good audiophile board for selling stuff?

$3000 ? Ah - then you'll be needing our entry-level line, sir. Our serious stuff is a very reasonable $56,000

Wow. How can you possibly say things like "sweeter, more music-like sound, and a better layering of depth, especially in the mid-frequencies" when talking about a device that reads bits from a CD and transmits them digitally to another device. That is, without laughing.

That's like saying "I prefer Western Digital hard drives because they make my JPEGs' colors richer."

They make the ones more oneish and the zeros more null, you numb eared cretin!



-Zeke

Indeed, it's amazing what happens once you get a reasonable setup. Years ago, I got myself a pair of Grado Labs SR60's -- reasonably priced headphones that sound just absolutely amazing. My first discovery was that the sound card in my PC was beyond useless. I could hear buzzing when I moved the mouse and, if I tried to scroll a window, it was far more pronounced. Turned out that the CD-ROM drive's internal audio output was significantly cleaner. My next discovery was that one of my favorite Bobby McFerrin CDs had been mastered by a pack of raving lunatics who must have plugged their mastering board into a two-stroke diesel generator. I believe the audiophiles refer to this quality as "revealing".

In my home theater, I decided to blow most of my budget on quality speakers (VMPS RM2's) and everything else is fairly pedestrian Japanese gear. My speaker wire came from Home Depot and my cables are Radio Shack's "Gold" line. This worked out pretty well. What I really want now is a larger room. If I wanted to get silly, I'd go for sound-absorbing foam on the wall behind the speakers.

Edit: And my favorite bit of incomprehensible audiophile dribble came from one dealer where I was listening to some overpriced speakers. I brought along a CD-R I'd burned with a variety of tunes to really stress all the different aspects of a speaker (some jazz vocals, some big band, some classical with serious dynamics, and some techno with deep bass). One salesman said that, when you burned a CD, you were loosing "at least 20%" of the sound from the original CD. (These were straight WAV rips; no MP3 compression.) Interestingly, several of their "audiophile" CD players simply couldn't handle a CD-R, while the more pedestrian gear worked just fine.

Standard joke: What's the difference between a used car salesman and a stereo salesman?

A: The used car salesman knows when he's lying.

Right, because it specifically doesn't interpolate missing data. I mean, I understand the general concepts involved and can see how a high-quality transport (with or without built-in DAC) can read data more accurately (after all, look how much effort we have to go to to get accurate rips of CDs on the computer), but to really affect the sound quality, especially on an unmarred CD? I don't think so.

Here's one more thing I don't get about these hyper expensive CD players: who cares if the speed is dead perfect when you could cache the whole thing at whatever X speed and then just spool the data to the DAC at the exact right rate?

Sorry, I know I'm using logic which isn't allowed in high end audio.

Now about those laser turntables...

Bringing this thread back from the dead, I saw this while reading through another fourm: Volume knob that will make your music sound better

You've got to be fucking kidding me.

The best part is that, even as if we didn't know that these people are gouging, they're charging $485 for a hunk of beechwood and a T-nut, or maybe a threaded insert, if they're fancy. Maybe $5 worth of materials.

I think they're clearly missing an opportunity to sell special audiophile-quality air to pump into the room to maximize the <bullshit audiophile adjective> <bullshit audiophile noun> of the music listening experience.

Nah. Air's hard to ship. A fan and a filter would be better. Plus, you have to replace the filter every 48 listening minutes.

Don't forget the special C37 lacquer. That might cost some big money.

Edit: Oh My. I just found out the price of that lacquer. 88$ for 10ml of it.

http://www.tnt-audio.com/accessories/c37_e.html

Gah. PT Barnum was right.

I think the sellers of these "audiophile" things are in a contest to see who can sell the most ridiculous item.

Ah yes, I saw that knob linked from this list of audiophile gadgets:

http://www.ilikejam.dsl.pipex.com/audiophile.htm

What amuses me is the descriptions in the reviews describing that a POWER CABLE "dramatically improves the immediacy of a transient’s inception, allowing for an incredible expanse of harmonic information and musical envelopment to follow"

Gareth

Yet again, I bring this thread from the dead.

This can not be real, I keep telling myself this, but somehow I feel it's true:

http://www.cableburner.com/index.htm

A cable burn-in service, so your sound will be better since your cables must be burned in.

Let me get this straight. Some audiophiles will use rare metals or excessively thick connection cables to get the least amount of loss or resistance, thus "improving" their sound. Yet this company caters to those audiophiles who want their cables deliberately *degraded* by usage.

Sigh.