[pclmulqdq]

What I don't get about this is that marketers keep getting away with pushing this BS on the audiofool public.

There is a core group of audiophile/EEs who design DACs, amps and the like and who do know what matters for sound quality, and there's a whole pile of marketers who try to jump on the train with gold-plated power cables and (apparently) expensive chunks of wood. The engineers don't seem to care to call out the marketers on their BS. Maybe they just aren't effective at it.

As a result, the public can't really tell the difference between true and false things, like how gold-plated headphone connectors are more conductive and durable than the cheap version (and thus sound better), but gold plated power cables have no effect on sound quality. If they did, there might be a lot more audiophiles since there is some semblance of authority about what is worth paying for. The engineers are sabotaging their market by refusing to educate customers.

[daniel-cussen]

There's stupid shit and it involves scams, like going to a record store and they say "hey maybe you're the chosen one" play a track then switch gear and say "listen to it again" and play a different track pretending to be the first, and bam, audiophile.

Then there's the blind. One of my ancestors was a blind Spanish classical guitarist, played in concerts often. So for them? They can tell you the brand of headphones you're listening to from the other side of the room. And that's nothing. They also think faster, listen to sound at a much much faster rate than ordinary speech. Like 4x? Something. Sky's the limit. And when they speak to each other they speak much faster more like the speech synthesizer.