Consoomers / Consoomer Culture - Because if it has a recogniseable brand on it, I’d buy it!

[Jump]

Stadium Arcadium on good fresh clean vinyl on a decent setup is an absolute fucking melt your face off trip. It's far, FAR better than the CD release, and nobody will ever know.

It only sounds amazing because the CD mix was complete trash. Thats the problem with most later CD releases. "Loudness war" and what not. The record labels compressed the shit out of the audio because they thought it sounded better in cars and over the radio. Buying the LP in the 90's-00's was a way to bypass the label's meddling and get what the artist actually intended the mix to sound like. Most orginal CD's from the 80s sound amazing and there is zero reason to get an LP over those.

CD releases of Papa don't preach.


The Beatles Something


And I think the most often mentioned when talking about the "loudness war" is Metallica's Dead Magnetic




So I tend to agree with that most modern LP collectors are strait up consoomers and not actuality in it for the music. If they where they would be completely open to getting the music on what ever format the best release was on. LP, CD, FLAC, etc.

 

[Neet Tokusatsu]

The only reason I have a CD drive at all is to rip music from a relative's music collection, if they do not have an album I want to rip I just use youtube-dl. I can not understand audiophiles. How can they hear differences in audio that no one else can is beyond me. Also FLAC files are fucking massive, I can compress them into a decent quality MP3 with no noticeable change in audio and save a shit ton of space.

I'm not gonna lie, i would love to own a couple of $500 sets of headphones to play my favorite games with, horror games and first person shooters surely could benefit with that kind of audio quality, But that's the thing with most audiophiles, there is a saying that perfectly describes them "A music fan uses their stereo to listen to music, an audiophile uses music to listen their stereo".

 

[Hippopatumus]

It only sounds amazing because the CD mix was complete trash.

I agree, but it doesn't change the fact (also it was mastered by the best dude in the industry for vinyl mixes). And there are a good solid handful of other vinyl releases through the years that truly do sound incredible and are worth collecting. I don't think many people have heard how good vinyl can actually sound on a proper system, it's EASILY AS GOOD as digital--not really better per se, but it can be kind of shocking just how good the technology actually can be. Not something consoomers will ever have experience with, buying shitty presses at the mall. It's a thoroughly obsolete technology, but it peaked pretty damn high.

Anyway, re: audiophiles, there is two kinds. One who sees audio equipment as a means to an end, and one who gets into some weird ass mysticism about the whole thing buying literal 'magic beads' to place on top of their speaker wires and thousand dollar IEC power cables. Really the whole audiophile thing could be its own thread. It's a weird symbiotic relationship between people willing to drop tens of thousands of dollars on literal "magic boxes" and the grifters who are all to happy to spin them a yarn about the garbage they're selling.

I'm an audiophile, in that I listen to a lot of music and equipment is a means to an end. My stereo costs around 6k, and it's about as good as you can get for the size room that I have. It's part of my home theater so it does double duty, and I can tell you it is well worth the cost for the amount of hours I have on it. I have people over and they are literally left speechless by it. For a frame of reference, it's moderately better in sound quality, loudness, and accuracy than a typical high-end megaplex theater. But I don't have magic beads, I have handmade horn-loaded loudspeakers and a subwoofer that was delivered via freight on a pallet.

 

[LinkinParkxNaruto[AMV]]

I think what really fucked it up was the inclusion of Earthbound characters in the Super Smash Bros. franchise. I know that was my first introduction to the franchise, and while I never played the games myself, I can definitely see that exposure bringing in some of the insufferable types we see on this thread.

I remember like 10 years ago youtubers started sperging about it as a hidden gem thats super special so hipsters latched on to it , it fell into the circlejerk blender and ended up in the same limbo as Joy Division shirts and jack skelingtong merch. things that get caught up in a feedback loop online and take a second life of their own as group signifiers, now the object itself is often judged overwhemingly positive or harshly not on its own properties but on its perceived value as an identity badge. Theres something i find kinda sad about it.

Products trascending into a substitute identity seems like a common trope with the consumeristic mindset, its not only about spending money, there's a tainting how things are processed and perceived when passing through that filter, as if everything gets reduced into the most reduced memeable form of its original self and in that form is also more quickly consumed and more easily discarded as well.

Emplemon has a good video that related to that with what happened to Rick and Morty.

Rick and Morty: Good Show, m.A.A.d. fandom

To be fair, you have to have a very high EQ to understand Rick and Morty. Don't become a balding nihilist like Rick. Visit https://keeps.com/emplemon for 50%...

www.youtube.com

 

[Gar For Archer]

I agree, but it doesn't change the fact (also it was mastered by the best dude in the industry for vinyl mixes). And there are a good solid handful of other vinyl releases through the years that truly do sound incredible and are worth collecting. I don't think many people have heard how good vinyl can actually sound on a proper system, it's EASILY AS GOOD as digital--not really better per se, but it can be kind of shocking just how good the technology actually can be. Not something consoomers will ever have experience with, buying shitty presses at the mall. It's a thoroughly obsolete technology, but it peaked pretty damn high.

Anyway, re: audiophiles, there is two kinds. One who sees audio equipment as a means to an end, and one who gets into some weird ass mysticism about the whole thing buying literal 'magic beads' to place on top of their speaker wires and thousand dollar IEC power cables. Really the whole audiophile thing could be its own thread. It's a weird symbiotic relationship between people willing to drop tens of thousands of dollars on literal "magic boxes" and the grifters who are all to happy to spin them a yarn about the garbage they're selling.

I'm an audiophile, in that I listen to a lot of music and equipment is a means to an end. My stereo costs around 6k, and it's about as good as you can get for the size room that I have. It's part of my home theater so it does double duty, and I can tell you it is well worth the cost for the amount of hours I have on it. I have people over and they are literally left speechless by it. For a frame of reference, it's moderately better in sound quality, loudness, and accuracy than a typical high-end megaplex theater. But I don't have magic beads, I have handmade horn-loaded loudspeakers and a subwoofer that was delivered via freight on a pallet.

It should be noted that most audiophile snake oil is in the headphones game, and back when I followed that sphere it was a common meme that you could pay $2000 for “top of the line” headphones… or you could get a $500 speakers that absolutely blow them out of the water.

Fact of the matter is, speakers will ALWAYS give you a better, more natural feeling sound at a fraction of the cost, because the sound is ACTUALLY coming from all around you instead of being funneled into a tiny ear cup. You can’t beat the natural reverberation of sound waves across a physical space.

I'm not gonna lie, i would love to own a couple of $500 sets of headphones to play my favorite games with, horror games and first person shooters surely could benefit with that kind of audio quality, But that's the thing with most audiophiles, there is a saying that perfectly describes them "A music fan uses their stereo to listen to music, an audiophile uses music to listen their stereo".

IMO, $300 is where the diminishing returns seriously kick in.

 

[Hippopatumus]

And here I am with my $36 KOSS PortaPro. (Seriously they are fantastic headphones, especially if you are into lots of bass)

But then you can't post on headphone forums about the richness of your $2k Sennheisers that weigh 3lbs.

 

[TheBeanz]

Stadium Arcadium on good fresh clean vinyl on a decent setup is an absolute fucking melt your face off trip. It's far, FAR better than the CD release, and nobody will ever know.

Unfortunately there are only a small minority of similarly-endowed vinyl releases, and 99% of all releases these days are just a direct dump of the digital master with no additional work done for the vinyl release which makes them objectively worse than digital and essentially pointless to own. Which is what makes them great fodder for this thread. Half the idiots buying the shit don't even have a record player, and the other half own a shitty one with a shitty cartridge. The modern vinyl industry is an excellent example of consoomerism.

Thanks for the tip, I'll keep an eye out for Stadium Arcadium.

A lot of mainstream pop vinyl releases these days are almost designed to be ornamental and get manufactured as cheaply as possible. My other half bought Taylor Swift's Lover on vinyl when it came out and when we played it, it sounded so bad I honestly thought my stylus was broken. I even switched to another record I knew was good quality right after listening just to make sure it wasn't! She then checked out what the Swifties were saying about this diabolical release, and all of social media was full of Zoomers hanging that same pink record up on their walls.

 

[byuu]

You can’t beat the natural reverberation of sound waves across a physical space.

So speakers are "better" because the sound is more distorted by the reverberation in your room?

If you're talking better as in higher fidelity, then it's the exact opposite, 50$ IEMs can beat a 500$ speaker.

There's a whole science to speaker placement and controlling the acoustics in a room, and it's all stuff you don't have to deal with at all with headphones.
Headphones also require far less power, which eliminate a lot of problems a speaker setup has to deal with. For example unlike headphones, good speakers require extra drivers for low and high frequencies - which also creates a new problem of interference between different drivers and so on.

 

[Andrew Neiman]

When it comes to Youtubers who talk about pop culture, which ones are good and which ones are bad.

Start with The Nerd Crew. They always have the latest details on Star Wars and Marvel properties.

 

[UnsufficentBoobage]

delivered via freight

This phrase made me remember this:

People filling entire rooms with their collections are often cray, but it is interesting to see pieces of history like that (other two ponies just vanished and nobody had ever seen them).

 

[Yeeted Teet]

This phrase made me remember this:
View attachment 2789411
View attachment 2789410View attachment 2789409

People filling entire rooms with their collections are often cray, but it is interesting to see pieces of history like that (other two ponies just vanished and nobody had ever seen them).

One off pieces like that are as close to interesting as these types of collections ever get. I wouldn't call it a good way to spend your money, but if you're into that kind of thing it's an infinitely better way to spend your money than shelves upon shelves of mass produced merchandise.

 

[Moguro Fukuzou]

Late to the party here I know but:

It's an interesting point about HiFi because when it gets down to it, good sound quality is good sound quality. When I was doing my setup, I checked some reviews and top 10 lists, bought some decent speakers and some decent wires and connected up to an amp and a turntable from 1990. It sounds great to me, would it sound better if I blew 12 grand on Bang and Olufsen? Maybe, but for the moment, it's good.

Reminds me of looking up videos on how to clean records and seeing how there's apparently 'drama' of sorts there. Watched several videos from older collectors who showcased cheap ways of getting everything clean that they'd been using for years vs. a lot of the newer audiophiles saying you need to buy expensive care items as cheap methods 'damage' the records. Like this guy had to delete his video on how he used to clean his record after all the hatred from audiophiles, which people have since re-uploaded because they liked his style of presentation and super cheap method:

The enthusiast communities for anything, especially when it comes to Reddit, are always a fucking shitshow of one-upmanship on who can blow the most money trying to get something that looks cool. It's best to avoid them.

Audiophiles are some of the most annoying to deal with because they always seem to want to one up eachother on their knowledge which leads to such conflicting/confusing advice for new people that it honestly isn't worth the bother. I've gotten better advice from the old farts that'll simply say to look for good quality second-hand equipment and to disregard all the marketing bullshit that companies love to use towards audiophiles. You are also far more likely to find people willing to sell those old systems (that still work) or you might even be able to get some for free as people upgrade their set-ups.

 

[The Lawgiver]

This meme is probably relevant to this thread, considering how deep into the rabbit hole of cosoomerism most audiophiles are.

View attachment 2787181



Yeah, playing with a physical cart on some kind of portable SNES is probably the most cumbersome and impractical way to play a SNES game on the go, he could easily emulate the game on his phone or use a modded PSP/3DS or even a Chinese handheld if he wanted. But the top priority was to show off his Earthbound cart it seems.

portable SNES is cool, actual button feedback is always superior to smartphone shit.Physical will last longer than digital if digital gets fucked somehow but digital could possibly be transferred upways easier. Both have their boons but my dumbass prefers physical stuff especially with the cloud subscription service always online shit being pushed lately with games.

This phrase made me remember this:
View attachment 2789411
View attachment 2789410View attachment 2789409

People filling entire rooms with their collections are often cray, but it is interesting to see pieces of history like that (other two ponies just vanished and nobody had ever seen them).

I wonder what happens to a lot of promotional display statues. Somewhere, only god knows where, that fucking giant N64 promo Mumbo Jumbo statue that showed up at E3 or may not be rotting. The thing had a fucking TV inside itand the only 3 options I can think are "warehouse, junkyard, or some weird wealthy motherfucker with a high ceiling in his living room". I know there's entire swaths of research people have done on some of the Sonic promo statues, and some were found in like a junkyard or something a few years back.

 

[NoReturn]

New Sophie Sohet video:

 

[whitepumpkin]

New Sophie Sohet video

Wow, I'm *so* jealous of this woman driving her porsche, eating appetizers off spoons that look like they came from a drive through, looking through boring expensive clothes and complaining she's freezing in what looks like 2°C.
It's just so needless. Interesting, though, when you look through her channel, there was this video:

Basically, she signed up for these bank accounts when she was in university, talks about how she never looked at prices when she went to the grocery store (?????), how she went out and clubbing and her 500 pounds she saved up disappeared so fast and it was the start of her debt. She managed to get out by accrediting working part-time on her resume to "2 years experience" and a company hired her so she was able to start paying it off. And then she went to another job with double the salary so all's well that ends well.

While her advice is basic common budgeting sense that most millennials should know, it's baffling to me to begin with. She was $40,000 in debt in university, but now that she has a good job she can drop thousands on clothes, bags, shoes, and it's completely fine? If you lose your job, Youtube shuts down, inflation hits, etc. Do you really want to be sitting around with a bunch of purses and shoes that mock you for how much you spent? I doubt in a survival situation, Gucci purses will be able to get you eggs or meat.

 

[NoReturn]

While her advice is basic common budgeting sense that most millennials should know, it's baffling to me to begin with. She was $40,000 in debt in university, but now that she has a good job she can drop thousands on clothes, bags, shoes, and it's completely fine? If you lose your job, Youtube shuts down, inflation hits, etc. Do you really want to be sitting around with a bunch of purses and shoes that mock you for how much you spent? I doubt in a survival situation, Gucci purses will be able to get you eggs or meat.

She's got a video for that one, too:

And while we're on the subject, I mostly post stuff like this in the sugar babies thread, but I figured you guys might also get a kick out of what qualifies as "luxury" and "aspirational living" to TikTokers.

 

[greenthrowaway]

Oh god I remember this thing: https://the-digital-reader.com/2016/05/09/freewrite-how-not-to-do-software/

Holy shit I’m sick of these newsletter pop ups. This one shakes and fills the screen before you even get to read a word.

 

[Vingle]

And while we're on the subject, I mostly post stuff like this in the sugar babies thread, but I figured you guys might also get a kick out of what qualifies as "luxury" and "aspirational living" to TikTokers.
video.mp4

Sounds like your standard ghetto nigress. And it sounds like she says gifs and not gifts.

video.mp4

She has probably gotten in debt or saved up for a long time.

About the sock organizer. I have yet to experience losing socks, and everything else than black or white socks on adult looks autistic.

Edit: This video about Amazon cracking down on Chinese sellers.

 

[NoReturn]

About the sock organizer. I have yet to experience losing socks, and everything else than black or white socks on adult looks autistic.

Unless the local fetishist is stealing individual socks from the laundromat that device seems like way more hassle than it's worth.

 

[TheBeanz]

She's got a video for that one, too:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=wEO5pS8Dp0oAnd while we're on the subject, I mostly post stuff like this in the sugar babies thread, but I figured you guys might also get a kick out of what qualifies as "luxury" and "aspirational living" to TikTokers.
video.mp4
video.mp4
video.mp4

'Luxury Fashion & Beauty/Automotive/Business

I would love to hear what insights this bird has on cars. As it happens she even has a review of the 981 Boxster: https://youtu.be/gKzQXuDVm4c

Key points in this review:

Spoiler: Automotive Autism

This is a Porsche Boxster it has a 2.7 litre engine (x2 for the retards in the back)
The black wheels of doom were her choice and she had them painted
'I got the PDK model'
'Flappy paddle gearshift so it's pretty cool to drive'
'It's so okay if you want to drive in heels because there's no gear changes'
REVS FROM COLD
Our first piece of actual consumer advice relates to the interior: Porsche embossed headrests are a £1000 option and she wouldn't bother with it. Also, Alcantara good
'That slot there is where you can put like a SIM Card? I don't know what that does'

This row of blanks shows you all the options she couldn't afford
Vague description of sport mode and traction control

Fuck me, fill up your car
Mistakes oil pressure for oil level
'This is the key for the car it looks like a little car'
Second piece of consumer advice talks about how there are two boot spaces, the frunk is the deeper of the two
'If you want to get under the bonnet of this thing you can't, you just can't'
She once transported a wardrobe in this car with the roof down
Talks about how weight distribution makes it good in the winter and she's never had a slide - I'm sure this has nothing to do with her never turning the traction control off or driving it anywhere near the limit
Third piece of consumer advice: £70 to fill the tank
'The brochures are always hopeful on fuel economy aren't they, I am getting about 10mpg' She admits she drives like a retard
Fourth piece of consumer advice: Servicing costs. First one will set you back about a grand. Tries to cope with main dealer servicing costs by saying it's only every 2 years 'so it's basically like a BMW or Mercedes where you spend £500 every year'
'I always get rid of my cars before the first 4 year service because that's a lot of money' - Probably the most consoomer thing she's said in the whole video. Coincidentally this will have nothing to do with a 3 year PCP deal.

It's as retarded as you think it is