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Snake oil

Paul's Posts — 08 December 2011

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Snake oil

Hucksters have been selling some form of snake oil for years.  Our industry is no different in the amount of oil peddled to people, but I think we differ in intent.

A true snake oil salesman is purposefully trying to sell something of no value to unsuspecting people.  High-end oil is different.

High-end oil is usually applied to legitimize something we hear but don’t understand – which is unfortunate because the products are typically effective – the application of the snake oil turns off prospective buyers.

I remember one CES years ago where the Bedini Brothers were demonstrating their new interface blocks to an excited crowd.  They had a pair of Sequerra Metronome loudspeakers powered by one of their amps and connected through their magic interface blocks with the tinniest speaker cable I have ever seen.

The pitch was that these magic blocks enabled the power of their amplifiers to be transferred to the loudspeakers “without the need for wires”.  The tiny wires that were used in the demo, between the two blocks, merely pointed out the correct path; lest the energy be lost in the ether.

I was standing in the back of the crowded room listening to the demo and trying not to interfere with their presentation.  The sound from the speakers was excellent and indeed impressive.

John Bedini spotted me and turned everyone’s attention to me.  Horrors.

“Paul, aren’t you impressed with this new invention?  Isn’t it amazing?”

“Well John, the demo sound you’re getting is very impressive and even more so through those skinny little wires.”

“You see?  Even Paul McGowan is a believer.  Proof this works!”

“Whoa, hold on.  I didn’t say it worked, I just said the sound was impressive.  If you want to prove it works, take the blocks out and let’s hear what the system sounds like without them.  If it’s a lot worse, then I am sold.”

Heavens.  A tirade of “non-believer”, “trying to upset my demo” ensued to the point I just quietly left the room shaking my head.

Every time I passed by their room, the crowds were enormous – everyone wanting to hear the amazing trick of delivering audio without wires.  No one seemed to notice the wires as John skillfully redirected attention to the great sound.

To this day I have no clue what they were doing – the snake oil explanation given for what we heard turned me off completely.

‘Tis a shame because it sounded really good.

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About Author

Paul McGowan

Paul McGowan is the CEO and co-founder of PS Audio Inc. a Boulder Colorado design and manufacturing company of high-end audio products and services. McGowan has been designing and building high-end products for nearly 40 years. Hobbies include skiing, music, hiking, artisan bread baking, kick boxing and cooking. He lives in Boulder Colorado with his wife Terri and his 4 sons.

(9) Readers Comments

  1. Ballisticman

    December 8, 2011 at 4:38 am

    Ah, the Wizard was behind the curtain. I think now we have the deilimma of the decision between the $4,000 speaker cable and the $$15,000 speaker cable. Asking the snake oil salesman for the model number of the test device they use to show the improvements.

    The typical responce is either, ‘go away boy, tou bother me’ or ‘If you don’t know, you don’t know’.

    At some limits you have to show me or the money stays in the wallet.

  2. Soundminded

    December 8, 2011 at 5:45 am

    In an industry that exists on seemingly almost nothing but advertising hyperbole, it’s difficult even for scientists and engineers to fashion legitimate tests. It’s practically impossible for the tyro audiophiles to know what’s of value and what isn’t let alone where the point of diminishing retuns lies and where the point of no return is.But that is a judgment every engineer must make in his designs if they are to be commercially viable and not merely a laboratory curiousity. Infinitesmal improvement if it exists at all at enormous cost is bad engineering and a product to be avoided but that seems to be the preponderence of what high end audio offers today.Talismans of every type abound including such diverse absurdities as a $500 wooden volume control knob, tees to support wires, bricks on amplifiers, tubes dunked in liquid nitrogen, rings for the outside of compact discs, are just the most obvious.Does a $5,000 Mark Levinson amplifier really outperform a $1000 Crown?They’re owned by the same parent company and it won’t shun the extra profits from those who think there’s a difference.

    Here’s an obvious example. The ONLY legitimate test of the value of a wire is NOT to compare wire A against wire B to see which sounds better but to compare wire A against a shunt.If there’s a difference, wire A is defective. In this test a $1 Radio Shack wire not only passes with flying colors in audio systems but in a much tougher test where the source is a cable NTSC video signal viewed on a 36″ Sony Wega TV screen compared to bypassing the source tuner and viewing the video signal directly through the TV’s tuner the images were indistinguishable too. That’s over 350 times the bandwidth of an audio signal.The tape monitor loop of a preamplifier makes an excellent and easy hookup for this test for interconnects in an audio system. It is the expensive so called “high end” product which claims improvement which is not merely no better, it is actually defective. Same with SET triode pee-wee amplifiers selling for tens of thousands of dollars. I’d sooner own a $100 T-amp.

    I was surprised myself in 2007 at the VTV Vacuum Tube Valley) trade show in Piscataway NJ. By ear alone I picked out the one solid state amplifier in the entire show.It reminded me why I switched from tubes to transistors over 40 years ago and never looked back.Whatever else is wrong with a sound system, a good solid state amplifier operating properly is not the source of it, there’s one kind of snake oil I’ll never fall for.

    BTW, that $100,000 turntable in the photo on another thread was butt ugly in my opinion. Will it outperform or even equal the performance of my beautiful Empire 698 or even 398GA? I don’t know but it woud be getting a run for its money at over 200 and 500 times the price in a direct comparison. It would also be interesting to see if its tonearm could match the performance of the Empire’s whose arm is uniquely dynamically balanced. Those are true engineering achievements worth their modest cost by today’s high end standards.

  3. December 8, 2011 at 5:47 am

    I think the big point of this story really isn’t the products or their value but their presentation. As you point out the “go away boy, you bother me” approach really is off-putting. My guess is that the Bedinni Brothers stumbled onto something that worked, didn’t have a clue why it worked and then promoted it with a story they made up to explain it. I see this a lot in wire sales people and power conditioner sales – products that are quite effective but not well understood – then we make up a story about why it is and the story gets holes punched in it.

    That’s a shame because many of these products are actually very effective despite their story.

  4. Soundminded

    December 8, 2011 at 6:47 am

    Bedini didn’t stumble onto something of real value. The legitimate goal of wire is to connect two nodes, one in each of two circuts together with an acceptable transfer of voltage, current, power between them when considered by criteria of efficiency (loss) and distortion. The mainstream wire and cable industry is not stupid and created standards for products which have stood the test of time by providing solutions that are effective and inexpensive for the better part of a century. Only those not aware of this fact are vulnerable to trick demonstrations.

    Wire is not intended as a control or filter element. In rare exceptions a twisted pair of wires was occasionally used as a “tweak” for trimming a very small picofarad capacitor in an RF or IF circuit in early television sets. In audio systems, when radically constructed they can act as filter elements where they shouldn’t, reducing amplifier damping to compensate for weak bass output in some speakers, their skin effect impedance or parallel shunt capacitance acting to roll off the response of otherwise shrill loudspeakers. (Some speaker wires have shunt capacitance so high they’ve been known to cause some solid state amplifiers to go into spontaneous oscillation and self destruct by forming a “tank circuit” that is an oscillator at its output stage.)

    Wire used as a filter or equalizer is a very bad choice to perform that function. Its effect is unpredictable from one installation to another except by those highly skilled in filter network analysis, it is uncontrollable in its effect, it is expensive, and there are far cheaper and better alternatives. Anyone who will not reveal how this sort of product works is selling snake oil.There are few equations in electrical engineering better understood, more thoroughly tested, finding better correlation between theory and real world experience than the telegrapher’s equaiton which models the network effects of wire precisely.

  5. Soundminded

    December 8, 2011 at 7:28 am

    One test of Bedini’s “trick” would be to have him reproduce it not with wires but with non conductive material like twine, nylon or cotton sewing thread or fishing line. Can this trick still be performed? Of course, for example with a radio transmitter connected to the amplifier output and a receiver with a battery operated T-amp at the speaker. The trick is done all of the time in magic shows. Whisper your father’s first name into my ear and the telepathic magician on stage will tell it to the entire audience.His illusion only becomes a crime when the magician uses it to try to sell the magic saw that appeared to be able to cut a woman in half without killing her.

  6. Soundminded

    December 8, 2011 at 9:01 am

    Schysters are undeterred by anything other than the law.They know there’s a sucker born every minute and you never give one an even break. Given all of the fraud in this world, this kind of petty deciet in this industry is well below the FTC’s radar screen. The quantity of money involved is too small to catch their attention.Personally I have little sympathy for those who throw their money around carelessly this way. Far better to waste it in the stock market with the really big crooks, investment bankers and financial advisors.

  7. December 8, 2011 at 9:13 am

    I would never categorize the Bedinni’s as shysters because in fact the products they delivered were as they said from a performance standpoint – just their stories didn’t line up.

    Imagine a weight loss pill that actually worked (I know there aren’t any, but …). And let’s say that the marketing for this claimed the benefits was from peach pits when actually the makers didn’t have a clue why it worked, but it did. The product is still made from peach pits, it still works, but the story isn’t true.

    This does not a shyster make. Just a bad storyteller.

  8. Soundminded

    December 8, 2011 at 9:47 am

    “The pitch was that these magic blocks enabled the power of their amplifiers to be transferred to the loudspeakers “without the need for wires”.”

    Even Tesla couldn’t get it to work and Bedinis are no Tesla.The military is experimenting with energy beam type weapons.Any device which could transfer power in that way would be far more valuable in other applications than as a mere audio device.

    The sure tests of snake oil include where people make claims in qualitative terms with no scientifically gathered data to back them up, often not even specifications, no peer reviewed technical papers with supporting data to be checked, when you have to take their word for it before you put your money down. Real advances can be documented and patented. I once had a flame war on a board where remarkable claims were made for a disc duplicator that “improved” recordings by among other things eliminating digital jitter (a favorite also of audiophile wire salesmen.) The testimonials and arguments were deafening. Months later someone discovered and posted that the device was an off the shelf duplicator that had been drop shipped to the supposed manufacturer, for which no special claims were made by the real manufacturer and which sold for half the price that the supposed genius who claimed it as his own was offering it for at a special introductory incentive price. Those who bought it were outraged. It’s always the same.

    Other scams at the industrial equipment level are far more lucrative, equally deceptive, and just as frustrating to see when your clients are duped into buying them.

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