Zapp_Fan
Member of the Trade: Aiwa
The logic to audiophoolery is... If you can't hear a night or day difference A) Your equipment isn't good enough, spend more or B) You are deaf, enjoy lousy sound. They never even consider C) Maybe there isn't a difference at all.
My boss likes to talk about the "bike shed effect" which if you haven't heard of it, is based on a (maybe apocryphal) anecdote -
A planning committee is designing a nuclear power plant. There are hundreds of pages of specifications, safety regulations, detailed reactor designs, and so on. They are reviewing the whole planning document and most pages go by without comment. Finally they get to a page in the document specifying the design of a bike shed in the parking lot of the power plant - quite possibly the least important part of the plan. Suddenly, everyone has a strong opinion - there are multiple pages of revisions, lots of active discussion on everything, especially what color to paint the shed.
The lesson is that people don't focus on what's actually important, they focus and try to improve things they can easily see and understand, even if it doesn't make a difference. Improving a reactor design is hard, takes a lot of work, and the details are hard to understand. The color of a bike shed is very easy to grasp, on the other hand...
I think a lot of audiophool stuff comes from this phenomenon. Things like jitter are easy to understand in a "lower is better" sense, and so are discussed actively. Jitter is definitely one of the bike sheds of the audio world...
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