Snake oil, fraud, confirmation bias


It is becoming increasingly apparent that many threads about legitimate topics devolve into one or more of the contributors here making claims of snake oil, fraud, or confirmation bias thereby derailing the conversation beyond the valid and relevant thread topic and this is getting ridiculous. For anyone here who honestly holds the position that there is snake oil and fraud in the world of Music Reproduction Systems I challenge them to prove their claims in court it should be an easy task based on the claims they make here in Audiogon  AND they will make a fortune because in the US once proven they can file a class action suit and profit enormously from the efforts of others to deceive. These people regularly claim that "there is no evidence" that things such as cables or fuses make a difference when in actual fact Audiogon is filled with evidence that these things make very real differences in Music Reproduction Systems of course those who claim fraud reject that evidence as "confirmation bias" but in absence of any documentation from them they are only repeating the claim they have made so many times that has been refuted many times here by those who have demonstrated to there satisfaction that they make a difference.   I think in actual truth the real fraudsters here are those that repeatedly make these claims of snake oil and fraud and often they have no experience to back up there claims they simply say the claims are impossible!
clearthink
Costco_emoji wrote,

I don’t know where Geoff gets this idea that there are things in this universe we can’t measure. We can measure black holes colliding half way across the galaxy, but we can’t measure the quality of our stereo??? Whatever! I had one chump tell me that it would be impossible to measure single instrument within an orchestra. It would be difficult, but hardly impossible, and probably not worth the effort. These snake oil clowns who claim you can’t measure a cable breaking in speak out of pure ignorance. The answer is obviously you can’t measure what doesn’t exist. People have in fact measured cables. Nelson Pass has a great article on cable which I’m sure none of the snake oilers would bother to look up. Stereophile measures almost everything they review so I’m not sure how anybody can say nobody measures anything. The only folks that don’t measure things are the folks who know there’s nothing to measure..... because you can measure the customer’s delusions. I have to wonder if sticking suction cup dildos to your speakers would improve the sound as much as some of this high dollar hocus pocus the con artists sell.

>>>>Costco, I’m pretty sure your reading compression went bye bye again. I didn’t say nobody measures anything. Duh! What I actually said was that there is no way to measure certain audiophile tweaks. You know, the ones that SCARE you. The ones that go BUMP in the night. The ones YOU don't understand. The ones you're constantly ranting about. In fact, Stereophile doesn’t meausure audio tweaks. Nobody does. Hel-loo! So, go ahead, fly off the handle.
@geoffkait 

Your post is a bad example. Hold a 100 pound weight in your hands for an hour. I think you will "perceive or feel" gravity.

BTW, how is that teleportation thing going? Have you had it peer reviewed yet? Why not? Have you published your research? Why not? What are you hiding?
My boomerang won’t come back - but that’s not what you said. You said in your example you could perceive gravity if you’re standing near a cliff. By the way, shouldn’t you be standing out on a ledge somewhere?

Are you volunteering to peer review the Teleportation Tweak? As I said previously I already published the long awaited, How the Teleportation Tweak Works. Try to keep up.
Oy. I certainly don’t believe science has completed its mission of creating a perfect model and understanding of the physical universe. It never will. But that doesn’t mean I believe in ghosts.

Electronically reproduced music is, in the end, a moving magnet that pushes air. If a tweak back up the reproduction chain doesn’t affect the movement of the magnet, it doesn’t affect the movement of the air, and it is thus not affecting the sound of the music. Anyone who believes otherwise is basically thinking the equivalent of believing a volcanic eruption is the sign of an angry deity.

Because science is imperfect and we won’t have more sensitive measuring instruments until we do, I will make some allowances that maybe some "snake oil" audio tweaks may actually affect sound quality in ways that are too nuanced or minute to be measured now but will be able to be measured in our sci-fi future. And then I will make an allowance that maybe the brain is sensitive enough to pick up what instruments can’t. Although that still doesn’t justify the dramatic results some folks report. But still, the desirability of the level of impact relative to the goal of achieving perfection is a subjective one, so I won’t say that a .000001% improvement isn’t a worthy goal if someone thinks it is.

But many of these tweaks simply go against common sense. It is theoretically possible that a power cable would be of lesser quality, or contain a defect that renders it less capable of conducting current than, the power cables in your wall. But to me that clearly can be fixed by remedying that defect and rendering the power cable to be of consistent quality with what is in the wall. But that’s not a $500 fix with fancy colors and giant connectors. It’s a $5 fix, with maybe a little workmanship involved. Otherwise it is just bling. The only way a power cable that goes beyond fixing a defect could affect audio quality would be if it goes much farther than one meter - it would need to go all the way to the pole, or the power substation, etc.

Let’s pose a hypothetical: let’s go to the sci-fi world where we are sure that measuring instruments are confidently as sensitive and capable as human hearing at measuring an audio signal emitting from the moving magnets (we may be there already, but I want this premise clear as part of the hypothetical). In that scenario, if the measuring instrument detected no difference when a fancy fuse is reversed in direction, would the pro-tweaker crowd still hold to the everything-is-subjective-and-if-I-hear-a-difference-then-there-is-one axiom?

I won’t hide the ball on my own belief. I do accept that there is a level of poor accessories that are effectively defective. 20 gauge speaker cable on a long run. Very cheap interconnects that diminish conductivity under torque. Unshielded or improperly grounded cables when shielding or grounding are required to eliminate interference of some sort. So then there is a level of problem solving to eliminate these "defects" and that includes after-market products. But those are $5-$100 items, not all of this super expensive, visually stunning but scientifically non-distinct products.

It’s bling. Enjoy it if you want to - I’d love to have some of that stuff just because it looks cool. But once you’ve gone to the level of eliminating defects, you’ve gone as far as you can with this stuff from the standpoint of affecting the movement of those magnets. There is a magical, mystical quality to music. But that doesn’t move the reproduction of music beyond the reach of science and engineering.