Is the entire audio industry a fraud?

[simplywyn]

I've been on these forums for quite a while, and while I don't believe everything that is being said here, I'm constantly catching myself believing in the fraud.

Case and point - I spent well over $2000CAD on a Pre-amp (with >$500 on tubes for a Freya+) and a Denafrips Ares II, think that I will have an amazing setup with these two items. I've been listening to them for over a year now and I consider them to be great.

Lo and behold, I decided to buy a SMSL DO200, for around $399 in the last 11.11 sale, and plugged it in. Immediately, I heard a lot worse sound, lack of bass and something's wrong with my speakers. Thinking to myself ah ha! I’ve made the right purchase decisions.

I then realized I had wired the left and rights wrong, so I fixed it and what a surprise, everything returned. More deeper bass (if you see my other thread about lack of bass with my R11's), room shaking response, a sense of excitement that was sorely lacking in the Denafrips and Freya combo, and just a sheer sense of "speed". Drums felt like they hit me with force, whereas in the previous setup they were dulled a bit. Although we are talking 99.9 vs 99.8 difference. The price difference is almost $2500 vs $399.

The more and more I realize, maybe this industry is just a load of fraud? Even using my wife as a test, she likes the SMSL far better (her hearing range is far better than mine actually, she can hear things I cannot, like small high pitched sounds in the music here and there).

TL/DR - basically, I spent $$$ on equipment that did nothing but burn money, all replaced by a $399 DAC that does it all. I'm also using mono LA90's which are amazing as well.

My question is - is the rest of the audio industry just full of it?

 

[Blumlein 88]

Well it may be a case of 97% of the industry giving the rest of it a bad reputation. That sort of thing. Not to mention self delusion can be fun and profitable (for others).

 

[majingotan]

The differences heard are so miniscule that one can chalk it up to placebo

 

[Blumlein 88]

Quote from JGH who founded Stereophile. The publication that more than any other helped create the subjective audio press. Even he realized if you divorce it from honesty controls, it becomes unmoored from reality and boy did that ever happen.

Do you see any signs of future vitality in high-end audio?

Vitality? Don't make me laugh. Audio as a hobby is dying, largely by its own hand. As far as the real world is concerned, high-end audio lost its credibility during the 1980s, when it flatly refused to submit to the kind of basic honesty controls (double-blind testing, for example) that had legitimized every other serious scientific endeavor since Pascal. [This refusal] is a source of endless derisive amusement among rational people and of perpetual embarrassment for me, because I am associated by so many people with the mess my disciples made of spreading my gospel. For the record: I never, ever claimed that measurements don't matter. What I said (and very often, at that) was, they don't always tell the whole story. Not quite the same thing.

Remember those loudspeaker shoot-outs we used to have during our annual writer gatherings in Santa Fe? The frequent occasions when various reviewers would repeatedly choose the same loudspeaker as their favorite (or least-favorite) model? That was all the proof needed that [blind] testing does work, aside from the fact that it's (still) the only honest kind. It also suggested that simple ear training, with DBT confirmation, could have built the kind of listening confidence among talented reviewers that might have made a world of difference in the outcome of high-end audio.

 

[JSmith]

My question is - is the rest of the audio industry just full of it?

Much of it is unfortunately and in some cases as you mention, outright fraud from magic rocks to exotic cables etc. Glad to hear you're enjoying your new devices.


JSmith

 

[Chrispy]

Then again, uneducated consumers are also part of the picture....believing the marketing/advertising, ignoring science, etc....

 

[amirm]

It is an amazing situation where the unbelievable has become the standard. And what we do here -- identifying incredibly performant products for so little money -- the unbelievable! How could cheaper be better? It goes beyond intuition. But such is reality once proof of performance (proper measurements) were thrown out.

 

[MAB]

People wonder why we cast doubt on a company that pushes $450 cable-lifters. Or cryogenically 'treats' a piece of equipment for thousands. Or abandons engineering-based design for mass-market appeal.

Sometimes it's subtle, other times in your face like an product with a safety issues and poor performance from a company that should know better.

Buyer beware, ASR is one of the few good sources of advice.

 

[SIY]

Let's distinguish between "the audio industry" and "the faith-based audio industry niche called high end." The latter is a minuscule subset of the former.

 

[AudiOhm]

We all go to work everyday, how we arrive is not important as long as we are there on time.

But then there are others that need to arrive in style...Audio is no different.

The outcome is always the same no matter how much you spend on getting there...

Ohms

 

[kemmler3D]

Speaking from experience, the ENTIRE industry isn't a fraud, but there are a few factors that make it more fraudulent.

(FYI: Wattage numbers in the low-end non-audiophile range are basically all outright lies, just so you know.)

Beyond that, the situation outside of places like ASR is difficult if you want to be honest while selling audio gear. The underlying problem is that (again, aside from ASR), NOBODY is going to stop manufacturers from lying about their performance. Not the FTC, not the DOJ, not the press, nobody. This basically makes it impossible to compete without lying.

And it gets worse, because subjective reviewers don't even lie, they just spread fantasies about what they heard without bothering to check if what they heard was due to the gear or just their imagination / placebo.

If you are an audio manufacturer and you don't like lying about your specs, you face the following problems:

1. Many, if not all of your competitors (if they are publishing specs) are lying to some extent. Even the best of them, who publish FR charts, will often use generous smoothing or large dB scales to make them look better... So the 'honest' speaker at any given price point looks worse than the lying competition. See also: Lance Armstrong and how he justified cheating in the tour de france. Well, in audio marketing nobody is coming along and investigating you after the fact, so...

2. Consumers don't usually understand measurements / specs even if you do publish them. So you've taken up valuable ad / marketing space with what amounts to gibberish from your customer's point of view.

3. The norm of the industry is to market any actual technological advantage as if it were the result of a collaboration between Einstein, Steve Jobs and Jesus Christ, and basically any feature (even if it hurts performance) as if it sounded like the silken voice of angels. Subjective language is something people actually take seriously for some reason. Weasel words are not red flags, for some reason. So there is no advantage to be gained with about 80% of buyers by sticking to the facts.

Example of how high-end companies cheat: We use a lab-tested monotonic radially diminishing magnetic field pattern in our drivers to optimize linear cone motion and reduce distortion.

Translation: It's a normal magnet and we measured the field in a lab at some point, in the process of building a completely normal speaker.

Example of how low-end companies cheat: 600 Watts
Translation: It's actually 40 watts but it sounds about as loud as we think people think 600 watts sounds.

At the end of the day, you put yourself at a serious disadvantage if you accurately describe the performance of your gear solely in objective terms.

At my previous company, our gear was good enough that we didn't actually have to lie about it, but we certainly used flowery language and touted our features to the limit of credibility, that's just how it works - as you've noticed.

 

[kemmler3D]

Let's distinguish between "the audio industry" and "the faith-based audio industry niche called high end." The latter is a minuscule subset of the former.

Sorry, but the low end of the industry also lies like rugs. Go see how many bluetooth speakers claim to produce X hundreds or even thousands of watts from a 12V 3A adaptor.

The mid-tier of the consumer market (Bose, Sonos) doesn't need to lie because they don't compete on performance or specs per se, (last I checked, Bose doesn't even publish specs) they have invested enough in advertising to rely on reputation. So ironically I would say their marketing tends to be the least objectionable (aside from hobbyist brands that publish accurate specs) because they don't need to make too many claims to begin with.

 

[restorer-john]

Fraud, misrepresentation, lies and deception are rife* across practically every industry out there. Audio is no different. It's up to individuals to protect themselves by educating themselves- nobody can do it for them.

* One of my closest friends of 30 years, with terminal cancer asked me to look at her AU$12,000 'rife frequency machine' and tell her if I thought it was 'good'. I was as honest as I could be.

 

[Chrispy]

Fraud, misrepresentation, lies and deception are rife* across practically every industry out there. Audio is no different. It's up to individuals to protect themselves by educating themselves- nobody can do it for them.

* One of my closest friends of 30 years, with terminal cancer asked me to look at her AU$12,000 'rife frequency machine' and tell her if I thought it was 'good'. I was as honest as I could be.

Had to look up rife frequencies....wow.

 

[Blumlein 88]

Fraud, misrepresentation, lies and deception are rife* across practically every industry out there. Audio is no different. It's up to individuals to protect themselves by educating themselves- nobody can do it for them.

* One of my closest friends of 30 years, with terminal cancer asked me to look at her AU$12,000 'rife frequency machine' and tell her if I thought it was 'good'. I was as honest as I could be.

Even Steve Jobs fell for unsubstantiated cures.

 

[Descartes]

Rife machines and cancer

There are claims that the Rife machine can treat different conditions including cancer. There is no reliable evidence that the Rife machine works as a cure for cancer.

www.cancerresearchuk.org

Sad!!

New 2019 GB4000 GB4000 Frequency Machine -

www.thegb4000.com

 

[JSmith]

Truth, Lies and Fraud in the Audiophile World

I’ve always loved music. I remember going to sleep as a 5 year old listening to music on a small AM transistor radio next to my bed. In…

medium.com

JSmith

 

[kemmler3D]

I've seen companies that tried to make innovative products, pay their workforce fairly and create a good reputation. They were eaten up with debt and bought by companies that made junk, sourced their parts from overseas and priced their products one dollar lower, because those companies had money. They made profit.

Yeah, that about sums up my experience as well.

I think it is possible to build a popular, mainstream, profitable, higher-performing audio company from scratch in a matter of about 5 years. Unfortunately from what I've seen, it would require at least $150M in investment up front, a large chunk of that would have to go straight into advertising, and investors would make returns, but not the kind of returns they want.

 

[JSmith]

Ah, this is the one I was trying to find earlier;

Hi-Fi is All a Scam - Roger Skoff Finally Admits All

Hi-Fi is All a Scam - Roger Skoff Finally Admits All

positive-feedback.com

Even so, that's not the real problem. What the real problem IS is that audiophiles, music lovers, Hi-Fi Crazies, and all the rest still fail to recognize that what they think they hear is NOT "sound" (as they, despite all rational explanation, still insist on calling it) but simply a pattern of vibrations—initiated as vibrations; recorded as vibrations; reproduced as vibrations; picked-up by their ears as vibrations; and transmuted to "sound" only IN their minds, BY their minds.

Other than that, sound is a complete fantasy; a hallucination—just one more example of Hi-Fi voodoo and possibly even the dread "placebo effect".

Forget all of our past discussions over the relative merits of tubes and solid-state; forget whether cables, cable lifters, room-treatments, power conditioners, "magic boxes," magic bowls, and other hotly-disputed "tweaks" work; forget it ALL: It's all a scam.

JSmith

 

[Tangband]

It is an amazing situation where the unbelievable has become the standard. And what we do here -- identifying incredibly performant products for so little money -- the unbelievable! How could cheaper be better? It goes beyond intuition. But such is reality once proof of performance (proper measurements) were thrown out.

The biggest fraud in the industry in youtube channels and hifi papers AND some dealers, is that more expensive electronics is always better than less expensive. And you never see those cheap, good bargains like Aiyima a07 or Topping d10s reviewed by What Hifi. I guess its all about advertising.

One other thing I noticed - When Apple suddenly released lossless and high res. music for 9 dollar/month, an incredible thing, almost none in the hifibusiness wrote about it. Amazon did the same- noone wrote about it. It was still TIDAL for 20 dollar/month and MQA that had all the writnings. Why ? Maybe because all the ”high end” gear promoted TIDAL connect and also Spotify connect . I guess noone in the hifi industry wants to review an Apple iPhone as a high end streamer for music, because theres no advertising money in it , and the dealers dont sell the hardware for it .