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It's difficult to read an audiophile guide as an analogue engineer

98 points by zdw 4y ago

sacnoradhq 4y ago
Hahaha. The title says it all. My dad was one of these who should've known better making a living at electronics. I recall an urban legend about an audio engineer who added a "richness" control to a piece of studio equipment that did absolutely nothing but allowed some rich person to feel like they engineered an album. Over a long enough distance (~30 m), it's better to use ADC <-HDMI-> DAC usually than send line-level signals due to losses involved unless one wishes to spend zillions on the most perfectly engineered and widely-incompatible shielded coaxial cable imaginable. Another is denial of Nyquist–Shannon. If you can't hear over 8 kHz, then you don't need 256-bit @ 96 kHz sampling. It's more likely a badly-chosen lossy compression codec (or it's parameters), a nonuniform DAC, or some other source of analog signal loss is causing loss of fidelity by the time it reaches ears. Further is the belief that lossless codecs cannot be replaced compressed lossless or sufficient parameters of some lossy formats. Obsession with vacuum tubes and/or vinyl. I get the ceremony of vinyl, but it's not going to improve over perfect digital reproduction.
- smeyer 4y ago
  >If you can't hear over 8 kHz Can't most folks hear frequencies higher than 8 kHz? I don't disagree with your conclusions since I don't care much about audio quality, but I feel like I'm missing something here.
  - causality0 4y ago
    Is there anything pleasant to hear over 8khz?
    - JohnBooty 4y ago
      Yeah, a lot of the "details" are 8khz and up. A pure 15khz tone isn't fun to listen to (if you can hear that high) but if you cut off everything above 8khz (or 7khz, or etc) things will start to sound increasingly more muffled. Experiment in Audacity or such to see for yourself.
    - muffles 4y ago
      The harmonics of a guitar or piano can extend well beyond 8kHz, even though they contain lower frequency components that give them their characteristic sound. In fact, the higher harmonics can contribute to the richness and complexity of the overall sound, even if they're not heard as distinct pitches. Similar effect occurs with cymbals, the high-frequency shimmer of cymbals can extend well above 8kHz. Also violins can include overtones that extend beyond 8kHz and the sound of a trumpet can include overtones that extend up to 10kHz or higher.
    - midoridensha 4y ago
      No one wants to listen to pure tones over 8kHz, but things like cymbal crashes would sound rather different if you cut off those higher frequencies. The primary frequencies are of course under that cut-off, but there's lots of other frequencies above it.
  - JohnBooty 4y ago
    Yeah I think parent poster confused a detail or two. 20hz-20khz is the human range, more or less. For most adults it's more like 15khz. The 44.1khz sampling rate of CD audio was chosen because it can represent frequencies up to 22.05hz (44.1khz / 2) which safely covers the frequency range of human hearing with a bit of headroom for good measure.
    - quickthrower2 4y ago
      But surely at 22khz you can only oscillate between 2 values if sampling at 44khz, whereas 2khz gets 20 values in the same 180 degrees of the wave? So doesn’t this mean you lose fidelity at higher frequencies? Edit: thanks for all these great responses!
      - aidenn0 4y ago
        A CD is 16 bits, so you have 65536 possible values to oscillate between. If you mean "does a 44khz only output a square (or triangle) wave at 22kHz, the answer is "no." If you have two alternating values at 44kHz, the output will be a perfect (to the limits of noise &c.) sine wave, since the DAC is band limited. If this is still confusing to you, I recommend watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG9jemV1T7I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG9jemV1T7I
      - tkuraku 4y ago
        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_samp... You can only capture all the information if you sample at twice the rate of the highest frequency of interest.
      - lxgr 4y ago
        A sine wave is a sine wave; it can't contain any "additional information" that would gain anything from getting encoded by more data points. If it would, it wouldn't be a sine wave anymore, and you could decompose it into its component of phase and amplitude shifted sine waves, which will occupy all kinds of places in the frequency domain, many of them higher than your initial 22 kHz. That's in fact what we mean when we say "a 22 kHz signal": An ensemble of all of these overlapping waves represented as a single signal. If you're sampling that with an ADC, you're not only sampling the the 22 kHz wave, but you're also sampling it – and that, but only that, can in fact be described with a single bit per ADC readout. Looking at it from an information theoretical point of view, the Kolgomorov complexity of "a sine wave of 22 kHz and amplitude x" is pretty minimal – just from that sentence, you can perfectly recreate that signal with no sampling whatsoever, and one ADC readout tells you its amplitude and phase. It can carry a bandwidth of 0 Hz.
  - spamizbad 4y ago
    Yep, but 8kHz is nearly twice the frequency of a piano’s high C (rightmost key). There are vocalists that can sing G10s (which is around 10k?) but they’re rare and not musically useful
    - Syonyk 4y ago
      It's not the base frequencies that matter, it's the harmonic sequence above the base note that makes for the difference between instruments. Play with it yourself - record various notes, on various instruments, do the FFT to break it into the frequency domain, and you'll see quite a few harmonics over the base note. Strip those out, and it sounds muddy. For those old enough, an analog phone line was typically limited to 300-3300Hz, give or take. It's more than enough to pass clearly understandable human voice, but neither it is the same as being next to someone. There are also a lot of the high frequencies present in the sort of transients that cymbals and snare drums and such put out - and I'll suggest that most audio compression algorithms mangle them quite badly until you get up into the lossless or "may as well have used lossless" bitrates.
    - JohnBooty 4y ago
      But that high C on a piano isn't a pure 4khz tone. There is a lot going on there above and below 4khz. You can prove this to yourself by looking at it in a frequency analyzer, or by simply listening to a pure 4khz tone and observing that it sounds a lot different than a piano. This is also why the same note played on different instruments sounds different. If you lop off everything above 8khz, things sound "muffled", like you've put a thin blanket over the speaker. No need to believe me, try it yourself in Audacity or any music playing app with EQ controls.
      - titzer 4y ago
        Not only that, but stringed instruments have a lot of frequencies in the first millisecond, right at the attack, until the string settles into its harmonic oscillations. This is very noticeable on a spectrogram and gives each plucked/raked/bowed note its distinctive character.
  - h2odragon 4y ago
    The common quoted range is something like 20hz to 20khz; most people aren't able to discern much beyond "sound is present" above 12khz to 16khz. There are however some folks who have much higher top ends, 24k to 32k and maybe more. hard to test. They hear bats talking. There's also things like hyperacusis which add an extra dimension of sensitivity to things others can dismiss completely like dynamic range and even phase. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperacusis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperacusis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperacusis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperacusis
  - wl 4y ago
    Yes, humans can detect sounds up to about 20 kHz when they're younger. That number goes down with age and noise exposure. But if you ever have taken a hearing test, you might notice they stop testing at 8 kHz. If you look at equal loudness curves, 8 kHz is around the point where sounds have to get much, much louder to be perceived as the same volume as sounds at lower frequencies. You can hear those higher frequencies in cymbals and a few other things in music if your hearing isn't thrashed, but in a practical sense, 8 kHz is the upper limit of useful human hearing.
- Exmoor 4y ago
  > I get the ceremony of vinyl, but it's not going to improve over perfect digital reproduction. As a millennial, I'm always slightly amused (and maybe a little horrified) to see my peers spend endless time and more than a little money hunting down vinyl releases of the music of our generation. I also listen to a lot of music from earlier generations and have noted that older collectors were and are thrilled to see that music get well-transferred and mastered releases on a digitally perfect and durable medium and generally consider those to be the definitive release.
  - primax 4y ago
    I'm quite fond of suggesting to them they just play a track of pops and hiss quietly over the digital recording to get the same effect.
  - Syonyk 4y ago
    What if they're right? https://dr.loudness-war.info/?artist=Taylor+Swift&album=Red https://dr.loudness-war.info/?artist=Taylor+Swift&album=Red - one fairly recent album I found in which the vinyl version seems to have quite a bit more dynamic range than the digital or CD versions. There's also the benefit of vinyl in that a single sale will typically send quite a bit of money actually to the band - vs streaming sending fractions of a penny, if that, per play. One of the best ways to actually support a band you like is to buy the LP, even if you don't have a turntable.
    - TimTheTinker 4y ago
      > in which the vinyl version seems to have quite a bit more dynamic range than the digital or CD versions Perhaps the mastering engineer did that intentionally? Surely the vinyl dynamic range doesn't exceed 96db.
    - Pet_Ant 4y ago
      As I said 58 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34597194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34597194 > Ugh, this frustrates me. You are just saying that the _mix_ put on vinyl is better than the mix put on CD. That same mix put on CD would be even better due to higher fidelity of the format. Vinyl is a strictly worse format... unfortunately it's also an easier source of better mixes. Demand better mixes, not vinyl.
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  Another is denial of Nyquist–Shannon Yeah. I'm in the camp that understands it. Well, maybe I don't totally understand it, but I understand its implications and was certainly unable to differentiate between "high-res" audio and redbook audio even in pathological cases. For consumer use, anything over CD quality (44.1khz / 16bit) is a waste. Over a long enough distance (~30 m), it's better to use ADC <-HDMI-> DAC usually than send line-level signals due to losses involved unless one wishes to spend zillions on the most perfectly engineered and widely-incompatible shielded coaxial cable imaginable. Or, for a simpler and more affordable option, just use balanced wiring. It is effectively interference proof. =) https://www.aviom.com/blog/balanced-vs-unbalanced/ https://www.aviom.com/blog/balanced-vs-unbalanced/ Further is the belief that lossless codecs cannot be replaced compressed lossless or sufficient parameters of some lossy formats. There are some details, particularly percussion, that are just not well represented by lossy formats. It's like trying to represent sharp text at small point sizes with a JPEG. Don't get me wrong. High bitrate lossy codecs are almost always good enough for nearly everything. It's what I listen to most of the time. I get the ceremony of vinyl, but it's not going to improve over perfect digital reproduction. Agree, although I actually don't see much of that -- people really perpetuating the myth that vinyl is technically superior to lossless digital -- these days. The one kink here is that sometimes vinyl releases are mastered better than their digital counterparts; many releases these days have that "brick wall" loudness wars mastering applied that smashes out all of the dynamic range. So sometimes there are vinyl releases that actually do sound better (though it has nothing to do with the format itself)
  - smilekzs 4y ago
    FWIW oversampling allows you to have simpler analog anti-aliasing (low pass) filters.
- Syonyk 4y ago
  > Further is the belief that lossless codecs cannot be replaced compressed lossless or sufficient parameters of some lossy formats. I'm a bit fuzzy as to what you're arguing here, but I think most people would agree that, at some bitrate, you're going to be effectively lossless with various compressed codes. That bitrate, though, is high enough that you're no longer saving that much over something like FLAC. Disk is cheap enough these days. I just tossed Dark Side of the Moon into a test. It's all 16 bit, 44.1kHz sample rate (CD quality). wav: 434MB flac: 249MB mp3 (-V0): 80MB A factor of 3 savings for MP3 vs lossless, with no generation losses, seems worth doing for audio. Tubes, the point isn't the "perfect reproduction" over digital, because a fairly cheap digital (relatively speaking) manages acoustically transparent reproduction (as long as the headphones or speakers can keep up). People just like how tubes sound. It's also a bit of a rejection of the digital, consumer tech, "can't build it, can't repair it, don't really own it" world we live in. I've got a Bottlehead kit half assembled on my workbench right now... Vinyl, similarly, I think is a rejection of that which has become background noise and digital and data-logged. Also, in terms of sound quality, be careful not to compare "The technical capabilities of a CD" with "The technical capabilities of vinyl." Compare albums, as delivered - https://dr.loudness-war.info/ https://dr.loudness-war.info/ is a useful resource here. In many cases, the CD mastering of an album is a brick wall compressed bit of rubbish, "optimized" for listening on earbuds on a subway. With both vinyl and the various "high def audio" formats, you're far more likely to find a master that's actually designed for a competent living room system - with the dynamics to match. https://dr.loudness-war.info/?artist=Boston&album=Boston https://dr.loudness-war.info/?artist=Boston&album=Boston - look at the difference in dynamic range between some of the older vinyl pressings of the album and some of the newer CD pressings. One may very well find that the vinyl sounds "better" - because it's got dynamic range. The problem is that the capabilities of the CD aren't being used, because someone was told, "Compress it and make it louder."
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  > Over a long enough distance (~30 m), it's better to use ADC <-HDMI-> DAC usually than send line-level signals due to losses involved unless one wishes to spend zillions on the most perfectly engineered and widely-incompatible shielded coaxial cable imaginable. This is something I ask every audiophile I ever meet. Why not use digital audio at all times and convert to analog as late as possible in the audio pipeline instead lf buying ten thousand dollar cables? No one ever gave me a good answer... > If you can't hear over 8 kHz, then you don't need 256-bit @ 96 kHz sampling. > Further is the belief that lossless codecs cannot be replaced compressed lossless or sufficient parameters of some lossy formats. The added precision is good for archival purposes and audio production though. It's easy to reduce quality later if necessary but the reverse is not true. Artist performances are unique, singular points in time. I think they should be captured with as much precision and quality as possible. > Obsession with vacuum tubes and/or vinyl. I get the ceremony of vinyl, but it's not going to improve over perfect digital reproduction. Isn't this due to the fact that older vinyls were mastered differently compared to modern releases? Nothing stops a digital audio recording from sounding just as good but the loudness war in the music industry resulted in masters with less dynamic range. Older music certainly has a different quality to my ears.
  - bobleeswagger 4y ago
    > This is something I ask every audiophile I ever meet. Why not use digital audio at all times and convert to analog as late as possible in the audio pipeline instead lf buying ten thousand dollar cables? No one ever gave me a good answer... If they want to keep the signal pure analog, that is enough of a reason.
    - matheusmoreira 4y ago
      > If they want to keep the signal pure analog, that is enough of a reason. Why would they want that? It's possible to perfectly reconstruct the original signal. The sampling theorem states that analog and digital audio are equivalent given a high enough sampling rate. > If a function x(t) contains no frequencies higher than B hertz, then it can be completely determined from its ordinates at a sequence of points spaced less than 1/2B seconds apart. I don't see the point of analog signals anywhere in the pipeline other than in a DAC whose output drives the actual speakers.
munificent 4y ago
> We’d suggest that better reviews would come from a truly independent publication giving the only HiFi verdicts that matter, blind tests and measurements from a high-end audio analyser, but we suspect that the industry lacks the courage to do so. It's not a lack of courage. The subjectivity is the point. Copy/pasting a comment of mine from last week: Whenever I think of audiophiles, I imagine a couple of older guys hanging out on a weekend. Because they're the kind of dudes who love maximizing and making numbers go up, it needs to have something to do with optimizing performance. Because they're somewhat wealthy and their success is a big part of their identity, it needs to be something expensive. Then, because they're friends who want to feel useful to each other, it needs to be riddled with inscrutable lore. That way there's always some handy bit of research, some nuggets of wisdom that they can share with each other. That's what this is really about: feeling like they can bond by sharing expertise about some complex hard to optimize problem. The actual problem itself is essentially arbitrary and subjective. In fact, it's better if it is arbitrary. Because any problem that can actually be solved means reaching an end to the ability to kibbitz and geek out. That's why bringing up objective metrics is such a faux pas in the audiophile world: it kills the game. And the whole point is to play the game together, forever.
- x0x0 4y ago
  There's places like audio science review which are exactly that, I think. eg their review of the Loxjie A30 https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/loxjie-a30-amplifier-review.17547/ https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/l...
  - JohnBooty 4y ago
    I can vouch for ASR. A very data-driven, engineering-driven view. The site's owner has several hundred thousand dollars worth of measurement gear - Audio Precision analyzer, GRAS headphone rig, Klippel NFS rig, etc.
    - Godel_unicode 4y ago
      > several hundred thousand dollars worth of measurement gear Isn’t this the point though? Does it actually require that much gear to get measurements that are accurate enough that no human can perceive the difference? With harmonic distortion for instance, we know what is inaudible and yet people keep lauding companies that push ever farther past it.
davidgerard 4y ago
As a some time rock journalist, I wish I could write about music as soaringly as audiophiles write about wires.
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  It was "journalists" themselves who got us into this mess, in a way. Audio magazines were dependent on advertisers, of course, and many of those advertisers were the sorts of companies selling bullcrap gear like magic speaker cables and other such snake oil. So you had the "journalists" in these magazines writing all this ridiculous crap singing the praises of magic speaker cables or whatever. The cycle continues today, in a way, with some Youtubers equally dependent on the income from those sorts of sources. The hobby as a whole has, THANKFULLY, largely moved away from the snake oil though. Lots of solid objectivists out there now. Snake oil salesmen can sway a magazine or an individual with money, but not an entire community. Lots more truth these days.
ggm 4y ago
It would be easier to read if you'd used polarity aligned fonts. These new quadrophonic, crystal annealled, polarised Times fonts, impart legibility especially in the legato middle section of an audiophile debate, the part where the recording needle was at 90 degrees vertical before the decline into the inner track. I only read using crystal aligned fonts. I recommend you do too. Available from bitstream, only $30,000 per letter. Ligatures not included.
- kps 4y ago
  The best fonts are made of lead, tin, and antimony.
  - ggm 4y ago
    78s do sound fantastic on the right player. I hope you're using a wooden needle not the modern steel kind.
    - 8bitsrule 4y ago
      Shouldn't that be a thistle?
- FpUser 4y ago
  OMG. Thank you. I would consider it to be the best comment.
steponlego 4y ago
I love all the anecdotes from people about audiophiles, it reminds me of the early days of the Randi forum. But OTOH there are very real subjective and objective ways to discover the truth, which is that a LOT of consumer audio products are trash. Take Class D amplifiers, for instance. They're complete and total trash until you get into the $1000+ market. Or many popular DACs (the chip, not the integrated product) which just sound, for lack of a better term, trashy and cold. Nasty.
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  Take Class D amplifiers, for instance. They're complete and total trash until you get into the $1000+ market Naaaaaah, this isn't true at all. Here's one with state of the art performance for $800: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/topping-la90-review-integrated-amplifier.33374/ https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/t... Lots of ones with totally acceptable performance for $100-$200 from Topping, SMSL, etc. By "totally acceptable" I mean they measure the same as affordable Class AB amps in the same price range. I've got loads of both in my house and have spent many hundreds of hours with each. One unfortunate reality for Class D amps is that admittedly, the power ratings tend to be wildly inflated. If something is advertised as "100W into 8ohms" you can bet that it's more like 40-50W before distortion rises massively in a hockey stick curve like graph. However if the buyer understands this, they still often deliver very competitive value. After all, any amp sounds bad when pushed into distortion.
- mellavora 4y ago
  I thought class T amplifiers were trash. Class D are more along the lines of "dogs*t".
- moogly 4y ago
  You really think companies like Genelec would put Class D amps in their products if they were "trash"?
  - steponlego 4y ago
    Heh, yeah.
dietrichepp 4y ago
I’ve been reading reviews of studio gear on gearspace recently and it’s been driving me crazy. It’s not like the audiophile space, not exactly, because the whole point of studio gear is to impart some kind of unique character (unless you’re talking, like, cables). So it’s a bunch of subjective opinions on things which are mostly subjective to begin with. What does a revision D 1176 sound like, and do you like a different revision better? What type of transformers do you prefer on your preamps?
- mellavora 4y ago
  Torroidy, with the steel shield to reduce hum. https://sklep.toroidy.pl/en_US/index https://sklep.toroidy.pl/en_US/index
  - dietrichepp 4y ago
    Those are not the types of transformers I’m talking about. You use signal transformers to isolate inputs / outputs, like these: https://cinemag.biz/mic_input/mic_input.php https://cinemag.biz/mic_input/mic_input.php https://cinemag.biz/line_input/line_input.php https://cinemag.biz/line_input/line_input.php They’re directly in the signal path of a preamp, and when overdriven, change the sound.
- regpertom 4y ago
  Not just studio but also live sound, from the perspective of people who use it for work. And so there is no ideal. What does it sound like? Ask yourself. Also ask yourself what your objectives are. Is it reliable and consistent? Does it play well with others? What, how, and when are your choices and everyone’s weaker when things get boiled down to ‘the best’ in such a space. So I like gearspace because enough people there understand that. I love when the first reply to ‘what’s the best mic?’ Is ‘what are you going to do with it?’ Instead of fawning over some ideal. You only put a LDC on vocals? Well I get by fine with a 58 so how essential is it really? Budget and priorities, very few things in the professional realm are actually trash, but boy is it fun and easy to say things like all class d amps are trash. Maybe they aren’t the best at reproduction, but they’re also light and cheap. You gonna spec 20k$ gear for a single Vox, acc gui, stomp gig to 30 people? Or is the pair of 500$ Yamahas gonna be fine? Solo or with a crew? 18kg vs 36kg for a 12 inch top box can make a difference. Blah blah blah sorry I’m rambling.
JohnBooty 4y ago
I mention this on every "audiophile" thread, but there are a lot of data- and engineering-driven audiophiles. There are folks (and associated communities) out there with engineering backgrounds and sophisticated industry-standard measurement gear: AudioPrecision analyzers, GRAD headphone measurement rigs, Klippel NFS scanners. https://www.erinsaudiocorner.com/ https://www.erinsaudiocorner.com/ https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?reviews/ https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?reviews/ I realize it's fun to dunk on all of the "crazies" who are tweaking their sound with crystals or whatever, but they are the lunatic fringe. Ultimately it's not too different from a lot of industries. Of course, folks hawking their products make some ludicrous claims at times. Just like car ads promise you a happy life with your family and dog if you buy a Subaru or Ford or whatever, there are some wild claims about audio equipment at times. However, there's also a very solid bedrock of actual engineering going on that can be understood and appreciated. And in my experience that's how most people do this hobby.
- inconceivable 4y ago
  seems like salvaging the audiophile label is a lost cause. i think most people just call those types audio engineers now. maybe audio quant will become en vogue in the future. or audio data scientist.
  - JohnBooty 4y ago
    I think "audio enthusiast" or "audio hobbyist" would probably be a good alternative. I am certainly enthusiastic about audio! However as a hobbyist it would be outrageous to call myself an audio engineer or scientist. Although, part of me I guess stupidly would like to reclaim "audiophile" as well.
  - brandall10 4y ago
    I’m someone who spent 15 years on Head-fi before discovering Audio Science Review 5 years ago. I’ll admit it, I move away from using the term audiophile, it’s such a loaded term. That said, I still have a set of Buchardt A500s that measure anechoically flat down to 25hz. I paid $4500 for these. I also have a set of Shure KSE1200 that I tune to Harman with PEQ using my lifetime subscription to Roon. These were $1650 as an open box. Aspirational ASR setups using high end studio monitors can push $10k. I believe the owner of ASR has a system exceeding $30k. None of these purchases are within the realm of normal, they just have backing by measurements of being pretty great… things that matter in the service of verifiably good sound. It would be wonderful to snatch that term back. The objectivism in the audio space seems to be taking a bigger mindshare as the years roll on.
ChancyChance 4y ago
That's it? <300 words and one quote? What a disappointment. I was expecting some analogue takedown of OP's claims to pseudoscience, instead of a not-even-long-enough-to-be-called-a-rant vapid puff piece.
yelling_cat 4y ago
What snares a lot of well-meaning music fans into wasting money on audio woo is that the first upgrades can be mind-blowing. Let's stick with headphones for simplicity. Pairing, say, a $400 set with a well-mastered album you've listened to hundreds of times and you'll discover sounds in it you've never noticed before - the singer's breathing, whispered background vocals, a guitar string's squeak. It even feels like each instrument is playing from physically distinct places! If the headphones are wired you might next add a $90 DAC/amp combo and - wow, you really feel the bass and sub-bass now! So what will take you to the next level? The honest answer is that absolutely nothing will provide improvement like what you've just experienced. Tripling your headphone budget gets you a number of beautiful, well-engineered cans with sound signatures tailored to your favorite sorts of music, but with improvements on the order of "that midrange has more detail, nice" than "holy crap!" Woo-selling companies target anyone still convinced at that point there is some next, higher level of audio bliss they can reach with the perfect combination of kit. Cables made from exotic materials, fancy power conditioners, rocks and stickers have glowing "reviews" and marketing pseudoscience about sonic transparency and skin effect. They do nothing and give the audiophile industry a bad name, but they'll be with us until suckers stop paying for them.
AstralStorm 4y ago
DIY part of the community is much more reasonable because the circuit diagrams are provided, and usually also build notes or examples. You can quickly make a reasonable guess at what the amplifier will do (or fail to) even before you build it with a bunch of EE knowledge and a few datasheets.
2b3a51 4y ago
I'm sitting here as the sun begins to set listening to Colin Carr playing Bach's Cello suites in an Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum recording from possibly a couple of decades ago on my cheapie headphones (Grado SR 80 open backed) coming off a mechanical hard drive via Linux and PulseAudo. The mp3 recorded at 128 kbit/s (they went to 192 kbit/s in later podcasts). I've got a real sense of the cello, and a feeling for the audience (little coughing!) and the size of the ISGM's room. Some breathing noises (Professor Carr is putting the work in) but the music is flowing. In terms of a transfer function this chain must be far from perfect but it sounds ok if a little 'chocolate'. I think it is all a bit subjective this stuff.
srcreigh 4y ago
My sound system project is pretty scientific. I have a mic to measure sound pressure, a program RoomEqWizard to measure the response of the system. A parametric EQ module to process the output against polynomial reductions. I also have a subwoofer box project. I modeled the response of my unit with a physics program WinISD. It incorporates properties of the subwoofer and the box to predict sound pressure levels. WinISD also predicts air velocity from the port, which if too high will produce fart noises. Farting is solved by making the port cross sectional area larger, and making the port channel longer to maintain the resonant frequency of the port. I have spent about $300 on supplies for the box. I’ll get a membership at a woodworking club to finish building it ($200/year, storage, tools, training). My 4.3cubic foot, 20-21Hz tuned sub box will enhance the response of the lowest audible 10-15Hz compared to the same speaker in a smaller box. It’ll fit nicely in my sedan trunk too. With respect to measuring response, an O(n) sine sweep can measure basic response. I’ve found many speakers can’t handle combination of bass and midrange, but can handle either or somewhat fine. I’m not sure how to measure this aspect. Maybe diff the original track from measured response somehow.

98 points by zdw 4y ago

Hahaha. The title says it all. My dad was one of these who should've known better making a living at electronics. I recall an urban legend about an audio engineer who added a "richness" control to a piece of studio equipment that did absolutely nothing but allowed some rich person to feel like they engineered an album. Over a long enough distance (~30 m), it's better to use ADC <-HDMI-> DAC usually than send line-level signals due to losses involved unless one wishes to spend zillions on the most perfectly engineered and widely-incompatible shielded coaxial cable imaginable. Another is denial of Nyquist–Shannon. If you can't hear over 8 kHz, then you don't need 256-bit @ 96 kHz sampling. It's more likely a badly-chosen lossy compression codec (or it's parameters), a nonuniform DAC, or some other source of analog signal loss is causing loss of fidelity by the time it reaches ears. Further is the belief that lossless codecs cannot be replaced compressed lossless or sufficient parameters of some lossy formats. Obsession with vacuum tubes and/or vinyl. I get the ceremony of vinyl, but it's not going to improve over perfect digital reproduction.

smeyer 4y ago
>If you can't hear over 8 kHz Can't most folks hear frequencies higher than 8 kHz? I don't disagree with your conclusions since I don't care much about audio quality, but I feel like I'm missing something here.
- causality0 4y ago
  Is there anything pleasant to hear over 8khz?
  - JohnBooty 4y ago
    Yeah, a lot of the "details" are 8khz and up. A pure 15khz tone isn't fun to listen to (if you can hear that high) but if you cut off everything above 8khz (or 7khz, or etc) things will start to sound increasingly more muffled. Experiment in Audacity or such to see for yourself.
  - muffles 4y ago
    The harmonics of a guitar or piano can extend well beyond 8kHz, even though they contain lower frequency components that give them their characteristic sound. In fact, the higher harmonics can contribute to the richness and complexity of the overall sound, even if they're not heard as distinct pitches. Similar effect occurs with cymbals, the high-frequency shimmer of cymbals can extend well above 8kHz. Also violins can include overtones that extend beyond 8kHz and the sound of a trumpet can include overtones that extend up to 10kHz or higher.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    No one wants to listen to pure tones over 8kHz, but things like cymbal crashes would sound rather different if you cut off those higher frequencies. The primary frequencies are of course under that cut-off, but there's lots of other frequencies above it.
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  Yeah I think parent poster confused a detail or two. 20hz-20khz is the human range, more or less. For most adults it's more like 15khz. The 44.1khz sampling rate of CD audio was chosen because it can represent frequencies up to 22.05hz (44.1khz / 2) which safely covers the frequency range of human hearing with a bit of headroom for good measure.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    But surely at 22khz you can only oscillate between 2 values if sampling at 44khz, whereas 2khz gets 20 values in the same 180 degrees of the wave? So doesn’t this mean you lose fidelity at higher frequencies? Edit: thanks for all these great responses!
    - aidenn0 4y ago
      A CD is 16 bits, so you have 65536 possible values to oscillate between. If you mean "does a 44khz only output a square (or triangle) wave at 22kHz, the answer is "no." If you have two alternating values at 44kHz, the output will be a perfect (to the limits of noise &c.) sine wave, since the DAC is band limited. If this is still confusing to you, I recommend watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG9jemV1T7I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG9jemV1T7I
    - tkuraku 4y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_samp... You can only capture all the information if you sample at twice the rate of the highest frequency of interest.
    - lxgr 4y ago
      A sine wave is a sine wave; it can't contain any "additional information" that would gain anything from getting encoded by more data points. If it would, it wouldn't be a sine wave anymore, and you could decompose it into its component of phase and amplitude shifted sine waves, which will occupy all kinds of places in the frequency domain, many of them higher than your initial 22 kHz. That's in fact what we mean when we say "a 22 kHz signal": An ensemble of all of these overlapping waves represented as a single signal. If you're sampling that with an ADC, you're not only sampling the the 22 kHz wave, but you're also sampling it – and that, but only that, can in fact be described with a single bit per ADC readout. Looking at it from an information theoretical point of view, the Kolgomorov complexity of "a sine wave of 22 kHz and amplitude x" is pretty minimal – just from that sentence, you can perfectly recreate that signal with no sampling whatsoever, and one ADC readout tells you its amplitude and phase. It can carry a bandwidth of 0 Hz.
- spamizbad 4y ago
  Yep, but 8kHz is nearly twice the frequency of a piano’s high C (rightmost key). There are vocalists that can sing G10s (which is around 10k?) but they’re rare and not musically useful
  - Syonyk 4y ago
    It's not the base frequencies that matter, it's the harmonic sequence above the base note that makes for the difference between instruments. Play with it yourself - record various notes, on various instruments, do the FFT to break it into the frequency domain, and you'll see quite a few harmonics over the base note. Strip those out, and it sounds muddy. For those old enough, an analog phone line was typically limited to 300-3300Hz, give or take. It's more than enough to pass clearly understandable human voice, but neither it is the same as being next to someone. There are also a lot of the high frequencies present in the sort of transients that cymbals and snare drums and such put out - and I'll suggest that most audio compression algorithms mangle them quite badly until you get up into the lossless or "may as well have used lossless" bitrates.
  - JohnBooty 4y ago
    But that high C on a piano isn't a pure 4khz tone. There is a lot going on there above and below 4khz. You can prove this to yourself by looking at it in a frequency analyzer, or by simply listening to a pure 4khz tone and observing that it sounds a lot different than a piano. This is also why the same note played on different instruments sounds different. If you lop off everything above 8khz, things sound "muffled", like you've put a thin blanket over the speaker. No need to believe me, try it yourself in Audacity or any music playing app with EQ controls.
    - titzer 4y ago
      Not only that, but stringed instruments have a lot of frequencies in the first millisecond, right at the attack, until the string settles into its harmonic oscillations. This is very noticeable on a spectrogram and gives each plucked/raked/bowed note its distinctive character.
- h2odragon 4y ago
  The common quoted range is something like 20hz to 20khz; most people aren't able to discern much beyond "sound is present" above 12khz to 16khz. There are however some folks who have much higher top ends, 24k to 32k and maybe more. hard to test. They hear bats talking. There's also things like hyperacusis which add an extra dimension of sensitivity to things others can dismiss completely like dynamic range and even phase. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperacusis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperacusis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperacusis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperacusis
- wl 4y ago
  Yes, humans can detect sounds up to about 20 kHz when they're younger. That number goes down with age and noise exposure. But if you ever have taken a hearing test, you might notice they stop testing at 8 kHz. If you look at equal loudness curves, 8 kHz is around the point where sounds have to get much, much louder to be perceived as the same volume as sounds at lower frequencies. You can hear those higher frequencies in cymbals and a few other things in music if your hearing isn't thrashed, but in a practical sense, 8 kHz is the upper limit of useful human hearing.
Exmoor 4y ago
> I get the ceremony of vinyl, but it's not going to improve over perfect digital reproduction. As a millennial, I'm always slightly amused (and maybe a little horrified) to see my peers spend endless time and more than a little money hunting down vinyl releases of the music of our generation. I also listen to a lot of music from earlier generations and have noted that older collectors were and are thrilled to see that music get well-transferred and mastered releases on a digitally perfect and durable medium and generally consider those to be the definitive release.
- primax 4y ago
  I'm quite fond of suggesting to them they just play a track of pops and hiss quietly over the digital recording to get the same effect.
- Syonyk 4y ago
  What if they're right? https://dr.loudness-war.info/?artist=Taylor+Swift&album=Red https://dr.loudness-war.info/?artist=Taylor+Swift&album=Red - one fairly recent album I found in which the vinyl version seems to have quite a bit more dynamic range than the digital or CD versions. There's also the benefit of vinyl in that a single sale will typically send quite a bit of money actually to the band - vs streaming sending fractions of a penny, if that, per play. One of the best ways to actually support a band you like is to buy the LP, even if you don't have a turntable.
  - TimTheTinker 4y ago
    > in which the vinyl version seems to have quite a bit more dynamic range than the digital or CD versions Perhaps the mastering engineer did that intentionally? Surely the vinyl dynamic range doesn't exceed 96db.
  - Pet_Ant 4y ago
    As I said 58 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34597194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34597194 > Ugh, this frustrates me. You are just saying that the _mix_ put on vinyl is better than the mix put on CD. That same mix put on CD would be even better due to higher fidelity of the format. Vinyl is a strictly worse format... unfortunately it's also an easier source of better mixes. Demand better mixes, not vinyl.
JohnBooty 4y ago
Another is denial of Nyquist–Shannon Yeah. I'm in the camp that understands it. Well, maybe I don't totally understand it, but I understand its implications and was certainly unable to differentiate between "high-res" audio and redbook audio even in pathological cases. For consumer use, anything over CD quality (44.1khz / 16bit) is a waste. Over a long enough distance (~30 m), it's better to use ADC <-HDMI-> DAC usually than send line-level signals due to losses involved unless one wishes to spend zillions on the most perfectly engineered and widely-incompatible shielded coaxial cable imaginable. Or, for a simpler and more affordable option, just use balanced wiring. It is effectively interference proof. =) https://www.aviom.com/blog/balanced-vs-unbalanced/ https://www.aviom.com/blog/balanced-vs-unbalanced/ Further is the belief that lossless codecs cannot be replaced compressed lossless or sufficient parameters of some lossy formats. There are some details, particularly percussion, that are just not well represented by lossy formats. It's like trying to represent sharp text at small point sizes with a JPEG. Don't get me wrong. High bitrate lossy codecs are almost always good enough for nearly everything. It's what I listen to most of the time. I get the ceremony of vinyl, but it's not going to improve over perfect digital reproduction. Agree, although I actually don't see much of that -- people really perpetuating the myth that vinyl is technically superior to lossless digital -- these days. The one kink here is that sometimes vinyl releases are mastered better than their digital counterparts; many releases these days have that "brick wall" loudness wars mastering applied that smashes out all of the dynamic range. So sometimes there are vinyl releases that actually do sound better (though it has nothing to do with the format itself)
- smilekzs 4y ago
  FWIW oversampling allows you to have simpler analog anti-aliasing (low pass) filters.
Syonyk 4y ago
> Further is the belief that lossless codecs cannot be replaced compressed lossless or sufficient parameters of some lossy formats. I'm a bit fuzzy as to what you're arguing here, but I think most people would agree that, at some bitrate, you're going to be effectively lossless with various compressed codes. That bitrate, though, is high enough that you're no longer saving that much over something like FLAC. Disk is cheap enough these days. I just tossed Dark Side of the Moon into a test. It's all 16 bit, 44.1kHz sample rate (CD quality). wav: 434MB flac: 249MB mp3 (-V0): 80MB A factor of 3 savings for MP3 vs lossless, with no generation losses, seems worth doing for audio. Tubes, the point isn't the "perfect reproduction" over digital, because a fairly cheap digital (relatively speaking) manages acoustically transparent reproduction (as long as the headphones or speakers can keep up). People just like how tubes sound. It's also a bit of a rejection of the digital, consumer tech, "can't build it, can't repair it, don't really own it" world we live in. I've got a Bottlehead kit half assembled on my workbench right now... Vinyl, similarly, I think is a rejection of that which has become background noise and digital and data-logged. Also, in terms of sound quality, be careful not to compare "The technical capabilities of a CD" with "The technical capabilities of vinyl." Compare albums, as delivered - https://dr.loudness-war.info/ https://dr.loudness-war.info/ is a useful resource here. In many cases, the CD mastering of an album is a brick wall compressed bit of rubbish, "optimized" for listening on earbuds on a subway. With both vinyl and the various "high def audio" formats, you're far more likely to find a master that's actually designed for a competent living room system - with the dynamics to match. https://dr.loudness-war.info/?artist=Boston&album=Boston https://dr.loudness-war.info/?artist=Boston&album=Boston - look at the difference in dynamic range between some of the older vinyl pressings of the album and some of the newer CD pressings. One may very well find that the vinyl sounds "better" - because it's got dynamic range. The problem is that the capabilities of the CD aren't being used, because someone was told, "Compress it and make it louder."
matheusmoreira 4y ago
> Over a long enough distance (~30 m), it's better to use ADC <-HDMI-> DAC usually than send line-level signals due to losses involved unless one wishes to spend zillions on the most perfectly engineered and widely-incompatible shielded coaxial cable imaginable. This is something I ask every audiophile I ever meet. Why not use digital audio at all times and convert to analog as late as possible in the audio pipeline instead lf buying ten thousand dollar cables? No one ever gave me a good answer... > If you can't hear over 8 kHz, then you don't need 256-bit @ 96 kHz sampling. > Further is the belief that lossless codecs cannot be replaced compressed lossless or sufficient parameters of some lossy formats. The added precision is good for archival purposes and audio production though. It's easy to reduce quality later if necessary but the reverse is not true. Artist performances are unique, singular points in time. I think they should be captured with as much precision and quality as possible. > Obsession with vacuum tubes and/or vinyl. I get the ceremony of vinyl, but it's not going to improve over perfect digital reproduction. Isn't this due to the fact that older vinyls were mastered differently compared to modern releases? Nothing stops a digital audio recording from sounding just as good but the loudness war in the music industry resulted in masters with less dynamic range. Older music certainly has a different quality to my ears.
- bobleeswagger 4y ago
  > This is something I ask every audiophile I ever meet. Why not use digital audio at all times and convert to analog as late as possible in the audio pipeline instead lf buying ten thousand dollar cables? No one ever gave me a good answer... If they want to keep the signal pure analog, that is enough of a reason.
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    > If they want to keep the signal pure analog, that is enough of a reason. Why would they want that? It's possible to perfectly reconstruct the original signal. The sampling theorem states that analog and digital audio are equivalent given a high enough sampling rate. > If a function x(t) contains no frequencies higher than B hertz, then it can be completely determined from its ordinates at a sequence of points spaced less than 1/2B seconds apart. I don't see the point of analog signals anywhere in the pipeline other than in a DAC whose output drives the actual speakers.

munificent 4y ago

> We’d suggest that better reviews would come from a truly independent publication giving the only HiFi verdicts that matter, blind tests and measurements from a high-end audio analyser, but we suspect that the industry lacks the courage to do so. It's not a lack of courage. The subjectivity is the point. Copy/pasting a comment of mine from last week: Whenever I think of audiophiles, I imagine a couple of older guys hanging out on a weekend. Because they're the kind of dudes who love maximizing and making numbers go up, it needs to have something to do with optimizing performance. Because they're somewhat wealthy and their success is a big part of their identity, it needs to be something expensive. Then, because they're friends who want to feel useful to each other, it needs to be riddled with inscrutable lore. That way there's always some handy bit of research, some nuggets of wisdom that they can share with each other. That's what this is really about: feeling like they can bond by sharing expertise about some complex hard to optimize problem. The actual problem itself is essentially arbitrary and subjective. In fact, it's better if it is arbitrary. Because any problem that can actually be solved means reaching an end to the ability to kibbitz and geek out. That's why bringing up objective metrics is such a faux pas in the audiophile world: it kills the game. And the whole point is to play the game together, forever.

x0x0 4y ago
There's places like audio science review which are exactly that, I think. eg their review of the Loxjie A30 https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/loxjie-a30-amplifier-review.17547/ https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/l...
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  I can vouch for ASR. A very data-driven, engineering-driven view. The site's owner has several hundred thousand dollars worth of measurement gear - Audio Precision analyzer, GRAS headphone rig, Klippel NFS rig, etc.
  - Godel_unicode 4y ago
    > several hundred thousand dollars worth of measurement gear Isn’t this the point though? Does it actually require that much gear to get measurements that are accurate enough that no human can perceive the difference? With harmonic distortion for instance, we know what is inaudible and yet people keep lauding companies that push ever farther past it.

davidgerard 4y ago

As a some time rock journalist, I wish I could write about music as soaringly as audiophiles write about wires.

JohnBooty 4y ago
It was "journalists" themselves who got us into this mess, in a way. Audio magazines were dependent on advertisers, of course, and many of those advertisers were the sorts of companies selling bullcrap gear like magic speaker cables and other such snake oil. So you had the "journalists" in these magazines writing all this ridiculous crap singing the praises of magic speaker cables or whatever. The cycle continues today, in a way, with some Youtubers equally dependent on the income from those sorts of sources. The hobby as a whole has, THANKFULLY, largely moved away from the snake oil though. Lots of solid objectivists out there now. Snake oil salesmen can sway a magazine or an individual with money, but not an entire community. Lots more truth these days.

ggm 4y ago

It would be easier to read if you'd used polarity aligned fonts. These new quadrophonic, crystal annealled, polarised Times fonts, impart legibility especially in the legato middle section of an audiophile debate, the part where the recording needle was at 90 degrees vertical before the decline into the inner track. I only read using crystal aligned fonts. I recommend you do too. Available from bitstream, only $30,000 per letter. Ligatures not included.

kps 4y ago
The best fonts are made of lead, tin, and antimony.
- ggm 4y ago
  78s do sound fantastic on the right player. I hope you're using a wooden needle not the modern steel kind.
  - 8bitsrule 4y ago
    Shouldn't that be a thistle?
FpUser 4y ago
OMG. Thank you. I would consider it to be the best comment.

steponlego 4y ago

I love all the anecdotes from people about audiophiles, it reminds me of the early days of the Randi forum. But OTOH there are very real subjective and objective ways to discover the truth, which is that a LOT of consumer audio products are trash. Take Class D amplifiers, for instance. They're complete and total trash until you get into the $1000+ market. Or many popular DACs (the chip, not the integrated product) which just sound, for lack of a better term, trashy and cold. Nasty.

JohnBooty 4y ago
Take Class D amplifiers, for instance. They're complete and total trash until you get into the $1000+ market Naaaaaah, this isn't true at all. Here's one with state of the art performance for $800: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/topping-la90-review-integrated-amplifier.33374/ https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/t... Lots of ones with totally acceptable performance for $100-$200 from Topping, SMSL, etc. By "totally acceptable" I mean they measure the same as affordable Class AB amps in the same price range. I've got loads of both in my house and have spent many hundreds of hours with each. One unfortunate reality for Class D amps is that admittedly, the power ratings tend to be wildly inflated. If something is advertised as "100W into 8ohms" you can bet that it's more like 40-50W before distortion rises massively in a hockey stick curve like graph. However if the buyer understands this, they still often deliver very competitive value. After all, any amp sounds bad when pushed into distortion.
mellavora 4y ago
I thought class T amplifiers were trash. Class D are more along the lines of "dogs*t".
moogly 4y ago
You really think companies like Genelec would put Class D amps in their products if they were "trash"?
- steponlego 4y ago
  Heh, yeah.

dietrichepp 4y ago

I’ve been reading reviews of studio gear on gearspace recently and it’s been driving me crazy. It’s not like the audiophile space, not exactly, because the whole point of studio gear is to impart some kind of unique character (unless you’re talking, like, cables). So it’s a bunch of subjective opinions on things which are mostly subjective to begin with. What does a revision D 1176 sound like, and do you like a different revision better? What type of transformers do you prefer on your preamps?

mellavora 4y ago
Torroidy, with the steel shield to reduce hum. https://sklep.toroidy.pl/en_US/index https://sklep.toroidy.pl/en_US/index
- dietrichepp 4y ago
  Those are not the types of transformers I’m talking about. You use signal transformers to isolate inputs / outputs, like these: https://cinemag.biz/mic_input/mic_input.php https://cinemag.biz/mic_input/mic_input.php https://cinemag.biz/line_input/line_input.php https://cinemag.biz/line_input/line_input.php They’re directly in the signal path of a preamp, and when overdriven, change the sound.
regpertom 4y ago
Not just studio but also live sound, from the perspective of people who use it for work. And so there is no ideal. What does it sound like? Ask yourself. Also ask yourself what your objectives are. Is it reliable and consistent? Does it play well with others? What, how, and when are your choices and everyone’s weaker when things get boiled down to ‘the best’ in such a space. So I like gearspace because enough people there understand that. I love when the first reply to ‘what’s the best mic?’ Is ‘what are you going to do with it?’ Instead of fawning over some ideal. You only put a LDC on vocals? Well I get by fine with a 58 so how essential is it really? Budget and priorities, very few things in the professional realm are actually trash, but boy is it fun and easy to say things like all class d amps are trash. Maybe they aren’t the best at reproduction, but they’re also light and cheap. You gonna spec 20k$ gear for a single Vox, acc gui, stomp gig to 30 people? Or is the pair of 500$ Yamahas gonna be fine? Solo or with a crew? 18kg vs 36kg for a 12 inch top box can make a difference. Blah blah blah sorry I’m rambling.

JohnBooty 4y ago

I mention this on every "audiophile" thread, but there are a lot of data- and engineering-driven audiophiles. There are folks (and associated communities) out there with engineering backgrounds and sophisticated industry-standard measurement gear: AudioPrecision analyzers, GRAD headphone measurement rigs, Klippel NFS scanners. https://www.erinsaudiocorner.com/ https://www.erinsaudiocorner.com/ https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?reviews/ https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?reviews/ I realize it's fun to dunk on all of the "crazies" who are tweaking their sound with crystals or whatever, but they are the lunatic fringe. Ultimately it's not too different from a lot of industries. Of course, folks hawking their products make some ludicrous claims at times. Just like car ads promise you a happy life with your family and dog if you buy a Subaru or Ford or whatever, there are some wild claims about audio equipment at times. However, there's also a very solid bedrock of actual engineering going on that can be understood and appreciated. And in my experience that's how most people do this hobby.

inconceivable 4y ago
seems like salvaging the audiophile label is a lost cause. i think most people just call those types audio engineers now. maybe audio quant will become en vogue in the future. or audio data scientist.
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  I think "audio enthusiast" or "audio hobbyist" would probably be a good alternative. I am certainly enthusiastic about audio! However as a hobbyist it would be outrageous to call myself an audio engineer or scientist. Although, part of me I guess stupidly would like to reclaim "audiophile" as well.
- brandall10 4y ago
  I’m someone who spent 15 years on Head-fi before discovering Audio Science Review 5 years ago. I’ll admit it, I move away from using the term audiophile, it’s such a loaded term. That said, I still have a set of Buchardt A500s that measure anechoically flat down to 25hz. I paid $4500 for these. I also have a set of Shure KSE1200 that I tune to Harman with PEQ using my lifetime subscription to Roon. These were $1650 as an open box. Aspirational ASR setups using high end studio monitors can push $10k. I believe the owner of ASR has a system exceeding $30k. None of these purchases are within the realm of normal, they just have backing by measurements of being pretty great… things that matter in the service of verifiably good sound. It would be wonderful to snatch that term back. The objectivism in the audio space seems to be taking a bigger mindshare as the years roll on.

ChancyChance 4y ago

That's it? <300 words and one quote? What a disappointment. I was expecting some analogue takedown of OP's claims to pseudoscience, instead of a not-even-long-enough-to-be-called-a-rant vapid puff piece.

yelling_cat 4y ago

What snares a lot of well-meaning music fans into wasting money on audio woo is that the first upgrades can be mind-blowing. Let's stick with headphones for simplicity. Pairing, say, a $400 set with a well-mastered album you've listened to hundreds of times and you'll discover sounds in it you've never noticed before - the singer's breathing, whispered background vocals, a guitar string's squeak. It even feels like each instrument is playing from physically distinct places! If the headphones are wired you might next add a $90 DAC/amp combo and - wow, you really feel the bass and sub-bass now! So what will take you to the next level? The honest answer is that absolutely nothing will provide improvement like what you've just experienced. Tripling your headphone budget gets you a number of beautiful, well-engineered cans with sound signatures tailored to your favorite sorts of music, but with improvements on the order of "that midrange has more detail, nice" than "holy crap!" Woo-selling companies target anyone still convinced at that point there is some next, higher level of audio bliss they can reach with the perfect combination of kit. Cables made from exotic materials, fancy power conditioners, rocks and stickers have glowing "reviews" and marketing pseudoscience about sonic transparency and skin effect. They do nothing and give the audiophile industry a bad name, but they'll be with us until suckers stop paying for them.

AstralStorm 4y ago

DIY part of the community is much more reasonable because the circuit diagrams are provided, and usually also build notes or examples. You can quickly make a reasonable guess at what the amplifier will do (or fail to) even before you build it with a bunch of EE knowledge and a few datasheets.

2b3a51 4y ago

I'm sitting here as the sun begins to set listening to Colin Carr playing Bach's Cello suites in an Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum recording from possibly a couple of decades ago on my cheapie headphones (Grado SR 80 open backed) coming off a mechanical hard drive via Linux and PulseAudo. The mp3 recorded at 128 kbit/s (they went to 192 kbit/s in later podcasts). I've got a real sense of the cello, and a feeling for the audience (little coughing!) and the size of the ISGM's room. Some breathing noises (Professor Carr is putting the work in) but the music is flowing. In terms of a transfer function this chain must be far from perfect but it sounds ok if a little 'chocolate'. I think it is all a bit subjective this stuff.

srcreigh 4y ago

My sound system project is pretty scientific. I have a mic to measure sound pressure, a program RoomEqWizard to measure the response of the system. A parametric EQ module to process the output against polynomial reductions. I also have a subwoofer box project. I modeled the response of my unit with a physics program WinISD. It incorporates properties of the subwoofer and the box to predict sound pressure levels. WinISD also predicts air velocity from the port, which if too high will produce fart noises. Farting is solved by making the port cross sectional area larger, and making the port channel longer to maintain the resonant frequency of the port. I have spent about $300 on supplies for the box. I’ll get a membership at a woodworking club to finish building it ($200/year, storage, tools, training). My 4.3cubic foot, 20-21Hz tuned sub box will enhance the response of the lowest audible 10-15Hz compared to the same speaker in a smaller box. It’ll fit nicely in my sedan trunk too. With respect to measuring response, an O(n) sine sweep can measure basic response. I’ve found many speakers can’t handle combination of bass and midrange, but can handle either or somewhat fine. I’m not sure how to measure this aspect. Maybe diff the original track from measured response somehow.