Audiophile shark jumping?

I first thought this was a April Fools joke, but seems these guys are for real - well, for whatever "real" means. Audiophile Ethernet cable. Only €4594 / £3875 / $5886 for a 8 m cable.

http://www.audioquest.com/ethernet/diamond

"The correct direction is determined by listening to every batch of metal conductors used in every AudioQuest audio cable. Arrows are clearly marked on the connectors to ensure superior sound quality. For best results have the arrow pointing in the direction of the flow of music. For example, NAS to Router, Router to Network Player."

OK, so while the google search engine infrastructure, the large hadron collider database and the human genome project are all OK using standard $3 cables, you need a $6000 cable to listen to spotify?

Wow. woW.

I expect they must make a lot of money from the 20% restocking fee on returns.

Probably not. If you had just paid 6 grand for your ethernet cable, would you admit you can't heart a night and day difference?

Every once in a while, I think there must be good money in the shlock audiophile business. Otherwise, why would there be so many firms like this?

What's sad is that for those same prices, you could do all sorts of things that would have a huge impact on audio quality: room treatments, furniture, cabinetry, etc.

Still doesn't beat a wooden volume control (~$500 so beats it on price but at least a cable actually could have some effect)

Err, no. Not on this cable. No better than STP or even regular cat5 for this job.

(need to be very clear about that here; otherwise some gullible googler might stumble across it as "hope" to justify wasting a lot of money).

Sadly, I'm not sure anything will "jump the shark" for the audiophile industry. There have been such ridiculous products at such ridiculous prices for so long that nothing is going to deter the faithful. For people like US, however, the tarting up of a cable like THIS certainly is a case of taking this nonsense to a whole new level.


I'm wondering if things will change once the current crop of audiophiles - still remembering the days of analog - die off. I think the market will shrink enough to put a lot of these companies out of business. There will always been people out there with money to burn on ridiculous things, but I don't think there will be as many doing it out of obsession over audio quality.

Is it terribly wrong of me to idly wonder if I should release some idiotic product into this market? I have read some of these product descriptions over the years, and after I finally stopped laughing (sometimes due to almost passing out from lack of air...) I can't help but come up with my own, even dafter ideas for 'audiophile' connectivity. I've invented some absolutely brilliant pseudoscientific rationalisations for special cables, for instance, and I've been convinced for a long time that one could, if one had a certain ethical flexibility regarding ones customers, make a really silly amount of money from them.

I mean, there must be people buying this crap, after all, or the suppliers wouldn't still be in business. Like spam, it works well enough to keep them spamming. So in that case, as the mark, I mean valued customer, obviously has more money than sense, it almost seems a shame to let it get away

It all seems to hinge on a certain amount of self-selecting psychology. The end user is convinced they have a special ability regarding audio than few others have, and therefore can really hear the difference that solid silver multistranded directional HDMI cable with a carbon-fibre sheath and special holy-water reservoir makes. Once they have spend several thousand dollars a meter on it, they damn well CAN hear a difference, their own minds ensure that. Which just reinforces the whole process...

So, in the end, you can't convince them they're wrong at all, as your measurements proving no difference between the ubercable and a bit of mains wiring merely shows that what they can hear is so subtle mere technology can't see it.

Weird. But strangely funny.

pca

I would love to see a web site of your hilarious pseudo-scientific products, but when you click to buy one, you get a SOLD OUT notice. Then track how many people got far enough to clicking on the Buy Now button.

Though I'm sure that actually making and selling those products would net you a lot of money in the short term, it's my fervent hope that the purveyors of such products eventually get convicted of fraud, and your contributions to this world are too awesome to be interrupted by jail time.

Is it fraud if the buyer believes they received the value they thought they were buying?

Speaker manufacturers have been selling audiophonic promises for decades, and continue to do so.

The key is that it all depends upon the listener and how they think they perceive the 'differences'.

Good fun to read and watch, but not my game to play.

Actually, that's an amusing idea. The problem is that if I do that someone might copy my IP and sell it for real!

pca

No I meant in this case the cable actually carries the data so if crap it could cause problems. It couldn't/wouldn't improve anything - I know that. A volume control knob however...

Do you really think so? I was wondering how carefully-worded the claims on that site were. I wonder if, when parsed out, each point could be backed up by the seller...

If you want to get into the shlock market with the ever so tiniest shred of decency, you should do a "tube amp replacement", where you carefully program a DSP to add all the distortion and "warmth" that tube people seem to crave, and then just drive things through a regular amp.

Sigh.

For the record, I continue to be a big fan of Home Depot's 12ga speaker wire. The price has gone up as with the price of copper, but it's still only $0.50/foot or thereabouts. Then I hook up some cheap gold-plated banana plugs I bought from Monoprice.

All my interconnects are cheap HDMI cables. I once bought a 3-pack of no-name HDMI cables for a friend, and it turned out that one of them was flawed. It was pretty obvious -- lots of snow and static on the TV. Replace the cable and everything was perfect.

But then you could sue them! Wouldn't that be awesome, suing them for IP over something that doesn't actually work? I love the irony there.

Wasn't there even a home cinema amp that had a tube. As in one. For a 5.1 system...

That would be fine as long as the tube was in the digital bitstream. It can 'warmth' to all the channels that way.

Only once have I been suckered into buying interconnects that were anything more than standard issue, I got some IXUS speaker cable (because it looked pretty) and a matching phono cable as it was thrown into the deal at "half-price" but was still £25 I think. The greatest shame was that the purchase was made a Richer Sounds

This was around 10 years ago, and recently I was re-using the photo cable for something and snagged one end and pulled hard, pulling the connector off the cable. Bugger I thought, that is my one nice cable ruined! Actually it turned out really well, I took it back to Richer Sounds and they replaced it no questions over the counter without a receipt under it's "lifetime" warranty. So I am now the proud owner of a slightly newer £50 phono to phono cable !!! So the extra £££ was actually worth it (kind of).

This new cable had direction arrows on it, tried it both ways, what a waste of time that was! I feel stupid even thinking about trying that!

Cheers

Cris

Just because your ears couldn't distinguish the difference does mean the sounds weren't richer and more colourful! I'm off to the shipping dock to pick up the special iSCSI cables I ordered to reduce the latency on my SAN, something todo with the shape of the copper core, or something...

Sell it on the resale market as 'brand new' and use the money for something else

Really? The same thing happened to my IXUS cables too, at least 12 yrs old, if only I had the time to take them back. None of my cheapo ones have broken or in any way malfunctioned, but the IXUS ones are certainly pretty.

Yes, looking back on it, that would have been a far more sensible thing to do !!!

Cheers

Cris

Yep, really!

I was quite amazed that they didn't even ask for a receipt, just swapped it out over the counter. Maybe that won't work every time but it did for me

Sometimes I don't mind paying a bit more if I get service like that, however I won't be paying £££ for cables in the near future!!!

Cheers

Cris

In the US, Monoprice.com is taking the wind out of the high priced cable game.

Their support is rather good, which makes it doubly impressive. I have been a customer for years, and have mostly good things to say.

Now they are moving into other 'high retail margin' product areas. Apparently their large IPS displays are also being well received.

Interesting! I hadn't seen that Monoprice was selling their own monitors. I wonder who actually makes them and for which other companies they manufacture.

Monoprice is great. I just wish they shipped a little faster to my area...