Awesome Audiophile Snake Oil

There is a certain irony in someone buying Amish crafted wooden racks for their hi-fi gear.

Spikes under your speakers, spikes under your turntable if you really must, but this is really overkill.

If an amplifier on spikes isn't snake oil, nothing is.

A friend-of-a-record-collector-friend had a concrete pillar built from his basement floor into his living room on which to place his turntable. For me, he's the winner of the Batshit Snakeoil Turntable Stability Olympics until someone builds a turntable housing into the pillar itself.

I just want to start a band called Threaded Megafeet.

I hope record collector friend used Geopolymer concrete, that so-called "high performance cellular" concrete has a quite pronounced drop off in the 16-22kHz range.....

Reducing vibrations on a turntable is definitely not snake oil but it is diminishing returns past a certain point.

I hang all of my equipment off of acoustically isolated roof anchors with lots of sonically invisible string.

Coma-style.

I wonder if your hi-hi system works better the closer you are to the equator.

Yeah I mean decoupling and trying to isolate from vibration is actual pretty normal, same reason they make shock mounts on microphones

prbly don't need to isolate your amplifier though

b-b-but earth hum percolates through the substrate of the transistors and polymodulates the incoming signal in the sub-bass otherwise!

the percolation of earth hum into one's transistor substrates can be such a bother to my ears

thank god I always have my audiophile geodes with me

Yeah amps no but speakers and turntables it's not some esoteric thing, plus w turntables it's good so the needle won't skip if you have kids jumping around & stuff

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a9/Kris_Kross_Jump.jpg

RIP Chris Kelly :(
Sad the way things turn out

That tuner in the middle of the Maple Shade gallery looks really cool, hate to think of what it costs.

this is basically the home audio equivalent of morgellon's disease

http://www.enjoythemusic.com/hificritic/vol5_no3/listening_to_storage.htm

ahhhh hah i came right in here when i saw that

now where are my gold cat 5 cables

OK that's amazing

this orange juice tastes horrible after brushing my teeth, and now there are even fewer answers why

Thought about this thread earlier when I was reading about Sonys new $1200 Walkman

I was just about to post that.

http://gizmodo.com/sony-walkman-reborn-again-as-a-1200-hi-res-audio-han-1677643981

The market for a $1200 portable music player can't be very big.

especially one whose only reason for existence is the rights to the name "Walkman" - a brand name that has little to no connection with audiophile sound.

I was kinda looking at this as a potential replacement for my iPod classic when that eventually dies, but at $1000 they can fuck right off.

can it play PONO files?

I was kinda looking at this as a potential replacement for my iPod classic

For $200 you can get a Fiio X1 with a 128gb micro SD card - plays FLAC, too. Fuck a Walkman.

(I just had to replace my iPod classic with a Fiio and am pretty happy with it, although the operating system's really basic compared to the iPod.)

saw what you want about pono but the neil remasters sound amazing

Per that Gizmodo piece, "Your ears can only ear so much."

that was an interesting read

but yeah as i've said upthread a few times the thing that bums me out about this is that all this snakeoil crap convinces ppl that no one can really tell the difference between a good quality playback system and shitty skullcandy heaphones or a bose sound dock, and it's like man you are literally spoiled for choice today with more cheap options for great sound, analog or digital, than ever

xposts isn't there a fiio which can take two micro SDs at once? 2 x 128 GB = my beautiful dream

although this morning i just experienced a micro sd failure for the first time when one of my 128 GB cards fried itself while docked in my macbook slot, got super hot and now is dead to the world. But I've been pretty happy with the "assortment of micro SD cards in a Sansa Clip" approach in the 9 months I've been doing it.

taking mental notes on this "Filo" for when my Cowon O2 eventually dies

oh it really is "Fiio", sorry

Still love my shitty skull candy Titan earbuds with their not flat frequency response and indestructibility thank you.

yeah but could get get monoprice ones that are better for peanuts

Agreed, there are a lot of great choices for a wide variety of price points. At some point there is a diminishing return per dollar, but there is slightly improved potential performance for those who are willing to pay more for certain things. I'm just relieved that I really don't need to replace/upgrade my 8,000 albums of 16/44.1 FLAC files that took me 25 years to accumulate.

Considering how great gadgets like Fiio sound, I have spent more than I really need to on a Meier Corda headphone amp/DAC set and various headphones, but am happy with the results.

hey m@tt can you tell me what kind of hard drives are the best for video game genres? I am thinking samsung for first-person shooters as I have heard they have a smoother feel, but perhaps a western digital for MMOs

Magnetically opaque hard-drive cables will make a bigger difference than drive brands. Other than the enclosures, which you obviously have to take off to maximize kinetic expansion.

otm

Mh I prefer that vintage warmth of 5" floppies, you only have to change disks a hundred and fifty times but worth it imo

cool, can't wait to trade account info so we can play that Borderlands Pre Sequel together, I assume you won't mind if it takes me a little while to join the game :)

y'all are making sure to make the 0.8 mm diameter trepanation hole just behind each ear right? Otherwise I don't know how you can even claim to have heard what brothers in arms sounds like

proper attenuation of your skull as it relates to your tympanic membrane is so key! I prefer a 0.7 with a slight left/right offset to compensate for ocular drift (my right eye is a little lower than the left)

"I prefer a 0.7 with a slight left/right offset"

Yes - "standard" symmetry and diameter (and depth) will not always provide even halfway tolerable sound quality.

Getting it right inevitably involves a lot of trial and errorrrxoentogwspgpg

[sorry, I rally must clean this keyboard sometime]

http://xiph.org/%7Exiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

this was great. thank you.

^ v interesting thx

Misinformation and superstition only serve charlatans.

this guy will never be in audiophile magazines