• WANTED: Happy members who like to discuss audio and other topics related to our interest. Desire to learn and share knowledge of science required. There are many reviews of audio hardware and expert members to help answer your questions. Click here to have your audio equipment measured for free!

What is an equivalent product to HiFi snake oil?

MacCali

Major Contributor
Joined
Dec 21, 2020
Messages
1,121
Likes
535
Probiotics, none are regulated by the FDA; in fact, animal products are more regulated than human probiotics because many enter the food chain. The only ones, like any treatment, are those proven in clinical trials. The number of probiotics in a capsule or billions of counts means zero, nothing, nada. First, know what you treating, then you match a probiotic with clinical evidence in published reviewed studies. There is about 2-3 brands in the United States and Canada (which, in Canada, they must prove efficacy). Otherwise, you waste about $30.00 a month on nothing but a placebo, the same with many OTC items; save your cash, and tell your family. 100 probiotics cost a company about $7.00 when they will sell it for nearly $100 and make false claims. Any OTC can say, "May help with," which is legal. Worse than wire because you are putting it in your body. That's my rant!
The only legit probiotics are third party tested for authenticity. Only a few do this and there’s only one or two companies who even are considered legit.

At least it will fish out the bs cause if the company is at least trying to show a measurement which is not what they publish. I think there’s only two probiotic brands that have submitted product with +/- 5% variations and they will consistently resend samples to show authenticity throughout.

I can provide the website I use if you are not aware
 

KellenVancouver

Addicted to Fun and Learning
Joined
Nov 16, 2021
Messages
835
Likes
5,889
In the past, designer leather goods were well made and had good material and workmanship. Today, they use mediocre materials and indifferent workmanship but people buy anyways because they are Louis Vuitton emblazoned everywhere on it. I looked at a pair of LV shoes and the leather felt like plastic. All for $1200 a pair. I ended up getting Allan Edmonds shoes for half price but, the workmanship and material(horween) was better.
Like everything else in life, it depends. Go with the cheapie Asian stuff and yeah, crap. But if you're willing to pay the price (a steep price) for quality leather goods, then you can get very high quality indeed. As evidence I'll cite the example of products made by The Leather Shop in Seattle, Washington. Can't do better. The Heirloom Messenger Bag I got from them is fantastic and will literally last me for all my remaining travels. Are they overpriced? Oh my yes, I think so. But can't argue with the quality, best there is. That said, The Leather Shop doesn't do shoes so may not work for you.
 

MacCali

Major Contributor
Joined
Dec 21, 2020
Messages
1,121
Likes
535
There is actually much research on probiotics especially for antibiotic associated diarrhea https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/probiotics-what-you-need-to-know. If you ever get that condition u want prescription stuff. The ultimate probiotic is a stool enema for clostridium difficile cases that r resistant to easier treatments. It works very well
Yes, but research has also shown the use of legit probiotics greatly reduce multiple health issues which most Americans suffer from.

Can’t precisely name them, but your usual blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes and the like. *those type of things for example, not implying precisely all those exact things

Beyond the supplemental aspects of dietary consumption. Most people have no clue how toxic the food you typically eat actually is, especially in America.

I had a very long run of an extremely clean diet. Which included meat consumption less than 3-4 times a year. Removal of anything GMO and the results breakdown as this.

Just like anything you consume you start to build a tolerance to the toxicity. Just like drinking alcohol, if you rarely drink a couple drinks will get you intoxicated and when you drink avidly you can drink a 12 pack and be alright.

Since having such a long break from consumption of these foods still to this day anytime I slip and ingest these products I feel really bad. Especially HFCS
 

MacCali

Major Contributor
Joined
Dec 21, 2020
Messages
1,121
Likes
535
Like everything else in life, it depends. Go with the cheapie Asian stuff and yeah, crap. But if you're willing to pay the price (a steep price) for quality leather goods, then you can get very high quality indeed. As evidence I'll cite the example of products made by The Leather Shop in Seattle, Washington. Can't do better. The Heirloom Messenger Bag I got from them is fantastic and will literally last me for all my remaining travels. Are they overpriced? Oh my yes, I think so. But can't argue with the quality, best there is. That said, The Leather Shop doesn't do shoes so may not work for you.
Yea man there’s guy who is a repair shop, the reality comes down to almost all products are trash. He knows all the grades of materials and costs as he repairs these high end products.

He has literally tore apart 3000 dollar purses and accessories showing it’s not even 200 dollar worth of materials and workmanship.

Someone can easily come in and tear that market up by investing 500 in materials and workmanship and create a product that would last a lifetime.

But just like lightbulbs they love planed obsolescence. They don’t want it to last and giant company got so many mouths to feed they will cut every corner to reach higher profit margins
 

ahofer

Major Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
Jun 3, 2019
Messages
4,947
Likes
8,694
Location
New York City
Did somebody upthread suggest homeopathy? There's an important similarity inasmuch as there is a dogged community of believers and no scientific evidence, and psychosomatic effects are deprecated by the believers vs the stimulus. Furthermore, the limitations of audible thresholds is similar to limitations on effective dosing. Homeopathy involves ridiculously small amounts of treatment substances, far below what could possible have an effect - sort of like how audiophiles view jitter or various kinds of distortion (real or theoretical).
 

Keith_W

Major Contributor
Joined
Jun 26, 2016
Messages
2,521
Likes
5,779
Location
Melbourne, Australia
I have said elsewhere on this forum that hifi snake oil is a relatively harmless form of snake oil. I do not see why people expand so much emotion and energy on fighting it. At worst, someone else with expandable income wastes money. They do it with full knowledge that it is expandable income. What does that have to do with you?

Compare that to more insidious forms of snake oil, especially medical snake oil. Abandon life-saving treatment for hocus-pocus like homeopathy, chiropractic, iridology, some fad diets, and not to mention plausible sounding but unproven therapy (for now) such as gene therapy, immune activation (note I am not talking about monoclonal antibodies or immunoregulators such as PD-L1 inhibitors here), and so on. Abandoning proven treatment in favour of unproven treatment will not only waste your money but can seriously damage your health or even kill you.

I am reminded of a case report of digitalis lata poisoning that I read about in a medical journal many years ago. The supplement contained extract of Foxglove, which contains the active ingredient Digoxin which is a well known medication for heart issues. The nett effect is to increase contractility (i.e. how vigorously your heart pumps) whilst slowing the heart rate, and can be used as a treatment for heart failure. However, Foxglove is like any other plant. The concentration of active ingredient depends on the season you harvest, which parts of the plant are used, whether the plant had full sun or shade, what the soil drainage was like, and so on. These concepts are familiar to anybody who has tried to grow their own fruits and vegetables - as a (very) small scale farmer myself, I know that tomatoes that face the sun are sweeter than tomatoes that don't. If your manufacturing process only specifies say "20% Foxglove", you are not actually specifying the amount of active ingredient that goes into your pill. I don't know about you, but if I ingest a tablet that says "Digoxin 62.5mcg" I would rather have the assurance that I am actually ingesting a controlled dosage of the ingredient, which comes with regulatory controls and punitive fines if subsequent tests show that the amount of Digoxin is not in fact 62.5mcg. As opposed to "20% Foxglove" which may contain varying amount of the active ingredient depending on growing, harvest, and processing conditions. As it turns out, the case report showed an unexpectedly high concentration of Digoxin way and over the almost homeopathic dose normally offered in the pill.

So: it is not as if medical snake oil does not work. Sometimes it does, but in a fortuitious, unpredictable, and uncontrolled manner - simply because conventional drugs are included, unadvertised, and sold to people who lack the training to know better.

Ingestion of these substances can hurt or even kill you, yet the supplement business is worth billions of dollars, and I am sure it dwarves the hifi snake oil business by several orders of magnitude. Yet you folk carry on about hifi snake oil as if it's the most evil thing on Earth. IT IS NOT.
 

drallim

Member
Joined
May 13, 2021
Messages
17
Likes
36
I have said elsewhere on this forum that hifi snake oil is a relatively harmless form of snake oil. I do not see why people expand so much emotion and energy on fighting it.
The attitude of "this bad thing isn't as bad as that other bad thing, therefore we should tolerate it" leads straight to hell. You end up tolerating everything because there is always something worse. Also I have developed the superhuman power to dislike two things at once so it's a false dichotomy.

At worst, someone else with expandable income wastes money. They do it with full knowledge that it is expandable income. What does that have to do with you?
It affects everyone, holds the entire industry back, by extension humanity itself. What improvements could have been made if all that snake oil money, attention, and effort went into legitimate developments instead?

I mean, why don't we have calibrated loudness compensation EQ in everything yet? Just enter a sensitivity number that comes with your headphones into your phone app, and the DSP automatically adjusts EQ based on the volume. That's low hanging fruit that will never happen because people are distracted by an avalanche of nonsense.
 

birdog1960

Senior Member
Joined
Oct 18, 2022
Messages
309
Likes
329
Location
Virginia
I have said elsewhere on this forum that hifi snake oil is a relatively harmless form of snake oil. I do not see why people expand so much emotion and energy on fighting it. At worst, someone else with expandable income wastes money. They do it with full knowledge that it is expandable income. What does that have to do with you?

Compare that to more insidious forms of snake oil, especially medical snake oil. Abandon life-saving treatment for hocus-pocus like homeopathy, chiropractic, iridology, some fad diets, and not to mention plausible sounding but unproven therapy (for now) such as gene therapy, immune activation (note I am not talking about monoclonal antibodies or immunoregulators such as PD-L1 inhibitors here), and so on. Abandoning proven treatment in favour of unproven treatment will not only waste your money but can seriously damage your health or even kill you.

I am reminded of a case report of digitalis lata poisoning that I read about in a medical journal many years ago. The supplement contained extract of Foxglove, which contains the active ingredient Digoxin which is a well known medication for heart issues. The nett effect is to increase contractility (i.e. how vigorously your heart pumps) whilst slowing the heart rate, and can be used as a treatment for heart failure. However, Foxglove is like any other plant. The concentration of active ingredient depends on the season you harvest, which parts of the plant are used, whether the plant had full sun or shade, what the soil drainage was like, and so on. These concepts are familiar to anybody who has tried to grow their own fruits and vegetables - as a (very) small scale farmer myself, I know that tomatoes that face the sun are sweeter than tomatoes that don't. If your manufacturing process only specifies say "20% Foxglove", you are not actually specifying the amount of active ingredient that goes into your pill. I don't know about you, but if I ingest a tablet that says "Digoxin 62.5mcg" I would rather have the assurance that I am actually ingesting a controlled dosage of the ingredient, which comes with regulatory controls and punitive fines if subsequent tests show that the amount of Digoxin is not in fact 62.5mcg. As opposed to "20% Foxglove" which may contain varying amount of the active ingredient depending on growing, harvest, and processing conditions. As it turns out, the case report showed an unexpectedly high concentration of Digoxin way and over the almost homeopathic dose normally offered in the pill.

So: it is not as if medical snake oil does not work. Sometimes it does, but in a fortuitious, unpredictable, and uncontrolled manner - simply because conventional drugs are included, unadvertised, and sold to people who lack the training to know better.

Ingestion of these substances can hurt or even kill you, yet the supplement business is worth billions of dollars, and I am sure it dwarves the hifi snake oil business by several orders of magnitude. Yet you folk carry on about hifi snake oil as if it's the most evil thing on Earth. IT IS NOT.
I would say that chelation therapy is one of the biggest snake oil procedures in medicine. Anyone who has had basic chemistry should understand how ridiculous it is. It's given to some folks with very serious conditions. More controversial because it occasionally has a legitimate indication is IV iron. Big money maker for infusion clinics. I also think very expensive Moh's surgery for many skin cancers is also snake oil. Neither a surgeon nor dermatologist, I removed many small lesions in my office successfully without recurrence.
 

Keith_W

Major Contributor
Joined
Jun 26, 2016
Messages
2,521
Likes
5,779
Location
Melbourne, Australia
The attitude of "this bad thing isn't as bad as that other bad thing, therefore we should tolerate it" leads straight to hell. You end up tolerating everything because there is always something worse. Also I have developed the superhuman power to dislike two things at once so it's a false dichotomy.

It isn't. You should be spending your energy arguing against more insidious forms of snake oil other than audio snake oil. To me there are several levels of snake oil, from most harmful to least harmful:

- Snake oil that damages your health. Examples are all forms of medical snake oil - homeopathy, chiropractic, alternative medicine, vaccine denial.
- Snake oil that damages society. Climate change denial, opposing gun control, political extremism, religious cults, science denial.
- Snake oil that damages you financially. Get rich quick schemes, pyramid schemes.
- Snake oil that makes you look stupid. Belief in UFO's, crystals, zombies, conspiracy theorists, cryptozoology ... and audio snake oil.

It affects everyone, holds the entire industry back, by extension humanity itself. What improvements could have been made if all that snake oil money, attention, and effort went into legitimate developments instead?

Surely you overstate that ... holds back humanity itself :D:D:D

If you want an example where money and effort goes into legitimate developments, what about televised sport? I think that televised sport and all those crap TV shows are a complete and utter waste of time. You do not learn anything from watching sport, unless you play that sport yourself. I watch swimming because I swim and I want to improve my technique. But for 99% of other viewers, swimmers may as well be 8 lanes of greyhounds or goldfish. Wouldn't it be better for society if everybody watched documentaries instead of sport?
 

drallim

Member
Joined
May 13, 2021
Messages
17
Likes
36
It isn't. You should be spending your energy arguing against more insidious forms of snake oil other than audio snake oil. To me there are several levels of snake oil, from most harmful to least harmful:

- Snake oil that damages your health. Examples are all forms of medical snake oil - homeopathy, chiropractic, alternative medicine, vaccine denial.
- Snake oil that damages society. Climate change denial, opposing gun control, political extremism, religious cults, science denial.
- Snake oil that damages you financially. Get rich quick schemes, pyramid schemes.
- Snake oil that makes you look stupid. Belief in UFO's, crystals, zombies, conspiracy theorists, cryptozoology ... and audio snake oil.
I will decide how I spend my energy, if you want to go on a crusade against chiropractors, that's up to you.

Also I don't agree with the moral hierarchy you're trying to impose. For one, audio snake oil reinforces and makes full use of science denial, so you are inconsistent there. There are many other problems with your hierarchy but I'm going to leave it there as you're starting to get preachy and political.

Surely you overstate that ... holds back humanity itself :D:D:D
Yes. Everything in society is inter-connected. Consumer product development very often directly affects more "serious" endeavours. Like PC graphics accelerators designed for playing video games being re-purposed for all sorts of research and AI development. Commodity electronics components made cheap by mass phone manufacture enabling all sorts of medical research prototypes, etc.

So what if gamers didn't demand better graphics cards every year and instead bought $2000 magic monitor cables and quantum mouse pads? Entire fields of research could have been held back significantly.

If you want an example where money and effort goes into legitimate developments, what about televised sport? I think that televised sport and all those crap TV shows are a complete and utter waste of time. You do not learn anything from watching sport, unless you play that sport yourself.
Not sure what your point is here. You could say the same about listening to music.
 

egellings

Major Contributor
Joined
Feb 6, 2020
Messages
4,004
Likes
3,244
Both sports & music are consumed for entertainment. Both can be instructive, too, as when a class act athlete or musician is watched or heard as they perform.
 

rwortman

Addicted to Fun and Learning
Forum Donor
Joined
Jan 29, 2019
Messages
740
Likes
683
'High performance' tyres.

Especially when targeted/marketed at users of normal 'commute' vehicles.
A controversial choice perhaps. And while I'm prepared to nail my balls to the wall for everyone to take aim at on this particular choice, just stop and think for a minute about how many occasions the 'performance' component in these usally expensive tyres are actually going to be utilised when taking your kids to school, nipping down to the supermarket, picking the folks up for dinner, etc.

Don't get me wrong, performance tyres definitely have a place, but I think that place should be confined to the track (and maybe the Autobahn) for 'performance' vehicles driven by 'performance-oriented' drivers with 'performance-oriented mind-sets'.
I was one such character for many years and enjoyed taking the Atom down to the Nurburgring where the co-owners and myself would enjoy collectively destroying multiple sets of Avon semi-slicks and laughing about who came back into the car park with just the canvas showing through rubber. But never at any stage did any of us have the idea or desire to replicate this style of driving out on the public roads. We all value keeping hold of our driving licenses and avoiding speeding fines.

When I see the likes of Pirelli, Michelin, Goodyear et al recommending their 'high performance' products at SUV's, family four-doors etc. you have to stop and think 'why? what for?'
Obviously it's to satiate and facilitate the ever-bourgeoning trend in car-manufacturers producing road vehicles with ever increasing power capacties but still, in the real world, where we live in a world full of speed cameras, speed limits, other road users, would you want/need to drive like Nelson Piquet?
I experience it regularly. I drive an 'idiot-magnet' car. I won't say what it is but it's the type of vehicle that some wannabe F1 stars look at and think 'target. I'll get him at the lights. I'll show that fkr who's fastest out of the both of us!'
I have fun with that; usually I give a little rev to indicate to said boy-racer that 'yeah, i'm up for a drag'. To which the response is usually more revving from boy-racer type. Lights go green, they blast away at warp-speed, I saunter away gently, preserving my tyres as well as my sense of integrity, sanity, rationailty. They, on the other hand manage to attain a temporary, very temporay enlargement of the testicles as well as removing about 2mm from their soft-compound 'performance tyres. I'd say that was a 'WIN WIN'. lol

And pre-empting the backlash from the boy-racers of the forum before they all start banging on about stopping power, cornering power, wet weather performance blaa de blaa, consider how much life you get from a set of soft-compound performance tyres by blasting away from traffic lights, screeching to a halt at red lights, pulling 3G in a bend, notwithstanding the hightened risk of such manouvres to other road users.

Maybe not exactly snake-oil then, as performance tyres can and do work. Just not when applied to most road vehicles.
When some idiot pulls out in front of you the decreased stopping distance afforded by those high performance tires will make a difference. The idea that calm drivers only need crap tires is silly.
 

birdog1960

Senior Member
Joined
Oct 18, 2022
Messages
309
Likes
329
Location
Virginia
When some idiot pulls out in front of you the decreased stopping distance afforded by those high performance tires will make a difference. The idea that calm drivers only need crap tires is silly.
ever had a low profile tire blow out a sidewall on the highway? Most people are better off with good all season tires. What will make a difference in that scenario is "eyesight" or equivalent sensing mechanism.
 

rwortman

Addicted to Fun and Learning
Forum Donor
Joined
Jan 29, 2019
Messages
740
Likes
683
Whatever the sensing mechanism high performance tires are and added safety margin. Even if your vision is perfect and your reflexes are in the 99’th percentile stopp9ng distance is still on the equation. There are such things as high performance all season tires, however, unless you live in snow country they aren’t necessarily the best choice. All season tires sacrifice wet traction for cold weather traction, making them worse tires for most of the year. When I lived in New England I had two sets of wheels, summer tires and winter tires. All seasons are worse in winter than a winter tire and worse in the summer than a summer tire. Bargain all season tires can be shockingly bad in the wet.

My dad thought the same as you. Too cheap to buy good tires and rationalized that they don’t matter. The “science’ says they do. Better traction all around the traction circle means a safer tire. It’s not snake oil if it‘s real but you don’t want to pay for it.
 

Keith_W

Major Contributor
Joined
Jun 26, 2016
Messages
2,521
Likes
5,779
Location
Melbourne, Australia
Not sure what your point is here. You could say the same about listening to music.

Listening to music is not the same as watching sports. For one, music (and film) helps me understand historic cultures and other cultures I am not familiar with. Of course this is not true if you listen to pop music and all the other dross that passes off as "music" these days. It is like the difference between literature and pop fiction. A lot of classical music helps you understand the history of the period. For a more complete understanding you also have to learn history or learn about other cultures to put it all in context. For example, I read Chinua Achebe in my youth and I know a bit about Fela Sowande (Nigerian composer). So when I met a Nigerian, he was completely surprised that I knew so much about Yoruba people because most people can't point to where Nigeria is on the map.
 

killdozzer

Major Contributor
Joined
Aug 2, 2020
Messages
1,615
Likes
1,628
Location
Zagreb
@drallim @Keith_W Interesting exchange, I enjoyed reading. I don't fully agree with either of you, but that's not the most important thing anyway. Just don't let the conversation heat up, it would be a waste.

Few side notes if you allow; it's not so easy to claim that if only money wouldn't go there, it would surely go here and that's why we should fight to stop it go there. Snake-oil money also creates income which otherwise wouldn't be there. Gullible people are not wasting our money/opportunities for a better tomorrow. Perhaps you could only make a case for asking a portion of the snake-oil money to be directed to R&D (Like Britain puts their lottery money into movie production and so on), but that's very problematic.

I also do see spilling over from one field to another when it comes to how people think and that's often why I don't cut any slack to snake-oil in any field. It is far more likely (talking just from my experience) to see homeopathy and anti-jitter contraptions in the same household. It's just that this is an audio forum and you should expect people taking interest in what is audio snake-oil.

Perhaps we should also take a step back to the original definition of snake oil. Anti gun control is not snake-oil.

@Keith_W if you allow, there's a good argument against "highbrowing" pop culture. Especially if you aim at the "learning about other cultures" argument. The division of high- and low- taste in culture is somewhat elitist. There's a lot to learn about other cultures through "the culture of the people" (even when it looks/sounds awful to you). One might say through classical culture you don't get the full picture.

@drallim So what if gamers didn't demand better graphics cards every year and instead bought $2000 magic monitor cables and quantum mouse pads? Entire fields of research could have been held back significantly.
But they weren't, which should be far more interesting. You might even say this is a good example of using gamers to create a huge amount of otherwise unattainable money to be put in further R&D. (Not that I like the idea to be charged a full price for a stage of development. It's like asking money from people willing to receive an experimental drug.) Of course, another angle is that it is very polluting to keep selling millions of units of a "developmental stage".
 

ahofer

Major Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
Jun 3, 2019
Messages
4,947
Likes
8,694
Location
New York City
At worst, someone else with expandable income wastes money.
At worst, someone with without expandable income wastes money.

Feel free to worry about whatever you like, calibrated to whatever human misery index you like. This is an Audio Forum. And all analogies are imperfect, otherwise they'd be identities.

By the way, with all the misery in the world, why did you spend the time to write that post?
 

Galliardist

Major Contributor
Joined
Jun 26, 2021
Messages
2,558
Likes
3,273
Location
Sydney. NSW, Australia
Listening to music is not the same as watching sports. For one, music (and film) helps me understand historic cultures and other cultures I am not familiar with. Of course this is not true if you listen to pop music and all the other dross that passes off as "music" these days. It is like the difference between literature and pop fiction. A lot of classical music helps you understand the history of the period. For a more complete understanding you also have to learn history or learn about other cultures to put it all in context. For example, I read Chinua Achebe in my youth and I know a bit about Fela Sowande (Nigerian composer). So when I met a Nigerian, he was completely surprised that I knew so much about Yoruba people because most people can't point to where Nigeria is on the map.
The usual argument about culture and "classical music" would apply here. Who are the great artists striving for high art and telling us of the history of the period? What you will get from "classical" or art music falls into two categories:
1) what the composer's patron or effective boss wanted:
2) what the middle classes will turn up and listen to.

In other words, they sold their services to whoever would have them, or were the pop musicians of their time.

Only when an urban population gets really large can an art musician live off sales to a small percentage of the population and do anything truly radical or pure". It's worth remembering that two of the supposedly most important musicians in western culture, Handel and Mozart, both ended up flat broke at points in their lives when they didn't have patronage and the audiences didn't turn up. When Beethoven premiered the Seventh Symphony among other works, a bunch of lesser "pop star" musicians had to turn up and play bit parts in the orchestra to help him out, and he once sold some works "exclusively" to most of the European publishers to get any money from the scores because his stuff just got pirated anyway.

Only at the end of the 19th century did we see the "classical music culture" arise. Prior to that audiences were noisier and worse behaved than at many modern pop concerts. Do something new and different, and they were as likely to riot as applaud. It's the same in other areas of culture too. Shakespeare had to fill theatres. Dickens' works were weekly installments for cheap periodicals.

And if you want to understand most British history or Australian culture through "classical music", you'll not find it easy. Sport history will get you further in Australia at least. And I reckon popular music will get you much further with understanding US history.

Of course my argument is as much a generalisation as yours. In reality, I guess any cultural artifact - a statue, a book, a piece of period jewellery, a building or a popular song can lead you into the study of a particular historical period.

The one thing we won't see of course is what of the current culture will become the representative art of our period in a hundred years' time, but I'm guessing it will be something that neither you or I particularly like, or that we would be completely surprised by.
 
Top Bottom