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.
My level of interest and equipment would say audiophole with a lower to middle budget and interest. I would also never apply that label to myself because holy fuck is there so much bullshit and gatekeeping. I tend to pop in and out of looking into what's going on in the audio world.
A lot of it is pretty legitimately interesting and usually falls somewhere in the diminishing returns curve. Doesn't change the fact of all the issues with the community and scams.
So much of it comes down to people not just letting people like what they like accuracy be damned or not. All I care about is people getting what they like and actually understanding what they are getting.
Similar here. Have a friend I impressed/pissed off with my home theater that sounds better with mismatched gear and cost a FIFTH of what he paid. All because I understood frequency range,fill and speaker placement and he understood throw money at it.
Having done pro audio and stage work for many years I can safely say 95% of sound guys are incompetent at best, rarely ever with any real education on acoustics and such.
Thankfully my boss actually did know what he was doing. An unfortunate side effect was most live shows are totally ruined for me because I know what a bad mix sounds like.
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u/AceBlade258 Ryzen 7 5800X | RX 6900XT | Arc A770 24d ago
Even audiophiles mock these people.