More 'Audiophile' bullsh*t

[Riff Raff]

FurtiveFreddy said:

This turntable dust cover for a mere £450:

To be fair to them, it can cost a bit of money to have a bespoke cover made.

From memory the one I had made for my SME turntable cost about £150 a decade ago, and I dealt directly with the firm that made it for me. If you buy from a dealer, they normally buy from a wholesaler, and the wholesaler buys from the manufacturer. They all add on a big mark up, as you are dealing with an extremely low sales volume product.

[jmorgan]

What is wrong with the box they come in? Cut the cardboard flaps off and turn it upside down.

[THX]

davepoth said:

THX said:

I recently put my sixty quid Sony in-ears through the wash, killing them (they'd actually survived a couple of previous washes)

So now I'm having to make do with my forty quid Sony's.

In all honesty, the difference is... Actually massive. The cheaper pair sound ste; same volume but screams at you, no clarity, poor bass response.

Just to offer some balance to this thread. I'm a big fan of putting down audio snobs, but when it comes to inner-ear headphones, there's a real difference.

Oh and BTW... My sixty quid Sony's sounded a st ton better than my £300 Shure's. Which currently reside in a box under the spare bed. Waste of money.

Hang on though. The £60 were better than the £40 ones, but the £300 ones are terrible? How does that prove anything?

The Hi Fi in my car was wired up with the mains cable from a Flymo.

Proves nothing. Feel free to ignore, I think I lost whatever point I was trying to make somewhere near "So now I'm having..."

[NDA]

swisstoni said:

During the 90's I confess to reading far too many HiFi mags.
I almost can't believe it, in retrospect, but I once stuck a load of sticky black triangles on various components because some bloke in a mag said it made a difference!

I used to work for those hifi mags... 3 of them in fact! We used to spend hours testing various bits of kit and listening intently to various nuances between arms, cartridges, tweeters, cabling, plugs, grades of oil in LP12's....

[robbyd]

and?

[Cobnapint]

NinjaPower said:

S6PNJ said:

Whilst looking for some headphones, I came across a website offering a 13A fuse for a standard plug - only £59.99! I'll take a dozen and do the whole house! http://www.analogueseduction.net/category-699/syne... and they use quantum tunnelling!

That is absolutely fking hilarious!

I wonder if they have ever sold any??

'RED fuses are then treated with 2,000,000 volts of electricity....'

...as opposed to two million volts of what, exactly..?

Brilliant.

[NDA]

robbyd said:

and?

Nothing really - other than reading this thread prodded my rusty memory.

These days I doubt I could hear the difference between a live band in my living room and an MP3 playing through Sonos - such is the appalling tinnitus I have to hear through. But, back in the day, I would listen for the sound of a percussionist breathing, present with a moving coil, not present with a moving magnet etc etc. I was pretty hooked.

[JonVTR]

FurtiveFreddy said:

Please someone tell me that website is a piss take!

Apart from the fuses, they're offering:
"Cable burn-in service" - they connect your interconnect cables to a magic box for a few days and charge you £34.25.
10ml of electrical contact cleaner for £19.95
This turntable dust cover for a mere £450:

http://www.analogueseduction.net/audioquest-speaker-cables/audioquest-ke-4-factory-terminated-speaker-cable.html

£23,120.00 for 10m of speaker cable...


I think I'll leave the Porsche.

[swisstoni]

NDA said:

swisstoni said:

During the 90's I confess to reading far too many HiFi mags.
I almost can't believe it, in retrospect, but I once stuck a load of sticky black triangles on various components because some bloke in a mag said it made a difference!

I used to work for those hifi mags... 3 of them in fact! We used to spend hours testing various bits of kit and listening intently to various nuances between arms, cartridges, tweeters, cabling, plugs, grades of oil in LP12's....

Well, it kept us all busy didn't it.
I'm sure you'd agree that although all the nonsense will not be missed, people rarely even hear good sound nowadays which is a bit of a pity.

[Bullett]

JonVTR said:

http://www.analogueseduction.net/audioquest-speake...

£23,120.00 for 10m of speaker cable...


I think I'll leave the Porsche.

All that money and it doesn't even come burnt in.

[TonyRPH]

Cobnapint said:

NinjaPower said:

S6PNJ said:

Whilst looking for some headphones, I came across a website offering a 13A fuse for a standard plug - only £59.99! I'll take a dozen and do the whole house! http://www.analogueseduction.net/category-699/syne... and they use quantum tunnelling!

That is absolutely fking hilarious!

I wonder if they have ever sold any??

'RED fuses are then treated with 2,000,000 volts of electricity....'

...as opposed to two million volts of what, exactly..?

Brilliant.

That's just a joke - bullst in fact.

I used to fix old CRT televisions, and even 2kV (2000v) would produce a healty 1cm arc.

The actual CRT (tube) was energised with 26kV - and that would easily jump and inch or more.

But 2 million volts??? That would destroy the fuse and everything in close proximity (unless it was in a very, very well insulated container).

And also "Synergistic Research RED Fuses feature proprietary alloy burn wires and end caps"

Alloy? Hopefully they don't mean aluminium alloy, because aluminium is a very poor conductor.

Do people really buy into this stuff?

[RobDickinson]

An van ge graaff can generate a lot of volts but not much ampage which is what a fuse is designed to blow with.

Still totally stupid but you could push 2 million volts through a 13A fuse and do no harm.

[Esseesse]

RobDickinson said:

An van ge graaff can generate a lot of volts but not much ampage which is what a fuse is designed to blow with.

Still totally stupid but you could push 2 million volts through a 13A fuse and do no harm.

Current

[TonyRPH]

Esseesse said:

RobDickinson said:

An van ge graaff can generate a lot of volts but not much ampage which is what a fuse is designed to blow with.

Still totally stupid but you could push 2 million volts through a 13A fuse and do no harm.

Current

Or amperage (although technically current is the correct term). Probably just a typo I suspect.

However - even at very low currents, that's still a lot of volts!

The TV stuff I was referring to was also in the order of mA (might have even been uA I forget) - not enough to kill anyway - I know, because I have been on the recieving end of 26kV on more than one occasion, resulting in minor burns (usually fingertips).

I even managed to get a steel pen ejected from my shirt pocket once, but that's another story.

[probedb]

TonyRPH said:

Do people really buy into this stuff?

Yes. If you want to make money, "audiophiles" with cash to burn are the easiest ones to take it from

[anonymous-user]

NDA said:

These days I doubt I could hear the difference between a live band in my living room and an MP3 playing through Sonos - such is the appalling tinnitus I have to hear through.

Was the tinnitus as a result of years of listening at volume or just something else?

[EggsBenedict]

Crackie said:

Troubleatmill said:

You can buy 1st gen copies of studio masters. Each tape is eye wateringly expensive though.
I cannot afford it.

But ... and this was my point ( and maybe I didn't make it well - a couple of bottles of red were in play.)

The sound quality is in a completely different league. ( being played on studio machines )

I immediately stopped spending on hifi once I heard it.

Regarding master tape being in a different league, I have little experience here. 25 years ago the press seemed to think high end vinyl was very close to master tape, and there may have been small improvements since then. There was a turntable group test in Feb 1990's Hi-Fi Choice; the test used master tapes from Altarus Records evaluate the performance of various players. The article, by Richard Black, concluded that the two best decks in the test ( Pink Triangle PT TOO with SME V & Townsend Rock Reference with Excaliber arm ) were extremely close to the master tape. The cartridge used for the test was far from state of the art; it was a mid range £100.00 Audio Technica AT-F5 moving coil. Still have the magazine.

Various newcomers such as Voyd, SME and Avid have appeared to improve things further in the last 25 years. The debate about whether or not CD sounds better than vinyl has been done to death already but there appears to be little to choose between them.

Edited by Crackie on Sunday 23 March 10:07

.... and this is the whole essence of the Hi-Fi debate. The phrase Hi-Fi is short for High Fidelity - so Hi-Fi should be a highly faithful reproduction of the source. Any system that puts something there that wasn't in the source, or emphasises any part of it at the expense of another is undesirable, hence that 'minimal path' philosophy that meant the death of tone controls on amplifiers (or at least 'good' ones) - essentially the more circuitry you had in the box, the more chance of introducing some taint or distortion.

However, there's the rub - how did the source sound, and how do you know how close you are to it? Well, you don't have the source, so everyone just relies on it 'sounding better'. I suppose the closest you could get is attending some concert where a recording was being made, and then listening to that recording via your HiFi. Even then - it's never going to be the same - being there watching live with thousands of others conjures a much different emotional repsonse to music than sitting in a room with the stereo on.

[gizlaroc]

And every hifi brand puts there on sonic signature on kit, if they didn't why would you buy theirs and not someone elses?


Hifi is finding kit you enjoy listening too.



Of course there is more they can do to get more info off the source, and loads can be done to clean up digital files, but they still put their sound on hardware.

[Mermaid]

gizlaroc said:

And every hifi brand puts there on sonic signature on kit, if they didn't why would you buy theirs and not someone elses?


Hifi is finding kit you enjoy listening too.

All DAC's are not equal - the most expensive ones are not necessarily the best sound and some cheap ones really surprise to the upside. Age is also a factor.

[EggsBenedict]

....and back on the case on whether something is bull or not, here's the ASA on Russ Andrews stuff:

http://www.asa.org.uk/Rulings/Adjudications/2014/1...

Basically says that the leads *do* reduce mains inteference (or at least 'appear' to), but make it very clear that this may not be audible (and they don't claim that it does) in a home hi-fi environment.

So basically, why buy them then?

ETA: URL for a GBP1K plus length of wire with a plug on the end.

Edited by EggsBenedict on Monday 6th October 13:30