The Amazing Randi’s challenge to the golden ear cult made Slashdot today, and in the comments there is a link to a list of the worst audiophile products ever.  If you remember what high end audio used to look like before The Absolute Sound and it’s spawn completely destroyed it, take a look now and weep.  Here’s what it’s come to:  A pen you color the edges of your CDs with to, I kid you not, "reduce the scattered reflections of the laser beam and increase the signal-to-noise ratio of the detected laser", for a "significant decrease in the harsh "edginess" in the sound of many CD’s and an increase in clarity, resolution and ambience".  A $485 dollar wooden volume control knob to reduce "vibrations" and make your system sound "much more open and free flowing with a nice improvement in resolution."  A thin mat you place "atop a CD, DVD-V, DVD-A, SACD, or mp3 disc" with cut-outs that will "…create a very specific energy spectra that mechanically dithers the laser to recognize and retrieve additional low level information that is otherwise lost, truncated or unseen."

But the ultimate really does have to be this demagnetizer for, I kid you not, CDs, CDRs, and DVDs.  Yes, a demagnetizer for an object made of polycarbonate plastic with an aluminum coating.  This is what you get, when you take objective measurements out of the picture, and replace them with a gaggle of golden ears.

[Update…] Oh you should see the Slashdotters commenting on this…

Oh. My. God. One of the items in there is some sort of box for processing your disks [musicdirect.com]:

"New! Featuring four beams, nearly twice the rotation speed and improved timing processing, the Quadri-Beam is an ultra cool disc treatment. This patented process reduces the noise floor allowing far more information to be retrieved from the disc. It also works great on DVDs, giving you a picture that is brighter, sharper, crisper and cleaner. For those of you who have never experienced the sonic benefits of the Bedini Clarifier, it significantly reduces high frequency glare and increases retrieval of information, enhancing dynamic range. Detail and resolution are improved dramatically."

I won’t comment. This is Slashdot, so I guess you have some entry level knowledge to know why this is the most ridiculous thing you’ve read in months.

There are physical reasons why vaccuum tube amplifiers sound DIFFERENT than solid state amplifiers. I don’t, however, subscribe to the philosophy that they’re better inherently, as I’ve heard some terrible-sounding tube amps.

Whoa. Let’s not equate the tube vs. solid-state debate with cable voodoo. You can look at the waveform of a tube amp’s output and compare it to a solid-state amp’s output and see the difference yourself, if you know what to look for. Tubes color the sound (essentially, distort it, but in a way that many people prefer) by emphasisizing the odd-ordered harmonics of a given tone.

EVEN ORDER, not odd order harmonics… TRANSISTOR gear has a higher ratio of odd harmonics to even, comparatively. Especially a triode vacuum tube in a single ended circuit design will have almost no 3rd harmonic signal compared to the second one.

"The thing is, even the cheap drilled wire of your phone-line is good enough to transmit multi-mhz signals for DSL over a few km."

That’s because the telephone system uses low-impedance balanced lines; without this technology, POTS would be largely impractical, and long-distance nearly impossible (at least in the days before satellite).

Low-Z balanced lines are also used in many hi-end audio systems, for the same reasons; they offer a material advantage. In fact, an inexpensive low-z balanced line cable can easily better very high-priced single-ended cables. It’s the primary reason that all of the equipment I build and work with uses balanced line technology.. better performance without fancy cables = value for the customer.