3 ms·

Speaking of Audiophile superstitions, I do wonder what the point of fully-diminished returns is. I don't mean the flat-earth level stuff. I mean standard audiop

by screye 4y ago

Speaking of Audiophile superstitions, I do wonder what the point of fully-diminished returns is. I don't mean the flat-earth level stuff. I mean standard audiophile discourse. Can humans tell the difference between a laptop DAC & an external DAC. Do expensive amplifiers have noticeably lower white-noise than the standard amp? Do high-impedance headphones actually achieve anything ? Do frequency response graphs mean anything if you can digitally EQ & is digital-EQ fully lossless ? Are planar magnetic headphones a scam ? Is FLAC practically overkill for a human ? I think I can tell the difference between a 100$ and $400 audiophile headphones. Amplifiers are more straight forward, because it is simply a loudness thing. And at high-enough volumes, I can still hear some white-noise on high-gain settings. But I am less sure about the other questions.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bakugo 4y ago
Better DACs/amps have noticeably lower noise floors than bad ones, yes. The 3.5mm jacks on my laptop and Nintendo Switch emit very audible white noise if I plug sensitive earphones into them. It's important to distinguish price from quality here, though. For example, the $10 apple USB-C to 3.5mm adapter is known in the (non snake oil obsessed part of the) audiophile community for having very good characteristics for its price, including an extremely low noise floor. I use one on my laptop instead of the built-in 3.5mm.
npteljes 4y ago
I think this point would be highly personal, and also dependent on usage. For example, if I were a streaming site, I wouldn't go for FLAC as that would eat a lot of bandwidth, and there are already successful streaming sites with as low as 96kbps AAC audio (Mixcloud). What I really liked is when claims are backed up with ABX tests. What these determined regarding codec settings is really useful I think, and I also liked that they determined "transparent" encoding settings this way. Very useful when looking to encode your library yourself.
bee_rider 4y ago
HIFIMAN Sundara’s (planar magnetic) are only like $299 on Amazon. So if it is a scam it isn’t a particularly effective one, I mean the audiophile sector has people selling magic speaker stands for thousands of dollars; if HIFIMAN wanted to rip people off they surely could do a better job. I’ve got some HE400i’s from them. Unfortunately I can only compare against some closed back Sennheisers (HD 380 pro) so it is not really an apples-to-apples thing. But the difference is pretty obvious, there’s more diaphragm and more power behind it. Bass ends up sounding a bit more crisp.
- screye 4y ago
  You read my mind. I have a JDS Atom + Sundara setup, and I can hear the difference vs my Galaxy Buds 2 pro (Crinacle's best wireless IEM winner). But, I have been wondering what percent of it is placebo, given the effort it takes to use a wired setup routed through an amp.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    I’ve got a schiit stack for my 400i’s (apparently they are designed to be drive-able by mobile amps but it is definitely right at the edge of what my desktop could do). It is hard to say how much is placebo. I definitely see how having a “plugging stuff in” ritual could get you in a different headspace. But FWIW, I ended up having the 400i setup in another room that I wasn’t able to use every day, just because of the vagaries of pandemic era “adjust the apartment for multiple people working from home” stuff. One of my strongest “oh this sounds better” moments came from realizing I’d gone through a couple room changes and (without thinking of it) been sitting next to the 400i’s, all plugged in and ready to go, for a while and just using the Sennheisers without thinking, hahaha. So there was not much ritual in that case. Could have still been influenced by placebo or some sort of pseudo-nostalgia thing, though. IEMs are even stranger, right? I had them mixed up with earbuds for a long time and assumed they were all just junk, but of course they can get really good sound quality by virtue of their position. Don’t need to push a big diaphragm if you are right up there in the ear canal!
bob1029 4y ago
> Do expensive amplifiers have noticeably lower white-noise than the standard amp? I'd say amplifier topology matters more than absolute noise figures. For example, you can build a 2kW class D amplifier that fits on a PCB weighing ~1lb. A 2kW class H amplifier is going to weigh over 40 lbs. Why would you ever want the one that weights 40x more and likely costs more as a result? The numbers are the same? Maybe even the THD is lower on the class D... The reason is the path the electrons take. In class D, there is a finite/discrete amount of energy available per unit time. The computer knows precisely what these limits are and controls the signal accordingly (clips/attenuates). In class H, there is a gigantic toroidal xformer that is responsible for directly stepping the raw line voltage to required DC rail(s) which then goes straight to your loudspeakers by way of basic mosfets. There isn't a discretized energy mechanism involved anymore. The entire chain is analog. As a consequence of topology and other factors, certain types of program material and loudspeakers can perform substantially better than otherwise possible. If you are looking to set up a system with ridiculous LFE that extends well-below 20Hz, class D amplification is probably going to get in your way.
JohnBooty 4y ago
a laptop DAC & an external DAC I have heard some godawful laptop DACs. We're not talking splitting audiophile hairs here, I'm talking night and day. I've also heard some great ones. In my experience Apple has always nailed this. Compared to a competent onboard laptop design (e.g. Apple) the audible difference with an external one will be more power, which is something a lot of pricy headphones benefit from. But for most normal headphones no, no huge difference. Do expensive amplifiers have noticeably lower white-noise than the standard amp? Speaker amps? A lot of expensive audiophile crap measures pretty poorly! However if you shop carefully you can get something like this, with objectively insanely good performance: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/review-and-measurements-of-benchmark-ahb2-amp.7628/ https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/r... Is 0.000225% THD audibly better than 0.01% THD? Honestly, generally not in my experience. Your average room has probably 40dB of noise floor if not more and your speakers are distortion machines too. Do high-impedance headphones actually achieve anything ? I've never seen a solid case in favor of them. Do frequency response graphs mean anything if you can digitally EQ For headphones? If the flaws of the headphone aren't too wild, then yeah they can be fixed pretty well with EQ. The bigger the flaws the more efficiency/output you sacrifice so there are limits. And some flaws like a lack of deep bass can't be compensated for. For speakers? Yeah and no. With speakers most sound that reaches your ears is reflected. If your speaker's off-axis sound is markedly different from the on-axis sound, this severely limits what can be accomplished with EQ because we can't EQ them separately. You fix one and the other breaks. is digital-EQ fully lossless Depends on the implementation. Obviously, you could certainly screw it up. But I think popular implementations like EqualizerAPO and Apple's built in Audio Units seem to get it right within any reasonable definition of audibility. Are planar magnetic headphones a scam I dunno, they sound really detailed to me. I don't think they're a must-have, but I've been impressed by them. Is FLAC practically overkill for a human ? Very difficult to tell from e.g. 320kbps audio. However consider that your audio may be lossily compressed later on, e.g. for Bluetooth transmission. I think even 320kbps kind of sounds like ass once you lossy compress it again for Bluetooth -- like a JPG that's been recompressed multiple times. So considering that lossless audio isn't much bigger than 256kbps-320kbps lossy anyway, I think it has a lot of value.
- screye 4y ago

by screye 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

bakugo 4y ago

Better DACs/amps have noticeably lower noise floors than bad ones, yes. The 3.5mm jacks on my laptop and Nintendo Switch emit very audible white noise if I plug sensitive earphones into them. It's important to distinguish price from quality here, though. For example, the $10 apple USB-C to 3.5mm adapter is known in the (non snake oil obsessed part of the) audiophile community for having very good characteristics for its price, including an extremely low noise floor. I use one on my laptop instead of the built-in 3.5mm.

npteljes 4y ago

I think this point would be highly personal, and also dependent on usage. For example, if I were a streaming site, I wouldn't go for FLAC as that would eat a lot of bandwidth, and there are already successful streaming sites with as low as 96kbps AAC audio (Mixcloud). What I really liked is when claims are backed up with ABX tests. What these determined regarding codec settings is really useful I think, and I also liked that they determined "transparent" encoding settings this way. Very useful when looking to encode your library yourself.

bee_rider 4y ago

HIFIMAN Sundara’s (planar magnetic) are only like $299 on Amazon. So if it is a scam it isn’t a particularly effective one, I mean the audiophile sector has people selling magic speaker stands for thousands of dollars; if HIFIMAN wanted to rip people off they surely could do a better job. I’ve got some HE400i’s from them. Unfortunately I can only compare against some closed back Sennheisers (HD 380 pro) so it is not really an apples-to-apples thing. But the difference is pretty obvious, there’s more diaphragm and more power behind it. Bass ends up sounding a bit more crisp.

screye 4y ago
You read my mind. I have a JDS Atom + Sundara setup, and I can hear the difference vs my Galaxy Buds 2 pro (Crinacle's best wireless IEM winner). But, I have been wondering what percent of it is placebo, given the effort it takes to use a wired setup routed through an amp.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  I’ve got a schiit stack for my 400i’s (apparently they are designed to be drive-able by mobile amps but it is definitely right at the edge of what my desktop could do). It is hard to say how much is placebo. I definitely see how having a “plugging stuff in” ritual could get you in a different headspace. But FWIW, I ended up having the 400i setup in another room that I wasn’t able to use every day, just because of the vagaries of pandemic era “adjust the apartment for multiple people working from home” stuff. One of my strongest “oh this sounds better” moments came from realizing I’d gone through a couple room changes and (without thinking of it) been sitting next to the 400i’s, all plugged in and ready to go, for a while and just using the Sennheisers without thinking, hahaha. So there was not much ritual in that case. Could have still been influenced by placebo or some sort of pseudo-nostalgia thing, though. IEMs are even stranger, right? I had them mixed up with earbuds for a long time and assumed they were all just junk, but of course they can get really good sound quality by virtue of their position. Don’t need to push a big diaphragm if you are right up there in the ear canal!

bob1029 4y ago

> Do expensive amplifiers have noticeably lower white-noise than the standard amp? I'd say amplifier topology matters more than absolute noise figures. For example, you can build a 2kW class D amplifier that fits on a PCB weighing ~1lb. A 2kW class H amplifier is going to weigh over 40 lbs. Why would you ever want the one that weights 40x more and likely costs more as a result? The numbers are the same? Maybe even the THD is lower on the class D... The reason is the path the electrons take. In class D, there is a finite/discrete amount of energy available per unit time. The computer knows precisely what these limits are and controls the signal accordingly (clips/attenuates). In class H, there is a gigantic toroidal xformer that is responsible for directly stepping the raw line voltage to required DC rail(s) which then goes straight to your loudspeakers by way of basic mosfets. There isn't a discretized energy mechanism involved anymore. The entire chain is analog. As a consequence of topology and other factors, certain types of program material and loudspeakers can perform substantially better than otherwise possible. If you are looking to set up a system with ridiculous LFE that extends well-below 20Hz, class D amplification is probably going to get in your way.

JohnBooty 4y ago

a laptop DAC & an external DAC I have heard some godawful laptop DACs. We're not talking splitting audiophile hairs here, I'm talking night and day. I've also heard some great ones. In my experience Apple has always nailed this. Compared to a competent onboard laptop design (e.g. Apple) the audible difference with an external one will be more power, which is something a lot of pricy headphones benefit from. But for most normal headphones no, no huge difference. Do expensive amplifiers have noticeably lower white-noise than the standard amp? Speaker amps? A lot of expensive audiophile crap measures pretty poorly! However if you shop carefully you can get something like this, with objectively insanely good performance: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/review-and-measurements-of-benchmark-ahb2-amp.7628/ https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/r... Is 0.000225% THD audibly better than 0.01% THD? Honestly, generally not in my experience. Your average room has probably 40dB of noise floor if not more and your speakers are distortion machines too. Do high-impedance headphones actually achieve anything ? I've never seen a solid case in favor of them. Do frequency response graphs mean anything if you can digitally EQ For headphones? If the flaws of the headphone aren't too wild, then yeah they can be fixed pretty well with EQ. The bigger the flaws the more efficiency/output you sacrifice so there are limits. And some flaws like a lack of deep bass can't be compensated for. For speakers? Yeah and no. With speakers most sound that reaches your ears is reflected. If your speaker's off-axis sound is markedly different from the on-axis sound, this severely limits what can be accomplished with EQ because we can't EQ them separately. You fix one and the other breaks. is digital-EQ fully lossless Depends on the implementation. Obviously, you could certainly screw it up. But I think popular implementations like EqualizerAPO and Apple's built in Audio Units seem to get it right within any reasonable definition of audibility. Are planar magnetic headphones a scam I dunno, they sound really detailed to me. I don't think they're a must-have, but I've been impressed by them. Is FLAC practically overkill for a human ? Very difficult to tell from e.g. 320kbps audio. However consider that your audio may be lossily compressed later on, e.g. for Bluetooth transmission. I think even 320kbps kind of sounds like ass once you lossy compress it again for Bluetooth -- like a JPG that's been recompressed multiple times. So considering that lossless audio isn't much bigger than 256kbps-320kbps lossy anyway, I think it has a lot of value.

screye 4y ago