High-end audio cables myth Trolls need to be booted off the island
High-end audio cables myth trolls need to be booted off the island. Now. And preferably with a BIG honking boot.
Why?
Because they are not audiophiles and all of us treating them as if they were is hurting the hobby.
Trolls, not Audiophiles
People who antagonize real audiophiles, insisting that running a signal through different kinds of wire does not affect the sound differently [violating the first or second laws of thermodynamics by the way], are just trolls.
Sometimes this is easier to see just how ridiculous our acceptance of these trolls are if we think of this happening in a more well-known hobby, like autos.
Saying that different cables all sound the same is like someone saying that different tires make no noticeable difference when driving a car.
Typically [continuing our analogy] these kinds of people would own a basic commuter car [modest stereo cobbled together from good, bad and terrible gear, typically wildly unbalanced sonically]. They put on some modestly nice Michelin V-rated tires [cheap cables one step above Monster] on it, and noticed no difference when using their car [stereo] the way they usually do – just plunking around [playing 3- and 4-piece jazz] .
These are people with minimal experience, minimal qualifications, minimal equipment, minimal skills at listening, and tragic inability to understand science.
So what is the problem? The problem is that they then go on the forums and loudly bash real audiophiles, shouting that in their ‘expert opinion’, cables have no affect on any stereo and it is all just hokum
These people declare themselves ‘experts’ though they do not ever think about [going back to our tire analogy] WHY they do or do not like the handling, about how it responds in emergency and under hostile weather conditions; how it could be better, worse or different; how it performs in the extremes of acceleration; and what parts of the design contributes to this or that behavior and subjective enjoyment or lack thereof. Etc.
These people are just trying to rile others and get attention by acting extraordinarily stupid.
Let’s not give it to them. In fact, let’s take ALL our attention away from them.
Hurting the Hobby
This is serious.
‘High-end audio cables myth’ is one of the first suggestions Google gives when typing in ‘high-end audio cables’.
When noobs visit one of the forums, and they see people accepting as valid another’s opinion that cables have no affect on the sound, that it is just our imagination, they draw the reasonable conclusion that ALL improvements in sound may also just be the wild imaginings of us audiophools.
To a lesser degree there are also those who believe all solid-state amps sound the same, that all CD players sound the same, and that all computer DACs sound the same. These people are also trolls.
We have become a playground for trolls. People who get off on being a**holes and jerks.
I’m Against the Death Penalty in this Case
I’ve thought about it but…. no.
So, not proposing anything too radical here 🙂
I just think we need to censure and, if necessary, kick these people off the reputable forums. If these forums are for Audiophiles, then let’s keep out the Audiophile-haters.
Face it, they hate us and yet they infest our forums.
Why are we putting up with this?
[Featured photo of big boot from Freshness Magazine]
Agreed!
For the sake of everyone’s sanity, You guys should do the blind test challenge with some reputable gear.
Stuff like this article gets HUGE press and is always ridiculously flawed (http://gizmodo.com/363154/audiophile-deathmatch-monster-cables-vs-a-coat-hanger). If you pulled this test with a familiar system, with familiar music, and switched cables blind, it would be more meaningful.
I remember doing a power cable challenge up at your house, and it was entirely clear which cables ‘won’…..But you won’t hear that perspective in the consumer marketplace without blind tests.
eh?
Hi Mike,
I do not think having us, or anyone else, doing blind tests will convince anyone – it will just serve as more entertainment for the circus.
I think 99% of the people in the consumer marketplace do not know what a blind [or double-blind] test is and do not want to know 🙂
Do people expect ‘blind tests’ of tires? Or do they instead put some amount of trust in the ‘overwhelming majority’ of manufacturers, the press, and expert car owners?
This is all about making fun of audiophiles, all the more successful because we respond as if this was a serious point of view by not just the uninformed public, but by trolls cum self-anointed audiophiles.
It is just bored people being mean and catty [and posting link bait blog posts like that Gizmodo article]. Yes, this is the decade[s] of mean and catty, but no reason for them to do this on OUR forums.
Or, more to the point, it is not of benefit for us who know better to interpret this as a valid point of view from one of our own – an audiophile [as opposed to a point of view of the general public who has no experience with the facts]. Whenever a group of people are mocked in this way, it is good for them to face the attack as a group, to declare publicly it is not true [and prove it, like Nordost et. al. as well as we, ourselves: publishing the different measured frequency responses of our old Levinson reference amps when we switched various power cords in and out], and censure people inside the group who assist the attackers.
It is easily provable. Anybody who goes in to a decent dealer for a demo [or attends one of Nordost’s demos at almost every show] can hear the difference with better cables – and thereafter distribute their high-end audio dollars more knowledgeably between gear and cables.
This is much easier than telling the difference between various tires IMHO [For myself, besides the different feel of having all the tires perfectly inflated when I drive out of the tire place – it takes several minutes of driving over bumps to feel the difference between snows and summer tires, and sometimes not until we drove over 70 mph for several hundred miles did we notice a difference – that the tires wore in such a way as to c-a-u-s-e t-h-e c-a-r t-o v-i-b-r-a-t-e at what became an somewhat annoyingly irritating frequency :-)]
As far as a coat hanger and Monster cable goes: Monster cable is more attractive, it is bendable, you can find and buy it at many places, it attaches to connectors and stays in place, and it has a resale value, etc. Not a fan of Monster cable, but this argument is the old DIY “I can build an X that will be just as good as that expensive Y, I just have to buy and attach the parts together” argument, or the “my daughter can paint as well as Picasso argument”, and on and on by the trolls and people who want to get a rise out of someone by mocking them and who have been doing so over the centuries, and, probably, millennia.
If someone can’t hear the difference, they are definitely not an audiophile. And, if someone can’t hear the difference over several demonstrations, they should see about getting your hearing checked. Seriously.
Thanks for posting and good to see you are still out there kickin’ 🙂
-Mike
Trolls in any context, including audio, create noise but are not likely to influence serious practitioners of the art, in this case, audiophiles.
A true audiophile spends hours listening and pays careful attention to all elements of the system always striving for some, usually quite personal, audio nirvana or realism. This person will make decisions based on what is heard and on budgetary constraints and will not be influenced to use poor interconnects or other inferior equipment by the comments of others who haven’t invested the time necessary to notice subtle differences.
Hi Bill,
You are right. They do not affect audiophiles – and certainly don’t persuade any of us, in this instance, not to spend outrageous amounts of money on cable 🙂
It is disturbing, though, that posting anything about cables on several audiophile forums out there just elicits massive swamping of the topic by anti-cable trolls. Be nice to find interesting discussions out there about cables – during the times I am bored and looking for fun stuff to read, I mean. Guess we can safely talk about cables here some more….
But this is an insular viewpoint. If we look outside our happy little hobby and towards the future and recruiting audiophiles from the general public, how we handle ridicule by trolls as a group, from both inside and outside the group, affects how successful we will be.
Thanks for posting…
Take care,
-Mike
Great post! I couldn’t agree more. Unfortunately I forgot this lesson and took the bait from a troll recently. It does no good to try and convince them. They don’t want to be convinced. Give them science, they will do or say anything to discredit the science in their own mind. Give them reviews, customer testimonials, anything. They will call it crap and then personally attack you. I have seen a “non-believer” get infuriated and walk out of a room where a cable demonstration just turned their world upside-down. They convinced themselves that there was some other form of trickery going on. It just couldn’t be the cables…
Hi Michael,
Seriously. It is like they are members of a secret cult.
I wonder where they meet. Do they pay dues? Do they carry membership cards around in their wallets? Do they have a secret handshake?
I wonder who their guru is. Must be somebody pretty darn charismatic to get their followers to be so fanatical in the face of such overwhelming evidence. Certainly no one in high-end audio is this charismatic, so that rules out my first guess that it was a cable manufacturer gone bad [or …? but no, can’t be THEM].
Anyway… 🙂
Thanks for your comment! Hopefully it will stop raining soon… and seriously all dry by RMAF, otherwise we are going to be wading through a lot of snow walking to the Hyatt :-/
Take care,
-Mike
Your tyre analogy is frankly idiotic.
Car tyres are made according to sound engineering principles and their performance can, and is, objectively and scientifically tested. Stopping distance in wet and dry conditions, slip angles and G-forces under cornering, noise, durability, etc are all measurable and quantifiable.
The same cannot be said of cables where pseudo science rules and all ‘testing’ is entirely subjective.
🙂 this is so funny.
The primary goal of both tires and cables is that they shouldn’t get you killed [thinking of power cables here].
The secondary goal is to get you, or the electrons from place A to place B.
This is all most people care about.
Then there are people who care a lot about tires. There are also people who care a lot about sound and cables.
Lots of folks think these passionate people fuss about a lot of nothing – because these folks do not care about tires or cables, personally. These folks then, if they are the type, post angry comments about things they do not care about. They feel they are missing out on something special. They do not know exactly what it is they are missing out on, but they just do not like this ‘missing out’ feeling at all.
Tire are a good example. We occasionally spend a lot of money on high performance tires while keeping it below $2000/tire [I know. Yikes!].
Similar to audio, try as they might, people have a hard time applying ‘sound engineering principles’ to the handling of cars, not to mention the tires on the car.
Or how it breaks, or slips, or sounds for MY specific car, the way *I* drive it, over the specific and various kinds of roads that my car might find itself on, under conditions that the road might be in, and the temperature.
Not to mention tires wear out – and are more like vacuum tubes than cables, which at least last nearly forever.
Naw, as soon as you get beyond getting from point A to B, the performance of both tires and cables is very often a ‘experience it to believe it’ kind of thing – and you need a sufficiently high quality auto or hifi system, and a desire to get the maximum of of them, to care about the differences.
The modeling of the performance tires, cables, and many, many other things are quite similar when you start looking at the in-situ details. Also, the tire industry is what, at 3 billion sold per year at $100? each, compared to little ole high-end audio? They had better spend some of that money on stats and marketing it to tire buyers!
[For the rest of you, I am ignoring all the ‘sound engineering principles’ like capacitance, inductance and speed of transmission that are applied to cables. We’ve done some experiments ourselves, back in the day, and would much prefer to see gain [negative of course], overall frequency response, and speed for each frequency across the spectrum]
Thanks for your post. We all know you represent a lot of people who have had little success with cable swapping in and out cables – do to poor cables and/or some component in the system dominating the sound so heavily that it muffles up and down-stream changes to the system [we have heard very high-quality speakers have so much impact on the sound, that major changes to the system, amplifiers in this case, were hardly detectable]