Are all of these "audio lies" generally true?

I generally agree with the article, but you are not the first (nor, I fear, the last) to post this.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this thread will magically relocate to the Sound Science forum. The people over there will be much more supportive.

They're tough to establish as true/false. I'll take a brief look

Cables are a flame war waiting to happen. I don't believe in them, but we have 2 entire forums dedicated to the topic, so as you can tell it's controversial.

Tubes....I can't comment on this since I haven't tried them, except that nearly everyone around here seems to agree they make a difference, although whether it's positive or negative varies depending on the setup.

Digital/Analog - Another flame war waiting to happen. I happen to agree with the author here - any potential benefits of analog sound are outweighed by how easy it is to get scratches/hiss/playback degradation, but this is again a controversial opinion

ABX tests: Yeah, he's spot on. They're the scientific standard and anyone who denies them is nuts. There, I said it.

Feedback: I'm not qualified to comment on this

Burn-In: Once again, controversial. I believe it's a load of crap, but that's a flame war waiting to happen

Biwiring, Power Conditioning, CD Treatment: See Burn-In or Cables.

Golden Ears: I'm not sure what he's arguing here, as there are certainly people who can hear better than others.

Essentially, this is a list of CONTROVERSIAL topics. Whether they're true or not....use the search function.

This article comes up for discussion here every so often.

I completely agree the cable and power conditioning arguments. I take excpetion with the assessment of vinyl and tubes. It completely skips over relevant information.

First, vinyl may not be perfect, but the article does not argue that it sounds bad. Vinyl - no matter the shortcomings - can sound unbelieveably good. Since vinyl is capable of fantastic sound, it should be used in addition to digital. I don't think there should be a digital/analog debate at all. People should use both. There's no reason not to.

The real benefit of vinyl lies in the catalog. There are cheap used records going back decades. Much of it was never transferred to digital. If you want to access this enormous amount of music, a turntable is the best way. As long as you don't go nuts buying 180g audiophile pressings for $40 a pop, you actually save money spinning records. If you buy used discs, you can get them for cheap or next to nothing sometimes. So if you want to explore music and not spend a huge amount of money, a turntable is mandatory. You will never access the wealth of music that's out there without vinyl. Since vinyl can sound excellent, calling it obsolete is a flagrant disservice to those of us who explore music, looking for new sounds and music we never knew existed.

Some people like to geek out over the specs of their system and get anal about the measurements on just a few different recordings. That's fine. But I think it's better to forget the geekery and find music to enjoy. Whether that's on black or silver discs, I don't care, but there's no way I could explore as much without the black ones.

Tubes are obsolete? OK, here's a fun exercise for you. Say you have a 12 year old solid state power amp that cooks off a chip. Go try to find a replacement, and I will wish you luck. When chips go out of production, they become unontanium. Go try to find a setof chips for the Blue Hawaii. It's not even that old of a design.

Chips are made in short runs today and when they're done, they are done. You can also thank just-in-time accounting (which everyone uses) for helping the chip fabricators get a pretty damn close read on demand and not producing spares. So when the run is over, you are not going to find any spares. The fab will be onto the next chip and your nice amp will make a nice four figure doorstop. Unless you want to buy a second unit and cannibalize it, of course.

On the other hand, if I blow an EL34 in my MV52, no problem. I can have another one sent whenever I want one. They're reasonably priced and in production.

Reliability is another issue I take. Hard wired, point-to-poin circuits are the best there are. Period. I have a ca. 1926 radio that has held up all these years. Mos of the original wiring is fine, even 83 years on. PCBs, on the other hand, can turn ugly with years of use and heat. If you lift a trace or scorch the board, have fun fixing that. Drillin holesand running jumpers isn't much fun. If enough of the board is fried, you'll end up going point-to-point to repair it, anyway. And think about it - real wires versus paper-thin traces. Which is going to hold up in the long term? And which is easier to repair? I can yank a bad wire and replace it in 5-10 minutes point-to-point. A bad trace can take hours to get to, assuming it can be repaired at all.

If you want long-term reliability and a guarantee that you can always get replacement parts, buy tubes. Solid state doesn't even compare. Oh, and lots of tubes are being put back into production. That's because patents and copyrights have been long expired on them. Even if there were demand to put some chops back into production, they would probably get bogged down in a copyright/patent fight over proprietary designs. So once a chip is gone, it is gone. Tubes have a way of coming back.

The accuracy of sound is also debatable. I'm posting from the phone, but there are arguments that tubes give a more natural response than chips do. I tend to believe it, as they sound more like the real thing to me.

Distortion and coloration are another matter not fully explored in the article. If you have a singer in an anechoic chamber, she is going to sound very different from when she's singing in an old church. You can argue the merits of the anechoic chamber (dead, flat, no room modes, etc., etc.) and point out the flaws of the church's acoustics. The problem is that I'd rather hear that singer in the old church.

Maybe tubes add something to the sound the same way an old church or classic nightclub do. I don't know. But the right venue can enhance a performance and I believe tha tubes do, as well. You never hear anyone moaning about a recording from a lively-sounding venue as opposed to a dead studio. So if it is OK for a venue to color the sound of a recording, what's so wrong with a little tube magic? We're supposed to be enjoying our gear, aren't we?

That's not to say that all colored gear sounds good, however. Some bass monster headphones soumd terrible because the bass kills everything else in the music. Tubes aren't (usually) like that.

That article just makes a lot of sense to me. When properly designed, there are no differences in sound between cables that I've experienced. And don't get me started on digital and power cables. There is more ******** in high-end audio than in homeopathic medicine and 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Penn and Teller really should do an episode on audiophilia. They would have a field day.

cables yes i completely agree... a well made cable with adequate shielding and decent connectors that can be bought cheap will sound the same as the $200 a foot cable... don't care what some of the cable freaks here think

tubes... they certainly have their place in the music production side of things (guitar/bass amps, effects, etc) but for playback it's all a matter of personal tastes and IMO i prefer solid state...

digital vs analog... this is a shaky area full of complex arguements

ABX tests... like Arainach i feel anyone who denies these tests is nuts

feedback... not qualified to comment

burn in... for speakers and headphones i believe in it... for electrical components and cables... pure snake oil

biwiring... not really qualified to comment on this not exactly a speaker guy

power conditioning... i don't really know enough about this but i smell BS when i hear people talk about the benefits of power conditioning

cd treatment... never seen or heard of any such nonsense before but the very concept just sounds silly

golden ears... like Arainach i'm having trouble figuring out what exactly he's arguing on that topic...

My only itch with that article is that, as Erik pointed out, some people actually like the moderate distortions introduced by vacuum tubes, and that the distortion are there is indisputable.

That article basically just served to reinforce things I already knew or suspected about the audiophile culture.

One point I feel is especially important to hammer in at every turn is that regarding the "high-end cable" myth. If Monster Cable as a company and a business model has taught us anything, it's that "high-end" cables are overpriced, unnecessary, and usually downright fraudulent money grabs.

I think your analogy between your preferring hearing music in a venue you enjoy and your preferring tubes for its sound signature deserves more exploration.

Some of the point I agree with, some I don't and some just sound like he's babbling. What I mean by that is, some points, and I use the term loosely, seem to come across as incomprehensible.

For example, point 10 "golden ears", some people can simple hear things that others can't. And that can easily be proven, by a simple hearing test. Another thing is, if you have certain training you could conceivably "hear" or notice things that a casual listener doesn't. For example, in an orchestral piece, if you're listening for the violins. You could possibly notice them while some else might not. From reading the article it seems to me that both would fall under the wide net cast by his rant. However, I think there are very logical explanations that can easily refute that point and other points as well.

That said I do agree with some points, namely the burn in one. While I believe that a certain degree of burn in exists, the amount of time quoted by some users, and/or companies is highly questionable, especially in light of the "trial periods" offered by manufacturers.

Erik, as per usual, is dead on. 8 of these points are, by and large, solid. However, I take issue with two of them:

Vinyl is A-OK in my book, due to availability of recordings and frequent presence of a superior master on vinyl. Given the exact same master tape transfer, I'll take digital every time, but that's not always possible.

Tubes are extremely linear devices, and do what they do just fine. They are not "warm", nor are they magic. Used properly, they are excellent audio devices. The presented argument is that they're obsolete and expensive. That's true, but there are non-audible benefits to tubes that are occasionally worth the money. One is availability, another is a nostalgic look, and another is that good tube equipment is often well-built. if you can have something that lights up, why would you take something that doesn't, all else being equal?

A 'lie' can not be true, or else it is not a 'lie' but a 'fact'...

Definitely going to agree with Erik's post also. I've read through this guy's site before, and I've read quite enough. While he makes many valid points and is correct on most of them, he tends to just babble on and on and whine and whine about how people choose to listen to music through different things in ways he doesn't approve of. This guy is simply one of those people that has utterly lost his mind in the equipment realm of audio and forgotten totally about music, that's my assessment. I choked down about 10 of his articles back in the day when I discovered his site and never saw a single reference to music, and subsequently gave up on reading it because his articles contain practically nothing good at all for me (to me, things that are totally obvious or nobody even cares about).

If there's one thing that I've learned after being on numerous websites like this one for years, it's that it's really just best to leave most people alone and let them buy what they think sounds best. I highly dislike the fact that people won't believe that cables don't make a difference, but it's really not worth arguing about because nobody's going to change their opinion on that matter. I'll reserve my argumentative side for when I'm doing science and being right actually matters. We wouldn't have so much great equipment on this website, tube or solid state, if the answer to good audio was as simple as Mr. Audio Critic would have us believe.

So you guys are all using Radio Shack cables in your set ups?

Up to this point, this has been a really good thread with very little unfair treatment of any single issue. Gobs of good insight offered as well! I hope we can keep it that way. I took the liberty of moving the thread to the Sound Science forum, thanks for the suggestion.
Cheers.