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Jumped on the "snakeoil" train in a different way ...

Fluffy

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How come Japanese are so susceptible to all this audiophile madness? I saw these examples many times but I never understood why Japan seems to be such a concentration of audiofoolery.

Buy the way, the second guy that shows up at around 1:00 has these monstrous speakers, that he basically uses as shelves to put stuff on. What good are all these tens of thousands worth of electronics if you are listening to it in the acoustic equivalence of a half-filled garbage can?
 

mansr

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How come Japanese are so susceptible to all this audiophile madness? I saw these examples many times but I never understood why Japan seems to be such a concentration of audiofoolery.
They go to extremes in all areas, be it tech (toilets included), food, porn, or anything else. Why should audiophoolery be an exception?
 

mansr

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Let me put it this way. Imagine if the rest of the world only saw Steve G. videos and made generalisations about Americans...
Then they'd have a much rosier picture than if they'd met some actually representative (House or otherwise) Americans.
 

Alobar

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How come Japanese are so susceptible to all this audiophile madness? I saw these examples many times but I never understood why Japan seems to be such a concentration of audiofoolery.
This was the country that just 80 years ago considered their leader a God. Maybe there's a connection there?
 

NoMoFoNo

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The Japanese are famous for fetishism in all its various forms. It's a major part of what has created friction, historically, between them and their neighbors. The idea of moderation in all things is essentially the opposite of Japanese culture.
 

pjug

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I think people might create these kind of rooms after relationships have gone bad. So this is never-cohabitate-again hifi. Sometimes I think I should build something like it for myself.
 

wwenze

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I'm tempted to dispel the myth...but nevermind (笑)

Let me put it this way. Imagine if the rest of the world only saw Steve G. videos and made generalisations about Americans...

There's one episode in Akiba's Trip The Animation where they casually made reference to the guy who bought a dedicated distribution transformer...
 

cjfrbw

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This was the country that just 80 years ago considered their leader a God. Maybe there's a connection there?
I was just on another site going over a thread about a decease Japanese 'guru'. The thread starter seems quite wealthy to the extent he can indulge his audio whims no matter how costly.

The thread starter said he had a system he developed over 15 years, and the Japanese 'guru' told him it was terrible. Of course, the guru also wound up selling him all of his own proprietary and extremely expensive boutique ouvres.

His description of the guru really paints the guru as a person with an intense OC disorder to the point of mental illness and exhaustion. He said in other threads that the guru could never complete a project because he became obsessed with some distraction midstream that would lead him on another tangent, and wouldn't develop a DAC because the entire electronics industry couldn't make a decent chip.

Some people just need gurus and cults, and their treasured hobbies are conduits towards such. Find a manic, magic guru with obsessive compulsive disorder, who believes in himself unconditionally, and follow at your financial peril.
 

mocenigo

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This was the country that just 80 years ago considered their leader a God. Maybe there's a connection there?

Like about 40% of America. The U.S. is getting there, slowly ;-)
 

scott wurcer

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How come Japanese are so susceptible to all this audiophile madness? I saw these examples many times but I never understood why Japan seems to be such a concentration of audiofoolery.

I have the benefit of having Japanese family, if you have not experienced it on a close personal level you simply can not understand.
 

mansr

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It's not just the Japanese. I will never forget seeing Tom Cruise--perhaps the second-most famous American--discuss his love of Synergistic Research products (and Ted Denney) on the Jimmy Fallon show:

https://www.facebook.com/synergisti...yre-both-synergistic-resea/10153579602861579/

Sadly, the video has been removed from YouTube, but it really happened.

Perhaps some people, regardless of nationality, just have a tendency to believe in crazy bullshit.
Is Ted Denney also a scientologist? That would explain a lot.
 
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