I remember what Ebay Used to be.

Yesterday's Ebay used to be a great place to sell those items that you no longer use. The fees were manageable and it was quite a hassle free experience all round. Buyers and seller alike were held accountable for their actions in a free and open marketplace where almost anything could be had and usually the price was more than fair.

Today's Ebay is like some sort of horrible joke. If you're a seller, the joke's on YOU!

Let me tell you about the fees!

Does the phrase "Highway Robbery" ring a bell?

The Ebay fee structure has always been setup so that they take a cut of whatever you sell your merchandise for. This cut has steadily increased since the inception of Ebay. The last item I sold on Ebay sold for about $800usd. By the time it was all said and done between Ebay and Paypal i was out nearly a hundred bucks. That is selling this item on Ebay cost me a hundred bucks. This despite the fact that they did no more work for me than they did for the guy who sold a DVD on Ebay for 10 Bucks! It's out of line and it's the reason why savvy sellers have already abandoned Ebay.

Feedback is now a one way street

Buyers can ruin your good name with absoute impunity.

In the good old days both buyer and seller had equal rights in terms of the feedback system. If a buyer took a long time to pay or didn't pay at all, as a seller it was your right to leave them negative feedback. Not anymore! Now sellers cannot leave negative feedback for buyers. This means that you could be a model seller, provide great pre and post sale service and the buyer can turn around and leave negative feedback against you and there's not a damn thing you can do about it!

Ebay protects the buyers, not the sellers. This is an error in business practices because it's the seller that pays all the fees.

Ebay's great service will bend you over!

So you can take chargebacks where the sun don't shine.

The other wonderful thing about todays new Ebay is the lack of flexibility in receiving payment. Unless you have a merchant Visa/Mastercard you MUST use paypal. Paypal service is not free. Ebay owns Paypal for those of you that weren't aware. They even try to rook you into paying money for a shipping label with the customer's address on it. I mean it's a digital picture of a shipping label that you have to print out yourself! As if I can't write that on a piece of paper with a wide tipped magic marker! If you don't use their shipping label service they may even use it as an excuse to delay the customer's payment to you. In many cases they hold your money until you provide a tracking number for the shipment. Sending the item via trackable shipping is also an added expense for seller whose customers want to save money by choosing cheaper shipping options that don't normally include tracking service.

The real problem here is that anytime someone buys from you using a credit card they can simply wait until the item arrives and then deny they ever got it. Once phone call takes the money out of your paypal account and puts it back in their credit card! I have heard many stories about sellers who shipped product and ended up with no money and no product! Even after they contacted the shipping company and obtained proof that the item arrived and was signed for, neither Paypal or the credit card companies did anything to help.

This is why many sellers demanded to be paid with money orders. This was the only way to protect your self from scammers. Ebay has basically made this impossible now with their new policies.

Tags: EBAY, Policies, Bullshit, Robbery, Unfair, Chargebacks

Here are some examples of jargon, buzzwords that mislead or are meaningless.

Musical

Quite often when a salesperson wants to convey that product X is better than product Y that costs quite a bit less, and there is no real difference, they will claim that product X is more “musical” I guess it’s not really a lie, I’m sure the extra money they want you to spend is music to their ears! Whenever you hear the word musical used in a description of an audio product just substitute the word bullshit and you’ll do just fine.

Noise Floor

A huge amount of products are sold on the premise that by reducing the amount of noise present you’ll hear more music. The idea being that if you get rid of noise, small details will become more apparent to your ear and the music will sound better. Hey it makes sense right? Less noise equals more music. The unfortunate thing is that more often than not they’re SAYING they are lowering the noise floor when in reality they are using a device that is widely used in the recording industry called a compressor. A compressor is like a super fast robot that turns up the volume when things are quiet and leaves the sound unchanged when the music gets louder. This has the effect of making anything processed in this way to sound more detailed and live. However it limits the dynamic range of the music so the difference between the loudest sounds and the softest sounds is in some cases dramatically reduced. A good example of this is commercials on TV. Ever notice how they sound louder than the shows you are watching? The people who produce these commercials employ compression to achieve this effect. It is also used to make dialogue in movies crystal clear despite all manner of other sound effects happening at the same time. When you employ compression to Jazz, opera and classical music all of which avoid using compression in the recording and production of the music, it works astonishingly well, the subtle aspects of the music jump out and tickle the ear drums. The problem comes when you want to listen to some good old rock and roll. Crunchy overdriven rock guitar is already as compressed as you can make it and still have it be pleasing to the ear. Compress it any more and it turns to mush! Long story short, if you like to rock out with your system occasionally be very careful with products that claim to “Lower the noise floor”

High Bandwidth

This one isn’t used as much as it used to be, but you never know when it will creep up again. All this means is that the product in question can reproduce very high highs and very low bass. Since most audiophiles are at least pushing 40 years of age it is unlikely that many can hear a frequency higher than 18 or 19KHZ. This is because most people begin to lose the ability to hear the very highest frequencies by the time they reach age 40. You would also require a room that allows you to sit up to 28 feet away from the speaker to most accurately reproduce 40Hz let alone 20Hz!. That’s a pretty big room as most sound experts will tell you that it is good to have the speakers away from the wall at least a few feet and it is also ideal to have some space between you and the wall behind you! So keeping all this in mind a sound system that can reproduce sounds from 20Hz up to 50,000 Khz is not worth paying extra money for! In fact it may cause problems! You see your speaker system will try to reproduce any signal you send it and this can have a negative effect on the overall sound you’re hearing from the speaker. For instance if a woofer has to slow down to try and reproduce something at 20 Hz it can’t simultaneously reproduce the rest of the signal as faithfully and so this becomes a detriment to the sound. Basically it’s like part of the music you can hear is being masked by a sound your speakers can’t even reproduce!

High Resolution

I have seen some speaker wire and interconnects described as being “High Resolution”. Good quality speaker wires and interconnects can have a positive impact on the sound but they can’t raise the resolution! A CD plays back at a higher resolution than an MP3 because more information derived from the original recording is present and available to recreate the music. An up sampling digital to analog converter takes digital information and converts it to a higher bit rate in the digital realm before converting it to the analog sound you hear, thus raising the resolution. Cables merely transfer a signal from one place to another with varying degrees of accuracy they cannot raise the resolution of the sound.

Tags: Bullshit, Buzzwords, Misleading, jargon

Shopping for High End Audio? Choosing the right components can be a daunting task at the best of times. So many conflicting theories and ideas about what sounds good, and what sounds less than good. Salesmen spewing out well rehearsed phrases and using sales techniques that are designed to sell you expensive product which will ultimately do nothing to enhance your enjoyment of music! The purpose of this web site is to expose some of the tactics used by the Hi Fi industry to rook you into a cycle of diminishing returns where good money chases bad money right down the drain!

“Sales Tactics” deals with the ways in which stereo salesmen confuse you into buying things that may not be right for your system in your room at home. Some of these you will recognize, some will have you scratching your head and saying “So that’s why they do/say that!”. The second section “BS Buzzwords” is reserved for confusing jargon. These are the buzzwords and catch phrases that are often used in Hi Fi ads to get you interested in certain products. These words when you really analyze them, are often misleading or meaningless.

We’re not trying to ruin what can be a fun and rewarding hobby. However, once you put all the BS aside you can concentrate on what will really and truthfully help you enjoy your music.


Sales Tactics

Tell em’ what they’re gonna hear!

Let’s see if you find this familiar. You’re in a stereo shop sitting in front of a stereo system. Before he puts the music on, the salesman describes for you what you’re going to hear. He then puts on a selection of music, and before you can really even begin to enjoy it, he then describes what you’re hearing. The salesman then turns the music off and proceeds to tell you what heard! This is a very old trick that uses the power of suggestion to lead you to the foregone conclusion that you should buy whatever the salesman is trying to sell you. This may even be a subtle form of hypnosis! Once the music has started to play, if the salesperson begins to talk simply turn to them, look them right in the eye and say “would it be alright if I just listen to the music”?

“Audiophile” Recordings

You ever notice that most “Audiophile” recordings are very sparse arrangements featuring very few instruments? When I think back to my days working in a stereo shop and remember the music the owner used to love to use to sell equipment. It was always, a single vocal, and a single guitar or a Holly Cole song featuring her voice, a standup bass and some sparse piano. Another shop in town used to use a recording of Japanese Taiko drummers, nothing but drums. There is a very good reason for this. The more you have going on in a recording the harder it is to accurately reproduce. So the thing to do is bring your own demo music with you and make sure to bring some more complex layered music with you and use that as part of your comparison. Always bring a good selection of music that you listen to when you’re out shopping and auditioning audio. Ask yourself, why would you ever evaluate a stereo system with music you’ve never heard before? You see I know from experience that the sales staff in Hi Fi shops will tweak the systems to sound great playing their chosen demonstration music. So if you use their music to evaluate a system the whole presentation has been staged, it’s a foregone conclusion and you will be misled.

Fatal Comparison

When you walk into a High End Audio shop for the first time, the staff checks out your shoes, your watch, your clothing in order to “qualify” you. This process determines what is likely to be in your wallet! Then the fun begins! If a salesman decides that you can afford the best stereo in the shop, he’ll let you have a listen to that system first. Nothing else you hear that visit will compare. Every other system you do listen to during that visit to the shop is reinforcing the idea that you should buy the highest priced system in the shop. If you have so much money that you don’t care that’s fine. If not, you may want to shop around or at the very least leave the shop and come back on another day with fresh ears and simply refuse to listen to any system or component that is out of the range of what you’d like to spend. Another good practice is to ask what things are selling for before you listen If the price is out of line with what you’d like to spend, ask to move on to something more affordable. If the salesman refuses, they are wasting your time and it is time to leave.

“Bad Recordings”

The function of a stereo system is to playback music whether it be a Vinyl Record, a CD or whatever. So then assuming that you’re listening to music that you enjoy, if the sound of the playback is Bad, bright, dark, or in any way less than ideal, it’s the fault of the stereo system NOT the recording itself. Whenever this happens during a stereo demonstration the salesman will attempt to blame the recording and then insist that he play you a “better recording”. If you are in fact buying a stereo system for your personal enjoyment, shouldn’t it sound good playing the music that you actually listen to? If the salesperson insists on using their demonstration music simply say “ I have a better idea, let’s try to find a system that sounds good playing this music, because this is what I listen to”!

Tags: Audiophile, HIFI, Bullshit, Tricks, Dishonest, Dealers