At first i'd like to say hi to all, as I've been lurking for a couple of years now (though I was registered and quite active user of r3mix.net).
I don't know if this been already posted (search didn't find anything) but here goes,
the funniest pieces of equipment I've ever seen (especially the wooden volume knobs ):
http://www.ilikejam.dsl.pipex.com/audiophile.htm

Welcome.

Are these for real?

Or as my brother, a builder, would put it: a bit o' 2 by 3.

"Silver Rock Signature Knob". Emphasis on the "knob" I think... (may be a British euphemism)

"I must be in the wrong business..."

edit: okay, lets see - i always had this feeling that i someway should be paid for my "services to public" by the masses. Maybe this is the right way to do it - let them pay for stupidity - i just need to sell 2 of them per month to pay all my monthly expenses..... that in turn would leave me with lots of free time to engage in unpaid creative projects. Sounds fair to me *grin*

"Cable Elevators Plus
God forbid your insulated speaker cables should touch anything as audiophilically damaging as your carpet."

10/10 :-D

I would be amused to hear the manufacturers or Musicdirect employees try to justify these items being purchased.

[nevermind]

Being an electronics engineering student, my thoughts:

No.

But the page at the link for that product explains how it all works. They describe how the device utilizes quantum dots and entanglement and all of that fancy physics stuff, in highly scientific and rigorous terminology, and they even have graphs! Hell, they threw in a quantum cat graph for good measure. That one alone explains the whole damn thing.

How can anyone possibly be skeptical after all that?

Nobody better tell the theoretical physicists about this thing, because they'll be so disappointed that it's so easy to put these phenomena in to practical manufacturing and use. While they're sitting there futzing around in their labs with all that "expensive" equipment, the manufacturer of this little device shows you can really manage to package it all up into a little piece of plastic and point it at your cd player to get all sorts of neat magical effects!

Man, I can't wait to see what they will come up with next!

^^^ Does it say if it works if the unit is left inside the little case?

You bought something from that list, didn't you.

In a French objectivist forum, we came across an explanation for cable elevators completely by accident. We were talking about speaker cable impedance.
If your floor is metallic, it will decrease the mutual inductance between the two wires of your speaker cable, which may cause an audible degradation because the mutual inductance usually acts against the internal inductance and cancels most of it. With the mutual inductance decreased, the total inductance rises, and can act as an audible lowpass filter.
Cable elevators prevent this if the elevation is high enough.

Edit : corrected the signums of the different kinds of inductance.

Everybody with a metallic floor, please hold up your hands.

Nope. My faraday cage days are long gone.

I'd be interested in seeing that link if you can find it. The use of "elevators", even on a metallic floor is highly dubious, at best. The explanation you've given above is plainly wrong, and even if it were true the effect would be too small to notice at audio frequencies. Whoever wrote the explanation was misguided...

Damn! The lacquer that "transforms transistor sound into tube sound" is no longer available for sale. I can't imagine why