Let me just warn you right from the giddy‑up: I’m going to be throwing some weird-sounding vocabulary at you here. But the concepts are simple, and I promise it’ll all make sense in the end. At least I hope it will.
The first of those terms is “The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.” It’s also known as the frequency illusion, and if you’re thinking to yourself, “Aha! A new audio thing for me to understand,” you’d be wrong. We’re not talking about that sort of frequency.
What the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon refers to is the cognitive bias that kicks in when we learn about or experience something new, and suddenly we see it or hear about it seemingly everywhere. Back when I drove a white PT Cruiser, for example, my city seemed to be overrun with the things. I couldn’t leave the house without passing at least two on the road. Now that I’m driving a red Ford F‑150, all the white PT Cruisers seem to have been relegated to garages, and I’m seeing Lariats and XLTs all over the place. Usually finished in red, at that.
Now, I’m not arrogant enough to think that my influence is so strong as to make that many people in my hometown sell their old cars and buy what I’m driving. Of course not. This is simply a matter of selective attention on the one hand and confirmation bias on the other. And all of that is merely a setup for what I really want to talk about today.
To the surprise of absolutely no one, I have never been a pro-wrestling fan. I don’t watch sports at all, aside from endurance racing. (GT class, specifically. The prototypes just don’t do it for me.) And I certainly don’t have any interest in fake sports.
But given that my country—the country I love, the country I’m so desperately trying to save—has devolved into a full-blown Kargo Kult Kakistocracy, terms from professional wrestling have started to sneak into the common discourse, especially political commentary. And the one wrestling phrase that I cannot help seeing in every domain of life is “kayfabe.”
What the heck is kayfabe? I’ll get to the proper definition in a second. But I think we can actually cut way closer to the heart of what the term means across all domains if I share a recent anecdote from a trip to the YMCA. It was something like dawn-thirty in the morning, I’d just checked in at the front desk, and was making my way back to the indoor pool, when I passed a chalkboard sign that I’d seen every day for the past month. Except this time, it was flanked by two Y employees having an argument. One was a coach for the youth football program. He was poking the words on the chalkboard—“You bring the huddle; we’ll bring the hustle”—with a palpable look of disgust on his face.
“To a football player, this makes no sense! You don’t bring a huddle. You just huddle! And who’s bringing the hustle? Why isn’t it the people huddling? This is stupid!”
Another employee—a snarky, sassy troublemaker who works the front desk—fired right back at him: “Listen, man, slogans aren’t supposed to make sense; we’re supposed to pretend like they make sense.”
That. That right there is kayfabe in action.
But what does it actually mean? In the original sense of the term, as used in the pro-wrestling community, it’s effectively the fourth wall—the suspension of disbelief in the rivalries and storylines surrounding the World Wrestling Entertainment Corporation and its ilk.
It’s a weird sort of ouroboros, though, this kayfabe concept, because there’s an in-group and out-group aspect to it all. Those on the inside insist upon never, ever breaking kayfabe, lest they ruin the illusion for their audience. And the audience plays right along, pretending to be convinced by these stories and rivalries and such, lest they hurt the feelings of their heroes. Neither side wants to break kayfabe for the other. They all pretend to believe. And yet, almost none of them actually believe any of this is real.
At least, I don’t think they do. I hope they don’t. Again, as I said, I don’t watch real sports, much less fake ones.
The point, though, is that this concept keeps popping up in all manner of different domains, from advertising to community hubs to Dungeons & Dragons to the absolute dumpster fire that is currently consuming U.S. politics.
You probably already see where I’m going with this, right? As I’ve mentioned several times recently—both on the SoundStage! Audiophile Podcast and Audio Unleashed—I’m starting to see kayfabe everywhere I look in the audiophile community.
Here’s how I put it in the latter, during an episode in which my co-host Brent Butterworth and I were discussing what it even means to be an audiophile: “. . . to be a pro wrestling fan, you have to pretend to believe that the staged performances are authentic. It’s not that you have to believe it; you have to pretend to believe it. So, in a lot of ways, I don’t know if these audiophiles really believe this stuff is [high-fidelity], or if they pretend to believe it’s hi-fi to prove their cred as a member of the audiophile community. Is it all kayfabe? Or am I just reading too deep into it?”
I’m being genuine here, by the way. I’m asking questions, not “just asking questions,” if you get the distinction. Because it should go without saying that I cannot read anyone’s mind. I cannot know what my wife or daughter or father is thinking, much less someone on the internet with whom I tenuously share a hobby.
But I’ll say this: it just feels far kinder to me to believe that some of the outlandish claims of some segments of the audiophile community are kayfabe than to believe they actually believe it.
What’s more likely, after all: that Danny Richie of GR‑Research (a very smart dude, mind you) actually buys into the hoax of $400 power cords, or that he simply plays his part and pretends to?
Do you think the manufacturers of $4000 network switches truly believe their products deliver audible improvements to the signal chain? Of course they don’t. Anyone who believes that doesn’t understand enough about packetized data to design networking hardware.
But they pretend to believe it because, under capitalism, the number-one rule is that you have to turn a big old pile of money into a bigger pile of money (and an even bigger pile than that next quarter) at any cost and by any means necessary, no matter how exploitative and immoral.
But I’ve never quite been able to figure out why someone like Jim Austin—former senior editor of Science magazine, for goodness’ sake, and now editor of Stereophile—would say things like this in defense of $4000 audiophile network switches: “Years ago, I almost certainly would have been on the side of those who refused to listen on theoretical grounds. Since then, several things happened. As I got older and gained experience, I learned that I’m not as smart as I thought I was when I was younger. With this came a greater acceptance of uncertainty, a willingness to give up the certainty of scientific proof and accept things with less evidence than, say, a rigorous double-blind test.”
There are two likely explanations for that sentence. Either Austin has turned his back on every ounce of scientific training he ever had, or he’s pretending to believe this nonsense.
Honestly, the second potential explanation is far kinder, in my opinion, so that’s what I choose to believe.
But why? Why would Jim Austin, who has a for-real Ph.D. in physics, go along with this kayfabe? I mean, advertising revenue might be one possible explanation, although I’d like a lot more evidence before making that sort of accusation.
A far likelier explanation, as I see it, is that there just isn’t a ton of research and development left to be done in terms of electronics, especially when it comes to signal-to-noise. But we live in a culture that’s positively obsessed with this year’s thing making last year’s thing look obsolete so you’ll buy the new thing. When that cycle stops, industries collapse.
And let’s face it: the hi‑fi industry isn’t at the peak of popularity these days, is it? Our industry has to sell more and more things to fewer and fewer people. Maybe this kind of kayfabe boils down to a certain segment of our hobby playing along, pretending to believe, merely out of fear that if they don’t, the industry will implode for good.
That might also explain why the True Believers™—or, if I’m correct in this hypothesis, the men who pretend to be True Believers™—get so hostile with those of us who advocate for actual scientific testing of the sort that genuinely informs us about whether or not the effect of $4000 network switches is audible. It might explain why Danny calls anyone with an ounce of skepticism about his claims “flat-earthers.”
I’m reminded of an apocryphal story about a scientific study involving monkeys being locked in a room with a ladder leading to a bunch of bananas hanging from the ceiling. Monkeys being monkeys, one of them immediately starts to climb the ladder to get a banana, the story goes, at which time a researcher comes in and blasts all the other monkeys with a fire hose. Pretty soon, all of the soaking-wet monkeys naturally attack any other monkey that tries to climb the ladder.
Then, one by one, monkeys are replaced, and each new monkey that’s thrown into the room immediately goes for the bananas and also immediately gets its ass kicked. Eventually, none of the original monkeys remain in the room, and yet any new monkey that goes for a banana is in for a whomping.
Here’s the thing, though: that experiment was completely made up. And the original study on which it was based revealed wholly different behavior in the face of similar circumstances.
But I think there’s a reason that we humans tell the apocryphal story. It may not say anything legitimate about monkey behavior, but it says a lot about human behavior.
It also says something about audiophilia, in my opinion. I think this weird kayfabe—really intelligent people professing to believe preposterous nonsense out of a sense of in-group cohesion and attacking anyone who doesn’t play along—could almost be viewed as something of an extinction burst, another phrase that I’m encountering more and more here lately in the waning years of the former American Empire.
If that’s the case, I absolutely refuse to play along. Sorry. I am, in a sense, more of a true believer than the True Believers™, in that I think high-fidelity audio playback is far too important to let it devolve into tribalism and spooky woo-woo.
Because the fact of the matter is that while behaviors like kayfabe can and do strengthen in-groups, they’re a huge turn-off to a big swath of the uninitiated. Even if I were the type of person who enjoyed sports, pro wrestling would be a huge turn-off for me, despite the fact that I love theatrics, LARPing, and ridiculous over-the-top fun. This weird cultish insistence that we pretend to believe things—and the more ridiculous they are, the more insistently we must pretend to believe in them—is more than I can deal with.
How many young music fans feel the same about hi-fi? I mean, anecdotally, I’ve met a few, even if neither they nor I had been properly exposed to the concept of kayfabe at the time.
Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Jim Austin really does believe that science stopped working the instant he took a job in hi‑fi. Maybe Danny Richie really does believe that $400 power cables make an audible difference.
I hope not, though. Because that would be far sadder than the charade I’ve proposed above.
. . . Dennis Burger
dennisb@soundstagenetwork.com
