choosing between only two or three steps for espresso. My friend has a Pharos manual grinder. I’ve come over to help his wife adjust the grind several times. I bring the same beans I’ve been using that week as a reference point. I’m always shocked how much better theirs tastes - even far-out-of-optimal shots - ones that are very fast or very slow. On my machine the unpleasant overextracted flavors creep in quickly. I chalk it up to consistency of the grind - and that’s observable. You can pinch grinds up and “smear” them across a white sheet of paper to observe size, and to a lesser extent, variability. I’m still surprised that the grinder affects the espresso more than the espresso machine. Note: the Pharos is a beast and I don’t recommend it unless you like armwrestling as part of you coffee prep every time.

karmakaze 5y ago

Psychoacoustics. It works if you think it works, like placebo (though that works even if you know it doesn't). Just don't double-blind test it--you'll regret it.

bartimus 5y ago

Though what's also ridiculous is how we still didn't manage to have a proper non-proprietary TCP/IP (Or UDP?) A/V protocol where you can just stream anything anywhere. What seems particularly tricky is to achieve perfectly synced streams where you could theoretically stream left/right channels of a stereo signal to different devices (of different brands). Each device would need to report back their effective latencies (including buffers) so that some sort of central controller can orchestrate everything perfectly. Either that or attempt to achieve extreme negligible stable latencies that approach analog accuracy. Please correct me if I'm wrong. I would love to hear the details.

an-unknown 5y ago
If you were thinking about e.g. Dante for proprietary protocols, then of course there are non-proprietary protocols too, like e.g. AES67. Alternatively, if you prefer a protocol at a lower level / without IP, then AVB/TSN is another standardized protocol suite. However, AVB/TSN usually requires special hardware support in the network interface cards and switches to assist with QoS and to meet the timing guarantees.
- bartimus 5y ago
  Thanks, very interesting. I'll be looking into those protocols. Though I suspect these will not allow me to send some A/V stream from my desktop to my phone. Or from my phone to my receiver. Basically a protocol that allows anyone to just send anything from anywhere to any A/V device attached to the network. With regard to AVB/TSN and specialized hardware. Would the $2500 switch from OP's article provide any benefits here?

Brian_K_White 5y ago

http://tandy.wiki/Audiophile_Pricetag http://tandy.wiki/Audiophile_Pricetag