AQ’s sciencey whitepaper that has been helpfully linked here very “convincingly” explains why you should not do ABX testing. Something something what if you actually can’t tell them apart, can’t have that now, can we?
That was the biggest piece of nonsense I’ve ever read. Skin effect affecting capacitance and inductance before it affects attenuation. If it did it would be measurable, but it doesn’t.
Bi-wiring - cables causing distortion. Cables don’t cause distortion
More pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo from FraudioQuest.
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I should one day measure some MIT cables I’ve inherited. They have boxes on them big enough to hide something that could cause distortion…
From “Project Gutenberg”, a site where you can download free ebooks of public domain text, I downloaded Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors”. I started reading, and reading, and reading, and…“hey, this isn’t funny!” Then I realized it had gone through error correction 
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Whether or not blind ABx is unnatural and not how we normally listen to music, it is the only way known to me that someone can objectively verify what he or she is hearing. My reasoning is that if an effect is audible to humans, with some actual physical cause, there should be at least one homo sapien on the planet who can hear it under those conditions. If someone says a particular Miles Davis trumpet solo evokes a greater emotional response with one power cord than with another, that’s what we call in science “non-falsifiable”. If spending $1,000 on a power cord increases the emotional depth of your response to music, then go for it. Not me.
I’ve often wondered whether the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ever tried suing them for trademark infringement.
It doesn’t even matter as the point in ABX is not listening to music anyway…
For all I know MIT (the other one) is getting a cut. With top of the line cable starting at $112K they certainly can afford some sharing. A little bit – weighing in at 20Kg it might use whopping $50 in materials!
Some of these folks are educated, just not in STEM.
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You’re saying the cable is so heavy it twisted the plug?
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Agree with everything you say here.
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Maybe not because it is heavy but because it is stiffed
Not his plug, the part in the wall. Old house
Back before audiophilia went off the rails, the now defunct “Audio” magazine (which of the three mainstream publications of the time, along with “Stereo Review” and “High Fidelity”, had the greater engineering bent) would do an April Fool’s special. It would feature a review of a piece of equipment designed by Professor I Lirpa, which is April I backwards.
However, audiophiles can still celebrate the day. There were two jokes on You Tube channels, one of which I saw immediately and the other I swallowed hook, line and sinker. The former was a thing Darko did on “renter’s fog”, which had accumulated in his German apartment in his absence and was putting a veil around the sound of his equipment. I got it immediately. The other was Steve Gutenberg’s “Audiophilliace”, which proclaimed Schiit Audio was changing its name to just “S”. About time they grew up, I opined. Alas, it was a joke.
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Nobody is forcing you to read them. Personally, I find them entertaining.
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Even though this system is not my cup of tea, the main point of this thread as I understand it is that if you replaced the cable from the digital source component (not visible in this photo,but probably somewhere) with either a stock cable from Monoprice or a fancy $1,000 one, nobody would be able to hear the difference. And probably, nobody would try to argue that it has insufficient resolution to hear the difference. It’s not about spending loads of money on audio equipment per se, it’s about spending it uselessly.
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I don’t think much of American schools, but you don’t even need full-on STEM to see through most of cable BS. High school physics should be enough.
I remember Drew. I bought a couple of things from him, nothing big ticket, just enough to keep the catalogs coming in the mail. And they were entertaining. The hyperbole was extreme, for whatever he was selling. He would always wax about having the neatest job in the world, because he got to play with toys. Kind of like a 16 year old. For all we knew, he was.
Maybe that’s why snake oil makers mention quantum tunneling and other scientific gobbledygook, to throw people off and make them think you do need a STEM degree. And that’s why we have experts, to call ■■. Ignore them at your own expense.
I work for a university physics department, and the lack of basic understanding of electricity among many freshmen is, to me, appalling. It wasn’t always this way. When I was in high school, to get an academic-track (pre-college) diploma you had to take at least one of physics or chemistry. I’m sure someone here will trash me for sitting on my high horse of superior knowledge and looking down at the rubes, but it’s not that at all. I’m saying, in 2023, everyone should have at least a basic knowledge of how electricity works. The fact that many people don’t has helped give rise to the “voodoo” audio industry.
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True, but quantum tunneling is really advanced stuff. I’ve graduated from physics and I know exactly what that is, but do high school grads know? You can make people with very solid general knowledge believe in voodoo, in the name of open-mindedness.
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