captainbeefheart
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I’m not sure whether there are any consumer grade applications for these power conditioners (excluding surge protectors), but I can certainly relate to its appeal based on my own journey with this hobby.
Before I had spent much time on this site, I had purchased an iFi Pro iCAN Signature for my headphone setup, along with several other of iFi’s offerings. It had certainly gotten raves over at Head-Fi, along with the salient (corporate-funded) audiophile websites around. I was really happy with it and still am. But once I became invested in their brand, I did a deeper dive into their accessories and gave in to an iFi Power Station ($599), a power strip that purports to have active noise cancellation circuitry and a number of likely redundant stages of passive filtering for each of its eight power outlets—promising an array of sonic improvements.
The thing reeks of heft and quality. And having this statement piece anchoring my gear provided me with a sense of fortitude and authenticity as an “Audiophile”, before I had even considered whether noise was an issue for me. We had purchased our home brand new, and I knew its build quality included a fastidious investment in robust electrical wiring.
That didn’t occur to me or factor into my purchase decision at the time at all—I was relatively new to this hobby, and in my inexperience I didn’t trust my ear to detect noise, nor had I sufficiently digested the principles evident on this site’s reviews. Given how much I had invested in my setup already, I was obsessed with FOMO, susceptible to any claims offering to make my already formidable investment sound even “better”—cables, connectors, power supplies, and conditioners such as this one. It was an obsessive, exhausting quest without any definable endpoint.
Then after some time on this site, someone here took me to task on an expensive digital cable, and I felt crummy enough trying to defend it that I chose to bow to their reason and return it for a serviceable one at a fraction of the price. Admittedly it bugged me for awhile. But after spending a year or so immersing myself in the spectrum of opinions here, I gradually got deprogrammed from the elitist platitudes on Head-Fi and leaned into my own reason-based training as a scientist in another field. And not only has this saved me a ton of money, it’s freed me up to enjoy my music instead of listening for elusory imperfections in my system.
The term “audiophile” has been appropriated by so many bad actors that it has not only become pretentious, but arguably meaningless. For those who haven’t done the work to confidently earn it, buying it has become a facile choice. And when music is exploited for status-seeking tastes, this is how predators such as PS Audio can successfully turn outlandish profits, producing little black boxes that offer fantastical promises that cannot be refuted.
"Deprogrammed" is a great term I am going to have to remember that when trying to convert "audiophiles" back into good old fashioned music enthusiasts.
I have a few friends and several acquaintances that thank me to this day for showing them the light. For the most part non of them were wealthy enough to have the financial cost of the audiophile condition have an impact one way or another. I'm not talking about I'm not saying the purchases of said equipment will put you in the poor house or take food out of a kids mouth, more that you could have invested the money for financial security or increase the budget for your kids college funds etc... Heck you could have stepped up your new car budget to get that dream vehicle you've been wanting. One of my good friends, veteran and working for USPS was highly afflicted, he had stereophile magazines laying around and Music Direct catalogs. Installing a new set of speakers I was helping him and he got genuinely upset with me that I hooked his speaker wires up incorrectly. I'm like "we listened to music for a few hours and it sounded amazing what are you talking about?". He then was worried if we could have done damage by having the speaker wire GOING IN THE WRONG DIRECTION. Yup not joking. It was at this point I knew I had to do an intervention. Since then he sold off a bunch of stuff and hasn't been happier with his system. But it did take some time as you said to undo all the programming that had been done from the industry and it's predatory behavior on the consumer. I mean he truly believed there was some sort of entity out there that would keep the industry honest and enforce some sort of false advertising laws. I don't know how many times I heard "but their website says right here this does xyz" and "I read in Stereophile abc about this digital cable and if so and so says it made a huge difference why would he lie?". After the whole psychology aspect was discussed and then the more technical aspects explained and then also demonstrated. He's the guy I put electrolytic capacitors in his crossover networks when he wanted these $300 beeswax paper and foil types from Jupiter I believe. He didn't see the networks but thought the new beeswax caps were installed and man did I hear the rave reviews of how this veil has lifted and the magic was now strong with his speakers, just pure hogwash. I finally opened up the networks and showed him as he didn't believe me. After some anger subsided and acceptance grew we laughed over it. I did work out a compromise with replacing the lytics with some polyester types which he really enjoys and saved a ton of cash. He got into doing experiments where we would have others over and do blind testing etc... The more we did this stuff it showed that in a true blind test the majority of the stuff claimed on the internet and by snake oil salesman cannot be repeatably identified, it's indistinguishable. Poor guy even sat through me even babbling on about technical stuff and data charts etc..
It's great when you can convert an audiophile over to the side of reason and balance.
There is also another aspect I am completely okay with and that's if you have nothing better to spend your money on and you just like to dress up your system with fancy looking exotic audio bling bling then as long as it doesn't diminish the performance at all then by all means that's great go for it, just don't claim the blacks are blacker and the vocals are like virgin mermaids singing to the Gods when we know the power cable hasn't done anything.