Here are your words: "...little of what I support is in the category of snake oil." So I asked you why you do that (support any at all), and you get all exasperated. Then you ask me to guess what snake oil you support? I dunno, I'm not a mind reader. But since you just admitted that some (little) amount of what you support is snake oil, why don't you tell us what it is, instead of asking me to guess. "Geeze", indeed.
My post was meant to indicate that we'd largely agree on what is snake oil, but I left room for the possibility that there might be some things we might disagree on as being "snake oil." People have a wide range of things they put in the category of "bullshit" and audiophiles, even on this forum, don't necessarily agree on absolutely everything.
So, it's possible you think I might own something you view as "snake oil"...I dunno...my too-expensive blingy turntable?...vinyl?...tube amps? Who knows? We might disagree, or we might agree in some way, disagree in another. That's the room I was leaving open.
It seems you want to insinuate snake oil in to the vinyl stuff, so there ya go...
My point, that you misread either deliberately or with incomprehension,
Your point was actually quite clearly stated. You tried to paint vinyl, in contrast to digital, as an especially fertile ground for snake oil.
is that it's widely accepted here on ASR that a plain old CD player with good specs is completely audibly transparent. But because vinyl is never audibly transparent, then people are more prone to think that 'everything matters', and being mechanical in nature feeds into that, with a huge number of 'pathways to improvement', and with very little certainty about which ones are myths.
Which is just repeating again that you think vinyl is a fertile ground for snake oil.
And yet...so is digital.
Why? Because audiophiles using pure subjective impressions can imagine ANYTHING makes a difference. Right? That doesn't stop with vinyl. That means since digital has plenty of technical parts there is plenty of "fertile ground" for imagining various differences where there are none, hence the endless list of tweaking in the digital realm.
There is hardly one bit of the digital chain that does NOT have audiophiles tweaking it - clocks, cases, sound cards, power supplies, internal cables, digital cables, take virtually every piece of the chain, every piece of digital design, and you'll find audiophiles going woo-woo over it, and manufacturers selling bogus ideas, to "cure" the problem. Have you really not paid attention to this?
Your own purported understanding of how bias works should have indicated that before you tried to make an argument specially singling out vinyl for pervasive snake oil.
With CD/digital, it's easy. All those things you just mentioned above, are crap. Myths. Snake oil. Job done.
See above. Both vinyl and digital are fertile grounds for snake oil. Snake oil isn't dependant on the technology per se, but on the approach to the technology.
Remember how so many ASR members bemoan the change from the "old days" of audiophile and audio magazines, which were less b.s., more technically focused, more measurement oriented, and then the sinister subjective rags took over in the 80's or so and ruined everything and now it's woo-woo everywhere you look?
When was the more technically non-snake oil oriented halcyon period for audiophiles?
It was during a time when records pervaded. It's not the technology: it's the way audiophiles approach any particular technology. It's pure uncontrolled subjectivism, whatever it's aimed at.
But try it with vinyl: which vinyl tweaks or features are snake oil, and which ones aren't? Hmmmm, not so easy, right?
But that's a different point. What you just wrote doesn't establish vinyl is especially ripe for snake oil. You are now merely saying that it's harder in vinyl to TELL the snake oil from the non-snake oil. First..tell that to all those audiophiles with their heads buried in digital snake oil. It would FAR outnumber those buried in vinyl snake oil, given digital sources have predominated for years. Secondly, if the fact vinyl features mechanical parts that really can alter the sound means it's harder to judge which is snake oil, that suggests that perhaps there's less snake oil involved, and more likelihood of something actually affecting the sound! If anything, that would suggest vinyl is a LESS fertile ground for actual snake oil, since some of the tweaks might be efficacious, where fewer of the digital tweaks would be valid, hence more likely snake oil.
So in any case your argument just seems empty; it's just running around in circles trying to find something "especially wrong" with vinyl.
As usual.
