What is the Silliest Accessory You Have Ever Seen.

"What is the Silliest Accessory You Have Ever Seen."

Proponents are right, mijostyn formed the question wrong and it is not only because he did not put question mark at the end.

Reading about Hallographs, I get an impression they are not an accessory after all. They seem to work as a crucial, centerpiece in fact, part of an audio system. They simply do not qualify for this thread about accessories.

@glupson, are you ever wrong? 

I need to stay up later at night, missed a lot of fun. 

What is the dynamic that make us so gullible when it comes to audio quality. Why does all this junk always make things sound better and not worse. Why are there always some people who are unable to understand that their hearing, all of our hearing is excellent at playing tricks on us. Seeing is believing, but hearing is not. Hearing is a very emotional sense. If you hear danger you are in big trouble. We can see much farther away than we can hear 99.9% of the time. If you see danger coming you generally have a lot more time to deal with it. It is why we stand on two legs. Good thing Indians were scared to attack at night. 
Lack of understanding/knowledge and ego I think are most to blame. None of us likes to be wrong. Because most of this stuff does no harm (no benefit either) other than financial it is much harder to fault. 
I am lucky I suppose in that my own mistakes have always screwed things up enough to notify me that I had botched it. Certainly people with a better understanding of the science behind all of this are less susceptible to the chicanery.
When dealing with strangers it is always best to proceed with a high degree of suspicion. Someone who is for real knows this and will go head over heals trying to show just how good their stuff really is at shows and such.
You get up in the morning and check your email box 3/4 of it is somebody trying to scam you. It may be sad but you have to keep that in mind when dealing with strangers.

mitch

have you actually tried MD products, or, are your simply pontificating?

mijostyn,

"@glupson, are you ever wrong?"

I was. Third grade elementary school math test. I got one question wrong. I am still considering psychotherapy for that trauma.

As far as "how come that tweaks are always for better" question, I asked that many times. At some point one person here, I think it was oregonpapa and, as usual, I may not be wrong, mentioned some tweak that made things worse. That was after I had asked many times the same question. I concluded that negative tweaks do exist, but do not get advertised as such that often.

I have had more negative experiences than I care to admit but usually not from "tweaks" but from poorly designed or misused equipment. I fell for the marketing. My favorite example being the Transcriptors Vestigial Tonearm. Try not to die laughing but I even tried to put a Koetsu in it and then blamed the Koetsu for poor tracking. When the right bass note came along it would pop right out of the groove. Worse it was on an LP 12.
My formative years. A V15 did not even fare well in that arm.

There was always better equipment to buy. Who wanted to waste money at the margin. The really stupid stuff didn't start until the early 80's and by then I had set up over 100 systems including the entire PA system at Flagler Dog Track. Experience and reading had gotten me well up to speed. The days of falling for marketing were over.