Audiophile scams - The world of audio is infamous for scams, what are some of the worst scams you have seen

[Buck Broken Chimp]

I think the Pono player, this was a grift by Jewish boomer icon Neil Young, pono means brave in some ooga booga language, he did a Kickstarter for it despite easily being rich enough to fund it himself. He clearly knows nothing about audio as he claimed that Vinyl records have superior dynamic range to CDs. Some retard he hired to "engineer" the pono player claimed that "there was no amplifier per se" do I even need to say what is wrong with this ? The build was a triangle that was horrible to hold and couldn't fit in your pocket, made out of shitty cheap plastic, had a shitty touch screen that couldn't be used for anything, didn't even have an option to search for your music, it used usb 2.0 despite coming out in 2015.

So what do you think ?

edit I just found an official quote from their site

The digital filter used in the PonoPlayer has minimal phase, and no unnatural (digital sounding) pre-ringing. All sounds made (including music) always have reflections and/or echoes after the initial sound. There is no sound in nature that has any echo or reflection before the sound, which is what conventional linear-phase digital filters do. This is one reason that digital sound has a reputation for sounding "unnatural" and harsh.

The fuck does any of this mean ? Honestly MP3 has gotten pretty good these days

 

[Cats]

Those HDMI and audio cables that have like a one micron wide strand of gold in them and are $3,000+

 

[Buck Broken Chimp]

Those HDMI and audio cables that have like a one micron wide strand of gold in them and are $3,000+

I saw a gold plated toslink cable, toslink if you don't know is optical, at least with HDMI you could make the pedantic argument that the better quality metals conducted electricity better (despite how standardized HDMI is), but the gold was literally decoration on the toslink cables.

 

[Pee Cola]

Techmoan did a couple of videos relating to audiophile scams, such as this CD shaver. Apparently shaving the edge of a CD at a 36 degree angle and colouring the edge in with a Sharpie is supposed to reduce light scatter from the laser, thus producing a better quality sound (spoiler alert: it does nothing except leave your CDs with a bevelled edge).

Then there's the CD demagnetizer. You can probably guess what it does and why it's a crock.

 

[mister fireworks]

I think the Pono player, this was a grift by Jewish boomer icon Neil Young, pono means brave in some ooga booga language, he did a Kickstarter for it despite easily being rich enough to fund it himself. He clearly knows nothing about audio as he claimed that Vinyl records have superior dynamic range to CDs. Some retard he hired to "engineer" the pono player claimed that "there was no amplifier per se" do I even need to say what is wrong with this ? The build was a triangle that was horrible to hold and couldn't fit in your pocket, made out of shitty cheap plastic, had a shitty touch screen that couldn't be used for anything, didn't even have an option to search for your music, it used usb 2.0 despite coming out in 2015.

His hearing must be fucked from the decades of touring and getting blasted with lound music anyway, right? Seems like an old rockstar would be especially unfit to sperg about the optimal dynamic audio range.

 

[Marche]

audiophile is full of snake oil and scams.
Looking at the Pono player and it's background it seems it was a result of a lot of music services selling lower quality format at the time and instead the "ayre" platform selling higher res music files and basically used hand in hand with that.
But the Pono player itself seems to be of low quality, poorly designed and kinda doodoo overall.
It also seem to come out around a time where ipods and mp3 players were being more phased out since everyone was using phones (which had heaphone jacks).
So a mix of low quality, no real market and even in the audio world basically just used to shill a store front for high quality audio.

I've been into audiophile stuff for just over a year and a half, I own a couple DAPs a heap of eartips and 10 or so sets of IEMs ranging from $50 to $1200, I feel once you go over about $300 it becomes less about what a normal person would think sounds good and more about what your sound preferences are.
Eartips are 99% about comfort and that 1% is sound but its very subtle. They can change how an IEM fits and thus change how the sound but it's not going to impact anything mostly besides comfort.
Cables I honestly cannot tell, I've tried cheap cables and a $299 effect Aduio cable and can't tell the difference besides how they feel in my hand, probably the most snake oil aspect of IEMs

I don't have enough experience with DAPs to say how much they impact audio but the couple I do have do change sound in very slight ways that no normal person could pick up on.

 

[⚞⛇⚟]

There is no way that the vacuum tubes that are on the thousand dollar AMPs are not scams. Everyone describing how great they are use many paragraphs of nothing to explain how the "valve sound warmth texture clipping distortion" is more natural or something.

 

[Peep Plops]

No you see vacuum tubes sound warm because they get physically warm during operation. It's just common sense. Seriously though they are nothing but outdated amplifiers with objectively lousy performance that consume hundreds of watts to push out maybe ten to the speakers themselves, the rest being used to heat up the house.

The whole hi-fi/audiophile industry has always been lousy with scams and with the advent of high performance chi-fi the old school western manufacturers of high-end audio (McIntosh, Naim, Bowers & Wilkins etc.) are desperately trying to pivot to the oligarch sector since they are either unwilling or incapable of competing with what the chinks are putting out.

I think we are going to see some serious crashes in the coming years when these boutique brands keep chasing an ever smaller customer base of wealthy boomers and oil sheiks while giving regular customers the finger by designing worse and worse performing products and constantly jacking up prices.

 

[The Snail]

Not necessarily a scam in the traditional sense, but a lot of audiophile youtubers try to lead you into a cycle of consooming, and line their pockets with amazon affiliate links and industry swag. The worst person, in my audiophile stint, is Z "Zeos" Reviews. Initially his content was entertaining and not too bad, but a little into his channels life, and now his whole schtic is coomer shit and spam-shilling repackaged chink-fi junk.

Never trust a reviewer who doesn't A) Suggest using an EQ, and, B) doesn't have (or recommend) a select few well measured pieces of gear.

Also a ton of DAPs are scams; they're overpriced, and advertise available (or modifiable features) on a lot of older android phones, like DSF playback. All you need is the LGv20/30/40/50 (40 and 50 have insane cameras too)

Here's a funny image.

There is no way that the vacuum tubes that are on the thousand dollar AMPs are not scams.

The only noticeable difference I heard was slightly more reverb in my music. It was with a cheap SMSL amplifier.

 

[Rekeita's Kidneys]

44.1/khz FLAC is good enough.

All else that matters is literally just your speakers and where they are positioned.
Amps rarely fucking matter, unless it's some broken piece of shit most modern amplifiers are damned near identical.

 

[Meriasek]

There is no way that the vacuum tubes that are on the thousand dollar AMPs are not scams. Everyone describing how great they are use many paragraphs of nothing to explain how the "valve sound warmth texture clipping distortion" is more natural or something.
Ver archivo adjunto 6665404

It's a perfect example of audiophiles listening to their equipment, not the music. A hifi amplifier is supposed to amplify the source perfectly linear, and transistor based circuits are able to do that very easily. Tube circuits are way quicker to add certain distortions, but due to how they work, they often create more pleasant sounding distortions. Hence the tubes sounding "warmer" in some way, although that's a rubber term. But again, now you're listening to the equipment and not the music, and people go to great lengths to minimize distortions in hifi tube circuits, so in the end it's all kinda bullshit.
However, tube amplifiers are pleasant to look at and fun to build, so I don't think they're gonna go away anytime soon.

 

[Rozzy]

The white van speaker scam where buyers are made to believe they are getting a good deal on premium audio products when in fact they are getting inferior generic products.
My favorite video on the subject from EEVblog, at 22:54 the vacuum tubes aren't connected to anything and are illuminated by LEDs.

 

[Marche]

There is no way that the vacuum tubes that are on the thousand dollar AMPs are not scams. Everyone describing how great they are use many paragraphs of nothing to explain how the "valve sound warmth texture clipping distortion" is more natural or something.
Ver archivo adjunto 6665404

Warm does not imply heat.
Warm generally means it pushes the lows (sub bass, bass, deep male vocals for example) up a bit in the sound scale.

I know most audiophile terms and stuff sound especially stupid if you go into the mindset of it all being fake and gay but yea those squigly lines you see to measure audio and a lot of terms do actually make more sense when you learn.
That isnt all snake oil but in this instance it definitely is not.

As I said in previous post at a point you are going after a sound stage you like less than just normalcy.
There is something called the harmon curve which is the optimal sound of normalcy for headphones/IEMs (there is a new curve called the new meta which is basically a even more Autistic version of this) but what it does is basically has a set optimal target for that sound stage but where Audiophile stuff comes into play is like say you want more bass then you would increase the lows or emphasise female vocals there are parts in mid highs to do that.
There are lots of terms like U shape, bright, dark, airy, muddy and so many more and even then you can never really hear how other people hear so its still all a baseline.

 

[Frank_Jaeger]

I know animay is anigay but this is relevant

 

[Tiggie_Tiger]

Audiophile equipment for the most part is just retarded. You're making something way more complex than it needs to be, and for what? A maybe, slightly improved listening experience? Just buy a quality headset with a decent amplifier to drive it. Nothing more.

Here's a funny image.

Seriously, what the fuck type of power cable is that? Why bother propping it up with ceramic insulators? Most professional audio equipment, or any decently designed electronics will be properly shielded and grounded anyway.

 

[itogi]

Two words: Gold-plated TOSLINK

 

[The Snail]

Seriously, what the fuck type of power cable is that? Why bother propping it up with ceramic insulators? Most professional audio equipment, or any decently designed electronics will be properly shielded and grounded anyway.

It's an anti-groundloop, japanese kosher copper wire framed, intel atom cpu embedded, pebbles from the shores of italy filled power cable. Plebs like you wouldn't get it.

 

[Nero Fiddled]

There is no way that the vacuum tubes that are on the thousand dollar AMPs are not scams. Everyone describing how great they are use many paragraphs of nothing to explain how the "valve sound warmth texture clipping distortion" is more natural or something.

There's still a big market for valve amps in the musical instrument amplification world.
People told me 40+ years ago that there's a real audible difference between valves and "transistors".

Got to say that 40 years later, I still can't hear it and I still stick to solid state amps.

 

[WTBOnlineFather]

Amps rarely fucking matter, unless it's some broken piece of shit most modern amplifiers are damned near identical.

They matter a lot. If you have high end and/or old power-hungry speakers, you might as well be running a $50 logitech set up if you're trying to power them with some shitty AV receiver like most people have. Same goes for headphones, sure you can plug Sennheiser HD800s into a cheap android chinkphone as your source but in that case you're getting a $200 sound out of your $1800 headphones.
No one needs to drop 15 grand on a janky snake oil tube amp, you just don't want yours to be the bottleneck. Good equipment doesn't have to be expensive, you can get very nice stuff for relatively cheap if you buy vintage or used.

Hi-fi peaked around the year 1990 and has only been getting more expensive since then but not better.

There's still a big market for valve amps in the musical instrument amplification world.
People told me 40+ years ago that there's a real audible difference between valves and "transistors".

Got to say that 40 years later, I still can't hear it and I still stick to solid state amps.

Tube amps distort differently from solid state amps and the dynamics of the distortion are different too. Since distortion is undesirable in real hi-fi, buying a tube amp for that is pretty retarded but they do still have a legitimate use in instrument amplification.

 

[Nero Fiddled]

Tube amps distort differently from solid state amps and the dynamics of the distortion are different too. Since distortion is undesirable in real hi-fi, buying a tube amp for that is pretty retarded but they do still have a legitimate use in instrument amplification.

Yeah, I've been told that.

Amongst my musical "collection", I own a Marshall guitar amp.
I had an "enthusiastic" person telling me how much he loved that "classic Marshall valve tone" earlier this year.
It's a solid state one.

I suspect there may have been a subtle difference there a few years ago, but in this age of modelling amps and more sophisticated electronics overall, that difference has become smaller and smaller.