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Comment by mattkevan | Hacker News Reader

Just spent the last 15 minutes reading through their websites in quiet amazement. How do they get funding? Why do people pay them?

When your ‘director of cryptography’ has this in his bio, surely something’s up:

> dedicated the last fifteen years to decrypting mathematical codes in Shakespeare’s writings that have revealed unknown sacred geometry hidden in the pyramids of Giza.

Another of their companies sells patches that relieves pain through the magic of quantum physics. Something about the energies of healing substances that unlock a pain relieving carrier wave.

Yikes.

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It's like audiophiles; there's not too many people who believe it, but enough of the ones that do have enough disposable income to make a great grift.

I'm genuinely confused here... some audio equipment does actually sound better than other audio equipment. Are you referring to snake oil audio cable salesmen?

Yes, the latter, and a lot of the really expensive home audio kit.

"Audiophiles" are generally associated with not high end audio equipment at absurd costs and no reasoning. Oxygen free copper cabling, making sure your cables are isolated from the floor on little stands to reduce the vibration they absorb, "burning in" amplifiers for thousands of hours to improve the flavor of the output in a supposedly perceptible way. Many behaviors with the consistency of rubbing deer blood on your car hood to give it bloodlust, and therefor extra speed.

> ...rubbing deer blood on your car hood to give it bloodlust, and therefor extra speed.

I've never heard this one; brilliantly funny!!

I've seen a coil in a fancy box sold for 800 bucks to clean and smooth out the air structure in the room to improve your sound experience. I suppose, that kind of stuff is meant.

People differ about which point Audiophilia descends into nonsense. Obviously the magic stones and $5000 digital cables are ridiculous.

I would probably argue for a more expansive definition. If you have to listen really, really hard to hear the enhancement piece of equipment gives then it's a waste of time and money.

But hell, I grew up listening to music recorded onto a C90 through a $40 walkman.

Not just "listen very hard", but "listen very hard during a double blind test".

I remember a thread on avsforum.com where one individual has claimed he could hear the difference between cheap and expensive cables. Someone on the forum offered to travel to his house, do a double blind test, and post the results. The individual agreed, and the test was performed. The results of 20 tests were something like 12/8, where 12 was the number of times he mistook the $5 cable for the $900 one.

Well, that was kind of expected, however the most interesting part was that despite this clear evidence, the individual still refused to change his mind about importance of the "high quality" cables. It was a bizarre and eye opening experience for me to follow that development.

There is a fundamental issue here. Some people (with understanding of 101 stats) see the results of 12/8 of false/true outcomes and read it as a confirmation of null hypothesis - 50%/50% of guessing the cord.

Some other people, however, see it as 8/20 you can hear the inferior product, they think that they are not peasants to get 8/20 feeling of inferior product, so shut up and take my money, cause $900 cable will guarantee 0/20 of hearing bad cable, totally worth it. nuff said

Speakers sound different, and thus some speakers will sound better to you. Most people find linear speaker performance "hard work" so you don't see it attempted in homes usually.

And maybe, if you don't use active speakers, the Amplifier makes a difference.

Everything else is snake oil, not just the cables. Separate CD transports, fancy DACs, "HD" formats, all snake oil.

I had no idea the old equidistant letter sequences trick is still alive after all these years.

I would say all the companies are different branches of the same Con artist.

Just working on different directions.

I clicked around and some of them even don't exist outside of strathspeycrown. Several of them have just plain placeholder sites.

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