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It’s much easier in audio equipment where there haven’t been any real advancements in the last 30 years. Premium brands mostly sell things like premium material

It’s much easier in audio equipment where there haven’t been any real advancements in the last 30 years. Premium brands mostly sell things like premium materials which subjectively make things sound “better”. Phones are a thousand times more complicated and the state of the art for chips is constantly changing

1-6 3y ago
B&O will have to build hand carved (wooden) or CNC milled electronics that borders on art. Hopefully the’ll incorporate upgradeable CPUs or microcontrollers then to really make it timeless. I can possibly see a direction there.
- peatmoss 3y ago
  Article mentions a £110,000 speaker line. For that money, I think you'd be better off paying a sound engineer and a woodworker to build a custom speaker set for your space. I struggle to imagine that B&O can do anything at a factory to deliver better sound than what could be achieved with a decent survey of the space and affordable quality components. A custom woodworker can certainly build extremely attractive, one-of-a-kind enclosures that conform to published specifications about speakers. Such a custom speaker design wouldn't even be full of snake oil, and would have the authenticity to impress any non-bullshit plebeian that a £110k-speaker-buying person invites to their home. :-)
dsr_ 3y ago
That's incorrect. In the last 30 years (since 1993), we have got class D amplifiers which can be both power-efficient and as flat as human ears can detect, switching power supplies to go along with them, DACs which are both cheap and absolutely transparent, MP3 and other perceptual lossy codecs, FLAC and ALAC, near field scanners to evaluate speaker performance, the Olive scoring method and several preference curves, and extreme improvements in bandwidth and storage.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  there were commercial class D amplifiers in the 1970s, Sony iirc. but back then Philips had a very cool amplifier, not class D, which fed a signal from the loudspeaker cone back into the negative feedback loop to correct any error!
  - dsr_ 3y ago
    They were invented in 1955, but high quality class D audio amplifiers have only been around since the mid90s, and are only now available as simultaneously good, high-power, and cheap. Servo-controlled subwoofers are readily available these days; full-range servo systems are comparatively rare, because the end user generally wants room-calibrated equalization anyway.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
  Audiophools have been convinced that none of that faithfully reproduces a recording. It's tech for the common people who can't afford a real amp fed by oxygen free cabling to a phonorecord player with a 60 dB noise floor.
amluto 3y ago
> where there haven’t been any real advancements in the last 30 years. Really? In the last 30 years, we have highly efficient, essentially perfect class D amplifiers. DACs and ADCs that are essentially perfect are cheap. We have essentially perfect audio codecs, if only we could get people to use them. We have enough bandwidth to stream lossless and near-lossless audio. We can combine cheap, excellent DSP with cheap, excellent amplifiers to make active speakers with excellent frequency response and appropriate limiting logic to avoid damaging the drivers.
- pydry 3y ago
  Where are these cheap and excellent amps and speakers? As far as I was aware a near perfect DSP is cheap as chips but if you wanted a decent subwoofer (for instance) you still needed to pay $$$.
  - amluto 3y ago
    The actual speakers haven’t changed much, although I suspect many are increasingly designed around the availability of good DSP. But the good amps are all over. Look at any site with actual data. For example, this thing is definitely cheap: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/extron-xpa-1002-plus-amplifier-review.35557/ https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/e... Some of what’s going on is that TI and others are making very good class D amplifiers on a chip, and they’re fairly easy to integrate. Several companies (IMO sadly mostly Chinese) are selling integrated DSPs and amps that are fantastic and cost a couple hundred dollars. They probably outperform multiple thousands of dollars of gear from 30 years ago, and they are far smaller and generate much much less heat.
- fbdab103 3y ago
  >We have essentially perfect audio codecs, if only we could get people to use them What audio codecs should we be using?
  - amluto 3y ago
    On your computer? Opus, AAC, MP3 with a good encoder and an appropriate rate? Many choices are widely available and transparent. It’s the hidden codecs that still degrade audio. HD radio, most Bluetooth protocols, mobile and landline phones and the networks that interconnect them, etc. You don’t get much say in these.
ta988 3y ago
There is a clear advancement. You used to need an amp and large speakers with long cables to have any kind of fidelity. Now you have decent sound with really small speakers. You can even listen to music on a laptop and it doesn't suck too much. We have tiny earbuds with no cable that isolate us from the outside sounds and also have a pretty incredible sound quality compared to what we had even 20 years ago in the same form factor.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  Even if we accept your claims about tiny earbuds and speakers (which I don't), the abysmally depressing fact is that we have nothing to listen to on them. All popular music has been systematically destroyed with dynamic compression since the late '90s.
  - mrob 3y ago
    You occasionally see remasters going against the trend and increasing dynamic range. Earache Records has several high dynamic range versions of classic metal albums on Bandcamp.
    - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
      That's nice to hear!
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    You might just want to stop listening to pop music. The way people engineer and mix pop music has traditionally been different from detail-oriented recordings and audiophile trappings. Before overcompression, pop music would trapeze between quiet acoustic sections and "wall of sound" crescendos that sounded awful on radio. Even further before that, fully soundstaged recordings got mixed down to mono to sound good on commodity listening hardware. There's a tenured history of making music worse to make it more widely enjoyable. The fact that the world's most popular headphones are lower-quality versions of the Earpods should tell you everything about the modern music landscape.
dangus 3y ago
Digital surround sound audio debuted in theaters in 1992, and DTS was released as a competitor to Dolby in 1993. You couldn’t even get movie audio at home with more than two channels 30 years ago.
FredPret 3y ago
Audio equipment got a thousand times better in the last decade, never mind three decades. I remember small speakers being absolutely tinny and bad in the 90's. Now the speakers in my phone kicks the butt of a medium-sized radio from that era. Hell, my HomePod is on par with the much larger and vastly more expensive B&O hifi system I had then!

1-6 3y ago

B&O will have to build hand carved (wooden) or CNC milled electronics that borders on art. Hopefully the’ll incorporate upgradeable CPUs or microcontrollers then to really make it timeless. I can possibly see a direction there.

peatmoss 3y ago
Article mentions a £110,000 speaker line. For that money, I think you'd be better off paying a sound engineer and a woodworker to build a custom speaker set for your space. I struggle to imagine that B&O can do anything at a factory to deliver better sound than what could be achieved with a decent survey of the space and affordable quality components. A custom woodworker can certainly build extremely attractive, one-of-a-kind enclosures that conform to published specifications about speakers. Such a custom speaker design wouldn't even be full of snake oil, and would have the authenticity to impress any non-bullshit plebeian that a £110k-speaker-buying person invites to their home. :-)

dsr_ 3y ago

That's incorrect. In the last 30 years (since 1993), we have got class D amplifiers which can be both power-efficient and as flat as human ears can detect, switching power supplies to go along with them, DACs which are both cheap and absolutely transparent, MP3 and other perceptual lossy codecs, FLAC and ALAC, near field scanners to evaluate speaker performance, the Olive scoring method and several preference curves, and extreme improvements in bandwidth and storage.

fsckboy 3y ago
there were commercial class D amplifiers in the 1970s, Sony iirc. but back then Philips had a very cool amplifier, not class D, which fed a signal from the loudspeaker cone back into the negative feedback loop to correct any error!
- dsr_ 3y ago
  They were invented in 1955, but high quality class D audio amplifiers have only been around since the mid90s, and are only now available as simultaneously good, high-power, and cheap. Servo-controlled subwoofers are readily available these days; full-range servo systems are comparatively rare, because the end user generally wants room-calibrated equalization anyway.
kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
Audiophools have been convinced that none of that faithfully reproduces a recording. It's tech for the common people who can't afford a real amp fed by oxygen free cabling to a phonorecord player with a 60 dB noise floor.

amluto 3y ago

> where there haven’t been any real advancements in the last 30 years. Really? In the last 30 years, we have highly efficient, essentially perfect class D amplifiers. DACs and ADCs that are essentially perfect are cheap. We have essentially perfect audio codecs, if only we could get people to use them. We have enough bandwidth to stream lossless and near-lossless audio. We can combine cheap, excellent DSP with cheap, excellent amplifiers to make active speakers with excellent frequency response and appropriate limiting logic to avoid damaging the drivers.

pydry 3y ago
Where are these cheap and excellent amps and speakers? As far as I was aware a near perfect DSP is cheap as chips but if you wanted a decent subwoofer (for instance) you still needed to pay $$$.
- amluto 3y ago
  The actual speakers haven’t changed much, although I suspect many are increasingly designed around the availability of good DSP. But the good amps are all over. Look at any site with actual data. For example, this thing is definitely cheap: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/extron-xpa-1002-plus-amplifier-review.35557/ https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/e... Some of what’s going on is that TI and others are making very good class D amplifiers on a chip, and they’re fairly easy to integrate. Several companies (IMO sadly mostly Chinese) are selling integrated DSPs and amps that are fantastic and cost a couple hundred dollars. They probably outperform multiple thousands of dollars of gear from 30 years ago, and they are far smaller and generate much much less heat.
fbdab103 3y ago
>We have essentially perfect audio codecs, if only we could get people to use them What audio codecs should we be using?
- amluto 3y ago
  On your computer? Opus, AAC, MP3 with a good encoder and an appropriate rate? Many choices are widely available and transparent. It’s the hidden codecs that still degrade audio. HD radio, most Bluetooth protocols, mobile and landline phones and the networks that interconnect them, etc. You don’t get much say in these.

ta988 3y ago

There is a clear advancement. You used to need an amp and large speakers with long cables to have any kind of fidelity. Now you have decent sound with really small speakers. You can even listen to music on a laptop and it doesn't suck too much. We have tiny earbuds with no cable that isolate us from the outside sounds and also have a pretty incredible sound quality compared to what we had even 20 years ago in the same form factor.

ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
Even if we accept your claims about tiny earbuds and speakers (which I don't), the abysmally depressing fact is that we have nothing to listen to on them. All popular music has been systematically destroyed with dynamic compression since the late '90s.
- mrob 3y ago
  You occasionally see remasters going against the trend and increasing dynamic range. Earache Records has several high dynamic range versions of classic metal albums on Bandcamp.
  - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
    That's nice to hear!
- smoldesu 3y ago
  You might just want to stop listening to pop music. The way people engineer and mix pop music has traditionally been different from detail-oriented recordings and audiophile trappings. Before overcompression, pop music would trapeze between quiet acoustic sections and "wall of sound" crescendos that sounded awful on radio. Even further before that, fully soundstaged recordings got mixed down to mono to sound good on commodity listening hardware. There's a tenured history of making music worse to make it more widely enjoyable. The fact that the world's most popular headphones are lower-quality versions of the Earpods should tell you everything about the modern music landscape.

dangus 3y ago

Digital surround sound audio debuted in theaters in 1992, and DTS was released as a competitor to Dolby in 1993. You couldn’t even get movie audio at home with more than two channels 30 years ago.

FredPret 3y ago

Audio equipment got a thousand times better in the last decade, never mind three decades. I remember small speakers being absolutely tinny and bad in the 90's. Now the speakers in my phone kicks the butt of a medium-sized radio from that era. Hell, my HomePod is on par with the much larger and vastly more expensive B&O hifi system I had then!