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James Randi Posts $1M Award On Speaker Cables
elrond amandil writes "James Randi offered US$ 1 million to anyone who can prove that a pair of $7,250 Pear Anjou speaker cables is any better than ordinary (and also overpriced) Monster Cables. Pointing out the absurd review by audiophile Dave Clark, who called the cables 'danceable,' Randi called it 'hilarious and preposterous.' He added that if the cables could do what their makers claimed, 'they would be paranormal.'"
... are listed here. Those wooden knobs are a real bargain! Only $485!
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
I find the audiophile phenomenon to be mighty amusing, even though I'm guilty of throwing away a few extra dollars for an "oxygen free" guitar cable or two. But holy crap, that's quite a price difference -- and for what? If anybody ever gives me crap about getting a Cinema Display instead of a Dell monitor, I'll just think of the Pear Anjou cables. Getting a monitor to match your workstation's case at least has "interior decorating" to justify the difference in cost, but who's ever going to see your speaker cables? Yikes!
P.S. Did you know that if you mark around the edges of your CDs with a sharpie that the music sounds better? ;-)
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
Well, the cables may be better according to measurements, but can you actually HEAR the difference, which is a totally seperate thing.
Ideally, you'd do a double blind study with a some audiophiles, playing tones and then music through speakers hooked up with one set of cables, and then the other.
Does the cable TRULY produce audiably different music?
The thing is, even the cheap drilled wire of your phone-line is good enough to transmit multi-mhz signals for DSL over a few km.
Even for Multi-Ghz coax cable for high-frequency applications, including gold-plated SMA connectors you dont really pay more than $100/m.
thats 5(!) orders of magnitude higher frequency than those cables operate at. Just to make the picture a bit more visual for the imagination impaired: the difference between the requirements of those cables, and audio cables, is bigger than the speed difference between a turtle and the voyager probes.
Audiophiles often use science to back their claims, but the mere fact that they dont unterstand anything about what they are talking about makes it pseudoscience/voodoo.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
"If someone gives $7000 just for cables, there is certainly some difference in his head comparing to the head of someone who is not crazy and/or mentally challenged."
If he has $50 million in the bank, his perception of the value of money is going to be different from yours.
Deleted
I've been a self described "audiophile" for quite a long time now, and it never ceases to amaze me just how much cash you can drop on upgrades for a sound or theater system. Speakers, woofers, tweeters, 2 way and 3 way setups, room design, cables, terminations, power cleaning... the list of products can go on and on forever. Some of these guys are really and truly nuts. I spent about 2 hours one day talking to an "expert" at a Tweeter and he firmly believed that due to the current flowing through the speaker wires you should have them elevated above the floor (on paper cups that are turned upside down and have a trench cut through them to support the wire) and leave them "at rest for at least a few days before pushing current through them to settle the magnetism radiating from them". The amount of money that can be spent on something as simple as speaker cables completely boggles the mind, and almost all of the marketing is spooky ghost stories about how this one works better than another one due to umpteen factors that nobody even really knows anything about. The problem is that it's difficult to scientifically PROVE that one cable isn't better than the other (at least as far as I'm aware), which is likely why he's put up this challenge. Proving the performance of a speaker cable beyond simply resistance, length and loss is hardly an exact science and often is open to the interpretation of the listener. Perhaps a blind test with a large amount of subjects would help but then you're still dealing with opinions which can hardly be substituted for fact.
Frankly, the drug dealers were our best customers - they just wanted something loud and they didn't f**k you around by insisting you order the latest greatest cable as reviewed by their favourite HiFi magazine. Paid in cash too.
I like to use mil-standard aircraft "Tefzel" wiring wherever I can for all my audio connections. It's a bit pricier than common hook-up wire if you buy it new, but I get lots of scraps for free (some very long "scraps" too!) from a friend who does avionics wiring in airplanes. Apparently whenever he re-wires an aircraft, they always remove the old wiring and use complete runs of brand new wires off the spool, and never splice or re-use old wire even if the old wire is in perfectly good shape.
Tefzil has a teflon insulation on it that is incredibly tough and resistant to abrasion, chemicals and oxidation from ozone or UV light deterioration. The stranded copper wire inside is oxygen-free and has a small percentage of silver alloyed in it to reduce the voltage drop per foot and it is tin-plated too, for corrosion protection and ease of soldering. This stuff lasts for over 50 years easily and retains like-new appearance and performance for decades.
Digital is different -- either it worked or it didn't.
While the error rate for HDTV is probably so low that any cable will work, can we please all stop saying "digital either works or it doesn't" as if digital channels are perfect and there is no such thing as error correction coding in digital signals?
There is quite a range where digital signals are transmitted without error, but in a bad physical channel, there will certainly be errors, and the error correction has to be really good in order to give you your original signal.
Error correction on a physical channel that's transmitting digital data works by "guessing" what the most likely transmitted symbol is, and it's not outside the realm of possibility that the algorithm guesses wrong.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
OK.
Maybe Randi's efforts don't truly matter in the grand scheme of things as one poster has mentioned.
But if there's one thing that website can do a very good job of, it's helping people understand the importance of and difficulty of crafting and executing proper double-blind tests.
I imagine I've been trolled. But your trivial snippets of "tests" of music or literature appreciation wouldn't in anyway shape or form qualify as double-blind tests. Goodness, I wouldn't even consider them anything other than cheap stunts providing no meaningful results whatsoever.
Please take the time to wander over to the JREF and especially the forums where you can read excruciatingly thorough discussions on the many audiophile type claims that are very similar to this. There is a great deal of information there provided by the claimants and forum members who have worked to hash out double-blind tests.
I've personally attended a "skeptics" meeting where he was giving a talk. One thing that struck me was how much hero-worshiping was going on. Some guy spent a good 20-25 minutes telling us about how well he knew James Randi, how close he was to James Randi, how he could pick up the phone and call James Randi, yadda yadda.
This was after waiting about 30 minutes for them to start- they had to get a laptop working with various videos of James Randi on (mostly asian) TV. Each video, of course, did not play properly, or they played the wrong ones (ie, the same thing over and over.)
His work is worthwhile and he's decent showman, but he's also grossly over-sold and over-hyped. The devotion (if not downright worshiping) is hilarious, given that it is being done by a bunch of people who call themselves "skeptics."
Please help metamoderate.
The reason I'm asking is the "psychology" of an experience isn't just the consciously reportable part. Philosopher Ned Block has done some great work consolidating the research into experience and reportability, and concludes that what we're aware of phenomenologically is of far wider scope than what we're able to access in reportable form. A number of my friends are professional jazz critics. Even for the best of them, what they're able to report from a concert is far less than what they're able to consciously (and unconsciously) experience of it. This isn't just the subtle effects, but some of the most overt aspects of the experience - to the listener. But these aspects don't map into our spoken vocabulary - although another musician will often be able to describe them with more music. (A lot of music is musicians describing other music.)
So the blind test you'd need to do is of more than whether listeners can tell you about the difference. The test needs to be about whether the experience has been phenomenologically different for the listeners, perhaps - especially because it's music - in ways where words fail them. To do that you're going to have to do some sort of longer-term tracking and evaluations of outcomes. For instance, if it's music that fills the particular listener with joy, is there more joy at the end of an hour's listening? That would be the measure of a true psychological effect. It's not psycho-acoustics we need to measure, but different outcomes in the inward experience of mood and consciousness.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I've always been amused by the cable thing. Even "high end" gear tends to use RCA phono jacks, which they gold plate, rather than BNC connectors, which are known to be flat to 50MHz and don't come loose.
Even Monster Cable for speaker cable is silly. All you need is heavy-gauge copper. Nothing else matters.
I was amused some years ago to find that Monster Cable didn't make VGA cables, where signal degradation is a real issue for long cables. That's a high bandwidth analog signal, and they'd have to actually work to make a good one. Eventually, they did get into VGA cables, which they overprice as usual. A high quality 5 meter VGA cable can be obtained for about $8, but Monster will charge you many times that.
The "tubes vs. transistors" amplifier thing is amusing. Back in 1990, Bob Carver, who designs amplifiers, challenged two high-end audio magazines to give him any audio amplifier at any price, and he'd duplicate its sound in one of his lower cost transistor amps. Two magazines took him up on the challenge. He won. Then, almost as a joke, he built the Carver Silver 7 amplifier, which is all tube and sold for $17,000/pair. Each amp has two chassis, one for the power supply, and the thing is chrome-plated. Audiophiles bought the things. Then he came out with a transistor amplifier with the same transfer function at 1/40th the price.
There are things that do matter, like read error counts on CDs, but they're usually hidden from consumers. Early CD players had error counters, but the industry agreed to hide that information when people started complaining. Now, most CD players reread and buffer, so it's less of an issue.
reminds me of the penn and teller bullshit on bottled water. if you tell a sucker that he is getting an ultra fancy product, his ego makes him believe you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfPAjUvvnIc
"People are hungry for this kind of thing," Randi said. "Knowledge of the future represents power, and people are looking for power, so they pay money to astrologers and 1-900 numbers, not realizing that if the astrologers and operators of the 1-900 service really had all this power, they'd use it for themselves and not have to do all this marketing to others."
Not sure what kind of speakers Nostradamus may have been using, tho.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
Think of all the Audiophiles who will go and purchase these $7000 cables to try to claim Randi's $1,000,000 prize. Randi may have actually increased the number of people who will hear about and purchase these overpriced monstrosities.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
When asked by a customer, I generally suggest a certain brand of speaker cable that sells in the $300 range. IBHEAE - I build hi-end audio electronics
Good to know. I'll never get closer than 10 feet to the door of your shop.
20 years ago, it was the gold-plated phono plug that made all the difference, when US$100 was nothing to get a better brilliance. And the cable from the record player to the (pre-)amp, it could be had at US$100/foot. Before I disgress, I was also in the business, 30 years ago, and absolutely enjoyed to see the cables within the record player as well as in the amp / pre-amp. You'd easily hit a meter of 30-sen shielded cable here and there, with another meter of 100-$ cable inbetween. Now make the calculations, if you still want to: How did the one meter 100-$ cable improve the sound ?! Compared to just another meter at 30 sen, that is. In case you don't happen to be an electrical engineer, these are just serial black boxes.
In order to disgress further, 20 years ago I was acceptance engineer of classical recording equipment for millions. I used to walk around the places and stages, seeing the drums of 1-$ cables, of easily 100 m in length, standing about, through which those very signals travelled before being recorded. And then, speaking engineering-wise, adding maybe a meter of gold-plated cable for some astronomic price, will make all the difference ?! From, instead, adding another one meter to the already existing 100 m ? Holy crap !
RTFA, this magician puts 4 feet of that super-super-cable between power amp and speakers. Through how many more feet will that signal run in the interior of both power amp and speaker until it reaches the coils (which are also made from cheapo solid copper) ? And often being sent through meters of more cheapo solid copper as crossover ? And none of those internal cables have any special quality.
Second, if the cable between power amp and speakers was that important, or, better, was any important, we'd much better do away with it altogether, and assemble the power amp within the speakers ! Pah, there you have it ! Even less loss than the one on the 4 feet of 7200 $ cable ! Meaning, no expenses at all for cable, no interferences at all; and you save 7200 $ !
Oh, sorry, not you in particular. Because you are manufacturer of such stuff, and if everyone had a good common sense, you wouldn't be able to put food on your family (R), at least not from cable sales.
The taste of wine is less, though still quite, subjective. More importantly, you get wine snob idiots who made up this whole ridiculous vocabulary to explain all these fancy subtleties of wine. The funny thing about wine double blind tests is when these same wine snobs can't tell the difference between a $30 bottle of wine and a $200 bottle of wine. So double-blind wine tests performed by random people? Not extremely useful, though still interesting. Double blind wine tests performed by wine snobs? Priceless.
Same with audiophile double blinds. These assholes make the most ridiculous claims full of complete crap nonsense terms they've made up. If they can't pass a double-blind test and prove that their silly theories can defy science, they deserve to be laughed at.
The important thing about James Randi is this. In the '70s there were a whole lot of people claiming to have scientifically demonstrated paranormal abilities. There was a public perception that things like telepathy and various other paranormal phenomena valid subjects of scientific study. In fact many very reputable scientists were taken in. There were studies done that showed that such phenomena existed and were subject to scientific study. Then James Randi came along and duplicated the tests and outright said he was using trickery (even told you what trickery he was using). He then set up tests that would prevent people from getting the results using any of the tricks he knew. No one was able to get results under those conditions. It is quite likely that if it wasn't for James Randi (and a few others like him) parapsychology would be a recognized science today. The scientists of the 70's couldn't find any flaws in the experiments that were run to demonstrate various "psychic" abilities, James Randi did (and proved it).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I find this whole audiophile thing to be absurd, but tubes are the real deal. Maybe not for stereo systems, but for guitar amps there is a noticeable different between those that are tube and transistor based. Tubes saturate differently than transistors. In many applications this is undesirable, but in the case of a guitar amp you will usually want some saturation. Tubes and transistors produce demonstrably different waveforms. Audiophile products (like the wooden knobs referenced earlier) often rely upon pseuso-scientific claims that are not demonstrable.
/. a few weeks ago.
Transistors do sound more harsh. That's why a lot of heavy metal guys prefer transistor amps (Dimebag Darrell really was the first guy I can think of who was vocal in his preference of tranny amps because of the harsh sound). I'd bet that most people could tell the difference between a transistor amp and a tube amp. It's subtle, but it's there. It's like the dynamic range compression that you find on newer recordings. You may not actively *notice* it, but the sound tends to fatigue your ear. There was a nice article on that here on
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"My twin-lead is working just fine - and with the same frequency response as the monster cable at 20Khz."
Try this with your system - set the input to something that's not on or something you don't have hooked up, then crank the volume all the way to 10. Listen carefully. Then turn lights on and off, the TV on and off, make a cellphone call, turn the ceiling fan on and off.
If you hear any noise at all during this test then your interconnects have room for improvement. Most everyday systems can't get all the way to 10 without major distress. I know this because I used to have an everyday system. My new and expensive system is completely silent during this exercise, but it took a set of expensive interconnects to get it that way (expensive = 5% of system cost). The difference is testable and repeatable.
As always with sound systems, if you can't hear the difference, don't pay for it. Before I got my latest system the one I had before simply wouldn't have justified the expensive interconnects -- whatever problems they cured were too small to matter when compared to the distortion coming from the equipment itself.
Note however that lamp cord is not shielded therefore it actually can be worse sounding than a shielded cable.
For speaker cable, that is not the problem. The signal induced into an unshielded speaker wire is in the micro or picowatt range in the audible frequency range. It is not enough amplitude to be heard over the background noise present in a room with a breathing person in it, or more often it is much less than the thermal noise(hiss) of the amplifier. At inaudible frequencies such as RF, the wire makes a fine radio antenna. Add in a little non-linear detection in the output stages of a cheap stereo and you can plainly hear "Breaker 19" as the guy goes by outside.
For the rest of us, the problem is not related to unshielded verses shielded. It has to do with dielectric loss. The cable was designed for 60 HZ power, not high frequencies. Some cable had quite a bit of loss at higher frequencies (I swept a lot of RF cable and power cord). Most people wouldn't notice as the cable length was too short to have much effect (small room, speakers only 6 feet or less from the receiver) and the cheap speakers provided much more response flaws to the fidelity by several orders of magnitude. Did you know the loss was great enough in the clear lamp cord that it could be used as a very inefficient EL wire? A high voltage high frequency signal made these babies glow violet. (Discovered from my Tesla coil days)
These very real high frequency losses is why the wire dielectric is such a big deal in the manufacture of cable for high frequency use. The twist and dielectric is the big differences in Cat 3 Cat 5 and Cat5e cable. The copper in all three is the same gauge and quality.
When an engineer designs cable and knows what he is doing, they design the audio cable just like they would an RF cable. Low loss, and match the load impedance. At one time we needed to run a long signal wire over 500 feet. We used RF coax. We terminated it and added a small inductance to compensate for the end equipment's input capacitance of 47 pF. Then we sweep tested it. (audiophiles rarely do this with test equipment). We managed to get flat response to 500 Kilocycles with only a half db loss at the high end. Loss and distortion in 20HZ to 20KHZ wasn't measurable unlike it was in our unterminated cable.
This is why network cable has a design impedance and it is required to terminate the cable with it's impedance. T connections is not permitted. (Unlike stereo where a Y cable is often used either external to the equipment or internally. Coax network cable required external terminations (Network old timers will remember the 50 ohm terminations) while utp cable forbids T connectors and the end equipment provides the termination.
More HF engineering goes into most network cable than goes into most audiophile cable. Audiophile speaker cable is almost never engineered to match the load impedance. Due to the complex impedance of a speaker, the best cable is either none or as short as possible. This is the reason for powered speakers and sub woofers. The signal wire can then be a better match to the load impedance of the speaker amplifier. Now if they would just stop using cheap amplifiers and speakers for powered speakers..
Other than just having all the heat in one spot in the dash, this is the reason premium car stereos have amplified speakers. No speaker wire while driving a complex impedance. You can't make a speaker wire to match the impedance of a speaker. An amplified speaker or amplifier at the speaker with very short wires is a better solution than any $7000 long speaker cable. Anyone who does RF engineering understands this.
The truth shall set you free!
I prefer an amp that doesn't clip at all. Then it doesn't matter whether it's a tube or a transistor. I'll add my own clipping and thermal noise for effect, thanks.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
An amp that *doesn't* clip? So, what, do you play through a HiWatt or something? A keyboard amp? A bass amp? One of those crazy Roland amps that I see a few jazz guys using (the ones who for some reason don't have a polytone)?
You think a stompbox sounds better than natural tube saturation? For real? Usually, stompboxes try to mimic the real thing. What you describe be some kind of device. And where can I get said stompbox?
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No, we're not.
Compare a Remington rifle to a Merkel. If you think that's comparing a mass-production item to a boutique item try comparing a Kimber to a Merkel. Compare the Remington to a Blaser or a Sako.
Compare a Smith and Wesson M41 target pistol to a Unique (out of business and French to boot, but still better than anything you can get from the U.S.), a Hammerli, or a Walter target pistol.
Compare the best revolver to ever come out of the S&W Performance Center to a Korth.
Compare the best semi-custom 1911-pattern target pistol you can get from a low-volume specialty manufacurer in the U.S. to a Pardini centerfire target pistol. Of all these comparisons, this one will be the closest, but only if the U.S. maker didn't have a bad day when they built your pistol.
No, the sad truth is that American gun makers don't take quality as seriously as the Europeans. It's true that you can't beat the bang-for-the-buck of the American brands. The Ruger .22 target auto is more pistol for less money than you can get anywhere. Unfortunately, it also looks like an industrial tool compared to the products of Europe.
For purely custom, incredibly expensive, one of a kind guns, you're as likely to find a suitable artist in the U.S. as elsewhere. But for combining mass production and high quality, no U.S. gun manufacturer can hold a candle to the best Europeans.
I use multiple strands of CAT5e adding up to 12 guage as my speaker cables and a double twisted pair with floating ground for my interconnects. I add $15/pr gold-plated RCA ends for the best sounding $30 interconnects on the face of planet earth. No seriously. They sound notably better (subjective I know, but I used to write high-end music reviews for a magazine some of you may remember called (are you ready?) Ultimate Audio. So I've spent *A LOT* of time listening to high end systems...) than anything else I've used excepting that time a borrowed a set of $1000/meter 99.9% pure silver cables from an audio-nut friend of mine. Insanity. CAT5e makes excellent audio cable :)
A Call For A New Slashdot Moderation Level!
In 1988, Philip Greenspun and I did a study of audiophile cables, as part of a Psychoacoustics laboratory course at MIT. Our paper was published in The Absolute Sound and the MIT Computer Music Journal (first page). The MIT version published several paragraphs and pages out of order, so you have to put the puzzle back together.
At the time, CD players were just out, and many audiophiles derided them, so we used 33RPM LP recordings, purchased new and played on a high-end turntable, and used expensive electrostatic speakers and a typical audiophile listening room, not an anechoic chamber, as audiophiles again had in the past not accepted such tests.
Rather than testing speaker cables, we decided to test the tonearm-to-preamp connection, where the signal as the weakest, reasoning that any effects would show up more profoundly there.
We tested a 1-meter long cable from Straight Wire (provided to us free, but costing about $100) and 24-feet of zip cord from Radio Shack (which we purchased).
To avoid any interference from switches or relays, I went into a closet with the equipment and the door closed, and Philip waited with the test subjects in the listening room. (This formally made our test single-blind, though it answered previous concerns from previous tests about signal depredation from switches. Still, we made sure that there was no way for subjects to find out during the test.)
Each run consisted of either AAAA or ABAB, with A or B being a one-minute passage played with cable A or cable B. AAAA or ABAB was etermined by coin toss. Before each minute passage, I unplugged the cables and plugged the cable back in, so there was no way for the subjects to tell which cable was used. We asked for each 4-minute run if the subjects thought it was A or B, and we asked after each 1-minute, if they preferred it.
We ran several groups of 5 subjects each, and did 6 runs with each. Our tests included audiophiles, musicians, and other random test subjects. We found no statistically significant ability for subjects either in preference or in ability to distinguish 1 meter long audiophile cable from 24 feet of Radio Shack zip cord.
If we discarded the first run for each group of subjects as a training run, we found an 80% confidence for ability to distinguish, which was still not significant. However, we did find a 95% confidence on preference, for the Radio Shack 24' zip cord!
Well, tube amps don't really clip as such, they just go non-linear. When you get to their current limit, the wave will take an asymptotic curve towards the limit, unlike a transistor.
In any case, if you operate an amp beyond its rated power, the results are crap.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I have heard/played several of the amp emulators, line 6 etc. They don't quite get it. They get close, sure, but like so many other things the devil is in the details. A $1000 line 6 amp is NOT going to sound like a Fender blackface. It just isn't. Obviously, that doesn't mean it isn't feasible, as you have already said. It's just that none of the modern emulator amps that I have ever heard quite replicate the right sound. I am sure that some amp maker out there could come up with some type of halo project and create an amp with DSP that sounds spot on. But then again, for what that would cost, why not just buy the real thing?
Tube amps are "living" things. Even how you route the wires can make a difference in how it sounds, especially in the older point to point wired amps. The tubes, the types of components you use (think of all the different types of capacitors you can get...carbon filament, silicon, paper, etc), everything, makes a difference. Amps fascinate me. I'd love to take my knowledge of electronics and love of guitars and make amps someday. They are, more than anything else I can think of, more than the sum of their parts.
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You obviously know more about this than I do, so I'm asking because I don't understand:
If you use powered amplifiers, then you're running the signal through wire to the amp. Any noise the wire picks up gets amplified.
If you're running a big amp, then running heavy wires out to the unpowered speakers, the noise you pick up appears 1:1 in the speakers.
Doesn't the latter situation seem innately better, from a noise-fighting standpoint?
When I lay out power-correction circuitry, I put all my effort into minimizing the loop area in front of the amplifiers, the high-impedance region, and downstream of the amp, I just make sure nothing's overtly stupid. It seems like the same would hold for audio amplifiers, wouldn't it? Or are you saying that the wire type does actually matter a lot, that shielded wire to powered amps is a much better solution than unshielded wire for either unpowered or powered speakers?
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Ok, so this topic is just up my alley. As a former editor for an unnamed Primedia publication I can let you in on a few secrets and also tell you why this article does not suprise me in the least. Now I don't know the "editor" of this audiophile mag, but I do use the term "editor" loosely as it infers some type of integrity. Here is the low down. Primedia is all about the bottom line and that generally leaves no room for the reader. The reader of a magazine is simply to boost numbers so the publication can show a potential advertiser how many readers they have and what the potential exposure for said company is, if they advertise. When I worked for one of their "magazines", I also use this term loosely since they are more like catalogs, I was often told to do a review of the product. When said review didn't live up to it's claims we either had to twist the truth and create enough hype that the shortcomming gets overlooked, or you call the advertiser and ask them if they want the article to run. The fact is the truth was obfusicated. In any case it is very easy to skew the results of any test. Also unless there is any test data they will usually just spit out manufacturer specs. I was actually fired because I pissed off some advertisers and published an article without checking to see if it was "ok" with the advertiser. This advertiser demanded my head for this and Primedia gave it to them. The $5000 full page ad was saved, praise be to Jesus. here is the deal and it is just like everything else, so get out the tin foil hats. Primedia doesn't care about it's readers. It cares about it's advertisers.
"I understand spending substantially more for a tiny improvement if you're talking about a hobby. Are the $3000 guitars $2900 better than the one i can buy in target? Doubful. But for a hobbiest RIO is skewed in the extreme."
Eh. Change the analogy up a bit. A guitar is like a stereo receiver and the strings are like the cables. If an audiophile told me that a $5000 receiver is better than a $1000 one, I'd wholeheartedly believe him. I could imagine all of the quality components therein. If a guitar player told me that his $300 strings were better than my $6 ones, I'd laugh at him; they're flippin' strings! $30 strings, maybe. $30 monster cable, maybe. Cables, like strings, are relatively simple. The thing that makes audiophiles so foolish in my eyes is not that they spend $10000 on a system, it's that they buy $5000 cables and $500 wooden knobs (purportedly, I mean people sell them right?)
I think your reasoning is sound, though. A hobbyist can justify a $3000 guitar or a $5000 length of speaker cable, where the uninitiated might find that foolish. I am a guitar player and I can assure you, if I had the disposable income, I'd own SEVERAL $3000 guitars and amps.
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