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Snake Oil Department, Top This

@amirm I hope someone can send you this for a review. I'd love to hear your take on it.

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Harmonic Resolution Systems VXR Equipment Rack

Harmonic Resolution Systems is a 25-year-old company based in Buffalo, New York, that designs and builds cutting-edge audio equipment racks and stands. It
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Type: Three-shelf equipment stand
Model reviewed: VXR-1921-3V with three M3X2 bases
Price: $37,245
 
How in the heck do you review a rack? In any case, I can guarantee there's no way it justifies its price tag.

Edit: I somehow missed that this was in the snake oil thread and thought it was a serious request. :facepalm:
 
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kyuu said:
How in the heck do you review a rack? In any case, I can guarantee there's no way it justifies its price tag.

Edit: I somehow missed that this was in the snake oil thread and thought it was a serious request. :facepalm:
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Easy, you put your gear on it, sit down, imagine that it sounds like it's worth $37,245, don't worry about how, and write it up.
 
kyuu said:
How in the heck do you review a rack? In any case, I can guarantee there's no way it justifies its price tag.
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I actually remember reading a review for one of these expensive racks in which the reviewer talked about a “break in period” for the rack!

This is where you end up in the “ everything makes a difference” world.
 
Have the "everything matters" crowd already settled on what conditions in the magnetic field of the earth are most conductive to a great sounding system? And does somebody offer a service to rate possible places of living based on that? Why don't audiophile reviews include mention of the sun's activity during the time of testing? After all, sun storms can induce electricity in circuits on the ground (see the Carrington event).

I often wonder whether there is a degree of ridiculousness where the audiophiles are going to stop. Then I come across another review of an optical cable and its "voicing", "directional" speaker cables or "acoustic treatment" discs of 2cm diameter which are supposed to treat bass issues and realize, again, that there is no limit to the madness.
 
People who can afford speaker cabled prices like a small car should have a good education and sometimes technical jobs / expertise. I always wondered if they don't get that hilarious cable nonsense at the point where they themselves screw that simple spade on or insert the banana.

But it seems something in the brain just dims out other things. Like nicotine addiction has the ability to dim out bad taste, smell, health degradation - very powerful. Then "sunk cost fallacy" is a real thing and it's not about small sums here. To me it's the persons that refuse to see the ridiculousness out of a variety of motivations.
 
Sal1950 said:
Where I come from 2 bits is $0.25 cents. ;)
Nobody knows what I'm talking about any more. :facepalm:
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2 bits, 4 bits, 6 bits, a dollar!
 
What more is there to say? There is a class of people who simply have the need for something like this.

The MSB Sentinel DAC is a flagship, three-chassis digital-to-analog converter widely considered the pinnacle of ultra-luxury high-end audio. Priced at $375,000, it isolates its digital processing, analog conversion, and power supplies into three separate, painstakingly CNC-machined enclosures to achieve unprecedented musical transparency and lifelike sound.
 
Descartes said:
What do you all think about IsoAcoustic GAIA?
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They look good and we (wife and) liked what we heard in an IsoAcoustics demonstration. Our stone floors eliminated the use of spiked feet.
 

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scrubb said:
In a few million years the Earth will finally be broken-in, and my stereo will really open up!
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You know it's a moving target as the Earth's magnetic field drifts and eventually flips every 200k-300k years. You just can't win.
 
Alexander Gödde said:
I often wonder whether there is a degree of ridiculousness where the audiophiles are going to stop. Then I come across another review of an optical cable and its "voicing", "directional" speaker cables or "acoustic treatment" discs of 2cm diameter which are supposed to treat bass issues and realize, again, that there is no limit to the madness.
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We tend to say "madness" jokingly but I think there is probably an element of genuine mental illness at the furthest fringe of audio snake oil, for some people. Just like religion or superstition ends up as the vehicle for delusional beliefs, so can audio stuff.

Ruediger said:
People who can afford speaker cabled prices like a small car should have a good education and sometimes technical jobs / expertise.
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A lot of money flows to finance / investment type people, who don't necessarily have any background in or meaningful exposure to science or engineering.
 
kemmler3D said:
A lot of money flows to finance / investment type people, who don't necessarily have any background in or meaningful exposure to science or engineering.
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Even for people in the engineering or science disciplines, it's not unusual to see a lot of magical thinking going on outside of their specialty. Some notable Nobel laureates have had... questionable beliefs. Also thinking of Richard Dawkins, who I recall recently professed to believe that LLMs were conscious beings.
 
kyuu said:
Even for people in the engineering or science disciplines, it's not unusual to see a lot of magical thinking going on outside of their specialty. Some notable Nobel laureates have had... questionable beliefs. Also thinking of Richard Dawkins, who I recall recently professed to believe that LLMs were conscious beings.
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This is true. In my previous line of work I also ran into people with plenty of money but no more than your average Best Buy customer's knowledge of audio. Either way, having the money to blow on fancy stuff doesn't mean you know how it works. How many Ferrari owners could service its timing belt or even point it out under the hood?

All it takes is a simple assumption that the pitch for a high-end product is not 0% true. If you are skeptical of how much a shelf could improve sound, but you 1) have a buttload of money to spend and 2) feel their pitch is at least remotely plausible, you might buy despite an expectation of very marginal (but real) improvements.

They probably buy a $30K shelf the same way we buy a DAC with 115 SINAD when we know 98 will do - peace of mind... or something like that.

It takes a leap of intuition that most people will not take, to realize the pitch for such products is actually 0%, not 50% or 5% or even 0.5% true in practice.
 
kemmler3D said:
They probably buy a $30K shelf the same way we buy a DAC with 115 SINAD when we know 98 will do - peace of mind... or something like that.
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So True, piece of mind, size of wallet, and which forums we frequent.

That spending $30,000 on an equipment stand would float someone's boat seems strange to me.

But, as an ASR reading nerd, upgrading my perfectly good TPA3255 amp to one with PFFB seemed quite logical even though I am quite certain my 70+ year old ears cannot possibly detect a difference. I am absolutely jealous that spending $30,000 on anything audio is not an option for me.
 
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