But trial and error is not the only tool. So many of these audiophile scams fall apart with even the most basic knowledge. You don’t need to be an audio enginee

But trial and error is not the only tool. So many of these audiophile scams fall apart with even the most basic knowledge. You don’t need to be an audio engineer to understand that an expensive audiophile SATA cable won’t make your music sound any different. Analog components are less obvious, but it doesn’t take too much to know that speaker cable is a lot less important than the speakers, and special deoxygenated cables are a waste of money, or that there’s dozens or hundreds of miles of wire between your outlet and the power plant so spending a thousand dollars on a power cable for the last two feet is unwise. One problem is that they will try to convince other people to follow in their obvious nonsense. Convincing someone to spend a bunch of money on an Ethernet cable to make their sound better is victimizing them. It’s also just symptomatic of a general failure of critical thinking that can become properly dangerous. There’s little fundamental difference between “I swapped in an expensive USB cable and it sounded better so high end USB cable is worth it” and “my kid got his shots and then he got diagnosed with autism so vaccines caused it.”