Over the weekend I visited a place called Water 2 Wine, where you can make your own wine. They help you make your wine, handle the fermentation for you, and even assist in designing custom labels. It’s cheaper than buying the wine in a liquor store, but much more expensive than making it yourself in your own home. If you have the equipment, that is. In any case, you can make good wine for about half the price you’d pay for an equivalent bottle in the store.
One of the options they give is to “condition” your wine with a magnet. The idea is that you set your wine bottle on this magnetic coaster thing, put the special cork in it, and let it set for 30 minutes. The magnet supposedly “ages” the wine two years in half an hour. The people at the store will tell you that it works great.
After leaving Water 2 Wine, I went to the homebrew store to get ingredients for another batch of beer (a juniper rye that I brewed up last night). There I noticed that they were selling The Perfect Sommelier–one of those wine coaster things. I asked the guy at the store if it really worked, because it sounds like a bunch of bullshit to me. He assured me that it really works, and that he’d give me my money back if I tried it and didn’t agree.
There’s really no reason for me to try the silly thing. Plenty of reviews of this and other devices have convinced me that these magnetic “conditioners” are just scams. There is no scientific evidence to support the claims that these people make. And yet people fall for this crap all the time. It’s like “high quality” speaker cables or putting things under pyramids. It’s a bunch of crap couched in vague pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo designed to fool uninformed people into parting with their money. Don’t fall for it.
I occasionally amuse myself by reading the website for Ultra High Fidelity magazine, http://www.uhfmag.com/. My absolute favorite item there is for sale in their Audiophile Store, at the bottom of the Audio Cables page http://www.uhfmag.com/Cables.html. That is where they sell their DIGITAL cables.
There they tell us that their listening tests show the 1.5 meter digital cables sound better than the 1 meter digital cables.
My theory is that the zeros must get flattened when they go through the connection and the longer cable gives them more time to bounce back into shape.
(It is nice of them to have a cheaper ($120 Canadian) digital cable as an alternative to their more expensive ($360 Canadian) “very best” digital cable.)