“Vegas again,” I thought, as the noisy A320 plonked down onto the runway at McCarran. I was in the front, thanks to a plethora of reward miles on United, and across the row through the portal I could see the Vegas Strip—hungry, pulsing. It was only a few months since I’d last been here for CES, and coming back to the city felt a lot like putting back on that dirty, comfortable sweater you just can’t seem to bring yourself to throw away.
But this time I wasn’t here to report on gadgets or meet vendors or anything else quite like I’d done before—this time, I was going up on stage myself. After calling out the audiophile cable gods, I’d come to settle the score. I’d brought a $ 340 “audiophile grade” Ethernet cable, and I was ready to put it to the test with the assistance of the James Randi Educational Foundation in front of a live audience of several hundred people.
My room was waiting for me at the Mandalay Bay hotel—the very first place I’d ever stayed in Vegas on my very first conference back in 2003 and the place that always springs to mind before anything else when I think of the city. After taxiing to the lobby, the place even smelled the same: fresh, in a vaguely artificial floral way. I’d sleep, and then I’d sing and dance up on stage. The goal was to find out if a $ 340 Ethernet cable made any difference when you’re using it to connect a computer to a NAS on which music was stored. To all common sense and science, the answer was “no,” but that hasn’t stopped a certain subset of audiophiles from believing in them—and from other silliness like decrying the efficacy of the scientific method when it comes to audio testing.
