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Snake Oil Department, Top This

An uncorrected audio error, if not audible, will not do any damage to the listing experience. The bank account will, because arithmetic is done to ensure that the account is accurate to the penny, and any error at all will send up a red flag. A monetary error, no matter how small, is unacceptable; an inaudible one, not so much.
 
Opening new horizons, why not three-phase power supplies? Audiophile-grade quality, of course.
 
Ron Texas said:
https://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/shunyata-research-sigma-nr-v2-power-cord

A $3500 power cord.
"This power cord brings an accuracy of timbre and harmony, a musical veracity, that I’ve simply not experienced before. Yes, it’s got all the audiophile virtues I’ve described in my previous experiences with Shunyata power cables. But those attributes really don’t speak to what the Sigma NR v2 is about. "

What drugs was he on? Can I have some?
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I’ll take a hit as long as it doesn’t lead me to blowing 3500 on one short cable!
 
mhardy6647 said:
It is probably worth noting that audiophile grades -- like musical waveforms -- are not quantized, but rather form a smooooooooooooooth continuum.
:cool:
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Beer puts a pole in the reconstruction filter, for sure. That must smooth out some the jaggies.
 
egellings said:
Beer puts a pole in the reconstruction filter, for sure. That must smooth out some the jaggies.
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I thought there was gonna be some kind of brewer's droop joke coming when i started to read this post... ;)
 
Gibsonian said:
I’ll take a hit as long as it doesn’t lead me to blowing 3500 on one short cable!
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From the review linked above
In studio recordings, the gestalt is one of actually being in the studio during recording rather than listening to playback of the recording session. On recordings such as Kenny Burrell’s “Saturday Night Blues” on the seminal hard-bop album Midnight Blue, or Melody Gardot’s “Your Heart is Black as Night” from My One and Only Thrill, I can hear the secondary reflections and, most incredibly, the decay of these secondary reflections splay off the opposite wall in the recording studio.
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All this from a cable that transfers the AC mains from the wall to the amplifier. Upon it's arrival at the amplifier, the AC passes through a fuse (a FUSE!!!!) then the primary of a power transformer. The resultant energy at the secondary of the transformer is then rectified, smoothed and filtered to achieve DC power for the amplifier circuits. The only property that this cable possesses that could affect the performance of the equipment is resistance which , in the case of a one meter cable would be utterly insignificant.

Additionally, the reviewer obviously knows nothing about studio recording or the post-processing that happens to every bit of final audio prior to mastering.

This reviewer is either a useful shill or an utterly deluded putz, probably both.

 
Fortunately, audiophile fuses are readily available... and of course appropriately expensive. :cool:
 
Ahmonge said:
This occurs when a tool (a sound system, for example) becomes an end in itself. Once you have the right equipment, the logical thing would be to focus on listening to music, attending concerts, etc. We should not pay more attention to our sound systems than we do to a screwdriver or a wrench.
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I’m always amazed how often this false dichotomy shows up in audiophile discussions.

This idea that we’re dealing with a zero sum scenario - you can either love the music or love gear - is just so obviously false. It’s not a zero sum game - you can love more than one thing. You can love music and you can also be really enthusiastic about audio gear. That’s pretty much what brings most people to a site like this in the first place.

If you find audio gear fascinating and rewarding, there’s nothing wrong at all with enjoying and acknowledging that. I absolutely love my system. I find the gear to be beautiful and interesting. It rewards my attention. I’ve fiddled with it, added to it and subtracted from it over the years, which has been tons of fun, and nothing has stopped me from absolutely loving listening to music through the system.

Lots of people (and let’s face it, especially in this hobby it tends to be a guy thing) like technology and gear. They like thinking about it reading about it tinkering with it.
Some people are so interested to get into DIY. Other people become so interested they even start their own companies designing audio gear. And thank goodness for that!

By all means you can take your approach - simply set up a system and forget about it afterwards. But there’s no reason to tell others who feel differently to do the very same, or suggest they have lost their way.

Otherwise, on the logic you are advising, our very website founder Amir should be the most pitiable audiophile here. I mean, look at the tremendous amount of time Amir has spent devoting himself to investigating, working with, measuring, testing, and writing about countless pieces of audio gear. The poor guy is doing that “ instead of just setting up a system, forgetting about it and focussing on the music.”

But of course most of us recognize that there’s nothing wrong at all with Amir or anyone else here being fascinated by and passionate about audio gear…. and it doesn’t automatically mean not being able to enjoy the music.
 
MattHooper said:
This idea that we’re dealing with a zero sum scenario - you can either love the music or love gear - is just so obviously false. It’s not a zero sum game - you can love more than one thing. You can love music and you can also be really enthusiastic about audio gear.
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Sometimes it's probably this, but in my experience, it's a little more nuanced (and non-zero-sum).

My general view is that audiophilia begins right around the time that the hobby of gear acquisition/research/debate/churn begins to supersede the hobby of listening to music. Not that it eclipses it completely, but that it begins to consume more time, effort, mental energy, etc. The audiophile goes to sleep dreaming of a speaker or an amp or a stylus (or if he's a true psycho, a cable riser or power cord lol) rather than a record, a concert, a song.
 
A haphazard senseless adherence to those imagined improvements and differences among high performing products would be responsible for long time audiophiles still wasting time and money while convincing themselves what they do makes their system sound better and more unbelievably their idea of fun. Not to mention the increasing chance of developing an addiction to snake oil type improvements when things are thought to be never good enough.
I have used the same brand amplification for 45 yrs, previous speakers 30 yr., current speakers 12 yrs. In spite of what was mentioned previously Amir has had the same speakers for 20 yrs. and would be using the same amp from back then if it still worked and replaced it with nothing special because amps are dacs when it comes to measurements, everyone is good enough if you have as much power as you want. Take member Dualmanzak for example, the only true objectivist/audiophile on this site. The same equipment forever, painstakingly optimized over the years using the best available recordings as a reference not a comparison of essentially identical preamps or worse to make a decision.
The purpose of this site is for people new to premium sound reproduction to not be suckered into the constant upgrade swindle so many of the oldtimers were dumb enough to be caught up in by the promise of non-existent industry advancements. Look at the performance of NTTY's (25 yr. old) CD player tests or any 80s premium Japanese integrated amp. Both objectively transparent and thereby a nail in the coffin to the overpriced mainly U.S. based small scale snake oil factory still dead horse beat by creepy septuganarians at AS and SP as worth considering for purchase.
See the inept recent article by Roger Bakel making an embarassing attempt at trying to prove overpriced products are justified by:
Excessive dealer markup
Tariffs (control of the market by government is socialism)
Low product demand (read: exclusive) resulting in increased production costs validate equal performance for 100x price compared to efficient off shore engineering and labor. Let's see Bakel explain that and a piss poor FX still allowing product "not from the U.S." to come out ahead.

In the same issue JA mentioned his pathological attraction to the dynamically crippled, so called timbre superior British ls3/5a and clones in his dynaudio review, as if we should be impressed that he has no intention of hearing music reproduced at realistic levels, it's all about not being annoyed, or moved by the performance. If he kept the Dynaudios and listened for a couple of months he would wonder why he listened to that other crap for so long and appreciated it.

So, back to the new breed, you are so lucky to have accurate, psychoacoustically valid speakers, powerful amplification and everything in between transparent by any measure for a price that seems artificially restricted to take your mind off of what is actually going on in the world.
It could be worse, you could be listening to $10k tube amps and speakers in the nearfield spouting opinions that seem perfectly sensible from your barren, twisted perspective.
 
MattHooper said:
I’m always amazed how often this false dichotomy shows up in audiophile discussions.

This idea that we’re dealing with a zero sum scenario - you can either love the music or love gear - is just so obviously false. It’s not a zero sum game - you can love more than one thing. You can love music and you can also be really enthusiastic about audio gear. That’s pretty much what brings most people to a site like this in the first place.

If you find audio gear fascinating and rewarding, there’s nothing wrong at all with enjoying and acknowledging that. I absolutely love my system. I find the gear to be beautiful and interesting. It rewards my attention. I’ve fiddled with it, added to it and subtracted from it over the years, which has been tons of fun, and nothing has stopped me from absolutely loving listening to music through the system.

Lots of people (and let’s face it, especially in this hobby it tends to be a guy thing) like technology and gear. They like thinking about it reading about it tinkering with it.
Some people are so interested to get into DIY. Other people become so interested they even start their own companies designing audio gear. And thank goodness for that!

By all means you can take your approach - simply set up a system and forget about it afterwards. But there’s no reason to tell others who feel differently to do the very same, or suggest they have lost their way.

Otherwise, on the logic you are advising, our very website founder Amir should be the most pitiable audiophile here. I mean, look at the tremendous amount of time Amir has spent devoting himself to investigating, working with, measuring, testing, and writing about countless pieces of audio gear. The poor guy is doing that “ instead of just setting up a system, forgetting about it and focussing on the music.”

But of course most of us recognize that there’s nothing wrong at all with Amir or anyone else here being fascinated by and passionate about audio gear…. and it doesn’t automatically mean not being able to enjoy the music.
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Thats very well said Matt. The posters comment you were referring to was absurd
 
MattHooper said:
I’m always amazed how often this false dichotomy shows up in audiophile discussions.

This idea that we’re dealing with a zero sum scenario - you can either love the music or love gear - is just so obviously false. It’s not a zero sum game - you can love more than one thing. You can love music and you can also be really enthusiastic about audio gear. That’s pretty much what brings most people to a site like this in the first place.

If you find audio gear fascinating and rewarding, there’s nothing wrong at all with enjoying and acknowledging that. I absolutely love my system. I find the gear to be beautiful and interesting. It rewards my attention. I’ve fiddled with it, added to it and subtracted from it over the years, which has been tons of fun, and nothing has stopped me from absolutely loving listening to music through the system.

Lots of people (and let’s face it, especially in this hobby it tends to be a guy thing) like technology and gear. They like thinking about it reading about it tinkering with it.
Some people are so interested to get into DIY. Other people become so interested they even start their own companies designing audio gear. And thank goodness for that!

By all means you can take your approach - simply set up a system and forget about it afterwards. But there’s no reason to tell others who feel differently to do the very same, or suggest they have lost their way.

Otherwise, on the logic you are advising, our very website founder Amir should be the most pitiable audiophile here. I mean, look at the tremendous amount of time Amir has spent devoting himself to investigating, working with, measuring, testing, and writing about countless pieces of audio gear. The poor guy is doing that “ instead of just setting up a system, forgetting about it and focussing on the music.”

But of course most of us recognize that there’s nothing wrong at all with Amir or anyone else here being fascinated by and passionate about audio gear…. and it doesn’t automatically mean not being able to enjoy the music.
Click to expand...

The comment to which you refer (and which you seem to criticize) by @Ahmonge was in itself a comment on the post immediately preceding it, by @Punter. The part of @Punter's post that I found most illustrative was, "For people with restricted social horizons, it's a pastime that can be indulged in a solitary way. This type of individual is hungry to add doo-dads and embellishments to their equipment. Over time, their HiFi rack becomes a sort of shrine."

It seems that the subject of his post was not a choice between gear or music. Instead, the subject of the post was people who were obsessed with equipment for its own sake ... for whom collecting audio gear had become largely symbolic.
Your post noted that how you love your system, and how you enjoy fiddling with it and had tons of fun, but the last sentence was, " ... and nothing has stopped me from absolutely loving listening to music through the system."
I took it that such love of listening was conspicuously lacking, and deliberately so, in the people Punter was describing.

Although it appeared to be reactionary, I feel that Ahmonge's comment, if taken in the spirit rather than the letter, was therefore justified.

What do you think?
 
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Palmer said:
True - I had to roll up a couple of quarters, and bang 'em into the fuse holders. Holds pretty well, so far. Can't get on the bus, though... ;)
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leo dicaprio toast meme.gif
 
Jim Taylor said:
Instead, the subject of the post was people who were obsessed with equipment for its own sake ... for whom collecting audio gear had become largely symbolic.
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Yes, but he used the example of this purported “obsession” to tell us why it was problematic in the first place, and that was based on what he clearly thinks is the right way to be an audiophile, in which he moved to general claims about how audiophiles in general should approach the hobby:

“Once you have the right equipment, the logical thing would be to focus on listening to music, attending concerts, etc. We should not pay more attention to our sound systems than we do to a screwdriver or a wrench.”

That’s clearly not aimed specifically at the small group of obsessives, it’s clearly aimed at any audiophile reading what he’s writing - we ought to have the attitude towards our gear that he advises, or we risk becoming one of these obsessives.

Which is why I pointed out it was a false dichotomy. I don’t really need to be told to pay no more attention to my system than equivalent of a screwdriver or a wrench or that I just need to complete it and only focus on the music and going out to concerts. I will practice my audio/music hobby as I please.

As you can see, while I certainly support spreading accurate information about audio gear (which makes ASR great ), I’m not really into the idea of audiophiles telling other audiophiles how they should be practising the hobby. If somebody enjoys audio gear enough to turn a room into a “ shrine” of audio gear, who am I to tell them that their passion is misplaced, that they shouldn’t follow their bliss and should do as I do?

There are plenty of ASR members who have rooms full of gear, including multiple DIY speakers and amps and all that. Anybody could diss that as some sort of shrine or misplaced enthusiasm. I think their passion is great. Good for them if this is what they’re into. Some people like to fiddle with old sports cars. Whatever…
 
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