Yes, and it's the same (or should be) with lawyers. Lawyers are officers of the court. If they knowingly engage in illegal activity, even on behalf of their clients, they are guilty of a crime. A lawyer cannot, for example, develop legal documents on behalf of a client that perpetrates a fraud, without themselves being guilty.
The point is that the requirement to be honest is placed on all people all the time. As an engineer, I am obligated by the laws of the states where I am licensed to deal with clients honestly and transparently, but in all cases to place the good of the public above all other considerations.
That so many people don't do this is the human condition, but that doesn't mean people should excuse it as an "alternative point of view".
If people want to spend vast sums on audio equipment, then blessings upon their house. If their motivation is that they want people to know they have the money to do so, then they will get exactly what they seek (for better or worse), but they can do so without any moral judgment from me. If they want to post online about it so that their audio buddies will be impressed, then the (temporary) admiration of their audio buddies will be their reward and I hope it's worth to them what it costs. But if they tell others that each $xx,xxx component they buy lifts veils and reveals the true music, then they are in almost every case either deluded or dishonest. I don't give them a pass, because it's not that hard to be honest enough to avoid being deluded. Do they really hear that difference? I propose that most of the time they do not, even as a result of bias.
The people that sold them that stuff to take advantage of that delusion or to perpetrate it further, in the moral sense at least, perpetrated a fraud: They have sold something with the claim that it does something it does not do. I have a problem with that, because the people who design the stuff know better. The designers don't use incantations to design their stuff after all. They use electrical engineering principles and measurement equipment. And if they don't, they are likely to end up being highlighted on ASR with a panther missing his head. I'm not including people like Nelson Pass--he is fairly honest about what he's trying to do even when it isn't accuracy.
Remember that the rhetoric of the high-end isn't that it is colored in a way that people might find pleasing or at least not detrimental. The rhetoric they use is (like the example I quoted above) that their stuff uniquely improves the accuracy of the system in ways that defy the very measurements their designers used to create the stuff. I wish they would be honest and say, "We think the coloration of our amplifier sounds good, and we think you'll agree. Down with accuracy!" But that's not what they are saying.
It's not about the cost, or the hyperbole. It's about the deception. But the hyperbole is surely over the top. We've seen example after example of people saying that their system is noticeably better and even revelatory, compared to what they had last week, which they reported as noticeably better and revelatory compared to what they had the week before. Is there really that much room for revelation deserving of exclamation points? That's a pretty hard thesis to defend. But it sure enables people to look down their nose at their fellow man who merely possesses what they thought was revelatory last week. Manufacturers playing into this corrosive thinking is usually cynical.
There are industry executives who do actually believe this stuff, and I know a couple, so there is room for mere delusion as well as deception. I don't want to paint the whole industry with the same brush. But the industry has a whole would be more honest with an audio press that acts as a true evaluator rather than a collaborator (or enabler). Is that AA kind of talk? I don't know--I've never been to AA (I have been to Al-Anon, though, and the one feature common to those meetings is a willingness of people to expose their worst nightmares and deepest flaws in search of the truth. They don't get there ever time, of course, but the very thing they are trying to overcome is the pain of self-delusion that results in making life worse for themselves and the AA member they love.)
Cables are the easy target here. Test after test (both tests of electrical characteristics and controlled preference testing) has been unable to identify any detriment to using the cheap RCA cables that used to come free with equipment, the power cords that come from the hardware store, and line cord for the speakers, as long as they are sized appropriately for the signal. Yet claim after claim includes lofty descriptions of how the cables noticeably improve the quality of the resulting audio. They are careful to avoid adjectives that are directly measurable. This dishonesty undermines the concept of objective fact, which is even worse than the fraud it perpetrates.
Rick "it's not merely self-righteous to expose lying" Denney
(for some reason)
