More 'Audiophile' bullsh*t

[Zirconia]

ATG said:

Amateurs. Any fule kno that you can only be properly earthed if you make it into a sleeping bag or a onesie. Audiophile listening onesies with oxygen reduced silver braided earthing cables that you can conveniently attach to any earthing rod in the garden.

OT, sort of.


Earthing rods, blast from the past. Back in the day of party lines, summer always a problem resulting in noisy lines (dry earth, the ground not the potential) and the complainant would be told to get a buck of water and go chuck it over the earthing rod used as part of the system for a party line. Result. But, if we have to water our rods, Perrier or Tesco finest? Probably something with pure unobtanium blended in. Cant see tap water being expensive enough.

[bristolracer]

ATG said:

that you can conveniently attach to any earthing rod in the garden.

Far rather the garden than the earth of my ring main, especially when some piece of chinese made ste decides to fry and dump it's current to earth. Lightning strikes may also be somewhat invigorating

[Gary C]

Zirconia said:

ATG said:

Amateurs. Any fule kno that you can only be properly earthed if you make it into a sleeping bag or a onesie. Audiophile listening onesies with oxygen reduced silver braided earthing cables that you can conveniently attach to any earthing rod in the garden.

OT, sort of.


Earthing rods, blast from the past. Back in the day of party lines, summer always a problem resulting in noisy lines (dry earth, the ground not the potential) and the complainant would be told to get a buck of water and go chuck it over the earthing rod used as part of the system for a party line. Result. But, if we have to water our rods, Perrier or Tesco finest? Probably something with pure unobtanium blended in. Cant see tap water being expensive enough.

Would have to be heavy water surely ?

$680/litre, is that expensive enough ?

[Morningside]

I am thinking of listening to my music in bed with this. An earthing sheet.

https://rowlandearthing.co.uk

[rxe]

sociopath said:

Whatever next? Howabout an audiophile network router.

Yours for £999 from Russ "snakeoil" Andrews

Oh god, don't.

A friend of mine (lovely bloke, very intelligent) has a bit of a blind spot for this sort of stuff. He had the house required with "audiophile network cable" which uses (expensive) silver rather than copper, and was some fatuous price a metre. At the time, I was building data centres for a living, so I knew a little bit about networking and the OSI 7 layer model. I tried to explain to him that it was bks, but he was having none of it. The only bit that got through was that is was all plugged into a £50 Netgear hub .... how can his precious spatially orientated packets pass unscathed through a cheap bit of Chinese silicon?

He's probably bought a "audiophile network router"....

Your post has prompted me to look at Russ Andrews website ... .£25 for a 10 amp "superfuse". Cracking business....

Edited by rxe on Wednesday 13th May 11:07

[bristolracer]

To be fair some of his customers probably wonder about guys buying carbon fibre bits for their cars or getting their brake calipers painted.
Neither makes any difference but makes the owner feel better.
Whatever floats your boat or fool and money?

[Zirconia]

bristolracer said:

To be fair some of his customers probably wonder about guys buying carbon fibre bits for their cars or getting their brake calipers painted.
Neither makes any difference but makes the owner feel better.
Whatever floats your boat or fool and money?

I used to buy chromed oil filters. No gain whatsoever from it and I knew it. I didn't drive around thinking I had an extra 3hp or it was any cooler or more efficient. It was just another colour.


Edit. Thinking about it, the filters were more expensive but in the order of a few quid. Not £££

Edited by Zirconia on Wednesday 13th May 15:09

[Bullett]

A carbon fibre whatever will be lighter though, right?

Of course the fact that a heavy lucnch cancels that out is irrelevant it is actually provable/measurable.

[rxe]

bristolracer said:

To be fair some of his customers probably wonder about guys buying carbon fibre bits for their cars or getting their brake calipers painted.
Neither makes any difference but makes the owner feel better.
Whatever floats your boat or fool and money?

I've had my brake calipers painted - it makes them look nice. If I was painting my brake calipers because I believed that the paint had special properties that altered the spin of the bosons in my brake pads leading to greater braking performance ... I would be an idiot.

[Kent Border Kenny]

I wonder if I could make some money in this sort of stuff through trading on my having been a physicist. I mean, a physicist must know their stuff, right? I worked in the design of the machine that found the Higgs. If someone with no scientific background can charge £25 for a fuse then surely one that’s been treated at the LHC to align it’s vibrations for a wider sound space and genuine 4-d spacetime presence could go for at least £30.

[Gary C]

bristolracer said:

To be fair some of his customers probably wonder about guys buying carbon fibre bits for their cars or getting their brake calipers painted.
Neither makes any difference but makes the owner feel better.
Whatever floats your boat or fool and money?

To be fair, I think people know what they are buying with carbon bits and painted calipers.

Now if a 'turbonator' cost £999 then you might have a comparison.

[bristolracer]

Gary C said:

bristolracer said:

To be fair some of his customers probably wonder about guys buying carbon fibre bits for their cars or getting their brake calipers painted.
Neither makes any difference but makes the owner feel better.
Whatever floats your boat or fool and money?

To be fair, I think people know what they are buying with carbon bits and painted calipers.

Now if a 'turbonator' cost £999 then you might have a comparison.

Why is it different?
If you look at the £25 fuse it is hand built, it comes in lovely packaging
If you look at the £999 router it has gold terminals, it isnt therefore a standard router.
And the guy makes a mark up on his kit.

Why is it ok for you to buy shiny bits for your car but a hifi enthusiast cant buy a shiny bits for his hifi?
Do you think his customers dont know what they are buying? If they believe it sounds better, why is that any different to you feeling better because your car looks better?

I wouldn't spend my money on it,but then again theres plenty of car mods I wouldn't spend on either

[Zirconia]

^^^^
Buy whatever you want, claim it to what it is not is the issue.

We used to use a BNC that came in at around 80p each, went through loads in a year, bulk buy. HD happened along and though the older ones were 3G rated, they didn't hack it in the field, poor performance at the higher bit rates and a physical connection that was poor and degraded with each use and would result in errors (measurable).

Neutrik started to knock out a superb number at around £2 each (going back a few years now, more expensive now), the difference is in the physical build, it tells (I see one culprit not using Neutrik, really should, they are great). We could also measure its performance and verify it did the job superbly in the digital world. Paying any more for that is daft but I know we can find more expensive ones with huge claims. I buy HDMI cables for a few quid, I can find them for a grand and mine will do exactly the same job.

Still, get some custom labelled heat shrink and braid and make it look like it is more than it needs to be

Besides, I think there is a modded car thread kicking around for giggles.

I have nice kick plates on my car that I paid extra for, can't see them most the time but it makes the car go faster and corner better.

[Gary C]

bristolracer said:

Gary C said:

bristolracer said:

To be fair some of his customers probably wonder about guys buying carbon fibre bits for their cars or getting their brake calipers painted.
Neither makes any difference but makes the owner feel better.
Whatever floats your boat or fool and money?

To be fair, I think people know what they are buying with carbon bits and painted calipers.

Now if a 'turbonator' cost £999 then you might have a comparison.

Why is it different?
If you look at the £25 fuse it is hand built, it comes in lovely packaging
If you look at the £999 router it has gold terminals, it isnt therefore a standard router.
And the guy makes a mark up on his kit.

Why is it ok for you to buy shiny bits for your car but a hifi enthusiast cant buy a shiny bits for his hifi?
Do you think his customers dont know what they are buying? If they believe it sounds better, why is that any different to you feeling better because your car looks better?

I wouldn't spend my money on it,but then again theres plenty of car mods I wouldn't spend on either

I would have thought the difference was obvious but I might not have been clear in what I meant.

If you bought a chrome tone arm because it looked nice on a deck and thats all it claimed to do thats like buying a bit of carbon for a dashboard. They would do what they claim to do.

Buying a carbon tone arm because it resonates less and tracks with more accurate bias or a set of high spec dampers that have less stiction and track the road surface better, fine. The differences maybe unnoticable in the real world but they have some sound (!) engineering behind them so pay your money, feel good and crack on.

Buying a 'audio quality' fuse or router is akin to the 'turbonator'. Both are trading on bullst claims. Soft minded people buy them and believe with almost religious zeal that they make a difference and hate it when people disbelieve their faith.

The difference between the two is the astonishing price of some the audio stuff.

[rxe]

Kent Border Kenny said:

I wonder if I could make some money in this sort of stuff through trading on my having been a physicist. I mean, a physicist must know their stuff, right? I worked in the design of the machine that found the Higgs. If someone with no scientific background can charge £25 for a fuse then surely one that’s been treated at the LHC to align it’s vibrations for a wider sound space and genuine 4-d spacetime presence could go for at least £30.

If you're a Dr, you're laughing. I suspect the next step will be to send them into space for "zero gravity conditioning". Probably aligns the crystals or something.

This rubbish was sort of viable in the analogue age. You could argue that your turntable motor assembled from unobtanium delivered better sound, as sound is all subjective.

In the digital age, it is all bobbins. It is 1 or 0, error corrected or not. You can't improve the quality of digital data with a mains lead - the md5 checksum of the file will be the same or it won't. When you're pushing packets, all of the error correction happens well below the level of the application. The only time the application ever detects a problem is when the connection is actually broken. If this stuff mattered, the network switches that push exabytes of data on a daily basis would need to be audiophile/gold plated .... and have fancy fuses with special main cables....

[silentbrown]

TonyRPH said:

https://www.xiph.org/paranoia/faq.html

I'd take what they say with a pinch of salt. They also imply there's no error correction data on audio CDs which is plain wrong,

website said:

A CD, audio or data, uses 2352 byte sectors. In a data CD, 304 bytes of each sector is used for header, sync and error correction. An audio CD uses all 2352 bytes for data

Also, it's important to distinguish between error correction (where the correction codes allow misread data to be entirely reconstructed in all it's original digital glory) and error concealment (which kicks in when the data can't be corrected as above, and normally takes the form of interpolation between the previous and following 'correct' audio.

[98elise]

bristolracer said:

Gary C said:

bristolracer said:

To be fair some of his customers probably wonder about guys buying carbon fibre bits for their cars or getting their brake calipers painted.
Neither makes any difference but makes the owner feel better.
Whatever floats your boat or fool and money?

To be fair, I think people know what they are buying with carbon bits and painted calipers.

Now if a 'turbonator' cost £999 then you might have a comparison.

Why is it different?
If you look at the £25 fuse it is hand built, it comes in lovely packaging
If you look at the £999 router it has gold terminals, it isnt therefore a standard router.
And the guy makes a mark up on his kit.

Why is it ok for you to buy shiny bits for your car but a hifi enthusiast cant buy a shiny bits for his hifi?
Do you think his customers dont know what they are buying? If they believe it sounds better, why is that any different to you feeling better because your car looks better?

I wouldn't spend my money on it,but then again theres plenty of car mods I wouldn't spend on either

The comparison would be if you painted your calipers to make the car go faster.

If a Hi-Fi enthusiast buys a shiny fuse because it looks nice, then fair play.

[TonyRPH]

silentbrown said:

I'd take what they say with a pinch of salt. They also imply there's no error correction data on audio CDs which is plain wrong,

Yes, I would have thought that the person / group who write the software would know that.

I'm not quite sure how to interpret some of their statements.

silentbrown said:

Also, it's important to distinguish between error correction (where the correction codes allow misread data to be entirely reconstructed in all it's original digital glory) and error concealment (which kicks in when the data can't be corrected as above, and normally takes the form of interpolation between the previous and following 'correct' audio.

Agree, CIRC usually takes care of the majority of errors if and when they occur.

[hyphen]

Ok, so this one isn't bullst as such. More admirably hilarious.

The audio player maker couldn't decide between 2 DACs, so put them both in. It has 4 headphone sockets

I want one!

https://www.avforums.com/reviews/astell-kern-afutu...

Edited by hyphen on Wednesday 26th August 17:21

[Kneedragger95]

Apologies of this has already been posted...

https://youtu.be/wliupB_i5JY

All yours for 600 quid

https://audiocomav.com/high-fidelity-cables-nps-12...

Edited by Kneedragger95 on Sunday 6th June 17:59