Mike,
I'm pretty sure you'd be banned real fast if you decided to make yourself the post police around here.
Pretty much any post that begins with "This isn't meant to start a fight" is designed to start a fight. I've never seen someone say such a thing without lobbing some incendiary nonsense into a crowd of people. I've been wanting to start a thread asking people where they draw the line of snake oil. I'm pretty sure leading with "This isn't meant to start a fight" isn't going to make such a thread go any smoother. In fact, I think it would just make me look like more of an arrogant idiot.
But hey.... Why not actually answer your question with the most obvious answer?
People depend on the science because the science does a good job of explaining reality for people who are subject to reality. (Not so useful for those functioning outside reality, I suppose.) It's also a much better solution to the problem of buying audio gear because science makes very useful predictions about what this, that, and the other will probably do. It avoids just blindly buying gear and trying it and most often getting poor results because the buyer didn't grasp the theory behind the component to make a proper match. People walk on paths through the woods in the daylight because it makes more sense than stumbling through the underbrush at night. Some would call such rational reasoning "close minded". Others would call that not being an idiot. "Close minded" these days is pretty much synonymous with "too smart to try failure".
So.... There's your answer. Wandering blindly through a forest at night is just plain old stupid. Blindly buying gear with no theoretical understanding of what it's doing is just plain old stupid. You have provided absolutely no underlying theory to your claims or methods. If "snake oil" is roughly defined as "claims unsubstantiated by a tested, repeatable, enumerated theory", everything you say and sell is pure snake oil.
I'm pretty sure you'd be banned real fast if you decided to make yourself the post police around here.
Pretty much any post that begins with "This isn't meant to start a fight" is designed to start a fight. I've never seen someone say such a thing without lobbing some incendiary nonsense into a crowd of people. I've been wanting to start a thread asking people where they draw the line of snake oil. I'm pretty sure leading with "This isn't meant to start a fight" isn't going to make such a thread go any smoother. In fact, I think it would just make me look like more of an arrogant idiot.
But hey.... Why not actually answer your question with the most obvious answer?
People depend on the science because the science does a good job of explaining reality for people who are subject to reality. (Not so useful for those functioning outside reality, I suppose.) It's also a much better solution to the problem of buying audio gear because science makes very useful predictions about what this, that, and the other will probably do. It avoids just blindly buying gear and trying it and most often getting poor results because the buyer didn't grasp the theory behind the component to make a proper match. People walk on paths through the woods in the daylight because it makes more sense than stumbling through the underbrush at night. Some would call such rational reasoning "close minded". Others would call that not being an idiot. "Close minded" these days is pretty much synonymous with "too smart to try failure".
So.... There's your answer. Wandering blindly through a forest at night is just plain old stupid. Blindly buying gear with no theoretical understanding of what it's doing is just plain old stupid. You have provided absolutely no underlying theory to your claims or methods. If "snake oil" is roughly defined as "claims unsubstantiated by a tested, repeatable, enumerated theory", everything you say and sell is pure snake oil.