Because you want your bits to be as precisely defined as possible, I guess . . .

*gapes in awe*

if I had $6,800 bucks to spare I'd spend more and fly all of Whisperado here to play at some venue. And hire the venue.

But that wasn't bad enough! After that, also by accident, I found a manufacturer who thinks liquid metals just aren't good enough -- they use *liquid ceramic* conductors. AKA, mud. (But budget hunters take note: they're a "mid-priced" alternative for speaker cables -- only $995 per 8' pair)

Really?
Would you cover the Archies' "Sugar Sugar"?
Would you cover Bobby Goldsboro's "Honey"?

Not that I would want to hear those songs ever again, in any form, in my entire life or afterlife or any of an infinite number of reincarnations, but I was just curious what your personal limits would be for $6,800.

(They might be trying to eliminate an internal echo, I suppose.)

One of the purposes of expensive connectors seems to be to reduce noise at the connection point. How much would it cost to have someone come in and solder silver cables directly to one's speaker and one's amp, on the inside, so there's no connector loss?

Amazon.com is full of pinatas.

Only serious.

Walking by his office, watching him carefully stretch the cord to let the little 1's go through...priceless.

-----
* Not me, honest. All I did was convince a technophobic secretary that someone had set the copier to recognize her ID code† and break down when she used it. She had a quirk of paper placement that could make the sheet sorter spit paper across the room. In retrospect, it was cruel, but it was also the fastest way to have her ask me to use my ID, her customer number, and set things up myself‡.

† All photocopying was billable, so you needed an ID code and a customer number to use the copiers

‡ Because I am an Electrostatic Reproduction Machine Whisperer

** It was slow because it was so primitive that its CPU part identifier was a negative number

"You know why the platter turns in the microwave oven?"

Dubious look. "No, why?"

Lean closer, lower voice conspiratorially, "It's to stir the microwaves."

"...uh...yeah."

"No, really!"

"Look, lady, I was born in the night, but I wasn't born last night."

Ah, now you remind me of an occasion when I was working for a large accountancy firm. A partner in the firm was showing a client his new laptop, but the darned thing wasn't working. Nothing on the display, no response to the keyboard, but it was plugged in and the battery light was showing. So something worked.

So he called the office techie, who bent over it (body-blocking it from the assembled nabobs), did things for a minute or two, and then let them at the now-working machine.

"What was the matter?" asked the partner (who came off like Jack Aubrey, but wasn't really that bright)
"Oh, it's complicated. Technical," said the techie, clearly wanting to leave the room as quickly as possible.
"Ah, come on, we're all technicologically up-to-date here; you can explain it."
"Well, um...it helps if you turn it on."

The techie fled the stunned silence that filled the room. Since he was my source for the story, I don't know what happened next.

You don't need to wonder how the Mythbusters people would handle them. You just need to wonder how much C4 it will take...

Quality matters far more on the input side. The signal from a microphone is low enough that the noise sources matter. Although we could sell these guys a pre-amp with cryogenic cooling.

Hmm, start with adapting some of the CPU-cooling tech out there. Water-cooled power transistors on a high-end amplifier almost makes sense.

Officially it's "Bad Science Unit", but everyone including the hosts calls it "Blowing Stuff Up".

*Which might make sense if they were plugging into gold-plated sockets. Might.

Jacque @20:
[...]"You know why the platter turns in the microwave oven?"
[...] "It's to stir the microwaves."

That is why the microwaves are frequently bounced off of the spinning blades of the exhaust fan. Where "stir" means to "disperse more evenly".

Serge @28:

A few weeks ago, we ordered a pizza, with sausage on half of it, and they asked on which half. Of course they did it on the wrong half, but we decided to rotate the pizza until the sausage was on the correct half.

You had a choice of three axes that you could have rotated the pizza around to fix their error, and you chose the one that left the pizza right side up, FTW!

Every fule kno that microwaves need to be shaken, not stirred.

I assumed he'd been laughing about the Lusers blowing down the cable for as long as we've been laughing about the techie who thought static build up was likely to a) be a problem and b) be reduced by blowing down it.

Then I read Meg's comment above and just realized this may have been his way of making sure the end-user was actually checking the cable was plugged in. Southern Californians might not react properly to a request to check the connection but "pull it out, blow down it and reconnect it" might just work.

Nah...on second thoughts...it was probably his first day there and they played a prank on him.

Bringing to mind the first line of my favorite review ever done in Rolling Stone magazine, which was of that Archies album: "Herein are contained sixteen strong arguments against the capitalist system."

Reminds me of the time way back when I was a computer operator. We had a regular job where a person came from data entry with a mag tape. We ran a simple job that loaded it to a disk file.

It always ran in a matter of seconds. One time the woman who brought it down said, "Are you sure it's in? That was awfully quick."

I went over to the drive, powered it down, and lifted the platters after screwing in the cover. "Yeah, it worked. It's considerably heavier now."

She nodded, then saw my grin, and said, "Oh, you!"

Another time another co-worker watched as I activated a tape drive with a DVCUP command (Device Up). She asked, "What's a dv cup?".

My mouth always led a wild and free life, and I replied, "A very large bra size."

I wonder what kind of music you listen to on your $6,800-speaker-cabled system.

For some reason the Archies' Sugar Sugar makes me think not of 'our' late 60s, but of the late 60s of Dick's Radio Free Albemuth, and I always start to feel paranoid when I hear it.

Fragano Ledgister @31: Where do you get 'shaken' or 'stirred' from 'microwave'? You use more microwaves. For the best model of such, observe Peter Sellers as the Grand Duchess of Grand Fenwick, holding the tiller of her ancient motorcar with one hand and graciously microwaving with the other.

Lyle Hopwood @33: H. Allen Smith recounts the tale of pranksters who would call rural folk in the early days of table phones and tell them that the phone company needed to blow out their lines, so they should put a cloth or a bag over the phone for the next couple of hours to protect against detritus. Looking at the phones of the time, with their lily-like protrusions, this almost verges on the credible. It also reports that witnesses report seeing the folk sitting near the phone, waiting to see the stuff come blowing out of the mouthpiece, which begins to strain my own credulity.

The one facing away from Mecca?

Regarding the MythBusters and the effects of sound... They showed that the human voice can shatter glass. I don't remember if the use of a huge sound system confirmed that the Brown Note can work as the myth goes, nor do I really want to know.

Steve w/b, #37: My partner claims to be able to hear all kinds of (IMO illusory) differences on recordings, mostly having to do with what kind of equipment was used to make the recording. As he also claims NOT to be able to hear the difference between a jig and a reel, I'm dubious.

Pranks: this reminds me of my favorite old answering-machine message, sadly no longer usable since we have a home-based business:

"The number you have reached, NNN-MMMM, is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try your call again. If you feel that you have reached this message in error, please leave your name and number at the sound of the tone."

In my best imitation of the artificial voice used for the "disconnected" message. It amused my friends no end, and generally got rid of telemarketers. And once or twice, someone actually left a message to the effect of, "This was a wrong number, but I just had to say that I LOVE your message!"

Adam Savage has never been the same since, though.

I wonder what kind of music you listen to on your $6,800-speaker-cabled system.
A system like that isn't meant to be used, any current running through that cable would change its characteristics.

I have a cousin that makes a very good living installing very-high-end stereo and video systems in Silly Valley. I expect that he has customers that spec'd cables like this.
"A Fool and his Money are soon Parted" makes for a pretty decent marketing plan, if you find the right fools.

That sounds like it was worth every penny. Who stopped him from singing the second line?

Jacque@20, actually that is the main reason for the fan in the microwave, because otherwise the waves would end up in a stable pattern in the metal box and not cook evenly. It doesn't do a perfect job, which is why rotating the food also helps.

Jo Walton, #26: "I heard Patrick sing the first line of "Sugar Sugar" last weekend. For free!"

Bruce:That sounds like it was worth every penny. Who stopped him from singing the second line?

On the original topic, a colleague there who worked in mixing bought a 6ft sample of every cable sold by Maplin Electronics, soldered RCA jacks onto them and listened to them. He decided which one sounded best, bought a reel of that cable, and made several and sold them at a huge markup through hifi hobbyist magazines (I don't think it was a double-blind listening test).

You'd think that the 14-week Radioman Class A school they had to pass prior to their first duty station would enlighten them, but we usually got 1 in 4 to bite on it.

Sounds and visions
Fill up the space
The death apocalypse
Of an alien race

Audiophiles
Can hear the difference
And slowly grow mad
From the voice in the distance

We live under ground
We speak with our hands
With higher quality madness
Than the less expensive brand

My father-in-law is quite an audiophile, and while I don't know how much his cables cost, he regularly mentions gold-plated things in his equipment stack.

Wow.

You don't--you just turn it on and listen to the surprisingly black background. It makes the sound of your breathing unexpectedly dynamic!

You do wonder how well this works. Are there really enough rich suckers to fall for this?

There are people out there who are willing to try making their own vacuum tubes, because they don't think solid-state devices have the right sound quality.

Well, yes, but if you tell your victim that, not only do their eyes glaze over, but it sounds technical enough to be plausible, and they'll just nod and take your word for it.

My way, you get all the fun of pulling their leg, for none of the effort.

...Resulting in one of my favorite phenomena from the early days of microwave ovens: nice, warm, chocolate chip cookies that look yummy...until you bite into them and discover the carbonized core.

On the topic of cables: I'm currently fighting a cheap ethernet cable of dubious provenance. Its little tabby-do that's supposed to hold it into the socket is, shall we say, insufficient unto the purpose. If you think at it hard, it slips loose. I wish I could remember if this is the one I bought from Radio Shack....

There may be a few folks who do, but I suspect the bigger effect in most stores that carry the ~$7000 cables is that they sell more $70 cables, which no longer seem quite so outlandish as they otherwise would be. The anchor pricing effect can be quite persistent, even when you know there's no sensible basis for the anchor.

At least it wasn't HFCS.

Although the second line is not identical to the first line (sorry, Patrick), it's just a different sequence of the same tokens in your compression dictionary.

(And I bet Bruce A. is sorry he mentioned that song. But since no one has followed up on the other song he mentioned, here is The Smothers Brothers' parody of it.)

I'll believe it's liquid metal if a salesman takes a randomly chosen box off the shelf and cuts the insulation and pours the liquid metal out.

Same with the 'liquid ceramic'.

Are there rich suckers out there? You betcha. Consider the unfortunate participants at that sweat lodge in Sedona.

and which you were probably
planning to return for a refund.

Forgive me? At least I saved you from
Sugar, Sugar and Honey

JMO, #66: And that anchor point can be amazingly sticky. At the Quilt Show here a couple of years ago, there was a hammer-dulcimer performer selling CDs for $16. He was probably picking up a lot of sales from people who are used to $20 CDs in the retail store -- but I walked away because the price point in my head for direct-from-the-artist CDs is $15, and my immediate reaction was "Too high." There might have been less sales resistance if he'd been doing something significantly different from every other hammer-dulcimer player in my collection, but he wasn't.

He wasn't a Quaddie?

Fits here because of the "online review" theme, IMO, if anyone was wondering.

If I had an extremely spare $6,800 [2] I would probably commission a punk rock song, to contain the lines "We live underground/ We speak with our hands/ We wear the earplugs all our lives". Sorry, Patrick.

[1] I sold that car for $500. Maybe we could consider it an investment?

[2]I don't even know how rich I'd have to be to do that. But it goes to show that anyone who says "So much money I wouldn't know what to do with it" has insufficient imagination. I haven't updated the list of Things To Do With That Much Money for a while, because it still has "pay three different people who don't know her to throw pies at [person X]."

Several years ago, James Randi declared that the marketing claims of many audiophile products qualified as "paranormal", and started offering the prize to manufacturers and reviewers who made those claims.

Various fallout here and here.

John

By strange coincidence, I just paid to commission a couple of songs on the lyrical theme of my choosing (they were donated by a student to my college's charity auction, and it was only $40), so I actually may steal your idea, Sandy, and do just that. We haven't finalized the details yet, but I requested that the songs be made available under a Creative Commons license, so I should be able to share the end result with the Fluorosphere.

I was denigrating the song, not the singer, Teresa.

I don't think I've ever actually heard Patrick sing. (I've listened to a couple of Whisperado tracks, but I don't remember Patrick being one of the vocalists on them.)

I got into observational position on this phenomenon by researching and purchasing some high-quality headphones -- which were good value and have given years of pleasure. But I certainly saw the rest of the pool from the shallow end.

As others here have pointed out, the equipment used by recording studios can be orders of magnitude less expensive than audiophile stuff. If you're researching an audio purchase over a couple hundred dollars, you'd do well to at least glance at the recording-professional catalogues; at a minimum, you'll be anchoring to a more reasonable set of numbers.

Patrick, #5: "Hell, for $6,800 I'll personally fly to your house and cover whatever music you meant to play."

Really?
Would you cover the Archies' "Sugar Sugar"?
Would you cover Bobby Goldsboro's "Honey"?

Not that I would want to hear those songs ever again, in any form, in my entire life or afterlife or any of an infinite number of reincarnations, but I was just curious what your personal limits would be for $6,800.

I have no trouble believing that PNH would be willing to cover "Honey" for $6,800.

But I'd bet he would demand considerably more cash if you insist that he perform it unironically.

Jacque@65, I've got one of that kind of ethernet cables at work also. I'd replace it, but it's 50 feet long (requiring purchasing paperwork as opposed to just getting one out of the bin) and I'd have to string the replacement behind a lot of furniture, and it's not one I use that often.

Find a friendly sysadmin/geek/cable jockey and borrow their crimp tool. There are websites and websites on wire order and connectors are cheap.

As for what umpteen-thousand-dollar stereo cables are good for, I imagine they make those elusive pensato notes jump right out of the speakers. ("Pensato note" = you don't play the note, you just think it. A marking allegedly invented specifically for the music of Anton Webern, which is usually cerebral and often quiet.)

P J Evans @ 61: There are people out there who are willing to try making their own vacuum tubes, because they don't think solid-state devices have the right sound quality.

The human ear is really good at hearing differences in sound, and the human brain is really good at imagining differences in sound, so it can be quite difficult to tease out (or eliminate) significant factors.

Recording equipment definitely matters; I'm confident, Lee, that if I were to play you recordings of something you were familiar with (say, your partner's voice) made with different types of microphone (e.g. dynamic vs. condenser) on my studio monitors, you would have no trouble telling them apart, even though both microphones were "professional." Hearing the difference in a fully-mixed recording on your home system is another matter, but I certainly wouldn't assume that your partner couldn't do it. (My wife likes to tell the story of when she was sitting in the studio with me and a collaborator, and we both jumped in our chairs and went "what was that?" as we were making a final dub. It was a dropout a few samples long that she couldn't hear at all.)

Other things are more subtle, but definitely audible in the right context when you know what to listen for; tubes vs. transistors falls into this category, but of course it isn't that simple, since you can't just swap one for the other without redesigning the rest of the circuit. The difference, essentially, is that tubes tend to distort more, but the distortion is less offensive.

Cables (above a reasonable quality threshold) don't seem to matter, but it's understandable that people would be susceptible to thinking they do, given the complexity and general air of mystery surrounding the subject of audio, and the ability of the bring to fool itself into hearing differences that don't exist--up to a point, anyway. The posted ad is well beyond that point.

Not even solid state electronics are immune -- some acquaintances of mine compared the parts in an old synthesizer to everything available from modern manufacturers in an effort to build a replica synth with the same response characteristics as the original.

When I've heard MIT-educated audiophiles preaching the gospel of gold connectors (and an MIT education does many things but it doesn't necessarily disabuse you of all your foolish ideas), the justification they gave was that current loops in the connectors were setting up some kind of filtering, which was minimized with the use of gold. Frankly this sounds plausible the way so much pseudoscience sounds plausible, but I'm not enough of an analog EE person to be 100% sure they're wrong.

And if you want weird resonance and filtering behavior, analog EE is full of it (and all EE is analog EE, when you get down to it). The professor that taught the class which had my housemate repairing a tube radio could tell you stories for hours with all of the weirdness he'd encountered. The early radio pioneers were an impressive bunch, and they did a lot of things they maybe didn't understand, even though those things worked. (Early versions of the "magic-more magic" switch story.) The physical world is a messy place, and our abstractions can only take the edge off that, not actually tame it.

A $6800 cable isn't going to take the edge off much messiness, though, except maybe a messy wallet with too much money in it.

Joel Spolsky at Fog Creek Software says he trains his support people to ask the customer to unplug the cables, blow the dust out of the connectors, and plug them back in.

Unironically.

I really loved this line, which is deeply true and very quotable: The physical world is a messy place, and our abstractions can only take the edge off that, not actually tame it.

And this whole audiophile discussion is making me think of perhaps my favorite fluorosphere quote, from Bruce Cohen: Any sufficiently unreliable technology is indistinguishable from superstition.

He obtained such a record, put it on the turntable and listened very carefully; there, just at the edge of hearing, was a faint hiss.

He hanged himself.

Wonderful. I was hoping to listen to Bach's "St Matthew Passion". You might need some backing singers.

All the highest notes, neither sharp nor flat:
The ear can't hear as high as that,
Still I ought to please any passing bat
With my High Fidelity.

And the wireless set can look so cool.

From the same sources:

"He lives underground with a lamp in his hat
And he sings far too loud, far too often, and FLAT"

Lost in sounds that I was hearing, long I stood there, wondering, fearing,
As the Morlock with big earplugs tried to make me understand.
His hands fluttered, vainly signing, but I knew not his designing,
As myself I caught the whispers coming from some ancient land.
Whispers...whispers...oh, the whispers! And the things that they command
Through eight feet of cable strand!

It is gone; I hear no longer; for the Morlock proved the stronger
As his claws destroyed my eardrums while he grinned his rictus grin.
Yet my hands still vainly flutter for cantatas and sonatas,
Reaching, clawing for the cables, the black sounds that ring within -
Black - as my soul's nights begin!

http://www.amazon.com/review/R273H6FER3R5L3/ref=cm_cr_dp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B000I1X6PM&nodeID=172282&tag=&linkCode=

That happened to a character in 'Noir', by K. W. Jeter. However, it wasn't done to a death row criminal, but a copyright violator.

"Vodka-martini."
"Shaken or stirred?"
"Do I look like I give a damn?"
- from 2006's Casino Royale

Years ago I was painting a house, and witnessed this next door.

A guy was in the middle of the backyard with the grill, with the rest of the party on the deck.

From the deck: "Honey, could you turn the grill around? The smoke is getting in our eyes."

Also, I think it is extremely cool that this thread contains filk (or is it fan poetry?) of "We Live Underground, We Speak With Our Hands." This may be a record.

I am also reminded that for years I couldn't recognize Evil Rob on the phone because telephones strip certain frequencies out of the transmission, and his voice apparently is very much defined in those ranges.

But that's substandard setups. Right now we're listening to our $250 system with the bulk speaker wire you get from the hardware store... and it's lovely, really it is. If I want top-quality music, I'm going to see it live.

Sandy B. #76: Evil Rob says it's not punk, it's progressive. Possibly progressive metal. "We wear the earplugs all our lives" is a line that demands an epic.

It was the music born in Eden, played
On dulcimers of choice chalcedony,
Poured out in flowing streams of gold for me
By many an Abyssinian maid.
With porphyry and pearl it was inlaid
And Grecian goldsmiths fashioned jewellery
To signal its perfected harmony,
Not to adorn; for it was perfect made.

I heard, and knew I'd never hear again
A distant bell but think it dull; that I'll
Perceive the wind's soft whisper in the grain
And hear in it the scraping of a file.
Despaired, looked up, and overhead, without
A fuss, (of course!) the stars were going out.

"Why do you remember that?" "Because it was funny."

Line four should read:

"By many a queenly Abyssinian maid"

Sorry.

This is nitpickery: that was a wonderful sonnet.

Oh, I get it. It's the tragic sequel to 2112.

B. Durbin, #121: Actually, I have no trouble believing that, because Rod Stewart and Kim Carnes sound very much alike in the first place. I've mistaken her for him more than once; it doesn't surprise me that you might have mistaken him for her.

David G, #123: I can't make it scan right the way you suggest; it messes with the emphases. But my musician's mind is perfectly happy to compress two syllables into one foot, and read it as "by MAny a QUEENly ABySINnian MAID".

Hee! Yes, please. I'd like this, if you'd be so kind.

The wailing. The keening. They cut us like knives.
The screams of our children, our husbands, our wives.
There was no recourse: for us to survive
We must wear the earplugs for all of our lives.

The death of our red sun deprived us of light.
By sound it was sundered, plunging us into night.
We are doomed to remember but cannot put things right:
The cables we wrought are too laden with spite.

We live underground. We speak with our hands.
Forever we stay here beneath shifting sands.
With treacle and sugar and honey so grand.
We live underground. We speak with our hands.

There is something wonderful about this idea,especially when the BBC have to play it on the chart show...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPsdjlPVaJU

No fair, Erik; that's been bouncing around in my head since I read "The Frogs" at 18 back when I had a ham radio license. Now it will never go away, and it's all your fault!

I'm surprised they let you have it in this room, anyway; the acoustics [pronounced a-cow-sticks] are all wrong. If you raise the ceiling four feet, put the fireplace on that wall to that wall, you still aren't going to get any stereophonic effect if you sit in the bottom of that cupboard.

Pendrift 128: also loud applause. Shades of Edward Lear?

Somewhere there is a lovely article where someone's cat chewed on one of those horrible audiophile power cords and they found that their $300 power cable was ordinary 14 gua. wire fed through a piece of garden hose to bulk it up.

http://gizmodo.com/371536/300-audiophile-grade-power-cable-is-really-worth-15

(Thank you, Google. Thoogle.)

It is a matter of record that at one point John Cage considered offering to license 4' 33" to the Muzak corporation. I do not know whether he ever actually made the attempt, nor if so what Muzak's reaction was.

Not necessarily: part of the complexity of that piece derives from the ambient soundscape in which it is performed. A performance at the Korean DMZ during a WW3 artillery barrage would compress differently than a performance in a sports stadium full of final-stand refugees during a zombie apocalypse, for example.

I was a performer of Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for 12 radios back in college, by the way. It was fun and interesting.

My Best Cat of All, Melisande Anastasia, was a Queenly Abyssinian maid who came into a home of two warring adult cats as a kitten and Made Peace by her force of presence and an occasional smack down once she got big enough.

She basically told them that was Not Catlike Behavior and I WILL NOT TOLERATE IT. And I'm the QUEEN, what do you want to make of it?

http://www.amazon.com/Wattgate-Audio-Grade-Duplex-Socket/dp/B000930W4M/ref=pd_sbs_gro_19

because if you've just spent $6,800 on your speaker cables, you wouldn't want to plug your stereo into just an ordinary power outlet - you need one which is screwed into the wall with gold-plated oxygen-free copper tabs!

"Upon arriving home from work, I found the package containing the outlets to be hovering a few inches off of the porch. Nervous at first, I remembered from previous reviews that this was normal behavior for these outlets. Unlike the other reviews though, my package seemed to be covered in a dark red substance. I found this was because the package had dismembered my delivery driver, and had stored his (her?) remains underneath our glider rocker. Nervously, I brought the package into my house. Thank God my wife and kids weren't home at the time.

When I tore the package open, the outlets demanded a sacrifice before bestowing their audio goodness upon my household. Reluctantly, I offered them our dog Patches. They instantly devoured the dogs flesh and soul. It was horrific to say the least, but unbeknownst to them, Patches was old and cancer-riddled anyways, so it was a win-win.

After the sacrifice was completed, the outlets went to work, not only installing themselves into our brick wall, but also making blood begin to flow up our walls. They said that this improved the voltage, but I still have my doubts."

SOUNDAMAX HiFi-3000X Series Generators are handbuilt by elves to minimize oblique refraction of the cable matrix's quantum quantum handwave, allowing you to luxuriate in the polyphonic bliss of maximal harmonic intensity--all for only $4,499. When your audiophile friends/competitors see the SOUNDAMAX generator purring* in the middle of your living room, they'll literally explode in a cloud of jealous rage, and your other friends will burst out with laughter--the laughter of awe.

SOUNDAMAX is especially excited to announce the release of the HiFi-3082SP, our first coal-powered model! Now you can finally hear those great blues masters the way they were meant to be heard--over the sound of hacking coughs. Log on to soundamaxhifi.com and order today!

* This is perfectly normal. SOUNDAMAX generators produce a slight growl as a part of their normal function of providing you with utterly perfect, untrammeled audio ear-gasms."

And for only $199.98 extra we'll include the SOUNDAMAX MO-1300 Mop and Bucket combination, to help clean up.

All: Next time you need a unicorn chaser, just look at this picture.

(Fuller, but still-sweet explanations from Neil and Amanda.)

*some record (phonograph) player cartridges give pretty darn weak signals. This is probably the origin of the interconnect mystique.