Funniest snake oil theories

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Janos this was the part of your very long post that I most object to. This is a complete mischaracterisation of the objections that have been raised here, repeatedly and very clearly, to the Bybee BS. I cannot help but think that you understand what has been written here but choose to pretend otherwise.

Let me try to set you straight:

Neither Mr. Bybee nor his company nor JC has ever made an intelligible claim about what the Bybee devices are supposed to actually do.

The claims on the Bybee website and marketing materials talk about quantum mechanics and room temperature superconductors, but never explain what those phenomena have to do with the devices, nor do they provide any evidence that the devices exhibit any effects that could even remotely be connected to those phenomena.

JC regularly posts spurious papers about carbon nanotubes and Cooper pairs, without ever providing any evidence, or even coherent claims, that connect these concepts to the Bybee devices. He might as well quote from Harry Potter books.

I know this means nothing to you, but the Bybee devices have been examined and measured and found to behave exactly like what they look like.

So, those of us who are not interested in trying these "devices" are not relying solely on second hand reports, but there are no falsifiable claims to even evaluate. Why would I "try" something that doesn't even say how I would know if it was working?
 
Sometimes less is less

Characteristics of snake oil products tend to give them away...

Eg:.
4) One person company, absence of credentials or exaggerated/fake credentials.


please add more...

This actually happened. Not sure what is morbidly more funny- the logic he used to part with real money, for an obviously fake degree.

Or reporting it publicly, rather than pursuing legal action for money recovery.
(My favourite pranks are when the victim tells everyone what they fell for).
Sorry, my phone's not allowing me to cut and paste a link. The story comes up Googling CBC Fake Master's Degree , CBC Marketplace Investigations.
A presumably successful businessman thought a quick phone call, describing his life experience, plus $8100 Canadian funds, would net him a genuine Master's Degree.
It did come with a hat, a gown, and a fake affidavit from John Kerry, after all.
Who needs pesky lectures, effort, academic studies, and a thesis to get a degree?
Would you buy a business plan from this man?
Post script: he says he felt this was the way education is going, and he may be right.
Today, a bank teller mentioned she's in the 3rd year of studying business management, marketing, and investments. I asked if she was a fan of Adam Smith. She said she doesn't watch American Idol.�� I said, huh? Wealth of Nations. No response. I said , an Inquiry into the Nature and Wealth of Nations. Adam Smith.No response. I said : Or are you a Keynesian? She never heard of him.
My class learned about this before junior highschool, in small town Maple Ridge, in 1977.
What are they teaching, now, and why do teachers want raises?
 
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A presumably successful businessman thought a quick phone call, describing his life experience, plus $8100 Canadian funds, would net him a genuine Master's Degree.
It did come with a hat, a gown, and a fake affidavit from John Kerry, after all.

I did catch a bit of that segment on The National. There's no way that guy would ever believe he received a real master's degree. Some people are delusional. If he truly believes his degree is real, I'd put him into that category of people. If he knows his degree is fake but he's passing it off as real, he probably in the direction of a con artist.

What's remarkable is how many get caught with "spiced up" resumes/CVs these days.

Tom
 
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Two thumbs up! I agree with every word!
(sorry for quoting almost everything - but I hope more people will read it this way)

There's so many variables that ultimately every component or gizmo that costs more than a clock radio falls into the snake oil category. Ultimately all is for our amusement, be it an unusual product or the entertaining fact that people shell out large sums of money for gizmos or gear we would not pay for on principle.

Personally, I would also add some overpriced components (not just gizmos) to the snake oil category. A multi-multi-way very heavy and ridiculously expensive famed speakers comes to my mind (I will not damage the company's repute, no name-calling) that I recently heard which was pure snake oil to my ears. It did create a unique illusion, but was very far from either accurate or natural. Sounded as a PA-system on steroids to me. The "Girl with a guitar" stereotypical hi-end demo material recording sounded quite stunning on it, although the girl sounded a lot more like an android and the guitar did not sound anything like any guitar. Then the the pianist played across the keyboard it, and it sounded as if it was a set of 6 totally different pianos across the notes.
Still, most people were fascinated by the unique sound (and the terrific price tag) that came from a large number of phase-mismatched drivers. I practiced self-restraint, and actually found this a very enjoyable experience to identify which drivers were out of phase compared to the others and observe the heavy crossover artifacts across the spectrum, but my local (audio) designer friend went into a spasmic fit and stormed out in rage. LOL. Well, I understand him. He has tremendous knowledge, builds awesome products for incredible value, and struggles to make it. Others build such monstrosity and make fortunes as people in general have absolutely no common sense when it comes to hearing, and rather trust the glossy papers than their own judgement.
Was a great night. Pervading smell of snake-oil makes more sense when it happens in a great company, shared with your friends. That's the stuff great stories are made of. We all learned from the experience, and everyone brought home a totally different message.


Interesting ideas here recently. So what's the bottom line for snake oil products and this thread? I tend to be a skeptic about most tweaks but in the end, if someone hears, or claims to hear, improvements in their systems - snake oil or not - should we really care? Placebo effect is sometimes real, meaning that when people are given sugar pills instead of real medicine, they sometimes get better. If their health improves simply because they believe in the cure, who are we to argue? If someone has a happier time listening to music in their system, and that improvement is worth the cost of the snake oil TO THEM, what right do I have to try to change their minds? Meanwhile, maybe on occasion there really IS something at play that the usual analyses fail to uncover? (no comment on Bybee products in particular)
The value of this thread to me is in the fascinating/absurd product ideas people come up with and their efforts to sell them. As a skeptic I am frequently amused. But personal attacks on people who are believers just seems silly to me. Let's get on with finding new products to gawk at.
 
"Demagnetising an LP is not possible, because it was never magnetised in the first place. Thank you for alerting us to treat the rest of your remarks with due caution."


:) Big smiles. Yes, it is possible, take a demagnetizer and turn it on. :)



Joking apart, I urge everyone to try this experiment out at home: listen to a record, then take the LP, demagnetize it, put it back on and listen again. If you have a revealing system, you will hear quite a difference. It lasts for 1 play. The stylus moving over the groove removes the effect - that is, play the same track twice, and second time it will be less dynamic / less detail, unless you demagnetize it again.

So how much magnetism did you measure on the disk before and after demagnetizing? If you didn't measure, then what did you change? How fo you know what you changed, and by how much?

Let me help you out:. Vinyl records are not magnetic. The only thing you changed was your brain.
 
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Why are people that way? The most compelling story to some people is that humans evolved with tribal mechanisms that make them extremely cooperative in times of need, functioning more like a hive than a collection of independent individuals.

The answer is far more simple.

A belief in the unbelievable is exactly the same as the belief in shills/snake oil salesmen, the belief in the unbelievable provides a soft cushion for the counciousness against the harsh realities of life, adding that to your audio system means that you can become finally at peace with the resulting performance of your audio system and stop searching for that extra bit of lower noise floor which improves an audio system, you can finally say to yourself that you've done everything that you could possibly ever do to improve your sound system.

The only reason why you would buy a bybee is so that you can finally stop stressing out over the constant search for perfection, and stop searching, full stop. It provides rich people peace of mind.

An actual improvement in the audio system isn't necessary for this psychological effect to take place. You can still believe that there is a change that has occured without there one actually taking place.

All that matters is that you believe that you've done everything that you can. And that can push a sale all on its own.

And seeing as that isn't allowed to be talked about here, I'll stop right there.
 
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HarryY, one thing to consider in the case of older people is hearing loss. Your father turning up the bass and treble may have been compensating for hearing loss, rather than colorizing the sound. What you perceive as colorized, he does not because of his deteriorating hearing.

Does vision (color) deteriorate with age? This seems to support that contention:
Color Vision Tends to Fade With Age: Study – WebMD


More than likely he is just trying to hear the bass louder in his mind, it works like a drug addiction, you become desensitized after a while, its higher frequencies which go first in old age, then again if your father has worked in an industrial environment his hearing could be so far gone that the only way that he can listen to bass is to feel it in the center of his head and body.

Same thing happens with bass-fiends who have ridiculous amounts of subwoofer power in their cars. At some point you become fatigued with listening to the same old bass and you begin to want to hear it more until you finally get sick of listening to loud bass completely.

Its like a drug addition. Your brain become desensitized to the lower levels of bass and you want more and more and more and cannot ever get enough, until you reach a point where you no longer care for bass, which is a point which I've reached and surpassed.

But after a while of being absent of good bass, you eventually come across a good track which has decent bass in it, and the rush begins again.

I went from loving really good deep bass soundtracks to listening to nothing at all. Now though that I've found taylor swift's new song, I like bass again.

YouTube
YouTube
 
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Then, in a matter of days to months, the same poster(s) are trotting forth the same gassy fish, replete with bow, sparkles and a monkey on a squeezebox.

Maybe this is why this is the SNAKEOIL themed sub-forum. It is the persistence of the oleaginous residue that makes bunkum so darn vexing.

GoatGuy

You do realize that the whole point of speech is to convey information accurately and so that the other party understands it. Now if you'll excuse me I need to go and get some more drink.

So I will translate for you.

Goatguy, i doth humbly writeth to thee in regards to thy posteth madeth on the 26th day of the septemb'r of two thousand and seventeenth year.

the whole articulate reasoning of speech intelligible to the human mind is so yond eith'r party may dabble and dwindle an idea down to the p'rfectly insoluble components of metallurgy and alchemy yond which f'rwith is digestible to the oth'r parties counciousness f'r which swift and legible reasoning and swift and legible context may beest did explain undutibly inc'rrect and without 'rr'r. Yond mine own lief broth'r is the sooth.

eke all is well on the farm howev'r aunt martha is sick with alcoholism, we has't did treat h'r with leeches to nay avail because the leeches just stayeth on h'r and enjoyeth the malodious drinketh
 
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I have these quantum copper biscuits. $300 a piece.

You stick it to your forehead and it uhm improves your center in the audio soundstage.
 

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You forgot to mention they work using quantum technology.
But I guess the big question is - have the biscuits been cryo'ed? Otherwise I see room for possible deluxe versions.

The deluxe version is already in production.
The problem is sourcing the correct coating.
The consistency is so variable as are the quantities to be found in the street.

Further versions will have a built-in demagnetiser as everyone knows that copper is highly magnetic.
 
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Yay we are as advanced as Meerkats

The capabilities of human beings are wildly exaggerated.

And with the eventual completion of development of advanced artificial intelligence, we are also obsolete. Including our enjoyment of and production of music.

There is something to be said about being amish, at least when you are amish you never have the threat of artificial intelligence becoming hostile.

I've never seen a milk churn try to attack me.

There is also something to be said to be holding onto old silicon chips like CPUs, from current era chips, because you just know that eventually AMD and Intel will introduce artificial intelligence into their products to 'improve' our lives. When in reality they are replacing our minds with a more faster replacement.

Take a look at how a secretary's office has turned from manually moving folders around and typing things on a computer or typewriter towards a completely paperless office with email and databases. The same thing can be said for driverless cars. ATMs instead of bank tellers. Prepackaged meals instead of home cooked meals. Fully automated factories and Fully automated hydroponic farms replacing regular farms.

YouTube

While progress is positive in one hand, it is detrimental in replacing humans with machines on the other hand. Yes the benefits outweigh the cons, but we are still displacing human beings for the sake of profit margins and efficiency.

At some point it has to stop. Otherwise we will no longer have any reason to exist. No meaning and no purpose in life, which for most if not all unemployed people out there has already begun.

The same can be said for the 'convenience' of digitized music. Once you've listened to everything in your library and expanded it to contain every single possible recording on the planet, once you've heard all of that music, what is left? You are age 30 and you've heard everything, what else do you listen to for the rest of your life?

There comes a point which you must constrain yourself and limit yourself so that you never run out of new musical things to enjoy. We each have roughly 80 years on this earth, digital audio has made it possible for people to access and listen to just about everything out there. I ask the question, once you've heard everything, what else is left? It used to be the case that somebody liked one song their entire life. Now we like thousands.

Digital music, the convenience of, is a drug, and it allows you to shoot-up every few minutes if you need/want to. The analog nature of vinyl limits and restricts and slows down that rate. Because if you were to fill your house with all of the albums of music available in the world but on vinyl, you would no longer have any more room to move.

There is a sweet spot whereby the human being as we know of them today can feel happiest, most content, with plenty of things to do but also without disease, or unexpected sudden deaths. We need to find that sweet spot and stop development. Otherwise we will lose ourselves, we will lose meaning of who we are and what we are, what our capabilities are.

This is also why I like cassette tape, it limits my consumption of music so I do not binge on it.

Note that I am not condoning the use of bybees in this post, this post is a tangent.

There is no spoon, but I would rather use a spoon to eat my cereal with. Ignorance is indeed bliss.
 
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......I just said it two days ago noise removal in preference to signal would turn the medical imaging industry on its head, Bybee up a diagnostic ultrasound machine and give it to real radiologists.
I tried exactly that today with my clip-on filters but the chicken sh*t radiologist was too scared that his bosses machine 'might' get damaged.
I will speak to his boss tomorrow, such experiment will be interesting.

Dan.
 
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