• 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!

This audio cable business is getting out of hand...

mhardy6647

Grand Contributor
Joined
Dec 12, 2019
Messages
11,212
Likes
24,172
"Bybee Slipstream Quantum Purifiers eliminate sub-audible noise, unmeasurable by typical test-bench instruments, producing previously unattainable resolution."

What is sub-audible noise?
Why, it's the kind that is unmeasurable by typical test-bench instruments, of course! ;)

Just imagine what it would be like to be a dog, with your head sticking out of the car window & your tongue lolling out in the quantum slipstream...

:cool:
 

Jimbob54

Grand Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
Oct 25, 2019
Messages
11,064
Likes
14,695
The pricing is weird on this one: https://nintronics.co.uk/jorma-design-prime-biwire-speaker-cable.html
1 meter £18,000.00
2 meter £18,007.00
4 meter £18,022.00

I'm not going to buy them, just found the pricing a bit confusing. Doesn't it almost seem like a scam?
In the meanwhile I'm awaiting the long overdue release of the Dark Matter Wormhole Cables.
https://www.tweekgeek.com/dark-matter-wormhole-cables/

The reason for the delay is rumored to be non synergizing quantum effects when tuning the slipstream golden quantum purifiers due to impure electrons. An accompanying power conditioner might soon be released.

Fair to say they are more bothered about the 18 than the 7 or the 22.
 

mansr

Major Contributor
Joined
Oct 5, 2018
Messages
4,685
Likes
10,700
Location
Hampshire

MattHooper

Master Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
Jan 27, 2019
Messages
7,194
Likes
11,806
Just got BANNED from Steve Hoffman Forums!

Wow!

Someone started a thread on the SH audio gear forum about having his view changed on audio cables by listening to some Nordost cables in a friend's system.

Naturally there were cable believers chiming in right off the bat. One gave a list of why there is a controversy at all about cables, the final reason "Posters are deaf." (Obviously, those who deny differences are deaf). So the snark started immediately from the cable side.

Another member (who some of us would recognize from an appearance here) chimed in that when people talk of not hearing differences, or about imagination or biases, he thinks they lack experience or a good enough system. (How many times have we heard that one before?).
And on it went.

I jumped in to provide a different view, that those who downplay the role of our biases in evaluating equipment likely haven't had experience testing their own biases (e.g. haven't experienced blind testing their beliefs). I simply defended the idea that without controlling for sighted bias in evaluating between cables, it's possible the conclusions can be in error. Naturally, the pushback started, people taking insult. I said over and over that I was not saying anyone had to become a scientist to enjoy the hobby, no one had to blind test, anyone can have any approach he wants, that I myself do not blind test everything I own etc. Only that there is no good reason, given what we know scientifically about our biases, to think audio is excepted, and that there's plenty of evidence biases play a role. You don't have to do science in building your system, but let's not pretend science has no application to audio evaluations if you want to get more rigorous.

Of course the hostility came pretty thick and fast, saying I'm spouting B.S., being "offensive," arrogant, a "threadcrapper" and on and on.
I kept trying to respond with as much civility as possible, clearing up all the strawmen being thrown my way. But it's just incredible how impossible it was to get anyone to even listen or absorb anything. It's just evade-points-reply-with-ad-hominem, rinse and repeat. (And demands to know my gear and experience).

DaveyF in the thread was noting he was proud about being banned from AVS (was he, or did he just leave?). I noted in my post that he got insulting on AVS and that I wouldn't be proud to be banned from a forum. And then I got banned! (And I'm not proud!).

This is one of the reasons I appreciate this forum. It seems there is no way to voice skepticism about any subjectivist shibboleths without being accused of being a dogmatist, nasty spoil-sport who, in merely voicing a different cautious view, insults the integrity of others who "know what they hear" and just wants to ruin audio for other people. And it's amazing how they do not see the hypocrisy: that so long as a poster is towing the line that cables obviously sound different, you can make as many pissy pot-shots at the skeptical side as you want, calling them "deaf" and "inexperienced" and BSers, threadcrappers...anything...and it's no foul. No moderator jumps in. No one objects to that snark. But if a skeptic as politely as possible gives his view, the skeptic is being the asshole. And you continually walk the line of being banned. A truly rigged game.

The reason I still engage these topics on the other audio forums is to keep representing the fact that not all audiophiles go for the pseudo-scientific thinking, that even in the seemingly more subjectivist-leaning forums, plenty of members are more cautious or skeptical about purely subjective audio claims. (I get lots of likes and messages of support, so I know they are there). I think it's good to push-back on the dogma
and highlight the hypocrisy. Though, with as much civility as possible, taking the higher road.

Where I went wrong if anywhere, I think, was my final post which was meant to highlight the inconsistency, but it did so by criticising a member's behaviour. Probably should have left that out. But, of course, all the criticisms of my character didn't get anyone else banned. Live and learn some more....
 

CDMC

Major Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
Sep 4, 2019
Messages
1,172
Likes
2,321
Just got BANNED from Steve Hoffman Forums!

Wow!

Someone started a thread on the SH audio gear forum about having his view changed on audio cables by listening to some Nordost cables in a friend's system.

Naturally there were cable believers chiming in right off the bat. One gave a list of why there is a controversy at all about cables, the final reason "Posters are deaf." (Obviously, those who deny differences are deaf). So the snark started immediately from the cable side.

Another member (who some of us would recognize from an appearance here) chimed in that when people talk of not hearing differences, or about imagination or biases, he thinks they lack experience or a good enough system. (How many times have we heard that one before?).
And on it went.

I jumped in to provide a different view, that those who downplay the role of our biases in evaluating equipment likely haven't had experience testing their own biases (e.g. haven't experienced blind testing their beliefs). I simply defended the idea that without controlling for sighted bias in evaluating between cables, it's possible the conclusions can be in error. Naturally, the pushback started, people taking insult. I said over and over that I was not saying anyone had to become a scientist to enjoy the hobby, no one had to blind test, anyone can have any approach he wants, that I myself do not blind test everything I own etc. Only that there is no good reason, given what we know scientifically about our biases, to think audio is excepted, and that there's plenty of evidence biases play a role. You don't have to do science in building your system, but let's not pretend science has no application to audio evaluations if you want to get more rigorous.

Of course the hostility came pretty thick and fast, saying I'm spouting B.S., being "offensive," arrogant, a "threadcrapper" and on and on.
I kept trying to respond with as much civility as possible, clearing up all the strawmen being thrown my way. But it's just incredible how impossible it was to get anyone to even listen or absorb anything. It's just evade-points-reply-with-ad-hominem, rinse and repeat. (And demands to know my gear and experience).

DaveyF in the thread was noting he was proud about being banned from AVS (was he, or did he just leave?). I noted in my post that he got insulting on AVS and that I wouldn't be proud to be banned from a forum. And then I got banned! (And I'm not proud!).

This is one of the reasons I appreciate this forum. It seems there is no way to voice skepticism about any subjectivist shibboleths without being accused of being a dogmatist, nasty spoil-sport who, in merely voicing a different cautious view, insults the integrity of others who "know what they hear" and just wants to ruin audio for other people. And it's amazing how they do not see the hypocrisy: that so long as a poster is towing the line that cables obviously sound different, you can make as many pissy pot-shots at the skeptical side as you want, calling them "deaf" and "inexperienced" and BSers, threadcrappers...anything...and it's no foul. No moderator jumps in. No one objects to that snark. But if a skeptic as politely as possible gives his view, the skeptic is being the asshole. And you continually walk the line of being banned. A truly rigged game.

The reason I still engage these topics on the other audio forums is to keep representing the fact that not all audiophiles go for the pseudo-scientific thinking, that even in the seemingly more subjectivist-leaning forums, plenty of members are more cautious or skeptical about purely subjective audio claims. (I get lots of likes and messages of support, so I know they are there). I think it's good to push-back on the dogma
and highlight the hypocrisy. Though, with as much civility as possible, taking the higher road.

Where I went wrong if anywhere, I think, was my final post which was meant to highlight the inconsistency, but it did so by criticising a member's behaviour. Probably should have left that out. But, of course, all the criticisms of my character didn't get anyone else banned. Live and learn some more....

You made the unfortunate mistake of "challenging" their religion. People want to be validated in their purchases and views and when that validation is challenged, rather than look at the information, their reaction is crucify the messenger. It is both amazing and sad. The internet brought us the ability to have the world's information at our fingertips, but rather than utilize the information available, most appear to prefer to go with conspiracies, unsupported information, and conjecture.

Look no further than the recent WebMD poll finding that less than 50% of Americans will get the Coronavirus Vaccine when available, as they don't trust it. Despite there being overwhelming evidence that the minute amount of risks to a small number of people, which is orders of magnitude lower than the risks of the getting the virus, people continue to believe that vaccines are somehow dangerous or bad. Despite the fact that the one study that found a correlation between autism and vaccines was not only found to be baised and poorly conducted, the doctor lost is medical license, and dozens of follow up studies have disproved it, there are a large number of people (including our commander in tweet) that continue to believe that vaccines cause autism.

I believe even those of us on this forum that believe strongly in scientific methodology still feel the tug of self validation in our purchases and beliefs. The difference is that most here are willing to accept that as humans, we tend to be biased and highly susceptible to placebos. Without accepting the foregoing, your mind cannot be open to looking at alternatives and accepting that your beliefs may be incorrect or based on inaccurate and/or outdated information.

It still doesn't change that you shouldn't have been banned.
 
Last edited:

teched58

Active Member
Joined
Apr 14, 2020
Messages
185
Likes
402
Just got BANNED from Steve Hoffman Forums!

Wow!

Someone started a thread on the SH audio gear forum about having his view changed on audio cables by listening to some Nordost cables in a friend's system.

Matt, that entire thread seems to have been abruptly removed from SH. Your post reminded me that I'd been reading a thread on Nordost over at SH yesterday, so I went back to take a look at the comment that got you banned. I'm assuming it's the thread on "heard-nordost-valhalla-2-makes-me-rethink-cabling." I get an error message now. Is that the correct thread?

What seems to be happening is that the audiophile forums are realigning, with the more technically oriented people coming here. I was a regular reader, occasional poster at AS; came over here a few months back when Chris went full woo. In the long run, I think this realignment is a good thing; it's tiring to constantly explain to the "but I heard it" crowd that Nyquist is not a "theory," it's a theorem (not that they would understand the point).

(To be fair to SH, I think they're somewhere in the middle as far as technical knuckle-dragging. I see their audio hardware forum as basically harmless, with a mostly non-technical audience wondering which Schitt they should buy. SH's real value is that there's always another Beatles thread (and I mean that in a positive way).
 

MattHooper

Master Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
Jan 27, 2019
Messages
7,194
Likes
11,806
Matt, that entire thread seems to have been abruptly removed from SH. Your post reminded me that I'd been reading a thread on Nordost over at SH yesterday, so I went back to take a look at the comment that got you banned. I'm assuming it's the thread on "heard-nordost-valhalla-2-makes-me-rethink-cabling." I get an error message now. Is that the correct thread?

Yes, that's the thread. I can't see that it was removed as I'm banned from even accessing the forum. (Until Aug 5 said the ban notice).

And once again evidence is removed showing that the acrimony in cable-debate threads comes mostly from affronted and irate pure-subjectivists
heating things up, rather than the skeptic side. But it's always blamed on the skeptic.
 

gorman

Active Member
Joined
Jun 26, 2020
Messages
119
Likes
88
I honestly fail to understand why is it so hard for people to accept that placebo is real. And when I say real, I mean real. If you are convinced that something will sound better, you can come to a point where you actually perceive it as better, your brain is telling you so.

The awesome things of resourcese like this website is that all the measurements generate a positive placebo for something that is real and also real. Best of both worlds, in my opinion. I hope the above is clear, as it has nothing to do with audio myths.
 

Geert

Major Contributor
Joined
Mar 20, 2020
Messages
1,937
Likes
3,525
Most forums have become nothing more than social media. It's just about sharing expiriences and having fun. Just check what types of comments receive the most likes.

From another topic on this forum: “Having social support, from an evolutionary standpoint, is far more important than knowing the truth.”
 

MattHooper

Master Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
Jan 27, 2019
Messages
7,194
Likes
11,806
I honestly fail to understand why is it so hard for people to accept that placebo is real. And when I say real, I mean real. If you are convinced that something will sound better, you can come to a point where you actually perceive it as better, your brain is telling you so.

The awesome things of resourcese like this website is that all the measurements generate a positive placebo for something that is real and also real. Best of both worlds, in my opinion. I hope the above is clear, as it has nothing to do with audio myths.

It's really of a piece with all the other clashes of skepticism and subjectively-born belief systems.

One's subjective experience is one's own. It's the most personal thing we have. And, if you hold that subjective interpretation is the way of knowing the world, then anything that challenges that is not only a de-stabalizing threat epistemologically, but personally.

"YOU are trying to tell ME that I can't trust my perception? Can't trust my own ears? Who are YOU to render judgement on MY EXPERIENCE?"

You get this in some form over and over.

And just as challenging a religious belief is to challenge something that people see bound up with who they are, challenging a subjective orientation in the audiophile is seen as a challenge of character, and they project this back to you. So you get lots of comments like "It seems you just don't TRUST your own hearing." The implication being that having confidence in your hearing is valorous, and lacking confidence is a sort of character defect, more indicative of something you may want to work on psychologically, so you can reach the confidence and contentment of the One Who Fully Trusts His Ears.

Human psychology never fails to amaze me.
 

Sal1950

Grand Contributor
The Chicago Crusher
Forum Donor
Joined
Mar 1, 2016
Messages
14,068
Likes
16,598
Location
Central Fl
Just got BANNED from Steve Hoffman Forums!
Is that the first believer forum you got kicked from?
If so you haven't been trying hard enough. LOL
Last place I used to try and talk sense to anyone was CA aka Audiophile Style. Since Chris changed the name and basically sent us to our own little room and banned us from talking on the rest of the forum, I and many others here just decided to boycott the place, nothing of any real value can be posted there any more. Chris learned that approach from Head-Fi who did the same some time back..
What's really set a bee going off in their bonnets is the success of ASR and the following the objective community has started to put together. Jim Austin's paranoid rantings in recent "As We See It's" has been the proof of our success. (See the Aug 2020 issue and last Dec).
RIP Peter, we may just take control back yet. :)

"The gullibility of audiophiles is what astonishes me the most, even after all these years. How is it possible, how did it ever happen, that they trust fairy-tale purveyors and mystic gurus more than reliable sources of scientific information? It wasn’t always so. Between the birth of “high fidelity,” circa 1947, and the early 1970s, what the engineers said was accepted by that generation of hi-fi enthusiasts as the truth. Then, as the ’70s decade grew older, the self-appointed experts without any scientific credentials started to crawl out of the woodwork. For a while they did not overpower the educated technologists but by the early ’80s they did, with the subjective “golden-ear” audio magazines as their chief line of communication. I remember pleading with some of the most brilliant academic and industrial brains in audio to fight against all the nonsense, to speak up loudly and brutally before the untutored drivel gets out of control, but they just laughed, dismissing the “flat-earthers” and “cultists” with a wave of the hand. Now look at them! Talk to the know-it-all young salesman in the high-end audio salon, read the catalogs of Audio Advisor, Music Direct, or any other high-end merchant, read any of the golden-ear audio magazines, check out the subjective audio websites—and weep. The witch doctors have taken over. Even so, all is not lost. You can still read Floyd Toole and Siegfried Linkwitz on loudspeakers, Douglas Self and Bob Cordell on amplifiers, David Rich (hometheaterhifi.com) on miscellaneous audio subjects, and a few others in that very sparsely populated club. (I am not including The Audio Critic, now that it has become almost silent.) Once you have breathed that atmosphere, you will have a pretty good idea what advice to ignore."
Peter Aczel

For those newer members here, be sure to read Peter's complete Legacy writings
http://www.biline.ca/audio_critic/audio_critic_web1.htm#acl

Also from Issue 26 Fall 2000 read "The 10 Biggest Lies In Audio"
https://www.biline.ca/audio_critic/mags/The_Audio_Critic_26_r.pdf
 

Get a hearing test

Active Member
Joined
Mar 21, 2019
Messages
101
Likes
29
Just got BANNED from Steve Hoffman Forums!

Naturally there were cable believers chiming in right off the bat. One gave a list of why there is a controversy at all about cables, the final reason "Posters are deaf." (Obviously, those who deny differences are deaf). So the snark started immediately from the cable side.
Expensive cables sounded like ass to me on first few listens. I might revisit them just to be sure again.
 

Inner Space

Major Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
May 18, 2020
Messages
1,285
Likes
2,938
... you get lots of comments like "It seems you just don't TRUST your own hearing." The implication being that having confidence in your hearing is valorous, and lacking confidence is a sort of character defect, more indicative of something you may want to work on psychologically, so you can reach the confidence and contentment of the One Who Fully Trusts His Ears.

The irony being, of course, is that ASR-inclined folks are the only ones who do trust their own hearing, and nothing else. Isn't that the implicit promise of unsighted and bias-free testing? It's the SH-inclined who lack confidence.

That said, the SH-inclined (for lack of a better term) must have deep reasons for their obstinate positions. It's not sufficient to point and laugh and call them dumb. Maybe they're trapped in dull jobs or relationships, desperate for agency or influence. Maybe they get vital escape-valve satisfaction from the illusions they cherish. My advice as a human is to leave them alone. You won't change them. They don't want to be changed. After a lousy day, they want a private bubble of their own, where they count for something, where their decisions mean something, where actions they take produce something meaningful.
 

Get a hearing test

Active Member
Joined
Mar 21, 2019
Messages
101
Likes
29
If one is an objectivist and knows they are expensive cables, expectation bias and placebo could provide that perception ;)
Have a baseline playlist that ive heard hundreds of times so when something is off in a bad way its easy to tell. Some notes were wrong and i dont even know how its technically possible. If cables were botched then isnt it likely only one side would sound bad? How likely is it that both cables came in botched or is it just that the cables are bad. Wrong thickness of wire or something like that. It does look nice but sounds worse than 1 or 2 eur rca cables.
 

MRC01

Major Contributor
Joined
Feb 5, 2019
Messages
3,422
Likes
4,029
Location
Pacific Northwest
Some expensive cables are improperly designed or constructed. For example, high reactance or improper grounding or shielding. In this case, the differences may be audible.

Yet my experience suggests that is the exception, where the norm is that most expensive cables aren't improperly designed or constructed, they're no worse than normal cheap cables, and would be transparent in proper A/B/X testing.

Expectation bias cuts both ways. If you believe there is a difference (for better or for worse), then it increases the chance that you will hear one, even if it's not there. And if you believe there is no difference, then it can reduce the sensitivity of the test, increasing the chance that you will fail to recognize a subtle difference that really was there.
 
Last edited:

Cbdb2

Major Contributor
Joined
Sep 8, 2019
Messages
1,530
Likes
1,485
Location
Vancouver
Agree, in a true blind test you would not even know what your testing, cables, amps, dacs, speakers etc.
 
Top Bottom