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.
Yeah it's definitely not the best. In both examples you end up with people being ripped off (there's also "magic" audio cables out there that cost more than my first car).
I just wanted to play the devil's advocate for a bit of fun. Would be much better in both situations of they had to label it as "not going to do much more than give you a small dopamine hit".
Spot on. the placebo effect is powerful and very likely plays a role in both scenarios.
Often I have supposed really expensive cables improve things just because it was time to replace cables already, or the connection was janky to begin with because the budding audiophile is upgrading from bare wire connectors to banana plugs.
That isn't really a placebo effect though. It's just imagining things but for it to be a placebo effect your imagination would also have to lead to an actual, measurable improvement of the audio quality. Which needless to say is impossible.
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.
More than placebo, I think it’s a god source for spiritualism.
I’m one of those “edgelords” that believe that organised religion doesn’t have a place in a civilised modern society, but I don’t think spiritualism in and of itself is bad.
Thus I’m all for crystals, horoscopes, praying and whatnot to fulfill one’s spiritual needs.
I’m pagan but I have issues with most modern use of crystals in spiritualism. Not on religious grounds (except the geotheistic ones), but because they’re almost never harvested ethically or in a way that isn’t extremely bad for the environment.
If you find some nice crystals in a walk through the forest or if you inherit some use them by all means, but more people need to consider the consequences of the materials they use in their spiritual practice.
I'm personally moreso of a believer that humans don't necessarily need spiritualism, we just need purpose. That purpose can be found following a deity or other spiritual pursuits, but can also be found with a task or organization, for example, volunteer work is often a source of community and meaningful interaction. It's when life feels purposeless that people fall into isolation and depression.
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.
Gold/Nickel plating is standard for most connectors nowadays except for the cheapest of contacts, which uses tin plating.
Gold plating can still wear off, because pure gold plating is "soft" and "hard" gold plating is usually done with some kind of mixture with other metals for hardness. And the cost of gold plating depends greatly on the thickness, since most of the cost won't be in materials but in process time.
That being said, if you truly want the absolute best uncorrodible and toughest plating for a connector, look for rhodium plating, but that is VERY expensive.
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.
digital connection, where it's literally impossible for the cable to make a difference to the sound quality
Digital isn't magic. Lower-quality cables can very much make a difference on digital connections, including digital audio, although the effects are very different from analogue signal degradation. Granted, for the low bitrates required for audio you'd have to have a really bad cable/connector. As long as you are above a certain quality threshold, it doesn't matter, but with surface corrosion you may end up with marginal signal levels or degraded signal edges causing more bit errors. What that means depends on the type of protocol and the kind of error detection and error correction. Best case is a very good error correction, and nothing happens. But it may lead to slower transfer speeds due to retransmits, dropouts in real-time connections, or worse.
Less than perfect conductivity or mismatched impedance may also limit the bandwidth, cause reflections, and other nasty signal degradation. It is no joke that some cheap HDMI cables cannot reliably transmit 4k signals, and the higher-quality ones generally have gold-plated contact surfaces for good reason.
Anybody else remember the $2000 gold plated hdmi cable on amazon? The reviews were wild lol.
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
Nothing wrong with that, but that's about taste and aesthetics, not performance.
I personally think the fastest way to game is in a gaming chair with RGB lights built in. Even moreso if your RGB mic protrudes slightly into the shot so everyone knows what an important and dedicated streamer you are.
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?
What's wrong with your dog
Here's a good article on the nonsense that is "ultra-high-end power cords".
that's not gunna make a good seal
Audiophiles incoming...
Oh no what have I done.
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.
But in 30 years, the gold plated one will be corroded a tiny bit less! So worth it!
And don’t let them touch the ground! Also get this DAC, it’s got bright highs. Don’t forget to burn in your headphones!
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.
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).
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.
Definetly not me buying yet another dedicated sound card for my PC 😅
Sometimes when I'm buying a new part or whatever I catch myself looking at sound cards then wondering wtf I'm doing anyway.
Some of them are really pretty, but if you only care about performance (Minimum and 1% FPS that is), go for the AE-5 Plus or the X-Fi XtremeGamer.
If you're producing music you're well advised to buy a dedicated sound card for latency and input / output purposes.
so, it's a lie?
Wood is a worse conductor than copper, so a copper cable is better than a wooden one.
I expect aluminum, copper, and gold wires would have similar performance over a short range.
Great. I guess I'll just throw out all my wooden aux cables then.
today I learned something
It's gotta be like a 1% improvement or something, nothing ever worth the price
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 make a difference
We bassists are better than this! Please let me be right, lol.
I'm pretty sure the gold playing on connectors is because of gold's non corrosive properties. If the goal was conductivity or a better signal, you'd use something like silver instead.
Me on god
