4 ms·

> Combine that with human status seeking and the placebo effect and you get $2500 audiophile ethernet switches. There is a very clear line separating expensive

by piaste 5y ago

> Combine that with human status seeking and the placebo effect and you get $2500 audiophile ethernet switches. There is a very clear line separating expensive audiophile equipment that might have some hard-to-measure non-placebo benefits, and expensive audiophile equipment that cannot possibly do anything. That line is the digital-analogic conversion. Any piece of equipment operating purely on digital information is either performing very straightforward redundancy checks and error correction, or it's snake oil. Tertium non datur.

rectang 5y ago
For people who don't fully understand or don't trust the rational explanation, it's easy for the placebo effect to create perceptions of differences where no differences whatsoever exist in reality. So in terms of marketing snake oil to suckers, I disagree that a bright line exists between small-but-measurable and not-measurable. The human tendency towards irrationality is very strong, easily capable of swamping small differences. I'll also say that it's not so much the hard-to-measure effects where you need to spend your time when pursuing accurate reproduction. Speakers have much poorer fidelity than anything else in the reproduction chain, and room acoustics matter a great deal (especially having a large enough room with high enough ceilings, to increase the ratio of direct sound coming from the speaker vs. reflected sound). The contributions of these factors are not small but they are are hard to understand, assess, and apply in practice.
AstralStorm 5y ago
Well, there is a pyramid of sound quality effects: Sound transducer (and room if applicable), ampliifer (incl. its power conditioning sometimes), DAC or source. The standard HiFi stance is that source should have no effect on DAC and vice versa, but some weird or old hardware does not do it right. Likewise DAC and amplifier shouldn't affect each other. Amplifier and transducer is a bit more complex due to analog electronics involved. Of course the source can be garbage too (e.g. bad resampling or compression), but reasonable sources are all the same if digital. Except when we're talking vinyl or something, where there's another transducer and amplifier involved.

by piaste 5y ago

rectang 5y ago

For people who don't fully understand or don't trust the rational explanation, it's easy for the placebo effect to create perceptions of differences where no differences whatsoever exist in reality. So in terms of marketing snake oil to suckers, I disagree that a bright line exists between small-but-measurable and not-measurable. The human tendency towards irrationality is very strong, easily capable of swamping small differences. I'll also say that it's not so much the hard-to-measure effects where you need to spend your time when pursuing accurate reproduction. Speakers have much poorer fidelity than anything else in the reproduction chain, and room acoustics matter a great deal (especially having a large enough room with high enough ceilings, to increase the ratio of direct sound coming from the speaker vs. reflected sound). The contributions of these factors are not small but they are are hard to understand, assess, and apply in practice.

AstralStorm 5y ago

Well, there is a pyramid of sound quality effects: Sound transducer (and room if applicable), ampliifer (incl. its power conditioning sometimes), DAC or source. The standard HiFi stance is that source should have no effect on DAC and vice versa, but some weird or old hardware does not do it right. Likewise DAC and amplifier shouldn't affect each other. Amplifier and transducer is a bit more complex due to analog electronics involved. Of course the source can be garbage too (e.g. bad resampling or compression), but reasonable sources are all the same if digital. Except when we're talking vinyl or something, where there's another transducer and amplifier involved.