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(Sorry for the incoherent rant that starts now) I've built high-end loudspeakers for about 9 years, and I'm of two minds when reading this article. While it's n

(Sorry for the incoherent rant that starts now) I've built high-end loudspeakers for about 9 years, and I'm of two minds when reading this article. While it's nice for a mainstreamish outlet to describe the experience of listening to a high-end audio system, there exists so much dis/misinformation in this article that it makes my skin crawl. So I will attempt to explain what I think high-end audio is (or should be) all about without all the journalistic BS (both from the gizmodo and the stereophile guy). The purpose of a high-end audio system is to create music that is indistinguishable from live sound. This is a really hard thing to do and my guess is at best, we are only 20% of the way there. But, given that most consumer-level stuff is probably at 0.42%, listening to a good high-end audio system is generally nothing short of incredible. The thing that really gets people when they first listen to the "good stuff" is that on a good high-end audio system, there will be sounds that don't seem to be coming from the speakers themselves, but from somewhere else in the room. The good stuff really is better, but you really can spend a ton of money and get shitty products (to be honest, I've listened to the $65k MAXX3's featured in the article and its more expensive sibling, the $125k X1s, and I thought they were decent speakers, but certainly not worth more than $8k). The problem with high-end audio, especially from a business perspective is two-fold. 1) How do you make better speakers than your competitors if the best you can do is 20% and you don't even know how to get to that 80%? and 2) How are you supposed to differentiate yourself from your competitors when the end goal is that every single speaker is supposed to sound exactly the same? Enter the magazines Stereophile and The Absolute Sound. These journalists with "golden ears" will purportedly tell us mere mortals what differences there are between speakers. The ones who do the best (like the Wilson Audio's featured in the article) will also get the most money. So, every manufacturer will push to get the best reviews from these magazines, and will even go to a sort of soft corruption to garner a strong review. During the review process, an equipment manufacturer will send his/her component to the reviewer for a few months so the reviewer can demo it in his/her own demo room. In an ideal world the reviewer will review the product accurately and send it back. What actually happens is that the "demo" unit will become available to the reviewer indefinitely without a need to return the product. The reviewer, however, already has a component in his own listening room, so why does he want another one? Well, because the review can sell it and make some extra money on used equipment (30% of a 10k CD player is still a lot of money). If the review pans the product, though, then the resale price will be far less than if the reviewer praises the product. So voila, instant good review. (If you read stereophile for a few months, you will see every other issue that the reviewer has found the best component he has ever listened to). This sort of practice seems to have been going on for at least a couple decades. Instead of trying to solve the insanely difficult problem of making speakers sound better, high end audio manufacturers spend their money on branding and shenanigans with reviewers. Their equipment (more for speakers than say CD players) will always be better than consumer grade stuff because no one has worked on the problem of making a better speaker and consumer grade speakers are made to be manufactured as cheaply as possible. The high end audio industry is a real mess because everyone forgot why there are here in the first place. Btw, it would be interesting if the less financially strapped members started designing speakers (you're all smart enough to do as good a job as Wilson Audio). The drivers for these speakers are available to people like us, because driver manufacturers do not do enough volume to stop selling to the DIY community. For instance, the drivers for the MAXXs break down roughly as follows: ~$150/ea for the Focal tweeters, ~$175/ea for Scanspeak midranges, ~$350/ea for the smaller Focal woofer, and ~$500 for the bigger one. While that ~$3000 for the drivers alone, that still a lot less than $65k (and besides, you could actually do better with a lot less money).

jerf 17y ago
"The purpose of a high-end audio system is to create music that is indistinguishable from live sound." That's your idea of the purpose, and it's my idea of the purpose. But is it just me, or is there a lot of people at the "higher end" actually putting together an analog system that introduces distortion that they like, or sounds good to them, rather than reliably relaying the signal? What some people call "flat" and "lifeless", I call "free of analog distortion". I've been in real concerts with no electronic gizmos to be found (orchestras and such), and if I close my eyes, it sounds more like a (good) CD than a vinyl record. (At least, on old CDs from the mid-1990s. Clipping's another story entirely, of course. Digital could and should be better, and perhaps the argument would be over, had digital not simply given up entirely on acoustic accuracy...) Despite the loaded and leading nature of my question, I'm serious about the question above. Does that sound right to anyone else?
- aston 17y ago
  Yeah, the "warmth" of analog recordings is just another word for "pleasing aural distortion," not unlike applying some blur and raising the brightness on photos for glamour shots.
- JereCoh 17y ago
  This is the best argument I've ever read regarding the BS of analog sound recording.
- stan_rogers 17y ago
  Remember that the "flat and lifeless" digital experience that Fremer was talking about was a long time ago.. Yeah, he's a bit of a nut, and I'm sure that some of what he hears is as much psychological as physical (especially as it regards such things as power cords _sans_ isolating filters and so forth), but the man has a point where digital is concerned. Or rather, as far as digital _was_ concerned. Remember the old days? When the digital recording involved brick-wall filtering of the analog source at 20KHz before digital sampling? I sure do. Sure, the clicks and pops were gone, but the filter introduced such distortion as to make the music nearly unlistenable for anyone who could hear anything over about 16KHz. High harmonics were so far out of phase with the fundamental that anything that has a percussive component (piano, xylophone, cymbals, etc.) would hurt my teeth. We've gotten past that problem with higher sampling rates during the recording phase, and digital processing can reduce the bitrate without inducing those phase errors. Redbook CD still has one major problem, though. Nyquist says that a 2F+k (where k is some small value) sampling rate is sufficient to encode an analog waveform unambiguously. For audio, that means that the 22.1KHz rate that CDs use for each channel ought to be enough. And it would be, but for the fact that there is a hidden encoding in stereo audio, and that encoding is the temporal difference between the signal's arrival at each of our two ears (or our two microphones, as the case may be). While no component of the audio signal may exceed 20KHz, proper spatial encoding may require a temporal resolution that requires the sampling rate capable of resolving a difference in arrival times of less than 50us. And yes, I understand that that's getting really finicky, and that the phase errors in most output transducers (speakers) will be greater than that, but the best equipment can _just_ make the difference perceptible. And for smaller ensembles (chamber music, acoustic jazz, folk, and that sort of thing), that spatial accuracy can take the listening experience to a level most people are completely incapable of imagining. SACD and DVD-A solve the fundamental problems of Redbook, but they came to the game just a little too late. People had already decided to settle for cassettes again. Not literally, mind you -- today's cassette is the MP3 file. Even at the highest bitrates (256 or 320Kbps), MP3s are audibly inferior even to Redbook, but damn they're handy, eh? They are Good Enough(TM) for most people, and you can carry a half a billion of the things on something smaller than the crappy pocket transistor radios we had when I was a kid. The upshot is that now that we can readily and cheaply produce recordings that are light years beyond anything anybody dreamed of in the '60s, the mass market that would have supported it has become irrevokably attached to yet another great leap backwards. That's really a pity.

jerf 17y ago

"The purpose of a high-end audio system is to create music that is indistinguishable from live sound." That's your idea of the purpose, and it's my idea of the purpose. But is it just me, or is there a lot of people at the "higher end" actually putting together an analog system that introduces distortion that they like, or sounds good to them, rather than reliably relaying the signal? What some people call "flat" and "lifeless", I call "free of analog distortion". I've been in real concerts with no electronic gizmos to be found (orchestras and such), and if I close my eyes, it sounds more like a (good) CD than a vinyl record. (At least, on old CDs from the mid-1990s. Clipping's another story entirely, of course. Digital could and should be better, and perhaps the argument would be over, had digital not simply given up entirely on acoustic accuracy...) Despite the loaded and leading nature of my question, I'm serious about the question above. Does that sound right to anyone else?

aston 17y ago
Yeah, the "warmth" of analog recordings is just another word for "pleasing aural distortion," not unlike applying some blur and raising the brightness on photos for glamour shots.
JereCoh 17y ago
This is the best argument I've ever read regarding the BS of analog sound recording.
stan_rogers 17y ago
Remember that the "flat and lifeless" digital experience that Fremer was talking about was a long time ago.. Yeah, he's a bit of a nut, and I'm sure that some of what he hears is as much psychological as physical (especially as it regards such things as power cords _sans_ isolating filters and so forth), but the man has a point where digital is concerned. Or rather, as far as digital _was_ concerned. Remember the old days? When the digital recording involved brick-wall filtering of the analog source at 20KHz before digital sampling? I sure do. Sure, the clicks and pops were gone, but the filter introduced such distortion as to make the music nearly unlistenable for anyone who could hear anything over about 16KHz. High harmonics were so far out of phase with the fundamental that anything that has a percussive component (piano, xylophone, cymbals, etc.) would hurt my teeth. We've gotten past that problem with higher sampling rates during the recording phase, and digital processing can reduce the bitrate without inducing those phase errors. Redbook CD still has one major problem, though. Nyquist says that a 2F+k (where k is some small value) sampling rate is sufficient to encode an analog waveform unambiguously. For audio, that means that the 22.1KHz rate that CDs use for each channel ought to be enough. And it would be, but for the fact that there is a hidden encoding in stereo audio, and that encoding is the temporal difference between the signal's arrival at each of our two ears (or our two microphones, as the case may be). While no component of the audio signal may exceed 20KHz, proper spatial encoding may require a temporal resolution that requires the sampling rate capable of resolving a difference in arrival times of less than 50us. And yes, I understand that that's getting really finicky, and that the phase errors in most output transducers (speakers) will be greater than that, but the best equipment can _just_ make the difference perceptible. And for smaller ensembles (chamber music, acoustic jazz, folk, and that sort of thing), that spatial accuracy can take the listening experience to a level most people are completely incapable of imagining. SACD and DVD-A solve the fundamental problems of Redbook, but they came to the game just a little too late. People had already decided to settle for cassettes again. Not literally, mind you -- today's cassette is the MP3 file. Even at the highest bitrates (256 or 320Kbps), MP3s are audibly inferior even to Redbook, but damn they're handy, eh? They are Good Enough(TM) for most people, and you can carry a half a billion of the things on something smaller than the crappy pocket transistor radios we had when I was a kid. The upshot is that now that we can readily and cheaply produce recordings that are light years beyond anything anybody dreamed of in the '60s, the mass market that would have supported it has become irrevokably attached to yet another great leap backwards. That's really a pity.