This is the essence of religion; ignorance and confirmation bias.

[AtheistCrusader]

http://www.enjoythemusic.com/hificritic/vol5_no3/listening_to_storage.htm

"The RAIDing of volumes could be the subject of a further investigation, to see if compounding disks may even exaggerate their audible signatures. For this initial study, we pulled out another Synology NAS unit, a DS211 two-bay box with two 2TB Western Digital RE4-GP 'green' disks set up in RAID 0. In other words, the two disks have data striped across both to augment performance. In the best case something like the sum of each individual drive's data throughput can be exploited, but at the risk of total data loss in the event of one disk expiring.

While this additional test was in no way scientific, we thought it would be worth finding out if this alternative NAS box/disk/RAID configuration offered anything different in our initial delve into the sonic differences of storage systems.

As it turned out, it was possibly the best sounding source yet. It could sustain pace and drive, and gave body and richness to music where the Kingston SSD, for example, had been heard as limpid and lightweight. Maybe higher frequencies still weren't as insightful as direct CD playback at its best, but the sound had a relaxed quality that this listener has found quite enticing enough to plan a migration of all music onto it — pending a test of other NAS combinations!"

There is zero difference between streaming 1's and 0's off one hard drive or another, beyond the speed the data is served up, and most systems can buffer the entire song in milliseconds. It is physically impossible for the sources to sound different.

But, people think it does. They do so for one of two reasons;

1. They don't know how it works at all, so they make it up as they go along.
2. They want to 'believe' regardless of any facts, because it gives them a sense of superiority, or justification for something. (Like spending 10k USD on a 10 meter cable that carries data just as well as a 5$ cable.)

Religion is ignorance, willful or genuine, backed up by confirmation bias. That's it.

[Curmudgeoness]

1. Ha, interesting comparison.

With all the emotional capital put into their religious beliefs, I guess they have to believe that it is worth it.

[onager]

2. Good ol' audiophile woo...

Thanks, I always get a good laugh out of these articles.

Another similarity to religion: whenever a real expert, like an audio/computer engineer, explains scientifically WHY this stuff is pure moonshine - the True Believers airily dismiss them as having inferior ears, etc. "Obviously you're a cold, unemotional person and incapable of accepting Jesus/Monster Cable into your heart."

This reminded me of those Magic Rocks some of the audiophiles were pushing a few years ago. Strap a little bag of these $159.00 rocks to your speaker cables, and your whole system suddenly sounded better! With more clarity in the bass and higher high frequencies! Which you won't hear anyway if they're over 20kHz, but never mind, you need the TOTAL ENRICHING EXPERIENCE...

No, that's not a typo up there. $159.00 for a small bag of rocks! Edison wept...

I found them here, in an article you may also enjoy: "The 5 Absolutely Most CENSORED 'Audiophile' Accessories:"

http://www.absolutelyhorrible.com/2009/04/23/the-5-absolutely-most-retarded-audiophile-accessories/

ETA - some people claim the "Magic Rocks" were a hoax. James Randi and JREF actually contacted the maker and tried to scientifically test them, with no luck. So I dunno. Some law enforcement agencies have paid good money for "quantum detectors" that didn't detect anything except gullibility. Maybe real, maybe not.

[AtheistCrusader]

5. "Brilliant Pebbles"

Ahaha that was a name for a proposed Reagan era Star Wars defense satellite grid.



It was supposed to be a kinetic-kill weapon, attacking enemy ICBM's in boost phase.


Similar waste of fucking money.

[Fumesucker]

3. I was on a headphone forum years ago and this test got put up...

http://www.klippel.de/listeningtest/lt/

It was indeed like a holy war, I literally got called unfit to reproduce because I pointed out that people who couldn't hear -20db distortion in the test were probably fooling themselves into thinking they could hear subtle differences between amplifiers with distortion figures many db better than that.

[edgineered]

4. With live harp orchestras on every cloud

one would have to be deluded to believe anyone would want to listen to anything else, streaming or otherwise. the sudden love of harps is part of the big promise, is it not?