What the, and I cannot overstate this, fuck?

@ricosuave @bloor

That's why cameras are commonly a cubic foot in volume.

@bloor this one is a perfect introduction to the game where you reverse engineer the audiophile's understanding of physics and electronics.

It's totally unhinged, and yet I can just see the common simplifications of crosstalk & stray capacitance that the designer latched onto. Amazing.

@hiisikoloart @bloor people who use music to listen to their audio equipment, instead of the other way around.

@flipper @bloor (not even joking)

https://www.dedicatedaudio.com/products/fospower-24k-gold-plated-toslink-digital-optical-audio-cable-s-pdif-3-ft

@StumpyTheMutt @bloor
Of course, Pease's conclusion didn't surprise anyone with even modest electronics knowledge, but it is very satisfying to be able to point to the words of one of the all time great EEs, when some audiophool doesn't believe me.
(But audiophools don't believe true experts, either. They only believe their preconceived notions, and those of other audiophools in their echo chambers.)

@bloor

The difference between science, engineering and actually understanding the world and magic and mysticism ‍️

@drwho @tony @bloor

Oh, there are plenty of possibilities to "improve" this design further - or coming up with something else being even more absurd, shifting the revenue stream in your direction. There are always room for "improving" cables and it will always sell.

But you need to be quite cynical playing on the psychology aspects related to making people believe they hear a difference - and have some quasi research papers supporting what they "hear". The rest is plain marketing and marketing strategies.

And don't forget: In this user segment - the sound always gets better the more expensive the cables or equipment is.

Good luck!

@mansr @bloor Is it more expensive than Odin 2?

@sophieschmieg @bloor looks like a antenna to me

@PeterLG @bloor does it glow in the dark?

@hiisikoloart @bloor

In theory, it’s people who care a lot about audio quality. They often claim to have better than average frequency range in their ears (many do, but a lot claim to hear things only bats can actually hear).

For a long time, a lot of consumer audio equipment was pretty terrible, so there were real reasons for wanting something better, I remember listening to a CD that I’d heard many times on my CD player and ripped to my iPad and discovering that CD player from the ‘80s had completely lost a load of low-volume bits and there was material that would probably have been audible on an expensive player in the ‘80s and was easily audible on a cheap player in the early 2000s.

At the same time, the Loudness War happened. Music execs found that people were more likely to like music if it was loud the first time they heard it. So they started making CDs louder. But CDs have a fixed dynamic range, so making it loader lost detail. They couldn’t do this with records because the needle would jump out of the track, so we had a weird period where LPs had better audio fidelity than CDs. Unfortunately, LPs are really finicky and it’s very easy to scratch them if you don’t perfectly balance the stylus to avoid more than minuscule pressure on the surface.

So, to listen to the highest-quality music, you needed a moderately expensive record deck, a decent amplifier (and pre-amp: again, LPs are annoying to play), and speakers. And it was fairly noticeable if you got any of these wrong.

But then DACs got a lot better. Cheap USB audio adaptors for computers had much better precision than anything available in the ‘80s, and could be placed outside of the case and away from RF interference from the computer. AAC audio supports a variable dynamic range (so bumping the loudness is just a scaling factor, not a loss of precision). Baseline speaker and amplifier quality improved a lot. By the mid 2000s, fairly cheap equipment gave better sound quality than anything you could buy in the ‘90s.

By then, an entire industry had grown up to cater to people who wanted the best sound quality possible and an even larger group of people who wanted to be seen as having the best sound quality. It moved from music appreciation to conspicuous consumption as a primary market driver. And that made it a ripe target for scams.

For analogue things, there were obvious things you could sell, like cables with gold-plated connectors. Gold is a good conductor and, unlike copper, doesn’t corrode, so this would make a difference (whether the difference is audible is another matter). But the move to mostly digital paths made this harder. You got very silly things like ‘audiophile grade’ Ethernet cables and optical connectors, which ignored the fact that the digital protocols had built-in error correction and that audio is staggeringly low bandwidth in comparison to other things carried over these connections so there’s space for a lot of error correction. A load of these things can be run over a wire coathanger with no loss in quality.

The entire ecosystem became dominated by very silly things. But they’re all quite interesting because they have some plausible-looking science behind them, which then goes off in a nonsense direction. For example, Ethernet is an electrical protocol, so signal quality matters. Gold is a good conductor. Gold connectors on Ethernet cables will reduce signal degradation. Pay no attention to the fact that the Ethernet standard is specified based on specifically rated cables and won’t be any better on ones with marginally better connectors.

My guess from the picture is that someone has noticed that electrical noise from a power supply can be a problem and has built something that looks very plausibly like it would solve that.

@dazo @drwho @tony @bloor Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/670/

@bloor I remember the good olden days when every household had some nice, mostly midrange hifi system. Was a bit of a status symbol and I guess mobility and space grew more important for the majority.

And now you only have super enthusiasts or people that listen to audio on a sh.. bluetooth speaker.

On the other hand that allowed me to gather some equipment for cheap.

Addit: preowened 90s /2k midrange stuff

@Jes @bloor
This revew of audiophile rocks is hilarious. Sadly the website and youtube channel are now closed

http://www.adventuresinhifiaudio.com/26/01/2018/audiophile-rocks-down-the-rabbit-hole-once-again/

@vk3kri That's exactly what I thought of when I saw it ... someone picked apart a litz wire!
@bloor

@c_chep @bloor it's a multiple redundant power cable, the rabbit now has to chew through each individual strand, they can't get the whole cable in 1 bite

@bloor Those would make great movie props. As for making great audio cables, they'd probably do exactly as well as everything else

@dazo @tony @bloor Psychology works both ways. When I bought an amp and speakers (1990s) I declined to buy cable. I said that I'd use mains flex (Electronics Australia had tested it and shown good results), knowing it would wind up the salesperson. He couldn't bear for that to be done so ended up giving me about 4m of silly Kimber Kable. It does the job, but no way was I paying for it.

@bloor
No, seriously, I need some answers

@bloor Yah, it's difficult to see what they've done with the black wires. I may have assumed they were weaved (if not twisted) – and my assumption might be wrong.

At first I thought they were doing something to minimize skin effect, but when it turned out to be power lines, it required a re-think.

I try to assume people aren't complete idiots and that there is some small effect they're chasing. Your cage dipole, effectively making a coaxial line, may be a better guess.