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What is wrong with audiophiles?

Something that has happened countless times happened again last night. Ordinary people over for a party listening to some music easily hear things audiophiles argue endlessly don't even exist. Oh, its worse even than that- they not only easily hear but are stunned and amazed at what they hear. Its absolutely clearly obvious this is not anything they ever were expecting, not anything they can explain- and also is not anything they can deny. Because its so freaking obvious! Happens every time. Then I come on here and read one after another not only saying its impossible, but actually ridiculing people for the audacity of reporting on the existence of reality.

What is wrong with audiophiles?

Okay, concrete examples. Easy demos done last night. Cable Elevators, little ceramic insulators, raise cables off the floor. There's four holding each speaker cable up off the floor. Removed them one by one while playing music. Then replaced them. Music playing the whole time. First one came out, instant the cable goes on the floor the guy in the sweet spot says, "OH! WTF!?!?!"

Yeah. Just one. One by one, sound stage just collapses. Put em back, image depth returns.

Another one? Okay.

Element CTS cables have Active Shielding, another easy demo. Unplug, plug back in. Only takes a few seconds. Tuning bullets. Same thing. These are all very easy to demo while the music is playing without interruption. This kills like I don' know how many birds with one stone. Auditory memory? Zero. Change happens real time. Double blind? What could be more double blind than you don't know? Because nobody, not me, not the listener, not one single person in the room, knows exactly when to expect to hear a change- or what change to expect, or even if there would be any change to hear at all. Heck, even I have never sat there while someone did this so even I did not know it was possible to hear just one, or that the change would happen not when the Cable Elevator was removed but when the cable went down on the floor.

We're talking real experience here people. No armchair theorizing. What real people really hear in real time playing real music in a real room.

I could go on. People who get the point will get the point. People who ridicule- ALWAYS without ever bothering to try and hear for themselves!- will continue to hate and argue.

What is wrong with audiophiles?

Something almost all audiophiles insist on, its like Dogma 101, you absolutely always must play the same "revealing" track over and over again. Well, I never do this. Used to. Realized pretty quickly though just how boring it is. Ask yourself, which is easier to concentrate on- something new and interesting? Or something repetitive and boring? You know the answer. Its silly even to argue. Every single person in my experience hears just fine without boring them to tears playing the same thing over and over again. Only audiophiles subject themselves to such counterproductive tedium.

What is wrong with audiophiles????
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geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
23,365 posts
 

12 angry men quotes 

Juror #12: Oh, come on. Nobody can know a thing like that. This isn’t an exact science.

Juror #2: You said we could throw out all the other evidence!

Juror #8: Prejudice always obscures the truth.

Juror #8: Nobody has to prove otherwise. The burden of proof is on the prosecution. The defendant doesn’t even have to open his mouth.

Juror #7: I don’t know about the rest of ’em but I’m gettin’ a little tired of this yakity-yack and back-and-forth, it’s gettin’ us nowhere. So I guess *I’ll* have to break it up; I change my vote to "not guilty."

atdavid
736 posts
 
Cool,


Then there must be lots of published double blind listening tests, published papers (no, not some guy shilling a magazine/review site).

What? There isn’t? Say it isn’t so!!! Cue the extend diatribes and excuses that will now follow

One of the problems with "audiophiles" ... they try to extend real, verified, not argued with even measurable things, i.e. EMI/RFI, which pretty much no-one argues with, and try to extend that to things very "generically" like vibration (of what?), magnetic fields (where, what field strength), fuses, wire directionality, of which things are far far from settled. I mean the could be settled pretty easily couldn’t they?

geoffkait18,250 posts11-14-2019 2:51pmWhat’s hilarious is there isn’t any argument any more about how the signal in cables and power cords and fuses is subject to external forces and noise such as vibration, magnetic fields and RFI/EMI. So I don’t know what all the ruckus is about. Same thing with wire directionality.

atdavid
736 posts
 
+3

glupson2,911 posts11-14-2019 3:57pm

Reminder, this thread is, allegedly, about what is wrong with audiophiles, not about wwhat is wrong with cables.

Unless you actually start thinking about d orbital splitting.

geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
23,365 posts
 
Let me help you out. Old audiophile axiom - You can’t debunk something that’s not bunk.

• Keep an arsenal of scientistic buzzwords at the tip of your tongue. So armed, you can effortlessly explain away even the most firmly acknowledged mysteries with a few impressive phrases and a wave of your hand. For example, the undeniable but incomprehensible facts of animal migration may be definitively ascribed to a "biological spatio-temporal vector-navigation program." Likewise, you may call upon such quasi-substantial conceptual conveniences as "biological clock," "self-organization" and "cellular memory" to deflate any suggestion that orthodox science may lack satisfactory explanations for intractably puzzling phenomena.

• Establish a crusading "Scientific Truth Foundation" staffed and funded by a hive of fawning acolytes. Then purport to offer a million-dollar reward to anyone who can repeatably demonstrate a paranormal phenomenon. Set the bar for paranormality nowhere in particular. Set the bar for repeatability at a "generous" 98%, safely ensuring that even normal scientific studies that demand a mere preponderance of evidence, or average results above chance, would fail to qualify for the prize. Should someone actually meet or exceed your criteria you can effortlessly dismiss their claim by pointing out that they’d just proven the phenomenon to be perfectly normal.

teo_audio
2,197 posts
 
+3

glupson2,911 posts11-14-2019 3:57pm

Reminder, this thread is, allegedly, about what is wrong with audiophiles, not about wwhat is wrong with cables.

Unless you actually start thinking about d orbital splitting.


When you really start thinking about it, it can make you posit that the electron is the causal aspect of the entirely fictitious nucleus. But of course, there is a theory to cover that one, too...
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