A Short History of two favorite words....

For those of you who may be too young to remember that Stereophile’s Jim Austin, author of the recent snake oil article in the OP and snake hunter extraordinaire, published the infamous article in Stereophile condemning the Intelligent Chip, in very unflattering language, even as regards your humble scribe if I recall correctly, I was at the time chief shill for the Intelligent Chip, a quantum mechanical CD tweak. I suspect JA must have felt the Intelligent Chip was some sort of attack on his physics PhD. “There is no way the Intelligent Chip can work,” he pronounced. Apparently he felt it disobeyed the laws of physics or something. I guess Jim Austin still hasn’t gotten over his love 💕 of oil of the snake. 🐍

note: a bit of an ironic twist - the holographic foils JA mentions in the recent article are actually on the Stereophile List of Recommended Components. 😀

Other audiophiles are willing to give a listen to anything that seems remotely plausible: cables, vibration isolation devices, whatever. A handful are happy to suspend disbelief entirely and give a serious listen to colorful foils posted on walls, special clocks, and photos in freezers. More deceptive are more recent devices that are claimed to interact with audio signals on a quantum level, aligning protons and whatnot—pure, obvious snake oil.

>>>>Far be it from me to pass any judgement here but how in tarnation could any audio tweak be more snake oil than the photos in the freezer tweak? Speaking of which, one wonders if the tweakaphones have perhaps dropped the ball on this one. You’d think they be all all over the photos in the freezer tweak like ducks on a June bug. Like ugly on an ape 🦍

As far as foils and special clocks and quantum stuff goes I guess I’ve got to plead mea culpa.