I don't understand this type of audiophiles. I also have a fairly high end, vintage audio system at home, but I'd never do anything like that in the name of audio quality. There's a quote I love about these people:
A normal person uses the audio system to listen music, while an audiophile uses music to listen to his audio system.
You don't understand the power of naivety, placebo effect, dreams and stupidity composed (multiply all). Not in any way intended to insult these people, I know a few (not as rich) and they simply do not want to understand the basic principles behind digital signals, error corrections etc. I know people that work in IT and still pretend that audio transmission over USB can add jitter to music and that a DAC can "open" or "close" "the stage" by low quality processing of the signal. There is no way to convince these people they are wrong, so I stopped trying many years ago.
I know people that work in IT and still pretend that audio transmission over USB can add jitter to music and that a DAC can "open" or "close" "the stage" by low quality processing of the signal.
Audio transmission over USB with cheap converters and poorly chosen levels can result in loss of sound quality. I'm pretty sure you can tell the difference between 8 bit, 12 bit, and 16 bit sound. Choosing levels poorly can reduce your resolution.
Also, there are cheap analog to digital converters which use voltage comparison, which basically linearly "search" for the voltage they should be encoding. So those fundamentally do introduce jitter. (Large changes in signal voltage get encoded a bit later than small ones.) I'm sure there are ways that jitter can be introduced the other way around by cheap DACs. However, if you add more bits and increase the sampling speed, those should largely go away.
Devices like DACs also include a small amplifier, and if those aren't properly designed, there can be some distortion introduced there as well.
That said, there are times when people think they hear a difference, and it's woo. There are other times when the difference is real, however. Audio is a real field with some real science and know how behind it. Please don't grant yourself instant superior expertise just because you've read some stuff online.
(On more than one occasion, I've gotten the "all audio is woo" knee-jerk from programmers who were just reacting to hearing the words "frequency response" not knowing what it was, but labeling it as woo. Ironically, they did remember stuff about Fourier transforms. Go figure.)
> a DAC can "open" or "close" "the stage" by low quality processing of the signal
In principle a low enough quality DAC certainly could affect "the stage", but in reality even cheap ones are likely good enough.
> There is no way to convince these people they are wrong
I'm pretty sure many of them don't want to be convinced since it would make their hobby pretty boring. I also wouldn't be surprised if industry players actively spread myths like these to sell more (expensive) products.
What kind of arguments you've been using? Are you talking specifically about the DA chips or the black boxes containing them? I pretty much can agree with you regarding the digital side of things, but could the actual appliances have notable differences in their analogue side or configuration? Maybe the actual value of having a $400 DAC appliance (built around a $2 Wolfson DAC chip) is going around problems in a computer's noisy or badly pre-amplified integrated audio output.
I don't mean to question your expertise on the subject, I'm just after an explanation what are the exact reasons why the setups with separate DAC and amp boxes have made me find new musical instruments on my audio files. And of course it would be nice to know if there is an inexpensive way of getting the analogue signal to a good amplifier without somehow ruining it.
I don't disagree with the point you're trying to make, but I'm not sure if USB is the best example to make that point.
Case in point: when I used a USB DAC with my NUC there's an intermittent electrical noise that's actually quite audible and distracting (even when nothing is playing). I ended up switching to another cheap DAC that accepts optical input, and the noise completely disappeared. I'm not entirely sure what caused the electrical noise to begin with, but that it existed means there's some potential for USB to mess with the audio signal.
Power audiophiles don't do digital. Noise is a very real thing in analog. Go to any rehearsal studio and ask about the power conditioning: almost sure they're not using power as coming from the steet.
To me, my iPod Shuffles, launch day iPhone, and modern iPhone all sound very different from one another when I play the same song. (I prefer the Shuffles.)
Is this a real thing, or should I upgrade to a better brand of crack?
Power, DAC'S and headphones are pretty much all that matter when it comes to sound quality. Power matters the most. "You don't understand the power of naivety, placebo effect, dreams and stupidity composed (multiply all)." Its not that simple.
>You don't understand the power of naivety, placebo effect, dreams and stupidity composed (multiply all). Not in any way intended to insult these people, I know a few (not as rich) and they simply do not want to understand the basic principles behind digital signals, error corrections etc.
You also don't understand that these people have found a pastime that makes them happy and engaged. Who cares about the actual difference in sound compared to that?
That's a very apt quote. The way I look at things like this is: Do recording studios go to the same lengths? After all, if the effect is real, and the studio didn't do something to mitigate it, then it's going to be on the track regardless of what you do in playback at home. Much more so, even, because of the gain stages involved when recording a microphone signal.
(Spoiler alert: Recording studios do not install their own power poles. What they do, though, is install isolated ground circuits.)
Most larger studios have a huge isolation trasformer for the whole set of studio circuits, and then smaller local filters like furmans. Balanced wiring as noted, also occasionally makes an appearance, but is less common. I run a dedicated ground. I personally use 3 transformers, and 3 filters (one capacitance, 2 mot). Not all in series mind you, but digital and analog gear are on seperate circuits, and a 3rd for hybrid designs (yay 80s synths). Analog recoding is sensitive to power in a huge way, but listening is seldom as affected. Note all studios use balanced audio, while most 'audiophile' crap is still unbalanced.
One of the things I truly will never understand about "Audiophiles" is their willingness to spend money on products that are, from a technical basis, indisputably categorized as snake oil. For instance:
It's an HDMI cable! The video signal has CRC in it and is packetized, it's either going to make it or it isn't. The quality of video delivered at, for instance, 2160p 60fps 10bit color to an expensive 80" 4K TV is going to be literally indistinguishable from the same video delivered by a $16 Amazon house brand HDMI cable.
Or this, it's a $340 cable for 1000BaseT Ethernet:
I can sort of understand methodology and expensive equipment modifications to separate AC power from amplifiers, and shield AC power lines and such, keep AC power runs away from speaker wires, etc. That has at least some basis in technological reality.
> It's an HDMI cable! The video signal has CRC in it and is packetized, it's either going to make it or it isn't.
I don't disagree with your main point, but this actually isn't quite true. The HDMI signal is split into 3 distinct interleaved periods: video data, data island and control. Video data is not packetized and the only possible error detection it has is from TMDS signaling, but no such error handling is required by the TMDS spec. You can absolutely get imperfect transmission of an HDMI video signal due to cable or other electrical problems. Auxiliary packets in the data island, including audio data, do have an error correction scheme (BCH + TERC4).
HDMI cables used to be a great example, but now there are something like 8 different levels of certification and only the highest have the bandwidth to carry a 2160p, 60fps, 10 bit, 4:4:4 signal. And as far as I can tell, they are all passive so your source or sink can't warn you that your cable isn't compatible. You'll just get artifacts.
The AmazonBasics cable will do 18Gbps, so it can do 2160p, 60fps, 10 bit, but only with chroma subsampling (which is fine because most video sources have chroma subsampling). The Amazon cable may work with a 4:4:4 signal, but it's not certified for it. There's a level above that for 48Gbps cables.
I totally agree with the general idea, though. As long as a cable for a digital signal meets the specifications set by the standards body, you're good.
One thing I can say about copper is that it is noisy.
We are running FPGAs (with NICs) and were getting lots of packet errors over the copper cable SFP cables. Turns out, we either needed to write out noise cleanup logic into the FPGA, or add in a noise cleanup module which would add an extra 50ns to packet processing to the FPGA. Simple solution was to convert to fiber and the noise and errors all went away.
I'd say if audiophiles truly want unmolested electricity, they ought to use optical fiber for as much of the run as possible.
Obviously don’t spend $1000 on a normal passive HDMI cable, but I’ve found that increasingly the all-or-nothing argument doesn’t work for some reason. I recently had to upgrade all my HDMI cables to get 4k HDR video working reliably. Before upgrading, the video would work, but I would occasionally see white “sparkles” on the video output. Googling this problem led me to many people recommending upgrading HDMI cables if you have very old cables.
This isn't _strictly_ true - I've seen basically the equivalent of noise in a HDMI picture (white dots all over the picture), and eventually tracked it back to a faulty HDMI cable.
I did replace it with the cheapest (<£5) HDMI cable I could find though, so there is that.
The examples you linked are crazy. It is possible, especially with the Ethernet, to just check the packet error rate, and see if there is a problem.
There's something to be said for a bit of extra effort in filtering, but most of what audiophiles pursue has no basis in electrical engineering reality.
And then there's even weirder audiophile accessories like cable elevators, amplifier stands, CD "demagnetizers", and "quantum chip" stickers -- all complete nonsense which doesn't even have any plausible way of affecting the audio.
I think this is a straw man, since a majority of audiophiles will tell you that a 1000 dollar HDMI cable is stupid. nobody actually buys that shit.
What does matter is getting a decent HDMI cable. I'm going to get a braided cable which I know supports the bandwidth of HDMI 2.1 (I think that's the current version).
Technically there is jitter in the digital domain, and it's possible to see problems at high bandwidth signals, but in low bandwidth transmissions like Flac, you're absolutely right.
If you have nanosecond timing requirements, then those might be useful, but for audio they are overkill.
One theory I read (for good quality USB cables to a DAC) is that reduced packet loss reduces jitter, which means that the clock rate of the DAC doesn't have to adjust in order to keep the buffer populated, but not overflowing. Sounds plausible, but I'm not sure that packet loss is high enough to actually cause this.
Yeah that basically describes me, between the ages of 16 and 26. We would spend hours moving gear to different locations (homes), fiddling with cables, different amplifiers and loudspeaker to find the best possible match our (limited) finances would allow.
Tube amplifiers combined with mosfet pre's, magnapans with external bass speakers. Class A amplifiers that would require a dedicated powerfuse per amplifier. First press vinyl from Japan. Van-den-Hul needles. Granite turntable platform.
Every single weekend we'd swap pre amps, amps, turntables, arms, elements, needles and listen to the "audio system via music" :)
What happened to my setup, you ask? I got married. My living room was modelled around the audio experience: it was not an ideal love nest :) I actually gave my hand crafted, tailor made end amplifiers away just a year ago to a young stranger I overheard talking about his audio quest and who is in the phase where he is searching for his ideal setup like I was 30 years ago.
I used to obsess over the sound quality before. But when I grew as a musician, I started to care less about the frequency balance, dynamic range and started to care more about the emotional content. Now I listen to music on the cheap and convenient bluetooth headphones, going through dozens new songs every day (in crappy streaming quality), and instead of tweaking Ozone settings, use LANDR for mastering and use this time to work on lyrics instead.
I think that you can consider extreme audiophilia to be an expression of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and therefore the audiophile industry is predatory in that it preys upon the mentally ill. I’ve seen it all - including $1,000 aftermarket wooden knobs that were said to dampen sound-corrupting vibrations in your power amplifier. The people who sell these items know exactly what they’re doing, and I hope more people will see them for what they are - common con men.
How do $1,000 aftermarket wooden knobs (with no detectable physical effect) differ from, say, a $1,000 bottle of wine (which cannot be distinguished in a blind taste test from a $5 bottle)?
They're just class signifiers. The difference I see is that audiophiles are less prestigious than oenophiles, but I don't see how you get from there to "audiophiles have a mental illness".
> say, a $1,000 bottle of wine (which cannot be distinguished in a blind taste test from a $5 bottle)?
Well for one thing, that's wrong- distinguishing wine is easy. Even people who are just pretty into wine can identify different vinyards etc. and actual sommeliers can nail wine down to the year it was bottled and the conditions it was stored[1].
The thing you're referring to is that when you line up regular people and give them $5 and $1000 bottles of wine, they will rank them in essentially random order. That should be no surprise at all. People have their own favorites. When you line up experts, they can differentiate cheap wine from expensive wine, but inside a broad category (say $200-$1000) they will rank essentially randomly. Again, that shouldn't be surprising at all, because "quality" itself isn't what's being paid for or looked for. Each wine is developed for a taste, not for some abstract quality metric that is the exact same for every wine.
Normal audiophiles will typically aim for objective metrics like THD, but the extreme guys are often aiming for subjective/vague things like timbre, color and soundstage. That leads to some esotericism. They also tend to have gobs of money to throw at this stuff, so a $1000 knob may be more about getting exactly what you want, or even just prestige. Both rational choices. Regardless, its inherently way more absurd than wine because even audiophiles with the most virgin ears will get nothing from .001% THD (very high end) vs <.0001% THD (verging on a lab setup), and virtually all will get nothing from <.01% THD. On the other hand, wine fanatics who have found their favorite wine will be able to recognize it quite accurately.
A $1000 bottle of wine is going to be from a specific year, from a specific vineyard. There's naturally a limited supply, so price will increase with demand like any collectible.
A wooden knob is not unique and anyone could manufacture an unlimited amount at low cost.
I understand what you mean, but just for the record, professional winetasters can pretty much guess which part of land in a given region a wine comes from in blind tests. So, i can tell you that there is a huge difference between a bottle labelled 1000$ and a 5$ one.
One telling indicator is that wine does practice blind tests a lot, and has blind test wine competitions that lead to prices, that help small wine producers get their brand recognized ( search for wine labelled with « medaille d’argent » or « medaille d’or » of any french wine contest and you won’t be disappointed) .
There's a slight difference. AFAIK oenophiles don't typically try to use pseudoscience to justify their purchases (or encourage others to make purchases)
If someone told me I should buy a wine because the doorknobs in the winery were special wooden knobs I would also question their judgement/sanity.
It would be like if the $5 bottle was glass, and the $1000 bottle contained the same wine in a special wooden bottle that allegedly dampened any disruptive vibrations without any research at all.
"I don't share these values, the person must be mentally ill. Wine is not at all the same thing, because let me explain my values which are obviously universal."
I don't know enough about wine, but judgding from experience, I can definetly tell the $1,000 and $20,000 whisky bottles apart by taste. And controlled double blind studies usually tell the same story: people can taste them apart.
Good point. I think that by their logic selling "enthusiast" versions of anything will almost always be classifiable as a practice that "preys upon the mentally ill".
Previously worked for an after market sales site for the industry and the level of fraud in the marketplace is what got me into anti-phishing in the first place. I’ve never seen anything like it.
The 82-year-old lawyer already had a $60,000 American-made amplifier, 1960s German loudspeakers that once belonged to a theater, Japanese audio cables threaded with gold and silver, and other pricey equipment.
Meanwhile, my wife plays her Dean Martin records through her own personal 15-watt AM radio station in the closet, picked up on vintage tube radios scattered around the house so the music sounds like it was intended by the audio engineers of the day.
There are all kinds of audiophiles. I don't understand any of them.
I take it you didn’t grow up in church. Hear me out: Audiophilia is a combination of technophilia and ritual, and it’s no surprise that Japan is the center of the audio technology world, given its culture.
All sound perception is subjective. In “MP3: The Meaning of a Format,” the author sites a study that showed college students preferred the sound of 128 MP3 over “lossless” or “HD” audio, probably because that’s what they cut their teeth on. This is why we have mastering with blown-out loudness and compression, even on CDs.
For others, though, even secular people, music is sacred. The quest for the perfect sound through fiddly nobs and fancy cables is like building a personal cathedral.
It’s all subjective, but there’s no denying that ritual enhances it.
Not to mention that any recorded music is going to:
1. sound quite different because it was recorded by several point microphones instead of your actual ears
2. Already have distortion introduced by the microphone and recording equipment.
That distortion will obviously be quite small, but higher end audiophile setups will often be easily smaller. It does not make sense to spend $XX,XXX to get to .03% THD from .03000001% THD.
Nothing crazy geeky. She picked up the transmitter at Goodwill for $5. It’s one of those “talking house” things that real estate agents use to tell people about houses when bobody’s around.
Looking at that web site now, I think I misremembered the 15 watt figure. That seems way too high. But whatever it is puts out a clean signal across the neighborhood.
It came with just a long wire for an antenna, but she found something on the internet to augment or change or replace it or something to improve the clarity in the backyard.
It's not a new idea, really. I remember seeing Nagra come out with a battery-powered preamp for home stereos, many years ago (and I think they still make them).
I also remember hearing back in the day of some audiophiles powering their systems with regenerating UPS from APC (like the kind you'd see in a data center), though PS Audio has been making such units marketed for audiophiles for a while now too.
DC to AC converters in common inverters (where your battery power gets turned into AC wall current) are usually digital (mosfets usually) and unless they're running at 96khz+, which is probably not the case even with "pure sine wave" inverters¹, they could also introduce some noise. Additionally, if you were charging the batteries at the same time, that charger could be carrying some noise into the DC current.
I'd love to see somebody sell an old-fashioned motor-generator set for generating absolutely pure sine-wave current from a noisy input. Give it a really heavy flywheel and maybe some complicated flexible interconnect between motor and generator, to remove any effects of the input power. Or, even better, have the motor crank up some sort of mechanical/hydraulic/pneumatic power storage, then switch off to let the generator run for an hour or so.
Batteries have significant and unavoidable source impedance. When the current goes up and down, as it does once per cycle, tens of thousands of times per second, the voltage of the power bus would move up and down slightly. You can obviously regulate it, but the whole point of what these guys want is an absolutely clean input.
The voltage of the grid will fall MUCH less when you pull current.
I work in the audio industry, and I can say two things: 1) most everything they do is audio mysticism (i.e. complete BS), and 2) they are very profitable customers.
As a trained EE, non-practicing, I would think it would be far easier to install filters/conditioners on the line to normalize the voltage and current (e.g. performing phase correction). Also, if you had a local AC->DC->AC conversion, could probably get a more uniform power source frequency. Not sure, been a long time since ive studied this, but I think a lot of thw high-end audiophile stuff is snake oil. I've been able to listen to a couple of high end audiophile installs. The electrostatic speakers are amazing, but I'm not going to appreciate enough to justify a $120k install over my $2k commodity home theater sound.
I used to work as a musician professionally, and have dealt with “dirty” power in old theatres. It was solved completely by bringing in a power conditioner. I don’t know why they can’t do that in this situation.
You can ML electrostatics for much less than 120k. They do sound great, but are still too much for me :)
I'm happy with my 10 year old Paradigms. The next speaker purchase I make is going to get something smaller instead of floor standing. I'm at a point now where I want good sound for music and home theater in the smallest package possible.
+1 for the electrostatic speakers. I bought a used pair of Martin Logans about ten years ago and I'm still totally in love with them. The model is Aerius i and they are from '99. Paid 1350 euros for them.
All of the above.
Most people want to buy a product that solves a particular problem. Some want to be convinced that what they get results in "perfect" audio, for whatever definition of perfect they have.
From what I've heard talking with a variety of these: it's similar to how every programmer is also asked if they can help with computer problems, and how they all know that turning it off and on again is the primary fix. It just goes with the field - everyone even tangentially related will encounter this kind of thing with some regularity.
What I like about this article is that they just find a few weirdos in Japan who actually end up doing that, and you get a blanket statement like "Audiophiles in Japan" while the proper headline should be "A few crazy old rich people". Journalism at its best.
If you parse a sentence that begins “Audiophiles in Japan...” as making a claim about every Japanese audiophile or even most of them, you will find the world
a confusing place. These sentences are everywhere. “Men are pigs”, “tacos are awesome”, etc.
Only two exemplars must exist for any such sentence to be true. Once you understand that, you will understand a lot more of what’s being said around you.
That depends on what categorizes "Audiophiles". If out of a million self-proclaimed audiophiles, a few hundreds are genuine ones and if out of those, a few tens are behaving this way, I think it can be reasonable to say that the audiophiles are behaving like that ;)
You must be aware that the audiophile community lives in a completely different world, where recreating sound is of more importance to them than rather enjoying the music on its own. The amount of money and time these people put in satisfying their "passion" is unrealistic. So, no. The article is right in talking about the weirdest of the weirdos ;)
I always wondered how people selling some of these audiophile gadgets can justify to themselves over long run what might appear as a scam to many outsiders. But then I was explained that this is little different than my|your|their wife spending $$$ on some ridiculously expensive Bottega|Hermes|Burberry|... handbag. Which after all is functionally about the same as $1 handbag.
Some people choose handbags, or cars, and I guess them audiophiles choose thick cables, and concrete poles. Each to their own.
Readit News
Audio transmission over USB with cheap converters and poorly chosen levels can result in loss of sound quality. I'm pretty sure you can tell the difference between 8 bit, 12 bit, and 16 bit sound. Choosing levels poorly can reduce your resolution.
Also, there are cheap analog to digital converters which use voltage comparison, which basically linearly "search" for the voltage they should be encoding. So those fundamentally do introduce jitter. (Large changes in signal voltage get encoded a bit later than small ones.) I'm sure there are ways that jitter can be introduced the other way around by cheap DACs. However, if you add more bits and increase the sampling speed, those should largely go away.
Devices like DACs also include a small amplifier, and if those aren't properly designed, there can be some distortion introduced there as well.
That said, there are times when people think they hear a difference, and it's woo. There are other times when the difference is real, however. Audio is a real field with some real science and know how behind it. Please don't grant yourself instant superior expertise just because you've read some stuff online.
(On more than one occasion, I've gotten the "all audio is woo" knee-jerk from programmers who were just reacting to hearing the words "frequency response" not knowing what it was, but labeling it as woo. Ironically, they did remember stuff about Fourier transforms. Go figure.)
In principle a low enough quality DAC certainly could affect "the stage", but in reality even cheap ones are likely good enough.
> There is no way to convince these people they are wrong
I'm pretty sure many of them don't want to be convinced since it would make their hobby pretty boring. I also wouldn't be surprised if industry players actively spread myths like these to sell more (expensive) products.
I don't mean to question your expertise on the subject, I'm just after an explanation what are the exact reasons why the setups with separate DAC and amp boxes have made me find new musical instruments on my audio files. And of course it would be nice to know if there is an inexpensive way of getting the analogue signal to a good amplifier without somehow ruining it.
Case in point: when I used a USB DAC with my NUC there's an intermittent electrical noise that's actually quite audible and distracting (even when nothing is playing). I ended up switching to another cheap DAC that accepts optical input, and the noise completely disappeared. I'm not entirely sure what caused the electrical noise to begin with, but that it existed means there's some potential for USB to mess with the audio signal.
Is this a real thing, or should I upgrade to a better brand of crack?
You also don't understand that these people have found a pastime that makes them happy and engaged. Who cares about the actual difference in sound compared to that?
:-)
Dead Comment
(Spoiler alert: Recording studios do not install their own power poles. What they do, though, is install isolated ground circuits.)
https://www.amazon.com/AudioQuest-Diamond-feet-Braided-Cable...
It's an HDMI cable! The video signal has CRC in it and is packetized, it's either going to make it or it isn't. The quality of video delivered at, for instance, 2160p 60fps 10bit color to an expensive 80" 4K TV is going to be literally indistinguishable from the same video delivered by a $16 Amazon house brand HDMI cable.
Or this, it's a $340 cable for 1000BaseT Ethernet:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/07/gallery-we-tear-apar...
People actually make the claim that their FLAC "sounds warmer" when transferred through this. How, exactly?
That's not enough? How about the $10,0000 1000BaseT Ethernet cable? https://arstechnica.com/staff/2015/02/to-the-audiophile-this...
I can sort of understand methodology and expensive equipment modifications to separate AC power from amplifiers, and shield AC power lines and such, keep AC power runs away from speaker wires, etc. That has at least some basis in technological reality.
I don't disagree with your main point, but this actually isn't quite true. The HDMI signal is split into 3 distinct interleaved periods: video data, data island and control. Video data is not packetized and the only possible error detection it has is from TMDS signaling, but no such error handling is required by the TMDS spec. You can absolutely get imperfect transmission of an HDMI video signal due to cable or other electrical problems. Auxiliary packets in the data island, including audio data, do have an error correction scheme (BCH + TERC4).
Feel free to check out the spec: https://glenwing.github.io/docs/HDMI-1.4b.pdf
The AmazonBasics cable will do 18Gbps, so it can do 2160p, 60fps, 10 bit, but only with chroma subsampling (which is fine because most video sources have chroma subsampling). The Amazon cable may work with a 4:4:4 signal, but it's not certified for it. There's a level above that for 48Gbps cables.
I totally agree with the general idea, though. As long as a cable for a digital signal meets the specifications set by the standards body, you're good.
We are running FPGAs (with NICs) and were getting lots of packet errors over the copper cable SFP cables. Turns out, we either needed to write out noise cleanup logic into the FPGA, or add in a noise cleanup module which would add an extra 50ns to packet processing to the FPGA. Simple solution was to convert to fiber and the noise and errors all went away.
I'd say if audiophiles truly want unmolested electricity, they ought to use optical fiber for as much of the run as possible.
Edit: a commenter below has a link to an actual audiophile SATA cable.
This isn't _strictly_ true - I've seen basically the equivalent of noise in a HDMI picture (white dots all over the picture), and eventually tracked it back to a faulty HDMI cable.
I did replace it with the cheapest (<£5) HDMI cable I could find though, so there is that.
There's something to be said for a bit of extra effort in filtering, but most of what audiophiles pursue has no basis in electrical engineering reality.
What does matter is getting a decent HDMI cable. I'm going to get a braided cable which I know supports the bandwidth of HDMI 2.1 (I think that's the current version).
1k? No. Probably more like 25.
If you have nanosecond timing requirements, then those might be useful, but for audio they are overkill.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jitter
The only thing I can agree is better on a digital cable is increased shielding to avoid ground noise.
Yeah that basically describes me, between the ages of 16 and 26. We would spend hours moving gear to different locations (homes), fiddling with cables, different amplifiers and loudspeaker to find the best possible match our (limited) finances would allow.
Tube amplifiers combined with mosfet pre's, magnapans with external bass speakers. Class A amplifiers that would require a dedicated powerfuse per amplifier. First press vinyl from Japan. Van-den-Hul needles. Granite turntable platform.
Every single weekend we'd swap pre amps, amps, turntables, arms, elements, needles and listen to the "audio system via music" :)
What happened to my setup, you ask? I got married. My living room was modelled around the audio experience: it was not an ideal love nest :) I actually gave my hand crafted, tailor made end amplifiers away just a year ago to a young stranger I overheard talking about his audio quest and who is in the phase where he is searching for his ideal setup like I was 30 years ago.
Deleted Comment
Sound quality is not music quality.
They're just class signifiers. The difference I see is that audiophiles are less prestigious than oenophiles, but I don't see how you get from there to "audiophiles have a mental illness".
Well for one thing, that's wrong- distinguishing wine is easy. Even people who are just pretty into wine can identify different vinyards etc. and actual sommeliers can nail wine down to the year it was bottled and the conditions it was stored[1].
The thing you're referring to is that when you line up regular people and give them $5 and $1000 bottles of wine, they will rank them in essentially random order. That should be no surprise at all. People have their own favorites. When you line up experts, they can differentiate cheap wine from expensive wine, but inside a broad category (say $200-$1000) they will rank essentially randomly. Again, that shouldn't be surprising at all, because "quality" itself isn't what's being paid for or looked for. Each wine is developed for a taste, not for some abstract quality metric that is the exact same for every wine.
Normal audiophiles will typically aim for objective metrics like THD, but the extreme guys are often aiming for subjective/vague things like timbre, color and soundstage. That leads to some esotericism. They also tend to have gobs of money to throw at this stuff, so a $1000 knob may be more about getting exactly what you want, or even just prestige. Both rational choices. Regardless, its inherently way more absurd than wine because even audiophiles with the most virgin ears will get nothing from .001% THD (very high end) vs <.0001% THD (verging on a lab setup), and virtually all will get nothing from <.01% THD. On the other hand, wine fanatics who have found their favorite wine will be able to recognize it quite accurately.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZQc0wfkU7I
A wooden knob is not unique and anyone could manufacture an unlimited amount at low cost.
One telling indicator is that wine does practice blind tests a lot, and has blind test wine competitions that lead to prices, that help small wine producers get their brand recognized ( search for wine labelled with « medaille d’argent » or « medaille d’or » of any french wine contest and you won’t be disappointed) .
Audio equipments very much less so.
If someone told me I should buy a wine because the doorknobs in the winery were special wooden knobs I would also question their judgement/sanity.
"I don't share these values, the person must be mentally ill. Wine is not at all the same thing, because let me explain my values which are obviously universal."
Meanwhile, my wife plays her Dean Martin records through her own personal 15-watt AM radio station in the closet, picked up on vintage tube radios scattered around the house so the music sounds like it was intended by the audio engineers of the day.
There are all kinds of audiophiles. I don't understand any of them.
All sound perception is subjective. In “MP3: The Meaning of a Format,” the author sites a study that showed college students preferred the sound of 128 MP3 over “lossless” or “HD” audio, probably because that’s what they cut their teeth on. This is why we have mastering with blown-out loudness and compression, even on CDs.
For others, though, even secular people, music is sacred. The quest for the perfect sound through fiddly nobs and fancy cables is like building a personal cathedral. It’s all subjective, but there’s no denying that ritual enhances it.
1. sound quite different because it was recorded by several point microphones instead of your actual ears
2. Already have distortion introduced by the microphone and recording equipment.
That distortion will obviously be quite small, but higher end audiophile setups will often be easily smaller. It does not make sense to spend $XX,XXX to get to .03% THD from .03000001% THD.
http://talkinghouse.com
Looking at that web site now, I think I misremembered the 15 watt figure. That seems way too high. But whatever it is puts out a clean signal across the neighborhood.
It came with just a long wire for an antenna, but she found something on the internet to augment or change or replace it or something to improve the clarity in the backyard.
I also remember hearing back in the day of some audiophiles powering their systems with regenerating UPS from APC (like the kind you'd see in a data center), though PS Audio has been making such units marketed for audiophiles for a while now too.
If only there was a genre of music called “deep cycle” we’d be on the gravy train for life. (Ref: HHGG)
Deleted Comment
Visible stepping on a "pure sine wave" inverter: ¹ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7-Issb89NhQ&t=7m20s
A cocktail of capacitors could do the trick.
Ironically, the word "battery" was originally used by Benjamin Franklin to refer to a bank capacitors, not to chemical cells.
The voltage of the grid will fall MUCH less when you pull current.
Dead Comment
I'm happy with my 10 year old Paradigms. The next speaker purchase I make is going to get something smaller instead of floor standing. I'm at a point now where I want good sound for music and home theater in the smallest package possible.
Only two exemplars must exist for any such sentence to be true. Once you understand that, you will understand a lot more of what’s being said around you.
Some people choose handbags, or cars, and I guess them audiophiles choose thick cables, and concrete poles. Each to their own.
It’s the same thing
Ya don't have people critizing folks buying a Porsche when a corolla will do the job just as well.
Audiophiles, as well as "hipsters" I think just provide themselves as an easy target for internet commentators.