We need more audiophile memes in this sub! The amount of pseudo-science bullshit is intense in the audio world, it is nearly overpowering for somebody new to it.
this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2025
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Link: https://longkft.hu/audioblog/diy-virtualis-fold/
There's an English translation.
The people actually making the music: I mastered this album with the $100 audio technica headphones and checked if it sounded good in my car
Self proclaimed audiophiles listening to that same music: for about twenty thousand dollars you can get a basic setup, sure. But to really understand the artist’s intention you need at least a hundred grand
Literally.
And for those songs with too much dynamic range for a car, well, that's what the volume knob is for!
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Songs are also mixed and mastered using equipment (headphones or monitors) with the flatest reponse as possible. You don't need super expensive gear to hear a song the way it was meant to be heard.
audiophile is just a synonym for a person who hates bass
What's someone who doesn't hate bass, they just hate your bass?
Hater.
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As an audiophile, this alt-j tune has great bass on a good system. (And when not played from YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBDunSOoXNo
There are people who will sell you a volume knob, machined from specially selected wood with exactly the right qualities, which will attenuate harmful resonances or otherwise purify the music you’re listening to. Others will sell you gold-plated SPDIF optical cables, or oxygen-free Ethernet cables which give the audio you’re streaming a warmer, fuller, more alive sound or something (presumably the expensively sourced copper in the cables somehow flips the bits in packets containing audio so that the audio the DAC reconstructs from the data is more aesthetically fulfilling). And if you’re a true ‘phile, you can pay the electric company to replace the transformer your house is connected to with one that delivers electricity with superior acoustic properties.
I just remembered this review I ran across years ago for "audio rocks". Audiophiles are a strange bunch.
http://www.adventuresinhifiaudio.com/26/01/2018/audiophile-rocks-down-the-rabbit-hole-once-again/
From http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html
Some years ago, I (GLS) was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no one knows who).
You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words ‘magic' and ‘more magic'. The switch was in the ‘more magic' position.
I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it's a basic fact of electricity that a switch can't do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side.
It was clear that this switch was someone's idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed.
Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the ‘more magic’ position before reviving the computer.
A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the ‘more magic’ position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn't affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch.
The computer promptly crashed.
This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since.
We still don't know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we'll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic.
I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I'm silly, but I usually keep it set on ‘more magic’.
1994: Another explanation of this story has since been offered. Note that the switch body was metal. Suppose that the non-connected side of the switch was connected to the switch body (usually the body is connected to a separate earth lug, but there are exceptions). The body is connected to the computer case, which is, presumably, grounded. Now the circuit ground within the machine isn't necessarily at the same potential as the case ground, so flipping the switch connected the circuit ground to the case ground, causing a voltage drop/jump which reset the machine. This was probably discovered by someone who found out the hard way that there was a potential difference between the two, and who then wired in the switch as a joke.
This story lives in my head forever as a perfect example of everything pointing to a theoretical answer but reality not caring.
The alternative explanation is immediately where I jumped to halfway through the story, though of course one pin would have to be contacting the metal body somehow.
Or, otherwise, it was forced into being a really cruddy capacitor ...
I'm amazed that an "MIT lab" doesn't have access to a volt-ohm meter
Audiophile is a misnomer because what they love is the equipment, not the music. Technophile would be more apt. (and it could apply to the identical condition in 10,000 different hobbies).
In the same spirit, I don't know where I heard the quote, but it went someone like this:
I use my headphones to listen to music, you use music to listen to your headphones.
Could also be written across the "we are not the same" meme.
Im a realistic audio enjoyer.. im not dropping 10000 dollars on a speaker set because I know my room isn't tuned. However ill set up my room best i can and buy nice used equipment to make it sound great.
I enjoy digital and analog sources. The mastering is what truly matters. I can tell you some of the best sound ive heard is off my reel to reel, because the mastering back then wasn't catering to shitty phone speakers.
Then again, the cd of Grace sounds amazing, again because of mastering.
I can say for absolute certainty that the vinyl 2 disc pressing of no more tears sounds VASTLY better than the cd, again because the cd is mastered like poop to appeal to the masses.
So one can enjoy audio and still be level headed about it. I dont give a shit what my cables are made of or if my amp has no lid on it.
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You could also call them moneyfobes, cause they sure like to throw money away for negligible differences in sound quality. I recently had to change my earphones, and it was a real odyssey cause in lots of guides the "low end" started with at least a couple zeros.
I used to work in audio, some of these superstition-level solutions are hilarious. I remember a site that sold little baggies of rocks that you hung from your IEC cables at the wall outlet, and I think they were almost $100 before shipping (7 or 8 years ago).
One thing I do like from the audiophile world though: elecrostat speakers. They're just neat.
And magnepans! Not electrostatic, they are dipole, but they sound like magic. Ive yet to not impress people with them
My friend told me this story from his antique radio club:
One club member is an audiphile and a former vibrations engineer for automotive companies. He disassembled his speakers and arranged custom housing for the drivers such that, based on his preferred listening spot, the peak of an average waveform from every driver would synchonize exactly at the spot where his ears should be. This, according to him, produces an unbeatable sound. We're talking about opening a speaker and moving its tweeter, like, half a millimeter back.
No, I don't understand how this is supposed to work, let alone consistently.
I don't believe audiovoodoo but maybe he wants to achieve beamforming, which is a real thing, that's how synthetic aperture radars work, as well as the latest Wi-Fi standards
I know you’re playing devil’s advocate, but to play devil:
In a theoretical world where you can manage to perfectly beamform the entire 20-20k Hz frequency range into a single node (or pair of nodes around the ears)… you’re still just re-condensing the original reference signal at the site of your beam target.
And if your idea of peak quality is to hear the reference signal loud and clear, it might be marginally easier to set up some well-tuned speakers in an arrangement relatively free of resonance hotspots and then crank up the volume.
So, how do you “crank up the volume” for that? Glad you asked; simple really: we need to apply a gain filter. To do this, we set up an array of batteries, and then connect only the positive side of the batteries to our audio cable. Positive electricity is bigger than negative electricity, so adding positive electricity to the cable means the speaker sound gets bigger.
In short, all you need to match the quality of a hi-fi beamforming speaker system can be replaced with a few 9V batteries connected to your tuner with a paperclip. Thanks for coming to my audio engineering TED talk.
I have nothing to add, i feel stupid now
At some point one must have considered wearing the speakers on their head...
There's no such thing as "the peak of an average waveform", since it doesn't make sense to average them.
They range from 20 Hz to 20000hz, so they have lengths between 2 cm and 1700 cm and peak everywhere in between.
What he was doing was attempting to avoid phase cancellation from stereo, which is an actual issue. You simply have to place yourself in the center, so that the distance to each speaker is the same.
It's an issue for low frequencies, which have long wavelengths, carry a lot of energy and are usually centered (to avoid phase issues in the first place), so it is both possible and audible if they cancel out after leaving the speakers. However, since they're long, it also means that there is some wiggle room. Obviously there's a perfect spot, but It won't have any noticable negative effect unless you're like 1 meter away from that and accidentally sit in the perfectly bad position. It is not as much of an issue for higher frequencies, since they have much shorter and more complex wavelengths, that are not necessarily centered in the first place. Even if they also theoretically do cancel out, it is unlikely that you would notice it happening at all, and if you do, you could simply move your head 1 cm to get into the right spot again.
In a car, the driver position is sort of fixed. It would make sense to angle the speakers for this purpose.
That would work perfectly if he listened to music consisting of a single tone of different volumes…
Only way that could make any sense would be if he was trying to make sure the speakers were in phase. If you’ve ever had one wired backwards there’s an exact spot where you can get them to cancel out, it feels bizarre. But you don’t need to adjust the cones, just wire things the right way lol.
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The sommeliers of the technology world. The perfect storm of electric hypochondria and placebo-gooning.
As with most things, there's a kernel of truth in amongst the dross. You will have a nicer time with a set of £70 headphones than with a £3.99 set. You will have a nicer time with a FLAC file than a 64kbps MP3 of the same song. But there's a very low ceiling of improvement that both physics and physiology will prevent you from surpassing. Maybe in the future with brain implants and shit like that we can start ramping up the fidelity of our listening abilities, but until then, you're just trickling an ocean through a literal bottleneck and insisting you're drowning in it.
Just listen to the damn music.
The sommelier thing is at least somewhat real but it actually takes work. I don't think anyone is getting much better sound than 320kbps with a good quality sound system. $300 studio monitors can give you pretty much peak sound quality at this point, no unobtanium wires required.
A group of international sommeliers were unable to detect that the red wine they were tasting was actually white wine with food coloring in it. I think that the bar for genuinely assessing wines by taste is very low.
Also, if you put the same wine in different bottles, they pretty reliably prefer (and describe the rich complexities of) the more expensive bottles.
I knew an audiophile that believed the government had top secret technology for additional audio channels in surround sound setups, like 17.7 or something. I tried very hard to explain how you can buy an off the shelf 128 channel recorder/playback device, and have as many channels as you can feasibly buy and set up, and the reason a lot of media was recorded in 5.1 was because a 5.1 setup was considered at the upper end of what people would be willing to pay for. He moved his target in response, to now the government has top secret 1000 channel audio equipment.
I don't know what the equivalent of the wine world is, but I hope never to meet it.
For most people Opus at 128 Kbps is transparent already
Disagree - you should hear these cables.
cracks XLR cable like a whip
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Real men ground their sound systems at the POSITIVE pin! Don't stay neutral people!
Anyway, is this a joke site?
Why would a man ground his pin? Doesn't he need it, like, in an excited state?
If you balance a tack hammer on your head, you can head off your foes with a balanced attack.
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This is all wrong! You can't just connect the batteries like in the photo. You have to put the batteries on rose quartz! You will hear an amazing improvement! It is not good to put them next to each other, they must be in contact with the crystal!
Spoiler
Content stolen from a totally serious comment on the blog post.
Thanks for sharing that story. This is the kind of stuff that makes me miss the old internet (personal stories about interesting stuff, told in blog format without any kind of social media hype-train angle) and gives me a great appreciation for the kind of nerdy shenanigans engineers used to do.
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Oh my goodness. This guy os beyond repair.
I've heard a lot of "audiophile" bullshit in my life, as I work with audio, but this idiot brats them all by a nautical mile.
He is always writing that it's necessary to connect them in parallel to make it work. But at the end he's suggesting to wire them like in the picture because it's easier...
Seems like BS to me, like the battery isn't connected so the wire is effectively an antenna
Maybe it just needs some stray capacitance
It reports a lot of people needing the exact same tiny amount of stray capacitance. Also, every other input is certainly better connected to the overall ground than to that antenna, so it's not an effective antenna.
I'm still hopping that the entire site is a joke. Otherwise, there's a lot of people out there who are a joke.
Hopefully "putting the batteries on rose quartz" is just like using another dielectric and further changes impedance and/or capacitance lmao
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