I can't believe no one has mentioned mpingo disks!

For $50 you get a coin sized piece of mpingo (ebony, for those of us
who are less politically correct) wood with a chinese character
engraved on it. You are supposed to place them (the more the merrier)
on your audio components and scatter a few about the room.

But, you must be careful whether you place the character up or down,
and the angle at which you rotate it. Obviously, there is a lot of
room for tweeking with these!

Jonathan "Numb" Scull at Steamingpile - oops, I mean Stereophile,
actually reviewed a $50k Boulder amplifier (makes rocks bigger?) and
claimed the sound was lacking just that little something until he
placed a couple mpingo disks on the amp.

What I want to know is, how does one get to be a reviewer in
Steamingpile? What are the qualifications, or are there any?

What about the "Tice Clock"? It was a special, audio-grade, digital
clock that you plug into the outlet with your CD player (or other
digital components) and it somehow magically "cleaned-up" the sound!

And what about "hospital grade" power outlets?

Green Pens?

Blue lights inside your CD player?

Bi-wiring (buy-wiring?) speakers?

It would be refreshing to see a few of the wealthier high-end audio
companies get together and place a series of "educational" ads to
teach their more gullible customers about what can and can't possibly
have any effect on anything but their wallets. If the industry would
police itself a little they might end up with more customers in the
end. As it is, normally intelligent people (who are becoming fewer
and fewer these days) see the BS promulgated by the scammers and just
walk away from the whole thing.

I guess even the big companies who have high-end product lines depend
so much on the gullibility of their customers that they don't want to
risk turning any of them off by revealing a little truth.

With the average intelligence dropping at the rate it is, we'll all
end up working for companies that make CD demagnetizers, green pens,
and all the other crap that littlers the high-end audio market.