"Audiophelia" is a mystical religion constructed to victimize the benighted, much like a tax on ignorance. Tribute to this religion is extracted directly from the victims' wallets, and worship in this religion takes the form of one-upmanship in expenditure for audio components. These components then become objects of supplication for imagined sonic superiority but virtually never for enjoyment of recorded musical performances—since recorded musical performances are made with audio equipment far inferior to what an audiophile would consider even barely acceptable—a fact totally ignored by victims of their bad religion.
Audio aftermarket fraud of the type depicted here, is often facilitated by the same technique many pharmaceutical companies use: fear-mongering. The fear that one could possibly not be getting all there is to get, plays most effectively on narcissists, some of whom may be insecure to the point of actual mental disease. (See "elitist narcissist" under the Wikipedia general article on Narcissistic Personality Disorder, LINK)
Of course it's easy to argue that victims of the audiophile equipment price con game deserve what they get, but even in a world where technology is overwhelming to most, fraud is still unethical and usually illegal. Since none of the advertising claims can be proved and when attacked are defended as "merely" free speech, we must live with and beware of this apparent yet-to-be revoked license to steal. Attention fraud lawyers! These claims need to be adjudicated in courts of law where facts can be sorted from fictions. If a few billion can be recovered from Bernie Madoff, maybe these crooks can be tapped for a few bucks or at least some nice legal fees....
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Quantity
(6), of the universal
(non-threaded) 1.5AP1D Audiopoints. These are CES show demo units.
These are our most popular Audiopoints(1.5" tall), and can be used in almost any application. Under speakers, amplifiers, preamplifiers, digital players, turntables, etc. They make anything on them sound better by reducing unwanted vibrational effects on the components. This is the original form of our Resonance Energy Transfer science, and has been the industry standard for 16 years. Never changed over this time frame, the Audiopoints have maintained their industry lead by performance and affordability. They are the original, and still the best. Accept no substitutes, the original Audiopoints will far outperform any imitator.
$174 (practical purpose: digging holes in carpets, floors and furniture)
From a pure engineering standpoint, transmitting loudspeaker vibration into a floor, is a very bad thing. Ideally, loudspeaker cabinets should not vibrate at all, since all vibration within the audible frequency band creates sound, and sound should never emanate from the cabinet, but only from designated radiating surfaces such as cones, domes, ports or horns, etc. Coupling loudspeaker vibration to an arbitrary surface such as a floor, changes the frequency response of the entire "system" now comprising cabinet and floor, thus degrading basic loudspeaker performance from that which was intended by the designer and scratched, clawed and coaxed from the damned loudspeaker, in the laboratory, sometimes by years of cut and try or finite-element computer analysis.
(Item: plastic sleeve which slips
over
wires)
Within your system, every solder
joint
and connection creates some distortion of the audio signal. (either bullshit or a
baldfaced lie) These
connections also make this sensitive signal
vulnerable to the destructive forces of EMI/RFI.* Take that down to a
molecular level, and one begins to realize that even the crystalline
grain structure of wire and cable itself (yeah, like we have any control of
the atoms in a made-in-China molded piece of junk) can add noise
and distortion
to the audio
signal. Hence the reasoning behind
"ultra pure" and "single crystal" cables and wire so commonly used
today (not
common at all). The accumulation of
these connections and runs of wire, starting at the source and ending
at the speaker, ultimately degrade sound quality. This latter
sentence is essentially true, however, there is no way placing totally
passive 'prayer' sleeves on wires can do anything physical about
it. Pure wishful thinking
and legally, fraud.
*not if the circuits are designed within good engineering practices.
$350 ea. (Practical purpose: divination of fools with too much disposable income, more reliably than divining rods or forked sticks to look for water!)
*not if the circuits are designed within good engineering practices.
$350 ea. (Practical purpose: divination of fools with too much disposable income, more reliably than divining rods or forked sticks to look for water!)
THE WORLD'S BEST power supply umbilical cable available for Musical Fidelity X-PSU v3, MSB, Audio Alchemy, Monolithic and similarly designed upgrade power supplies and audio equipment. BRAND NEW Revelation Audio Labs 'PASSAGE' Cryo-Silver Reference power cable, featuring deep cryogenic treated 5-NINES (99.999%) ultra-pure solid silver conductors. [Japanese wire manufacturers have been offering 6-nines copper wire for many years!] THE LATEST UPGRADE for use with: Musical Fidelity X-PSU v3 upgrade power supply MSB DAC's, PRE-AMPS and POWER SUPPLIES (all models and versions including Platinium and Gold) MONOLITHIC HC-1 and HC-2 POWER SUPPLIES,PS-1 and PS-2 PHONO PRE-AMPS, PA-1 LINE STAGE AUDIO ALCHEMY (all models) when used with Power Stations with detatchable power cable and other similar digital audio gear. Inquire for appications. 3-pin, 5-pin, 6-pin, 1/8" mini-phono connector models available, please specify. The power supplies themselves do an excellent to outstanding job of providing plenty of good, clean, high-current power to the devices they are intended to operate. However, the stock power cords leave much to be desired regarding high quality power deliverance capability. YOU WILL BE UTTERLY ASTOUNDED WHEN YOU HEAR THE HUGE IMPROVEMENTS "THIS LITTLE CABLE" MAKES TO YOUR MUSIC! $179 (Included with every power supply.) One might assume that the makers of power supplies for super high-end gear would be keen to accommodate the type of gear and its purchaser's preference for super high-endy, well, everything. No? Don't you think it's kinda arrogant to ASSUME the included power cabling on an expensive high-end piece is not good enough and that its manufacturer is inviting inferior performance so that the product's reputation will suffer? Looks like sucker bait to me!
CES Show Demo pair of 1 meter (~39 inches) Sonoran Plateau Interconnect cables, Single-ended (RCA) terminated, MicroBearing filled. These are the top-of-the-line Sonoran Plateau interconnect cables. All copper conductors, VDH RCA connectors. Proprietary directional shielding, MicroBearing fill, heavy duty construction with excellent strain reliefs. Extremely low noise floor, organic detail, neutral frequency balance, and very musical. Not etched or dry or analytical. A superb cable that competes with many cables costing much more. Get the high-end sound you are looking for, without the high cost. Works great with tube or solid state components. Definitely a "reference grade" cable. $550 (Or you could use the included cables that come in the box when you buy a CD or DVD player. If it's a really good and probably expensive player, why on earth would the manufacturer risk a bad impression of it by including inadequate cables to hook it up so you'd be disappointed right out of the box? Is that question not obvious to intelligent audiophiles?
Our reputation for outstanding power cables is only enhanced by the David Power. Designed to include some of our finest technology, David is one of the most exotic cables available at this price point. Its unique ability to dramatically reduce distortion (distortion is evidently defined here as an embarrassing excess of cash in your wallet.) while increasing power renders David fearless in the face of giants. $550 (Included with every audio component. Never mind the garbage solid copper wire in the walls of the house, or the transformer full of garbage copper wire that this cord feeds inside the component the fraud victim will buy it for...) Note: Engineering department qualified adequate power cords are included with every audio component. They probably meet electrical codes for the destination country as well, wouldn't you imagine? Oh, and lest we forget, what about the wire between the idiot who buys these cords, and the electrical generating station anywhere from miles to hundreds of miles away, feeding electricity through (oh my, gasp) ALUMINUM WIRE, to (non-audiophile) power station transformers, on down the line to (oh my, gasp) non-audiophile power-pole transformers, then hundreds of feet of wire to the house, etc., etc.
The CT Silver Reference interconnect is the best interconnect for under $1000. $549 With $1000 to spend on an interconnect shopping orgy, one has lots and lots of choices I'll wager.
Massive 6-gauge conductor cross-section. (Never mind about the hundreds of feet of disgustingly thin and cheesy 12-gauge solid copper garbage wire between the power pole and your wall outlets.) Furutech FI-25 high-end grade rhodium connectors. Capable of extremely high current delivery, yet rendering delicately accurate musical nuances. Transparent and lightning fast. Excellent for use on all equipment types. 20-amp IEC available. (Default is 15 amp, only good for 1800 watts to your preamp, but the cable is so thick and stiff it will probably tip over components anyway so probably better not to invest in the 20-amp version.)
"Special" power cords are FRAUD, pure and simple. There is no way that adding 6 feet of "good" wire to hundreds of feet of "bad" wire—leading from thousands of feet of powerline wire (horrors!)—changes one damn thing. Don't forget the coiled copper crap in the preamp or amplifier power supply transformer! Oh yeah, all that garbage copper is in series with the power cord too! The people polishing that turd are liars and thieves.
2.0-meter: $1,699 [FREE SHIPPING WORLDWIDE!] If they didn't ship this free, I'd sue for the insult.
MY SECOND
ALL-TIME FAVORITE AUDIO
FRAUD
LP Record Clamp
Big brother to David,
Nite Power is often championed as the greatest single improvement made
to an audio system. Reduced
heat dissipation and power
consumption provide proof of Nite’s design. Natural,
uncoloured
sound and expanded, controlled bandwidth provide proof of Nite’s
performance. (Yes, that
WOULD provide proof if it actually happened. Anyone measured that
on the test bench yet? No?) $1100 Claims for power cords improving audio
bandwidth (extending an audio system's low and high frequency limits)
are comparable to a mechanic telling you that chrome goodies for your
car can make the car go faster. One has NOTHING to do
with the other. A lot of chrome on a car may make it LOOK faster,
but that's all it can do. LP Record Clamp
A legendary Shun Mook product now
being made in a very, very limited number. This record clamp is
made from extremely rare pieces of dried ebony briar. This extra
heavy century old ebony root which were immersed in the swamps of
Africa has a unique power that no other wood possesses (yeah, the
power to drain your wallet and make your wife leave you).
The vibration generated
by the diamond stylus in the vinyl groove
besides inducing an electroflux through the phono-cartridge also
excites
the ebony molecules, causing it to resonate. This in turn is
feed back through the stylus and is reproduced as
expanded sound staging, enhanced separation, sharpened focus and
enriched tonal balance of the music. Due to the rareness of this
timber, there is no doubt that it will
become a collector item in the future. $1200
This is precisely the opposite of why
LP disc clamps were created; to kill resonances and prevent disc-borne
vibration that degrades record playback performance. Duh!
Resonance
BAD! Damping GOOD! Basic physical properties don't change
because some arrogant ass thinks his money can buy off the laws of
physics. Wanna
borrow my hockey puck?
How's two bucks sound to ya, eh...?
How's two bucks sound to ya, eh...?
New ultra high performance Purist Audio Design Opis Ferox interconnect in single ended RCA configuration. $1852.50 (35,000% profit, or included when you buy a CD or DVD player)
A tribute to the Most High, Master Power is an obvious and dramatic upgrade. Heightened power flow and a pure signal create an emphatic sound unlike anything you’ve previously encountered. Superior technological applications underscore our reputable design to give rise to the Master of power cables. $2100 (included with every audio component) As above for the $1699 Cryo-Silver, but $400 bucks more!
Oops! Add a nickel for the spade lugs! Hell, throw in a buck for the big dude with the prison tats who crimps on the lugs with the special pliers.
Note: The most stringent requirement for the best wire in the known world would be in communications satellites costing as much as billions of dollars, and researched to exhaustion in laboratories with the best testing equipment available on Earth, and yet, no such weird wire is to be found there where it matters most, but rather good, solid, real science-based engineering. If it were possible to document weird wire claims, it would have been done and the "technology" included in satellites, but of course, there is no laboratory proof of weird wire claims. Because the claims are bullshit. Con artists rarely have access to laboratories. Caveat emptor on those faith-based purchases.
MY ALL-TIME FAVORITE AUDIO FRAUD
Demagnetize OPTICAL media? Someone flunked grade school physics! No magnet on earth OR HEAVEN could alter the path of photons. This is total, idiotic, egregious fraud!
The deMag works for disc media as well as cables, connectors, and power cords! No part of the playback chain should be disturbed by resolution-sapping magnetic interference.
Demagnetizing LPs
How can an LP be magnetized? It’s plastic!
The fact is that pigment added to the plastic during the manufacturing process is the culprit. The minute amount of ferrous material in the pigment causes LPs to become magnetized. Testing at the Tokyo Nanotechnology center with a IHI Gauss meter showed that after an LP was treated with the deMag the magnetic field of the LP was lowered from 620~630 nT to 572~582 nT (nanotesla: a unit of magnetic field strength,1 Tesla = 10,000 gauss)
Wow! That's an 8% change in a magnetic field value on average equal to 0.006 gauss. Earth's magneitic field strength in temperate lattitudes is almost 100 times stronger than this claim of vinyl's magnetic residuals. (Earth's magnetic field at 50° latitude is 0.000058 tesla or 0.58 gauss). Put another way, the magnetism they're attacking is less than 0.0001% (one ten-thousandth of a percent) or 0.0000001 as strong as the field all around us. Do ya think your refrigerator magnets have to go? Perhaps you'd better get rid of all your credit cards with magnetic stripes. Hope you have no tools in your kitchen like knives, forks or spoons. Throw out any device in the bathroom that has a motor, like the shaver, the hairdryer and the ceiling fan! Be sure to have your house furnace heater and cooling compressor removed. Better never start your car within 100 feet of your house! Run for your life--there are magnets everywhere! Oh, and lest we forget they want to demagnetize LP RECORDS, the magnets in RECORD PLAYERS produce a field MILLIONS of percent stronger than the records placed on them.) See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_magnetic_field
Here's a photo of my Micro Seiki DDX1000--a fine and expensive ($1000 in 1980) turntable--with an Annis Laboratories magnetometer on the mat. As you can see, the magnetic field from the motor is off the scale above 5 gauss, or some 80,000 times (8 million percent) stronger than any possible residual magnetism a vinyl record disk could exhibit. Proportion still matters! Fear and superstition can not change the laws of nature. Clearly any fool who buys this manufacturer's line of bullshit and thinks he will hear a magnetic field change of 0.00008% quite simply deserves to be robbed of his money. Note: the black hockey puck-looking object on the platter is a precision machined 480 g solid brass record clamp with molded rubber damping jacket. (cost, $12 in 1974)
Demagnetizing Cables
Electric current generates a magnetic field as it flows through a power cord or conductor. However, magnetic impurities within the materials themselves become magnetized and introduce further magnetic distortion. Just loop your cables and power cords with their connectors on the deMag and begin treatment. Oops, did we forget that the ALTERNATING currents passing through cables magnetizes and demagnetizes them CONTINUOUSLY?
No matter how valuable or expensive your system is, the only way to achieve top performance is by demagnetizing your problems away! Lie, bullshit and FRAUD! There are no other demagnetizers on the market that can be used in such a versatile and effective way. The deMag Demagnetizer can even be used on metal-based accessories like CD stabilizers or speaker terminals. It could also be used on brains—who knows how distorted things might sound if your MIND is magnetized!
$1800
Specification:• Dimension: 487mm/19” W × 68mm/2.7” H (without spikes) × 470mm/18.5” D
• Net Weight: 11.0Kgs/24lbs
SUCKERS
or IDIOTS only PLEASE !
And last, but
certainly not least...
This is what happens when a really
good machinist is "downsized" and becomes a pot dealer
to make ends meet. Here in California, insurance companies don't
cover these in earthquake zones. If it fell on you, you'd be
flattened like the LP on the platter.
Never mind the fact that Neumann VMS70 record cutting lathes exhibit
1000 times more
noise—and less accuracy—than this huge male phallus, you know in your
heart that if you had enough money to buy the Bugatti Type 41
Royale, that you really would need to have roads built of polished
stainless steel on which to drive it. This turntable is
essentially a toy and from a practical standpoint, about as useful for
playing records
as a 200 inch Palomar telescope is for plucking your eyebrows, you vain
silly! BTW, don't ask about the price. It's likely to
change if anyone ever actually ordered one of these, but a guess would
put it somewhere in the range of a nice house in the 'burbs.
| Now, before you go gettin' all
self-righteous and thinking even for a moment that this deserves
comment, argument or attempts at refutation, forget it. I only
argue the merits of things that can actually be repeatably demonstrated
to dispassionate objective observers. I'm not willing to share
your religion any more than you're willing to share mine. But hey, it's your
money--enjoy it any way you want.
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