I used to work at Circuit City and they always wanted us to push the $50 Monster cables and I was like no, these $5 cables are just fine. unfortunately, some customers think a higher price makes them better and won’t listen to some dumb salesperson.
With some cables sometimes quality is higher with price though. I prefer a good 5 USD usb cable than a shitty one that breaks at the joint after a few days of use.
Same with audio cables for guitars, sound is probably not going to suffer (although really long cables can have some issues), but wear damage is definitely noticeable for the very cheap ones.
$5 is not a high price. Some people (mostly audiophiles) are spending hundreds of dollars on a few feet of cable. Check out basically any cable on this page: https://kimber.com/
Quick edit, I do get your point, quality does usually go up with price, but to a point. This meme is making fun of people who buy sturdy stuff, but who buy vaporware.
Devil’s advocate:
Crystals - placebo effect can be a thing, and if they provide a sense of relief that’s a good thing. As long as they still take their actual medicne and don’t think putting a herring in a sock will cure cancer.
Cables - While there’s obviously a cut-off point. As an IT guy I have fixed a not-insignificant number of issues with sound/display/network quality/dropouts by replacing crap/damaged cables with slightly more expensive ones. Just don’t expect them to turn. a 360p stream into 4k
Yeah, but people are continually scammed out of their life savings for snake oil that promises to do the impossible. If your making 100k and spend $30 a month on some bottle of homeopathic nonsense and placebo yourself out of a headache, that’s fine I guess.
But the person who sold that to you is also getting hundreds of dollars a month from people making barely more than that by selling tic tacs or whatever at a several thousand percent markup, promising false hope to the vulnerable at the mere cost of everything they own.
Bit of a sore spot for me I guess, just because of who I know. What you say is technically true - a bit of extra placebo might be fine, but so many fall really hard for them, and the “innocent” use helps by middle+ class people who can afford it helps legitimize it, making it easier to prey on those who can’t.
On the crystal bit: honestly, alternative medicine stuff, as bogus as it may or may not be, can be fine and even sometimes helpful if it doesn’t replace any of the actual medicine. Not only are placebos pretty dandy, some alternative medicine things actually help with treatment adhesion sometimes, because it can make the patient feel empowered in their health outcomes more than the usual spiel of “keep hydrated”/“eat well”/“sleep well”/“exercise” and in turn, can help people actually do these things, because they feel that they can actually impact their health with things they do.
Now, does this good outweigh the risk of them dropping the actual treatment over the alternative medicine stuff? I don’t know, I’m not a researcher in this area, but I feel like not everything we do had to make sense you know? If something feels good and there’s no harm in doing it, go ahead and knock yourself out, we are after all, sentient meat, and that comes with quirks.
I would agree except:
It creates an environment for scammers and charlatans to thrive. They grow and become more powerful and exploit more people. And the behavior becomes more common and more accepted as “that’s just how it is” or “their own fault, lol idiots…”
It’s just not worth it. A patient can tell themselves a white lie if they want, but it should be illegal for ANYONE, doctor or not to sell unproven medicine, and we need to crack down on the “not intended to treat or cure any illness” loophole.
Audiophiles incoming…
Gold-plating the connectors is actually one of the few things that does make sense. When new, they won’t sound better, but they corrode less, which can, sometime in the future, make a difference, albeit very slight: surface oxidation can form a tiny capacitor. That said, I think you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference to chrome-plated ones. But unlike lots of other esoteric “high-end” nonsense, this one has at least theoretical technical merit. And the micrometer-scale galvanic gold-plating isn’t expensive, either.
I think the meme makes more since for any digital connection, where it’s literally impossible for the cable to make a difference to the sound quality. I have seen some wacky shit online, like claims of gold plated optical audio cables.
if you have swamp-like humidity, the coating prevents corrosion. if that is not an issue for you, it will do nothing. even if it were more conductive, audio signals are so low current, it wouldn’t makeas difference
What’s wrong with your dogMy favorite part about every power cable photo like this, is knowing that right inside the wall it’s just normal cheap romex wiring all the way to the breaker box, and then cheap aluminum wiring all the way down the power lines.
What am I seing in this picture?
Here’s a good article on the nonsense that is “ultra-high-end power cords”.
A very expensive power cord setup for audiophiles… it’s snake
bloodoil basically.Snake blood, upgraded version of snake oil ?
I think the theory is that the power cable creates a magnetic field around it that could interfere with the ultra precise electronics and what we are looking at is shielding for it. It could be complete bullsh but there is scientific reasoning behind it. It’s for people who pay premium to reach that final 5% and I have some weird kind of respect for such passion. When you are paying north of tens of thousands of dollars for a system, the expensive cable is the least of your problems.
That can’t be said for people who pay several thousand dollars for a premium hdmi cable that is supposed to 4k-ify a full hd signal. That what constitutes as snake oil in my mind.
It’s complete bullshit cuz that field doesn’t interact with the already shielded signal cables. You can also have the speaker cables shielded if you think that field with interfere with a signal that large.
In any case, even if it does interfere, you can’t hear the interference, I guarantee you that. No human can, and this has been proven on multiple blind listening tests, yet these things still sell 🤷. Sheep will be sheep.
Gold is a better conductor than copper and gold also does not corrode. So they actually are better cables, since the thing the cable does is made significantly easier and less prone to failure when the wires and connectors are gold and not copper or some other metal that doesn’t conduct electricity as well.
The conductivity doesn’t mean a damn thing when it’s plating some shit-tier alloy.
That corrosion resistance though… more than worth the price. I made that mistake on some monitors once. ONCE.
Gold is a worse conductor than copper. The benefit is just protection from corrosion.
(Copper conductivity is 6 * 10^7 S/m, gold is 4*10^7 S/m. Silver is 6.3 * 10^7, but very prone to corrosion).
Most ridiculous are gold-plated HDMI cables.
You could be right, but I present you evidence for even more stupidity…
Gold plated toslink cables
Lol, do (or did) they really exist ?
Yes and because of the stupidity of it they now say that it’s made that way to protect te connector against corrosion. Usually toslink cables are all plastic so I would really like to see how it corrodes
These RGB lights can boost your Gaming performance!
I’ll take your entire stock!
i know that people don’t like rgb, but i absolutely adore when everything in my room sparkles and shines like a christmas tree
