I truly do not understand how some people manage to convince themselves to buy such useless and expensive products. I get spending lots of money on quality DACs, amplifiers, speakers, headphones, etc... But some of the products marketed towards audiophiles are truly ridiculous.
What's next? A specially designed CPU and memory to decode "cleaner sounding bits"?
It's an extreme version of the more expensive is better mentality that made the coffee industry boom in the 90s+ and made Apple a trillion dollar company.
At least with those things, there's the theoretical possibility that there's a difference though.
Why is it so hard to convince people that on the digital side of the equation, there's an objective right or wrong answer, and it's impossible to get any better than an exact copy of the bits?
Audiophiles aren't concerned with just the signal being reproduced faithfully - it has to happen without side effects. You're talking past each other if you don't address that.
But ultimately that means a clean digital pipeline and high quality D/A converters before it hits an actual speaker. The thing is... unless there are unnecessary conversions (making the signal less than bitperfect), there is no point for a lot of the digital side of this
Side effects like power consumed from the grid? Heat voided into the room? Gravitational attraction from the heavy case? Money draining from their account?
But could be bested by simply squeezing the bag with your dirty grubby hands.
Juicero is truly one of my favorite companies ever. The whole thing was a massive pile of extravagant hardware whose only reason for existence was to tell you "no, you cannot squeeze this particular bag of juice". It is the quintessential silicon valley echo chamber product. The fact that its founder went on to hawk "raw water" coming from spigots drilled into the hillsides along state highways only makes the story that much better.
My wife bought me a $300 coffee grinder for Christmas. As a coffee ...enthusiast?... I'm quite fond of it. Perfectly consistent grid, very quiet electric operation, small footprint. I could argue that $300 was too much for it, but I'm willing to pay a premium for good product. $1,650 would be utterly insane.
I recently picked up the Fellow Ode for myself. I'm very happy with it so far and it's working exactly as advertised. Quiet, consistent, and very fast.
I don’t think it’s a good analogy. With the coffee grinders you can have objective physical measurements for the coffee particle size distribution after the grinding process. Sure, the taste improvement would hit diminishing returns as the grinder price increases, but it would still exist. You as a buyer have to decide for yourself at which point the price stops making sense based on your budget.
The audiophile hardware on the other hand is being sold based on the promises that defy an objective physical reality.
At least with coffee grinders you can measure the distribution of particle sizes to see that cheaper grinders are producing something quantitatively different as output, and use blind tests to see if you care. $1650 might still be a bit much, but the way you grind coffee does have a surprising impact on how it tastes.
I’m not a coffee “enthusiast” but we have a grinder at home, and I’m definitely not getting the same coffee as I did in the office when I used their grinders.
Grinding coffee is hard. It's very easy to get particles that are too fine, overextract, and ruin the taste. So some engineering is required to get a good result.
For these limited-run products, you're paying for the product development to a greater extent than you would for a product that sells in the millions. Software is very similar, someone could use Wordpress off the shelf, but they have a bunch of ideas for how their thing should be different, and so pay artisans $300 an hour to make their very own custom blog. The $1700 coffee grinder is the same effect at play.
No, Apple is at least partially successful because it’s a luxury brand. That’s not the same as more expensive=better. The Apple comparison is also dumb because even if you think they’re overpriced, they aren’t priced arbitrarily high and there’s a tangible difference between an Apple product and competitors. Compare that to wine, coffee and audio equipment that fails to be differentiated in blind tests.
> there’s a tangible difference between an Apple product and competitors
This seems pretty subjective. iPhone does exactly same things (takes pictures, makes calls, runs apps) as a $50 no-name device running Android. Similarly, a bottle of Two Buck Chuck gets you drunk the same as a $25k Romanée-Conti.
Classic “only one metric matters”, by this standard you should only choose food based on how full does it make you which I guess is how we arrived at Soylent
> iPhone does exactly same things (takes pictures, makes calls, runs apps) as a $50 no-name device running Android
The photo quality on the iPhone will be of objectively higher quality due to the larger, superior lenses. There's simply more light information to work with.
If you want to get drunk and that's your only value you place on a drink why even choose wine to compare? You can buy bottom shelf vodka and get more ethanol for your buck than Two Buck Chuck. Hell, vodka is wastefully distilled multiple times, why not just chase bootleg moonshine producers for even less? It all gets you drunk the same so they must be equivalent products.
Pedantic point since we're on HN and I spent some time learning about this. Moonshine is also distilled, so the best bang-for-your-buck in terms of ethanol quantity for price would be water, sugar and bread yeast, maybe adding tomato paste and lemon juice, commonly known as "Birdwatchers sugar wash recipe". If labor is considered free, a still shouldn't add much to the cost as long as you use it a lot.
> iPhone does exactly same things (takes pictures, makes calls, runs apps) as a $50 no-name device running Android
Replace «iPhone» with “Samsung Galaxy” and your argument stays true. It’s just that manufacturers created a market for phones with giant screens, 3+ cameras and CPUs that can fly you to Oort cloud.
The meme that people buy Apple products as status symbols needs to die at some point. If you can name one single other manufacturer making products at the quality of an iPhone but at half the price then you can call them overpriced. I don't normally like to use the "if it was possible someone would have done it by now" argument but there are literally millions of Apple copycats and wannabees and they all suck. Apple's product design and manufacturing is insanely good and can be felt going to any big box store and picking up any laptop. If you don't care about that then of course you'll say they're overpriced because dollars aren't going to places you don't care about. It's why I love my M50x's, they're cheap ass plastic and faux leather because every dollar went into the inside.
Look I spent probably eight years deriding iPhones with some stupid sense of techno-superiority with my Android until I actually tried one. They are so much better holy shit, the speed of Safari alone is worth the price of admission.
You can be both a status symbol and an objectively superior product; they are not mutually exclusive.
A laptop can be bought by someone who says, "Ooh, Apple, new, shiny, cool," and the next person to buy the same laptop might say, "This is the objectively better device for my use case."
The truth is clear when it costs more but is is objectively worse, yet sells anyway.
The most characteristic Apple customer experience is persuading themselves that they can learn to live without the feature deleted in the latest software update.
I'm still not an iPhone owner, but I'm close. The presence of a do not disturb physical button on the phone, the UI...with my pixel, it's not always a simple one swipe to the flashlight button. Which is amazingly annoying compared to even older phones. I have since bought a dedicated flashlight.
>Apple's product design and manufacturing is insanely good
Apple might be qualitatively better than most, but I wouldn't call it quantitatively "insanely good". The product design often has major "bugs", like "you are holding it wrong" iPhone 4 or the macbook pro keyboards that stopped working a lot.
I myself had a screen replacement once on a mbp 2015 model because the "protective coating" peeled off... a known problem and Apple replaced it for free even tho I was a few months outside of my warranty.
And the power cable had a tendency to shed off the outer isolation layer and/or "fray", which is by no means a problem only I had given the many "how to fix" DIY youtube videos. Same thing with other cables, like the Lightning ones, I am told.
Cooling in the Intel macbook pros and airs also was a constant problem, and the engineering seems ridiculous at times[0].
That was the product design side... the manufacturing... not really what Apple does itself. The same manufacturers who work for Apple usually work for a lot of other companies as well. It might be that Apple insists on better quality (and maybe even pays a premium). But the iPhones I saw do not look like they had a lot better manufacturing quality than the phones I was using (I am not talking about better/more expensive components, that's a design decision).
Or more recently the 2019 MBP where plugging in the charger on the left side of the machine would cause it to thermal throttle whereas the right side was fine.
I think many people conflate at least 3 different terms when discussing whether iPhones are expensive:
- “Luxury good” is objective. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxury_goods: “a luxury good (or upmarket good) is a good for which demand increases more than what is proportional as income rises, so that expenditures on the good become a greater proportion of overall spending” (luxury goods need not be expensive, either, especially if they only become useful in combination with other items that are expensive. Many people can afford to buy golf balls, but I think they still are luxury goods because golf clubs, club membership, and the ability to find time to play golf all are luxury goods)
- “Status symbol” is subjective, with groups of people deciding whether something is a status symbol. Status symbols need not even be expensive. Cultural or legal norms can prohibit the “don’t haves” from acquiring them (in Rome, not everybody was allowed to wear a toga, for example).
- “Overpriced” is subjective, with each individual deciding for themselves whether they think something is overpriced. Because of this, arguing whether an item _is_ overpriced is useless.
I see “overpriced” as 100% distinct from “has high profit margin” That’s objective, but a consequence of the value users see in a product (either as a functional item or as status symbol)
I don’t have the numbers, but chances are that iPhones are luxury goods. Whether they’re the other two depends on context. If you work at the Free Software Foundation, they may not be status symbols, for example.
BMWs are better "driving machines" than Honda Civics. They're still a luxury car and status symbols. Things can be two things at once. Just as the Honda Civic will get you from point A to point B just fine, there's a phone less than half the price of a new iPhone 13 pro will do what smartphones need to do these days. You just look like old-fashioned and not very "with it" if you do.
Guess how well that phone sells?
Not very well. It sells so poorly that the manufacturer's announced they're going to stop making them. It's even from the same manufacturer but the paucity of its sales is what makes me believe a lot of people are iPhones for status symbols. I'm talking, of course, about the $400 iPhones SE (vs the iPhone 13 Pro which clocks in at $1,000). There are other differences too, but you will get made fun of, either to your face, or behind your back, for having a 'phone with a button'.
Just own up to the fact that you have a luxury phone.
This is such a weird view of the world, Apple products are the Honda Civics. They're literally mass-market products with 50% market share in the US. They're not some snooty artisanal soda, they're Coke, and you're over here arguing that if you drink anything other than Big K you're doing it for the status.
You are allowed to aim a little higher than rice and beans for dinner without fear of it being called gourmet. It's been a decade since anyone cared what kind of phone you have. My four year old used iPhone with a cracked screen makes me look rich AF I'm sure.
Are you a teenager? I can understand phone status mattering a lot to them, but if someone tried to make fun of me for using an iPhone SE2 I'd just laugh at them for trying to assign status to such an embarrassingly minor thing.
It is in fact not related in any way to coffee or to Apple. Not even remotely.
Apple sells products which are, in the main, at very similar price points to its competition, and it has won because it simply. makes. better. products. I'm not sure why there is still delusional thinking about this—apparently the last 20 years have not proven the point well enough?
My guess is that it's a similar social phenomenon to flat-earthers, qanon, etc, in that a group of like-minded people form and customs emerge in which making ever-more outlandish claims are taken as stronger commitment signal to the group.
I was reading last week about an 'audiophile ssd' product and I browsed an audiofile forum thread[0], expecting to have a chuckle at users ridiculing it but there's actually 6 pages of people praising it and finding new adjectives to describe the sound it produces. The most popular posts [1] also detail other absurd things they have done to produce a better sound- "I can opt to convert a FLAC to WAV format and play that from RAM, this somehow lowers the perceived noise flow and makes music sound more organic and detailed"
Jesus Christ that forum thread. Those people really need mental help. Like, how can a mentally stable person write something like:
"A system deficit I recognized over the last several months was choral music, couldn't enjoy it when played as I was hearing wrong harmonics, kind of a glaze on the sound with poor word intelligibility regardless of whether the OS resided on Optane or in RAM. Had me agonizing over what could fix it...problem solved using the FEMTO NVMe drive"
> TLC mode: It sounds like background music, no features and powerless, everything is flattened, lacks extension and density.
> pSLC mode: There is a special natural feeling, it becomes more smooth and calm, the thickness is slightly increased, and overall it is more resistant to hearing but still slightly dry."
Wow, that's incredible. Mmm yes, I love digitally encoded music to be slightly thicker and resistant to... hearing?
This is why I love audiophile marketing/reviews so much. They make every single equipment "upgrade" sound like a huge change in how the music sounds. Just throw in enough dull and lively sounding adjectives and you can convince the reader that yes, this expensive piece of equipment is EXACTLY what you're missing!
Make sure to adjust the memory timings to enhance the soundstage. (Or whatever other ridiculous jargon they'll come up with to elaborate upon the placebo effect.)
The most expensive (and ridiculous) thing that I've seen in the audiophile world is the Nordost Odin 2 cable, priced at $20k-$30k per m. I would have thought it was a joke until I saw actual people buying it.
I wonder if these sorts of things are actually bought individually (as in a consumer decides they should upgrade their audio cables, does the research, and chooses this pricy product) or whether they’re primarily sold as part of large expensive home theater/audio installs.
It seems like this would be easier to sell as a line item on an already six figure home theater install (or seven figure house build), rather than individually. But I honestly have no idea.
I recently purchased a used Yamaha SW-45 subwoofer for 30€. I asked the seller if for an extra 10€ he could include the RCA cable, to save me a trip to the nearest mall / Amazon locker. He tried to sell me a 40€ "high quality" cable...
> I truly do not understand how some people manage to convince themselves to buy such useless and expensive products.
There is a gigantic multi-trillion dollar industry built around convincing people to trade their money for shit they don't need. Advertising and marketing are diseases, and what you're looking at is a severe infection.
> I get spending lots of money on quality DACs, amplifiers, speakers, headphones, etc...
A/B testing audio reproduction components is extremely difficult. The human perceptual mechanism is a pattern detector, not a fine-grained measurement device — it's impossible to preserve sounds in memory long enough to make a informed distinction, all you have are the impressions the sounds left behind. You can improve with training, allowing you to recognize more patterns and thus capture better impressions, but only to an extent — recalling what something sounded like is still very lossy.
Combine that with human status seeking and the placebo effect and you get $2500 audiophile ethernet switches.
Source: I was a mastering engineer for a couple of years, and I had to help build a good monitoring environment for the studio. It was hard.
> Combine that with human status seeking and the placebo effect and you get $2500 audiophile ethernet switches.
There is a very clear line separating expensive audiophile equipment that might have some hard-to-measure non-placebo benefits, and expensive audiophile equipment that cannot possibly do anything.
That line is the digital-analogic conversion. Any piece of equipment operating purely on digital information is either performing very straightforward redundancy checks and error correction, or it's snake oil. Tertium non datur.
For people who don't fully understand or don't trust the rational explanation, it's easy for the placebo effect to create perceptions of differences where no differences whatsoever exist in reality. So in terms of marketing snake oil to suckers, I disagree that a bright line exists between small-but-measurable and not-measurable. The human tendency towards irrationality is very strong, easily capable of swamping small differences.
I'll also say that it's not so much the hard-to-measure effects where you need to spend your time when pursuing accurate reproduction. Speakers have much poorer fidelity than anything else in the reproduction chain, and room acoustics matter a great deal (especially having a large enough room with high enough ceilings, to increase the ratio of direct sound coming from the speaker vs. reflected sound). The contributions of these factors are not small but they are are hard to understand, assess, and apply in practice.
Well, there is a pyramid of sound quality effects:
Sound transducer (and room if applicable), ampliifer (incl. its power conditioning sometimes), DAC or source.
The standard HiFi stance is that source should have no effect on DAC and vice versa, but some weird or old hardware does not do it right. Likewise DAC and amplifier shouldn't affect each other.
Amplifier and transducer is a bit more complex due to analog electronics involved.
Of course the source can be garbage too (e.g. bad resampling or compression), but reasonable sources are all the same if digital. Except when we're talking vinyl or something, where there's another transducer and amplifier involved.
(The difference is that we're doing clever things with class D amplifiers to get the best sound possible out of a mobile phone, and charge a few dollars per chip. While it's technically a "specially designed CPU", really it's a proprietary DSP with the analogue front end on the same die)
To be fair I've got some $2500 switches. OK they're layer 3, run routing protocols, have 48 POE ports and dual power supplies, and I still think they're overpriced, but it's fairly standard.
A single power supply 5 port unmanaged switch though? Hilarious. Make you you get the right ethernet cables that run in the right direction
Not all bits, the 0's, due to friction on the sides, might be slower, while the 1's are slimmer, but since they have edges they might get stuck in the bends (but on the other hand they are good at cleaning the pipes).
I worry sometimes that AWS sometimes runs out of 1s and begins quietly replacing them with lowercase Ls. I can tell the difference, but not everyone can.
An Australian electronics magazine did an April fools article about using mercury in garden hose for better speaker sound quality, they had a follow up article the next issue to clarify it was satire and dangerous as a few audiophile idiots actually attempted it.
Maybe I didn't follow this correctly, but I thought it was implying the filtered power supply was improved audio of streamed audio. If so, how could an analog power supply have any impact on the bits in a digital audio stream?
When feeding audio over a digital connection to a DAC which takes timing directly from the input stream, bad timing (eg. from optical cables rather than coaxial, and conceivably bad power supplies could cause it too) can lead to sample duration inconsistency and jitter. In the case of a network switch, it's a straight-up scam.
Also power supply hum (60hz it higher for switching supplies) can induce interference in the player's output signal. I'd use a filtered power supply for any player, but not necessarily the network switch. ("Ethernet offers galvanic isolation by design. All connections are transformed coupled.")
For optical cables, is that a PCM-specific thing? Something like Dolby Digital over Optical has to be run through a decoder in a way that seems like "sample duration inconsistency" would either result in total failure to decode parts,or simply be not an issue.
Of course (with a few dollars worth of parts) the DAC could pretty easily buffer and re-clock the data stream with a precision clock if you're not worried about adding a tiny delay. I've seen this done in some DACs on the USB stream.
Is there any actual evidence this cleans the signal at all? Sounds like gold plated HDMI cables to me.... we've already figured out error correction and such for networking, esp. if it's just local connections.
The only reasonable thing I can think of is they're maxing out the bandwith of the cables (seriously doubt) and cheaper hardware can't keep up as well (crap firmware, too many packet drops from cheap hardware, etc.)
But even then, it sounds like a huuuge stretch from my limited IT/networking experience.
I bought one of their power strips out of necessity and had to return it the same day due to a faulty power switch. I ended up going across the road to a farm equipment store that had regular power strips.
This is true, for things like ¼" instrument cables, there is a big difference between the cheapest cable and something a bit better and you don't need audiophile ears to hear it. The cheap ones will frequently start to generate loud crackling noises after a short time of use. Since the onset is unpredictable, there's some incentive to just spend the money to get the more expensive cable so you don't need to worry about a cable going bad mid-performance.
I saw that micro center was selling "Monster" branded LED strips and some wall led tiles that looked kind interesting albeit expensive. I just assumed the brand name got bought, but I just assumed overpriced...
I’m going to file this under “matters of faith” and not even going to consider the fact that the switch is _nowhere_ involved in turning the bits into sound.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't Ethernet signals not just differential, but magnetically isolated? All ethernet signals go through transformers to mitigate noise, ESD and ground loops. [1]
Yes, that's correct. As long as the switch isn't horribly non-compliant (such as EMI/EMC issues), and whatever you're plugging the other end into has a properly designed port with proper grounding, there's basically no way it will affect an audio system.
The product is complete pseudoscience, and looking at the site of the company that makes it, almost all their other stuff seems to be based on nonsense too.
Yeah, with a bit of distance. I mean like if it's half a meter away from your speaker cables or amplifier, a switch putting out excessive EMI could couple noise in to that over the air. But it will do absolutely nothing to the actual data.
EMI can be a real problem especially for things like recording electric guitars, because electric guitar pickups are basically antennas and have to be exposed to be able to pick up the strings.
Looks like the original review this refers to isn't taking any criticism:
> NOTE: We understand that for many, the ability of a switch to "alter" the sound defies what they know and/or understand about networks (cables, switches, protocols, etc.). With that in mind, we are not going to approve comments that attack the review or the reviewer
Typical for the esoteric end of the audiophile community. A lot of the nonsense cable reviewers have turned off their comments on their blogs and insist if they can hear a difference then it must be true. Same people also refuse to do any kind of blind testing and attack the process with a vehemence that suggests there is something to hide about these reviews.
Which is true, the emperor has no clothes and they are paid to describe them in great detail.
Synergistic are notorious for making ridiculous claims about their digital products. There is a cult around digital jitter that has developed and is currently destroying audio forums, its adherents insist they can hear audible jitter effects over digital transmission despite even the worst measurements being well under the audible noise floor. The best thing to do is not engage with them.
This would have been a much better article if they purchased the device and tore it apart to see what is inside. I mean is it full of generic unlabeled chips salvaged off some other switch? Is it all name brand? How is the circuit board layout? Are you at least getting top of the line components?
Also would have been interesting to analyze the audio streams on an oscilloscope to see how "enhanced" (or not enhanced) they were when passed through this switch.
Instead this article just looks at a single review. I mean obviously this switch doesn't magically make audio better somehow. But demonstrating why that is would have been both entertaining and provided a good community service.
I guess somebody should fork over some cash and ship one of these to AvE, bigclive, or electroboom... at least they'd tear it down.
I mean you are probably right but I'd love the teardown anyway. Maybe you are wrong? Maybe they have custom silicon or at least "name brand" chips? Or maybe it is a shitshow that features the crappiest power supply and salvaged chips with the markings scraped off tossed onto the worst PCB on earth. Maybe it is a hub and not a switch?
I can see one possibility something like this can make a difference: RF and electrical interference/noise. Best thing is: this is measurable. So there should be no need to trust subjective analysis of another audiophile.
Thats what I was thinking, but even so, it is a weird product.
First, Ethernet does not have a ground wire; and ground is the biggest source of electrical interference for analog audio.
Second, the Ethernet switch is a really weird place to try an address this. If this is your concern, I assume that you hold every peripheral that plugs into your computer to at least the same standards (especially almost everything else you might plug into it, as most connections attach directly to ground). You also need to deal with all of the noise that components inside your computer can generate.
If electrical interference in your analog components are a concern, you are better off spending your money closer to the analog circuit. An electrically isolated sound card with a digital input 100% solves any concern about analog noise in the rest of the system [0].
[0] Unless the noise is so bad that it interferes with the digital computation.
I think someone who buys this thing already listens their music inside a Faraday cage anechoic chamber with power from a perfect sine generator a few kilometers away to bar any vibration from affecting the listening experience.
Or maybe I'm creative enough to consider designing gear for audiophiles.
You should see how much money people in the car enthusiast community spend on "pointless" stuff. What is it about audiophiles in particular that attracts so much ridicule? It's their money, what would you rather they spent it on?
Same reason flat earthers are so irksome - because they cloak themselves in the language of science (physics and optics for flat earthers; signal theory and electrical engineering for audiophile quacks).
> It's their money, what would you rather they spent it on?
Honestly because in many cases the people that blow their money on this stuff are people like our parents. This stuff is a scam that sucks in good people who aren't the most financially responsible. They rack up a ton of debt on their credit cards thinking they are buying good stuff. And it screws them over and causes grief in the family.
I mean yes, everybody in the room is an adult, but the fallout from a family member who is stupidly spending their retirement money on crap like this affects everybody else.
As electronics engineers and experts, many of us take issue with fraudulent claims in electronics. Audiophile-market electronics seem to show up as fraudulent more than many others. It has nothing to do with the audiophiles.
Are audiophiles similar to wine tasters? My understanding is that wine tasters cannot reliably pick an expensive wine by taste alone. Is audio similar to this or is there merit to it?
The study that pushed that thought about wine tasting was looking at amateur enthusiasts, not professionals. The top folks can identify, in all common cases, the vineyard that a wine has come from. Some aspects of this are surprisingly straightforward to learn. Smell is an incredibly powerful sense when you train it, but most of us don't. It is not pseudoscience, though you can have a pretty solid debate about whether it's truly a useful skill or not.
Haven't several blind taste tests been done with professional sommeliers where they've failed to pick the "good" wine against the "bad" reliably? Or they've been given the same wine several times and given it different ratings each time?
I believe so. I remember when CDs first appeared, we used to makes tapes of them and then A/B test. With Dolby Noise Reduction(C) over speakers nobody could tell the difference and I had young ears back then. The quiet parts of Jazz or classical on newly recorded stuff through headphones there was less hiss, but for rock little difference. But they were always advertising new Xbit Digital to Audio conversions. Even my headphones had a "for digital" sticker on them (Sonys MDR-V6s and I don't think there was anything digital about them...)
I think its about feeling you have something special.
Of course now we've come full circle and records are the new best sounding thing.. I remember having to clean them and hearing pops and skips... but here we are.
Wine tasters can't pick an expensive wine by taste alone because price is mostly related to marketing. There are some excellent cheap wines and no-so-great expensive wines.
Professional wine tasters are like human spectrometers. They can tell you each component of the wine (aromas, sugar, alcohol, tanins, etc...), using that and their knowledge, they can identify characteristics of grapes and vineyards, process, and defects. The audio equivalent would be a sound engineer, who can listen for bad mixing, noise and distorsion. Both work with producers to improve their products.
Audiophiles have more in common with wine "connoisseurs", who have some knowledge but are sometimes influenced by marketing and the placebo effect and are mostly driven by enjoyment and sometimes social status.
Audiophiles are a strange bunch. Some of them believe drawing around the edge of a CD with a special pen (not just any marker will do you know!) will improve the sound [1]. It's a laughably stupid premise.
To me, it seems like an "analog" cargo cult thing. A lot of audiophiles simply don't get the digital transition.
In the old times, the musical signal was analog and any impairment was a degradation. Audiophiles went to great length to avoid this.
And they keep on applying this approach to the digital part of a modern system, in completely useless ways. For example, here, it seems they use a marker to prevent light to leak from the side of the CD. I guess it's a misguided way to try to increase the SNR of the laser detector while reading the disc.
What they don't get is that the digital part of the system doesn't carry a musical signal. It's information, that is used to reconstruct a musical signal at the DAC. And this information is very robust. As long as it can be reconstructed error free, SNR and the like do not matter. As long as it arrives on time at the DAC (I'm simplifying a bit, but it's easy to get the idea) any previous jitter is irrelevant.
If you're an audiophile, keep on caring about the DAC and the analog chain after it. And don't bother too much about the digital part, it's not audio it's IT!
I'm so confused by expensive gear like this, or gold-plated connectors etc — what's the actual TAM for customers like this that it's worth putting a product like this out there?
I can't imagine there are more than.... 50 audiophiles out there that would pay for something like this. Or am I wildly off?
Some people around me are wine enthusiasts. I once put a label from an expensive wine on a cheap bottle of wine. That was a fun little experiment that works with switches as well...
I used to find these things funny, but now I wonder if the woo-tier audiophile brands aren't taking advantage of mental illness.
There's a certain ingrained assumption that the customers for these products are all "rich idiots," and many of them may well fit that archetype, but even so, the line between "can hear the difference between ethernet switches" and "affected by proximity to batteries" feels uncomfortably fuzzy to me.
I don't think that is their market. Their market is elderly retired people who don't really know any better. They'll use credit cards to pay for all this and it really messes with family dynamics.
Spending their fixed retirement income and racking up debt. Folks who are teetering on the edge of needing their kids to get financial power of attorney.
Let's say it actually worked though. I.e., it was just production level audio equipment, rather than woo. Does that make it okay for them to sell it to those on a fixed income?
Not defending it, just seems weird to decry it for taking money away from people who can't afford it, when the whole positioning is "makes audio sound better". Decry it simply for the fact it doesn't work, not that people who can't afford it spend money on it.
I'd love to know who isn't on a fixed income. I get pay £X a month, its fixed, I can't just say "Ahh this month I'm going to take twice as much income"
Meanwhile pensioners see their pensions shooting up above earnings all the time.
Like all the crypto stuff, I've started to think of this as "memtic pandemic"; the idea that it's worth spending absurd amounts of money on audio improvements / pictures of apes is spread over the internet and infects certain vulnerable people with adverse results.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] threadWhat's next? A specially designed CPU and memory to decode "cleaner sounding bits"?
Why is it so hard to convince people that on the digital side of the equation, there's an objective right or wrong answer, and it's impossible to get any better than an exact copy of the bits?
They get all of that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL65i1XhVec
https://weberworkshops.com/products/hg-2
But could be bested by simply squeezing the bag with your dirty grubby hands.
Juicero is truly one of my favorite companies ever. The whole thing was a massive pile of extravagant hardware whose only reason for existence was to tell you "no, you cannot squeeze this particular bag of juice". It is the quintessential silicon valley echo chamber product. The fact that its founder went on to hawk "raw water" coming from spigots drilled into the hillsides along state highways only makes the story that much better.
The audiophile hardware on the other hand is being sold based on the promises that defy an objective physical reality.
I’m not a coffee “enthusiast” but we have a grinder at home, and I’m definitely not getting the same coffee as I did in the office when I used their grinders.
For these limited-run products, you're paying for the product development to a greater extent than you would for a product that sells in the millions. Software is very similar, someone could use Wordpress off the shelf, but they have a bunch of ideas for how their thing should be different, and so pay artisans $300 an hour to make their very own custom blog. The $1700 coffee grinder is the same effect at play.
This seems pretty subjective. iPhone does exactly same things (takes pictures, makes calls, runs apps) as a $50 no-name device running Android. Similarly, a bottle of Two Buck Chuck gets you drunk the same as a $25k Romanée-Conti.
The photo quality on the iPhone will be of objectively higher quality due to the larger, superior lenses. There's simply more light information to work with.
But yeah, homemade sugar solution and wine yeast would be your most efficient per dollar.
Replace «iPhone» with “Samsung Galaxy” and your argument stays true. It’s just that manufacturers created a market for phones with giant screens, 3+ cameras and CPUs that can fly you to Oort cloud.
Look I spent probably eight years deriding iPhones with some stupid sense of techno-superiority with my Android until I actually tried one. They are so much better holy shit, the speed of Safari alone is worth the price of admission.
A laptop can be bought by someone who says, "Ooh, Apple, new, shiny, cool," and the next person to buy the same laptop might say, "This is the objectively better device for my use case."
The most characteristic Apple customer experience is persuading themselves that they can learn to live without the feature deleted in the latest software update.
Apple might be qualitatively better than most, but I wouldn't call it quantitatively "insanely good". The product design often has major "bugs", like "you are holding it wrong" iPhone 4 or the macbook pro keyboards that stopped working a lot.
I myself had a screen replacement once on a mbp 2015 model because the "protective coating" peeled off... a known problem and Apple replaced it for free even tho I was a few months outside of my warranty.
And the power cable had a tendency to shed off the outer isolation layer and/or "fray", which is by no means a problem only I had given the many "how to fix" DIY youtube videos. Same thing with other cables, like the Lightning ones, I am told.
Cooling in the Intel macbook pros and airs also was a constant problem, and the engineering seems ridiculous at times[0].
That was the product design side... the manufacturing... not really what Apple does itself. The same manufacturers who work for Apple usually work for a lot of other companies as well. It might be that Apple insists on better quality (and maybe even pays a premium). But the iPhones I saw do not look like they had a lot better manufacturing quality than the phones I was using (I am not talking about better/more expensive components, that's a design decision).
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiCBYAP_Sgg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vh-TdgfSNLs
Or more recently the 2019 MBP where plugging in the charger on the left side of the machine would cause it to thermal throttle whereas the right side was fine.
- “Luxury good” is objective. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxury_goods: “a luxury good (or upmarket good) is a good for which demand increases more than what is proportional as income rises, so that expenditures on the good become a greater proportion of overall spending” (luxury goods need not be expensive, either, especially if they only become useful in combination with other items that are expensive. Many people can afford to buy golf balls, but I think they still are luxury goods because golf clubs, club membership, and the ability to find time to play golf all are luxury goods)
- “Status symbol” is subjective, with groups of people deciding whether something is a status symbol. Status symbols need not even be expensive. Cultural or legal norms can prohibit the “don’t haves” from acquiring them (in Rome, not everybody was allowed to wear a toga, for example).
- “Overpriced” is subjective, with each individual deciding for themselves whether they think something is overpriced. Because of this, arguing whether an item _is_ overpriced is useless.
I see “overpriced” as 100% distinct from “has high profit margin” That’s objective, but a consequence of the value users see in a product (either as a functional item or as status symbol)
I don’t have the numbers, but chances are that iPhones are luxury goods. Whether they’re the other two depends on context. If you work at the Free Software Foundation, they may not be status symbols, for example.
Guess how well that phone sells?
Not very well. It sells so poorly that the manufacturer's announced they're going to stop making them. It's even from the same manufacturer but the paucity of its sales is what makes me believe a lot of people are iPhones for status symbols. I'm talking, of course, about the $400 iPhones SE (vs the iPhone 13 Pro which clocks in at $1,000). There are other differences too, but you will get made fun of, either to your face, or behind your back, for having a 'phone with a button'.
Just own up to the fact that you have a luxury phone.
You are allowed to aim a little higher than rice and beans for dinner without fear of it being called gourmet. It's been a decade since anyone cared what kind of phone you have. My four year old used iPhone with a cracked screen makes me look rich AF I'm sure.
What? We must be living in different worlds. Being made fun of is bizarre.
There’s an iPhone SE 2 as well. I have it.
Apple sells products which are, in the main, at very similar price points to its competition, and it has won because it simply. makes. better. products. I'm not sure why there is still delusional thinking about this—apparently the last 20 years have not proven the point well enough?
Must we mention monitor stands again?
Please.
[0] https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/62753-nvme-ssd-desi... [1] https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/62753-nvme-ssd-desi...
Or more generally Elitism. If there is much difference between the two, anyways.
Those folks would be embarrassed to mention those rooms contained things as goofy as this. It's excessive and unreasonable.
"A system deficit I recognized over the last several months was choral music, couldn't enjoy it when played as I was hearing wrong harmonics, kind of a glaze on the sound with poor word intelligibility regardless of whether the OS resided on Optane or in RAM. Had me agonizing over what could fix it...problem solved using the FEMTO NVMe drive"
[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvme-ssd-for-audiophiles
> pSLC mode: There is a special natural feeling, it becomes more smooth and calm, the thickness is slightly increased, and overall it is more resistant to hearing but still slightly dry."
Wow, that's incredible. Mmm yes, I love digitally encoded music to be slightly thicker and resistant to... hearing?
It seems like this would be easier to sell as a line item on an already six figure home theater install (or seven figure house build), rather than individually. But I honestly have no idea.
There is a gigantic multi-trillion dollar industry built around convincing people to trade their money for shit they don't need. Advertising and marketing are diseases, and what you're looking at is a severe infection.
A/B testing audio reproduction components is extremely difficult. The human perceptual mechanism is a pattern detector, not a fine-grained measurement device — it's impossible to preserve sounds in memory long enough to make a informed distinction, all you have are the impressions the sounds left behind. You can improve with training, allowing you to recognize more patterns and thus capture better impressions, but only to an extent — recalling what something sounded like is still very lossy.
Combine that with human status seeking and the placebo effect and you get $2500 audiophile ethernet switches.
Source: I was a mastering engineer for a couple of years, and I had to help build a good monitoring environment for the studio. It was hard.
There is a very clear line separating expensive audiophile equipment that might have some hard-to-measure non-placebo benefits, and expensive audiophile equipment that cannot possibly do anything.
That line is the digital-analogic conversion. Any piece of equipment operating purely on digital information is either performing very straightforward redundancy checks and error correction, or it's snake oil. Tertium non datur.
I'll also say that it's not so much the hard-to-measure effects where you need to spend your time when pursuing accurate reproduction. Speakers have much poorer fidelity than anything else in the reproduction chain, and room acoustics matter a great deal (especially having a large enough room with high enough ceilings, to increase the ratio of direct sound coming from the speaker vs. reflected sound). The contributions of these factors are not small but they are are hard to understand, assess, and apply in practice.
The standard HiFi stance is that source should have no effect on DAC and vice versa, but some weird or old hardware does not do it right. Likewise DAC and amplifier shouldn't affect each other. Amplifier and transducer is a bit more complex due to analog electronics involved.
Of course the source can be garbage too (e.g. bad resampling or compression), but reasonable sources are all the same if digital. Except when we're talking vinyl or something, where there's another transducer and amplifier involved.
Part of me envies the fools, everything must be magical for them.
(The difference is that we're doing clever things with class D amplifiers to get the best sound possible out of a mobile phone, and charge a few dollars per chip. While it's technically a "specially designed CPU", really it's a proprietary DSP with the analogue front end on the same die)
A single power supply 5 port unmanaged switch though? Hilarious. Make you you get the right ethernet cables that run in the right direction
https://forums.whathifi.com/threads/directional-ethernet-cab...
Only £629 for 1.5m cable.
Only for the record the historical coat hangers test: https://web.archive.org/web/20081104211239/https://consumeri...
and a 2019 re-make:
https://www.soundguys.com/cable-myths-reviving-the-coathange...
/S
Some pseudo-reference, JFYI:
https://msfn.org/board/topic/154863-the-meta-sata-pataphysic...
I wonder if ADSL over wet string helps the guitar sounds really reverberate in my spotify streams.
Glass fiber, are you kidding? These are sapphire fiber. The bits flow more fluidly.
Also power supply hum (60hz it higher for switching supplies) can induce interference in the player's output signal. I'd use a filtered power supply for any player, but not necessarily the network switch. ("Ethernet offers galvanic isolation by design. All connections are transformed coupled.")
But even then, it sounds like a huuuge stretch from my limited IT/networking experience.
can i interest you in some coathangers ive just now artisinally soldered together?
https://www.microcenter.com/search/search_results.aspx?Ntt=l...
[1] http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/Appnotes/VPPD-01740.pd...
The product is complete pseudoscience, and looking at the site of the company that makes it, almost all their other stuff seems to be based on nonsense too.
EMI can be a real problem especially for things like recording electric guitars, because electric guitar pickups are basically antennas and have to be exposed to be able to pick up the strings.
> NOTE: We understand that for many, the ability of a switch to "alter" the sound defies what they know and/or understand about networks (cables, switches, protocols, etc.). With that in mind, we are not going to approve comments that attack the review or the reviewer
Which is true, the emperor has no clothes and they are paid to describe them in great detail.
https://www.entreq.com/products/ground-boxes-17667704
Not only is it ridiculous, its potentially dangerous too!
Synergistic is a flag bearer for this nonsense.
https://www.audioasylum.com/forums/pcaudio/messages/11/11997...
Also would have been interesting to analyze the audio streams on an oscilloscope to see how "enhanced" (or not enhanced) they were when passed through this switch.
Instead this article just looks at a single review. I mean obviously this switch doesn't magically make audio better somehow. But demonstrating why that is would have been both entertaining and provided a good community service.
I guess somebody should fork over some cash and ship one of these to AvE, bigclive, or electroboom... at least they'd tear it down.
The trick here is that nobody is going to toss $2500 at Synergistic just to pull one apart and void the warranty to find out. Quite a clever scam.
Who knows? I'd like to know!
First, Ethernet does not have a ground wire; and ground is the biggest source of electrical interference for analog audio.
Second, the Ethernet switch is a really weird place to try an address this. If this is your concern, I assume that you hold every peripheral that plugs into your computer to at least the same standards (especially almost everything else you might plug into it, as most connections attach directly to ground). You also need to deal with all of the noise that components inside your computer can generate.
If electrical interference in your analog components are a concern, you are better off spending your money closer to the analog circuit. An electrically isolated sound card with a digital input 100% solves any concern about analog noise in the rest of the system [0].
[0] Unless the noise is so bad that it interferes with the digital computation.
Or maybe I'm creative enough to consider designing gear for audiophiles.
Honestly because in many cases the people that blow their money on this stuff are people like our parents. This stuff is a scam that sucks in good people who aren't the most financially responsible. They rack up a ton of debt on their credit cards thinking they are buying good stuff. And it screws them over and causes grief in the family.
I mean yes, everybody in the room is an adult, but the fallout from a family member who is stupidly spending their retirement money on crap like this affects everybody else.
I think its about feeling you have something special.
Of course now we've come full circle and records are the new best sounding thing.. I remember having to clean them and hearing pops and skips... but here we are.
but I'm old and my ears are happy with mp3s....
Professional wine tasters are like human spectrometers. They can tell you each component of the wine (aromas, sugar, alcohol, tanins, etc...), using that and their knowledge, they can identify characteristics of grapes and vineyards, process, and defects. The audio equivalent would be a sound engineer, who can listen for bad mixing, noise and distorsion. Both work with producers to improve their products.
Audiophiles have more in common with wine "connoisseurs", who have some knowledge but are sometimes influenced by marketing and the placebo effect and are mostly driven by enjoyment and sometimes social status.
[1] http://www.audioreview.com/product/accessories/others/audio-...
In the old times, the musical signal was analog and any impairment was a degradation. Audiophiles went to great length to avoid this.
And they keep on applying this approach to the digital part of a modern system, in completely useless ways. For example, here, it seems they use a marker to prevent light to leak from the side of the CD. I guess it's a misguided way to try to increase the SNR of the laser detector while reading the disc.
What they don't get is that the digital part of the system doesn't carry a musical signal. It's information, that is used to reconstruct a musical signal at the DAC. And this information is very robust. As long as it can be reconstructed error free, SNR and the like do not matter. As long as it arrives on time at the DAC (I'm simplifying a bit, but it's easy to get the idea) any previous jitter is irrelevant.
If you're an audiophile, keep on caring about the DAC and the analog chain after it. And don't bother too much about the digital part, it's not audio it's IT!
I can't imagine there are more than.... 50 audiophiles out there that would pay for something like this. Or am I wildly off?
https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/
An audiophile buys music so as to listen to their hifi equipment.
There's a certain ingrained assumption that the customers for these products are all "rich idiots," and many of them may well fit that archetype, but even so, the line between "can hear the difference between ethernet switches" and "affected by proximity to batteries" feels uncomfortably fuzzy to me.
I don't think that is their market. Their market is elderly retired people who don't really know any better. They'll use credit cards to pay for all this and it really messes with family dynamics.
At least this is my experience.
Spending the inheritance?
Not defending it, just seems weird to decry it for taking money away from people who can't afford it, when the whole positioning is "makes audio sound better". Decry it simply for the fact it doesn't work, not that people who can't afford it spend money on it.
Meanwhile pensioners see their pensions shooting up above earnings all the time.
Are you aware of any articles or research that documents these adverse results?