Audiophiles and Gearheads - is there any other hobby that has more pseudoscience?

[someidiot]

Another hobby full of pseudo science is mechanical keyboards. People describing the sound and feel of mechanical keyboard switches is fraught with it.

Disagree Strongly. If you've never used one you won't get it. I zealously accumulated a stash of the original IBM clicky keyboards back when people were tossing them because they only came with the PC/PS2 interface and not USB. In fact, I'm typing on one now, having bought a PS2-USB converter so I can continue to use it through PC upgrades. And if you happen to notice the odd missing character in my posts, it's usually because that interface has a bit of latency and drops the odd keystroke (it's worse when paired with gmail because of its auto-save function) and I didn't catch it.

I absolutely love the sound and feel of these things, so much so that I took a stab at replacing the original keyboard on my HP PA-RISC workstation (used for Mentor EDA) because the stock keyboard eats ass (in a bad way). Unfortunately, to date I haven't been able to accomplish that because HP used their HP-HIL (HP Human Interface Loop) interface for it, and there's some unresolved voodoo in the conversion (involving the mouse, which is daisy-chained through the same interface).

But your error is one of category. Using this keyboard is not a "hobby", and there's no scientific claim involved. It's a keyboard that basically functions like any other, and a legitimate preference on the part of someone who took high school typing classes 50 years ago (only guy in the room other than the teacher) and has maintained the skill.

 

[Bandit]

"Lore" is often more important than fact in hobbies.

It’s funny, “LORE” is involved in a great many things, sometimes rite up there with “B S” !! A BIG LOL.

 

[someidiot]

Should we throw homeopathy into this?

Hell yes! If homeopathy isn't the OG of antiscientific whack jobs, nothing is. Next in line to that chart-topper is the closely-related chiropractic.

 

[Doggggboy]

Hell yes! If homeopathy isn't the OG of antiscientific whack jobs, nothing is. Next in line to that chart-topper is the closely-related chiropractic.

You mean....the ghosts weren't correct?
Yes, the founder of chiropractic, Daniel David Palmer, claimed the practice originated from supernatural guidance. In 1895, Palmer, a spiritualist and magnetic healer, stated that the basic principles of chiropractic were revealed to him during a séance by the spirit of a deceased physician named Dr. Jim Atkinson. Palmer viewed chiropractic as a form of spiritual revelation, referring to it as a "ghost religion" where an "intelligent spiritual being" provided the foundational philosophy.

 

[architect]

I absolutely love the sound and feel of these things, so much that I took a stab at replacing the original keyboard on my HP PA-RISC workstation (used for Mentor EDA) because the stock keyboard eats ass (in a bad way).

Have you explored into the world of custom switches, caps, and boards?

I have only dipped my toes out of curiosity influenced by friends who are completely in the deep end. I tried 65g switches and found them way too heavy despite how the community raves over heavier springs, but maybe because I'm getting older. My fingers just get fatigued real quick.

Here's one of my custom ones:

 

[someidiot]

Have you explored into the world of custom switches, caps, and boards?

That's a hard "no", simply because I've got too damn much unfinished else going on!

I have only dipped my toes out of curiosity influenced by friends who are completely in the deep end. I tried 65g switches and found them way too heavy despite how the community raves over heavier springs, but maybe because I'm getting older. My fingers just get fatigued real quick.

Here's one of my custom ones:

View attachment 88062

That's actually quite cute. But as I explained, the one outstanding keyboard problem I have has nothing to do with the switches or keycaps, and everything to do with HP's oddball interface in the HP-UX workstation in question.

 

[someidiot]

You mean....the ghosts weren't correct?
Yes, the founder of chiropractic, Daniel David Palmer, claimed the practice originated from supernatural guidance. In 1895, Palmer, a spiritualist and magnetic healer, stated that the basic principles of chiropractic were revealed to him during a séance by the spirit of a deceased physician named Dr. Jim Atkinson. Palmer viewed chiropractic as a form of spiritual revelation, referring to it as a "ghost religion" where an "intelligent spiritual being" provided the foundational philosophy.

Heh... great, isn't it? Martin Gardner had a really good chapter on this stuff in his book "Science - Good, Bad, and Bogus". If anyone around here wants my old and somewhat water-damaged copy, let me know. If you'd like to order (a used) one online, please talk to me first, because (for the stupidest of reasons) it's actually quite hard to do, and you're likely to get a different title of his. Took me a few tries before I figured out what was going on.

I've got a great relationship with my present GP, thanks in part to my happening to be reading a collection of H.L. Mencken's writing while awaiting my first appointment with the Doc some years back. When I got called in to the examination room, I was giggling up a storm because I was reading one of Mencken's rants on chiropractic - he just hated that stuff - and that was a hundred years ago.

 

[architect]

The "love the sound and feel" of keyboards you describe is what spurred an entire community of mechanical keyboard enjoyers, so just wondering if you crossed that line lol. But is mainly a community that make their livelihood through keyboards or just spend a lot of time on one. It's also how someone might describe their favourite motorcycle or car isn't it?

 

[Chicken lights]

But what someone -likes- or calls "best" is an entirely different thing. When played the same song across three speakers someone might prefer one over the other because of desirable EQ qualities. Maybe I just like one pair of speakers more because the emphasize of vocals, whereas someone else prefer a bassier profile? There is no "natural" sound or how something "ought" to sound. The space and speaker positions change as well. Any reference sound is a product of its own specific and difficult to replicate environment.

It's hard to say whether stage gear or audiophile gear came first. Basically you have an input (laptop, CD, record player, etc) that goes to a pre-amp, then to a crossover (maybe wrong terminology), then goes to the power amps. Your bass, mids and highs each get an amp. Your bass mids and highs are in their own separate enclosures. That's kinda simplified (and I may have things wrong). The crossover controls the high and low frequencies of each speaker system. Stage gear it would be the control board

I have a Technics 1200MK2 with a Shure M97xE paired with Cerwin Vegas speakers that I found kicked to the curb because of disintegrated surround foam

And some people want free Cerwin Vegas 🙂

 

[someidiot]

The "love the sound and feel" of keyboards you describe is what spurred an entire community of mechanical keyboard enjoyers, so just wondering if you crossed that line lol. But is mainly a community that make their livelihood through keyboards or just spend a lot of time on one. It's also how someone might describe their favourite motorcycle or car isn't it?

If what you're describing is the line between "enjoyer" and "cult member", I'm mos def on the sensible side of it, and will remain so. I'm not actually out on a busy street corner waving my old IBM keyboard at traffic and yelling about how their souls are damned for all eternity if they don't accept into their hearts The One True Way. I just like using them is all - as you say, just like a bike, car... or sailboat. No need to get crazy about it.

If what you mean by "make their livelihood" is someone who manufactures them, nothing illegitimate about that either - folks make a living doing stuff that's a lot weirder. If there's a market demand, it'd be rather stunned for someone not to step up to fulfill it, even if the customers are fanatics.

 

[architect]

It's hard to say whether stage gear or audiophile gear came first. Basically you have an input (laptop, CD, record player, etc) that goes to a pre-amp, then to a crossover (maybe wrong terminology), then goes to the power amps. Your bass, mids and highs each get an amp. Your bass mids and highs are in their own separate enclosures. That's kinda simplified (and I may have things wrong). The crossover controls the high and low frequencies of each speaker system. Stage gear it would be the control board


And some people want free Cerwin Vegas 🙂

I think audiophile is basically trying to reproduce stage or professional experience at home by understanding and investing into the complete ecosystem from the input source downstream to speakers and even room layout. People do this based on person circumstances like time, finances and space, with all sorts of "hobbies".

There's a fellow in Japan that invested in his own dedicated electrical pole:

I don't know this gentlemen and have no judgment on how he uses to spend his time and money. But he is dedicated and I respect that.

I don't consider myself an audiophile because it wasn't a persisting active pursuit from a consumption standpoint. I collected my gear and system and happily settled with what I got, including the free crappy Cerwin Vegas!

Most people just hook up PC speakers to their computers or cheap headphones to listen to their Spotify.

 

[Tom O]

What I hate is there doesn’t seem to be any agreed upon volume level for tv’s especially where you have to crank up the volume to hear what they say then the commercials come on and you kid says “ CHRIST are you Deaf? “

 

[architect]

If what you're describing is the line between "enjoyer" and "cult member", I'm mos def on the sensible side of it, and will remain so. I'm not actually out on a busy street corner waving my old IBM keyboard at traffic and yelling about how their souls are damned for all eternity if they don't accept into their hearts The One True Way. I just like using them is all - as you say, just like a bike, car... or sailboat. No need to get crazy about it.

If what you mean by "make their livelihood" is someone who manufactures them, nothing illegitimate about that either - folks make a living doing stuff that's a lot weirder. If there's a market demand, it'd be rather stunned for someone not to step up to fulfill it, even if the customers are fanatics.

I don't make any distinction between "enjoyer" and "cult member", and like in my above post just a function of dedication and interest. I think there's a slippery slope misuse of the very precise term "pseudo science", now being used pejorative to describe someone's -entertainment- that isn't well understood by the former. The difference is the term is tradtionally use againt group of people who decided to form their own pursuit outside th elong established scientific community, based on the scientific method to solve objective problems.

One can argue that people here are quite "crazy" about their hobbies, like mentioned above with sharpening bits! lol

I say livelihood to describe people that work "9-5" at the computers like developers that code for a living and didn't want to just accept any generic keyboard issued by the office or vanilla manufacturers. They time they spend on their keyboards inform their decision to invest into meeting their taste, much like a house for a family.

 

[architect]

What I hate is there doesn’t seem to be any agreed upon volume level for tv’s especially where you have to crank up the volume to hear what they say then the commercials come on and you kid says “ CHRIST are you Deaf? “

That is by design based on the days of a single TV in the house where the intro music was extra loud as a signal for the start of the show and for everyone in the household to gather, or in the case of commercials making god-damn-sure you hear heard it knowing that you walked away during the commercial break.

 

[someidiot]

What I hate is there doesn’t seem to be any agreed upon volume level for tv’s especially where you have to crank up the volume to hear what they say then the commercials come on and you kid says “ CHRIST are you Deaf? “

Well, that has traditionally had more to do with compression than actual volume, but the point is still valid.

I don't have live TV now (out of range of digital broadcast) and just download (torrent) what I want to watch rather than streaming. The problem I often run into is the program being ripped with the volume too low to actually hear. It forced me to add an AV receiver so I'd have better control over the volume than the TV alone permitted.

 

[SightlessSeer]

Disagree Strongly. If you've never used one you won't get it. I zealously accumulated a stash of the original IBM clicky keyboards back when people were tossing them because they only came with the PC/PS2 interface and not USB. In fact, I'm typing on one now, having bought a PS2-USB converter so I can continue to use it through PC upgrades. And if you happen to notice the odd missing character in my posts, it's usually because that interface has a bit of latency and drops the odd keystroke (it's worse when paired with gmail because of its auto-save function) and I didn't catch it.

I absolutely love the sound and feel of these things, so much so that I took a stab at replacing the original keyboard on my HP PA-RISC workstation (used for Mentor EDA) because the stock keyboard eats ass (in a bad way). Unfortunately, to date I haven't been able to accomplish that because HP used their HP-HIL (HP Human Interface Loop) interface for it, and there's some unresolved voodoo in the conversion (involving the mouse, which is daisy-chained through the same interface).

But your error is one of category. Using this keyboard is not a "hobby", and there's no scientific claim involved. It's a keyboard that basically functions like any other, and a legitimate preference on the part of someone who took high school typing classes 50 years ago (only guy in the room other than the teacher) and has maintained the skill.

No I do get it. My work keyboard is a 1989 gold badge omnikey with blue Alps, my daily driver home keyboard is a Focus FK-2001 that I replaced the original white Alps with NOS white Alps, and I have a decent collection of other vintage boards including a model M, an AEK, an SGI granite, a WYSE terminal board, and some other interesting ones. I even built my own PS/2 / AT and ADB converters as a case mod for the PC that I build so I can plug any vintage keyboard that speaks one of those protocols into it natively.

All that being said, the way that people talk about different keyboards and switches is mega pseudoscience-y (especially when talking about custom keyboards). Thinks like Thock-i-ness, buttery, etc. People do things like add foam padding to cases or make custom PCBs with slots to increase the flex (which in particular always confused me). And god help you if you get them started on lubricants. I haven't been active on keyboard forums in more than half a decade, so the best examples don't necessarily come to mind, but hopefully you see what I'm getting at.

Similar to Audio, there are aspects that make real differences (e.g. build/material quality, repairability) and just as many aspects that are pseudoscience.

 

[someidiot]

Okay, so to be honest... This isn't a confession, because it's not a product of "audiophile-crazy golden ears" bullshit, but pure practicality. We moved our log house out to the country 25 years ago, which meant putting down a new foundation, but it was another year (iIrc) until we poured the basement slab. I the meantime, I almost couldn't listen to records because everything caused the stylus to skip - whether our malamute thundering along the springy floor or a door slammed at the other end of the house. So when we were pouring the slab, I said "screw this", cut a hole in the living room floor, and stuck a piece of sonotube down to the basement floor. Then I asked the concrete guys to make sure they had enough to spare to fill the tube. No more skips. (Yes, things are a bit messy and dusty in that corner at the moment. Summer's just about over, I'll deal with it.)

 

[architect]

Okay, so to be honest... This isn't a confession, because it's not a product of "audiophile-crazy golden ears" bullshit, but pure practicality. We moved our log house out to the country 25 years ago, which meant putting down a new foundation, but it was another year (iIrc) until we poured the basement slab. I the meantime, I almost couldn't listen to records because everything caused the stylus to skip - whether our malamute thundering along the springy floor or a door slammed at the other end of the house. So when we were pouring the slab, I said "screw this", cut a hole in the floor, and stuck a piece of sonotube down to the basement. Then I asked the concrete guys to make sure they had enough to spare to fill the tube. No more skips. (Yes, things are a bit messy and dusty in that corner at the moment. Summer's just about over, I'll deal with it.)

View attachment 88064

LOL I think someone needs to make a video of you to go along with the guy with his own electric pole! If this isn't "pseudoscience" I don'tknow what is 😱 😵 😀

I say this with affection and respect, of course.

 

[someidiot]

No I do get it. My work keyboard is a 1989 gold badge omnikey with blue Alps, my daily driver home keyboard is a Focus FK-2001 that I replaced the original white Alps with NOS white Alps, and I have a decent collection of other vintage boards including a model M, an AEK, an SGI granite, a WYSE terminal board, and some other interesting ones. I even build my own PS/2 / AT and ADB converters as a case mod for the PC that I build so I can plug any vintage keyboard that speaks one of those protocols into it natively.

All that being said, the way that people talk about different keyboards and switches is mega pseudoscience-y (especially when talking about custom keyboards). Thinks like Thock-i-ness, buttery, etc. People do things like add foam padding to cases or make custom PCBs with slots to increase the flex (which in particular always confused me). And god help you if you get them started on lubricants. I haven't been active on keyboard forums in more than half a decade, so the best examples don't necessarily come to mind, but hopefully you see what I'm getting at.

Similar to Audio, there are aspects that make real differences (e.g. build/material quality, repairability) and just as many aspects that are pseudoscience.

Ah, okay - thanks for clearing that up. See, you're way deeper into it than I am - I can never remember the IBM model numbers because I simply don't give a toss - I'm happy to like what I like without disappearing down every possible rabbit hole. Sounds like just as well, if they've come up with the kind of idiotic terminology you describe.

Because I tend to collect offbeat stuff, I do have a small collection of ergonomic keyboards that I happened to run across at various surplus joints over the years. For a while I was thinking of reproducing a hemispherical one-handed keyboard (with seven keys, I think...) that had been described in a mid-70s issue of Interface Age, but kind of set that aside because it predated the "modern" IBM PC (or similar), only provided basic ASCII output, and would have needed a bit of a redesign to actually make it useful. And an old pal of mine used to use a Twiddler a lot.

That HP-HIL keyboard really stinks, though - just a very bad feel - and I really should return to trying to get that converter working.

 

[architect]

That poor family record player isn't made for this kind of industrial environment! All that dust and debris...

Something like the Technics 1200Mk2 is a hefty 30lbs, direct drive, and high dampening tone arm that can compensate for a lot of vibration. It was designed for DJs in absolutely insane environments with big speakers alongside blasting building-shaking house music and attendees jumping along.