I’ve never been one of those weird audiophile types. They’ve always struck me as a wee bit odd listening to John Coltrane, in the dark, with their eyes closed, suspended from the ceiling by elastic bands, completely nude. You know the sort of thing.
One of their other bizarre habits, and one which is also shared by the gullible punters who buy TVs at Dixons, is buying obscenely expensive cables.
My HDMI cables cost £3.89 each, if I were to be a cable snob I’d have paid £99.95 for a Monster brand HDMI cable.
And if I’d done that you could rightly claim that I was a complete twat, because I would be.
I recall the father of a friend of mine that bought an £80 SCART cable. He used this to connect a DVD player to a 50″ low definition, back projection television. He was informed by the salesman that it would improve picture quality immeasurably. Immeasurably.
Yeah, maybe if it was fucking magic.
That’s the point though isn’t it, the gullible can be fooled very easily. As can the conceited.
If you think you have some kind of divine power that enables you to sense the effect that using oxygen free copper over regular copper has on the electrical impulse that carries your audio signal to your speakers, you’ve got to have some kind of messiah complex. It just isn’t possible.
The same goes for HDMI cables, the signal is digital it either works or it doesn’t, there’s no in between. Even worse than that is the bizarre swindle of the gold plated optical cable. What the fuck use is gold plating to a device that relies on optical integrity? None, that’s what. How could it be, unless of course gold has some amazing optical properties I’m not aware of!
All of the above just serves to enhance the glee I felt when reading this article about audiophiles being unable to tell the difference between aforementioned Monster cables and coat hangers. That’s right, coat hangers.
Oh, how we laughed.
The amazing optical properties of gold… it is shiny!
For that reason only, fuckwits will buy stuff like that.
The old equation of the uninformed.
Expensive = Good
In addition of course the fact that someone works in a shop seems to accord them some kind of higher power.
God knows the number of times I’ve given people advice, realistic advice, that as soon as they step into PC World goes out of the window because a twelve year old in a PC World shirt tells them that the shiny Toshiba laptop comes with 94 mega RAMs of internet.
The same goes for the perception of quality, spend £2,000 on a Samsung television and you’ll get something amazing, spend the same amount on a Bang & Olufsen set and you’ll get an average television.