5 ms·

>This is the history of a successful charlatan. Agreed. Its tough though... I know of a couple times in my life I've thought something was OK until I saw some

>This is the history of a successful charlatan. Agreed. Its tough though... I know of a couple times in my life I've thought something was OK until I saw something else. Examples, Glass. Binoculars, camera lenses, rifle scopes, telescopes. Glass differences are very real. You might be A-OK with some Bushnell Binos, but USE Swarovski or Vortex Razor or something lower-highend and you'll get it. Now, I didn't write LOOK THROUGH, I wrote USE. This has an obvious point of diminishing returns. I would never buy higher-highend glass. Another example is something like TV black levels. If you don't notice black levels - good for you! Don't look for it. Because once you have a dark room and notice it, you'll see it forever. I notice soap opera effect, black levels, local/regional dimming, burn in, and it all removes me from the material. Again, Sucks. I wouldn't buy a higher-highend TV, but I pretty much can't get by with low end anymore. So... I KIND OF WANT to believe there is a serious quality range with audio gear, but I guess the difference is in glass or TV black levels, I can snap a picture and prove a difference. Audio is only ever perception. I can't prove a wave on an oscilloscope is more pleasing than another exactly within reason. That said.... You're right. Sterophiles and Audiophiles seem to be people with too many dollars and not enough cents/sense, and lots of people taking advantage of that. But maybe I just haven't used the right gear yet.

janekm 7y ago
You can measure all the differences in TV picture you described (and you didn't even mention colour gamut & dynamic range). You can measure the differences in optical glass. You can't measure the difference between a $10/m speaker cable and $10000/m speaker cable (usually... some of the expensive speaker cable is so crazy it may mess up the sound), or an amplifier sitting on a $5000 stand. And $1000 power cables, plugging into your usual wall outlet...
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  We can measure the difference in cables though! I can put them through a scope or analyzer and I can even show you real hard differences between them. What we can't do is prove that makes a difference to your ear vs mine and that's the real problem. So there are two difference classes of scam here. The one where it's true there is a difference in this $10 and $10000 cable, but they're effective identical. And the scam where this is no measurable or even logical difference at all. It's the former scam that I think allows the "audiophile" industry to thrive.
  - janekm 7y ago
    At audio frequencies (and well beyond), you won't be able to measure any meaningful differences: https://www.lifewire.com/speaker-cables-make-a-difference-3134902 https://www.lifewire.com/speaker-cables-make-a-difference-31... And the absurdity becomes much more obvious when contrasting with the differences in speakers and speaker crossovers...
    - beat 7y ago
      That depends on impedance behaviors between components, too. As a guitarist, I did guitar cable listening tests. With passive guitar pickups (high impedance, low output devices), different cables have easily audible fingerprints. With active pickups, there's no difference at all. The difference between cables is no longer enough to audibly affect the signal. And within this realm, more expensive doesn't always mean better. I've had cheap cables sound better than expensive cables.
      - janekm 7y ago
        That's a point, I was assuming low impedance output stages as would be standard for any ordinary hifi equipment these days (but not necessarily for the really expensive stuff of course...). Some of the expensive cables are over-dimensioned or crazily constructed leading to excess capacitance and/or impedance which would lead to terrible performance with a high impedance driver.
        beat 7y ago
        Impedance is a difficult and complex thing (which is why failure mode #1 for dudes on the internet being all "objective" and "scientific" is failing to grok the difference between impedance and resistance). So how an output stage is constructed (or an input stage, for that matter) has a lot to do with its behavior in the face of 10 octaves of frequency range and 50+ decibels of real-world dynamics. Is it transformer-coupled? (Rare in hi-fi, common in pro audio) Capacitor coupled? Direct coupled? Differential? All of these have different and frequency-dependent capacitative, inductive, and resistive behaviors. Put in those terms, it's kind of a no-brainer that cables would matter. But in "objective" internet-land, it's all straight wire with gain, perfect flat resistance. Which is fine on paper...
- malandrew 7y ago
  I used to live on the Avenida Paulista in São Paulo, Brazil and one of the interesting quirks about that location is the number of high power TV and Radio antennas in the immediate vicinity. At the time I had a hi-fi system that had previously sounded great, but in this particular location was impacted by the high electromagnetic interference in the area. Most of the noise got in between the RCA cables between the pre-amp and the power amps. I spent the better part of a year building cables and trying out different designs to isolate the noise, such as having a floating woven metal shield with a small capacitor at one end to ground the shield. I don't remember all the different things I tried, but they definitely had varying levels of material impact. That said, with RCA cables I never got the noise completely out of the system and eventually switched everything out for something with balanced XLR connectors, which eliminated the problem. tl:dr; expensive cables don't really matter. cable design does to a point, but if you really want great sound without interference, you need to switch to a system with a balanced design. Unfortunately, this requires changing all components, not just the cables. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_audio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_audio
- fwip 7y ago
  A microphone is just a camera for sound.
ip26 7y ago
If swaros are low-highend, what's high-highend?
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  The bring up a different discussion about highend and impractical highend. Swaros cheaper models are practical. They're well built, they're expesnive but not outrageous. They're REAL products. There are high-highend products that AREN'T REAL. Things that come out of shops that sell 100 all year, things that can't be used like normal products. Etc. In this case, Miyauchi Binos or something like that. It's a bad descriptiong I made because you have have practical highend and impractical in the same brand. Maybe a good test is if you can buy them at typical store vs only a specialty store. My local sporting goods store has Swarovski optics, but they top out at $2,000 because nothing higher would sell - after that you are in the point of diminishing returns anyhow.
  - ip26 7y ago
    Thank you, that was a helpful answer.
mikeash 7y ago
Audio is subjective but differences in quality can still be objectively measured. You play the same music through different equipment and have the listener rate them without knowing what they are. Consistent improvements will show up across different listeners, and differences that come down to personal taste will still show up across different sessions with the same listener. The most telling thing about the audiophile world is how allergic they are to anything that resembles this sort of blind testing.
- PretzelFisch 7y ago
  Right but, people often match volume/level when testing so things sound different, because +3db tends to sound better to the human ear.
- beat 7y ago
  Some things are very hard to measure objectively, though, despite being real. (Anything subject to chaos theory, for sure.) I mix records. I use two different sets of monitors for mixing - a pair of Tannoy System 12 DMT monitors (equivalent would cost about $4000; they were very popular in hip-hop studios back in the '90s), and a more modern pair of Focal Alpha 50 powered monitors (about $800/pair new). Both monitors are quality professional gear. In terms of frequency response, they're both quite flat, although the big Tannoys have more bass extension. They don't sound anything alike. I find the Focals much more useful and predictable for the critical listening of mixing. They're also more tiring to listen to for extended periods. They're brutal, especially for transients and the very leading edge of sounds. I don't trust mixing on the Tannoys. But if I want to listen to music, rather than mix, I'll take the Tannoys any day. They treat transients more gently, and make for a much more pleasant, euphonic experience. Internet audiophile wannabes will then tell me I'm hearing distortion. Which is nonsense. Two speakers say the same thing in different ways, and the differences are very, very difficult to measure - but they are nonetheless quite real and plainly audible.
  - opencl 7y ago
    What you're talking about absolutely is measurable. There has been tons and tons of research into various aspects of audio reproduction and how to measure different things and to what degree they're audible. Techniques for measuring transient response have been around since the 1940s. Unfortunately most places writing reviews of audio equipment don't bother to go much beyond frequency response and distortion. Audioxpress ran a really nice 2 part article a decade ago describing a bunch of different types of speaker measurements and summarizing some research into how audible each aspect is. https://www.audioxpress.com/article/testing-loudspeakers-which-measurements-matter-part-2 https://www.audioxpress.com/article/testing-loudspeakers-whi... https://www.audioxpress.com/article/testing-loudspeakers-which-measurements-matter-part-1 https://www.audioxpress.com/article/testing-loudspeakers-whi...
criddell 7y ago
Being able to enjoy something even though you know something better is out there is something that I've managed to achieve in many areas of my life. For example, I love a great beer. I'll go out of my way to try something new. But when I'm sitting in the sun watching baseball with my wife, I'll get a Budweiser with my hot dog and it will be glorious. There was a time in my life where I would complain about the lack of craft beers at the ballpark. I was an idiot and enjoyed life less.
smolder 7y ago
There is certainly a range of quality in audio gear, but it's a complicated thing. Some things that are reasonably easy to notice with a stereo system: 1) Dynamic range: how loud does it get, how quiet does it get? Does it sound good when its loud? does it sound good when it's soft? Small/inefficient speakers will struggle at high volumes, resulting in high distortion. That's measurable and often not hard to hear. Big speakers with the powerful amps needed to drive them which sound good at high volume often suffer from audible hiss at lower volume, short distance listening, due to inadequate power supply noise rejection relative to the gain. Big speakers also will generally have further-spaced drivers, and that bigger geometry can have a noticeable effect on spacial coherency, especially at short distances. (Ideally you want your speakers to be a point source, not different frequencies coming from different angles) 2) Flatness in frequency response: this is easy to measure with equipment, but also quite easy to hear by playing a sine wave that slowly sweeps the audible range. If the amplitude of the wave in the signal is consistent, there shouldn't be a ton of variation in volume of the reproduction. It can be heavily effected by the room they're in, usually in the bass & mid-bass range where the wavelengths are similar to room dimensions, but some speakers will be much more consistent than others across the rest. 3) Dispersion characteristics: when you move your ears around relative to the speakers, does the frequency response change dramatically? Some speakers don't sound very good in the high frequencies once your ears go a few degrees off axis from the source. This stuff gets a lot more obvious when doing A/B comparisons. You're right that you can't really tell how good a system is just by listening to a random song and judging it's sound quality like you can with video on a TV, and I think that stems from an inherent difference between hearing and vision. The sound you hear is ALWAYS heavily effected by the space its in, reflections and sympathetic vibrations, the angle you hear it from, and so on. Source material varies wildly in quality and recording/mastering technique. It's much harder to perceive "wrongness" in audio because it's so varied to begin with.
- johnvanommen 7y ago
  Power response is a really fascinating metric, and people don't bring it up very often. The interesting thing about power response is that it's one of those things that you can't fix with an EQ. IE, if I have a speaker that's too "hot" or it's too rolled off, I can address that via EQ. But if your power response is bad, there is very little you can do about it. It IS possible to improve the power response by tweaking the crossover, but that is one of those things that separates the good engineers from the great ones: nearly anyone can make a speaker that measures flat on axis. The hard part is getting it to behave on axis AND off. If you look at brands like KEF and Genelec, they've paid a lot of attention to this.
lb1lf 7y ago
>Its tough though... I know of a couple times in my life I've thought something was OK until I saw something else. Examples, Glass. Binoculars, camera lenses, rifle scopes, telescopes. Glass differences are very real. -Aye. I had a rather absurd discussion with a colleague here the other day; he keeps a pair of el cheapo grande binoculars in his office, some 10x50 monsters which he proudly announced cost less than $100. The colour cast was so bad that even I (being tritanope) immediately spotted it and found it annoying. Colour fringing like you wouldn't believe. A tiny, reasonably sharp spot in the centre of one pupil, the other was nowhere near acceptable. Light falloff and softening was quite aggressive as you approached the edges. I then brought out my Zeiss Victory 8x32s, as they happened to be in my office that day after a field trip. His first impression? 'The colours are off, and it looks unnaturally sharp.' Sigh. Never mind that one could read the (comparably) small print on a sign across the sound on the 8x Zeiss whereas even the headline was a smudge on the 10x cheapos. At the risk of sounding elitist, I think that for some people, low cost makes for excellent quality in the same way as high cost equates same for others.
- colanderman 7y ago
  Apparently, at least a decade ago, a lot of people prefer the sound of poorly-encoded MP3s: http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/the-sizzling-sound-of-music.html http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/the-sizzling-sound-of-music... There's no accounting for taste.

janekm 7y ago

You can measure all the differences in TV picture you described (and you didn't even mention colour gamut & dynamic range). You can measure the differences in optical glass. You can't measure the difference between a $10/m speaker cable and $10000/m speaker cable (usually... some of the expensive speaker cable is so crazy it may mess up the sound), or an amplifier sitting on a $5000 stand. And $1000 power cables, plugging into your usual wall outlet...

SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
We can measure the difference in cables though! I can put them through a scope or analyzer and I can even show you real hard differences between them. What we can't do is prove that makes a difference to your ear vs mine and that's the real problem. So there are two difference classes of scam here. The one where it's true there is a difference in this $10 and $10000 cable, but they're effective identical. And the scam where this is no measurable or even logical difference at all. It's the former scam that I think allows the "audiophile" industry to thrive.
- janekm 7y ago
  At audio frequencies (and well beyond), you won't be able to measure any meaningful differences: https://www.lifewire.com/speaker-cables-make-a-difference-3134902 https://www.lifewire.com/speaker-cables-make-a-difference-31... And the absurdity becomes much more obvious when contrasting with the differences in speakers and speaker crossovers...
  - beat 7y ago
    That depends on impedance behaviors between components, too. As a guitarist, I did guitar cable listening tests. With passive guitar pickups (high impedance, low output devices), different cables have easily audible fingerprints. With active pickups, there's no difference at all. The difference between cables is no longer enough to audibly affect the signal. And within this realm, more expensive doesn't always mean better. I've had cheap cables sound better than expensive cables.
    - janekm 7y ago
      That's a point, I was assuming low impedance output stages as would be standard for any ordinary hifi equipment these days (but not necessarily for the really expensive stuff of course...). Some of the expensive cables are over-dimensioned or crazily constructed leading to excess capacitance and/or impedance which would lead to terrible performance with a high impedance driver.
      - beat 7y ago
        Impedance is a difficult and complex thing (which is why failure mode #1 for dudes on the internet being all "objective" and "scientific" is failing to grok the difference between impedance and resistance). So how an output stage is constructed (or an input stage, for that matter) has a lot to do with its behavior in the face of 10 octaves of frequency range and 50+ decibels of real-world dynamics. Is it transformer-coupled? (Rare in hi-fi, common in pro audio) Capacitor coupled? Direct coupled? Differential? All of these have different and frequency-dependent capacitative, inductive, and resistive behaviors. Put in those terms, it's kind of a no-brainer that cables would matter. But in "objective" internet-land, it's all straight wire with gain, perfect flat resistance. Which is fine on paper...
malandrew 7y ago
I used to live on the Avenida Paulista in São Paulo, Brazil and one of the interesting quirks about that location is the number of high power TV and Radio antennas in the immediate vicinity. At the time I had a hi-fi system that had previously sounded great, but in this particular location was impacted by the high electromagnetic interference in the area. Most of the noise got in between the RCA cables between the pre-amp and the power amps. I spent the better part of a year building cables and trying out different designs to isolate the noise, such as having a floating woven metal shield with a small capacitor at one end to ground the shield. I don't remember all the different things I tried, but they definitely had varying levels of material impact. That said, with RCA cables I never got the noise completely out of the system and eventually switched everything out for something with balanced XLR connectors, which eliminated the problem. tl:dr; expensive cables don't really matter. cable design does to a point, but if you really want great sound without interference, you need to switch to a system with a balanced design. Unfortunately, this requires changing all components, not just the cables. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_audio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_audio
fwip 7y ago
A microphone is just a camera for sound.

ip26 7y ago

If swaros are low-highend, what's high-highend?

SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
The bring up a different discussion about highend and impractical highend. Swaros cheaper models are practical. They're well built, they're expesnive but not outrageous. They're REAL products. There are high-highend products that AREN'T REAL. Things that come out of shops that sell 100 all year, things that can't be used like normal products. Etc. In this case, Miyauchi Binos or something like that. It's a bad descriptiong I made because you have have practical highend and impractical in the same brand. Maybe a good test is if you can buy them at typical store vs only a specialty store. My local sporting goods store has Swarovski optics, but they top out at $2,000 because nothing higher would sell - after that you are in the point of diminishing returns anyhow.
- ip26 7y ago
  Thank you, that was a helpful answer.

mikeash 7y ago

Audio is subjective but differences in quality can still be objectively measured. You play the same music through different equipment and have the listener rate them without knowing what they are. Consistent improvements will show up across different listeners, and differences that come down to personal taste will still show up across different sessions with the same listener. The most telling thing about the audiophile world is how allergic they are to anything that resembles this sort of blind testing.

PretzelFisch 7y ago
Right but, people often match volume/level when testing so things sound different, because +3db tends to sound better to the human ear.
beat 7y ago
Some things are very hard to measure objectively, though, despite being real. (Anything subject to chaos theory, for sure.) I mix records. I use two different sets of monitors for mixing - a pair of Tannoy System 12 DMT monitors (equivalent would cost about $4000; they were very popular in hip-hop studios back in the '90s), and a more modern pair of Focal Alpha 50 powered monitors (about $800/pair new). Both monitors are quality professional gear. In terms of frequency response, they're both quite flat, although the big Tannoys have more bass extension. They don't sound anything alike. I find the Focals much more useful and predictable for the critical listening of mixing. They're also more tiring to listen to for extended periods. They're brutal, especially for transients and the very leading edge of sounds. I don't trust mixing on the Tannoys. But if I want to listen to music, rather than mix, I'll take the Tannoys any day. They treat transients more gently, and make for a much more pleasant, euphonic experience. Internet audiophile wannabes will then tell me I'm hearing distortion. Which is nonsense. Two speakers say the same thing in different ways, and the differences are very, very difficult to measure - but they are nonetheless quite real and plainly audible.
- opencl 7y ago
  What you're talking about absolutely is measurable. There has been tons and tons of research into various aspects of audio reproduction and how to measure different things and to what degree they're audible. Techniques for measuring transient response have been around since the 1940s. Unfortunately most places writing reviews of audio equipment don't bother to go much beyond frequency response and distortion. Audioxpress ran a really nice 2 part article a decade ago describing a bunch of different types of speaker measurements and summarizing some research into how audible each aspect is. https://www.audioxpress.com/article/testing-loudspeakers-which-measurements-matter-part-2 https://www.audioxpress.com/article/testing-loudspeakers-whi... https://www.audioxpress.com/article/testing-loudspeakers-which-measurements-matter-part-1 https://www.audioxpress.com/article/testing-loudspeakers-whi...

criddell 7y ago

Being able to enjoy something even though you know something better is out there is something that I've managed to achieve in many areas of my life. For example, I love a great beer. I'll go out of my way to try something new. But when I'm sitting in the sun watching baseball with my wife, I'll get a Budweiser with my hot dog and it will be glorious. There was a time in my life where I would complain about the lack of craft beers at the ballpark. I was an idiot and enjoyed life less.

smolder 7y ago

There is certainly a range of quality in audio gear, but it's a complicated thing. Some things that are reasonably easy to notice with a stereo system: 1) Dynamic range: how loud does it get, how quiet does it get? Does it sound good when its loud? does it sound good when it's soft? Small/inefficient speakers will struggle at high volumes, resulting in high distortion. That's measurable and often not hard to hear. Big speakers with the powerful amps needed to drive them which sound good at high volume often suffer from audible hiss at lower volume, short distance listening, due to inadequate power supply noise rejection relative to the gain. Big speakers also will generally have further-spaced drivers, and that bigger geometry can have a noticeable effect on spacial coherency, especially at short distances. (Ideally you want your speakers to be a point source, not different frequencies coming from different angles) 2) Flatness in frequency response: this is easy to measure with equipment, but also quite easy to hear by playing a sine wave that slowly sweeps the audible range. If the amplitude of the wave in the signal is consistent, there shouldn't be a ton of variation in volume of the reproduction. It can be heavily effected by the room they're in, usually in the bass & mid-bass range where the wavelengths are similar to room dimensions, but some speakers will be much more consistent than others across the rest. 3) Dispersion characteristics: when you move your ears around relative to the speakers, does the frequency response change dramatically? Some speakers don't sound very good in the high frequencies once your ears go a few degrees off axis from the source. This stuff gets a lot more obvious when doing A/B comparisons. You're right that you can't really tell how good a system is just by listening to a random song and judging it's sound quality like you can with video on a TV, and I think that stems from an inherent difference between hearing and vision. The sound you hear is ALWAYS heavily effected by the space its in, reflections and sympathetic vibrations, the angle you hear it from, and so on. Source material varies wildly in quality and recording/mastering technique. It's much harder to perceive "wrongness" in audio because it's so varied to begin with.

johnvanommen 7y ago
Power response is a really fascinating metric, and people don't bring it up very often. The interesting thing about power response is that it's one of those things that you can't fix with an EQ. IE, if I have a speaker that's too "hot" or it's too rolled off, I can address that via EQ. But if your power response is bad, there is very little you can do about it. It IS possible to improve the power response by tweaking the crossover, but that is one of those things that separates the good engineers from the great ones: nearly anyone can make a speaker that measures flat on axis. The hard part is getting it to behave on axis AND off. If you look at brands like KEF and Genelec, they've paid a lot of attention to this.

lb1lf 7y ago

>Its tough though... I know of a couple times in my life I've thought something was OK until I saw something else. Examples, Glass. Binoculars, camera lenses, rifle scopes, telescopes. Glass differences are very real. -Aye. I had a rather absurd discussion with a colleague here the other day; he keeps a pair of el cheapo grande binoculars in his office, some 10x50 monsters which he proudly announced cost less than $100. The colour cast was so bad that even I (being tritanope) immediately spotted it and found it annoying. Colour fringing like you wouldn't believe. A tiny, reasonably sharp spot in the centre of one pupil, the other was nowhere near acceptable. Light falloff and softening was quite aggressive as you approached the edges. I then brought out my Zeiss Victory 8x32s, as they happened to be in my office that day after a field trip. His first impression? 'The colours are off, and it looks unnaturally sharp.' Sigh. Never mind that one could read the (comparably) small print on a sign across the sound on the 8x Zeiss whereas even the headline was a smudge on the 10x cheapos. At the risk of sounding elitist, I think that for some people, low cost makes for excellent quality in the same way as high cost equates same for others.

colanderman 7y ago
Apparently, at least a decade ago, a lot of people prefer the sound of poorly-encoded MP3s: http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/the-sizzling-sound-of-music.html http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/the-sizzling-sound-of-music... There's no accounting for taste.