• SGG@lemmy.world
    56·
    1 year ago

    Devil’s advocate:

    Crystals - placebo effect can be a thing, and if they provide a sense of relief that’s a good thing. As long as they still take their actual medicne and don’t think putting a herring in a sock will cure cancer.

    Cables - While there’s obviously a cut-off point. As an IT guy I have fixed a not-insignificant number of issues with sound/display/network quality/dropouts by replacing crap/damaged cables with slightly more expensive ones. Just don’t expect them to turn. a 360p stream into 4k

    • IronDonkey@reddthat.com
      6·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, but people are continually scammed out of their life savings for snake oil that promises to do the impossible. If your making 100k and spend $30 a month on some bottle of homeopathic nonsense and placebo yourself out of a headache, that’s fine I guess.

      But the person who sold that to you is also getting hundreds of dollars a month from people making barely more than that by selling tic tacs or whatever at a several thousand percent markup, promising false hope to the vulnerable at the mere cost of everything they own.

      Bit of a sore spot for me I guess, just because of who I know. What you say is technically true - a bit of extra placebo might be fine, but so many fall really hard for them, and the “innocent” use helps by middle+ class people who can afford it helps legitimize it, making it easier to prey on those who can’t.

      • SGG@lemmy.world
        3·
        1 year ago

        Yeah it’s definitely not the best. In both examples you end up with people being ripped off (there’s also “magic” audio cables out there that cost more than my first car).

        I just wanted to play the devil’s advocate for a bit of fun. Would be much better in both situations of they had to label it as “not going to do much more than give you a small dopamine hit”.

    • LynnValk@lemmy.world
      5·
      1 year ago

      On the crystal bit: honestly, alternative medicine stuff, as bogus as it may or may not be, can be fine and even sometimes helpful if it doesn’t replace any of the actual medicine. Not only are placebos pretty dandy, some alternative medicine things actually help with treatment adhesion sometimes, because it can make the patient feel empowered in their health outcomes more than the usual spiel of “keep hydrated”/“eat well”/“sleep well”/“exercise” and in turn, can help people actually do these things, because they feel that they can actually impact their health with things they do.

      Now, does this good outweigh the risk of them dropping the actual treatment over the alternative medicine stuff? I don’t know, I’m not a researcher in this area, but I feel like not everything we do had to make sense you know? If something feels good and there’s no harm in doing it, go ahead and knock yourself out, we are after all, sentient meat, and that comes with quirks.

      • gibmiser@lemmy.world
        8·
        1 year ago

        I would agree except:

        It creates an environment for scammers and charlatans to thrive. They grow and become more powerful and exploit more people. And the behavior becomes more common and more accepted as “that’s just how it is” or “their own fault, lol idiots…”

        It’s just not worth it. A patient can tell themselves a white lie if they want, but it should be illegal for ANYONE, doctor or not to sell unproven medicine, and we need to crack down on the “not intended to treat or cure any illness” loophole.

    • beardsley@midwest.social
      4·
      1 year ago

      Spot on. the placebo effect is powerful and very likely plays a role in both scenarios.

      Often I have supposed really expensive cables improve things just because it was time to replace cables already, or the connection was janky to begin with because the budding audiophile is upgrading from bare wire connectors to banana plugs.

      • Skirfir@feddit.de
        4·
        1 year ago

        That isn’t really a placebo effect though. It’s just imagining things but for it to be a placebo effect your imagination would also have to lead to an actual, measurable improvement of the audio quality. Which needless to say is impossible.

    • LynnValk@lemmy.world
      3·
      1 year ago

      On the crystal bit: honestly, alternative medicine stuff, as bogus as it may or may not be, can be fine and even sometimes helpful if it doesn’t replace any of the actual medicine. Not only are placebos pretty dandy, some alternative medicine things actually help with treatment adhesion sometimes, because it can make the patient feel empowered in their health outcomes more than the usual spiel of “keep hydrated”/“eat well”/“sleep well”/“exercise” and in turn, can help people actually do these things, because they feel that they can actually impact their health with things they do.

      Now, does this good outweigh the risk of them dropping the actual treatment over the alternative medicine stuff? I don’t know, I’m not a researcher in this area, but I feel like not everything we do had to make sense you know? If something feels good and there’s no harm in doing it, go ahead and knock yourself out, we are after all, sentient meat, and that comes with quirks.

    • Dojan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      More than placebo, I think it’s a god source for spiritualism.

      I’m one of those “edgelords” that believe that organised religion doesn’t have a place in a civilised modern society, but I don’t think spiritualism in and of itself is bad.

      Thus I’m all for crystals, horoscopes, praying and whatnot to fulfill one’s spiritual needs.

      • captainlezbian@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        1 year ago

        I’m pagan but I have issues with most modern use of crystals in spiritualism. Not on religious grounds (except the geotheistic ones), but because they’re almost never harvested ethically or in a way that isn’t extremely bad for the environment.

        If you find some nice crystals in a walk through the forest or if you inherit some use them by all means, but more people need to consider the consequences of the materials they use in their spiritual practice.

      • TheSaneWriter@vlemmy.netEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        I’m personally moreso of a believer that humans don’t necessarily need spiritualism, we just need purpose. That purpose can be found following a deity or other spiritual pursuits, but can also be found with a task or organization, for example, volunteer work is often a source of community and meaningful interaction. It’s when life feels purposeless that people fall into isolation and depression.

    • LynnValk@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      On the crystal bit: honestly, alternative medicine stuff, as bogus as it may or may not be, can be fine and even sometimes helpful if it doesn’t replace any of the actual medicine. Not only are placebos pretty dandy, some alternative medicine things actually help with treatment adhesion sometimes, because it can make the patient feel empowered in their health outcomes more than the usual spiel of “keep hydrated”/“eat well”/“sleep well”/“exercise” and in turn, can help people actually do these things, because they feel that they can actually impact their health with things they do.

      Now, does this good outweigh the risk of them dropping the actual treatment over the alternative medicine stuff? I don’t know, I’m not a researcher in this area, but I feel like not everything we do had to make sense you know? If something feels good and there’s no harm in doing it, go ahead and knock yourself out, we are after all, sentient meat, and that comes with quirks.

  • Hopfgeist@feddit.de
    46·
    1 year ago

    Gold-plating the connectors is actually one of the few things that does make sense. When new, they won’t sound better, but they corrode less, which can, sometime in the future, make a difference, albeit very slight: surface oxidation can form a tiny capacitor. That said, I think you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference to chrome-plated ones. But unlike lots of other esoteric “high-end” nonsense, this one has at least theoretical technical merit. And the micrometer-scale galvanic gold-plating isn’t expensive, either.

    • Margot Robbie@lemmy.world
      16·
      1 year ago

      Gold/Nickel plating is standard for most connectors nowadays except for the cheapest of contacts, which uses tin plating.

      Gold plating can still wear off, because pure gold plating is “soft” and “hard” gold plating is usually done with some kind of mixture with other metals for hardness. And the cost of gold plating depends greatly on the thickness, since most of the cost won’t be in materials but in process time.

      That being said, if you truly want the absolute best uncorrodible and toughest plating for a connector, look for rhodium plating, but that is VERY expensive.

    • kurosawaa@programming.dev
      9·
      1 year ago

      I think the meme makes more since for any digital connection, where it’s literally impossible for the cable to make a difference to the sound quality. I have seen some wacky shit online, like claims of gold plated optical audio cables.

      • Hopfgeist@feddit.de
        6·
        1 year ago

        digital connection, where it’s literally impossible for the cable to make a difference to the sound quality

        Digital isn’t magic. Lower-quality cables can very much make a difference on digital connections, including digital audio, although the effects are very different from analogue signal degradation. Granted, for the low bitrates required for audio you’d have to have a really bad cable/connector. As long as you are above a certain quality threshold, it doesn’t matter, but with surface corrosion you may end up with marginal signal levels or degraded signal edges causing more bit errors. What that means depends on the type of protocol and the kind of error detection and error correction. Best case is a very good error correction, and nothing happens. But it may lead to slower transfer speeds due to retransmits, dropouts in real-time connections, or worse.

        Less than perfect conductivity or mismatched impedance may also limit the bandwidth, cause reflections, and other nasty signal degradation. It is no joke that some cheap HDMI cables cannot reliably transmit 4k signals, and the higher-quality ones generally have gold-plated contact surfaces for good reason.

        • kurosawaa@programming.dev
          8·
          1 year ago

          The difference in HDMI cables is entirely dependent on which version of HDMi hey are compliant with, it has nothing to do with using gold or any other kind of material. A digital signal is either readable or unreadable with no in-between. The chance of a degraded cable only lowering then quality of the output rather than resulting in total failiure is near impossible.

        • PiselloSauro@feddit.it
          17·
          1 year ago

          Yes and because of the stupidity of it they now say that it’s made that way to protect te connector against corrosion. Usually toslink cables are all plastic so I would really like to see how it corrodes

    • lain3English
      10·
      1 year ago

      i know that people don’t like rgb, but i absolutely adore when everything in my room sparkles and shines like a christmas tree

    • Stalinwolf@lemmy.caEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      I personally think the fastest way to game is in a gaming chair with RGB lights built in. Even moreso if your RGB mic protrudes slightly into the shot so everyone knows what an important and dedicated streamer you are.

    • MangoPenguin
      13·
      1 year ago

      My favorite part about every power cable photo like this, is knowing that right inside the wall it’s just normal cheap romex wiring all the way to the breaker box, and then cheap aluminum wiring all the way down the power lines.

        • sombrero@lemm.ee
          2·
          1 year ago

          I think the theory is that the power cable creates a magnetic field around it that could interfere with the ultra precise electronics and what we are looking at is shielding for it. It could be complete bullsh but there is scientific reasoning behind it. It’s for people who pay premium to reach that final 5% and I have some weird kind of respect for such passion. When you are paying north of tens of thousands of dollars for a system, the expensive cable is the least of your problems.

          That can’t be said for people who pay several thousand dollars for a premium hdmi cable that is supposed to 4k-ify a full hd signal. That what constitutes as snake oil in my mind.

          • PCChipsM922U@sh.itjust.works
            6·
            1 year ago

            It’s complete bullshit cuz that field doesn’t interact with the already shielded signal cables. You can also have the speaker cables shielded if you think that field with interfere with a signal that large.

            In any case, even if it does interfere, you can’t hear the interference, I guarantee you that. No human can, and this has been proven on multiple blind listening tests, yet these things still sell 🤷. Sheep will be sheep.

  • 🇰 🔵 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@lemmy.world
    27·
    1 year ago

    Gold is a better conductor than copper and gold also does not corrode. So they actually are better cables, since the thing the cable does is made significantly easier and less prone to failure when the wires and connectors are gold and not copper or some other metal that doesn’t conduct electricity as well.

    • ic33@lemmy.worldEnglish
      23·
      1 year ago

      Gold is a worse conductor than copper. The benefit is just protection from corrosion.

      (Copper conductivity is 6 * 10^7 S/m, gold is 4*10^7 S/m. Silver is 6.3 * 10^7, but very prone to corrosion).

    • AnObscureTenet@lemmy.world
      15·
      1 year ago

      The conductivity doesn’t mean a damn thing when it’s plating some shit-tier alloy.

      That corrosion resistance though… more than worth the price. I made that mistake on some monitors once. ONCE.

  • MagnusRobotFighter@lemmy.world
    19·
    1 year ago

    I used to work at Circuit City and they always wanted us to push the $50 Monster cables and I was like no, these $5 cables are just fine. unfortunately, some customers think a higher price makes them better and won’t listen to some dumb salesperson.

    • desconectado@lemm.ee
      14·
      1 year ago

      With some cables sometimes quality is higher with price though. I prefer a good 5 USD usb cable than a shitty one that breaks at the joint after a few days of use.

      Same with audio cables for guitars, sound is probably not going to suffer (although really long cables can have some issues), but wear damage is definitely noticeable for the very cheap ones.

      • IMongoose@lemmy.world
        5·
        1 year ago

        $5 is not a high price. Some people (mostly audiophiles) are spending hundreds of dollars on a few feet of cable. Check out basically any cable on this page: https://kimber.com/

        Quick edit, I do get your point, quality does usually go up with price, but to a point. This meme is making fun of people who buy sturdy stuff, but who buy vaporware.

  • haakon@lemmy.fmhy.ml
    17·
    1 year ago

    And don’t let them touch the ground! Also get this DAC, it’s got bright highs. Don’t forget to burn in your headphones!

    • dodgy_bagel
      4·
      1 year ago

      Wood is a worse conductor than copper, so a copper cable is better than a wooden one.

      I expect aluminum, copper, and gold wires would have similar performance over a short range.