Why Are Audiophiles so Bound and Determined to Make Others Waste Money

[WickedInsignia]

Even without the psuedo-science babble and Marv's "expertise" SBAF is just a few bullies with a moat of cannon fodder.

There's one single thing that puts ASR's integrity above the rest. It's probably the most telling aspect of an online platform and we take it for granted.
Look around here. Notice something? Something that could influence what sort of discussion is allowed on a forum? Something that would bias even the most righteous self-acclaimed purveyor of truth? Or maybe you notice the complete lack of something so present everywhere else?

That's right: it's the complete and utter absence of ads.

 

[Ilkless]

Even without the psuedo-science babble and Marv's "expertise" SBAF is just a few bullies with a moat of cannon fodder.

There's one single thing that puts ASR's integrity above the rest. It puts it above Jude's slimy bullshit, Marv's exclusive club for only his bestest of buddies and the absolute mudpile that is r/Audiophile. It's probably the most telling aspect of an online platform and we take it for granted.
Look around here. Notice something? Something that could influence what sort of discussion is allowed on a forum? Something that would bias even the most righteous self-acclaimed purveyor of truth? Or maybe you notice the complete lack of something so present everywhere else?

That's right: it's the complete and utter absence of ads.

I don't begrudge that some people romanticise and fetishise equipment, and this fetishisation can enhance enjoyment. I do it myself. Just have the integrity to admit it is because it provides a certain multi-sensory experience that sound waves merely partially factor into. Yet these people will tell you the sound waves are perceptibly different (without evidence). Nor any explanation why they can discern this despite the moderating effect of non-auditory stimuli. Confront them and they claim that these differences and characteristics are so overpowering that they can be reliably discerned, swamping out the moderating effect (or that they can just mentally filter out this moderating effect through sheer force of will).

 

[maverickronin]

I hosted an audio club meeting about twelve years ago. One of the attendees put on a couple of recordings he had brought and then asked if my preamplifier inverted phase. I said I didn't think so, and refrained from telling him that I'd investigated and tried to hear phase inversion in the past and considered its effects to be inaudible (and therefore imaginary). He said that he was 95% sure the phase was being inverted. I nodded politely.

Next day I called the preamplifier manufacturer who confirmed that it DID invert phase. Granted his chance of being right was 50%, but what stood out to me was his expression of near-certainty about something which was inaudible to me. He allowed for the possibility that he was mistaken, while expressing his high degree of confidence in what his ears where telling him.

Said attendee became one of my beta testers, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that I can neither hear nor explain what he evidently can hear.

Even though you'd think this would be a lot easier to hear than reversed phase, pretty much every time I go to a headphone meet there are always one or two setups with reversed stereo, and I always seem to be the first person to notice.

 

[maverickronin]

I don't begrudge that some people romanticise and fetishise equipment, and this fetishisation can enhance enjoyment. I do it myself. Just have the integrity to admit it is because it provides a certain multi-sensory experience that sound waves merely partially factor into. Yet these people will tell you the sound waves are perceptibly different (without evidence). Nor any explanation why they can discern this despite the moderating effect of non-auditory stimuli. Confront them and they claim that these differences and characteristics are so overpowering that they can be reliably discerned, swamping out the moderating effect (or that they can just mentally filter out this moderating effect through sheer force of will).

This seems to make audio especially weird as hobbies go. Few people seem to have trouble admitting that factors other than pure performance influence their preferences for other things like cars, motorcycles, boats, DIY PC builds, gaming peripherals, furniture, etc.

 

[mkawa]

Even without the psuedo-science babble and Marv's "expertise" SBAF is just a few bullies with a moat of cannon fodder.

There's one single thing that puts ASR's integrity above the rest. It puts it above Jude's slimy bullshit, Marv's exclusive club for only his bestest of buddies and the absolute mudpile that is r/Audiophile. It's probably the most telling aspect of an online platform and we take it for granted.
Look around here. Notice something? Something that could influence what sort of discussion is allowed on a forum? Something that would bias even the most righteous self-acclaimed purveyor of truth? Or maybe you notice the complete lack of something so present everywhere else?

That's right: it's the complete and utter absence of ads.

i've known jude was slimy from the day head-fi opened, and yah, ads are why. he was clearly a pusher and it wasn't right. the only reason i was ever on head-fi was that the headwize DIY forum had to migrate there when cmoy couldn't maintain headwize anymore.

there is a definite profit aspect to this exploitation as well as community pressure

 

[rdenney]

The media does not help with always trying to have two sides to every story.

Many things are so well-proven that our whole society actually relies on them being correct, yet the media still on occasion tries to give the opposing view equal time.

I think this has something to do with why some people think that science is just a different opinion. It's not opinion, it's science, and it has been rigorously proven. When 99% of experts agree on something, it's not right to give Jim-Bob equal time for his unfounded, insane ideas. Then every Jim-Bob thinks he should also be given time and have his opinions not dismissed outright. But maybe I'm being uncharitable again...

99% of exerts agreeing is not evidence. They may base their agreement on evidence, or they may just be trusting that others have done so and are parroting their group. Experts and scientists can be as subject to groupthink as non-experts.

What is lost on much of the population are the skills needed to reasonably interpret evidence, without having to depend on consensus.

A consensus of experts has frequently been wrong. Settled science happens when theories are proven or demonstrated to be predictive with rigorous and repeated testing.

Rick “who challenges groupthink among experts in his professional work every day” Denney

 

[mkawa]

as a research scientist i strongly disagree with the statement that 99% of experts agreeing on something can be meaningless groupthink. we literally dedicate our lives to the _process_ of science and the cornerstone of that process is peer review and intellectual honesty. if 99% of experts agree, it's because we've read evidence, performed our own experiments to confirm the findings, published the results of those experiments as well, subject to peer review, and so on. yes, if we all lacked intellectual honesty, there could be a problem, but I do strongly believe (and so do those I consider to be the scions in my field who are most likely to be the ones reviewing work) in the process of peer review, and that it is NOT ever simple groupthink.

if settled science is disrupted because of new evidence, the process of science is meant to discover it, present that new evidence and settle the new perspective, just as it did the last.

 

[rdenney]

I’ve done my share of research science, too, and review research papers for three different journals. Does that mean I know anything in particular? What it does mean is that I find enough to complain about in those papers not to trust mere consensus.

The statement was not that 99% of scientists who have researched a specific question have formed a consensus conclusion based on evidence, but rather 99% of experts. How does one gain perceived expertise? Often by skimming research papers and articles and rarely by their own repetition or deep study. This is part of the problem. There is simply too much to know in science writ large. I don’t make the mistake that the public often makes of distrusting science because I distrust scientists, but I can surely understand it.

Scientists outside their specialty are as subject to being wrong-headed as anyone else. Even within their specialty, consensus over major settled topics has changed radically in history because of the work of revolutionary thinkers.

I have personally rebutted so-called settled science amongst engineers in my specialty in several specific areas, with solid evidence but limited success so far with expert engineers. Many of those engineers routinely sit on panels of experts, write papers with the assumption that their science is correct (without having confirmed it themselves), reject the work the small minority they disagreed with, and opine loudly when challenged. (As do I.) If experts were open-minded about what they “know” only from consensus opinion, a single dart of real data that refutes the consensus model would be all it would take to force a reassessment.

Rick “the process of science is often subverted by scientists with vested interest in their prior conclusions” Denney

 

[murraycamp]

because people have brainrot from commodity fetishism

Well-stated. Most succinct and accurate answer to this question I have read to date.

 

[Robin L]

I've been at this for over fifty years. Lately I've been reading the old High Fidelitys and Stereo Reviews [previously HiFi/Stereo Review] over the last week. worldradiohistory.com has all the issues, it's a great website for all things in broadcasting and audio:

RADIO and BROADCAST HISTORY library with thousands of books and magazines (worldradiohistory.com)
STEREO REVIEW: Consumer audio and music magazine beginning in 1958 (worldradiohistory.com)
HIGH FIDELITY - Consumer audio and music magazine (worldradiohistory.com)

I haven't read the old Stereophiles yet:

STEREOPHILE: High-end monthly audio magazine beginning 1962 (worldradiohistory.com)

I've been reading the issues from 1970-1965, so far. It presents a picture of the "Audiophile" very different from what it has mutated into.

The most useful thing Thomas Pynchon wrote is his third Proverb for Paranoids: "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers." "Why are audiophiles so bound and determined to make others waste money" is a wrong question. There are a number of questions worth asking and answering. The first is why is "High-End = Audiophile = expensive gear a thing? How and when did this fantasy realm of ultra-expensive audio nirvana come to be? Posing the question "Why are audiophiles so bound and determined to make others waste money" places the action, the fault, on the consumer. How did such a consumer come to be? And shouldn't the question be who's making the super-expensive stuff, and how did the mark-ups for audio gear become insane? How did these essentially bespoke amplifiers, speakers, turntables, cable lifters get publicized over more practical and less expensive gear? Why? What's the economic source that drives this machine? I don't see audiophiles being bound and determined to make others waste their money. They are bound and determined to waste their own money. That's their own business, of course. But still, why the cryogenically treated $30,000 RCA terminated one meter line-level stereo interconnect?

You may ask yourself: "How did I get here?"

I'm mentioning the old audio periodicals and providing links to demonstrate how taste changed along with the expectations of audio gear. I focused on these years in part to check out the reviews of Beatles records as they came out---somedays Gene Lees thinks the Beatles are a-ok, others he thinks they're they four horsemen of the musical apocalypse. But I'm also looking at the prices of the gear back then. I've gone as far back as one of my favorite bits of old gear, the all-tube Fisher 500-C. Makes everything sound "mellow". If you measure the 500-C, you can measure that "mellow", with early treble roll-off and bass saturating the transformers. The Fisher 500-C was around $300 and while not exactly TOTL, not cheap by the standards of the day. The tube Marantz gear of the time was pretty much TOTL and went for about six times as much for the combo of pre-amp, amp and tuner. I think the priciest speakers were the KLH 9 electrostatic panels, around $1000 a pair. Turntables mostly hovered around $100, speakers for $100 a pair. Shure's V-15 was around $60. Acoustic Research model 3 speakers were $300.

I don't think the companies active in 1965 were as big or as profitable as the Samsungs of today. Acoustic Research sold a lot of speakers back then, Garrard a lot of turntables. This was just before the big boom in sales of electronics from Japan and the rise of the transistor. A lot of the ads in these magazines tout the "Value" of their products. It seems as though economy was an active virtue in those long forgotten days, though it's probably more likely that people didn't have as much cash to throw around.

$1 back in 1965 was worth $12 of today's dollars. So multiply prices accordingly. But remember that some of these prices represented the upper limit of audio-land at the time There were no Wilson Audio WAMM Master Chronosonic Towers, that sell for $850,000 MSRP per pair. Nothing even close to that neighborhood way back in 1967, when I was the dandy of Gamma Chi. Of course, if you read the music reviews, you'll note that there was nothing approaching the loudness levels of today's music either. There might be a small correlation there.

I'm going to keep digging into all this old audiophilia, searching for the moment the Shaki Stone came to be, when the first cable lifter appeared, when the "audiophile cable" industry first emerged. I'm guessing around 1981, just before the CD began its attack on Vinyl Supremacy.

I'm glad I found this forum, information from this site has been very useful in getting great sounding gear for cheap, which is all I really wanted in the first place.

 

[PierreV]

I'm mentioning the old audio periodicals and providing links to demonstrate how taste changed along with the expectations of audio gear.

The world has, indeed, changed.

 

[MarkS]

when the "audiophile cable" industry first emerged.

https://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/a-short-history-of-high-end-cables

 

[mkawa]

I’ve done my share of research science, too, and review research papers for three different journals. Does that mean I know anything in particular? What it does mean is that I find enough to complain about in those papers not to trust mere consensus.

The statement was not that 99% of scientists who have researched a specific question have formed a consensus conclusion based on evidence, but rather 99% of experts. How does one gain perceived expertise? Often by skimming research papers and articles and rarely by their own repetition or deep study. This is part of the problem. There is simply too much to know in science writ large. I don’t make the mistake that the public often makes of distrusting science because I distrust scientists, but I can surely understand it.

Scientists outside their specialty are as subject to being wrong-headed as anyone else. Even within their specialty, consensus over major settled topics has changed radically in history because of the work of revolutionary thinkers.

I have personally rebutted so-called settled science amongst engineers in my specialty in several specific areas, with solid evidence but limited success so far with expert engineers. Many of those engineers routinely sit on panels of experts, write papers with the assumption that their science is correct (without having confirmed it themselves), reject the work the small minority they disagreed with, and opine loudly when challenged. (As do I.) If experts were open-minded about what they “know” only from consensus opinion, a single dart of real data that refutes the consensus model would be all it would take to force a reassessment.

Rick “the process of science is often subverted by scientists with vested interest in their prior conclusions” Denney

well said, and i agree. the half-informed "expert" and scientists outside of their area of expertise dipping in too far are dangerous to real science and especially among "expert engineers" there is a _lot_ of groupthink, often formed from 20-30 year old science that has since been shown to have been flawed (ie, when they went to school X was agreed to be true, so therefore it will always be true), etc.

"the process of science is often subverted by scientists with vested interest in their prior conclusions" is not an example of groupthink, I think, but straight intellectual dishonesty and unfortunately it doesn't always have a cost in reputation for a variety of reasons.

in one of my favorite classes in grad school, the instructor stopped for a second in the middle of an explanation (he was one of those 100x multiplexers) and said "all we have as researchers are our reputations. don't ever sacrifice your reputation for short term gain" (i'm paraphrasing, he would say 10 things at once as well).

 

[mhardy6647]

https://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/a-short-history-of-high-end-cables

Later, and better, known as CobraCable (destroyer of marginally stable amplifiers).

Audio Dec. 1977

 

[JeffS7444]

People like getting new toys from time to time; supposedly our hominid minds are attracted to novelty.

 

[Newman]

...The most useful thing Thomas Pynchon wrote is his third Proverb for Paranoids: "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers." ...

A good example would be getting people to stop asking “what is the scientific consensus on topic X”, and get them asking “are scientists, as a group, corruptly self-interested and group-thinking sheep” instead. People who try to do that are trying to get you to ask the wrong questions. Know anyone here who does that?

 

[rdenney]

The correct question is: what does the science say about X? Instead of: what do scientists say about X?

The latter question should suffice to filter out all responses except those validated by proper data and analysis, but scientists often want to be one of the cool kids, too.

Rick “not immune” Denney

 

[Frgirard]

even the scientists need to be loved.

 

[PierreV]

A good example would be getting people to stop asking “what is the scientific consensus on topic X”, and get them asking “are scientists, as a group, corruptly self-interested and group-thinking sheep” instead. People who try to do that are trying to get you to ask the wrong questions. Know anyone here who does that?

Jealous? A scientist stole your wife? Ate your cookie?

 

[Gekel]

It's actually about them IMO from a psychological perspective... the more people that buy the things they have the less they feel they've wasted their money and the more they feel justified in their purchase.

Plus you need to add that the more people come back with a positive feedback, because "they heard a clear improvement", the more people follow the others and also "hear something".

The snake oil products of the audio industry are on the same level like homeopathic products in healthcare. For decades the advocates of these sugar pills fail to prove that they work beyond the placebo effect, yet people still believe that you can mix an active ingredient (more like some kind of basic chemicals like coal, chalk or even chemicals causing cancer) with sugar, shake it in a specific way (by knocking it against leather), then to thin it down even more by taking a small portion of this "energetic enhanced mixture", mix it with more sugar, again knock the mixture against leather in a specific way, and voila, you have a medicine which one the one side works in a better way than the the undiluted raw chemical but without the negative effects of that chemical.

And people buy this shit. There is a whole industry selling sugar at a the same price like pure silver, and it is big business - just like the one with the cables.

Side note:
If you run across one of these homeo believing persons or even believe in this on your own... what do you do if the sugar fails and doesn't help? Do you take two pills instead of one or to you slice one pill in half and eat less? If you take two, you already have broken the most important rule how these sugar pills should work and you follow the traditional rules of chemistry and physics.