Audiophiles are crazy

[Jeff White]

Enjoy.

http://lessloss.com/

"Our innovative solution for dealing with the inevitable distortions..."

"The total number of power cables in this project was 70. Louis Motek travelled personally to Riga to oversee operations on the day of installation. Installation was completed in a single day."

Price: $595

2 cables ? 5 % off
3+ cables ? 10 % off

$37,485.00 worth of power cables.

Finally, the clients' creativity being completely hampered due to those pesky old distorting power cables being used is no longer an issue. Thank the gods they were able to be installed in a single day. One wouldn't want the studio to be shut down and bleeding money for more than a day, ya know?

Jeff

[Andy Peters]

Burn in on speakers (any kind of transducer) I can kind of understand. It has moving parts.

What gets my goat is when audiophiles talk about burning in amps, preamps, or.... believe it or not.... CABLES.

Yah, those $3000 speaker wires sound MUCH better after they burn in for a couple weeks.

Have you ever noticed that the audiophile cable sellers offer a money-back return policy where the return time is less than the burn-in time?

-a

[Snarl 12/8]

I have a theory about burn in time. That it's actually the time it takes an average [crazy] audiophile to get used to the sound of the new gear. Basically, it's our ears that get burnt in, not the gear itself. I've noticed this in myself, where at first I might not think a mic, speaker, headphones, preamp, etc., etc., sounds all that great, but after a week of using it (or less) I start thinking it sounds pretty damn good.

Has anyone done double blind experiments on burn in? Or careful, anechoic chamber before/after recordings and flipped phase to see if there was any difference at all? Much less an euphonic one?

edit: I feel like I should clarify my position. I believe that burn in probably does help some types of gear or electrical components (transducers maybe, maybe caps?), but I'm not 100% sure which ones. Although I do have a sortof list in my head of stuff that I personally feel can't possibly be affected by burn in. Like power cables, for example. I also don't believe that power cables, or audio cables could possibly be directional, since, y'know, the electricity is AC and generally going back and forth equally. So, WTF?! I discount heavily any other claims made by someone that's claiming that shit.

[jhharvest]

There has been some experiments. Afaik speakers might slightly change their characteristics over time but other pieces of kit generally won't. But true audiophiles reject double blind ABX because of the unnatural listening circumstances which makes it impossible to appreciate the subtler nuances of the marketing copy...

[vvv]

Strikes me that tubes should be burned in?

See here and here, for example ...

[shedshrine]

$1000 earbuds
" Quad Hi-Definition Balanced MicroDrivers for extended high-end crystal sound.
A revolutionary low-pass filter that will act like a subwoofer. So much so that Shure has a pending patent on this new design.
You will now be able to adjust between 3 sound signatures via user serviceable nozzle - user changeable for different sound signatures. You can choose between warm sound, balanced sound or bright sound "