Unbelievable Audio Bunkum reaches its apogee

Who cares what they spend their money on

The advent of digital music reproduction seemed to make the established Hi-Fi journalists collectively lose their minds. Back in the pre-digital times it was perfectly plausible for untrained journalists to wax lyrical about the differences between turntable cartridges (because you can measure the differences) or debate the merits of amplifier design. By the time the late eighties had rolled around, the early CD players had become indistinguishable from each other which I guess must have prompted something of a crisis: what do we write about now?

Cable nonsense, green pens, floundering

Then these guys stumbled across jitter. Jitter suddenly became a big deal in the audio review community, mostly it appears because jitter was the answer to the CD manufacturers overstated claims of "perfect sound forever". The discovery by audio magazines of the existence of jitter enabled them to make plausible sounding claims about audio quality that completely ignore the error correcting algorithms built into CD playback. These claims led to all sorts of chicanery that audiophile publications like Stereophile still publish with a straight face.

No amount of green texta can turn Dido into Francoise Hardy.

The green pen is probably the most egregious example of the woo-woo craziness that came out of worrying about jitter. Marking the edge of your CD with a magical green marker improves the sound! No plausible explanation given, just a pile of strange conjecture about how CDs worked rather than how they actually worked, but expensive versions of the pen sold very well in those days.

Ethernet cables and switches?

In the streaming world we now inhabit, there are even fewer places where anything in the playback chain can affect the sound. Often in a modern system the audio stream heads straight into an amplifier, where it's decoded for playback. There are few cables involved and sometimes none if you have a good wireless setup. So the woo-woo merchants have ended up at the last place they can possibly extract money from the woo addled audiophile community: power cables and ethernet setups.

This brings me to a product whose existence entirely depends on misinformation: the ENO Ethernet filter. The company involved makes a lot of extremely expensive ethernet cables. They are apparently aiming at a market where 10,000km of undersea fibre, a mountain of switching silicon and the crumbling infrastructure of your local telecom company can be safely ignored in the audio playback chain because you bought 35cm of ethernet cable that cost 500 pounds. This amounts to quite an astonishing claim. Astonishing claims require extraordinary evidence in my opinion. "Network Acoustics bring streaming to life" apparently. I think there is one too many letters in that last word. An example quote from their website:

Add an ENO to your streaming audio system and we believe you will find the effect is nothing short of stunning. A unique passive filtering system which plugs in between your network switch or router, and your streaming device. The enclosure is carefully selected to offer the best performance for the purpose. Made from ABS plastic rather than metal, chosen due to the magnetic fields generated internally by the filtering process.

This is absolute, total, utter nonsense. I can tell you exactly what the "stunning effect" is going to be, you will be out 500 pounds and in the unlikely event you are still married, you won't be for long.

So, actually I do care what they spend their money on

Now, I know I shouldn't be overly concerned with what other people spend their beer tokens on, especially those people who deliberately (or otherwise) suspend their disbelief in order to talk themselves into something that can't possibly happen. They must really want something to happen, or can't justify replacing their amplifier or speakers but have an itch to improve their audio playback system. It's a seductive idea that somehow the "big audio" cabal have missed something that some boutique company from nowhere have discovered and are making available to a select few discerning customers. I don't care what they spend their money on, but I do care that the zeitgeist of misinformation is only encouraged by this ridiculous companies outlandish and unverifiable claims.

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