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Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

Of course they’re anecdotal - listening to music is a subjective experience. If someone really thinks their music sounds better after adding $100 cable lifters and taping $50 bags of rocks to their $10,000 system, they are automatically correct. Their ears, their hobby.

It would be like saying that something can’t work because it’s a placebo - even if all they’re getting is a sugar pill, if the symptoms went away, that’s not really something that you can argue with.

I put audiophiles on the same level as sommeliers. The best wine is the one that tastes best to the drinker. You can haul out your GCMS to test the wine and your ABX testing software to test the audio and tell someone their subjective experience is Wrong, but this misses the point. We’re not talking about medical efficacy here, we’re talking about artwork.

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Please don't lump all audiophiles in with some sort of distorted (irony...) stereotype.

I don't have a $10k system, or anything close to it, but yes, my system that I put together for about $1000 is way way way way better than what you're listening onm because I care enough to have a good external DAC, and feed that into a good amp paired with either a set of decent used speakers or one of a couple of sets of good headphones.

No "cable lifters" in sight.

It's not so much all audiophiles as all humans. Confirmation bias is very real. Sometimes it matters. Sometimes it doesn't. But we all suffer from it.

Your external dac is indistinguishable to your ears from the internal one in whatever device you are using to supply it with bits. This is precisely what OP is talking about.

No it isn’t, because if it was internal it would be inside my PC... which is pretty electrically noisy. I can run from my PC to the amp directly and here audible clicks every time I move the mouse or the one of the hard drives spins up.

There’s a huge gap in quality between most onboard DACs and externals. It’s not necessarily because the onboard is worse at C-ing the Ds to the As, but because they’re not isolated from the noisy electronics that share the power supply.

My laptop emits different squeals when I scroll a window, for example.

That's just shitty grounding. Try putting one of those 3-to-2 prong adapters on your charging cable and you'll see right away.

Shitty circuit layout maybe, but it's much easier to move the dac outside the noisy box than to fix the cicuit layout. Most computers today can manage a digital audio output, either through HDMI, spdif from the sound card, or via USB. Keeping the analog path away from noise is sensible in a way that 96kHz and oxygen free cables are not.

Nope, occurs even just on battery.

That’s not the DAC.

Right, but it makes the onboard DAC useless. So sidestepping that and shipping the bits out to something else is worth doing.

It’s not even placebo...contextual stimuli actually will change how things sound. If you have decent speakers at your computer, listen to a passage with your monitor on, then the same passage with it off, it will sound quite different.

Another example from audio production, adjusting signal processors while processing is bypassed, and being convinced the sound is changed.

Another one I’ve been noticing is how the resolution of the gain control affects perception of the “power” of the amp. If the resolution of the volume knob is high, meaning it takes more turning motion for the same level increase, the amp “feels” weaker to me, biasing my perception of sound.

The mother of all dilemmas when it comes to comparing audio gear is that the louder source always sounds “better.” This a very powerful perceptual distortion.

So while I think stereotypical audiophile practices are non-sensical, I have no doubt that they really make the systems sound better to the practitioners!

Placebo effects are real.

Ears are easy too fool by visuals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0

Placebo effects are real profitable.

The issue is I have is that people are being convinced they need to spend $100's and $1000's of dollars to get the placebo effect. If it is indeed just placebo it should be acheivable for free.

Instead what you have is not placebo effect, but perceived value effect.

After working in high-end audio for many years it became apparent that the (high) price tag was in fact the benefit.

Some people just want what there neighbor cannot afford.

I have $2000 speakers and I use a $60 2nd-hand amp from 1999 and a $20 bluetooth dac with them. Audiophiles hate me. Bluetooth is the greatest sin, apparently.

I have AB tested my amp with newer models and while there was a difference, it was very minor and not worth upgrading IMO

If you're listening to uncompressed (losslessly compressed) audio, you're mostly fine with Bluetooth. But if your source is already lossily compressed, they you're multiplying the artifacts of MP3 or AAC by the artifacts of aptX or SBC, and that becomes very audible if you know what to listen for.

>We’re not talking about medical efficacy here, we’re talking about artwork.

if only audiophiles see it this way themselves...

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