As someone with a long-standing use of the flair "Evil science" in this sub, I object to your use of the term, and conflation with snake oil.
I should have registered that trademark…
That said: Products like exotic cable, cable lifters, shakti stones, Mapingo room tuning reduced-size hockey pucks, green CD markers and similar: All snakeoil.
As for other products: The word you're looking for is "well-engineered" and "poorly engineered" - not good or evil science - science doesn't have moral value, only how it's applied. People who build products don't do science; they do engineering.
There are poorly-engineered products out there with sky-high price tags, and there are well-engineered products with moderate pricetags.
Throwing out the poorly engineered products, such as this one out, your question becomes one of "Does properly engineered products show a (scientifically) provable increase in sound quality?"
The answer to that is "Yes" and "Maybe":
- Harman has done research with large-scale double-blinded listening tests that in essence show that speakers that objectively measure better are also greatly preferred over products that don't measure as well.
- That research doesn't extend to other components, such as amplifiers or sources.
As for when "diminishing returns" set in: It depends on the technical/engineering requirements for an audio system. If all you want to do is to listen to relatively bass-deprived music in a small room at moderate levels, seated close to the speakers, then they set in pretty quickly, and the improvement you'd be getting from a $5000 solution over a $500 one will be marginal.
If you have other requirements, such as being able to play the full audio frequency range at THX cinema levels, then diminishing returns for you may not set in until you have $50000 invested. Here's a physics example for you:
- Let's say you're seated 4m from the speakers, and you want THX reference levels. This would mean a peak SPL of 105 dB in your listening position. Since sound drops off by 6 dB for every doubling of distance, this means that the loudspeaker would need to be capable of reproducing 117 dB at a distance of 1m.
- The most difficult bit about producing 117 dB is in the bass, as the excursion becomes large. You'll realistically need at least two 15" subs to reach this level
- You're also starting to run into power issues - a typical loudspeaker with a dome tweeter has an actual sensitivity of 87 dB/W/m. To be able to play 105 dB peaks at 4m with this speaker, you will need an amplifier capable of outputting 500W short-term. You now have two issues: If you're using Class AB amplification with toroidal transformers, not many amplifiers are actually capable of this without considerable cost. The second issue is that traditional tweeters aren't all that fond of being fed that much power - the voice coil will get hot, the isolation will melt and the tweeter will fry.
There are multiple other issues that aren't covered here, such as room interaction and directivity, because they are an entirely new can of worms, with products just released or being released - the new Lexicon speaker utilizing beam forming, the Beolab 90, pictured on top of this page doing some of the same, and the Kii Audio Three which attempts to solve directivity in the bass domain. All of them costly solutions.
Love it.
Start troll thread with statement that asks for subjective opinions on a general topic, get responses calling out troll thread, then complain that we somehow owe you data.
Even the basic title of this thread is stated incorrectly. Science cannot be either evil or good. The application of the science or the scientist could be evil but I wouldn't use that word as we are discussing audio products, not something that's life and death.
I'm certainly comfortable with words like unscrupulous and unethical when referring to many of the claims made about high end audio products but that's usually more of a marketing issue than a science issue.
I also think you're conflating questioning the value of high end products with lack of experience or ownership of them. I can only speak for myself, but I suspect many of us make purchases because we decide we want something, even when we know there are cheaper options that would be audibly indistinguishable. Nothing wrong with that IMO as long as you understand what you're buying going in and claims aren't made post purchase that aren't backed with data.
Edit - took to long writing/editing this and everyone stole my thunder
Edit - took to long writing/editing this and everyone stole my thunder
