[zabil]

> You’ll find people in every hobby who are more into the gear than the actual activity

Honestly, that’s part of the fun for some of us, even early on. I’ve been playing guitar for a while now, and while I enjoy it, the repetitive nature can sometimes get dull. Exploring new gear and chasing different tones has been my way of breaking through those ruts.

Yes, it’s expensive and it eats into practice time — no doubt. But some of us are just wired to enjoy the experimentation. I eventually found a setup I really like, but I don’t regret going through the gear phase. It kept things exciting and helped me stay connected to the hobby.

[etrautmann]

That’s been exactly my experience with photography as well.

[atoav]

Don't get me wrong here, I am deeply interested in gear and sound, after all I design and build my own modular synthesizer modules, guitar pedals, speaker cabinets and so on.

So the reality of what forms a sound matters to me because I like to be in control of the result. And that means that I can't rely on the countless wrong poetic fantasies of people in the market to sell more gear, consisting of cosmetic stuff that doesn't impact the sound.

That does not mean I spend no time researching gear, quite the opposite. I just complained that what people think impacts their sound isn't what actually impacts their sound, because they have been given factually wrong mental models. And I know they are factually wrong because I experimented with applying them in practise.

E.g. one laughable mental model is sound per material analogy. You use silver in a cable (a good conductor at least), so that must therefore make for a "silvery" tone (typically they hear that in the high frequency range somewhere). Oh no the manufacturer used metal in the speaker enclosure? So now it sounds metallic and sterile. They used wood? Warm and rich. They used spongy mushrooms? Probably very psychadelic, you get the idea. Reasoning on the level of a kindergardener.

And that is it. No measurement, no blind A/B test, just mumbo-jumbo and fools who swear they could hear the gras grow if someone just tells them there was gras growing while the lawn is made of plastic.

For silver cables you can do a null test. Run the same signal through 5m of copper and 5m of silver and subtract one from another, while carefully making sure the levels match. The difference will be some noise down there at the edge of your audio interfaces recording capabilities. And that difference is absolutely inaudible. But what about the different higher conductivity of silver? Just use more copper. If there is any topic we know a ton about it is how electrons transmit charge in conducters and so far no impactful special frequency and dynamic-changing properties have been found in a piece of wire.

Meanwhile everybody skips room acoustics, cause that is boring and labour intensive and involves having to understand how complex sound behaves in confined spaces and how to measure that. And lets not ponder why Hifi people use unbalanced connections..

It is easier to sell someone highly pure silver cables than it is to sell them bass absorber their room would actually need to listen to the music some sound engineers mixed in decades ago on NS-10s.

TL;DR: I just find it sad that people can't just enjoy music listening or music making without buying into esotheric nonsense that does not describe reality as it is. Music is already magical. The hear it is made on and the stuff it is played back on is purely physical however. And that does not take away from the magic, IMO it adds to it.

[vegadw]

Good cables (Though maybe not silver, that shouldn't matter much), ironically, actually do make an audible difference. Just good, oxygen free, low capacitance cable is what you want. Because guitars are high impedance and how tone pots are wired and the input your plugging into (Be it a pedal, amp, or interface) also usually being high impedance, how much capacitance (Not resistance, not really) matters a lot in where the natural cutoff of the passive LRC circuit your making. Go listen to some demos on Youtube just swapping cables, it matters.

It does mostly matter for noise though, yeah.

Also, active guitars largely get around these problems, as do low-impedance pickups.

I find it weird that people chase all these different pickups and sounds instead of just getting a modern, active, flat-response pickup (See Cycfi's Nu & Spectra series) and EQing and compressing to the response they want.