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The belief is one thing. The will to own something others do not have or cannot afford, that is setting their systems apart from the average, is another aspect. It is like having gold crust on your steak or a Tourbillon in your mechanical wristwatch. Pure snobbism. You can despise it, you can decry it, but the motivation behind it is immune to being labelled ´snake oil´.
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I've written about the false equivalency with watch enthusiasts before. Nobody buys a tourbillon for the reasons tourbillons were invented a coupla hundred years ago. They were invented because pocket watches may sit in the pocket with the crown up or sideways, and those two positions (plus other possible positions) cause any error in the poise of the balance or any anomaly in the way the hairspring hangs or any slack in the balance arbor jewels to change slightly the timekeeping accuracy of the balance. The tourbillon, by using the clockworks to drive the balance assembly to rotate once per minute, evenly spent the same amount of time in every position, averaging those errors out consistently.
Even mechanical watches don't need or benefit from tourbillons any more.
But here's the point: Nobody believes that they do. Even the guys will to spend five or six figures for a high-end watch with a tourbillon don't for a second believe it will affect accuracy in any important way. They just think the machine that works that way is cool and worth admiring. It's the same with most any other traditional advantage of this or that in the mechanical watch world--whatever legitimate reason there was to come up with the feature back in the day is really no longer needed. Even 130 years ago, when the railroad watch standard was established that
required high accuracy as a matter of life safety watches so certified did not use tourbillons. But they certainly did have many extra jewels to reduce movement drag and wear even at the margins. Railroad-grade (and approved) pocket watches were required to run within 15 seconds a week, and they were rigorously inspected to make sure they stayed that way.
And nobody in the watch world believes that features like tourbillons have any effect even if they don't know or care one bit about how the things work. They just think they are cool to look at and represent a level of craft higher than regular mechanical watches. Buying them is more about making an artistic statement than making a technical choice, because watches share quite a lot with jewelry in function. It is not usually snobbishness that drives such choices by my observation, though snobs exist at all economic levels.
(Tourbillons are just one example from the watch world--there are dozens of others.)
But in the audio world, there are deep enthusiasts who
believe they hear a difference when they install a boutique power cable. Even when they have enough technical education to know better, they believe it. They believe it because the "experts" have been saying it over and over again for decades. There are items even sillier than multi-thousand-dollar power cables: grounding boxes (literally a box filled with dirt), green highlighter on (the label side of) CD's, and on and on.
And they don't believe it because they prefer coloration. JA once said at a conference that the market would probably prefer amps with a healthy dose of second-harmonic distortion, and he knows what he's talking about. But those who might have that preference will be told that what they are hearing is more accurate and more
true to the music, when it is neither closer to the electrical signal or even close to what the real instruments sound like. They are trading one distortion for another.
It turns out that those measurements back in the magazines of the 70's and 80's weren't bad but they weren't actually complete--we know more now than we did then and software-based measurement is far more powerful now. For example, I posted a test review of a Holman preamp that I just refurbished, using 80's technology to measure it. There was no fast fourier transform technique for spectral analysis--that requires digital sampling (the FFT is a computational convenience for digital data). In those days, people would run an oscillator sweep and write down the distortion at frequent intervals as they did so. It worked, but it didn't tell the whole story. It would be difficult for me to do a two-tone IMD test with a bench distortion analyzer, let alone a multitone test like Amir performs. Those old magazines didn't get it wrong, but how they did things weren't going to form the foundation for a boutique industry that catered to a high-spending wealthy clientele, and that was the explicit strategy undertaken by the first purveyor of boutique cables, by all accounts.
The problem is that even the experts now believe they hear stuff and are unwilling to test their ability to detect those attributes they describe using controlled testing. I'd like to see carefully controlled comparisons during the subjective review, which would apply science without making it any less subjective. Do that in addition to the objective performance measurements. But that runs the risk of bringing the whole house of cards down.
Rick "has no problem with people buying boutique items, but has real problems with making stuff up to manipulate them into doing so" Denney
