Amazon.com can be a carnival fun house if you know where to look. Consider a customer-submitted picture of an adorable baby bunny, its little face tucked into its paws, its fluffy ears drooping. U MAKE BUNNY CRY accuses the caption. The picture accompanies the Cloverdale “Fresh Whole Rabbit”, available for purchase for a mere $45.90. That fresh rabbit has engendered any number of jolly comments from the free souls on Amazon. One chap had considered his Cloverdale fresh whole rabbit to be rather foul-tasting until he discovered that you were supposed to cook it first. Another customer went on a tirade about deception in advertising, since this supposedly whole rabbit arrived without its floppy ears. But the customer images were overall the best, from the crying bunny to the image of a cartoon bunny despatched with a sharp carrot to the chest.
As anyone who has shopped Amazon knows only too well, product pages feature a horizontally-scrolling list of similar stuff you just might want to add. Great marketing ploy. So what products might accompany the Cloverdale Fresh Whole Rabbit? First up on the list is yet another fresh whole rabbit from a competitor. That makes sense. From that point on, however, Amazon turns Dadaist. Zubaz pants—thin, loose fabric pants with grotesque tie-dye patterns—engender a helpful warning from a customer that wearing Zubaz pants without underwear and visiting a strip bar might prove embarrassing. The 3B Scientific W43014 Testicle Self Exam Form might be just the thing for the budding doctor in the family; described as “A Bag Fulla Fun” by an enthusiast, it will set you back $114.00. You’re a mere 1-Click away from acquiring a plastic tub filled with approximately 1500 guaranteed live ladybugs. “Nice bugs,” reports a satisfied buyer. The story “Hgiyiyi (hgjhjh, hjhk)” is available in paperback but has yet to become a Kindle title. Apparently that frustrates a would-be reader, who speaks his mind in no uncertain terms. “Asdlfj sdfijsfdij j sfdkj sfi sdfhsd fjksfdkhj fdkd fsj dfkjsdf kjdfj!” he fulminates, adding one final “ghglghg” for emphasis.
Continued scrolling through the list brings up a pair of AudioQuest K2 terminated speaker cables, length eight feet. This poses the obvious question: what do AudioQuest speaker cables have in common with fresh whole rabbits, Zubaz pants, testicle self-exams, and Hgiyiyi?
Nothing specific—thank God. But the AudioQuest speaker cables retail for $8,400. No, I’m not making that up. They are speaker cables. They cost over a grand a foot. And that’s what landed them in the soup along with weeping bunnies and latex testicles: to date they have elicited 172 customer reviews that range from sputtering indignation to all-stops-out mockery. Fantastical imagery abounds: “I saw brave men claw their own eyes out… oh, god, the screaming… the mobs of feral children feasting on corpses, the shadows MOVING, the fires burning in the air! The CHANTING!” reports one reviewer. Any number of people tell of using the AudioQuests to connect their $25 computer speakers and achieving instant audio nirvana.
One of the more whimsical reviews came from a known audio commentator, who tells us that this cable transformed a CD of the St. Matthew Passion into a live performance of the real thing, conducted by Bach himself in 1727, and proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Joshua Rifkin was right and Bach did indeed prefer one player to a part.
There was more (oh, a lot more) but you get the general drift.
Audiophilia is a big tent. For the most part it’s free of the fringe element. Most of us are just folks (mostly guys) who think audio gear is cool, love well-reproduced music in our homes, and find a comforting and happy hobby in the harmless pursuit of gizmos, gear, and doodads. It’s cheaper than collecting cars, less objectionable than collecting guns, it does not raise our cholesterol or blood glucose levels, and it’s legal. What’s not to like?
Cable arguments run through the audiophile world as a leitmotiv, ever subject to subtle transformations and yet always circling around the basic idea that once a few basic electronic issues are settled, no cable can make all that much difference. I’m solidly in the mockery camp where insanely expensive cables are concerned, but on the other hand, I have heard unmistakable differences between cables with my own ears. That doesn’t mean that all cable-dom is devoid of snake oil, but it does tell me that differences do occur. I replaced the stock cable that comes with my Sennheiser HD 800 headphones with a pure copper model from Cardas, and a light but distinct blare in the low treble region was notably ameliorated. It wasn’t a showstopper by any means, but the change is audible. Recently I reviewed an “audiophile” USB cable. I played a recording of a Handel violin sonata (Andrew Manze and Richard Egarr) with my Mac Mini connected to the DAC (digital-to-analog converter) via an off-the-shelf USB cable. It sounded just fine, although the violin was a tiny bit strident here and there. I tried the fancier USB cable, and much to my surprise, the violin moved back on the soundstage a bit closer to the harpsichord and lost that strident edge. It sounded considerably more natural, less electronic and less “recorded.” I wasn’t expecting to hear any difference. But there it was.
But $8400 for a speaker cable? The incredible thing is that $8400 isn’t all that expensive for super-duper high-end cables. Somebody must be buying them.
It isn’t me, though. I don’t want to make bunnies cry.