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Audiophiles... It's a joke, right?
I went to look at that article about James Randi vs The Audiophiles and I was astounded by the idea of paying £3600 for a cable. £3600 for a completely wired high quality sound system I would be willing to pay, but a single 12 foot cable lead me to ask what makes these people buy this kind of thing? Is it psychological or is it really possible to train your hearing above that of normal human biology?
I know that double blind tests will prove whether you can actually hear a differentiation in sound but it still wont answer why people can't realize there is a limit to human hearing.
I know that double blind tests will prove whether you can actually hear a differentiation in sound but it still wont answer why people can't realize there is a limit to human hearing.
Comments
They're just stupid if you ask me.
Supply and demand isn't as straightforward as "high price = low demand, low price = high demand". If the price is high enough, demand will actually start increasing because an item is now expensive enough to be valued as an item of conspicuous consumption (ie, some people will pay more money to have the opportunity of being seen paying more money, like when someone buys their date an expensive wine to impress them even though they can't tell the difference between it and cheap plonk.) Also, many people who don't have a way of identifying quality in an item go by price, assuming that if an item is more expensive, it is because it is more valuable, and if it is suspiciously cheap something must be wrong with it.
The reason people buy things like this are many. However, the primary reason is social currency. Social currency is what powers materialism and consumerism. People buy these cords, and consciously justify it to themselves by believing in the bullshit story about better audio quality. In reality, whether they know it or not, these people buy expensive yet useless things for the social value. When people come over to their house, they can show off their ultra fancy cables. They can brag about how expensive and awesome their stereo is. They feel better about themselves, and they think other people think better of them because they have more expensive things.
It's the same with just about everything else people buy. You don't buy an iPhone on day one because you need to send text messages with a nice UI that badly. You buy one on day one so you can be the envy of everyone around you. You don't buy a 360 elite and the Halo collector's edition because that little helmet is actually going to be useful. You buy it because when people come over to play at your house you hope they will think you are so cool, or be jealous of your l33t rig. People don't amass huge collections of comic books because they are going to read them, or because it's a good investment; even though they might tell themselves that. They do it so that at comic conventions they can brag about how many complete runs they have, and have more geek cred.
The advent of instantaneous global communication and the Internet is causing a simultaneous boom and bust for this type of behavior. More than ever before people are able to buy new things, get good deals, and generally find new ways to get more social currency for less.
At the same time, other people are changing their mindset. They see the people who spend a crap-ton of money on a fancy stereo as complete tools. They instead respect people who have skills, not dollars. People who do great work on open source projects, write music, or make good YouTube videos are instead the recipients of social currency. There is a growing culture of people who respect others not for what they own, but for what they do. Rather than trying to be the coolest kid in town by owning every Nintendo game, you try to get your blog onto the front page of Digg.
Regardless of how they justify it to themselves and others, audiophiles only buy the expensive cable to feel better about themselves. More than anything else, people want others to look up to them, even just the tiniest bit. For this, they will believe almost any lie and pay almost any price.
I agree with Viga in that I though audiophiles just got rid of that mains hum noise and used FLAC and those fancy audio DVDs but this, this isn't Sparta; This is madness.
As Scott mentioned, they have a crazy desire to feel better than others - so much that they literally make up a superpower (super-human hearing). How screwed up is that?
It's pretty scary to me that to gain social acceptance, people will literally make this stuff up. ("The music is "danceable" with cable X, but has more "bloom" with cable Y.) Give me a freaking break. It's pathetic.
What's really sleezy are the snake-oil salesmen that prey upon these people. Talk about a wasted life.
Please don't hold owning a nice stereo against someone. I have no social currency; I live in Iowa. I just want to listen to a performance that sounds like a person might actually be in the room with me. I've spent my life performing, I can tell the difference so it's important to me.
Coincidentally, I've rarely have someone over to my house to listen to my stereo that actually notices the difference on a double blind test.
It's when you start spending thousands of dollars that we're talking about.
But yes. Awesome speakers, go mad. They do make a difference. Cables, pathetically little difference if at all.
If you buy cables for an electric guitar their is a difference in quality. I bought 2 low budget cables and both had a cable break after 1 month. So I spent about double the money on a fancy cable and it hasn't had a problem in 1 year.
The only thing a cable should be more expensive for, in my opinion, is durability.
My personal recommendation is this. Buy a stereo that has all the features for your purposes, and as few extra features as possible. When worrying about speakers and amplification, just make sure you get enough volume for the intended listening area. Surround sound for the great room? Go big. Bookshelf for the bedroom, go small. Also, never buy Bose, monster cables, etc. They do sound good, and they are less bullshit than the cables that Randi is going after, but they are still overpriced. You can get stuff just as good for much less money.
However, most of the time, you can find stuff that's just as good for a lot less money. I remember that my dad had a pair of Optimus (Radioshack brand, I think) bookshelf speakers that were hella powerful and way cheap; they were easily on par with most "high-end" speakers that I've heard.
EDIT: Y'know, I'm really getting cheesed with these various crazy batshit groups adopting a moniker that could otherwise be useful. I used to call myself an "audiophile," in that I had a great appreciation for good audio quality, and liked to set up a room to have a good sound balance versus its acoustics and so forth. Now, if I called myself an "audiophile," it means I'm a nutjob.
Give me back my words, you bastards.
I've called myself an audiophile for years and just now realize it has such bad connotations. I spend very little money on my stereo system, but have tweaked it well by cheap means (mostly by adjusting the acoustics of the room).
I see only one condition where expensive cables can be justified, and that's when you need to shield them from electromagnetic noise (like a badly shielded PC). You can make shielded cables yourself, but if you don't bother I guess $150 is OK for such cables (too much for me, but far too cheap for the nutty audiophiles). The sound quality of low voltage signal cables are more affected by noise than the speaker cables where expensive cables are just stupid.
I know how easy it is to fool yourself about sound quality. Listening is a very subjective thing, and other stuff can easily cloud your judgement when comparing components of similar and fairly good quality. One day a HQ CD player is teh awesome, and the next it could be beaten by a cheap-ass DVD player, depending on your mood. I can see how non-skeptics can fool themselves into perceiving the sound from a $500+ cable as superior.
Also, I agree with Scott's last post. When buying a sound system, make sure the room, amplifier and speakers are suited for each other. A HQ system can sound horrible in the wrong room. When people invest in a proper sound system, I advice them to use a dealer that lets them take it home to try it out, or at least gives a complete satisfaction money back guarantee.
I would just like to add that there is a great difference to how good people are at recognizing sound quality, and it is possible to train yourself at listening just as you can train tasting. Quite a lot of people elsewhere on the Net seems to be of the opinion that just because they themselves don't hear the difference between their portable mp3 player and a HQ sound system, no-one can. Those people are wrong and annoying.
Anyway, all hail Randi!
EDIT: I checked with the online stores, and the good and cheap cable was probably around 1/5 of the price of the Monster cables, not 1/10. To my disappointment it is discontinued and replaced by one that is just cheap. :-(
Then again I'm a guitar player who uses a tube amp. XD
Silliness aside, audiophiles are bat-shit crazy, I have one for a neighbor, he uses the master room of his house as a listening room, the room looks beautiful with all the wood and the speakers and such, but for such a normal thing as listening to music? He pretty much makes sure everything is ready and set up just so he can start up his bazzillon dollar audio system, I took a listen and it sounded just like my laptop speaker, but the room was comfortable enough for me not to tell him (What? the chair was one of those "OMIFUCKINTHOR what a comfortable chair!") but before I got to the second song I got rushed off because he needed to stabilize the this and that. I tested to see if they weren't (that) crazy and they propounded in epic fail.
I still don't know why I actually said yes when he asked me if I wanted to take a listen.
just enough so the signal being carried doesn't have extra baggage like ground loop hum.Ground loops are caused by mismatched grounds. They have NOTHING to do with cable quality, only with whether or not ALL of your cables are "balanced" as opposed to "unbalanced." A cheap balanced cable is just as good as an expensive one. You obviously don't understand what the cables actually do, and I doubt you can hear the difference.
The truth is, you really don't have to spend a lot on mixers and compressors.That's utter bullshit. The quality of your mixer's amps has a hell of a lot more to do with your sound quality than the cables do.
especially if you buy from Radio ShackRadio Shack is perhaps the worst place you can buy cables. They're all overpriced, and they really push the Monster-style bullshit cables that are marked up a zillion percent yet aren't any better.
That's still not enough to make me buy them, so let them die in a fire.
A question for the audiofans: I'm buying a pair of the etymonics so I can listen to my mp3 player without my ears hurting. Can anyone suggest a 20gb+ player that gives good sound quality and isn't an iPod (which is my current first choice.)
I wanted a Cowon D2 but my music collection is 13gb and growing rapidly and I'd like to keep an small library of audiobooks as well as the 5gb or so of podcasts (though most of that is video.) I think a 60gb iPod 5th gen might be good for me but I heard that the bass isn't that good.
*sadface*
Thank you, thank you. I'm taking requests all night.
Audiophile (one of the sane ones)?
In a studio - or worse: at a concert - there is so much electronics that it's difficult and very time consuming to find the source of the electromagnetic noise. Then Shielded cables is the way to go, or preferably balanced cables that Rym mentioned. On such cables the quality difference is basically how much beating they take before they brake, not sound quality.
EDIT: Rewrote the last part.