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.
3,007 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
Music festivals gave me hearing loss. My best friend and I started making earplugs, and it’s now a multimillion-dollar business. : https://mrf.lu/Pk73
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BSJ49rmNr/
As we have always though the reason for selling expensive cables is high dealer profit. note: the comment that the dealer made more profit on the cables than the receiver they sold. That tells it all.
I had the opportunity to see the “Engineering Department” of one of the leading manufactures of speaker cables. if you are interested in my story tell me in your comments and I’ll post it.
https://youtu.be/m22UmmnuYcA?is=dbQ6reSHrjge_JRu
Tomi Engdahl says:
Audiophiles often debate gear choices, but the people who record, mix, and master music have a different perspective. Working engineers across forums and professional groups have shared what really matters in day-to-day audio work. Their comments reveal how music is created, what actually affects sound, and where common beliefs can go off track.
Here are the top 8 lessons they want listeners to know about what shapes the music you hear and where your time and effort make the biggest difference.
Full story: https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/08/real-audio-engineers-wish-audiophiles-knew/?utm_source=fb&utm_campaign=caption
Tomi Engdahl says:
An independent testing project set out to do something the audio world rarely bothers with. The team ran more than 60 cables through a full battery of measurements to find out whether the differences people swear they hear actually show up in the data.
On the usual tests, the cables were nearly indistinguishable. Frequency response and distortion barely moved from one cable to the next, which is the result skeptics have pointed to for years as proof that pricey cables are a waste of money.
But then the team examined an area almost nobody bothers to measure, and the differences stopped being subtle. They were large enough that the testers could reliably hear them, and they lined up with why some cables make listeners feel tense while others let the music breathe.
Veteran engineer Joakim Juhl had been predicting this since 2007.
He argues the industry has been running the wrong tests for decades, chasing numbers that look identical while ignoring the one thing that genuinely sets cables apart.
The property he keeps describing is something he believes ordinary ears detect more readily than our best equipment can, which is exactly why the usual measurements keep declaring cables identical while listeners keep hearing otherwise.
Full story in the comments.
Full story: https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/09/standard-tests-hiding-what-makes-cables-different/?utm_source=fb&utm_campaign=comment
Tomi Engdahl says:
Do you believe cables can really change the sound, or is it mostly hype?
Headphonesty mostly placebo
Headphonesty If you make a cable bad enough it definitely *can* change the sound. The overly simplified claim is all cables sound the same. The reality is the vast majority of competently designed and built cables are audibly transparent. But there are ways to make a cable less than audibly transparent.
Headphonesty I know by experience that some do. It’s not all that hard to determine. A/B comparisons. Plus, what is usually left out of the argument is, that the ability for a line output device to drive a complex load factors in heavily with regard to cable choice.
Headphonesty if you compare 10 similar violons and well done, from Chinese study violon to Stradivarius you can ear a real differences just if the violonist is excellent.
If you ear a Stradivarius compare to a study violon both played by a young music student, what can you expect ?
And of course if Maria Duenas or Hilary Hann plays a 100 € violon, their talent save the result (but they prefer to play and record with a Stradivarius).
Cable never add talent, but if your system is really resolutive, then you can easely ear a huge sound’s differences and choose your favorite taste.
Headphonesty see my comment. i had it demonstrated to me in my local audiophile store. definitely make a difference but which is better is up to the listener, not a measurement. of course that was back in the 80′s and it may be less true now with advancements.
Different cables can sound slightly “different”. But I don’t know how one would really judge “better” or “worse”. We use decent quality balanced cables in the studio mainly with Neutrik XLR or jack connectors. I build my own as required.
Somewhere in every setup there is one wildly overpriced cable nobody will admit made zero difference. The drawer of shame is real.
Blind tests are fun. Back in the days, we tested 20 different high end cables and an old phone cable.
Voting results from 8 people in the jury were mostly random, but the phone cable was considered slightly better than the others.
PS I’m a physicist, amateur musician, music lover and also a lover of good audio tech!
Kenneth Bodin The humble phone cable taking the crown over twenty high end contenders is the most audiophile plot twist we have read all week. Your jury accidentally ran the perfect experiment.
Engineering is the answer like i said all along. it doesn’t entirely matter the cable, it is how the entire chain relates. Coherent sound means the right frequency’s are coming together at the right times. All frequency’s have issues in the sense, they are all different lengths in time. Good systems attempt to align them up so there timing is coherent as final result. Hence one major reason why eq is needed to align phase(timing and frequency length) in a way they come together. So by altering group delay timings and looking at the total time of all the frequency’s how they work together is more important that what cable you have, the cable can change parameters but already we need alterations to make it sound right to our perception and hearing. I like to think of things as constructing time differences to compensate for delay time or any issue.
Maybe I could say that different frequency’s do require different start and stop times to align them correctly. Do yourself a favor and draw some different waves on tracing paper and on real paper and slide them along in time. You see how they compare and where in time do you put one frequency vs another of a different length. This is where I speak of perception and how are ears really work. The frequency’s need reconstruction to make them right to our perception. our ears work on patterns so this with good designed equipment can bring it to our ears. I all ways rant about timing. how we get to final result matches. Having a great cable isn’t matching how frequency’s and time through out components work. Engineering with time in mind and old analog eq can shift phase and actually fix issues.
I’m trying to say everythign matters in relevance. that is where good sound comes from, not from cables along but how components marry time and phase and everything through the response. Time is frequency my audiophile buddies. Altering time does not matter as a single parameter. it matters than the right parts of the sound are together in time, so compensations can ensure things come together. we have angles and that affects distance and that effects time too. it’s a combination of everything. even volume whilst it isn’t time, the peak level will be lower in comparison to something else making it more further away and quieter. the brain is complex in the way it works out the sound but i say it one last time.
Coherent timing through out is what really matters, This is the best ever experiment. get some engineers to do blind tests with people. have your insanely expensive cables and have cheaper ones but ensure that each cable has a different system attached to it and each is tuned correctly. so measure the timing and compensate through system design. my point is to engineer both systems. the expensive cable system to match and the cheaper cable to match the rest of the system to correct timing errors and make it all match. I bet as a final result. no one would tell the difference. The brain is sensitive to timing. Component matching by design matters. You may be still able to measure something that would look different but i bet you would think they sounded the same.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Engineering is the answer like i said all along. it doesn’t entirely matter the cable, it is how the entire chain relates. Coherent sound means the right frequency’s are coming together at the right times. All frequency’s have issues in the sense, they are all different lengths in time. Good systems attempt to align them up so there timing is coherent as final result. Hence one major reason why eq is needed to align phase(timing and frequency length) in a way they come together. So by altering group delay timings and looking at the total time of all the frequency’s how they work together is more important that what cable you have, the cable can change parameters but already we need alterations to make it sound right to our perception and hearing. I like to think of things as constructing time differences to compensate for delay time or any issue.
Maybe I could say that different frequency’s do require different start and stop times to align them correctly. Do yourself a favor and draw some different waves on tracing paper and on real paper and slide them along in time. You see how they compare and where in time do you put one frequency vs another of a different length. This is where I speak of perception and how are ears really work. The frequency’s need reconstruction to make them right to our perception. our ears work on patterns so this with good designed equipment can bring it to our ears. I all ways rant about timing. how we get to final result matches. Having a great cable isn’t matching how frequency’s and time through out components work. Engineering with time in mind and old analog eq can shift phase and actually fix issues.
I’m trying to say everythign matters in relevance. that is where good sound comes from, not from cables along but how components marry time and phase and everything through the response. Time is frequency my audiophile buddies. Altering time does not matter as a single parameter. it matters than the right parts of the sound are together in time, so compensations can ensure things come together. we have angles and that affects distance and that effects time too. it’s a combination of everything. even volume whilst it isn’t time, the peak level will be lower in comparison to something else making it more further away and quieter. the brain is complex in the way it works out the sound but i say it one last time.
Coherent timing through out is what really matters, This is the best ever experiment. get some engineers to do blind tests with people. have your insanely expensive cables and have cheaper ones but ensure that each cable has a different system attached to it and each is tuned correctly. so measure the timing and compensate through system design. my point is to engineer both systems. the expensive cable system to match and the cheaper cable to match the rest of the system to correct timing errors and make it all match. I bet as a final result. no one would tell the difference. The brain is sensitive to timing. Component matching by design matters. You may be still able to measure something that would look different but i bet you would think they sounded the same.
Ben Feltham brain is sensitive to timing. A proper cable based signal transport system has very minimal / practically non-existent timing problems at audio frequencies at few meters distance that typical hifi systems have. Well built equipment and technically decent cables, significant differences are pretty much impossible to hear or mrasure. There are equipment not so well built, bad cables and cables that try to sound intentionally different – those can mess up audio more.
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