Stodge.org

Hi-fi nuts are legendary for spending a whole lot of money on chromed plated tat. Most audiophiles would like to think of themselves as perfectionists in the science of sound, when in actual fact they are just a bunch of emotional suckers addicted to exchanging cash for electrical bling.

Manufacturers of high-end audio gear are happy to cater for this audience; all they need to do is make products that look cool and write spiritual sounding blurbs about how the latest interconnect will counter-balance the electro-ohmic resonance of your valve-biassed interossiter.

A great example of pseudoscience (and fraud) are Shakti Stones; apparantly a noise reduction technology that look a little like ingots of iron. According to the astroturf campaign intended to promote this product, customers typically need to acquire more than ten of these (at $200 a go), and place them onto hi-fi interconnects. At best these lumps of metal act like choke cores, however any percieved improvement in quality over what a $5 choke is imaginary. Pseudoscience debunker “The Amazing Randi” calls them “The Stupid Stones“.

What good is a $2000 set of iron ingots without a $2000 power cable for them to rest on? Even if there could be a benefit from optimising the last meter of power cable to your-hi-fi, the other 10 miles to the power-station remain the same as ever. The manufacturers do not explain how this wire magically brings perfection to a power-supply that is 99.9% based on cheap industrial copper wiring.

The cable promises to virtually eliminate “capacitive and inductive reactance” (whatever that means) because it has no ferrous and carbon components… which in English means it does exactly what any other power-cable would do because it is made of copper… just like any other power cable.