Could a scam artist make a quick buck in audio

[mep]

Both of these posts are combative while contributing zero to the conversation. Is this really all you have? I not only showed that the FFT article doesn't prove what some people think it proves, I also explained why it doesn't. As they say: Epic Fail.

--Ethan

Making an honest observation is different than being combative.

 

[microstrip]

Everyone can be sure that some of the tweaks are scams - the field of tweak is mainly subjective, and badly intentioned people or simply, deluded or baffled people can easily create a myth.

The critical question is however how can we separate the trusty tweaks and who should we trust to validate this separation? At what point are we moving from improvement to placebo?

Most of the people who systematically warns us against tweaks and expensive hifi have never brought nothing we could use in practical terms with any reliability, as IMHO the systematic use of their methods would reduce significantly the quality of my stereo audio system and the enjoyment I get from it.

We have a thread going on on cable elevators. Some brave people reported that under blind test could not hear any difference and could easily accept removing them from their systems. As far as I saw, no one could strongly support their use. Would we be brave enough to have the attitude towards all the cables and power conditioning devices of our system, eliminating them step by step if we do not get a valid result in a blind test?

 

[Orb]

Bah so no-one interested in my quantum-nano tech paint (equal to home decoration) and wallpaper idea?
I guess it was not so cunning ah well

CHeers
Orb

 

[MylesBAstor]

That study doesn't prove what some audiophooles seem to think it means. It has nothing to do with "ears can hear what science can't measure," which of course is incorrect. All that article addresses is one type of measurement, and this is not new information anyway. Yes, FFT windowing limits the frequency resolution of the display. Anyone who has seen the skirts on an FFT graph of a single frequency sine wave understands this. As for peers, the discussion here is just starting:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=99371



Further - and I've made this point many times before - a null test will show all differences between two signals, including differences you might not even be looking for. For example, if someone believes that two hard drives sound different when playing the same Wave file, you can set up a null in DAW software to prove or disprove that hypothesis in about five minutes. If the files null to total silence, then they are identical - period, end of story.

--Ethan

That's opposed to dial o' matic phooles who battle windmills?

 

[JackD201]

Both of these posts are combative while contributing zero to the conversation. Is this really all you have? I not only showed that the FFT article doesn't prove what some people think it proves, I also explained why it doesn't. As they say: Epic Fail.

--Ethan

No and sorry, No.

 

[GaryProtein]

Could a scam artist make a quick buck in audio?


They do every day.

 

[Gregadd]

Apparently there is a big fake olive oil trade

 

[Orb]

And a fake beef trade going on in Europe, seems some cheap "beef" products are over 60% horse.
This does not say which part of the horse just identified dna....

The supermarkets say "it is not our fault because we buy from distributors in good faith [leaving out their thoughts on how said distributors achieve the insanely cheap price".
The distributor say "it is not our fault because we buy the meat from abroad and they say it is beef [leaving out also their thoughts plausible deniability and best to not know how it is done at insanely cheap prices".

Hopefully middle class will wake up now and stop buying meats from supermarkets, who deliberately wanted to shaft local butchers and the concept of knowing where the meat came from.
I feel for those who are on the breadline and are sometimes stuck where they can buy meat from leaving it to be a supermarket budget line.
So anyone fancy a kebab instead, mmmmmm
Cheers
Orb

 

[mep]

It could be worse. There have been recent stories about restaurant owners who hit a deer on the way to work and took said deer into their restaurant kitchens in order to butcher and serve it up for their customers. And you wonder why some of those Chinese all you can eat buffets are so cheap. And no, I'm not making this stuff up:

http://www.wkyt.com/wymt/home/headlines/Whitley-County-restaurant-shut-down-after-road-kill-found-in-kitchen-171867021.html

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

Ground pounding naysaying engineering types are handed their ass, in spades. the kind that says if it can't be measured, that it does not exist. That if the 'law' says it can't exist, that it does not. That they fail to understand that there are no laws, only theory. That they push engineering principles into being some sort of inviolate religious context.

That they deny, vehemently so... that hearing can beat or trump measurement principles and associated theory. Over and over. Relentlessly. viciously.

When will they learn.

But they don't, you see. They run from the discussion of their logic faults and come back to attack thinking people again and again. The worst kind of fault. The kind that keeps repeating itself, from lack of mental correction, the lack of recognition in fault, and then change... of the self. That such circular expression is the somewhere around the level of a pouting child.

No wonder that those of us who trust our hearing are so drained and exasperated. We are wrestling with stubborn children, who refuse to even begin to understand the fault in their logic function and basic mental position.


Here's the ass-handing for today. And I promise, it's a good. solid. beating.

Might keep them quiet for a few days. One can only hope:


Human hearing beats the Fourier uncertainty principle

For the first time, physicists have found that humans can discriminate a sound's frequency (related to a note's pitch) and timing (whether a note comes before or after another note) more than 10 times better than the limit imposed by the Fourier uncertainty principle. Not surprisingly, some of the subjects with the best listening precision were musicians, but even non-musicians could exceed the uncertainty limit.

The results rule out the majority of auditory processing brain algorithms that have been proposed, since only a few models can match this impressive human performance.

The researchers, Jacob Oppenheim and Marcelo Magnasco at Rockefeller University in New York, have published their study on the first direct test of the Fourier uncertainty principle in human hearing in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters. The Fourier uncertainty principle states that a time-frequency tradeoff exists for sound signals, so that the shorter the duration of a sound, the larger the spread of different types of frequencies is required to represent the sound. Conversely, sounds with tight clusters of frequencies must have longer durations. The uncertainty principle limits the precision of the simultaneous measurement of the duration and frequency of a sound. To investigate human hearing in this context, the researchers turned to psychophysics, an area of study that uses various techniques to reveal how physical stimuli affect human sensation. Using physics, these techniques can establish tight bounds on the performance of the senses.

http://phys.org/news/2013-02-human-fourier-uncertainty-principle.html

So how many of the magic pebbles did you buy?

Tim

 

[JackD201]

Horse meat passed off as beef is nothing compared to melamine in powdered milk and plaster of paris in pork buns. Grrrrrrrrrrrr.

 

[mep]

How about the street vendors who take rancid oil that has been used to death by a restaurant and poured out and they use it to cook you some yummy treats?

 

[Orb]

Horse meat passed off as beef is nothing compared to melamine in powdered milk and plaster of paris in pork buns. Grrrrrrrrrrrr.

Yeah that was shocking about the baby milk in China (I think).
Problem though is the state of some horses throughout Europe and the medicine used to treat them (still not as bad as the baby milk scandal I agree - glad you mentioned that as shows how far fake products go).
Going back a couple of decades, used to be normal practice to feed cattle meat and critically bone meal.
I bet if all the food chains checked carefully some of this practice still goes on, and a classic way for some pretty nasty diseases to enter the food chain; whether or not in traditional form they are transmissible to humans should be irrelevant IMO but is used as a defense by some in agriculture.

Cheers
Orb

 

[FrantzM]

Hi

Don't get me started on the state of our foods. The list of poisons passing for food is long . It is only matched by the disease they produce. From the seemingly "healthy" margarine to bugger patty that won't ever spoil and all this under the "watchful" eyes of health authorities.

back to the subject of the thread

I am asking the question wih all honesty: Don't you think that the level of Snake Oil products in Audio is unusually high? maybe higher than other hobbies?

 

[opus111]

Not only under the "watchful" eye of health authorities but also actively encouraged by government subsidies - e.g. HFCS.

Yes I think the level of snake oil is higher than in other hobbies, but then audio guys are more religious than average. This makes them above averagely gullible and hence this attracts the snake oil pushers.

<edit> I'm here using 'religious' in a slightly idiosyncratic way, but what I mean has a fairly concise definition. To me religious behaviour is any behaviour where a non-falsifiable justification is given for it.

 

[JackD201]

My only other serious hobby is Golf. Golf might actually be a bit worse. Imagine a scenario where the governing body actually imposes performance limits yet every body claims to make equipment that will make you longer and straighter.

There are some serious similarities. One could get his swing analyzed using ultra slow mo and doppler radar to give him swing speed, clubhead speed, launch angles, swing paths etc. That would supposedly dictate what clubheads, shafts, lie and face angles, swing weights, kick points, etc. to use. In other words get custom fitted. Doing so can potentially save you a lot of money because it contains costs incurred from purely trial and error. The hitch is, effectivity of fitting is directly proportional to the player's consistency. Sound familiar? Sometimes you could get fitted but the look at address or the "feel" is all wrong. Being a game that is largely mental, that alone could screw up the objective which is a better scoring average. Accurate but not musical?

So a mid-low handicapper like me will benefit less from really fine fitting than say a PGA Tour professional. At this point diminishing returns start to really kick in. For a beginner or long time hacker, that's where the snake oil happens. Promises of great results for money instead of effort. Someone who knows his game can separate the chaff from the wheat to a greater extent the same way someone who knows his preferences and priorities in audio can.

 

[Orb]

Hi

Don't get me started on the state of our foods. The list of poisons passing for food is long . It is only matched by the disease they produce. From the seemingly "healthy" margarine to bugger patty that won't ever spoil and all this under the "watchful" eyes of health authorities.

back to the subject of the thread

I am asking the question wih all honesty: Don't you think that the level of Snake Oil products in Audio is unusually high? maybe higher than other hobbies?

Well, I think we all can say that Snake Oil products in audio is nowhere near out of control as food
So in general context of fakes and snake oil, audio is not too bad.
Cheers
Orb

 

[Alan Sircom]

Well, I think we all can say that Snake Oil products in audio is nowhere near out of control as food
So in general context of fakes and snake oil, audio is not too bad.
Cheers
Orb

That puts the audio industry on a par with the second best one-legged quarterback in all of Wyoming.

I'd have to say that if I were going to set myself up as a scam artist, I'd choose a better 'patch' than audio. OK, so there is the unfortunate instance that no matter how far from the straight-and-narrow you go in audio, you'll always find someone more crazy than you. You'll also get a group of supporters and followers. But in some respects, that subset of complete and utter nutcases is no larger and smaller than in any population - how many people worldwide began a sentence with "Well, as a Virgo..." or "Speaking as a Sagittarian..." today, and meant it?

The fact remains however that in audio you are dealing with a relatively small pool of people. Scams seem to work best if you can take a lot of people for a small amount of money, a small amount of people for a lot of money or a lot of people for a lot of money. Trying to take few people for an OK amount of money is not really the sort of returns a wannabe Ponzi or a Madoff dreams of.

While I am sure there have been, are and always will be those who try to scam people in audio, there is also a lot of sincere belief in the veracity of a company's product by the designers, no matter how abjectly insane that product might appear.

I guess it all harks back to the fundamental continuum in audio today. I'm pretty sure he wasn't the first person to coin the phrase, but Floyd-Toole's description of audio as, "science in the service of art" fits well. Unfortunately, audio has become so polarized of late that one group of people see that quote as, "SCIENCE mf btf fnuedft pf fpf", while the other group read it as, "ffubpth mf btf fnuedft pf ART". One extreme is too arid to survive in the wild, the other too impractical. The pragmatic, real-world response is somewhere between those two polar opposites, and where that 'somewhere' is depends from person to person and from country to country. It's a fluid thing too, changing with each year.

 

[Ethan Winer]

Trying to take few people for an OK amount of money is not really the sort of returns a wannabe Ponzi or a Madoff dreams of.

Sure, though I imagine Noel Lee of Monster is pretty darn wealthy.

--Ethan

 

[mep]

Sure, though I imagine Noel Lee of Monster is pretty darn wealthy.

--Ethan

So Noel Lee is a scam artist? Is that permissible to accuse a manufacturer of being a scam artist on WBF? Aren't there tens of thousands of happy owners of Monster Cable products or are his customers lining up to take him to court?