Are these people oblivious to the cable on the other side of the wall socket?

I am waiting for audiophile Romex and breakers. But, they do have audiophile receptacles. I am a proud owner of a $100 receptacle I inherited from the previous owner of our house, It’s a lovely thing, pure copper contacts and hospital grade construction. Nice plastics. Very well made.

But that’s one of the things about this, these products are very nicely made of premium materials with very attractive designs. They are heavy, and solid, and feature gold and oxygen free copper and exotic wire construction.

The fraud isn‘t how how they are built but in the claims about what all that fancy construction can do.

One of the problems is that various parts of this fiction aren’t fiction. That is, better cables can improve sound quality over poorly made ones. So it seems very logical that you can just keep making the better and the differences will be subtler and subtler but always accessible to the initiated and sensitive who “actually care about listening to music” as one reviewer put it.

 

It makes me wonder if there is such a thing as audiophilia addiction.
One never bothers about footballers, and other wealthy folk losing thousands in the casino, but gambling is a problem in the less well off.
Do such people exist who spend so much of their income on audiophile products that they can’t afford to eat?
(I wouldn’t say “heat their home” as they probably have class-A amplifiers)

 

It makes me wonder if there is such a thing as audiophilia addiction.
One never bothers about footballers, and other wealthy folk losing thousands in the casino, but gambling is a problem in the less well off.
Do such people exist who spend so much of their income on audiophile products that they can’t afford to eat?
(I wouldn’t say “heat their home” as they probably have class-A amplifiers)

I think it might be a matter of scale. I have recently become more keenly aware of people buying things they can’t afford according to how much they can pay. That is, people will decide they want to participate in some elitist collector hobby, but they have limited cash (or more often credit). An ecosystem becomes established whereby they can buy, sell, and trade among themselves.

So, they take whatever that chunk of money they can manage turns out to be (it seems to usually be the equivalent of 1-10K USD) and they buy expensive, elitist things in their chosen milieu, then discuss them online with other people doing the same thing. They carefully preserve all the packaging and literature, and treat these items like museum pieces because they are only renting them.

In order to keep the cycle going, they have to resell (or trade) them. Reselling usually means a small loss (a few percent) and that is the “rent”. That‘s the slice of their income it is costing them to belong to the club. of course, the keep some infrastructure so they can do whatever one of their group does, but this ~5K investment is their stake.

That money could have gone to savings, or furniture, or car maintenance, &c. but they have something special that is far above their means at the cost of having a generally more comfortable life or inventing in the future. If they do have to bail out in an emergency and sell off their collection, they often lose a lot and recovering can be very hard.

I am not really being judgmental (in terms of morality) here. I believe in people’s right to their autonomy. I believe they should given agency, and make their own choices so long as they are not harming others. But to the extent they are harming themselves, I don’t feel shy to express my own judgment in terms of the wisdom that is there—or not.

 

Anyway, returning to the engineering. . . .
No engineer worth his salt would fall for the “huge transformer” fallacy. The transformer in the photo is probably about 1kVA, driving a 10Watt load.
That means firstly, a hundred times the magnetic flux inside the case as there needs to be. There is probably as much spurious flux with the screening can as there would be from a sensible transformer without screening.
Secondly, the pulse currents when the capacitors charge must be huge -how does it pass the harmonics current regulations? It’s probably large enough to be exempt!
All those pulse currents then really do need some serious filtering to remove their effects from the DC output voltage.
And the real fallacy is - the larger the transformer, the shorter the pulse currents, the less time the output runs off the transformer and the more it runs off the capacitors.
A split-bobbin transformer with loads of leakage inductance would produce a smoother output.

 

Into the early '90's, switching power supplies had frequencies as low as 10kHz and not normally higher than 100kHz. I'm sure that most of these would have crushed the quality of an audio amplifier as those frequencies and the harmonics would have been hard to keep out of the audio signal. This is the reason most amplifier designers, in those days, wanted linear power supplies.

With better IC design today, it's not uncommon for switching supplies to run at 500kHz or more. Those frequencies, aren't going to affect the audio signal nearly as much. For the audio proletariat, a high frequency switcher will be just fine. For the audiophile, a linear supply may make a difference, but audio vs standard capacitors are not going to make a measurable difference.

 

Never heard of "audio-grade" capacitors.
If anything, they would be substandard to "HF capacitors"" since the latter would have better characteristics.

 

Never heard of "audio-grade" capacitors.
If anything, they would be substandard to "HF capacitors"" since the latter would have better characteristics.

https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/tantalum-capacitors/0266617
a tantalum? I’d never use a tantalum in audio!
How does a capacitor deliver a rich bass?
one would have thought better of a reputable capacitor manufacturer!

 

Yea, but they have a nice musical note printed on them.

 

Yea, but they have a nice musical note printed on them.

Of course! that makes all the difference.

 

Buying fancy audio equipments and accessories is actually very addictive, just like women love shopping for expensive bags and clothes, or men keep collecting luxury watches.
I can explain this behavior using psychology and marketing tricks:
First stage - Audiophiles are quite often to be exposed to magazines and websites that talking about all these snake oil things with very high price and have fancy looking. It’s all because they often read, search all these stuffs and the searching alogrithm of course tracks their behavior and suggest relevent products. Once they see the accessories are more expensive, look bigger, has more attractive name, good reviews, they will feel the need to have that things, as long as they still can pay for it.

Sencond stage - The need will grow bigger day by day, and it makes them feel stress and unhappy with their current setup. They assume their system should/can be better if they put in accessories.

Third stage - Once they bought and install the accessories into their system, right on the momenf they sit down and listen to their system, two things will happen:
- They will listen more focus, thus they can hear more details which they always skip during normal listening.
- The feeling of achievement will produce serotonin and dopamine which make them feel relax, happy and pleasure. That way, they will feel their system sound better, even there is no actual difference.

Marketing and sale teams of all these kind snake oil of course are all masters in psychological manupulation.

 

I ripped my CD collection to make it available on my network and devices.

As an experiment, I ripped at a range of quality settings, and in blind tests neither I nor any of my friends could discriminate between them on any device, including my top-notch stereo system.

The quality of our aging ears - the last link in the chain - has made all the other technology secondary.

Saved a lot of disk space!

 

"Rich sound in the bass register and clear sound."

https://docs.rs-online.com/915d/0900766b811f911f.pdf

 

"Rich sound in the bass register and clear sound."

https://docs.rs-online.com/915d/0900766b811f911f.pdf

Maybe “rich sound in the cash register”.