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It’s exactly this. “Audiophiles” are a weird bunch. Much of what they claim to hear is scientifically proven as total nonsense. Audio Science Review is a great

It’s exactly this. “Audiophiles” are a weird bunch. Much of what they claim to hear is scientifically proven as total nonsense. Audio Science Review is a great place where they scientifically analyse audio equipment. The quality of speaker wire for all meaningful measurements is utterly irrelevant for instance. Realistically, as long as you are enjoying the art, how you are enjoying it should be irrelevant. I often make the point to people that a terrible movie will be terrible no matter how you watch it - HDR, 4K, Atmos won’t make a difference. A crappy movie, will always be a crappy movie. The same with music, and inversely - a great song will still sound great and enjoyable on a really crappy car stereo.

itsoktocry 4y ago
On one had, totally agree. The audiophile world is full of so much nonsense. On the other, a decent home theatre amplifier and set of speakers is going to blow away a sound bar. I think people who think "it all sounds the same" have never heard a really good stereo. I have an alright, but far from high end, stereo set up in a listening environment in my basement, and everyone I've ever listened to music with down there is blown away.
- christoph 4y ago
  Absolutely. 100%. Last night we turned the “stereo” up really loud after Eurovision to listen to Mikas album for the first time in years - Full height Revel fronts, monitor audio rear effect speakers, dual subs, blasted it. I spent hours tuning curves on the Denon amp with an external microphone last year… Anyone that thinks a sound bar would sound anything like what we hear is honestly deluded. But, I also wouldn’t spend much more money on it… it’s way more than good enough for us… audiophiles would tell me I could spend another £10k on equipment chasing another 1%, I’m not sure at this point it would deliver anymore intrinsic value. At a different token, two Sonos in Stereo in my kitchen are more than good enough while I’m cooking to listen to music and podcasts. I’d never, ever, want to see high end audio equipment die. When it all works together, the experience is truly sublime, engrossing and immersive like nothing else.
  - jIyajbe 4y ago
    Same. The only thing I miss about owning my own home is that I can't set up a home theater. The last house I owned had a bare-to-the-studs basement when we bought it. I built a home theater to die for there: ran every wire you could think of, built the walls and ceiling where and how I wanted for optimum sound, acoustically treated everything, researched all the audio and video equipment, installed a projector, built my own screen, even built all of my speakers myself, in my shop. The whole process took a year, and I had an enormous amount of fun doing it. And it worked: Watching movies was great, but sitting there with the lights dimmed low, listening to Beethoven's 9th Symphony, or (different mood) Dire Straits "Love Over Gold"...There's no experience that compares.
    - christoph 4y ago
      Sounds like bliss. Not just the end result, the process as well. I think that’s what people who haven’t gone down the audio highway don’t understand. The constant tweaking and adjusting is sometimes a very cathartic experience. You really do get to enjoy the fruits of your labour like very few other endeavours.
    - glouwbug 4y ago
      Love Over Gold (the track) from Alchemy is my favorite live performance
- seanp2k2 4y ago
  Recovering audiophile here. I used to continually chase gains until I got more into the professional side of things (I’ve been making music myself for a couple of decades). I ended up getting a few TOTL setups and I regret not doing that sooner. I went through entirely too many mediocre headphones and speakers before just spending the money on high-end studio monitors. I’d recommend people check out the pro offerings from ATC, Focal, Barefoot, PSI, DynAudio, Adam, etc. My living room setup now is literally just a MiniDSP SHD to handle Spotify/ AirPlay streaming and preamp duties into the active monitors. Vinyl setup runs through a Muffsy phono preamp kit I built. Headphones are mainly a high-end set of custom IEMs, Shure electrostatics, and Senn HD800S with a nice RME interface as DAC + amp. All that solved my GAS on the listening side, now I take all the money I’ve been saving there and put it into interesting synths and eurorack ;) The pro side has some weird beliefs and desires too though, like an obsession with vintage gear including stuff like early digital reverbs. Plenty of pros believe that Mogami Gold cables are actually better in terms of sound quality, but my studio is wired up with Canare star quad for the extra noise rejection and a lot of GLS plus some Hosa patch cables as I’ve found their connectors to be good-enough quality and the cables are generally easy enough to work with / durable without being overly expensive. Megabuck old-school gear like LA-2As, 1176es, Neve 1073s, Neumann U67 and more-recent Sony C800-G mics, Manley compressors, etc all have crazy followings and people are always GASing for them, but they won’t make a crap song magically sound good, only take an already-good song and take it up another 10% (and even then only in skilled hands). So much more can be achieved by most folks with just more practice and education around mixing, yet everyone wants to spend their way to better sound. Instruments and their amps are arguably even worse, with guitar and synth players as large contributors (I’m guilty as heck here too). We always want that perfect axe that we somehow believe will take us to the next level, or that vintage CS-80 or Rhodes. We know we’d be better off practicing and learning our instruments better, but instead we endlessly tweak Kemper profiles, swap strings / pickups / picks, rewire pedal boards, rearrange modular synths, and most importantly, read, talk about, and pine for the next gear purchase. It’s madness. There’s even a joke in the modular community that making music is the least important part of modular synths. “Music? Never heard of it. My $8000 electronic mission center only does microtonal bleeps and bloops in Euclidean cycles.” But anyway, hobbies are fun. Sad to see Onkyo go, but not that sad as I never actually owned any of their gear. They seemed like a cheaper Denon. I was always more into the DIY side of home audio before I switched to pro gear, with folks like Nelson Pass and Siegfried Linkwitz as personal heroes. Don’t forget Roger Linn and Daphne Oram on the creation side!
mindslight 4y ago
I don't agree with the inverse. Bad speakers (eg laptops, especially Thinkpads) can make listening to good songs into a meh experience. It's better than nothing when you want music, but rarely will you notice that spontaneous feeling of love for what you're hearing. This doesn't justify the utterly diminishing returns of the audiophile world or the whole speaker cable nonsense, but paying something for a decent setup is worth it. Although from what I understand that effective price point is much lower with headphones compared to speakers. For movies, I watched a cam rip once. The experience was so bad I vowed never again. And the weird bit is all the distortions were like only half-perceptable (warbly audio, mild shadows / reflections from people walking near the camera), so I would just feel like something was wrong but couldn't immediately place it.
- seanp2k2 4y ago
  There’s also the matter of familiarity — if you’ve already heard a song on good gear many times, your brain will fill in the gaps even on bad playback equipment, but finding new stuff might not be as enjoyable because much will be left out, like bass textures, interesting things happening with sound staging, and even entire bits of melody or background that aren’t easy to pick out with smartphone / laptop / normal car speakers. Edit: the car case is particularly funny as many luxury brands offer $$$$-$$$$$ options for better sound systems when they can’t solve the fundamental flaws of compromised placement and background noise inherent to cars. That McIntosh system in your new $120k Jeep Grand Wagoneer might impress the neighbor but it still won’t do much to quiet the roar of real all-terrain tires on the highway.
prmoustache 4y ago
> The same with music, and inversely - a great song will still sound great and enjoyable on a really crappy car stereo. Not really agree on this one. I would say you will still like it and maybe enjoy it because this is the only way you can enjoy it while driving. But that doesn't mean it sound great. The issue is that most music is overcompressed these days to make up for the fact that most people are listening to music in hostile environment or with bad devices. Which make the difference with higher fidelity equipment less important. Without being an audiophile I have records from the 90's that only felt so great on headphones or decent hifi. The music was less compressed these days, there were much higher amplitude difference between parts of the song, instruments. Back in the days listening on the radio felt weird and flat. We just lowered the bar to the point that everything feel weird and flat. Like fast food or premade dishes that only have a general way too salty or too sweet tastes where your palate cannot do the sorting anymore of the different ingredients that have been put to it. I still think a decent hifi equipment would make a ton of difference for someone into classical records. Modern POP music? Waste of money.
thirdsun 4y ago
> It’s exactly this. “Audiophiles” are a weird bunch. Much of what they claim to hear is scientifically proven as total nonsense. Audio Science Review is a great place where they scientifically analyse audio equipment. The quality of speaker wire for all meaningful measurements is utterly irrelevant for instance. You are talking about the extreme kind of audiophiles that aren't really representative of the community, which covers a wide spectrum of people. It's like saying all developers are socially awkward loners. Merely a stereotype. > I often make the point to people that a terrible movie will be terrible no matter how you watch it - HDR, 4K, Atmos won’t make a difference. A crappy movie, will always be a crappy movie. Of course. Noone would argue against that. However a great movie really shines on good equipment. Imagine watching Blade Runner 2049 on a laptop display. No amount of convenience is making that experience worthwhile in my opinion.
- dagw 4y ago
  Imagine watching Blade Runner 2049 on a laptop display. No amount of convenience is making that experience worthwhile in my opinion. I watched most of the 'classic' movie canon (including the original Blade Runner) on rented VHS tapes and a cheap CRT TV, and many of those where among the most 'worthwhile' movie watching experiences in my life. A great movie will 'shine' on any equipment.

itsoktocry 4y ago

On one had, totally agree. The audiophile world is full of so much nonsense. On the other, a decent home theatre amplifier and set of speakers is going to blow away a sound bar. I think people who think "it all sounds the same" have never heard a really good stereo. I have an alright, but far from high end, stereo set up in a listening environment in my basement, and everyone I've ever listened to music with down there is blown away.

christoph 4y ago
Absolutely. 100%. Last night we turned the “stereo” up really loud after Eurovision to listen to Mikas album for the first time in years - Full height Revel fronts, monitor audio rear effect speakers, dual subs, blasted it. I spent hours tuning curves on the Denon amp with an external microphone last year… Anyone that thinks a sound bar would sound anything like what we hear is honestly deluded. But, I also wouldn’t spend much more money on it… it’s way more than good enough for us… audiophiles would tell me I could spend another £10k on equipment chasing another 1%, I’m not sure at this point it would deliver anymore intrinsic value. At a different token, two Sonos in Stereo in my kitchen are more than good enough while I’m cooking to listen to music and podcasts. I’d never, ever, want to see high end audio equipment die. When it all works together, the experience is truly sublime, engrossing and immersive like nothing else.
- jIyajbe 4y ago
  Same. The only thing I miss about owning my own home is that I can't set up a home theater. The last house I owned had a bare-to-the-studs basement when we bought it. I built a home theater to die for there: ran every wire you could think of, built the walls and ceiling where and how I wanted for optimum sound, acoustically treated everything, researched all the audio and video equipment, installed a projector, built my own screen, even built all of my speakers myself, in my shop. The whole process took a year, and I had an enormous amount of fun doing it. And it worked: Watching movies was great, but sitting there with the lights dimmed low, listening to Beethoven's 9th Symphony, or (different mood) Dire Straits "Love Over Gold"...There's no experience that compares.
  - christoph 4y ago
    Sounds like bliss. Not just the end result, the process as well. I think that’s what people who haven’t gone down the audio highway don’t understand. The constant tweaking and adjusting is sometimes a very cathartic experience. You really do get to enjoy the fruits of your labour like very few other endeavours.
  - glouwbug 4y ago
    Love Over Gold (the track) from Alchemy is my favorite live performance
seanp2k2 4y ago
Recovering audiophile here. I used to continually chase gains until I got more into the professional side of things (I’ve been making music myself for a couple of decades). I ended up getting a few TOTL setups and I regret not doing that sooner. I went through entirely too many mediocre headphones and speakers before just spending the money on high-end studio monitors. I’d recommend people check out the pro offerings from ATC, Focal, Barefoot, PSI, DynAudio, Adam, etc. My living room setup now is literally just a MiniDSP SHD to handle Spotify/ AirPlay streaming and preamp duties into the active monitors. Vinyl setup runs through a Muffsy phono preamp kit I built. Headphones are mainly a high-end set of custom IEMs, Shure electrostatics, and Senn HD800S with a nice RME interface as DAC + amp. All that solved my GAS on the listening side, now I take all the money I’ve been saving there and put it into interesting synths and eurorack ;) The pro side has some weird beliefs and desires too though, like an obsession with vintage gear including stuff like early digital reverbs. Plenty of pros believe that Mogami Gold cables are actually better in terms of sound quality, but my studio is wired up with Canare star quad for the extra noise rejection and a lot of GLS plus some Hosa patch cables as I’ve found their connectors to be good-enough quality and the cables are generally easy enough to work with / durable without being overly expensive. Megabuck old-school gear like LA-2As, 1176es, Neve 1073s, Neumann U67 and more-recent Sony C800-G mics, Manley compressors, etc all have crazy followings and people are always GASing for them, but they won’t make a crap song magically sound good, only take an already-good song and take it up another 10% (and even then only in skilled hands). So much more can be achieved by most folks with just more practice and education around mixing, yet everyone wants to spend their way to better sound. Instruments and their amps are arguably even worse, with guitar and synth players as large contributors (I’m guilty as heck here too). We always want that perfect axe that we somehow believe will take us to the next level, or that vintage CS-80 or Rhodes. We know we’d be better off practicing and learning our instruments better, but instead we endlessly tweak Kemper profiles, swap strings / pickups / picks, rewire pedal boards, rearrange modular synths, and most importantly, read, talk about, and pine for the next gear purchase. It’s madness. There’s even a joke in the modular community that making music is the least important part of modular synths. “Music? Never heard of it. My $8000 electronic mission center only does microtonal bleeps and bloops in Euclidean cycles.” But anyway, hobbies are fun. Sad to see Onkyo go, but not that sad as I never actually owned any of their gear. They seemed like a cheaper Denon. I was always more into the DIY side of home audio before I switched to pro gear, with folks like Nelson Pass and Siegfried Linkwitz as personal heroes. Don’t forget Roger Linn and Daphne Oram on the creation side!

mindslight 4y ago

I don't agree with the inverse. Bad speakers (eg laptops, especially Thinkpads) can make listening to good songs into a meh experience. It's better than nothing when you want music, but rarely will you notice that spontaneous feeling of love for what you're hearing. This doesn't justify the utterly diminishing returns of the audiophile world or the whole speaker cable nonsense, but paying something for a decent setup is worth it. Although from what I understand that effective price point is much lower with headphones compared to speakers. For movies, I watched a cam rip once. The experience was so bad I vowed never again. And the weird bit is all the distortions were like only half-perceptable (warbly audio, mild shadows / reflections from people walking near the camera), so I would just feel like something was wrong but couldn't immediately place it.

seanp2k2 4y ago
There’s also the matter of familiarity — if you’ve already heard a song on good gear many times, your brain will fill in the gaps even on bad playback equipment, but finding new stuff might not be as enjoyable because much will be left out, like bass textures, interesting things happening with sound staging, and even entire bits of melody or background that aren’t easy to pick out with smartphone / laptop / normal car speakers. Edit: the car case is particularly funny as many luxury brands offer $$$$-$$$$$ options for better sound systems when they can’t solve the fundamental flaws of compromised placement and background noise inherent to cars. That McIntosh system in your new $120k Jeep Grand Wagoneer might impress the neighbor but it still won’t do much to quiet the roar of real all-terrain tires on the highway.

prmoustache 4y ago

> The same with music, and inversely - a great song will still sound great and enjoyable on a really crappy car stereo. Not really agree on this one. I would say you will still like it and maybe enjoy it because this is the only way you can enjoy it while driving. But that doesn't mean it sound great. The issue is that most music is overcompressed these days to make up for the fact that most people are listening to music in hostile environment or with bad devices. Which make the difference with higher fidelity equipment less important. Without being an audiophile I have records from the 90's that only felt so great on headphones or decent hifi. The music was less compressed these days, there were much higher amplitude difference between parts of the song, instruments. Back in the days listening on the radio felt weird and flat. We just lowered the bar to the point that everything feel weird and flat. Like fast food or premade dishes that only have a general way too salty or too sweet tastes where your palate cannot do the sorting anymore of the different ingredients that have been put to it. I still think a decent hifi equipment would make a ton of difference for someone into classical records. Modern POP music? Waste of money.

thirdsun 4y ago

> It’s exactly this. “Audiophiles” are a weird bunch. Much of what they claim to hear is scientifically proven as total nonsense. Audio Science Review is a great place where they scientifically analyse audio equipment. The quality of speaker wire for all meaningful measurements is utterly irrelevant for instance. You are talking about the extreme kind of audiophiles that aren't really representative of the community, which covers a wide spectrum of people. It's like saying all developers are socially awkward loners. Merely a stereotype. > I often make the point to people that a terrible movie will be terrible no matter how you watch it - HDR, 4K, Atmos won’t make a difference. A crappy movie, will always be a crappy movie. Of course. Noone would argue against that. However a great movie really shines on good equipment. Imagine watching Blade Runner 2049 on a laptop display. No amount of convenience is making that experience worthwhile in my opinion.

dagw 4y ago
Imagine watching Blade Runner 2049 on a laptop display. No amount of convenience is making that experience worthwhile in my opinion. I watched most of the 'classic' movie canon (including the original Blade Runner) on rented VHS tapes and a cheap CRT TV, and many of those where among the most 'worthwhile' movie watching experiences in my life. A great movie will 'shine' on any equipment.