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I never considered that, but I can totally see major discounts in pre-HD era equipment. Has there not been a lot of gains (like going from 420P to 4k) in the au

I never considered that, but I can totally see major discounts in pre-HD era equipment. Has there not been a lot of gains (like going from 420P to 4k) in the audio-side of things in that past 10 or 20 years? If not, can I use that same reasoning and buy some top shelf old speakers? I've always wanted to do it but I didn't want to be ripped off.

acdha 6y ago
Uncompressed digital audio hit the limits of human perception around the turn of the century. The big things affecting people’s perceived quality were bad compression, noise due to things like poor shielding on low-end computers, or using something like Bluetooth where bandwidth constraints forced heavy compression. If you get a decent DAC (which isn’t a ton of money - USB devices are quite mature) a 20-30 year old system is going to sound great. Newer ones might be smaller or use less power but sound reproduction has been mature for many decades.
- fggg444 6y ago
  not too sure what you mean by uncompressed because digital audio is always lossy by its very nature
  - fomine3 6y ago
    It's true due to sampling, but anyway nowadays all music source is digital so can't be a problem.
    - Doxin 6y ago
      Sampling only limits the highest possible frequency, it doesn't quantize over time like a lot of people expect it to. Unless frequencies above 22khz are somehow an integral part of your listening experience you can use 44khz and suffer no ill effects. Anyone talking about sampling and showing you a graph with stair steps is misleading. No DAC would be able to produce such a perfect stair step in the first place, let alone be tuned to do so on purpose.
  - acdha 6y ago
    All recordings have loss, nothing unique about digital in that regard. The point I was making was simply that once CD quality (16-bit, 44hz) became mainstream and only modestly more expensive hardware could get into 24-bit / 96khz range you were past the point where almost anyone – even trained “golden ears” listeners — could notice a difference from further improvements in that regard. Given real-world limits, the threshold was lower for most people. The reason I mentioned compression is because you’d find people who’d say digital recordings didn’t sound good but misattributed why: the problem wasn’t digital, it was either low-quality codec implementations, constricted bit-rates[1], or technical flaws like the MP3 format’s inability to precisely handle sharp attack sounds like cymbals. If you did an A/B test with those, yes, people would notice a difference but the same was true of uncompressed audio or compression using newer codecs. 1. e.g. pre-VoLTE cell phone audio sounded terrible on most carriers unless you edited your phone’s settings to increase the bitrate, because the carriers were trying to fit more customers onto each cell tower. A little more bandwidth and it sounded much closer to landline calls.
Arcanum-XIII 6y ago
There was no major change in the speaker itself for a long while - a top of the line speaker from the 80 is probably still good... if the material aged well. The elasticity of the membrane probably suffered more than anything else for example. That’s why modern speaker still cost a lot.
declnz 6y ago
My take on this: Some advances, but nothing that noticeable for large or medium-sized home speakers, compared to other advances. Related story: until not long ago I used some inherited 70s Kef HiFi speakers with a cheap modernish amp, and they sounded lovely, even against more modern equivalents (which I also had). A mid-70s TV, though...

acdha 6y ago

Uncompressed digital audio hit the limits of human perception around the turn of the century. The big things affecting people’s perceived quality were bad compression, noise due to things like poor shielding on low-end computers, or using something like Bluetooth where bandwidth constraints forced heavy compression. If you get a decent DAC (which isn’t a ton of money - USB devices are quite mature) a 20-30 year old system is going to sound great. Newer ones might be smaller or use less power but sound reproduction has been mature for many decades.

fggg444 6y ago
not too sure what you mean by uncompressed because digital audio is always lossy by its very nature
- fomine3 6y ago
  It's true due to sampling, but anyway nowadays all music source is digital so can't be a problem.
  - Doxin 6y ago
    Sampling only limits the highest possible frequency, it doesn't quantize over time like a lot of people expect it to. Unless frequencies above 22khz are somehow an integral part of your listening experience you can use 44khz and suffer no ill effects. Anyone talking about sampling and showing you a graph with stair steps is misleading. No DAC would be able to produce such a perfect stair step in the first place, let alone be tuned to do so on purpose.
- acdha 6y ago
  All recordings have loss, nothing unique about digital in that regard. The point I was making was simply that once CD quality (16-bit, 44hz) became mainstream and only modestly more expensive hardware could get into 24-bit / 96khz range you were past the point where almost anyone – even trained “golden ears” listeners — could notice a difference from further improvements in that regard. Given real-world limits, the threshold was lower for most people. The reason I mentioned compression is because you’d find people who’d say digital recordings didn’t sound good but misattributed why: the problem wasn’t digital, it was either low-quality codec implementations, constricted bit-rates[1], or technical flaws like the MP3 format’s inability to precisely handle sharp attack sounds like cymbals. If you did an A/B test with those, yes, people would notice a difference but the same was true of uncompressed audio or compression using newer codecs. 1. e.g. pre-VoLTE cell phone audio sounded terrible on most carriers unless you edited your phone’s settings to increase the bitrate, because the carriers were trying to fit more customers onto each cell tower. A little more bandwidth and it sounded much closer to landline calls.

Arcanum-XIII 6y ago

There was no major change in the speaker itself for a long while - a top of the line speaker from the 80 is probably still good... if the material aged well. The elasticity of the membrane probably suffered more than anything else for example. That’s why modern speaker still cost a lot.

declnz 6y ago

My take on this: Some advances, but nothing that noticeable for large or medium-sized home speakers, compared to other advances. Related story: until not long ago I used some inherited 70s Kef HiFi speakers with a cheap modernish amp, and they sounded lovely, even against more modern equivalents (which I also had). A mid-70s TV, though...