Awesome Audiophile Snake Oil

lololololol

"The very best sound was obtained when I slightly loosened the screws on the Duplex Covers. And they sound great!!.

8]

lolololol

every product on the site is like New Hope for the Ape-Eared

i love that website! check out this fancy table: http://machinadynamica.com/machina25.htm

it's supposed to isolate your amplifier from vibrations, "especially the 0 -10 Hz variety produced by Earth's crust movement, traffic, subways, tides, etc. "

how a spring could cancel out waves slower than 1 Hz?

but the best is this "teleportation tweak"
http://machinadynamica.com/machina60.htm

everything on there is great but I'm still standing by the Tru-Tone Duplex cover as the most balls-out

http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volume_12_3/marigo-labs-signature-3d-mat-7-2005.html

oh wait though codename turquoise is pretty fucking rad

Brilliant Pebbles is my favorite one on that site i think

From cidepress' link, this was amusing:

"Where most audiophiles would agree, however, is that tweaks are a minor aspect of system building. Defined by the dictionary in Microsoft Word® as "a slight adjustment or change in..."

italics mine.

http://machinadynamica.com/water.gif for brains

Somewhere, audiophile dude pushes the leather sofa away from the wall, sees four-socket outlet, shrieks.

Well, these are great, but you don't have to spend a lot of money to improve sound:

http://www.belt.demon.co.uk/Free_Techniques/Free_Techniques.html

Holy shit the Teleportation Tweak! We are dealing with <i>balls</i> here, gentlemen. Big, round, shiny balls, of finest brass, lovingly hand-polished to a mirror shine by a taskforce of brilliant Sound Artisans. These balls can be yours for the astonishingly low price of $680 (Big Shiny Brass Balls are not subject to our 30-day money-back guarantee)

it doesn't actually take any courage to be a con man, is the thing. you just have to really, really hate everybody.

The interesting thing about these tweaks is that they abandon the pretense of scientific support. Whereas w/ feet for speaker stands in Stereophile or whatever they'll be some physicist explaining how the damping works, here's it's just like, Hey, put this magic clock in the room and it'll improve the sound. I love it.

Sorry, maybe I'm Billy-doesn't-get-it, but is this site real or an elaborate spoof?

I had initially assumed spoof, but I followed some links and poked around and it appears to be real, or at least elaborate enough a spoof to include three or four different sites. Stereophile had an article on some of these tweaks a few years ago anyway:

http://www.stereophile.com/news/10415/

even if it is a spoof there's certainly enough real snake-oil products with extremely similar purposes/explanations

here's a collection of some more: http://www.ilikejam.dsl.pipex.com/audiophile.htm

i know someone who swears by this ....
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=280182123367&ssPageName=STRK:MEWA:IT&ih=018

"extremely flat"

I don't even know what "a richer, fuller sound, with less emphasis of detail" means. it's supposed to be a good thing?

My latest tweak = this chair;

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v236/njsouthall/Photo624.jpg

i'm actually buying a glass platter for my turntable. i might even buy that mat for it. i'm a sucka 4 luv.

actually the chair i'm assuming was a joke, but honestly i was suprised how much getting speaker stands and "correctly" positioning my chair i listen in and the speakers in the room made a HUGE difference in how good things sounded.

The chair's totally not a joke; it's expensive and comfortable and easily moved but it's not likely to make me fall asleep in it (no headrest); if I'm comfortable and awake, I can concentrate on listening more. I bought it (almost) with the sole intention of it being a 'headphones' chair.

But yeah, basic physics says position your speakers correctly and sit in the right spot; you simply don't get stereo-imaging without it.

http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/03/audiophiles-cant-tell-the-difference-between-monster-cable-and/

...a coat hanger.

that's AMAZING.
audiophiles are some weird people, man.

actually the chair i'm assuming was a joke, but honestly i was suprised how much getting speaker stands and "correctly" positioning my chair i listen in and the speakers in the room made a HUGE difference in how good things sounded.

-- M@tt He1ges0n, Thursday, December 13, 2007 11:39 PM

totally true

actually properly treating one's room acoustically would probably do a better job than moving your chair and speakers about

is there already a company selling audiophile interior house paint?

because if there is, I should start selling audiophile EXTERIOR house paint.

(xpost)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/cb/Dbsts2.jpg

I was much, much less impressed with this enormous fucking Naim set-up than I should have been given how much it ought to have cost. Sure it went LOUD, but sound-wise I wouldn't swap it for my own system, I don't think.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v236/njsouthall/IMG_0126.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v236/njsouthall/IMG_0128.jpg

Is it just perspective on that first photo, or are your speakers nearly at shoulder height?

Oh, no - is that a Cyrus CD player? Or tuner? And why isn't everything on Mana shelves? That's why it doesn't sound that good. And has it been on continuously for five years? Another biggie with Naimists. (Seriously, that doesn't look like a great room for those huge - and amazingly ugly - speakers).

What's the turntable - Nottingham Spacedek or something? Oracle Delphi?

mp3s out a old marantz amp someone gave me and 15 y/o bottom of the line cambridge soundworks speakers all day babay

although i did love to read sudiophile magazines when i worked at a bookstore just for the lulz

The speakers are nearly to chest height - I'm 5'8".

The Cyrus is just a DAC for his wireless streaming thing. Dunno what the turntable is. The room is big but odd; it's a loft that used to be three bedrooms. There's a (low) double bed behind the speakers, plus a desk, which is where I slept (not the desk) (although that picture was taken at 6am so sleeping wasn't exactly urgent and key that weekend).

Yeah, I really wish someone had just given me a peek into my co-habiting/flat in communal block/married-with-kids future when I was handing over the moolah for all my gear in 1996-97. I wish I'd just got something good/2nd-hand with a small footprint (Cyrus CD/integrated, ProAc speakers, something like that; maybe a Pro-Ject record deck, old Marantz cassette deck, NAD tuner, cables from Maplin) and STOPPED there. Think of all the photographic gear I could've bought with the money saved if I'd just contracted that particular hobbyist bug a decade earlier!

(Ah, DAC for wireless streaming; the Naim box-stacking is kinda insane - external power supplies for everything. Makes my Audiolab pre/mono arrangement look positively understated).

The speakers are Naim DBLs. They weigh about 15st each. Retail these days at £15k. When he got them, in 2000, they should have been £12k. He got them for £4k cos they were "shop-soiled" - the band he's in had an arrangement with Naim and they'd been using them as a playback set-up when they recorded an album in a country house, and the guitarist's dog had taken a bite out of the bottom corner of one, or something.

I'm kind of glad I've had a brush with stuff that's seriously high-end because it's warned me off a bit. Our flat's not that small, but it's a flat nonetheless, and, you know, I want stuff on the walls and holidays and a new camera and stuff maybe too.

I think my main response to audiophilia these days is that the best way to make your hi-fi sound great is to play better records on it.

actually properly treating one's room acoustically would probably do a better job than moving your chair and speakers about

How so?

the best way to make your hi-fi sound great is to play better records on it.

b i n g o

if anyone is looking for really great speakers that won't break your bank....i bought these about a year ago and couldn't be more pleased with them...they are really surprising given the price and size:

Epos ELS 3 mini monitors:

http://www.musicdirect.com/product/73457

i run them with a Cambridge Audio integrated amp w/Cambridge phono pre-amp.....

My turntable is a Rega P1 -- one thing on that i would recommend is buying a glass platter and also i replaced the original ortofon cartridge with a Denon DL 160 cartridge which is a fucking amazing cartridge for the price...

For CD player I run a really really old NAD one that I got off craigslist for $35...it works pretty well, has a hard time tracking CD-Rs but will play them after awhile (it's from 87 though so I guess there weren't even CD-Rs then)

Post more pics of slobs in garrets seasoned with with ridiculous sound systems and ugly furniture.

I really like the coffee table.

I think my favourite way / place to listen to music these days, rather than the big sofa and NAD / Cambridge Audio / Tannoy / proper rack & stands set-up in the living room, with everything anchored in a nice triangle, blah blah, equidistant from rear walls, speakers toed in, is the hotch-potch system in the back room, with the knackered Marantz CD, 20-year-old Marantz amp, DAC, and diddy Q Acoustics speakers. Cos I have space, peace, my comfy chair, books, headphones, no TV or console to distract.

Those are the kind of speakers you buy to justify having previously bought Monster Cable.

What's the sensitivity rating on those things? It might be all show, but they certainly look like they could bring on an involuntary bowel movement.

Unfortunately, it’s very difficult for institutions to come up with the kind of cash these things cost

yep, this is the issue, see that beef between UC San Diago (?) and the jazz collection guy

DIEGO FFS

Actually this is more relevant - they found a rare recording in Gleason's archive, and while they wanted to sell it, they also wanted to make it available to everyone:

RP: You mentioned Gleason. I know that plays into you discovering the Brandeis 1963 concert tape that got officially released. How did that happen?

JG: Ralph Gleason was a huge supporter of Dylan early on and became friendly with him. And he saved absolutely everything.

Years after Gleason died, I got introduced to the family at a time where they were trying to raise some money and clear the house out. The first time, it was kind of like, “Okay, you can go into the garage this time.” I went into the garage, and they had maybe fifteen file cabinets filled with stuff. I bought a lot of stuff, and they liked dealing with me. So the next time was, “You can go in the house.” Then the third time is, “You can go in the basement.”

In the basement, he had all these reel-to-reel tapes. Some of them were extensively annotated, and some of them not at all. Most interesting was maybe three feet of reel-to-reel Dylan tapes. Gleason had gotten stuff from Dylan and Grossman and Columbia Records. He was friends with John Hammond. People would send him tapes of bootlegs.

Some of the stuff, it was obvious it wasn’t that interesting. Tapes of bootlegs that had been released. And some of the stuff looked interesting. I said to Toby, Ralph’s son, “If you’re up for it, I’ll take the tapes that look interesting. I’ll book a studio at my expense, listen to them, and we can figure out where we go from there.”

A friend of mine had a studio and we just listened to tapes and tried to figure out what was what. So we’re listening to these things that are fairly uninteresting—“oh, this is a bootleg” or “oh, this tape’s been circulated.” There was this one that just said “Dylan Brandeis” in very light pencil on the spine of a white box. I put it on, and it was like perfect quality stereo. I was like, “What the hell is this?” I started Googling. There’s no Bob Dylan Brandeis tape anywhere. No story behind it. Just the two words, “Dylan Brandeis,” on the side.

The quality, as I said, was just incredible. So I sent it to Jeff Rosen and he said, “All right, here’s what I can pay you.” It wasn’t what [the Gleason family] was expecting, but as I explained, yes, you have an unreleased Bob Dylan tape, but it’s of no good to anybody else in terms of releasing it. Otherwise, it’s just somebody buying it to brag. They, like I, were interested in seeing it get released, so I sold it on their behalf to the Dylan office. Pretty quickly, they came up with a plan to release it.

Musicians and artists, not to mention manufacturers of every stripe, have been producing "limited edition" things for a very long time. Many times it doesn't work at all but it does sometimes work in my experience

― Cattedrale metropolitana di Santa Maria de Episcopio, Wednesday, April 8, 2026 1:06 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i mean to a degree every DIY indie or punk band ever is producing "limited edition" vinyl as they can't afford to press much more than a couple hundred

Its just that the demand is even more limited (usually).

"increasingly selective"

The DIY indie and punk version of "limited edition" is a nice trophy in taste - like, I bought this when the band and label barely had enough money to press this record, and now y'all calling yourself fans but I was there first!

hey don't talk shit about my Slay Tracks 7" that I bought when it came out ;)

another thing about these gimmick reissues is that they frequently have utterly worthless mastering and QC

But you get the soothing zipper-like sounds of non-fill. Oooo.....

a.k.a. "warmth"

Brrrr, it's cold in here. I better zip and unzip my hoodie over and over again just to feel that warmth.

misposted this to the Shady Scams thread:

i already shouted out the new episode of We Buy Records on the AI thread, but it deserves a mention here for their incredulous discussion of the $9,800 EX700 cartridge, "crafted from the finest spruce harvested in the South Tyrol region of Northern Italy—the very area said to be the source of the wood used for Stradivarius violins."

― Mighty Morphin Is The Subject of My Sentence (Doctor Casino), Friday, April 10, 2026 4:52 PM bookmarkflaglink

As you can imagine, the compatibility with string instruments is outstanding, but we hope you will play all genres of music with this cartridge.

the compatibility, definitely imagined!

I don't know if it would be enough to make a difference, but if anything, isn't wood a suboptimal material for this use?
Like, you don't actually want the cartridge itself to resonate, right?
Although with an object this small, I doubt it would matter either way, as there wouldn't be enough wood to resonate much.
But at least in principle, it seems to me like if it even did make a difference, it could be worse not better.

I have a wooden Grado cartridge, I like it! it's super sensitive though, sometimes I have to turn the weight up higher than usual

My dad’s turntable is some MFSL/Fender collaboration thing and the plinth is lacquered wood with a sunburst finish. It sounds really good, though.

Correct me if I'm wrong but usually, you can't manufacture collectability like this, right?

When I was ordering comic books for a living, whenever Marvel or DC would have a big special event they'd have 1 in 100 or 1 in 1000 variants (which was normal). Then another company started offering - at the same time I was ordering the initial run, so ~2 months ahead of release - graded versions of these variants. They'd arrive slabbed and a guaranteed 9.8 (not sure if it was actually on release day or if they arrived later). Not once did I see the guaranteed 9.8 version sell (via EBay or a collectible app) for as much as the initial price. The existence of guaranteed mint options immediately devalued the entire concept of grading and slabbing. (Similarly, the existence of those variants was starting to backfire when I escaped from that life - they almost never sold for as much money as the wholesale cost of buying the extra issues.)

Once something is slabbed, is it sealed forever?

You can crack open the slab with a butter knife

It's a funny idea that the creators spent so much time writing and drawing pages that their core audience prefer to be physically inaccessible.

the comics thing and the albums thing above makes me wonder why companies don't just sell good quality prints of things and forget about the actual content

https://tweekgeek.com/products/qsa-ac-receptacles?variant=42872435408963

they sold me at Each level delivers a distinct sonic character

those distinct sonic characters in full

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fehb2cmv39u5c1.jpeg

https://i.redd.it/ehb2cmv39u5c1.jpeg

ULTRA Crystal Gold Red Level Treatment I believe In You

absolutely incredible find, top shelf stuff. I've ordered one for home & one for the office

i ordered one for my toaster, hoping to get more natural precision and openness, something that respects the space and character of the bread

Special order, non-returnable. Trade-up program available.

It’s admirable. If they sell one of these to some dink it will be an amazing return on their investment.

priest: "the housing is intentional" congregation: "the treatment is everything"

If they sell one of these to some dink

there's a testimonial! So at least one dink bought one: It widened the soundstage considerably, bringing out detail that was still buried. Everything is exact in its space and character. The natural room decay sits as it should, delicate and hanging when it should be.

ooh which model??

i’m sure that’s a genuine unbiased 5-star review or if you pay enough money you’ll convince yourself it was worth it

and it was the gold one, which is $6,500

brb getting a $6500 loan

Rose tinted outlets

My condo's aluminum wiring is why I bought it, houses wired with copper have lifeless soundstages no matter what you do. I didn't upgrade my home stereo, I upgraded my stereo home.

you’re delusional, you have to live closest to the power substation, otherwise you might as well through your $100k tube amp in the trash

amateur hour. I replaced my wire with cca (copper clad aluminum) because I love fire hazards, not for any particular audiophile ideas

xp really? i live next to a substation, had to buy a thin metal hat from the shakti stone folks to offset the too-clean electrical signal

Once it’s been through the step-down transformers at the substation you can forget about signal purity. You’re going to have to hire live musicians

god this thread delivers

Don't sleep on the jitter conditioner sticker:

https://tweekgeek.com/products/qsa-power-jitter-power-conditioner?variant=42601972596803

Q S
( )→
Q S
( )→
Q S

it’s just science

Gonna get me some receptacle testers, paint them silver, and sell them as power aligners. If the little light is green, you have aligned the electrical currents to optimize the audio wave conductivity of the room. If the little light is red, you need to upgrade to the gold model for an additional $15,000. Absolutely no returns.

Beautiful whether or not it's a bit

https://bsky.app/profile/tarabomp.bsky.social/post/3motasltwq22f

"Brendan Perry's voice being more dimensional"

Perry's Eye of the Hunter DOES sound amazing on a good stereo