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

[Buck Broken Chimp]

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.

Exactly this, for a few hundred you can get headphones that are pretty good at most things, the really expensive stuff is more about doing one thing amazingly well and is meant to be the favorite headphone of a few people not good for most people. The Sennheiser HD800s and it's sound stage come to mind for this.

 

[reptile baht spaniard rid]

44.1/khz FLAC is good enough.

There are some very small edge cases where it might NOT be good enough, but then you're doing mixing/editing and would know where that is.

Most people either don't notice any quality of audio beyond "loud", and those people think that Bose is the be-all and end-all of home audio.

If you actually start to care about reproduction you either go to "what's the best I can get that sounds like what the artist/mixer wanted" which costs a bit but not much, or you go full insane audiophile and listen to your system not the music (and they often don't even do that, they just post about it instead).

Real "audio engineering" involves making things not sound shitty in large theaters and concert halls and stadiums, not arranging a few speakers in a room at home.

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

the best part about becoming a professional audio engineer is realizing how totally dogshit 95% of professional audio is and what a waste of time it is trying to get it to sound "good"

 

[tehpope]

Does anyone remember that troll site selling bamboo cables for like 5 figures?

 

[WTBOnlineFather]

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.

Yeah modelling shit comes so close at this point that it's basically as good as the real thing. The point is that tube amps for instruments have a distinct sound & feel when overdriven that's considered desirable by many and it took decades before we were able to emulate it to a satisfactory degree using solid state and digital tech. So it's not snake oil, it's just a niche thing.

In hi-fi setups overdrive is highly undesirable so hi-fi tube amps are very expensive space heaters, or the most overpriced mild midbass boost in existence, if you will.

 

[Shroom King]

Yes, this thread has potential.

44.1/khz FLAC is good enough.

I see your 44.1 and raise you 24/96 wav vs. flac sperging.



The only missing from MrRom92's post is the smug emoji .

 

[Asian tech support]

Ok so someone here last year made a really funny post about how they know of a subset of audiophiles who get mega autistic over "clean" electricity, implying they had issues about where their juice was sourced from. I asked for a clarification because that sounds batshit but never received one.

User who posted that, if you come across this thread please please please post some more information. This has been a brainworm for like a year now.

 

[Pee Cola]

It's a perfect example of audiophiles listening to their equipment, not the music.

Alan Parsons was right.

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.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=i3B_KKyntQE

The very first EEVBlog video I ever watched. I still go back to it from time to time as it's a classic.

 

[itogi]

I just remembered another type of scam, upselling SVHS players specifically because of their Hi-Fi features.

 

[seri0us]

Not a scam per se, but I've got some HELLA thick braided "audiophile" HDMI cables a lot like this:

They're really not great at bending which puts a ton of strain/torque on device connectors.

 

[Blue Flying Leaf]

They're really not great at bending which puts a ton of strain/torque on device connectors.

That's entirely your fault for not buying cable lifters

 

[BikeLock]

Exactly this, for a few hundred you can get headphones that are pretty good at most things, the really expensive stuff is more about doing one thing amazingly well and is meant to be the favorite headphone of a few people not good for most people. The Sennheiser HD800s and it's sound stage come to mind for this.

All you really need are those MassDrop Sennheiser HD650's and an amp to run them. I used an O2 DAC and Amp that I built myself for years.

 

[Inco G. Nito]

reduce light scatter from the laser, thus producing a better quality sound

The funniest part about this is that this relies on the (correct) assumption that most audiophiles are braindead retards and think CDs are analog.

 

[N Space]

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

Not true, there's a recent wave of very high quality and affordable chi-fi DACs and AMPs flooding the market. Topping is perhaps the best example, the D90III DAC has the best SINAD measured by the ASR forum and it only costs $899, the D50III has a lower SINAD but is perfectly transparent and only costs $229. In the realm of IEMs, you have the 7Hz Salnotes Zero neatly following the Harman Curve and sporting <1% THD across the spectrum for fucking $22.

 

[Cats]

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.

LOADS of audiophile-style snake oil crap bleeds over into guitars and amps. mainly pickups and wood. Seymour Duncan and other big aftermarket pickup companies like them have something like a few thousand different humbucker "designs" that are almost identical. Don't get me wrong a single coil is nothing like a humbucker, and a bad pickup is nothing like a good one. But the marketing for pickups is just absolutely silly and preys upon people being fooled by their "audio OCD". Boomers perform the same song and dance when it comes to "tonewoods" for electric guitars too when it has been proven many times over (with accompanying video evidence) that there is no difference discernable to the human ear between an electric guitar with a body and neck made from $3000 dollar exotic woods, $20 dollar maple, or even no wood at all with its strings anchored between two points and floating.

 

[PovertySprocket]

The algo recommended me this video.

 

[Pepe Cortisona]

The secondhand iPod market is a total mess right now, overrun with listings for "iPod Classic with Wolfson's audio chip" hyped up as having a "warmer, better sound, perfect for audiophiles!" or any other buzzword were most sellers don’t even know what they’re talking about. Then they slap a $100 minimum price tag on a beaten up 4th gen just because some YouTuber/TikTok influencer rediscovered what an iPod is

 

[Vecr]

The secondhand iPod market is a total mess right now, overrun with listings for "iPod Classic with Wolfson's audio chip" hyped up as having a "warmer, better sound, perfect for audiophiles!" or any other buzzword were most sellers don’t even know what they’re talking about. Then they slap a $100 minimum price tag on a beaten up 4th gen just because some YouTuber/TikTok influencer rediscovered what an iPod is

Compared to that I'm sure my two DACs are really good. Good luck replacing the audio jack on that if it gets worn out/something stuck in it, even compared to a super cheap DAC going for way less money.

 

[Rodeo Roadrunner]

Man the shit I've seen is wild. Audiophile snakeoil types will try to sell you literally anything they can to claim your system will sound better, from power filters, cables, feet for your equipment, stands for cables to rest on (so they don't touch the ground). I've been to CanJams in the past, and I went to RMAF twice (Rocky Mountain Audio Festival). To be clear, a lot of the stuff sold and marketed at those places is legitimate and sounds incredible, including setups that cost close to or exceeding $1 million. I heard a $750k Focal Utopia speaker setup that was unreal. We got the vendor to play some Astrix on it and annoyed the other vendors next door because it was too loud.

Anyway, since this thread is about scams and not legitimate products, here are a few that I have come across, there are many more that I have forgotten about. And I am not into vinyl but the vinyl snakeoil is even wilder than a lot of the digital stuff.

Spoiler: An entire audio format that scammed TIDAL

First, an entire audio format called MQA (Master Quality Authenticated) and the company that made it, Meridian Audio. I actually attended one of the presentations for this at RMAF years ago. Basically it is a lossy audio format that was designed to replace FLAC. Now, how does that make sense since FLAC is lossless and MQA is lossy? From what I remember, they purported to bring a real-to-live-performance quality to the audio by also encoding a special "filter" section in parallel to the compressed audio, and when played back on their proprietary (or licensed) hardware, the audio would be decompressed, and then the hardware (which has the proprietary filter algorithms) would apply the special filter section in the recording, to the playback of the track. So basically the benefits would be smaller file sizes (smaller than FLAC, larger than 320 MP3) for your whole collection, and a sort of "guarantee" that each recording you listened to that was MQA certified had been mastered by audio professionals. Surprisingly they got a lot of support initially, they even got TIDAL to offer a bunch of their catalog on MQA. As far as I know now the company still exists but the format is defunct. I can't be bothered to find all of my old articles on it, but there were tons of forum threads and amateur analysis that people did to see if it was better than FLAC, and the conclusion was that unsurprisingly it wasn't.

I remember in the RMAF presentation specifically the guy kept going on and on about the research that went into restoring some Jazz record that apparently had been playing like 5 bpm too fast because the copies of the master tapes that everyone used for vinyl copies (and later CD copies) was played back on the wrong tape machine or something, and they did forensic research to find the original master tapes and the original master tape player they used in studio for the mixdown. Wish I could remember which recording it was.

Here is an article on it I found where you can get a brief history of it. ARCHIVE. Tidal also stopped support for the format this year.

Spoiler: Power Conditioners and the man who installed his own power pole

You could fill up half a convention center with all the shit there is regarding power conditioners. The premise behind it is relatively simple actually, and that is, the power feeding an amplifier (and also DACS and any other equipment) needs to be clean and even. A power conditioner tries to make the sine wave of an AC power source and make it as close to a perfect sine wave as possible. There is something to this, as power filters and conditioners are used in a variety of applications, especially in medical and sensitive instrument applications. It doesn't help that many homes and apartments are badly wired, such that turning on or using other appliances can change the sine wave to the rest of the house. One of the biggest "targets" for power filters in audio is the noise floor, and a perfectly black background. Basically if you can turn your speakers/headphones all the way up and you hear noise, you don't have a perfectly black background. Even Sweetwater (big audio equipment/instrument seller) sells power filters. The point is they are useful in some applications and are used by non-audiophiles. However, the way some audiophile reviewers and snake oil people talk about them, you would think they are miraculous cures for what ails your home system. Perusing the Sweetwater description, we get a reasonable idea behind what power conditioners are supposed to do. But The Absolute Sound reviews conditioners that cost well into the 5 figure range, (ARCHIVE) and the way they describe it is completely different, as if it is a revelatory experience.


Bonus, the insane story of the Japanese man that got the power company to install his own power pole and line just for his audio setup.

Spoiler: Cables; when pure gold is not enough

If overpriced power conditioners could fill half a convention center, then cables could fill the other half. If people really want I can see if I can find all my old saved articles and research into different cables, but essentially everything confirmed that cables that carry a digital signal (USB cables or anything of the sort) don't benefit beyond not getting the $2 Chinese junk. For analog signals the results were similar, but there is theoretically a difference depending on cable construction. But don't let lab analysis fool you, listen to the audio yourself and believe. (ARCHIVE) Would you like $10,000 power cords that rest on carbon fiber stilts? Would you like Infinite Crystal Silver conductors to carry the strains of your guitars? The wild world of cables has it all.

Spoiler: Synergistic Research aka Scamming Research

I put a thumbnail above of a power filter from these guys, but they really deserve their own entire section. These guys have the snake oil flea market, they sell everything you could possibly think of:

• Quantum Ground Lifters. They use 1,000,000 volts of electricity to Quantum Tunnel the ground connection of your wall plugs. In reality this "device" that essentially moves the ground connection from the bottom of the electrical plug to the top. Note, this can violate local electrical codes because in the case of flooding you can turn your room into a giant electrical deathtrap.
• GCT, aka Ground Circuit Transducer, a cylinder of metal that you simply place near any fuses or connections in your setup and your audio will magically improve.
• ECT, aka Electronic Circuit Transducer. These are small widgets that you place inside your electronics to quote "hear music with a lower noise floor, higher resolution and a significant increase in soundstage scale with improved mid-range clarity and low frequency control. In fact once you place ECTs in your system, you’ll never want to take them out."
  • Spoiler: An image of how absurd this is

    
• Carbon Tuning Discs, literal carbon fiber discs. "Each disc gets treated with a unique UEF compound that interacts with EM fields wherever you place them in your system or on cables to improve sound quality. The conductive carbon fiber material of the disc enhances the interaction between the UEF compound and the surrounding EM fields where it is placed.
• A $16,000 Roon streaming box literally called Voodoo. "No one does Voodoo like we do."
  • Spoiler: Opening Paragraphs of their description.

    [*]The Voodoo Streamer Server began with the intention of overcoming the last significant barrier separating digital audio from the best turntables and reel-to-reel tape decks. Namely, a sense of compression where digital streaming sounds flatter and with high-frequency limitations when directly compared to the best LPs and tapes. To paraphrase Harry Pearson, “If you want to enjoy digital, don’t listen to analog.” And while we love digital, we couldn’t help but remember Harry’s words every time we performed back-to-back comparisons between our digital rig, especially when streaming on Quboz and Tidal, and our state-of-the-art turntable and tape deck. So, for years, we focused on engineering better digital and AC cables to bring our digital experience closer to what we hear when listening to analog. This quest stretched over two decades, where we engineered some of the world’s highest-performance digital cables, but still, something was missing. So, we turned our attention to the last remaining links in the digital chain, namely, Ethernet Switches and Network Routers. And again, we take a massive leap forward. And again, something is missing. So, we set our sights on the last remaining component in the chain, the server/streamer.
    
    Before the Voodoo project even began, we had amassed an arsenal of technologies that could be used to build the ultimate music streamering server. Namely, EM Cell technology developed and refined over the past fifteen years for our PowerCell line conditioners and Active Ground Block ground conditioners. LPS power supplies also utilizing EM Cell technologies in our Ethernet Switch and Network Router, and ULF bias technology to eliminate high-frequency distortion as first developed for our Galileo PowerCell line conditioner. Serendipitously, we had just perfected these technologies as an ecosystem for digital applications through our UEF Ethernet Router and Ethernet Switch. So we developed the world’s most musically robust server architecture, where we listened to dozens of motherboards, CPU processors, and RAM options in double-blind testing, picking only the most resolved and musical options. We then paired our new Linux computer with our latest LPS technology, refined over the past decade, to power your new Voodoo Streamer/Server. Finally, we adapted the ULF Bias technology from our state-of-the-art Galileo Ground Block and PowerCell line conditioners, which proved to be the ultimate game changer. By overcoming high-frequency noise all too common in digital circuits, we eliminated both digital compression and annoying high-frequency artifacts assumed to be intrinsic to the digital format. Now, instead of digital sounding somewhat veiled and with high-frequency hash, it is analog that sounds spacially compressed with high frequencies that lack extension and transparency.
    [*]

Basically everything on their site is scam worthy. Just click around and you will find insane stuff.

I am still relatively into audio, and would encourage people to go listen to really high end and expensive setups if they never have. But the stuff that they sell at audio shows still blows me away years later.

 

[The Ugly 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.

About 10 years ago, the guy who ran one of the biggest guitar shops in the city told me he barely sold amps to professional musicians at all, since the modeling had gotten so good that was what nearly everyone was using now.