Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud

Probably going to make some people mad... but I went down the Audiophile rabbit hole last year before ultimately coming to the conclusion that it just isn't worth it. I understand the appeal, especially someone who values a nice piece of hardware. There is so much to choose from... DACs, DAPs, amps, fancy looking balanced cables in quality braiding, headphones with solid wood accents, IEMs that look straight outa sci-fi.

A few things I learned that may save someone time:

(1) Sound quality is in the medium, not the build. Speakers almost always sound better than a pair of cans (headphones), headphones almost always sound better than IEMs, IEMs almost always sound better than over the ears.

(2) The difference in sound quality between something that is a few hundred dollars, and something that is a few thousand is so small that "diminishing returns" as a phrase doesn't do it justice.

(3) The stack of DACs, EQs, preamps, and neatly managed RCA/XLR cables looks cool on your desk - but they take up a lot of space and cost a lot of money for something that sounds maybe 10% better than a pair of AirPods Max (provided you remember to turn on lossless in apple music, which I forgot to!)

The classic fable round these parts is Quad (and/or Cambridge Audio?) demo-ing their latest and greatest at a 1970s Heathrow Expo using mains cables as speaker wire.

It’s the least important part of any system and indeed my Quad amp and CA R50s are wired with twisted, braided, brown lamp cable as a nice aesthetic homage.

I don't know... this test is unscientific... clearly mud and banana can have an unintended side effect that makes audio sound better and needs to be investigated immediately.

on a more serious note.. doesn't seem like the "good" audio was good? there is a huge difference between noise free audio and garbage integrated audio / speakers with hizz imbalance and peaking... if the "good" audio is bad then there obviously won't be a difference between any of them.

which makes me think... banana and mud are noise filters... hmm...

One could modify this experiment to have very obvious effects. For example:

- Run the amplifier output through a banana or mud. Even if this somehow works and you can hear the sound, you’ll probably smell it as you cook and/or electrolyze your conductor :) (The banana likely works because the load impedance is very high in the experiment they did. The load impedance with an actual speaker is typically in the ballpark of 8 ohms. I admit I haven’t stuck a pair of multimeter probes in a banana lately, let alone done a proper I-V or AC impedance measurement.)

- Use really long cables. It’s not especially rare to be able to hear and even understand AM radio that gets accidentally picked up on a long cable and converted to baseband by some accidental nonlinearity in the amplifier.

- Use the actual outdoor mud on a rainy day as your conductor. I bet you can get some very loud mains hum like that.

Even audiophiles can probably identify these effects!

It's fashionable to dunk on audiophiles because many of their beliefs are silly and there are businesses that prey on them selling them "oxygen-free" cables and stuff like that. And some of their beliefs are auto-suggestion. But here's another way to look at it: some audio setups will sound better than others in your living room, because of a million variables you can't really control for. Maybe one manufacturer compensates for speaker characteristics in a different way and that accidentally works better with the speaker you have and the room you're in. Maybe it's the deficiencies of the amplifier that prevent resonance from a nearby bookshelf. Or a ceiling lamp. Or maybe they cause resonance that actually sounds good to you.

So yeah, audiophiles are in over their heads and tend to attribute near-mystical properties to individual electronic components, but the only tool they can rely on is trial and error. So if you can afford it, and if some of it seemingly sounds better... have fun? You're going to make mistakes, but that's not the end of the world.

While I believe a significant portion of audiophile gear is unscientific nonsense, in this case it’s not clear how adding different materials into the circuit would add distortion or change the audio in any way.

The perfect speaker system is indistinguishable from having a live band in the room with you (when blindfolded).

Can today's audio systems do that? How much money do I have to spend to get there?

I don’t question that audiophiles hear different things on expensive equipment, but I think it’s all placebo. “If I spend a stupid amount of money on this, my brain will gin up the sound to satisfy my expectations.”

I've recently been wondering if audiophilia is so polarizing a topic for reasons related to concept that some folks hear Laurel instead of Yanny.

I remember Technics used to advertise with amplifiers that used bamboo somewhere in the capacitors? Always wondered if there was actual bamboo in there somewhere and what the electrical effects were...

I cant pack wet mud into a tube and run it in the attic and it stay wet. Same with bananas unfortunatly as that would give banana plugs a lot more meaning.

> As we can see in the image above, there are only six correct answers out of 43 guesses

I would guess that this experiment is under powered and no conclusions can be drawn from it.

The biggest problem with audio hardware businesses is 95% of what they say about their products is marketing bullshit. It doesn't take a lot of money to get really good gear, if you put in the research, but its very easy to get ripped off if you don't, spending multiple times more than you need to get a worse result.

Just look at the boxes for half this stuff, quoting peak power for speakers instead of RMS, which is the equivalent of saying "This LED hits 50 watts for .00001 seconds during startup! Wow so amazing! (but don't look at the average 1 watt of output past that)"

The speakers, the cables, the AMPs, even digital source cables nearly all have 90% marketing budgets which drive up the price of many products without increasing quality at all.

I spent 3 years in school studying to be an audio engineer, and have built all my own stereo set ups from random equipment and home made bits and bobs, but I am fussy about a clean signal and carefull speaker placement, do silly things like wash a record in the sink with soap and water, and since I run missmatched speakers, amps that are not built tough, die quickly, just occured to me to impidence match sides by daisy chaining random speakers till I get a match, liking that. But yep!, we are not whales, and cant hear at 200khz and dont need to hear the difference between mud and bananas, but I think a whale would.

This seems like a business opportunity. “Ethically sourced organic mud speaker wires for a clean, organic, pure sound.” /s