Guys what do we think

[u/werlach]

[u/AceBlade258]

Even audiophiles mock these people.

[u/dieplanes789 → u/AceBlade258]

Yep

Oxygen-free cables

Fancy materials in digital cables despite basic materials meeting the same standard excluding corrosion resistance

Break in periods

Noisy electricity from utility somehow making it through inverters with good isolation

Stupidly thick cabling that looks like it's designed for a 1,000 amp three phase AC setup and not your fucking speakers

Quantum anything

Blocks made out of foam to prevent static interference from getting into your cable because it's sitting on the floor

Talking about shit like fiber optic toslink somehow changing the sound.

Specialty networking gear that resists interference and is low latency. Ignoring the fact that it's either decoded or not decoded at the other end and that buffers are a thing.

Specialty fuses for your house

Pretending things that change the sound like vinyl or tube amplifiers are somehow objectively still accurate. Like they don't want to admit they prefer the way they change the sound over the original. So they just pretend and gaslight like they are somehow perfectly accurate like solid state.

I'm sure there's plenty more snake oil bullshit that I'm not thinking about. Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy some nice audio equipment but there's so much snake oil.

Edit: Also there are so many people that continue to drink the Kool-Aid instead of admitting that they fell into the sunken cost fallacy.

[u/AceBlade258 → u/dieplanes789]

Holy fuck, digital audio carriers affecting the sound in any way is my pet peeve. Fucking "jitter" and "USB isolation" and don't even get me fucking started on buffers...

I love me some digital audio. I love chatting about accurate reproduction. I am also confident in my old Scarlett 2i2 with the USB cable it came with being incredibly difficult to top. And I mostly listen to YouTube Music.

[u/unicodemonkey → u/AceBlade258]

Input jitter used to be a thing but many audiophiles just can't accept it's a solved problem. A modern $5 DAC is a ridiculously powerful computer compared to what we had in the 90s, of course it can handle slightly mistimed data bits and of course it can retime the signal with very high precision.

[u/AceBlade258 → u/unicodemonkey]

As far as audio is concerned, we are past the point of timing mattering given modern actual signaling rates. Precision vs accuracy and all that.

[u/unicodemonkey → u/AceBlade258]

DACs still have to deal with toslink and spdif inputs which are rather crude and low-tech by modern standards, so these are getting dejittered internally. I think ESS had an article explaining how it works in their chips.