The worlds most famous skeptical investigator is famous for debunking celebrity charlatans like the nonsense-talking, spoon-bending mystic Uri Geller. I’m glad to say that he also has time to educate the world about entirely materialistic forms of flim-flam: this week he has turned his attention to the high-end hifi industry, specifically their tendancy to sell outrageously priced “interconnects” and speaker cables to gullible “audiophiles”.
Having served my time in community radio, I can be sure that there is no audible difference between an interconnect costing 50p and one which costs £50. There is a practical difference, which is that you have £49.50 less to spend on more important studio devices.
No recording studios engineer make use of high-end cables – they use whatever they find in the studio-spares bin which is mainly cheap, disposable cables. Good recording studios are full of expensive equipment, but these are things like mixing-desks and recording devices. The interconnects between these devices will usually be twisted-pair copper or cheap fibre-optic.
The entire CD mastering process introduces so much distortion into the recording that even if the quality of interconnects and speaker-cable made a difference it would be utterly insignificant compared to the amount of ‘noise’ that is intrinsically part of any recording.
For these reasons, I expect that James Randi’s challenge will remain un-accepted for the foreseeable future.
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