(from the There’s One Born Every Minute dept.)
(via email)
James Randi’s Swift – September 28, 2007
MORE CABLE NONSENSE
Several readers alerted us to yet another hilarious and preposterous situation in the “audiophile” business, which we have referred to frequently simply because if some of their claims were true, they would be paranormal. Here’s another such.Monster Cable – a company that turns out a fine line of products, but not untinged with the woo-woo flavor, sells a set of $80 HDMI [High Definition Multimedia Interface] cables, designed to handle new signals brought about by the advent of High Definition TV. I thought that was a heavy price to be asking – no, I didn’t invest! – but now we see that the Pear Cable company is advertising a pair of 12-foot “Anjou” audio cables for $7,250; that’s $302 a foot! And, as expected, “experts” were approached for their opinions on the performance of these wonders. Excerpts:
…way better than anything I have heard…Simply put these are very danceable cables. Music playing through them results in the proverbial foot-tapping scene with the need or desire to get up and move. Great swing and pace – these cables smack that right on the nose big time.
…simply way better than anything I have heard prior to their audition.
Well, we at the JREF are willing to be shown that these “no-compromise” cables perform better than, say, the equivalent Monster cables. While Pear rattles on about “capacitance,” “inductance,” “skin effect,” “mechanical integrity” and “radio frequency interface,” – all real qualities and concerns, and adored by the hi-fi nut-cases – we naively believe that a product should be judged by its actual performance, not by qualities that can only be perceived by attentive dogs or by hi-tech instrumentation. That said, we offer the JREF million-dollar prize to – for example – Dave Clark, Editor of the audio review publication Positive Feedback Online, who provided the above rave review. If Mr. Clark should choose to apply for the prize, he would be unlike John Atkinson of Stereophile Magazine – see randi.org/jr/121004science.html#11 – who made great noises about being ready to snap up the million, then got distracted by things such as gullible readers who accepted his claimed abilities, and backed out. But we’ll see…
Monster cables are already overpriced, but asking $7,250 for a pair 12 foot audio cables is beyond ludicrous. I doubt anyone can tell a difference in a blind test.