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The shops know this. High-end hifi is full of grift. It literally relies on people with more money than sense who can be persuaded to spend a fortune on compone

The shops know this. High-end hifi is full of grift. It literally relies on people with more money than sense who can be persuaded to spend a fortune on components and extras that either make no difference to the sound or make it objectively less accurate. Which is why you get nonsense like directional cables, cable supports to keep cables off the floor, cables with magic insulation, magic rocks that go on top of components, magic knobs, magic creams, "quantum" anything, grounding boxes full of pebbles that don't ground anything, and so on. Also, most of the people who can afford this hobby are rich old boomers who often can't hear much above 7k on a good day.

m3kw9 3y ago
To be slightly fair it’s like food, make it look better and it tastes better, but this dials it to 11
kibwen 3y ago
> High-end hifi is full of grift. It literally relies on people with more money than sense who can be persuaded to spend a fortune on components and extras that either make no difference to the sound or make it objectively less accurate. Replace "hifi" with any other product and the sentiment remains the same. High-end houses, high-end cars, high-end clothes, high-end food, high-end technology... the ostensible quality of the product is entirely divorced from the price, because the actual product isn't the speaker or the handbag or the smartphone or etc; the real product is social signaling via conspicuous consumption.
- rdlw 3y ago
  To be fair, with most of those, you're paying for a piece of art to some extent. I don't think anyone buying $500 cables thinks the cables themselves are worth that, they're buying them because they expect some tiny increase in sound quality which measurably and provably doesn't exist. Someone buying a $10k sweater isn't buying it for the engineering in the material, but for the perceived artistic value. Of course, there's also a grift involved here, where fashion brands can pass things off as having great artistic value just because they're associated with the brand. But at least the perceived value is subjective and not coming from something that can be measured not to exist.
ansible 3y ago
I had previously toyed with the idea of marketing "organic" audiophile speaker cables. The ad copy would have been that the cables were harvested from veins of copper dragons that lived in faraway mountains. That the sound would be warmer and richer than ordinary, industrially produced artificial speaker cables, which tend to sound harsh.
ErneX 3y ago
And "audiophile" network switches that are rebranded tp-links
LastNevadan 3y ago
I remember being an electronics store once and seeing some cables intended for audio that described themselves as being "low oxygen" cables. My god, the nonsense that people fall for!
- faustin 3y ago
  Out of all the ridiculous things, this one is actually not completely ridiculous. For low temperature physics applications, Oxygen-Free High Conductivity (OFHC) Copper is the only material that is sufficiently thermally conductive at low temperatures. I’m not an audio person, but I have a hard time imagining it would make much of a difference at room temperature; maybe similar performance with a slightly thinner cable?
  - behringer 3y ago
    My walk in freezer sounds amazing though
  - userbinator 3y ago
    Avoiding corrosion may be another benefit, although I'm not sure how much effect it has in practice compared to regular non-oxygen-free copper.
    - 20after4 3y ago
      Finely stranded, tinned copper marine wire would be the ideal for corrosion resistance.
PaulHoule 3y ago
It's bad enough that some audiophiles make it a point to not talk about being an audiophile because they don't want to be the associated with that foolishness.
ThinkingGuy 3y ago
I had a friend in college who worked part-time at a shop that sold and installed audiophile gear. He was a music engineering major, so he was aware of how much of what they sold was snake oil. Example: a 3-foot RCA cable that sold for several thousand dollars. The jacks were gold-plated. Not just with ordinary gold, but "special" gold. From a particular mine in South Africa. He told me once "If I ever sell that cable, I don't know how I'll live with myself." One time he and another guy had just completed an installation in a very wealthy customer's home. Hundreds of thousands of dollars on an ultra-high-end amplifier, CD player, speakers, etc. He started playing one of the customer's CDs on the systems. The customer went on and on, lavishing praise at how "warm" and "crisp" his music sounded on the new system. Suddenly my friend's co-worker leaned over and whispered, "Do you hear that?..." My friend knew exactly what he was referring to: they had accidently wired the speakers out of phase.
- seanhunter 3y ago
  My favourite variant of this is high-end digital audio cables.[1] Presumably the ones are really spiky and the zeros are really round when you use such a cable. [1] yes this really does actually exist as a thing.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    If USB-C has taught me anything it’s that higher signal integrity in more expensive cables is actually really a thing. I have usb-c devices which are so temperamental (razer kiyo pro) that they won’t run stable without actual thunderbolt cables. Even high-end fasgear 10gbps/100w cables aren’t good enough signal integrity or the camera will eventually freeze and crash. The extra thunderbolt shielding/better termination really does make a difference even if the pairs are not being used. Hdmi and DP cables also have a range of shielding and termination quality, and pushing more data through them will show the difference, especially in longer lengths that are at the limit of the spec. Everything looks good when you are only doing 1080p30, try doing 2160p120 on a tv or UWQHD 160 hz on a pc, with a max-length (2m) cable and tell me every cable is just as good. Even every DisplayPort 1.4 cable or hdmi 2.1 cable is not “as good” let alone a rando lower-tier cable with the older shielding. Oculink folks know damn well that not every cable is just as good either. Copper oculink cables are a fucking mess. I’m not saying Monster wasn’t ripping you off for some gold-plated connectors, especially back in 2000 when hdmi stated with 1.x in the name. But the reality is that if nothing else we have manifested the world where digital cable quality matters. And really the “hurr durr digital signals” thing has always been a little bit of an oversimplification, even as someone who’s said it before too. There isn’t a correlation with price in the high end, going from a $30 cable to a $150 cable doesn’t get you anything, but going from a $5 cable to a $30 cable you certainly do get better shielded cable and better termination if nothing else, and yes, it does make a difference when you are actually pushing the spec to the limit. You will definitely find out that not even all 10gbps usb-c or hdmi 2.1 UHBR cables are created equal let alone ye olde hdmi 1.3 bullshit cable.
bluescrn 3y ago
The age factor is so real. Once you're in your 40s, there's just no point, your ears are probably the limiting factor. The positive is that you can just embrace the convenience of 'good enough' compressed audio and wireless headphones.
- schrijver 3y ago
  Not so sure about that, mixing engineers have to do very precise manipulation of sound and there’s plenty of them working well into their 40ies and beyond. While of course aspects of your hearing deteriorate, it should still be pretty simple to pick out the artefacts of compressed audio if you’ve gotten attuned to them at a younger age… At least for heavier compression, something like a 320kbps MP3 or 256 AAC is hard to distinguish from lossless but that’s also true for young folks.
- Baeocystin 3y ago
  When I was a kid, the whine of CRTs was genuinely annoying, and those 'keep pests away' things hurt when they went off. I was looking forward to not having to experience that as I got older. Now that I'm middle-aged, I can tell there's a little loss around the vocal frequencies... but damn if those old tubes and pest devices aren't as annoying as ever. Ears are weird.
  - dekhn 3y ago
    I had a magic skill when I was in high school: I could walk into any computer lab and tell you exactly which monitors were on (when the computer was off). I believe this is around 15K. it looks my hearing drops off between 13k (noticeably quiet compared to 12k) to 14k (can't hear it at all).
    - temp0826 3y ago
      Hah reminded me of when I was a kid walking into the living room with a few people around many times and turning off the TV (crt of course) that was just showing a black screen. It was so loud and obvious to me. Now all the TVs seem to have bizarre screensavers
seanhunter 3y ago
Yup. When I used to do studio recordings as a musician, most studios have A/B/C speakers for mixing. They have the nice speakers usually on concrete breeze blocks which is what you do your first mix on, and those are equivalent to entry-level-ish audiophile speakers but not super-expensive, then they have the B speakers which are a bit worse and then they have the depressing C speakers which represent what people usually have at home. Even super-expensive studios that will happily drop 10s of thousands on a valve preamp or Neumann mic don't use any kind of fancy cable or unobtanium plugs or anything. Just regular hard-wearing well-shielded audio/speaker/whatever[1] cables depending on application. [1] There are some differences based on whether the cable is going to carry just audio or audio+phantom power and also whether it's line level or speaker level or whatever it's called. It's been a while.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  And now they also mix it so it sounds good on earbuds and even phone speakers.
hedgehog 3y ago
My favorite from when I used to be around this stuff was a CD demagnetizer.
- joezydeco 3y ago
  Do you remember the green marker meme? https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bewaring-of-the-green/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bewaring-of-the-green/
  - lttlrck 3y ago
    It wasn't a meme, it was a real product. A matt green paint pen. In my foolishness I bought such a pen. It was a fun thing to try with friends for maybe £10. Freezing CDs was another one. We tried that too. We were probably mildly stoned for that. This was the early nineties. It was an interesting time in Hifi. 1-bits DACs and other fun marketing blurb. I listen to CDs almost daily, on the same amplifier I had back then. I still have the CD player but it needs a new laser and controller board. I laugh to myself every time I pull out a CD with a green edge. It's a lovely reminder of my young self and my friends in our late teens.
    - hedgehog 3y ago
      Ah yes, DirectStream Digital. I think the math behind that was solid but there wasn't really any point because PCM was totally sufficient. The company I was working for made AD and DA converters for recording studios and film so we were adjacent to all the insane HiFi stuff but didn't really interact with it. We did get bug reports that were real but effectively not visible, I learned a lot about debugging from watching my boss work on those.
drewcoo 3y ago
Wait, wait, wait! There's stereo cream? Do I apply it to the speakers or the walls or the listeners or what?
- ARandomerDude 3y ago
  Ears. Inside and out, just try not to get it in your hair.
willcipriano 3y ago
> magic creams Hifi hand lotion: Deep down you know spending this much for better audio is masturbatory, skip the middle man.

m3kw9 3y ago

To be slightly fair it’s like food, make it look better and it tastes better, but this dials it to 11

kibwen 3y ago

> High-end hifi is full of grift. It literally relies on people with more money than sense who can be persuaded to spend a fortune on components and extras that either make no difference to the sound or make it objectively less accurate. Replace "hifi" with any other product and the sentiment remains the same. High-end houses, high-end cars, high-end clothes, high-end food, high-end technology... the ostensible quality of the product is entirely divorced from the price, because the actual product isn't the speaker or the handbag or the smartphone or etc; the real product is social signaling via conspicuous consumption.

rdlw 3y ago
To be fair, with most of those, you're paying for a piece of art to some extent. I don't think anyone buying $500 cables thinks the cables themselves are worth that, they're buying them because they expect some tiny increase in sound quality which measurably and provably doesn't exist. Someone buying a $10k sweater isn't buying it for the engineering in the material, but for the perceived artistic value. Of course, there's also a grift involved here, where fashion brands can pass things off as having great artistic value just because they're associated with the brand. But at least the perceived value is subjective and not coming from something that can be measured not to exist.

ansible 3y ago

I had previously toyed with the idea of marketing "organic" audiophile speaker cables. The ad copy would have been that the cables were harvested from veins of copper dragons that lived in faraway mountains. That the sound would be warmer and richer than ordinary, industrially produced artificial speaker cables, which tend to sound harsh.

ErneX 3y ago

And "audiophile" network switches that are rebranded tp-links

LastNevadan 3y ago

I remember being an electronics store once and seeing some cables intended for audio that described themselves as being "low oxygen" cables. My god, the nonsense that people fall for!

faustin 3y ago
Out of all the ridiculous things, this one is actually not completely ridiculous. For low temperature physics applications, Oxygen-Free High Conductivity (OFHC) Copper is the only material that is sufficiently thermally conductive at low temperatures. I’m not an audio person, but I have a hard time imagining it would make much of a difference at room temperature; maybe similar performance with a slightly thinner cable?
- behringer 3y ago
  My walk in freezer sounds amazing though
- userbinator 3y ago
  Avoiding corrosion may be another benefit, although I'm not sure how much effect it has in practice compared to regular non-oxygen-free copper.
  - 20after4 3y ago
    Finely stranded, tinned copper marine wire would be the ideal for corrosion resistance.

PaulHoule 3y ago

It's bad enough that some audiophiles make it a point to not talk about being an audiophile because they don't want to be the associated with that foolishness.

ThinkingGuy 3y ago

I had a friend in college who worked part-time at a shop that sold and installed audiophile gear. He was a music engineering major, so he was aware of how much of what they sold was snake oil. Example: a 3-foot RCA cable that sold for several thousand dollars. The jacks were gold-plated. Not just with ordinary gold, but "special" gold. From a particular mine in South Africa. He told me once "If I ever sell that cable, I don't know how I'll live with myself." One time he and another guy had just completed an installation in a very wealthy customer's home. Hundreds of thousands of dollars on an ultra-high-end amplifier, CD player, speakers, etc. He started playing one of the customer's CDs on the systems. The customer went on and on, lavishing praise at how "warm" and "crisp" his music sounded on the new system. Suddenly my friend's co-worker leaned over and whispered, "Do you hear that?..." My friend knew exactly what he was referring to: they had accidently wired the speakers out of phase.

seanhunter 3y ago
My favourite variant of this is high-end digital audio cables.[1] Presumably the ones are really spiky and the zeros are really round when you use such a cable. [1] yes this really does actually exist as a thing.
- paulmd 3y ago
  If USB-C has taught me anything it’s that higher signal integrity in more expensive cables is actually really a thing. I have usb-c devices which are so temperamental (razer kiyo pro) that they won’t run stable without actual thunderbolt cables. Even high-end fasgear 10gbps/100w cables aren’t good enough signal integrity or the camera will eventually freeze and crash. The extra thunderbolt shielding/better termination really does make a difference even if the pairs are not being used. Hdmi and DP cables also have a range of shielding and termination quality, and pushing more data through them will show the difference, especially in longer lengths that are at the limit of the spec. Everything looks good when you are only doing 1080p30, try doing 2160p120 on a tv or UWQHD 160 hz on a pc, with a max-length (2m) cable and tell me every cable is just as good. Even every DisplayPort 1.4 cable or hdmi 2.1 cable is not “as good” let alone a rando lower-tier cable with the older shielding. Oculink folks know damn well that not every cable is just as good either. Copper oculink cables are a fucking mess. I’m not saying Monster wasn’t ripping you off for some gold-plated connectors, especially back in 2000 when hdmi stated with 1.x in the name. But the reality is that if nothing else we have manifested the world where digital cable quality matters. And really the “hurr durr digital signals” thing has always been a little bit of an oversimplification, even as someone who’s said it before too. There isn’t a correlation with price in the high end, going from a $30 cable to a $150 cable doesn’t get you anything, but going from a $5 cable to a $30 cable you certainly do get better shielded cable and better termination if nothing else, and yes, it does make a difference when you are actually pushing the spec to the limit. You will definitely find out that not even all 10gbps usb-c or hdmi 2.1 UHBR cables are created equal let alone ye olde hdmi 1.3 bullshit cable.

bluescrn 3y ago

The age factor is so real. Once you're in your 40s, there's just no point, your ears are probably the limiting factor. The positive is that you can just embrace the convenience of 'good enough' compressed audio and wireless headphones.

schrijver 3y ago
Not so sure about that, mixing engineers have to do very precise manipulation of sound and there’s plenty of them working well into their 40ies and beyond. While of course aspects of your hearing deteriorate, it should still be pretty simple to pick out the artefacts of compressed audio if you’ve gotten attuned to them at a younger age… At least for heavier compression, something like a 320kbps MP3 or 256 AAC is hard to distinguish from lossless but that’s also true for young folks.
Baeocystin 3y ago
When I was a kid, the whine of CRTs was genuinely annoying, and those 'keep pests away' things hurt when they went off. I was looking forward to not having to experience that as I got older. Now that I'm middle-aged, I can tell there's a little loss around the vocal frequencies... but damn if those old tubes and pest devices aren't as annoying as ever. Ears are weird.
- dekhn 3y ago
  I had a magic skill when I was in high school: I could walk into any computer lab and tell you exactly which monitors were on (when the computer was off). I believe this is around 15K. it looks my hearing drops off between 13k (noticeably quiet compared to 12k) to 14k (can't hear it at all).
  - temp0826 3y ago
    Hah reminded me of when I was a kid walking into the living room with a few people around many times and turning off the TV (crt of course) that was just showing a black screen. It was so loud and obvious to me. Now all the TVs seem to have bizarre screensavers

seanhunter 3y ago

Yup. When I used to do studio recordings as a musician, most studios have A/B/C speakers for mixing. They have the nice speakers usually on concrete breeze blocks which is what you do your first mix on, and those are equivalent to entry-level-ish audiophile speakers but not super-expensive, then they have the B speakers which are a bit worse and then they have the depressing C speakers which represent what people usually have at home. Even super-expensive studios that will happily drop 10s of thousands on a valve preamp or Neumann mic don't use any kind of fancy cable or unobtanium plugs or anything. Just regular hard-wearing well-shielded audio/speaker/whatever[1] cables depending on application. [1] There are some differences based on whether the cable is going to carry just audio or audio+phantom power and also whether it's line level or speaker level or whatever it's called. It's been a while.

SoftTalker 3y ago
And now they also mix it so it sounds good on earbuds and even phone speakers.

hedgehog 3y ago

My favorite from when I used to be around this stuff was a CD demagnetizer.

joezydeco 3y ago
Do you remember the green marker meme? https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bewaring-of-the-green/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bewaring-of-the-green/
- lttlrck 3y ago
  It wasn't a meme, it was a real product. A matt green paint pen. In my foolishness I bought such a pen. It was a fun thing to try with friends for maybe £10. Freezing CDs was another one. We tried that too. We were probably mildly stoned for that. This was the early nineties. It was an interesting time in Hifi. 1-bits DACs and other fun marketing blurb. I listen to CDs almost daily, on the same amplifier I had back then. I still have the CD player but it needs a new laser and controller board. I laugh to myself every time I pull out a CD with a green edge. It's a lovely reminder of my young self and my friends in our late teens.
  - hedgehog 3y ago
    Ah yes, DirectStream Digital. I think the math behind that was solid but there wasn't really any point because PCM was totally sufficient. The company I was working for made AD and DA converters for recording studios and film so we were adjacent to all the insane HiFi stuff but didn't really interact with it. We did get bug reports that were real but effectively not visible, I learned a lot about debugging from watching my boss work on those.

drewcoo 3y ago

Wait, wait, wait! There's stereo cream? Do I apply it to the speakers or the walls or the listeners or what?

ARandomerDude 3y ago
Ears. Inside and out, just try not to get it in your hair.

willcipriano 3y ago

> magic creams Hifi hand lotion: Deep down you know spending this much for better audio is masturbatory, skip the middle man.