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Top 10 Signs That A Cable Company is Selling Snake Oil

This response was published by Audioholics.com.
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The audio industry is full of hype with the most nonsense surrounding the simplest component of the A/V chain - interconnects and speaker cables. Because there are often very little measurable and audible differences between cables, many of the exotic cable vendors use psuedo junk science to differentiate their products from their competitors. These vendors often prey upon the suggestible audiophile giving them reasons why these products must be utilized in their precious systems in order to achieve the best performance possible to reach the true path of audio nirvana. Listed below are the top 10 cable snake oil claims to watch out for. If a vendor is selling you on any of these fallacies, run don't walk away from their products, unless of course you enjoy a good sci-fi story and desire to buy expensive audio jewelery.  

Watch out if a Cable Vendor or Manufacturer:
  1. Promotes that their product allegedly eliminates audio related Skin Effect and/or "Strand Jumping" problems.
  2. Claims revolutionary breakthrough in cable technology by polarizing or biasing the dielectric using a battery.
  3. Promotes that their products eliminate "Audiogenic", "Diode Rectification" or any type of non linear distortions. See Debunking the Myth of Cable Distortion and Dielectric Biasing
  4. Physically places (+) and (-) wire leads in separate dielectrics not closely spaced in a common jacket. See: Calculating Cable Inductance of Twin Feeder Cables
  5. Claims vast improvements in sound by inserting "Cable Elevators" to raise the cables off the floor and minimize electron misfiring or static energy fields.
  6. Claims that cryogenically freezing cables improves fidelity or measurably changes electrical properties after the cable is restored to room temperature.
  7. Claims that their cables require a "Break In" period.
  8. Claims that measurements cannot quantify why their designs are superior and often misapply engineering principles in their reasoning but abandon the associated governing laws and metrics that establish them.
  9. Claims audible differences exist between stranded and non-stranded wires of same gauge rating, geometry and conductor spacing.
  10. Claims audible differences between silver and copper cables of equal design geometry and gauge.

128x128blumartini
teo_audio
2,197 posts
 
example:
PLEASE, someone illustrate to me that Teo Audio is selling snake oil. So I can tear them a new one with the entirety of the physics of conductivity, and the whole of Wikipedia regarding kinetics, electron transfer function, quantum electrodynamic function and so on.

Almost no one tries anymore. For the first decade of the product existence, it was a fight against the ignorance every day. Day after day. For almost 10 years. Unbelievable levels of abuse.

And now, nothing.

Just that...the people who did not understand... and having beat the crap out of us in print for a decade, they slink away and repeat....by unleashing their ignorance on someone else or some other device or product. It is slowly being accepted that the conductivity of a fluid is NOT the same as it is with wire. As it isn’t, for...by any point in the physics of conductivity, the two are not the same. As Wikipedia will tell anyone who wants to look, with about 100 pages or so of dense physics text on the matters involved.

But, you see, they don’t come back and apologize or retract their decade of abuse. They just chase down, beat up, and gnaw ceaselessly on the next thing they don’t understand.

In this case, a list from some audio website that has published an attack manifesto.

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe. -Albert Einstien
tomic601's avatar
tomic601
12,911 posts
 
Hopefully the ceaselessly illiterate society will challenge as invalid snake oil the dialectic bias patent ( shared by Bill Low and Richard Vandersteen- not a cable manufacturer ) in patent court. Doubt that will happen....

back to music and the new frontier.....

what did Gabriel say ?

” She’s so Frontier.... “
jtcf's avatar
jtcf
1,617 posts
 
It's really not worth the effort to dig up and post science and evidence to the contrary.It's a silly article.
geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
23,365 posts
 
An obvious troll. Bad Blumartini! Most of those “audiophile myths” are actually true. Duh! Where do all the nitwits come from?
gnxsam
1 posts
 
Despite all the naysayers you are spot on and it reminds me of when I worked at several “high end” audio stores years ago. I spent two summers working in two stores, one in Chicago and another in the Norfolk area, almost two years apart. I remember feeling very annoyed with all these claims from vendors about their revolutionary cables so I decided a test, which in both instances ultimately cost me my job (summer job so no big deal but did well for my masters thesis). I did blind tests for as many customers as I could and I would setup using the same speakers, same song three times in a row and would change only the cables (speaker cable, power cable, interconnects or digital cable). In each test it was.generally just speaker cables to make my point. I don’t remember a single customer that ever picked the “audiophile” cable (nordost snake oil, etc) in any of my tests as being better. More often then not the monoprice or blue jeans would end up on top, again I repeat the high end cables never won. I generally told customers after that when they were ready to buy cables to let me know and I would choose their winner (not letting them know which one it was). Again, two states, two years apart, same “high end” stuff and no one could tell (we had several local producers who are well known in the music business who picked Best Buy monster cable). So much like other fads you don’t always get what you pay for. 
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