Yeah, but people are continually scammed out of their life savings for snake oil that promises to do the impossible. If your making 100k and spend $30 a month on some bottle of homeopathic nonsense and placebo yourself out of a headache, that's fine I guess.

But the person who sold that to you is also getting hundreds of dollars a month from people making barely more than that by selling tic tacs or whatever at a several thousand percent markup, promising false hope to the vulnerable at the mere cost of everything they own.

Bit of a sore spot for me I guess, just because of who I know. What you say is technically true - a bit of extra placebo might be fine, but so many fall really hard for them, and the "innocent" use helps by middle+ class people who can afford it helps legitimize it, making it easier to prey on those who can't.

Gold/Nickel plating is standard for most connectors nowadays except for the cheapest of contacts, which uses tin plating.

Gold plating can still wear off, because pure gold plating is "soft" and "hard" gold plating is usually done with some kind of mixture with other metals for hardness. And the cost of gold plating depends greatly on the thickness, since most of the cost won't be in materials but in process time.

That being said, if you truly want the absolute best uncorrodible and toughest plating for a connector, look for rhodium plating, but that is VERY expensive.

I think the meme makes more since for any digital connection, where it's literally impossible for the cable to make a difference to the sound quality. I have seen some wacky shit online, like claims of gold plated optical audio cables.

You could be right, but I present you evidence for even more stupidity…

Gold plated toslink cables

i know that people don't like rgb, but i absolutely adore when everything in my room sparkles and shines like a christmas tree

I personally think the fastest way to game is in a gaming chair with RGB lights built in. Even moreso if your RGB mic protrudes slightly into the shot so everyone knows what an important and dedicated streamer you are.

My favorite part about every power cable photo like this, is knowing that right inside the wall it's just normal cheap romex wiring all the way to the breaker box, and then cheap aluminum wiring all the way down the power lines.

What am I seing in this picture?

that's not gunna make a good seal

With some cables sometimes quality is higher with price though. I prefer a good 5 USD usb cable than a shitty one that breaks at the joint after a few days of use.

Same with audio cables for guitars, sound is probably not going to suffer (although really long cables can have some issues), but wear damage is definitely noticeable for the very cheap ones.

Gold is a worse conductor than copper. The benefit is just protection from corrosion.

(Copper conductivity is 6 * 10^7 S/m, gold is 4*10^7 S/m. Silver is 6.3 * 10^7, but very prone to corrosion).

The conductivity doesn't mean a damn thing when it's plating some shit-tier alloy.

That corrosion resistance though... more than worth the price. I made that mistake on some monitors once. ONCE.

It used to be required back in the 486 days. Get off my lawn!

Sometimes when I'm buying a new part or whatever I catch myself looking at sound cards then wondering wtf I'm doing anyway.

If you're producing music you're well advised to buy a dedicated sound card for latency and input / output purposes.