What annoys me today in marketing and media that too often today then talking on hi-fi, science is replaced by bizarre belief structures and marketing fluff, leading to a decades-long stagnation of the audiophile domain. Science makes progress, pseudo-science doesn’t. Hi-fi world is filled by pseudoscience, dogma and fruitloopery to the extent that it resembles a fundamentalist religion. Loudspeaker performance hasn’t tangibly improved in forty years and vast sums are spent addressing the wrong problems.
Business for Engineers: Marketers Lie article points tout that marketing tells lies — falsehoods — things that serve to convey a false impression. Marketing’s purpose is to determining how the product will be branded, positioned, and sold. It seems that there too many snake oil rubbish products marketed in the name of hifi. It is irritating to watch the stupid people in the world be fooled.
In EEVblog #29 – Audiophile Audiophoolery video David L. Jones (from EEVBlog) cuts loose on the Golden Ear Audiophiles and all their Audiophoolery snake oil rubbish. The information presented in Dave’s unique non-scripted overly enthusiastic style! He’s an enthusiastic chap, but couldn’t agree more with many of the opinions he expressed: Directional cables, thousand dollar IEC power cables, and all that rubbish. Monster Cable gets mostered. Note what he says right at the end: “If you pay ridiculous money for these cable you will hear a difference, but don’t expect your friends to”. If you want to believe, you will.
My points on hifi-nonsense:
One of the tenets of audiophile systems is that they are assembled from components, allegedly so that the user can “choose” the best combination. This is pretty largely a myth. The main advantage of component systems is that the dealer can sell ridiculously expensive cables, hand-knitted by Peruvian virgins and soaked in snake oil, to connect it all up. Say goodbye to the noughties: Yesterday’s hi-fi biz is BUSTED, bro article asks are the days of floorstanders and separates numbered? If traditional two-channel audio does have a future, then it could be as the preserve of high resolution audio. Sony has taken the industry lead in High-Res Audio.
HIFI Cable Humbug and Snake oil etc. blog posting rightly points out that there is too much emphasis placed on spending huge sums of money on HIFI cables. Most of what is written about this subject is complete tripe. HIFI magazines promote myths about the benefits of all sorts of equipment. I am as amazed as the writer that that so called audiophiles and HIFI journalists can be fooled into thinking that very expensive speaker cables etc. improve performance. I generally agree – most of this expensive interconnect cable stuff is just plain overpriced.
I can agree that in analogue interconnect cables there are few cases where better cables can really result in cleaner sound, but usually getting any noticeable difference needs that the one you compare with was very bad yo start with (clearly too thin speaker wires with resistance, interconnect that picks interference etc..) or the equipment in the systems are so that they are overly-sensitive to cable characteristics (generally bad equipment designs can make for example cable capacitance affect 100 times or more than it should). Definitely too much snake oil. Good solid engineering is all that is required (like keep LCR low, Teflon or other good insulation, shielding if required, proper gauge for application and the distance traveled). Geometry is a factor but not in the same sense these yahoos preach and deceive.
In digital interconnect cables story is different than on those analogue interconnect cables. Generally in digital interconnect cables the communication either works, does not work or sometimes work unreliably. The digital cable either gets the bits to the other end or not, it does not magically alter the sound that goes through the cable. You need to have active electronics like digital signal processor to change the tone of the audio signal traveling on the digital cable, cable will just not do that.
But this digital interconnect cables characteristics has not stopped hifi marketers to make very expensive cable products that are marketed with unbelievable claims. Ethernet has come to audio world, so there are hifi Ethernet cables. How about 500 dollar Ethernet cable? That’s ridiculous. And it’s only 1.5 meters. Then how about $10,000 audiophile ethernet cable? Bias your dielectrics with the Dielectric-Bias ethernet cable from AudioQuest: “When insulation is unbiased, it slows down parts of the signal differently, a big problem for very time-sensitive multi-octave audio.” I see this as complete marketing crap speak. It seems that they’re made for gullible idiots. No professional would EVER waste money on those cables. Audioquest even produces iPhone sync cables in similar price ranges.
HIFI Cable insulators/supports (expensive blocks that keep cables few centimeters off the floor) are a product category I don’t get. They typically claim to offer incredible performance as well as appealing appearance. Conventional cable isolation theory holds that optimal cable performance can be achieved by elevating cables from the floor in an attempt to control vibrations and manage static fields. Typical cable elevators are made from electrically insulating materials such as wood, glass, plastic or ceramics. Most of these products claim superior performance based upon the materials or methods of elevation. I don’t get those claims.
Along with green magic markers on CDs and audio bricks is another item called the wire conditioner. The claim is that unused wires do not sound the same as wires that have been used for a period of time. I don’t get this product category. And I don’t believe claims in the line like “Natural Quartz crystals along with proprietary materials cause a molecular restructuring of the media, which reduces stress, and significantly improves its mechanical, acoustic, electric, and optical characteristics.” All sounds like just pure marketing with no real benefits.
CD no evil, hear no evil. But the key thing about the CD was that it represented an obvious leap from earlier recording media that simply weren’t good enough for delivery of post-produced material to the consumer to one that was. Once you have made that leap, there is no requirement to go further. The 16 bits of CD were effectively extended to 18 bits by the development of noise shaping, which allows over 100dB signal to noise ratio. That falls a bit short of the 140dB maximum range of human hearing, but that has never been a real goal. If you improve the digital media, the sound quality limiting problem became the transducers; the headphones and the speakers.
We need to talk about SPEAKERS: Soz, ‘audiophiles’, only IT will break the sound barrier article says that today’s loudspeakers are nowhere near as good as they could be, due in no small measure to the presence of “traditional” audiophile products. that today’s loudspeakers are nowhere near as good as they could be, due in no small measure to the presence of “traditional” audiophile products. I can agree with this. Loudspeaker performance hasn’t tangibly improved in forty years and vast sums are spent addressing the wrong problems.
We need to talk about SPEAKERS: Soz, ‘audiophiles’, only IT will break the sound barrier article makes good points on design, DSPs and the debunking of traditional hi-fi. Science makes progress, pseudo-science doesn’t. Legacy loudspeakers are omni-directional at low frequencies, but as frequency rises, the radiation becomes more directional until at the highest frequencies the sound only emerges directly forwards. Thus to enjoy the full frequency range, the listener has to sit in the so-called sweet spot. As a result legacy loudspeakers with sweet spots need extensive room treatment to soak up the deficient off-axis sound. New tools that can change speaker system designs in the future are omni-directional speakers and DSP-based room correction. It’s a scenario ripe for “disruption”.
Computers have become an integrated part of many audio setups. Back in the day integrated audio solutions in PCs had trouble earning respect. Ode To Sound Blaster: Are Discrete Audio Cards Still Worth the Investment? posting tells that it’s been 25 years since the first Sound Blaster card was introduced (a pretty remarkable feat considering the diminished reliance on discrete audio in PCs) and many enthusiasts still consider a sound card an essential piece to the PC building puzzle. It seems that in general onboard sound is finally “Good Enough”, and has been “Good Enough” for a long time now. For most users it is hard to justify the high price of special sound card on PC anymore. There are still some PCs with bad sound hardware on motherboard and buttload of cheap USB adapters with very poor performance. However, what if you want the best sound possible, the lowest noise possible, and don’t really game or use the various audio enhancements? You just want a plain-vanilla sound card, but with the highest quality audio (products typically made for music makers). You can find some really good USB solutions that will blow on-board audio out of the water for about $100 or so.
Although solid-state technology overwhelmingly dominates today’s world of electronics, vacuum tubes are holding out in two small but vibrant areas. Some people like the sound of tubes. The Cool Sound of Tubes article says that a commercially viable number of people find that they prefer the sound produced by tubed equipment in three areas: musical-instrument (MI) amplifiers (mainly guitar amps), some processing devices used in recording studios, and a small but growing percentage of high-fidelity equipment at the high end of the audiophile market. Keep those filaments lit, Design your own Vacuum Tube Audio Equipment article claims that vacuum tubes do sound better than transistors (before you hate in the comments check out this scholarly article on the topic). The difficulty is cost; tube gear is very expensive because it uses lots of copper, iron, often point-to-point wired by hand, and requires a heavy metal chassis to support all of these parts. With this high cost and relative simplicity of circuitry (compared to modern electronics) comes good justification for building your own gear. Maybe this is one of the last frontiers of do-it-yourself that is actually worth doing.
2,266 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
QSA fuses | Inner Magazines https://share.google/2QYF64vZUabmt7Q2B
Tomi Engdahl says:
The analogue format is RIAA EQ’d and compressed by design. Stuff is needed in the signal path to inaccurately reverse this. CDs? Nope! Vinyl is, IMHO, for children who want to be different and, by so being, are all the same.
Tomi Engdahl says:
I enjoy the process of playing vinyl records very much. Flipping through my record collection instead of browsing a digital library. Forcing myself to listen through an entire album the way the artist intended it to be played. Turning sides, lowering the needle to the groove. It’s a tactile process. I also love the mechanics of turntables and I restore vintage turntables as a hobby.
Now, do I pretend that analogue sounds better than digital? No! I value the possibility to EQ my sound so much that I run my analogue sources through ADC -> DSP -> DAC. That still doesn’t reduce my enjoyment of playing records.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jon CopeHi Jon one of the things you pay for in more expensive amplifiers is an accurate RIAA stage
Tomi Engdahl says:
Copper wire is copper wire
Just make sure it’s not copper clad aluminum, or CCA. Aluminum is about 60% less conductive than copper, but there’s a lot of cheap speaker wire in the market made of CCA.
shhh…audiophiles are very sensitive.
Curtis Clemons So you really either don’t know nothing about wires or you’re a argumentative person or even possibly a bot with a response like that
Curtis Clemons doesnt the purity matter? Or quality of the connectors?
Thomas Palacio well if it isn’t 100% copper it isn’t copper wire is it
Tomi Engdahl says:
Oxygen-free copper (OFC), or Oxygen-Free High Conductivity (OFHC) copper, is a high-purity copper with an extremely low oxygen content, typically less than 0.001%. This purity results in superior electrical and thermal conductivity, excellent corrosion resistance, and good weldability, making it ideal for premium applications in the electronics, electrical, and scientific industries. OFHC is a premium grade of copper that exhibits the properties of pure copper, used in wiring, electronic components, and precision scientific instruments where minimal resistance and efficient heat dissipation are critical.
Key Characteristics
High Purity: OFHC is a high-purity copper, with purity levels reaching 99.99%.
Low Oxygen Content: Its defining feature is an exceptionally low oxygen content, typically below 0.001%.
Superior Conductivity: The absence of oxygen minimizes impurities and improves the metallic structure, leading to exceptionally high electrical and thermal conductivity.
Corrosion Resistance: The low oxygen content enhances its resistance to oxidation and corrosion.
Ductility and Machinability: OFHC copper possesses high ductility and excellent machinability.
How it’s Made
OFHC is produced through advanced electrolytic refining processes that remove almost all impurities, including oxygen, from the molten copper.
Applications
Due to its enhanced properties, OFHC is used in a variety of specialized applications, including:
Electronics:
Used in conductors for electronic devices and high-fidelity audio equipment.
Electrical Industry:
Found in high-performance wiring, motor windings, and electrical contacts.
Scientific Instruments:
Utilized in precision scientific equipment, particularly in fields requiring high conductivity and purity.
Industrial Applications:
Its durability and resistance to corrosion make it suitable for certain industrial and marine applications.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Here are 10 signs you’re more of a gear addict than an audiophile: https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/05/signs-gear-addict-audiophile/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Audio legend reveals how a ‘black market’ for obsolete parts is keeping high-end audio alive: https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/08/audio-legend-reveals-black-market-obsolete-parts/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Here are ‘non-audiophile’ brands that purists mock but real users continue to rely on.
Full story: https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/09/mainstream-audio-brands-worth-owning-audiophiles/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Pretty cables cost exponentially more than plain ones. You know, because audiophoolery is really more about cable porn than “sOuNd”.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Bose 901 made one reviewer start his own Hi-Fi magazine just to fight back.
Full story: https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/09/bose-901-loved-hated-speaker-hifi-history/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Lots of pseudo Electrical Engineers graduating from YouTube Institute of Technology lately
Tomi Engdahl says:
Alex Gray no that was not and never was the reason therefore I repeat, the 20 -20 Bandwidth was for AMPLIFIERS ONLY and the 20 KHz upper limit was specified in order that “TRANSIENTS” could be reproduced cleanly in the days of the valve, “tube” No shit Sherlock, just the plain old truth! there are no harmonics of human use or audible to the human ear at 20 KHz, If and adult can get past 12 KHz they will have an awful life! If you examine an accurate RTA you will see that all these imaginary harmonics that Audiophools claim to be able to hear are down in the weeds along with harmonic distortion and noise especially as with digital that, “Noise Floor” has actually gone UP! As it did when early transistorised equipment began to appear. I know this because I was working with Pro-Audio equipment in the 1960s! Initially transistorised equipment could not get near the reliability of Valves/Vacuum tubes!
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/14PrQAEbqEA/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Harmonic or transients, frequency response or slew rate, they come to the same thing. As for hearing, in my 20s I could distinctly hear the 15.75kHz whistle of a modern TV line output transformer, and the older 10kHz sets were very audible.
Tomi Engdahl says:
From https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BP5bWwLfX/
Alex Grey
Leigh Reke also of course, at the radio station I did masses of audio editing and I can assure you that the digitally reproduced waveform of a pure sine wave looked just like the image on the left in the original post. Vinyl generally had a lot more tracking distortion, surface noise, clicks, rumble, wow and flutter even from decent quality turntable abd stylus – a ridulous amount of care and expense needed to remotely approach what a typical digital reproduction chain achieved effortlessly and economically.