8 ms·

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 DAC

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)

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)