| There is no disdain for audiophiles. There is a lot of disdain for audio-fools: people who go beyond the entirely defensible "This is what I like" and enter into counter-factual explanations of why their preferences constitute truth. It's always fashionable to crap on people who waste their money on things which are at best immaterial and at worst actively harmful to sound quality. Drawing with a green marker on the edge of your CDs will not improve the sound. Shun Mook Mpingo disks do not and cannot do anything for audible resonance control of your room. Replacing your volume knob with mahogany might look nice, but will not change the sound quality. Unless you live in a particularly bad region of the world, a line conditioner will not improve your sound; if you do, a UPS does a better job. Under no circumstances will replacing a working, up-to-code electrical outlet with an audio-rated outlet improve anything about the sound. In general, an amplifier does an excellent job of removing noise from the power supply before adding it to the signal, and there's a nice objective measurement you can perform to see how good a job each one does. Ethernet cables are not directional. Speaker cables are not directional. Interconnects are not directional. Anyone selling you one of the above cables and claiming that it is directional is at best a fool and at worst a liar who is selling you a product that is defective. Raising your cables off the floor with expensive blocks may look good to you, but it doesn't change the sound. Paying for gold connectors improves the corrosion resistance, but the going rate varies from quite reasonable to extortionate. Silver cables and connectors are a bad idea; copper is excellent. Lamp cord works well. For short runs, an unbent wire clothes hanger will work in a way indistinguishable from a properly constructed cable. Claims of audibility need to be subjected to measurement, both of the systems and of the people claiming distinguishability. Tests must be double-blind: that is, the experimenter and the subject should both not know what the tested article is during the test. In conclusion: people like to fool themselves. That's fine, as long as they don't fool other people, too. |