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The problem with this kind of hifi snake oil is that it makes it very difficult to tell what actually will improve your home hifi audio quality, if that's what

• jacquesm 5y ago
  The ground rule is that if you're over 30 it doesn't really matter: your ears have already dropped to the point that your stereo - no matter how bad - will handily outperform your ears. Best you can do at that point is get some good headphones and an EQ to level things out a bit.
  • ariendj 5y ago
    This is incorrect. Accurate reproduction of low frequency content is still very hard to do and you can hear low frequencies for as long as you live.
  • xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
    Isn't this the same problem? What're "good headphones"? Are they $100? $1000? What about an EQ? The consumer sound system industry is rampant with folks selling and worse, recommending, snake oil.
    • iso1210 5y ago
      Good headphones to me are ones which are comfy to wear over a long period
      • robonerd 5y ago
        Or headphones that last a long time, rather than falling apart after a few years.
        • iso1210 5y ago
          I think I've had my Bose 25s about 8 years, replaced the pads a couple of times but other than that they've worked well
          • jacquesm 5y ago
            Keep them carefully, the new ones aren't nearly as good.
      • iancmceachern 5y ago
        I've found bose to be the only over ear headphones that don't hurt my ears.
    • jacquesm 5y ago
      Anything over $200 is probably better spent on the amp and that too need not be super expensive to be more than good enough. Really, most hi-fi is just like jewelry: overpriced junk that is intended as a statement of the owner's affluence.
  • LeoPanthera 5y ago
    Well, even old ears will still hear distortion. Personally I don't like to assume that I will be the only person to listen to my hifi!
  • formerly_proven 5y ago
    Correct speakers and speaker placement is worth more than 100000 € in gold plated cables.
    • jacquesm 5y ago
      Yep. But it doesn't send out those oh so precious conspicuous consumption signals.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • IgorPartola 5y ago
    This is obviously false. Try driving a 100W speaker with a 300W amp/signal and you’ll quickly discover that you actually can hear a blown speaker. You can also hear bad crossover between different speakers, bad placement, bad timing, bad sound insulation, echo, reverb, etc. Sure if you are comparing a single speaker to another single more expensive speaker you might not feel the difference. But if you are comparing a poorly put together setup to a well done one, you will absolutely hear the difference. And I am not audiophile at all saying this.
    • eimrine 5y ago
      300W and 100W is a bad example because it is a disaster instead of music. And you have not mentioned one good example - 1 liter speaker vs 100 liter one.
    • jacquesm 5y ago
      The point is that $2000 will get you there, for all of your gear. And that the quality of your cables isn't going to make a shred of a difference. I'll be happy to demonstrate this with a run of speaker wire of the highest grade and one made of household extension chord, a pair of nice studio microphones and an oscilloscope with two inputs running in differential mode. You won't see anything on the trace so what's left is in the mind. You can put a quality setup together for $2K and you can put an extremely poor one together for 10 times that.
      • ubercow13 5y ago
        That's true below age 30, too.
        • jacquesm 5y ago
          Yes, it is. To a large extent anything truly hifi is wasted on anybody but babies and dogs.
  • maigret 5y ago
    Yes your ear degrade but no that doesn’t mean everything is equal if you are used to listen to music. As a proof for that, many successful sound engineers have been over 50 and still mixed legendary recordings. Most people won’t hear good audio gear but that’s not related to age ;) Good equipment will often sound better, to what amount is the question. And yes some things are just fake and don’t deliver better sound, so listening yourself is very important.
    • robonerd 5y ago
      > As a proof for that, many successful sound engineers have been over 50 and still mixed legendary recordings. Surely that has much more to do with artistic skill than frequency response of their ears. Having excellent hearing won't make you intrinsically skilled at audio mixing. > Most people won’t hear good audio gear but that’s not related to age ;) The relationship between age and hearing loss is incontrovertible. Hearing loss is cumulative, it increases with age. Some people lose their hearing faster or younger than others for a wide array of reasons, but nobody is completely immune to it.
      • maigret 5y ago
        You are just mentioning the ear, not the cumulated ear + brain (perception). While the physical hearing declines, the perception can gets sharper with time. Age makes hearing very high frequencies impossible but thankfully that’s not the main range where instruments play. (And yes, I know about harmonics) Audio quality is not just about high frequencies thankfully.
    • jacquesm 5y ago
      Beethoven was quite deaf but still an amazing composer and performer near the end of his life. Anyway, no need to believe me, just go and do a test and see how well you can still hear and you'll come away even more impressed with your brain than with your ears. Your ears degrade and your brain works very hard to make up for that degradation.
      • maigret 5y ago
  • talove 5y ago
    I want to refute this reply since it's up at the very top to say... even with moderate hearing damage your ears are still very capable and amazing. Equipment and room acoustics play a great deal in how much information you perceive from an audio wave. It's shocking when you step into a treated room from high-end speakers. I've done a lot of damage to my ears over the years as a sound engineer, tour manager, musician. I have mild tinnitus. I can still walk into a treated room and listen to audio from a high-end sound system and have a bunch of "OH SHIT" moments where I perceive so much more information than I do through headphones, car stereos, high-end home systems. The last 1-2 decades of computer audio have been a race toward the bottom of punchy bass and air'y high end. It's the equivalent of motion smoothing on TVs. Except nobody talks about it, you can't turn it off, and 'good sound' is just stuff that has a tight thump. This is true of every range of products from Airpod Max's, to high-end Bang & Olufsen to Sonos systems. Anyway, my point with that is...Sure this stuff may not get preference in a blind test. That's missing the point tho. The audiophile's pursuit is to limit points in the signal path that create distortion and cause loss of fidelity. Do these cables do much? Probably not compared to another pair of cables with gold plated connectors and high-quality copper. That said, the real test in high-end gear is not a blind test of one song, it's doing something like listening to the snare drum ring in 10 different songs, something with a lot of resonance and overtones, and see if you can actually perceive more information across a set of songs. If all these cables offer is high-quality materials, construction, and quality control and the cost to produce them is 60-80% of that. Then great, I am glad they exist and I hope they make a buck making them.
    • jacquesm 5y ago
      > even with moderate hearing damage your ears are still very capable and amazing Absolutely. A quality audio level spectrum analyzer in a few grams with this incredible output system. Nature is amazing at every turn. > Equipment and room acoustics play a great deal in how much information you perceive from an audio wave. It's shocking when you step into a treated room from high-end speakers. I've done a lot of damage to my ears over the years as a sound engineer, tour manager, musician. I have mild tinnitus. I can still walk into a treated room and listen to audio from a high-end sound system and have a bunch of "OH SHIT" moments where I perceive so much more information than I do through headphones, car stereos, high-end home systems. Good for you. But just being able to listen closely - the kind of thing that makes the difference between a good sound engineer and a not-so-good one - is hard work and requires your undivided attention. Most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a master, a digitized version of the same master and an MP3. Which is fine. > The last 1-2 decades of computer audio have been a race toward the bottom of punchy bass and air'y high end. It's the equivalent of motion smoothing on TVs. Except nobody talks about it, you can't turn it off, and 'good sound' is just stuff that has a tight thump. This is true of every range of products from Airpod Max's, to high-end Bang & Olufsen to Sonos systems. Indeed. But: compression alone, streaming artifacts, synthesis of the sound back from whatever junk the compression algorithm introduced, all of these are such enormous sources of distortion that all a high end system will do is accentuate the junk. Less clarity may well be a blessing in that case. > Anyway, my point with that is...Sure this stuff may not get preference in a blind test. That's missing the point tho. The audiophile's pursuit is to limit points in the signal path that create distortion and cause loss of fidelity. Yes. And these cables are bullshit.
  • default-kramer 5y ago
    This just isn't true. My father (who is well over 30) would have no trouble telling the difference between a $100 Walmart stereo, my $700 speakers, and the $4000 speakers at the local hi-fi shop in a scientifically controlled blind test. And I'd bet that over 95% of the population can do the same.
    • robonerd 5y ago
      > This just isn't true. Asserting that a scientifically controlled blind test would reveal something is not the same as actually performing that test. Have you?
    • jacquesm 5y ago
      > This just isn't true. Ok then. Let's just say that I find something very funny about people listening to 128 K MP3s or streaming services on high end audio. I wonder if they're trying to nail down that extra bit of distortion the compressor introduced or to re-create the missing frequency bands from the carefully compressed MP3s. > And I'd bet that over 95% of the population can do the same. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZeSZFYCNRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZeSZFYCNRw
      • ratww 5y ago
        I don't really think this clip is a good counter example. I'm pretty sure 95% of the population would be able to guess correctly, in a blind test, who is Joshua Bell and who is me playing some stuff on the violin, and I'm actually quite alright at it. Still doesn't mean they'd stop on the subway for either one of us... I'd still call bs on GP's father being able to tell between a 700 and 4000 set of speakers on a REAL double blind test, but between a 100 and the others? I don't see why not. There's lots of crappy cheap hi-fis on that price range.
        • jacquesm 5y ago
          That clip is a fantastic counter example: it offered a front row seat to a world class performance utterly distortion free. Ok, not the ideal venue but I would have been more than happy to miss any number of appointments just to stand there for the full duration. Of course some of those people were probably in a hurry to not be late for the evening's performance ;)
  • Pr0ject217 5y ago
  • falcolas 5y ago
    Really? Why can I, at over 40, blindly the difference between $200 Beats and $80 Koss headphones? Theres no amount of equalizer that can make up for the low quality drivers that simply fail to emit quality mids. That fail to emit clean sounds below a certain DB threshold. Yeah, your ears change over time - you will lose sensitivity. That, however, will not make crap headphones or speakers suddenly sound good. It just means you want headphones or speakers that match up well with your current hearing.
    • jacquesm 5y ago
      Because of $120, apparently! Note that I did say good headphones.
      • falcolas 5y ago
        The Koss headphones are the good headphones. Better than the Beats headphones at least. And yes, with quality headphones, the equalizer can do some of the work. But it's generally better to have headphones that match your hearing, so you can focus on the fine tuning with the equalizer instead of trying to brute force against a major difference.
        • jacquesm 5y ago
          This is true. I have a Sony noise cancelling one that is pretty good both for music consumption and for piano practice. And that's about the only bit where I'm really picky, digital pianos can - and do - sound wonderful embedded in a piece of music but once they have to pretend to actually be a piano, for practice or to render midi files of previous recordings then suddenly sample quality is so much more important than just for regular playback. I took a long time to decide which digital piano I would buy because I could not find one that felt close enough to the real thing to make me happy to practice on it but eventually found the Yamaha P-515 and it is as close as it gets feel wise and sound wise (but not on the built in speakers, but a set of external monitors). Especially in the low end that gets nasty quickly if you hit a couple of notes with sustain. But that's not a regular listening to music situation. Agreed on trying to 'match your hearing' the problem there is that matching your hearing and physical comfort are not always to be found in the same brand, and when you're wearing headphones for 8 to 12 hours per day physical comfort becomes a major factor.
  • pieterk 5y ago
    Hearing ability overall doesn't decrease with age per se. Hearing aids are common, but not in the 30 plus population. Our hearing does evolve in the ultra high frequency range, at 12kHz and above, but I'd argue that's not a very useful part of our range anyway, unlike the octaves our human voice ranges in. I'd say hearing and especially listening gets better with age, so investing in better acoustics is always a great experience.
    • jacquesm 5y ago
      > Hearing ability overall doesn't decrease with age per se. The established literature begs to differ. > Our hearing does evolve in the ultra high frequency range, at 12kHz and above, but I'd argue that's not a very useful part of our range anyway, unlike the octaves our human voice ranges in. If only it were all that simple. For starters, 12KHz isn't 'ultra high', and past 50 8 KHz should still be doable but sensitivity is what matters it this is a gradual process, not a hard cut-off from one day to the next. As you age the various components of your hearing mechanism stiffen, dry out and calcify making it harder to hear tones that you could hear easily before. So the ability to perceive an 'x' frequency may never go away but your ability to detect frequency 'x' at loudness level 'y' definitely does change. Human voices have overtones just as instruments do, and those help in determining timbre and may help to recognize words and particular speakers (as in: people speaking, not the electromagnetic devices). > I'd say hearing and especially listening gets better with age The first is definitely not supported by data, in fact the data all points the other way: reduced sensitivity over time, especially in the highs. As for listening: listening is an art and like any art you can get better at it over time but without good input it gets harder even if you get better. > so investing in better acoustics is always a great experience. Up to a point. And that point lies well below where audiophilia begins.
  • bayindirh 5y ago
    That's not true in any way. I'm over 35, and I can clearly differentiate the sound quality & detail level between my Hi-Fi systems. My favorite and bigger system has a sound signature so distinct, I can easily differentiate it from other systems with ease. Its sound also much more detailed than other systems, and have the capability to paralyze me in front of it while listening albums. None of the systems I have are slouches in terms of sound reproduction capability, but human ears do not turn into muffled receivers the day you turn 30.
• scotty79 5y ago
  > it makes it very difficult to tell what actually will improve your home hifi audio quality It's really not. The answer when it comes to audiophile equipment is always 'no'.
• pieterk 5y ago
  Love that website. Another great resource for engineering your way around sound is http://www.sengpielaudio.com/calculator-ak-ohm.htm http://www.sengpielaudio.com/calculator-ak-ohm.htm
• bayindirh 5y ago
  > how little you actually have to spend to get good sound. Can confirm. My highest end system is using gold plated RCA cables bought with the system 30 years ago, simple Acoustic Research speaker cables (at the gauge my speaker manufacturer recommends), and all is connected with factory stock cables to a Philips surge protector. It's an absolute delight to listen.