What NOT to Buy — The Snake Oil Chapterما لا يجب شراؤه — فصل زيت الأفعى

This chapter is about products that exist to separate the undiscerning buyer from their money while offering little to no audible benefit.

Exotic speaker cables: Controlled blind tests consistently show identification drops to random chance when volume is matched.

Gold-plated USB cables: Digital data either arrives correctly or it doesn't. No intermediate state.

Power conditioners: Every competent audio component already has power supply filtering. A surge-protection power strip is all you need.

Cable risers: The electromagnetic influence of your carpet is not something any reasonable physicist would consider relevant.

"Burn-in" for cables: No credible scientific mechanism. What changes is the listener's expectation, not the copper.

Audiophile Ethernet cables: The network protocol includes error correction. The audio data arrives bit-for-bit identical.

The reason these products persist is expectation bias — the tendency to perceive what we expect to perceive. Trust blind testing over sighted listening. Trust measurements over marketing.