Awesome Audiophile Snake Oil

only 3 grand for the acoustic immersion pod!

http://digital.hammacher.com/Items/11727/11727_1000x1000.jpg

re: ok, about that very first that very first link on this thread

i mean i will i no way attest to whether or not that very first piece of stupid audio snake oil works, BUT.

as a guy running a p decent home studio in the third world, i can attest that electrical issues absolutely can screw up/degrade the sound of yer stereo signal. i mean, i doubt that outlet thing would make a hell of a difference, but in certain dire electrical situations i could imagine a bit of well placed electrical shielding could help sound quality, perhaps even to the point where you'd actually notice.

please! i'm not defending the usefulness of this particular product per se. but i'm pretty sure some of my (reputable, high end) gear touts it electrical shielding as part of it's awesomeness. and i've def had some gigs, and even studio sessions, all but ruined cause of crappy electrical interference fuckin with our sound

i'm not saying you should rush out and buy that $500 electrical outlet cover, mind. but i wonder what it's made of and if there might be ANY use to it. like, if it was made with a small faraday cage (page?) coated in highly non-conductive ceramic or something?

just a thought. ianaei electronic geeks please feel free to explain why this would be actually be impossible/useless in scientific terms for all of out edification :)

Oh for sure. You just need your equipment isolated or on a real, grounded and isolated circuit. Basically comes down to proper wiring, not audiophile gear. Ground hum is a thing.

xxp wanna buy that pod

Why does it have teeth?

The teeth are sound absorbing foam to prevent echos and reflections caused by the chair and speakers being inside a semi-enclosed pod. Although a better solution would be to, er, not have the chair and speakers in a semi-enclosed pod.

http://the-egg-chair.com/wp-content/uploads/men_in_black_stereo_egg.jpg
in stereo...

I don't think the stuff in this revive qualifies as snake oil. Snake oil is ineffective. The stuff in the revive may be effective. They've just ignored the cost portion of the cost-performance trade-off. The tru-tone duplex covers, however, make no scientific sense. The website says they can provide shielding beyond steel duplex covers. A sheet of steel is pretty conductive. I don't believe that the areas surrounding your wall outlets are the most effective emitters of EM noise in your room anyway.

the "snail" speaker looks ridiculous. but one can give a scientific argument for the design. The active vs. passive crossover argument is odd to me, though. I'd think that a passive filter has much lower noise limits than a circuit with an active device, which is its own source of noise.

There probably exists a group of dudes that becomes excited over the idea of using the most amplifiers ever with their snail speakers, though.

So, uh, this thing called SoundPimp. It doesn't qualify as vanilla snake oil obv, as it very clearly does something audible -- I was just wondering whether greater audiophiles than me have anything to say about it; e.g. whether the idea seems legit or whether it actually does something dubious to the signal for a (claimed) superficially pleasant effect?

The premise, as I understand it, is that the stereo field as heard through earphones is seen as the baseline ideal. However, when using loudspeakers, crosstalk (ie left ear hearing the right channel and right ear hearing the left) confuses the stereo field. This piece of software is supposed to correct for this in some way. (The claim is that it works significantly better the crappier your speakers are. Also, it seems reasonable to assume it works best for recordings aiming to recreate some sort of physical space perhaps.) There's a demo video on the site with samples in normal stereo/treated stereo.

Any thoughts? Anyone used it? Am I gullible for even asking? ;)

Any thoughts?

Heh, disregard last line, it fell beneath the editing horizon.

yeah i dunno, if you had good speakers and a good amp and good placement of your speakers, how is this even an issue?

i bought an "audio enhancer" thing, this box thing from audioquest and it was kind of a ripoff

this is a terrible solution to the bad speaker placement 'problem'

Yeah fair points; I guess it's about when you don't have good stuff & placement, see my mention of crappy speakers. I read about this thing in a Norwegian tech magazine, where the journo claimed to get notable separation even from a tablet-type device...

i dunno, the extreme separation of headphones doesn't really exist in real life anyway

seems like there are a lot of things you could spend money on to make your setup sound better that would be money better spent

my newer amplifier had a little microphone you hook up and then move to the spots in the room where you'd sit and it'd do some adjustments. kind of neat!

damn that's kinda sick, what kind?

marantz receiver, with audyssey algorithms or whatever: http://www.audyssey.com/audio-technology/category

I guess this is the specific page for it. They license it to a handful of receiver manufacturers: http://www.audyssey.com/audio-technology/multeq

oh shit algorithms, that's serious stuff haha

did you feel like it made a difference?

My headphone amp has a crossover switch to GET RID OF the extreme and unnatural separation of headphones and make for a more realistic soundstage. People complain about the extreme stereo separation of Beatles stereo mixes, for example. So this seems like an odd concept to me. But I listen through a nice pair of B&W 685s that are positioned on stands to produce a sweet spot right in the middle of the sofa.

I need to rerun it, but yeah, it did do some neato shit

(I rearranged my furniture, I didn't change the inherent accoustics of my living space. Yet.)

The idea is that instead of one sweet spot in the whole room, it tries to balance at multiple points

The calibration bit is basically it playing different tones, iirc

Oh ok like those test tone records and cds they used to sell?

People complain about the extreme stereo separation of Beatles stereo mixes, for example. So this seems like an odd concept to me.

yah I think the whole conceit about that software I mentioned is that it is for music actually recorded in a room with mics a head's-width apart from each other etc, not for more "engineered" stereo images, as surely much more music is.

http://tomross.com/300px-Dummyhead.jpg

disembodied android microphone head OTM

Nah, more like BEEEEP
or BOOOOP
only pretty fast because it's a robot

It's really just adjusting the EQ per speaker to try to make it consistent as it can, I guess. And it doesn't require you to make judgment calls

It doesn't make too much sense to EQ for a point in the room. If you turn down a frequency band at one point in a room, you turn it down everywhere. So if you EQ to make a point to the side better, you are likely making the 'sweet spot' in the center worse. Perhaps it makes a point to the side much better, while only making the center a little worse. It's just too much, imo.

http://tomross.com/300px-Dummyhead.jpg

was this taken from up one of these guys' asses?

Guess at mh's mic: in addition to general EQ, it might possibly do some phase-delay type majic to cancel out unfortunate/unnatural superpositions in one's current location etc? I dunno; a middle C has a wavelength of well above one metre, so it doesn't sound entirely impossible to do this, but on the other hand, reflections from walls etc must complicate things considerably.

was this taken from up one of these guys' asses?

Nah, that's a not entirely unused recording technique.

Buy Sufjan's RKTF Stereo Upgrade System:

Remove the jagged rock from its cardboard housing
Kill a person that owns better stereo equipment than you
Take the stereo equipment
Frame a sleeping drifter by slipping the rock into his or her coat pocket

After setting up the new stereo equipment, press the button labeled "GO!" on our iOS/android app to begin your new listening adventure!

xpost

btw the mobile fidelity 180 gram reissue of "hated in the nation" sound great

stereo field as heard through earphones is seen as the baseline ideal

what absolute twaddle

http://wow.heavylistening.com/

We're all ordering three, right

a woman dropped a promo copy off at my work.
i am scared to listen to it, tbqh. it will probably not live up to my dreams.

Since fake stereo is definitely a form of auditory snake oil, maybe I can ask this question itt: anyone know a nice freeware app which would let me add a non-hideous very slight amount of spread to pure mono WAV files? The simpler the better...

Actually do really want to listen to that WOW record, but I got a Buddha Machine for Xmas, so, y'know...

It does sound pretty fucking fun!

that WOW thing is not snake oil that's a badass piece of work imo

the snake oil that actually works

I want the WOW record. I want 2, actually. Damn. 33.33333 pounds though, fuck!

I'd like to make a similar record, only instead of a steady unending sine wave, it consists of a pulsating sine wave (staccato 8th notes at 120 bpm). if you played two copies at the same time, it would not only highlight the wow and flutter differences on the two record players, but also would create cool steve reich-style phasing as it would be impossible for the two to spin at the exact same speed

Since fake stereo is definitely a form of auditory snake oil, maybe I can ask this question itt: anyone know a nice freeware app which would let me add a non-hideous very slight amount of spread to pure mono WAV files? The simpler the better...

audacity

xpost i would call it PULSING WOW and sell it for 33.222222222 pounds

Cool. is there a particular preset you'd recommend on there?

xpost

also, would buy PULSING WOW

i haven't used audacity in forever. it's possible there's a Spread preset. but if not, here's what ya do:

1. start with a single, mono track.
2. copy the track. now you have two mono tracks.
3. adjust the pan on each mono track however you see fit - one leaning toward the right, one to the left.
4. combine the two tracks into a single stereo track (either by bouncing down or just saving the whole project as a wav or mp3)

if i was fabulously wealthy i really would press some copies of PULSING WOW, along with a series of other minimal concept records gloriously ripped off from the ideas of heavylistening. i'd call my fake label heavenlywhistling, too, just to emphasize what a rip off it was. but the actual final products - the pulsing minimal wav, the collection of harmonic trio waves, etc - would be so great to listen to, regardless of the originality.

but no, what rich people appear to do is purchase additional rooms