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Comment by creakingstairs | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure if this is something in other countries too. But some of the extreme audiophiles in Korea have given us some amazing memes. One claimed they could tell the difference in sound by the source of the electricity.

Gold plating also gets brought up a lot. Some people claimed that music from gold plated sata cable!! sounds better, so someone had set up an experiment with an open invitation, only for no one to turn up [1].

[1] https://namu.wiki/w/순은%20SATA%20케이블%20논란

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I once talked to an audiophile who claims that they can hear the difference between wav and lossless flac encoded from said wav (flac is worse). Like dude, the decoded audio samples are literally the same bit by bit. But maybe their expensive audiophile setup can't even decode flac without dropping frames.

I keep coming back to this forum post as the most relevant audiophile meme, in which someone finds an alternate memcpy implementation and claims to hear the difference:

https://www.audioasylum.com/forums/pcaudio/messages/11/11997...

Wow that is gold. Thank you for this. I'm almost tempted to translate this and share it in a Korean audiophile forum.

  “[..] this version removes the hard edge produced by memcpy”
  “[..] most players use malloc to get memory while new is the c++ method and sounds better”

The very essence of religion.

Satire?

Or dumb as tire.

I don't know. I remember older PC's of the 486 to Pentium era making different noises via bad active speakers, or even in the FM-Radio. Especially during uncompressing some stuff, but also different operations in different programs.

The same can often be said for todays onboard sound, no matter if via headphones, or active speakers. That's why some people are saying use the cheapest USB-sound-dongle, and enjoy decoupled sound, otherwise enjoy the buzz of your system-busses.

Also mainboard makers advertising some sort of shielding for the audio chip from the rest of the board, for the same reasons.

Memcopy produces a pattern on the memory-bus, which may be audible under some circumstances. Using a different pattern may "sound" different, or not all.

shrug

Remember these Japanese extreme audiophiles having their own special power utility installed? (2016)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-gift-for-music-lovers-who-hav...

I remember seeing this at the time and thinking: wouldn't a custom UPS be better, tunable with custom firmware and a web interface and / or screen, etc.

Someone should build that sort of product and market it to audiophiles.

Edit to add: I see there exists a product category known as power conditioners, that's part the way there.

I have a cheap S/PDIF to RCA converter, powered by DC from micro USB connector. You can definitely hear distortions and background hum with some USB chargers.

Low quality audio hardware absolutely exists and is rampant at the cheap end. And some standards, like USB2.0 (when used for data), are terrible and will cause audible noise if lots of care isn't taken to filter things and avoid ground loops.

But if you're spending $2500 on a headphone amp instead of $250 on a professional quality audio interface, or $1500 on jewel encrusted RCA cables instead of $30 on balanced XLR cables, or you think 192kHz sounds better than 48kHz because you have superhuman hearing and can somehow hear ultrasound, you're wasting your money and you have no idea what you're doing when it comes to audio quality.

That’s an issue with your cheap connector not filtering it’s power supply and has nothing to do with the physical contacts being used.

>One claimed they could tell the difference in sound by the source of the electricity

How confident are they of this? Would they be willing to do the experiment?

I’d suspect likely the same result as the gold plated sata cables:

> someone had set up an experiment with an open invitation, only for no one to turn up

None of them are ever willing to do the experiment (double blind).

As another commenter rightly noted below, they are always confident but they quickly shy away whenever an experiment is suggested.

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