Author Topic: Snake oil  (Read 11282 times)

Re: Snake oil
« Reply #50 on: 05 July, 2020, 01:00:36 pm »

I really want to get a group of Audiophiles and do a blind test of a fancy multiple 10's of grand setup, with all the fancy Ethernet cabling etc...

And one with just every day normal cabling... See if any of them can actually tell the difference....

But must make sure that all systems use the audiophile version of memcpy()... the standard glibc one isn't good enough...

https://www.audioasylum.com/cgi/t.mpl?f=pcaudio&m=119979

J

The wine snobs/experts all fail at blind testings, so running several audio blind tests would be likely to be really, really embarassing, and very funny.

quixoticgeek

  • Mostly Harmless
Re: Snake oil
« Reply #51 on: 05 July, 2020, 01:13:00 pm »

The wine snobs/experts all fail at blind testings, so running several audio blind tests would be likely to be really, really embarassing, and very funny.

I used to know a guy who claimed he could tell every hop in a beer upon tasting/smelling the beer.

So I made a batch of beers, brought them to him, and said "please, name the hops in these". He named a hop in every single one of them. Which is a surprise as there were no hops in any of them...

He took it with good grace at least...

J
--
Beer, bikes, and backpacking
http://b.42q.eu/

TheLurker

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Re: Snake oil
« Reply #52 on: 05 July, 2020, 01:32:53 pm »
Quote from: quixoticgeek

But must make sure that all systems use the audiophile version of memcpy()... the standard glibc ...

https://www.audioasylum.com/cgi/....

There's probably a good reason why that site is called the asylum.  Can't imagine what it could be though.
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Tim Hall

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Re: Snake oil
« Reply #53 on: 05 July, 2020, 07:09:10 pm »
Christ. I read the whole thing waiting for the punchline.
You're lucky. I started reading his whole blog, then started reading the manufacturers' product pages. There's some right charlatans out there.
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Gattopardo

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Re: Snake oil
« Reply #54 on: 05 July, 2020, 07:34:25 pm »

The wine snobs/experts all fail at blind testings, so running several audio blind tests would be likely to be really, really embarassing, and very funny.

I used to know a guy who claimed he could tell every hop in a beer upon tasting/smelling the beer.

So I made a batch of beers, brought them to him, and said "please, name the hops in these". He named a hop in every single one of them. Which is a surprise as there were no hops in any of them...

He took it with good grace at least...

J

Did you hop nearby?

Beardy

  • Shedist
Re: Snake oi
« Reply #55 on: 05 July, 2020, 08:49:43 pm »
I’ve played around endlessly with Hi-Fi equalisers and balance and bass and treble. I also bought some very low end proper Hi-Fi once. But I’m deaf below 2KHz, and the only way I can hear the twiddly bits is by having the volume obnoxiously loud which due to my diff ears then also deafens me with the high frequency stuff. I’m apt to forget this when I’m fiddling and am forever looking for the holy grail. The nearest I’ve got is a pair of high end headphones with built in auto equalisation. I can have them obnoxiously loud without being overly anti-social (although I then get into trouble for cutting myself off). I still have to turn them down on occasion because they’re too loud for me, but that’s because the internet is crap at managing sound levels.
For every complex problem in the world, there is a simple and easily understood solution that’s wrong.

Re: Snake oil
« Reply #56 on: 05 July, 2020, 09:03:20 pm »


The wine snobs/experts all fail at blind testings

Well, no. They may not have a perfect record, what they like may have no relation to what you like and they may not always get the value right, but they certainly can and do blind taste regularly. I'd expect a sommelier to identify the grape and region blind, and very often they will get the actual wine, that's because wine is real. Whether there's any value in the overhyped excess, that's another discussion.

Kim

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Re: Snake oil
« Reply #57 on: 05 July, 2020, 09:21:46 pm »
The other problem with doing blind tests on hi-fi buffs is that, much like a deaf child reading their parent's facial expression during an audiological assessment, they're prone to learning what the different switch positions on your A/B box sound like...

quixoticgeek

  • Mostly Harmless
Re: Snake oil
« Reply #58 on: 05 July, 2020, 10:24:04 pm »
The other problem with doing blind tests on hi-fi buffs is that, much like a deaf child reading their parent's facial expression during an audiological assessment, they're prone to learning what the different switch positions on your A/B box sound like...

But can they tell you which of the setups is the uber expensive one, and which isn't?

J
--
Beer, bikes, and backpacking
http://b.42q.eu/

Re: Snake oil
« Reply #59 on: 08 July, 2020, 10:41:54 am »
May I remind everyone about Peter W Belt?

tonycollinet

  • No Longer a western province of Númenor
Re: Snake oil
« Reply #60 on: 09 July, 2020, 02:51:40 pm »
So the guy played an album (apparently streamed through his home router) with and without this switch. He recorded the result, put it on the audio track of a video, it gets compressed, sent across the internet through however many non-hifi switches, out of DAC in people's computers and they can *still* hear the difference?

Exactly what I have just ranted about in the comments.

tonycollinet

  • No Longer a western province of Númenor
Re: Snake oil
« Reply #61 on: 09 July, 2020, 03:05:34 pm »
Or as you get older your hearing decays....

Or is it wearing out?

It is being consumed

Re: Snake oil
« Reply #62 on: 09 July, 2020, 03:53:07 pm »
Oh heck the same company does a hifi SATA cable as well. It's "directional" and a snip at 350 Euros.
I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that.

tonycollinet

  • No Longer a western province of Númenor
Re: Snake oil
« Reply #63 on: 09 July, 2020, 03:53:12 pm »
So the guy played an album (apparently streamed through his home router) with and without this switch. He recorded the result, put it on the audio track of a video, it gets compressed, sent across the internet through however many non-hifi switches, out of DAC in people's computers and they can *still* hear the difference?

Exactly what I have just ranted about in the comments.

And I've had a response. I think he missed the point.

Re: Snake oil
« Reply #64 on: 09 July, 2020, 04:36:49 pm »
Oh heck the same company does a hifi SATA cable as well. It's "directional" and a snip at 350 Euros.

Directional? That's the ACK stuffed up then

Kim

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Re: Snake oil
« Reply #65 on: 09 July, 2020, 05:21:43 pm »
Oh heck the same company does a hifi SATA cable as well. It's "directional" and a snip at 350 Euros.

Directional? That's the ACK stuffed up then

It's okay, it comes with special drive firmware that either writes files sequentially to the disk, or reads out every sector in order over and over again.  When you've finished writing, you take the disk out (hot-swap, innit) and reverse the cable.

Mature high-level software support is already available in all popular *nix distributions, via the /dev/nrstX device.  You do remember how to use tar, don't you?  ;D

Re: Snake oil
« Reply #66 on: 09 July, 2020, 07:22:26 pm »
  You do remember how to use tar, don't you?  ;D

Balls comes into it, doesn't it?

ian

Re: Snake oil
« Reply #67 on: 09 July, 2020, 07:34:17 pm »
I remember when they invented cassette players that could play either side without you needing to swap it. That was groundbreaking hifi technology.

Though you'd always (a) record something on the wrong side, usually over your best bits of the top 40 or (b) somehow manage press a sequence of buttons that tried to play the tape in both directions thus resulting in a spool calamity or a   s  t  r   e     t     c    h   e  d tape.

Cudzoziemiec

  • Ride adventurously and stop for a brew.
Re: Snake oil
« Reply #68 on: 09 July, 2020, 09:37:20 pm »
Audio cassettes were, let's face it, crap. Useful but crap.
Riding a concrete path through the nebulous and chaotic future.

Kim

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Re: Snake oil
« Reply #69 on: 09 July, 2020, 10:02:19 pm »
Nahh, they worked out how to make them not shit a few years after we were all using CD for everything except car and Walkman purposes.

Ever used a decent cassette deck with Dolby S?  I only managed it once, under "What does this button do?" conditions.

ian

Re: Snake oil
« Reply #70 on: 10 July, 2020, 09:29:18 am »
I don't think anyone knew what all the Dolby buttons did. Probably Thomas. Mostly a bit vague about the metal/chrome button too (everyone was disappointed that pressing metal didn't turn up the volume to 11 and blast out Run to the Hills). You could by more expensive tapes, I don't think anyone did, not when you could get a good deal on a five-pack for TDK C90s from Woolies (my entire childhood came from Woolies, from the record counter to the pick-n-mix). Don't buy the C120s though, they're the ones that go safari around the innards of your tape deck and have to retrieved with the handy pencil you kept to hand for just such situations.

Let's not get to the Amstrad stereo, enough lights to pretend you were driving a sonic Enterprise, and a cool smoked glass door. Modern hifi doesn't come close.

Re: Snake oil
« Reply #71 on: 10 July, 2020, 11:18:18 am »
I don't think anyone knew what all the Dolby buttons did. Probably Thomas.

He was hyperactive.


(I do remember having a thing for that backing singer)

robgul

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Re: Snake oil
« Reply #72 on: 10 July, 2020, 11:35:41 am »
Audio cassettes were, let's face it, crap. Useful but crap.

You don't see them in road nowadays when you're sitting in a traffic jam .... and CDs are few and far between - all you see is the little laughing gas canisters and McDonalds packaging.

Cassettes were poor but the 8-track cartridges weren't too bad for sound quality but never caught on for music ..... in the mid/late 80s I worked for an IT business and we used them for data storage when a "winchester" hard drive cost a fortune.

Kim

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Re: Snake oil
« Reply #73 on: 10 July, 2020, 11:42:11 am »
Audio cassettes were, let's face it, crap. Useful but crap.

You don't see them in road nowadays when you're sitting in a traffic jam .... and CDs are few and far between - all you see is the little laughing gas canisters and McDonalds packaging.

Objection: Roadkill USB cables are the new unspooled cassettes.

Kim

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Re: Snake oil
« Reply #74 on: 10 July, 2020, 11:47:48 am »
I don't think anyone knew what all the Dolby buttons did.

The one and only time I came across an S-capable tape deck was in a recording studio.  It worked surprisingly well, much better than the much more common B ever managed.  Noise level comparable to reel-to-reel tape.  Admittedly I was using good quality cassettes for that job (dubbing an orchestral recording I'd made on MiniDisc to tape for a high-ranking luddite), and didn't have a Woolies C90 to hand.