It's important to appreciate that there are several different breeds of audiophile out there...
There are those that are obsessed with objectively measurable sound quality. They want to reproduce the recorded waveform as accurately as possible, and they want products that can be measured doing that, but they often pursue accuracy beyond the limits of any human to hear.
There are those that like a little distortion or degradation if it sounds nice to them. These are the people who collect tube amps and will openly admit they're not as accurate, but accuracy is not what they're after.
There are those who embrace voodoo. I knew a physics professor who was one of these. He had hideously expensive isolation platforms, resonator weights, unobtanium cables, "ambient field conditioners"... You name it. He knew there was no scientific basis for any them to work, but he had very deliberately deluded himself. If asked, he'd explain that the ultimate goal of the audiophile's pursuit was pleasure. If he could shut down his reasoning and spend hours moving resonator stones around on top of his CD transport until he thought he had improved the sound, and this gave him pleasure, was that pleasure not real even if the sound was exactly the same?
Then there are those who combine contradictory aspects of all of the above without any self-awareness or critical thinking skills. That's the sort that will torment themselves, and others, arguing on internet forums about why their own snake oil of choice is legitimate, real, and how anyone who isn't using it is a cretin.
I'm an instrumentation junkie at heart, but I'm a pragmatist first. I have a cheap receiver and cheap speakers. What I want so badly is for software solutions to be properly cheap. Rooms are relatively static conditions, meaning a simple FIR filter can be tuned once and give consistent results. Calibrating speakers and room multipath should not be gatekept with $1000+ hardware. Freedsp is the only name I know that offers a cheap option. They are a modest operation that only supply designs and bare boards. Integrating freedsp into a modern home theatre setup requires inelegant solutions (Source -> TV -> Receiver -> freedsp -> amplifier).
I just wish there was any competition left in the big players to push measurable home audio performance higher.
If you already have a receiver, pretty much anything these days will come with a room measurement system to create that FIR filter. You don't get the coefficients, though.
>they often pursue accuracy beyond the limits of any human to hear
Not simply beyond human hearing but beyond the limits where any information is preserved at all. There's a class of audiophiles who have never even heard of Shannon-Nyquist.
I echo the above, but wanted to an important (to me) nuance for those who pursue accuracy beyond the limits of human hearing.
Usually, errors and distortions stack across multiple system components. While really bad components can be A/B/X tested accurately, good ones rarely can be. Still, imperceptible errors that accumulate/amplify can result in actual, audible differences. One can liken it to floating point computations where the error ranges grow each time and can reach unacceptable levels.
> If he could shut down his reasoning and spend hours moving resonator stones around on top of his CD transport until he thought he had improved the sound, and this gave him pleasure, was that pleasure not real even if the sound was exactly the same?
Of course it was, the placebo effect exists and works after all. Where these audiophiles turn into audiophools is here:
> hideously expensive isolation platforms, resonator weights, unobtanium cables, "ambient field conditioners"... You name it
They allow themselves to be duped by unscrupulous snake oil merchants instead of simply telling themselves that the rocks they collected on the beach are just the thing to liven up their sound stage.
I've always felt totally alone falling somewhere between hardcore audiophiles and the 'norm,' which seems to feel a cell phone or cheap laptop speaker is as good as anything else for music. I really notice the difference between cheap crap, and say an older used brand name receiver with freestanding floor speakers, the kind of system you can find on craigslist for about $100. But I cannot notice a major difference between the $100 system, and say a $100k system (or whatever audiophiles spend). I also do notice a big difference between a 96Kbps MP3 and 320Kbps, but not between 320Kbps and lossless.
You certainly aren't alone! I find 128kbps unlistenable but I A/B tested 320 vs lossless and - nope, couldn't tell the difference, even trying hard to do so.
I consider myself an enthusiast/hobbyist, not an audiophile, and hold a pretty high level of scepticism about the truly devoted tbh.
That said I've never had the pleasure of listening to anything north of around the £10k mark, so I would love to be convinced of a genuine move-the-dial listening benefit of the really high end gear!
Buddy of mine has a $20k pair of monitors in a soundproofed room, and I was able to A/B 320 vs lossless on that system only, and only on certain types of material. The difference was only evident in the very high frequencies, and I really had to focus to tell.
There used to be an ABX plugin for Foobar, where you could test yourself if you could make out the difference between an MP3 of your choice and a lossless one.
I think I scored worse than a coin flip when it came to 320 files
That said I've never had the pleasure of listening
to anything north of around the £10k mark
I've listened to gear well north of that and I certainly don't have "golden ears" (I don't think many do) but the TL;DR is that you hit diminishing returns way before £10k.
Ultimately, we're talking about signal reproduction here, and inexpensive gear can put out some seriously accurate sound thanks to onboard DSP processing that uses software to compensate for less than amazing hardware. As long as the sound reaching your ears is correct, doesn't matter how it was achieved.
The one thing you can potentially gain once you get in to the realm of paying thousands of dollars is oodles of power from the amplifier and oodles of power handling from the speakers, which may or may not let you begin to approximate the sound of live music.
If you have ever had the pleasure of hearing an orchestra perform live, the average SPL (sound pressure level) may not be that high, but the fleeting momentary peaks from something like a timpani might be north of 100dB. That's a bit of a feat for your stereo system to pull off and there's no substitute for horsepower there.
But even then, this doesn't necessarily cost megabucks.
I think the main sell of hidef audio isn't so much the 'extra bits' but usually they're different masters, and not compressed for CD. A lot of it is in the mind though for sure. Almost anything sounds pretty good on good (>500 euro) headphones. :}
I've always felt totally alone falling somewhere between
hardcore audiophiles
To me, the "hardcore" audiophiles are the ones who understand a bit of actual science & engineering and don't go chasing ridiculous crap like audiophile USB cables.
The lunatic fringe gets all the attention, because they're comically delusional, but they are not hardcore to me.
or whatever audiophiles spend
Bought new, the modern equivalent of that $100 Craigslist system is (vast simplification and approximation) about $500. A well-researched $500-$2500 (new) stereo system is in my experience and opinion the range where you get appreciably better and better sound.
At $500 you are already getting a system that is not doing a whole lot wrong. But not massive output or deep deep bass.
By $2500 you're getting something that's doing very close to the full 17hz-20khz at output levels that will more than exceed just about any reasonable residential situation. And in fact your listening room is the bottleneck now.
Above that price you're paying for very boutiquey exotic stuff that can pull off certain tricks, very high levels of output, etc.
Those prices are very approximate and assume a well researched and set up system.
You certainly aren't getting any speaker going correctly to 17 Hz even for ten times this price.
Stereo speakers are not made to go very low, that's what a subwoofer is for. Not all subwoofers even go that low!
Above $2500 for a good stereo system will get you a better sound, but as always, the more you pay, the less you'll be able to hear the difference. Also, the better the sound is, the more you'll have to be careful about amp pairing and room acoustic.
I can genuinely tell the difference between 320K MP3 and CD, and between CD and HD, (a group of enthusiasts got together and double-blind tested each other) but only in carefully controlled circumstances with a LOT of focus. As in, wearing really good headphones in a silent distraction-free room with my eyes closed and focusing on particular features like cymbals and chimes and staging, and even then only after switching back and forth between samples a dozen times. So after realizing that, I always aim to have CD quality, but I couldn't care less about HD audio.
And like you said, $100 Craigslist systems from 1990 sound drastically better than modern consumer-grade systems. People started caring more about "smart" convenience features and less about sound quality a long time ago.
I don't think you're alone at all (I'm in that range, for one) I just think people liking good audio without spending a ton doesn't grab a lot of attention.
There are decent articles on headphones in the $60-300 range, mobile DACs that don't break the bank, etc, that I think show that our contingent is alive and well.
> But I cannot notice a major difference between the $100 system, and say a $100k system (or whatever audiophiles spend).
You definitely will, but at lot of it will come from the fact that the latter system will be set up well in an isolated room with proper speaker placement, while the former will be some speakers thrown in a living wherever they fit.
Sensitive speakers are the huge difference, because they will give you more detail at normal listening amplifications. A good pair of speakers and 25-50W of amplification power is more than enough for most domestic scenarios, and even then you'll be using it with volume in half. The difference are the speakers - and sensitive speakers are expensive compared to a "$100 system"
I'm in the same camp. I consider myself an audiophile, but spend most of my time reading things and laughing at "them". There's definitely a fair bit of critical thinking required when you're investigating audio gear for personal use. That said, a proper DAC/Amp stack and a good set of headphones are well worth the investment, it's just that you are strongly into the diminishing returns area once you spend more than about $1k all-in on the entire setup.
The thing is, I think of it like I do many of my "hobbies" which are really just about improving my actual quality of experience/quality of life in the things I do every day. I am typing this comment on a custom-built $900 mechanical keyboard, and just got off a conference call where I was speaking into $1k worth of microphone gear, with a $3k camera setup pointed at me, and listening to the other person through $2k worth of audio output gear (headphones + DAC/Amp stack). To the casual observer that's utterly ridiculous and I've wasted all this money for nothing. On the other hand, I spend 8+ hours a day wearing those headphones, on meetings, and typing, anything that even marginally improves the quality of my experience doing the things I do for 8+ hours every day and intend to do for most of the remainder of my life, means that I am improving my overall quality of life in a meaningful way.
I do this for the exact same reason I spent big on my chair, desk, lighting, and my bed. Between my home office and my bedroom, I spend 75% or more of my entire life (roughly 18 out of every 24 hours) in those two places until I retire. It is absolutely worthwhile for people who spend a lot of time listening to audio to optimize the way they listen to audio. You just have to really keep your critical thinking hat on, though, because the market is full of snake oil.
> But I cannot notice a major difference between the $100 system, and say a $100k system (or whatever audiophiles spend).
I more or less agree with this but the main problem is that people listen in untreated rooms with horrible acoustics.
Once you hit that "medium good" threshold, which is pretty easy these days, more expensive speakers aren't going to make a difference until you get your acoustics under control.
If you do have a nice room, you will definitely notice the difference between the medium good setup and a nicer one, although you will hit diminishing returns WAY before you reach the $100k speakers.
absolutely and whether you think you care about sound quality or not, one thing I have found is that it makes a huge difference for dialog clarity. I watched Dune when it came out in a brand new theater in Los Angeles and then a few months later on my home system. I was quite surprised by how much more of the dialog was intelligible than I had thought
That's the way with so many things, huh? I got a one of the nicer sets of Logitech computer speakers, and while it's not amazing, it's fine, and definitely better than the junky speakers that use to come with desktop systems. I can tell the difference between $.99 coffee and $3 coffee, but $50 coffee is lost on me. A $10 wine is likely to be better than Three Buck Chuck, but I don't know if I could tell the difference between $10 and $100.
For almost everything, unless you're really, really into that thing, there's a segment of the price curve where more money == more better, but afterward you're just shoveling cash into a black hole.
There is a lot of diminishing returns for audiophile products.
You should be able to hear the difference between a $100 speaker system and a $1,000 speaker system.
But there are other things like room acoustics and stuff that can cause issues. If you put a really good system in a bad room I could imagine it would be harder to tell a difference.
$1,000 to $10,000 might be a lot harder to tell the difference assuming you sourced a good performing setup at each price point.
Same for MP3 vs Lossless, you could probably hear the difference between 320Kbps on specific songs if you know what to listen for but I doubt you can hear it on everything and you would have to concentrate pretty hard rather than enjoying the music.
Tiny class-d amps, containing barely $20 worth of parts, produce perfect (to my ears) sound. I don't know why receivers are still so expensive, but I suspect it's a total racket (literal price fixing).
On the other hand, TVs, sound bars, and the HomePod mini produce audio so bad I can't believe people put up with it.
> On the other hand, TVs, sound bars, and the HomePod mini produce audio so bad I can't believe people put up with it.
I can chime in on this one. I used to be like OP: Not an audiophile, but someone who can appreciate the difference between a $1000 setup and a $100 setup. Once I got married, and someone with better interior decorating taste started having a vote on home decor, that appreciation had to go out the window. Nobody with any taste wants floor-standing big ugly black boxes positioned at the "Optimal" listening positions in the living room. Do an image search for "high end speakers". Yuck.
Now days, receivers are much more of a home theater setup and less of an audio setup, if that makes sense. Lots of 4k upscaling, DSP for video, and handling the different standards like Dolby Vision and Atmos. If you're just looking for something to play music, you can get a lot of amazing receivers from the late 80s - 00s for pennies on the dollar.
I think that fundamentally, everyone agrees that there are diminishing returns with audio products, people just have different tolerances for bad audio, different amounts of fucks to give about it, and different levels of ability to configure their setups. I don't know what the distribution of people looks like along those axes, but you sound "normal" to me in regards to taste, and by virtue of being on this forum are probably above average in regards to technical ability to configure things. Lots of people would probably find it a bit too much trouble to worry about and configure the external audio receiver and freestanding floor speakers (which incidentally describes my setup as well), but I don't think that's equivalent to them not recognizing the improvement. Sound bars seem to be deliberately intended to fill the market segment for people who want and can afford better sound, but can't manage the configuration.
You can notice the compression at the edges of the audio, like vocals or cymbals. Linda Ronstadt is one singer who's voice makes compression obvious - her line turns into a hacksaw blade on some songs.
That said, every system has distortion - the question is what sound do you like/want. Do you want a sound that's more forward or more laid back? Do you like more midrange? Vocals?
Audio also becomes more complicated because of hearing loss. I can't hear anything over 12-13k, so I'm sure that's affected my audio setup at some level.
I think there are a lot of us, but we aren't very visible because we just buy some best-bang-for-the-buck equipment to get us above trash-tier sound, or hit a few pawn shops, get set up to our satisfaction, then don't think about it again. Shit lasts decades, once you hit good-enough there's not much reason to keep messing with it. Only thing you might be replacing about once a decade is headphones—maybe.
Same here! We stopped using laptop speakers around 5 or so years ago when we got some good bookshelf speakers[0] instead. We mounted them to the foot of our bed where we use our laptop.
We've since built our own subwoofer and also mounted a bass shaker[1] (transducer) below the bed, which produces actual vibrations in response to low frequencies, by moving a heavy weight instead of a speaker cone.
The tactile stimulation from low frequencies actually significantly helps with immersion, focus, and relaxation, similar to some can easily fall asleep in a running car.
Of course, it also helps when we're just in the mood to transmit high-power bass frequencies straight into our fricken' bones...
Anyway, I think the total for our sound system is below $1k. We never made a parts list for our subwoofer but we estimate the cost to have been around $300–400. The rest of the system consists of the $180 (at the time) bookshelf speakers[0], the $50 (at the time) bass shaker[1], and the $80 (or so) amplifier to drive said shaker[2].
We also use a device called a "line driver"[3] (around $20) to raise the signal level for the input to our bass shaker's amplifier. "Line driver" is indeed the magic search term, and "preamp" will get you garbage (either $2 op-amp boards, or phonographs).
But aside from all the engineering effort that went into it, because it was a really fun hobby project, it's mostly just a mediocre system. We're totally content with that, and proud because it is a great experience for us, and very fun to listen to.
At this point, the only upgrade we would really want would be to find a new living space that can accommodate a rotary woofer[4], which changes the air pressure of the entire room to produce frequencies from around 20Hz down to even 0Hz.
But our current setup is more than enough to thoroughly enjoy and appreciate. <3
Also we store our entire music library in mp3 format >:3
"found that a function called memcpy was the culprit, most memory players use memcpy and this is one of the reasons why memory play sounds worse ie digital sounding. Fortunately there is an optimised version of memcpy from http://www.agner.org/optimize/, using this version removes the hard edge produced by memcpy."
It's probably that by optimizing code they reduced CPU load, therefore reducing fan noise due to overheating, and finally inducing clearer sound quality with lower SNR. It makes sense to me.
You mean to tell me that a media player doing audio playback is thrashing memcpy so hard that it's spinning up the fan? And that there is enough low-hanging fruit in standard memcpy implementations to actually make a difference?
The more likely explanation is that these people are simply delusional.
Yuo see, when standard memcpy runs it has a big variance of power, i.e. large cycle to cycle differences in effective current through the processing chip. Agner Fog's memcpy is optimized to use the pipelines effectively, makes the processing operate smoothly and not in discrete steps, much less variation. That variation causes fluctuation in primary voltage supply which leaks into the analog path, creating noise and harshness.
Surely they'd run this on a system without a fan? I'd say immersed in liquid nitrogen to minimise thermal noise and powered through an ultra-low noise, DC, battery-only supply, and the whole thing inside an independently Earthed faraday cage.
If not, all the effort on the memcpy is going to waste.
I think this is close to the most credible explanation for why you could ever hear a difference. High CPU load could result in buffer underruns, which can result in audible artifacts (as there's not enough samples in the buffer to guarantee smooth playback). Although I highly doubt that this would be a problem on 2013 hardware...
Hmm, I'd guess that it might impact something that is different between different compilers and the like - timing on when the different code runs. Eg. One memcpy sometimes runs faster than other times, leading to distortion on the music. I imagine there's lots of built in tools that minimize said distortion by buffering, but if your buffered data is just barely keeping up with what's playing, a slightly slower copy could leaver the buffer empty for a moment
I'm not sure if that's what the (almost certainly delusional) linked article was talking about but your explanation holds water... but only for onboard motherboard embedded audio. That does tend to pick up a lot of electrical noise and just be mediocre at best.
However this can all be sidestepped with an affordable external DAC connected with optical or USB.
I don't know why people are mocking this discussion. It's well documented that tight loops on CPUs can cause electromagnetic interference. Old timers with C64s will recall how it could affect the TV monitor output "fuzziness" and nearby AM radios - heck, I could even tell how a program hung by the sound it made.
Fun fact: vinyl has constant angular velocity, not constant linear velocity. It means that sound fidelity gets progressively worse while going from outer tracks to inner tracks.
Depends on the content/ amount of sound recorded.
Memory: Frank Zappa used to go for 22 mins a side on lps to allow the quality to remain constant throughout the playing of his plastic releases.
The needle wiggles side-to-side and might collide with the groove next to it if two bass hits are poorly timed. I suppose the likelihood becomes greater with the more compact inner area?
Also the high end sounds better the faster the vinyl is going so the outer tracks win there too. 45rmp records have more sparkle. The speed of the vinyl is like sample rate.
How can audiophiles continue to exist with knowledge being so easily available? And how can someone be clever enough to be a software engineer and not clever enough to figure out crystals in bags taped to cables do not affect music quality.
Just some nuggets from that thread:
"Sounds awesome, the previous version had a slight tendency to defuse the treble, but with VS2012 compile it is a much more complete sound with absolutely no digital harshness, some 16/44 albums I could hardly play before without getting a headache are now rendered in their full glory."
"It's just lazyness on the part of the player developers that they rely on the old methods, I guess they think bits are bits."
"Goto also sounds better than anything else I have tried."
- the "Goto" in the quote means a goto in C used to replace a loop.
"also most players use malloc to get memory while new is the c++ method and sounds better."
I think about the audiophile fringe approximately the same way I think about flat-earthers: I'm sure there is a core of true believers, but that at this point there's just massive amounts of trolling going on - and Poe's law applies: any sufficiently advanced form of trolling is indistinguishable from kookery.
That is always my initial thought... until I remind myself that audiophile products exist, and they are being bought by somebody! Trolling on internet is cheap/free; buying audiophile equipment is not :O
All depends. No doubt the fringe is fixating on the 0.1% that doesn't make a difference.
When it comes to hardware: if you have a great and clean signal chain, good ears, decent monitors +/ good room, good headphones, you can record and hear the difference of good gear (diminishing returns though, you are paying for throughput (channels), latency, or even just build-quality/brand (Apple esque) etc at some point).
Of course marketing adds hyperbole and takes certain aspects into woo territory. At the software level: sampling rate can (depending on programming of individual plugins) make a difference in your mixing session (you get nasty artifacts, like EQ cramping, in plugins that don't have internal over-sampling).
This is all the professional gear with a track record rather than the "prosumer" gear (maybe that's the definition of audiophile you were connotating).
No, audiophiles are absolutely real. Look at how many of them buy vinyl records of music that was produced digitally; any sampling artifacts that might hypothetically be audible would be replicated on the vinyl. As long as the master is digital there's no way a vinyl record could possibly sound better than a lossless digital recording like FLACC or CDDA.
And then there are people who buy vinyl records of video game sound-tracks, in which case it doesn't even make sense to remove sampling artifacts since those would be present in the original game.
I built my own audiophile stereo set based on Nelson Pass' Directly Coupled B1 pre amp design, Pavel Dudek's PA03 power amp, a pair of DIY loudspeaker kits from lautsprecherbau.de, and an audiophile Rasperry Pi DAC board which I sponsored on Kickstarter running Volumio player distribution. I went even as far as using discrete OpAmps because they sounded better to me.
My pet conspiracy theory is that flat-earthers are actually a false flag operation by some 3letteragency to make actual conspiracy theorists look bad. ;)
Every community has a fringe of crazies. I remember back when I first got into audio in high school, when I bought my first pair of >$10 headphones and suddenly I could hear details in music that weren't there before, and wondering how deep the rabbit hole went. I started reading audio forums and saw that most postings came from a small number of extremely active posters that made absurd, hyperbolic claims. There's a product review that has since become a meme, about some ridiculous $1000 RCA cables, how they sounded "smoky" and "danceable". I read that when it was first posted and felt disgusted. Then the moderators of the forum I read most often announced that any discussion of double-blind testing was banned and anyone who discussed it would immediately be banned. I deleted my account on that forum. What a disappointment. But the fact that fringe crazies exist doesn't mean the subject is all a joke. Car tuning is a legitimate hobby, even though I have idiot cousins who will physically assault anyone who questions the purpose of their undercarriage neon lights. And there is a difference between junk audio equipment and good audio equipment, even though there is also plenty of snake oil under the label "audiophile".
There used to be Monster audio cables that cost thousands. The Amazon reviews were hysterical. I can’t find it anymore, but this one has funny reviews for a $1500 HDMI adapter:
>How can audiophiles continue to exist with knowledge being so easily available?
There are many things like this. Coffee people, for instance, who will straight faced insist to you that they can tell the difference between stirring the coffee grounds with a tiny metal "distribution tool" 5 times or 10 times, and who will post "recipes" for soaking ground up beans in hot water.
Off topic but I bet you could tell the difference between an espresso shot pulled after stirring the grounds to ensure even distribution vs one that hasn't been messed with. I'm not saying you can tell the difference between stirring with a toothpick vs stirring with tiny metal tines. You can actually observe a difference in how the water flows through the grounds, you can measure how much coffee has been extracted into the water with a refractometer, and you can do a blind taste test and identify which is which. If the grounds are not evenly distributed, you get channels where the water passes through under high pressure, and this over extracts those grounds making the shot taste extremely bitter, and other grinds are left untouched or under extracted. I was very skeptical of this until I observed it myself.
Not saying that you could tell the difference, but as a random physical process I am sure there is some vague difference in stirring vs. not. So at least there is no immediately obvious falsehood.
Claiming that bits are not bits is on a flat earth level stupid.
Distribution tools are for espresso, not pour over or immersion brewed coffee. In espresso, you have extremely high pressure, so if there is a density differential in the coffee cake, you will get most of the water flowing through the spot that has the lowest density, and the rest of the cake will not be visited, making for a weaker drink.
Also, the "recipes" are usually just a ratio of coffee grounds to boiling water by mass, a rough idea of how fine to grind, and a brew time. If you take these parameters and vary them by any reasonable amount, you will definitely taste the difference.
Overall, it's not an apt analogy. There is no "fidelity" for coffee like there is for audio. There is a quantitative loss function you can define for audio quality - just the sound you're trying to replicate versus the sound that your system actually ends up generating. For example, no human ear can hear frequencies above ~22kHz, meaning anything over the normal ~44kHz sample rate provably makes no difference.
Reminds me of the invention of Fisher's exact test:
>The example is loosely based on an event in Fisher's life. The lady in question, Muriel Bristol, claimed to be able to tell whether the tea or the milk was added first to a cup. Her future husband, William Roach, suggested that Fisher give her eight cups, four of each variety, in random order. One could then ask what the probability was for her getting the specific number of cups she identified correct (in fact all eight), but just by chance.
The thing you're laughing at is how you deal with coffee grinders that spit out clumpy coffee. If you don't break the clumps, the high pressure water from an espresso machine will distribute unevenly throughout the puck (choosing to go through the path of least resistance) and will be the difference between drinking a notoriously-finnicky-to-get-right light roast and battery acid.
It's just physics, and something you can check for yourself in 5 minutes or by asking any chemical/food engineer who knows the basics of extraction.
In addition to just letting people have their fun (so long as it stays fun/isn’t just a method of gatekeeping/isn’t just picking fights or whatever) I think we should all remember to exercise a little humility and consider that maybe we are wrong about what matters or doesn’t. Sometimes things look a little ridiculous from the outside, but once it’s explained or you do it yourself, it makes a little more sense.
For instance, there was a time where if you had told me that the number one thing that would improve my coffee was the purchasing of a conical burr grinder, I would’ve raised an eyebrow. Now? I find it is almost more important than the beans I buy. Even my first cheap $50 one elevated my coffee to a whole new level. Despite years of people complementing the quality of my cold brew, I still have to insist that they buy even a cheap burr before anything else. And every single one of them that has followed my advice has thanked me later! All because someone else told me first and I said “screw it why not?”
Anyway, the point of the above is not to brag about my coffee at home (which I’m sure isn’t even that impressive). It’s mostly to illustrate that sometimes what sounds ridiculous does actually matter. We just don’t know it.
Not to defend stir guy, but small changes to the brewing process do change what gets extracted. Chemistry is wild stuff, but if you just pour warm water over beans you found and call it coffee I can see why you wouldn't necessarily appreciate that.
I've become fascinated with James Hoffman's channel on all things coffee related - I have no desire to buy fancy coffee, grinders, coffee machines, kettles etc. and I'm perfectly happy with my cheap Sainsbury's coffee and a John Lewis machine that probably cost £60.
It's probably the same conditioning that Pavlov discovered. The clinking metal creates anticipation leading to a real and measurable difference in satisfaction. The brain is interesting that way.
Who am I to judge? I will fight you over spaces instead of tabs and don't you dare remove my trailing commas. If it's not supported by the language I'll write a transpiler and add it to the CI flow just before deploy, because git history.
> will straight faced insist to you that they can tell the difference between stirring the coffee grounds with a tiny metal "distribution tool"
I could probably distribute the coffee by simply shaking and tapping the portafilter on the counter, but stirring it makes it more even and I'm less likely to make a mess that way.
Also that they can tell the difference between stirring with an expensive tool vs a toothpick or needle.
Sure stirring grounds to break up clumps seems like a good idea. But it's mind boggling someone managed to name the technique after themselves and get everyone to refer to it by an acronym with their name in it.
My wife keeps asking me if I prefer Twining English Breakfast or Irish Breakfast tea. I opened both boxed and had two cups side by side. They are exactly the same.
Could say that about your comment, right? Let the coffee fans enjoy the process of improving their coffee. Unless they start gatekeeping shit or insulting my (very pedestrian) taste in coffee, I don't care.
Absurd comparison - channeling is a known physical phenomenon that occurs when you fail to declump the grounds. It causes the high pressure water to find the path of least resistance through the basket and leaves the majority of the grounds underextracted.
Hey, balancing extraction is hard! You can't necessarily make a good puck without declumping it first, which helps the process a bit! I've also seen a number of people without just also alternatively thunk it to even things out a bit before making the puck.
There are some silly things and not all are required -- I don't do espresso or distribute my grounds, for example. I just Chemex with too many beans and let the flood of taste flow. And the little things really do make a difference (proper filter to catch the oils, blooming, light pour on the water, burr grinder (!!!!), freshness of the grind and the right age for the beans, etc). I'm not the snobbiest of snobs but I can tell! And at a certain point, its like looking at a painting. Even the littlest 'off' brushstroke can ruin a whole piece of something like the Mona Lisa.
A lot of roasting software is computerized these days too, so there is some precision in the process and in very particular roasts from certain boutique manufacturers these days. It's pretty nifty stuff. If you want to nerd snipe yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0t8DZ2yHs8
So at that level, basically we are super far up the log curve of diminishing returns. But then again, if your coffee is an experience, pulling away some not-insignificant-% of those last notes of bitterness is really and truly helpful.
On the audio side -- Yes, I'm an audiophile, but a very practical one, and I try to stay by the very old adage (as it were) that music enjoyment is 90% our emotional state and 10% equipment. That said, I can tell the difference pretty clearly between 44khz and 88khz on TIDAL -- it's really not that hard for me personally, at least. Both sound great but the 44khz feels like it's projected onto an awkward hexagon, whereas the 88khz is very semicircular and doesn't 'feel' unnatural. I really have to be into the music to be noticing though. It really is worth it for that 'art museum' experience (and yes, I did check to see if I could tell 24 bit 44khz and 24 bit 88khz apart. It's a very very clear difference to me! Above it is harder and I really can't say tbh). I do have a good DAC and lower mid-tier headphones (well-worn 598s, well over a decade at this point! :D got my originals somewhere between 7th and 10th grade. man, these have been around a while, dang). So anyways I know what I like and I get to have access to an experience that I haven't been able to before. It makes me want to cry, some songs are so beautiful. I'll go downtown to live jazz just to vibe if I can, that's the best. But here, I get to get a little bit closer to that experience, and I can tell when I'm not there. The emotional side can cover the gap, but...man. The little things do matter.
So that's why I think maybe it's not so silly that some people distribute their coffee grounds. If you're interested, there's this extremely practical bloke named James Hoffman who uses it as part of his core routine, he has some phenomenal coffee videos as well. Here's a great video where he discusses some of the nuances of the different methods here, and I think he has a pretty great, balanced opinion on it! (Usually I defer to him, tbh. He does refer to at least one method as 'incremental gains'): https://youtu.be/xb3IxAr4RCo?t=239
Hope that was interesting to you. This was interesting to write, many thanks for reading and greatly appreciated for whoever stuck it out to this point! :D <3 :)))) :D
This is basically the current "holy war" among some audiophiles. There's measurement-intensive approaches likes audiosciencereview and then there's the more subjective things like "soundstage" and "depth" and "clarity".
That's why it's so fun, though. Audio reproduction can be measured objectively but the experience of listening to something can only be measured subjectively. Ultimately, if the $5k D-Link router sounds better to someone, who am I to argue?
I have a mid-fi setup by audiophile standards, but it's still more of an investment than most people I know have made. When asked for advice, I tell people to focus on what sounds good to them. If it sounds good, then it _is_ good, assuming one isn't buying something to impress others.
Also, if they ask nicely, I'll give them a discount on my optimized-for-their-CPU-architecture, hand-coded, machine language version of malloc, free, and memcpy.
I'm in the same camp as you, I've got way more in my setup than the average person, but its mid-fi at best, and mostly on the headphone side. I like music, and I have headphones on for 5-8 hours a day, I'd like to optimize that experience. The good news is the average pair of headphones today is SO so much better than it used to be, and in a weird way some of the overpriced stuff from Apple/Sony/etc... is actually getting better sound to people that hadn't experienced it before.
I really wish there was more emphasis on the transparent + objective measurement side of things industry wide. There is in some places, but at the end of the day entire companies are built around not having objectively perfect sound reproduction, because there is a following of people that like the house-sound they engineer in to their speaker/headphones. And there is value there, its just hard to quantify.
About 12 years ago I built a pair of large (relatively) full-range bookshelf speakers for near-field studio monitor type use at my desk with a wild 3 chamber porting setup. No traditional physical filter-network whatsoever, I borrowed a decent mic, measured the response, generated an inverse impulse filter that I could use to preprocess the signal going to the amp to arrive at a "perfectly" flat frequency response. Guess what? it sounded ok at best.
>Audio reproduction can be measured objectively but the experience of listening to something can only be measured subjectively
This is very true. I bought an earphone recently because it had the best technicals for its price-point. I was nice, but somewhat overwhelming to listen to for a long time. Some songs were harsh and sounded too airy. As much as I wanted to love it, I couldn't.
Then I bought a cheaper one that lots of reviewers said sounded good on anything they tried (Tin T2). It had "worse" technicals but guess what, I'm using it more than the older one and finding it way more pleasant to listen to.
Measurement is complicated. It's not one-and-done and can easily be done incorrectly or misinterpreted. GoldenSound recently did a video on this topic, showing how minor changes in settings for analysis tools and analysis hardware can cause radically different conclusions.
There are also many techniques in hardware that make a piece of audio equipment measure objectively better, but sound worse - like feedback.
Audio is really complicated and can't be boiled down to one or two comparison charts.
Audiophile-grade self-delusion is, fortunately, fairly rare. What's far more common today is the error many consumers make about 4K TV. I have friends who show me their new 4K TV and think it looks "amazing" just because they are feeding it a source labeled "4K" resolution, without considering (or even knowing) the bit rate of the compressed source.
While there are good 4K sources like UHD Bluray discs and a few decent streaming sources (but it's spotty and inconsistent), the vast majority of "4K" sources look pretty awful due to being wildly over-compressed. And the level of self-delusion from some of my friends – who are otherwise very smart – is near-emperor's-new-clothes level.
A recent example was the Super Bowl which was one of the few "special events" Comcast aired in 4K (only available on the latest version of Comcast's streaming boxes which few people have – and 4K is not available if you use DVR). I checked it out on a current-year higher-end 65" 4K TV (~$3k) which I adjusted myself to disable the myriad default settings claimed to "enhance" signals but often mangle them in unexpected ways.
Even set up properly on a good TV it looked terrible. The tell-tale DCT macro-blocking was rampant and in many shots the base 4K-ness of the resolution space seemed to highlight the 'peggishness' worse than the 1080p version (which I was cross-checking against out of now-morbid curiosity). The super bowl is widely claimed to be the best quality 4K live broadcast. $250,000 lenses on the best cameras sent through the best signal paths managed by hundreds of engineers across a small city of the world's best production trucks. All stomped into a peggish mess so that cable and satellite companies can shove hundreds of channels of infomercials and decades-old Murder She Wrote episodes down the pipe simultaneously. I guess they'll keep doing it until enough people demand better or someone offers an alternative. Afterward I searched online and it appears the only widely accessible way to view the SB in decent 4K was if you live in one of the few cities that currently have broadcast TV stations airing true 4K and you set up an over-the-air antenna. While it's still compressed, due to FCC specifications for signals actually broadcast OTA, it's pretty mild and apparently looks sensational compared the what most people saw at home on their "awesome" new 4K TVs.
Oh, this is something I've been wondering about - I've had a 4K TV for years, but I don't think I've ever seen a 4K Bluray (I don't think I even know anyone who had a Bluray player).
Are you saying that streaming a movie (say a recent Marvel one) in 4K from Disney Plus will look noticeably less good than if I played the same movie from a Bluray player?
4K TV signals invariably suck, absolutely. But depending on people's preferences, they may think the vibrant colors and improved sharpness of even a mediocre 4k HDR stream looks "better" than a higher-bitrate 1080 SDR video. Personally, I'm a bit of a purist so I prefer SDR blu-ray unless the source material was filmed with HDR in mind, but I totally understand why others prefer the "pop" of a 4k remaster streamed over Netflix. It's all different preferences.
> Audiophile-grade self-delusion is, fortunately, fairly rare.
Oh not from where I see the world! hehe - infact I see most stem educated people of reasonably good IQ by and large living a mythology they do not even know they are living in because they've never really understood the difference between knowledge and understanding and the whole purpose of the humanities.
Mythology is the stories we tell about how we as individuals relate to society and the cosmos.
Elon Musk functions as a sort of deva or heroic god myth that many people do not even realise they are buying into.
Mythology even includes how we structure science - the "genius", the archetypes and roles and stories we tell about heros and how scientific activity takes place - these are myths that have causal effects in producing actual science. Mythology is meta to everything. Its literally the meaning about who we are and our place in the world. There's many cases. Pick your mythology wisely because if you don't you'll get a poor version of one by cultural default.
I can tell you a lot on Hacker News does not look too much different from the audiophile community from this perspective hehe
As long as it looks better than 1080 I'm happy with it. Are you saying I shouldn't watch or can't enjoy 4K unless it's perfect? Sounds like you're the one suffering from self-delusion.
Like kernel or compiler development, audio and DSP development is seen by some as a black art that’s subject to mysterious incantations and arcane rituals.
Everybody knows how to write a for loop and wire up a CRUD app these days, but satisfying a low-latency audio buffer request while decoding media and applying effects feels fraught and often (genuinely) looks like a garble of translated Matlab with countless inscrutable variable names and seemingly random constants peppered everywhere.
From that sense of awe (traditional meaning), it’s only a small leap to start wondering if even “known” textbook truths about things like memcpy matter differently than normal. And then the cultist gossip begins, you get the echo chamber effect on casual forums and meetups, and this is where you end up.
Reminds me of comments when CD's came out int he 1980's. Audiophiles and magazine articles insisted they could "hear the aluminum".
What they were actually hearing was songs mastered for Vinyl or casette that had not been properly remastered for digital. Vinyl and casettes required pre-emphasis of highs to offset the limited high frequency response and noise of analog media.
It's actually one of the best reasons to buy old vinyl for music that wasn't very popular. So much stuff got put into CDs without being mastered for it and it does sound objectively worse, as you've pointed out. There's a lot of great music (to certain people anyways) that you can't get a great digital copy of because it was never made. Even the digital copies are often pulled from a record or from a master tape but never remastered. Anything that could sell was probably remastered for CDs and digital.
Of course, anything recorded with digital recording equipment and pressed to vinyl is simply for aesthetic reasons. Some people just like playing records and listening to music this way.
> Vinyl and casettes required pre-emphasis of highs to offset the limited high frequency response and noise of analog media.
This is true of tape but not vinyl. High frequencies are difficult for vinyl and are better off rolled off. A lot of exciters were used before the tape to get a certain, pleasing distortion. Sounded bad when people started switching to ADAT from analog tape.
Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture saying that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any parody of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied.
Audiophiles aren't just about dumb stuff of this sort though. The majority of the community is mainly interested in things like trying different speakers/headphones and listening setups, where there are measurable differences and what one prefers entirely subjective.
For me the lack of understanding that it is subjective is part and parcel with being an "audiophile" - I like the "sound" of vinyl, the difference between me and the audiophile religious I know is they'll tell me I don't just "like" it, that it's objectively better and they start saying nonsense like we're reading in the posted thread.
Comparison is the thief of joy, and the only thing audiophiles do is compare.
> where there are measurable differences and what one prefers entirely subjective.
It may be true, but the audiophile in question didn't bother to do any blind test.
And I believe that actually most of the audiophiles don't do any blind tests, otherwise they'd use twisted coatangers as cables and save themselves a lots of money.
How can audiophiles continue to exist with knowledge
being so easily available?
Well, good news! There is a newer breed of data-driven audiophiles who rely on hard data and solid engineering.
An example would be https://www.audiosciencereview.com - he has reviewed a few thousand projects using industry standard measurement gear like Audio Precision analyzers, Klippel scanners, etc.
> And how can someone be clever enough to be a software engineer and not clever enough to figure out crystals in bags taped to cables do not affect music quality.
After living through the past several years in the US, this is not a question I ask.
There are millions of people that genuinely reject the idea they suffer from normal cognitive biases, or that they can be fooled, and that's a huge part of their worldview, that they are "smarter" than other people because they aren't affected by those pesky "biases". So whatever they "experience" must be ground truth. So if they think the song sounds better under C++, it doesn't matter what "the experts" say, they must be wrong.
Back when I was a kid, I swore that using a different MP3 decoder in Winamp (libmpg123.dll I think?) had a much better soundstage and bass extension than the default one.
I like to think that isn’t the same madness as thinking a different memcpy, because I figured different implementations would map different inputs to different outputs and thus could definitely affect the sound, but any context or knowledge would be appreciated!
There were definitely variations in sound quality from different MP3 encoders, so you probably weren't imagining things. IIRC libmpg123 was for decoding/ playback rather than encoding, but there were a number of suboptimal encoders before the scene settled on LAME as the best option for MP3's. These days you can get better lossy encodes at smaller files with AAC (the industry standard for end-user lossy audio) or Opus — a great free & open source alternative.
All you could want to know about audio encoding, including listening tests (with original posts from the heyday) is still online at the Hydrogen Audio forum.
There are some great threads there, and they've been debunking audiophile snake-oil for decades. Enjoy the rabbit hole ;)
>How can audiophiles continue to exist with knowledge being so easily available?
Humans are not rational. This is easy to say, and hard to swallow - so, pretty similar to when you'd confront anyone's beliefs with rational refutation.
> How can audiophiles continue to exist with knowledge being so easily available? And how can someone be clever enough to be a software engineer and not clever enough to figure out crystals in bags taped to cables do not affect music quality.
You don't have to be clever to be a software engineer. It's not that difficult.
Last time I used Rust to build a music player, the resulting audio quality was much worse than my C++ version. I'm sure these new kids on the block ("Rustaceans" or whatever they call themselves) know what they are doing when building web applications and CLIs, but when audio quality has to 120% of the original sound, nothing beats true and tested C++. I cannot explain how or why, but programs made with C++ just sounds better, fuller and more authentic than programs made with other languages.
Due to Rust's fearless concurrency, every time I have to add a new instrument, I either have to make a copy of the entire track to add it, or temporarily borrow the bass from the guitar track, which leads to tiny jumps in the audio. Notwithstanding the need for unsafe when I want to put the amp to 11.
I think this is key. I’m sure the listeners subjectively enjoying one version over the other, but not because the quality is any different. Instead they have the confidence that they picked the best option and can relax. Of course the real test would be if they could tell the difference, and I think the obvious answer is they couldn’t.
>And how can someone be clever enough to be a software engineer and not clever enough to figure out crystals in bags taped to cables do not affect music quality.
this is why IQ tests are BS. You can be smart in one thing (taking IQ tests) but not another.
A favorite of mine has been to say with a straight face that "it's important to make sure that there are no kinks in your cables, because the 0's pass through easily but the sharp edges of the 1's get caught on things" and seeing if anyone catches on.
> How can audiophiles continue to exist with knowledge being so easily available?
I think having a look at the current political climate answers this by itself.
Knowledge has lost much value, and anecdotal reasoning is at pre-education system levels.
Intelligence are declining in all ages [1].
And now top that with hallucinating AI:s that people without contextual knowledge can't even spot when they are making things up.
The human ear is analogue, therefore it can be subject to a form of asymptotic Sysipheanism, ever searching for the smallest shred of better quality audio, not realizing that "quality" can be hallucinated.
Skilled artists / machinist can train body to stupid degrees of precision, i.e. identifying colours, feeling out a thou. IMO something like that happening with audiophiles who are skilled at listening but when brain trained to discern fine details forced to rationalize inputs whose differences are largely chaotic and start hallucinating noise into conviction. I think many audiophiles are actually hearing differences, but the source of differences are subjective/meaningless.
Most "audiophiles" won't argue in forums; they'll just buy the equipment they think sounds right for them and then just leave it at that.
The listening experience differs from person to person, depending on everything from hearing, to noise to the individual listener's preferences and tastes. The audiophiles you mention try to justify that individual experience using whatever argument available, including false ones.
> How can audiophiles continue to exist with knowledge being so easily available? And how can someone be clever enough to be a software engineer and not clever enough to figure out crystals in bags taped to cables do not affect music quality.
I consider myself an audiophile because I hear a difference between no amp+dac sennheiser hd650 vs with amp+dac. so when you ask "How can audiophile continue to exist" ? thats a bit of a dumb take aint it?
The same way as flat-earthers. Also, showing off. Also, self-suggestion. Also, monetary incentive for vendors to keep their buyers spending money on snake oil.
I am a Hifi enthuiast. Member of church of hifi. Ie I believe it sounds better sometimes. This is similar to how a wine can be rated higher if you have a nice time with friends in a good setting. Lately I have started to switch over to studio monitors. Sound is subjective for example with headphones its harder to say that what audio curve is correct as that is subjective to the listener.
>Lately I have started to switch over to studio monitors.
A colleague on a Zoom call noticed I had audio equipment in my room, and excitedly asked what my headphone setup was. He didn't recognize the Sony MDR-7506 cans on my head, which were running out of a Focusrite audio interface that I use for multitrack recording. Sometimes I listen on my Yamaha MSP7 monitors. He went on to rattle off some absurdly expensive equipment that I forgot immediately upon Googling. I forget if his amp cost four figures or five figures.
I didn't have the heart to say: I'm just using what they use in recording studios.
I understand chasing fidelity, it's driven me to upgrade my own equipment over the years, but capital-a Audiophile stuff is kind of its own thing. People extracting outrageous amounts of money in return for a certain kind of marketing copy and bespoke physical presentation. It feels cynical to me, but it seems to be an ecosystem that exists on its own without much harm to the rest of the world.
I read a bunch of posts on that thread, but it wasn't clear to me the setup. Certainly seems possible that different implementations would have different CPU utilization, and impact the power supply differently. Not to mention RF noise changes to the local environment.
Today's PCs and cables aren't particularly well shielded. In fact I switched routers because an unshielded USB cable inside the router had a significant impact on Wifi performance if I used the USB for connecting storage.
I also bought a USB connected SDR (software defined radio) and I can tell you that position relative to my PC and the quality of the shielding of the USB cable was directly visible on the waterfall display. Moving the SDR (but not the Antenna) showed significant changes in reception across large swaths of the frequency range.
I've definitely had fan, coil whine, and related interference with different CPU utilization before. I've also had speakers, even wireless speakers get interference from my computer that varies with load, not to mention things like an incoming cellphone call.
Doesn't seem that crazy that different memory allocation and memcpy implementations could impact sound quality of any local audio equipment. Or that playing from ramdisk could sound better than from disk (assuming said disk is emitting noticeable RF).
It is bad enough as someone who is conscious of sound quality I would never use the term “audiophile” to describe myself and I’d advise anybody marketing audio stuff (like the serious fallen “Audioholics” which is reduced to handwringing about why people aren’t interested in buying what they sell”) to avoid using it.
I think audiophiles don't have any meta-perception of how their own cognitive process colors sensory information, while somehow being able to map the difference in aural space.
So maybe in a sense it does "sound" different, but it's more because what they are thinking about leaks into their aural experience.
> "Goto also sounds better than anything else I have tried." - the "Goto" in the quote means a goto in C used to replace a loop.
It strikes me as plausible that there might be differences in how the compiler treats goto vs whatever other loop. Pretty sure GCC can't optimize goto in the same ways.
But what if it's not fake...what if there's a slight...like...difference in timings or something? That nevertheless affects the ways signals are eventually rendered in the output? Or what if...literally...there is something more going on...among the movement of electrons (some other layer of information conveyance) than EE would consider...and these folks are picking up on that?
I didn't think flat-earthers existed for real. Then I came across them on the good old internet. At first I thought most of them would have to be trolls, not really believing it.. but then you realize that so many of them get extremely angry when you try to debate them. They truly exist.
But then again I actually met a person who believed the moon landings were fake.. brilliant guy otherwise, but too young to (unlike myself) having lived through the time period. He (and some others) seemed to believe that it was all CGI, not realizing or grasping that the watch he was wearing had way more computing power than the whole space program at that time. And that every illustration of the moon surface before Apollo 8 (they didn't land, they just took photos) were so very different from the real thing.
Same as how homeopathy, flat earthers, etc can exist. Also people like to have something to call themselves special. This provides a group in which you can show off your 'knowledge' and gadgetry and so on.
Same reason why you can be a scientist and like Trump. Or be a nurse and be anti-vax. Or be a teacher who hates kids. The world is full of fakes and irrational people.
> How can audiophiles continue to exist with knowledge being so easily available?
People need to feel superior. So they choose a subjective field and claim to be objectively correct. Audiophiles are a relatively harmless version of this; other sorts of "truther" become actively dangerous.
Many moons ago I found myself making parts for the audiophile community. Eventually I got in to making complete headphones. Designing and building audiophile headphones is a multi-modal skill that is very engaging. I was pretty good at it. But I had to exit the audiophile world because it was too crazy for me.
I would get messages from customers that were completely insane. And if you say "yo, that's insane" word gets out and it damages your brand. So you're rewarded for perpetuating these weird myths.
If I could build these really cool headphones without having to deal with audiophiles, I probably would. It was challenging and a lot of fun, and I was pretty good at it.
I saw the observation years ago that "Normal people use their stereos to listen to their music. Audiophiles use their music to listen to their stereos."
I think I read a thread like this almost 10 years ago when I happened to be doing some audio work, maybe it was the same one.
If memory serves, there was somebody saying that exiting the program cleanly sounds worse, you need to crash on a page fault reading the input buffer instead, and that's your end of file behavior.
Someone else said FLAC makes it sound worse, but I suspect they just couldn't figure out how to use libflac.
In other words they were bad programmers writing buggy, half baked shit, and they explained away their broken code as sounding better.
Even the snippet I see in the linked post, right off the bat they start their loop with WaitForSingleObject, that's kind of suspect; the first thing they do is enter the kernel to block at every loop. I suspect they aren't doing that in an optimal way.
Readit News
There are those that are obsessed with objectively measurable sound quality. They want to reproduce the recorded waveform as accurately as possible, and they want products that can be measured doing that, but they often pursue accuracy beyond the limits of any human to hear.
There are those that like a little distortion or degradation if it sounds nice to them. These are the people who collect tube amps and will openly admit they're not as accurate, but accuracy is not what they're after.
There are those who embrace voodoo. I knew a physics professor who was one of these. He had hideously expensive isolation platforms, resonator weights, unobtanium cables, "ambient field conditioners"... You name it. He knew there was no scientific basis for any them to work, but he had very deliberately deluded himself. If asked, he'd explain that the ultimate goal of the audiophile's pursuit was pleasure. If he could shut down his reasoning and spend hours moving resonator stones around on top of his CD transport until he thought he had improved the sound, and this gave him pleasure, was that pleasure not real even if the sound was exactly the same?
Then there are those who combine contradictory aspects of all of the above without any self-awareness or critical thinking skills. That's the sort that will torment themselves, and others, arguing on internet forums about why their own snake oil of choice is legitimate, real, and how anyone who isn't using it is a cretin.
I just wish there was any competition left in the big players to push measurable home audio performance higher.
Not really that expensive: https://www.parts-express.com/Dayton-Audio-OmniMic-V2-Acoust...
https://www.parts-express.com/search?order=relevance:desc&ke...
Not simply beyond human hearing but beyond the limits where any information is preserved at all. There's a class of audiophiles who have never even heard of Shannon-Nyquist.
Usually, errors and distortions stack across multiple system components. While really bad components can be A/B/X tested accurately, good ones rarely can be. Still, imperceptible errors that accumulate/amplify can result in actual, audible differences. One can liken it to floating point computations where the error ranges grow each time and can reach unacceptable levels.
Of course it was, the placebo effect exists and works after all. Where these audiophiles turn into audiophools is here:
> hideously expensive isolation platforms, resonator weights, unobtanium cables, "ambient field conditioners"... You name it
They allow themselves to be duped by unscrupulous snake oil merchants instead of simply telling themselves that the rocks they collected on the beach are just the thing to liven up their sound stage.
Not as real as the pleasure obtainable by spending all that money on hookers and blow instead of hideously expensive snake oil.
Money can buy happiness, but it's not always a good deal.
I consider myself an enthusiast/hobbyist, not an audiophile, and hold a pretty high level of scepticism about the truly devoted tbh.
That said I've never had the pleasure of listening to anything north of around the £10k mark, so I would love to be convinced of a genuine move-the-dial listening benefit of the really high end gear!
I think I scored worse than a coin flip when it came to 320 files
Some really nice floorstanding speakers though offer a jaw dropping improvement that’s measurable.
Ultimately, we're talking about signal reproduction here, and inexpensive gear can put out some seriously accurate sound thanks to onboard DSP processing that uses software to compensate for less than amazing hardware. As long as the sound reaching your ears is correct, doesn't matter how it was achieved.
The one thing you can potentially gain once you get in to the realm of paying thousands of dollars is oodles of power from the amplifier and oodles of power handling from the speakers, which may or may not let you begin to approximate the sound of live music.
If you have ever had the pleasure of hearing an orchestra perform live, the average SPL (sound pressure level) may not be that high, but the fleeting momentary peaks from something like a timpani might be north of 100dB. That's a bit of a feat for your stereo system to pull off and there's no substitute for horsepower there.
But even then, this doesn't necessarily cost megabucks.
The lunatic fringe gets all the attention, because they're comically delusional, but they are not hardcore to me.
Bought new, the modern equivalent of that $100 Craigslist system is (vast simplification and approximation) about $500. A well-researched $500-$2500 (new) stereo system is in my experience and opinion the range where you get appreciably better and better sound.At $500 you are already getting a system that is not doing a whole lot wrong. But not massive output or deep deep bass.
By $2500 you're getting something that's doing very close to the full 17hz-20khz at output levels that will more than exceed just about any reasonable residential situation. And in fact your listening room is the bottleneck now.
Above that price you're paying for very boutiquey exotic stuff that can pull off certain tricks, very high levels of output, etc.
Those prices are very approximate and assume a well researched and set up system.
Stereo speakers are not made to go very low, that's what a subwoofer is for. Not all subwoofers even go that low!
Above $2500 for a good stereo system will get you a better sound, but as always, the more you pay, the less you'll be able to hear the difference. Also, the better the sound is, the more you'll have to be careful about amp pairing and room acoustic.
You definitely will, but at lot of it will come from the fact that the latter system will be set up well in an isolated room with proper speaker placement, while the former will be some speakers thrown in a living wherever they fit.
The thing is, I think of it like I do many of my "hobbies" which are really just about improving my actual quality of experience/quality of life in the things I do every day. I am typing this comment on a custom-built $900 mechanical keyboard, and just got off a conference call where I was speaking into $1k worth of microphone gear, with a $3k camera setup pointed at me, and listening to the other person through $2k worth of audio output gear (headphones + DAC/Amp stack). To the casual observer that's utterly ridiculous and I've wasted all this money for nothing. On the other hand, I spend 8+ hours a day wearing those headphones, on meetings, and typing, anything that even marginally improves the quality of my experience doing the things I do for 8+ hours every day and intend to do for most of the remainder of my life, means that I am improving my overall quality of life in a meaningful way.
I do this for the exact same reason I spent big on my chair, desk, lighting, and my bed. Between my home office and my bedroom, I spend 75% or more of my entire life (roughly 18 out of every 24 hours) in those two places until I retire. It is absolutely worthwhile for people who spend a lot of time listening to audio to optimize the way they listen to audio. You just have to really keep your critical thinking hat on, though, because the market is full of snake oil.
I more or less agree with this but the main problem is that people listen in untreated rooms with horrible acoustics.
Once you hit that "medium good" threshold, which is pretty easy these days, more expensive speakers aren't going to make a difference until you get your acoustics under control.
If you do have a nice room, you will definitely notice the difference between the medium good setup and a nicer one, although you will hit diminishing returns WAY before you reach the $100k speakers.
For almost everything, unless you're really, really into that thing, there's a segment of the price curve where more money == more better, but afterward you're just shoveling cash into a black hole.
You should be able to hear the difference between a $100 speaker system and a $1,000 speaker system.
But there are other things like room acoustics and stuff that can cause issues. If you put a really good system in a bad room I could imagine it would be harder to tell a difference.
$1,000 to $10,000 might be a lot harder to tell the difference assuming you sourced a good performing setup at each price point.
Same for MP3 vs Lossless, you could probably hear the difference between 320Kbps on specific songs if you know what to listen for but I doubt you can hear it on everything and you would have to concentrate pretty hard rather than enjoying the music.
On the other hand, TVs, sound bars, and the HomePod mini produce audio so bad I can't believe people put up with it.
I can chime in on this one. I used to be like OP: Not an audiophile, but someone who can appreciate the difference between a $1000 setup and a $100 setup. Once I got married, and someone with better interior decorating taste started having a vote on home decor, that appreciation had to go out the window. Nobody with any taste wants floor-standing big ugly black boxes positioned at the "Optimal" listening positions in the living room. Do an image search for "high end speakers". Yuck.
That said, every system has distortion - the question is what sound do you like/want. Do you want a sound that's more forward or more laid back? Do you like more midrange? Vocals?
Audio also becomes more complicated because of hearing loss. I can't hear anything over 12-13k, so I'm sure that's affected my audio setup at some level.
The biggest differences are almost universally going to be detected when you move from a loudspeaker with minimal volume to one with large volume.
Basic physics, dimensions of rooms, etc are way more important than anything else.
Sure - more lumber costs more, but there are clever ways around this too.
It's just that most loonies like to argue more than most sane people care to respond.
Deleted Comment
We've since built our own subwoofer and also mounted a bass shaker[1] (transducer) below the bed, which produces actual vibrations in response to low frequencies, by moving a heavy weight instead of a speaker cone.
The tactile stimulation from low frequencies actually significantly helps with immersion, focus, and relaxation, similar to some can easily fall asleep in a running car.
Of course, it also helps when we're just in the mood to transmit high-power bass frequencies straight into our fricken' bones...
Anyway, I think the total for our sound system is below $1k. We never made a parts list for our subwoofer but we estimate the cost to have been around $300–400. The rest of the system consists of the $180 (at the time) bookshelf speakers[0], the $50 (at the time) bass shaker[1], and the $80 (or so) amplifier to drive said shaker[2].
We also use a device called a "line driver"[3] (around $20) to raise the signal level for the input to our bass shaker's amplifier. "Line driver" is indeed the magic search term, and "preamp" will get you garbage (either $2 op-amp boards, or phonographs).
But aside from all the engineering effort that went into it, because it was a really fun hobby project, it's mostly just a mediocre system. We're totally content with that, and proud because it is a great experience for us, and very fun to listen to.
At this point, the only upgrade we would really want would be to find a new living space that can accommodate a rotary woofer[4], which changes the air pressure of the entire room to produce frequencies from around 20Hz down to even 0Hz.
But our current setup is more than enough to thoroughly enjoy and appreciate. <3
Also we store our entire music library in mp3 format >:3
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GMPDAHM
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01CDDPJTI
[2]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07TTMN51V
[3]: https://www.ebay.com/itm/271412659106
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_woofer
-Emily
Dead Comment
"found that a function called memcpy was the culprit, most memory players use memcpy and this is one of the reasons why memory play sounds worse ie digital sounding. Fortunately there is an optimised version of memcpy from http://www.agner.org/optimize/, using this version removes the hard edge produced by memcpy."
The more likely explanation is that these people are simply delusional.
If not, all the effort on the memcpy is going to waste.
Like in, is really one less memcpy doing all that difference?
However this can all be sidestepped with an affordable external DAC connected with optical or USB.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16167594
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/25435/com...
If you're avidly listening to music this is less than a year.
The vast majority of vinyl junkie audiophiles are not replacing their stylus anywhere near that frequently.
Sorry, no source/ link atm.
Also the high end sounds better the faster the vinyl is going so the outer tracks win there too. 45rmp records have more sparkle. The speed of the vinyl is like sample rate.
Just some nuggets from that thread:
"Sounds awesome, the previous version had a slight tendency to defuse the treble, but with VS2012 compile it is a much more complete sound with absolutely no digital harshness, some 16/44 albums I could hardly play before without getting a headache are now rendered in their full glory."
"It's just lazyness on the part of the player developers that they rely on the old methods, I guess they think bits are bits."
"Goto also sounds better than anything else I have tried." - the "Goto" in the quote means a goto in C used to replace a loop.
"also most players use malloc to get memory while new is the c++ method and sounds better."
When it comes to hardware: if you have a great and clean signal chain, good ears, decent monitors +/ good room, good headphones, you can record and hear the difference of good gear (diminishing returns though, you are paying for throughput (channels), latency, or even just build-quality/brand (Apple esque) etc at some point).
Of course marketing adds hyperbole and takes certain aspects into woo territory. At the software level: sampling rate can (depending on programming of individual plugins) make a difference in your mixing session (you get nasty artifacts, like EQ cramping, in plugins that don't have internal over-sampling).
This is all the professional gear with a track record rather than the "prosumer" gear (maybe that's the definition of audiophile you were connotating).
And then there are people who buy vinyl records of video game sound-tracks, in which case it doesn't even make sense to remove sampling artifacts since those would be present in the original game.
Was totally worth it!
Here's some pictures of my amps: https://www.bursonaudio.com/pa03-gainclone-power-amp-by-pave...
https://www.amazon.com/AudioQuest-Diamond-6-56-Braided-Cable...
Q: If I plug this into my Flux Capacitor will I finally be able to time travel?
A: Yes because I am actually answering this question from 2035 and its best supported with the flux capacitor
There are many things like this. Coffee people, for instance, who will straight faced insist to you that they can tell the difference between stirring the coffee grounds with a tiny metal "distribution tool" 5 times or 10 times, and who will post "recipes" for soaking ground up beans in hot water.
Just let people have their thing. They like it.
Claiming that bits are not bits is on a flat earth level stupid.
Distribution tools are for espresso, not pour over or immersion brewed coffee. In espresso, you have extremely high pressure, so if there is a density differential in the coffee cake, you will get most of the water flowing through the spot that has the lowest density, and the rest of the cake will not be visited, making for a weaker drink.
Also, the "recipes" are usually just a ratio of coffee grounds to boiling water by mass, a rough idea of how fine to grind, and a brew time. If you take these parameters and vary them by any reasonable amount, you will definitely taste the difference.
Overall, it's not an apt analogy. There is no "fidelity" for coffee like there is for audio. There is a quantitative loss function you can define for audio quality - just the sound you're trying to replicate versus the sound that your system actually ends up generating. For example, no human ear can hear frequencies above ~22kHz, meaning anything over the normal ~44kHz sample rate provably makes no difference.
>The example is loosely based on an event in Fisher's life. The lady in question, Muriel Bristol, claimed to be able to tell whether the tea or the milk was added first to a cup. Her future husband, William Roach, suggested that Fisher give her eight cups, four of each variety, in random order. One could then ask what the probability was for her getting the specific number of cups she identified correct (in fact all eight), but just by chance.
From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_tasting_tea
It's just physics, and something you can check for yourself in 5 minutes or by asking any chemical/food engineer who knows the basics of extraction.
For instance, there was a time where if you had told me that the number one thing that would improve my coffee was the purchasing of a conical burr grinder, I would’ve raised an eyebrow. Now? I find it is almost more important than the beans I buy. Even my first cheap $50 one elevated my coffee to a whole new level. Despite years of people complementing the quality of my cold brew, I still have to insist that they buy even a cheap burr before anything else. And every single one of them that has followed my advice has thanked me later! All because someone else told me first and I said “screw it why not?”
Anyway, the point of the above is not to brag about my coffee at home (which I’m sure isn’t even that impressive). It’s mostly to illustrate that sometimes what sounds ridiculous does actually matter. We just don’t know it.
Who am I to judge? I will fight you over spaces instead of tabs and don't you dare remove my trailing commas. If it's not supported by the language I'll write a transpiler and add it to the CI flow just before deploy, because git history.
I could probably distribute the coffee by simply shaking and tapping the portafilter on the counter, but stirring it makes it more even and I'm less likely to make a mess that way.
Sure stirring grounds to break up clumps seems like a good idea. But it's mind boggling someone managed to name the technique after themselves and get everyone to refer to it by an acronym with their name in it.
Smile & wave boys!
Could say that about your comment, right? Let the coffee fans enjoy the process of improving their coffee. Unless they start gatekeeping shit or insulting my (very pedestrian) taste in coffee, I don't care.
What if my thing is making fun of such people?
Deleted Comment
With religion being the biggest of all.
Humans are predisposed to believe in something even if it makes no sense.
There are some silly things and not all are required -- I don't do espresso or distribute my grounds, for example. I just Chemex with too many beans and let the flood of taste flow. And the little things really do make a difference (proper filter to catch the oils, blooming, light pour on the water, burr grinder (!!!!), freshness of the grind and the right age for the beans, etc). I'm not the snobbiest of snobs but I can tell! And at a certain point, its like looking at a painting. Even the littlest 'off' brushstroke can ruin a whole piece of something like the Mona Lisa.
A lot of roasting software is computerized these days too, so there is some precision in the process and in very particular roasts from certain boutique manufacturers these days. It's pretty nifty stuff. If you want to nerd snipe yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0t8DZ2yHs8
So at that level, basically we are super far up the log curve of diminishing returns. But then again, if your coffee is an experience, pulling away some not-insignificant-% of those last notes of bitterness is really and truly helpful.
On the audio side -- Yes, I'm an audiophile, but a very practical one, and I try to stay by the very old adage (as it were) that music enjoyment is 90% our emotional state and 10% equipment. That said, I can tell the difference pretty clearly between 44khz and 88khz on TIDAL -- it's really not that hard for me personally, at least. Both sound great but the 44khz feels like it's projected onto an awkward hexagon, whereas the 88khz is very semicircular and doesn't 'feel' unnatural. I really have to be into the music to be noticing though. It really is worth it for that 'art museum' experience (and yes, I did check to see if I could tell 24 bit 44khz and 24 bit 88khz apart. It's a very very clear difference to me! Above it is harder and I really can't say tbh). I do have a good DAC and lower mid-tier headphones (well-worn 598s, well over a decade at this point! :D got my originals somewhere between 7th and 10th grade. man, these have been around a while, dang). So anyways I know what I like and I get to have access to an experience that I haven't been able to before. It makes me want to cry, some songs are so beautiful. I'll go downtown to live jazz just to vibe if I can, that's the best. But here, I get to get a little bit closer to that experience, and I can tell when I'm not there. The emotional side can cover the gap, but...man. The little things do matter.
So that's why I think maybe it's not so silly that some people distribute their coffee grounds. If you're interested, there's this extremely practical bloke named James Hoffman who uses it as part of his core routine, he has some phenomenal coffee videos as well. Here's a great video where he discusses some of the nuances of the different methods here, and I think he has a pretty great, balanced opinion on it! (Usually I defer to him, tbh. He does refer to at least one method as 'incremental gains'): https://youtu.be/xb3IxAr4RCo?t=239
Hope that was interesting to you. This was interesting to write, many thanks for reading and greatly appreciated for whoever stuck it out to this point! :D <3 :)))) :D
That's why it's so fun, though. Audio reproduction can be measured objectively but the experience of listening to something can only be measured subjectively. Ultimately, if the $5k D-Link router sounds better to someone, who am I to argue?
I have a mid-fi setup by audiophile standards, but it's still more of an investment than most people I know have made. When asked for advice, I tell people to focus on what sounds good to them. If it sounds good, then it _is_ good, assuming one isn't buying something to impress others.
Also, if they ask nicely, I'll give them a discount on my optimized-for-their-CPU-architecture, hand-coded, machine language version of malloc, free, and memcpy.
I'm in the same camp as you, I've got way more in my setup than the average person, but its mid-fi at best, and mostly on the headphone side. I like music, and I have headphones on for 5-8 hours a day, I'd like to optimize that experience. The good news is the average pair of headphones today is SO so much better than it used to be, and in a weird way some of the overpriced stuff from Apple/Sony/etc... is actually getting better sound to people that hadn't experienced it before.
I really wish there was more emphasis on the transparent + objective measurement side of things industry wide. There is in some places, but at the end of the day entire companies are built around not having objectively perfect sound reproduction, because there is a following of people that like the house-sound they engineer in to their speaker/headphones. And there is value there, its just hard to quantify.
About 12 years ago I built a pair of large (relatively) full-range bookshelf speakers for near-field studio monitor type use at my desk with a wild 3 chamber porting setup. No traditional physical filter-network whatsoever, I borrowed a decent mic, measured the response, generated an inverse impulse filter that I could use to preprocess the signal going to the amp to arrive at a "perfectly" flat frequency response. Guess what? it sounded ok at best.
Audio is hard. Your ears are weird.
This is very true. I bought an earphone recently because it had the best technicals for its price-point. I was nice, but somewhat overwhelming to listen to for a long time. Some songs were harsh and sounded too airy. As much as I wanted to love it, I couldn't.
Then I bought a cheaper one that lots of reviewers said sounded good on anything they tried (Tin T2). It had "worse" technicals but guess what, I'm using it more than the older one and finding it way more pleasant to listen to.
There are also many techniques in hardware that make a piece of audio equipment measure objectively better, but sound worse - like feedback.
Audio is really complicated and can't be boiled down to one or two comparison charts.
ASR is essentially worthless, unfortunately.
You can argue just fine when they fail the blind comparison test.
While there are good 4K sources like UHD Bluray discs and a few decent streaming sources (but it's spotty and inconsistent), the vast majority of "4K" sources look pretty awful due to being wildly over-compressed. And the level of self-delusion from some of my friends – who are otherwise very smart – is near-emperor's-new-clothes level.
A recent example was the Super Bowl which was one of the few "special events" Comcast aired in 4K (only available on the latest version of Comcast's streaming boxes which few people have – and 4K is not available if you use DVR). I checked it out on a current-year higher-end 65" 4K TV (~$3k) which I adjusted myself to disable the myriad default settings claimed to "enhance" signals but often mangle them in unexpected ways.
Even set up properly on a good TV it looked terrible. The tell-tale DCT macro-blocking was rampant and in many shots the base 4K-ness of the resolution space seemed to highlight the 'peggishness' worse than the 1080p version (which I was cross-checking against out of now-morbid curiosity). The super bowl is widely claimed to be the best quality 4K live broadcast. $250,000 lenses on the best cameras sent through the best signal paths managed by hundreds of engineers across a small city of the world's best production trucks. All stomped into a peggish mess so that cable and satellite companies can shove hundreds of channels of infomercials and decades-old Murder She Wrote episodes down the pipe simultaneously. I guess they'll keep doing it until enough people demand better or someone offers an alternative. Afterward I searched online and it appears the only widely accessible way to view the SB in decent 4K was if you live in one of the few cities that currently have broadcast TV stations airing true 4K and you set up an over-the-air antenna. While it's still compressed, due to FCC specifications for signals actually broadcast OTA, it's pretty mild and apparently looks sensational compared the what most people saw at home on their "awesome" new 4K TVs.
Are you saying that streaming a movie (say a recent Marvel one) in 4K from Disney Plus will look noticeably less good than if I played the same movie from a Bluray player?
What about a Bluray torrent?
Deleted Comment
Oh not from where I see the world! hehe - infact I see most stem educated people of reasonably good IQ by and large living a mythology they do not even know they are living in because they've never really understood the difference between knowledge and understanding and the whole purpose of the humanities.
Mythology is the stories we tell about how we as individuals relate to society and the cosmos.
Elon Musk functions as a sort of deva or heroic god myth that many people do not even realise they are buying into.
Mythology even includes how we structure science - the "genius", the archetypes and roles and stories we tell about heros and how scientific activity takes place - these are myths that have causal effects in producing actual science. Mythology is meta to everything. Its literally the meaning about who we are and our place in the world. There's many cases. Pick your mythology wisely because if you don't you'll get a poor version of one by cultural default.
I can tell you a lot on Hacker News does not look too much different from the audiophile community from this perspective hehe
Everybody knows how to write a for loop and wire up a CRUD app these days, but satisfying a low-latency audio buffer request while decoding media and applying effects feels fraught and often (genuinely) looks like a garble of translated Matlab with countless inscrutable variable names and seemingly random constants peppered everywhere.
From that sense of awe (traditional meaning), it’s only a small leap to start wondering if even “known” textbook truths about things like memcpy matter differently than normal. And then the cultist gossip begins, you get the echo chamber effect on casual forums and meetups, and this is where you end up.
Reminds me of comments when CD's came out int he 1980's. Audiophiles and magazine articles insisted they could "hear the aluminum".
What they were actually hearing was songs mastered for Vinyl or casette that had not been properly remastered for digital. Vinyl and casettes required pre-emphasis of highs to offset the limited high frequency response and noise of analog media.
Of course, anything recorded with digital recording equipment and pressed to vinyl is simply for aesthetic reasons. Some people just like playing records and listening to music this way.
This is true of tape but not vinyl. High frequencies are difficult for vinyl and are better off rolled off. A lot of exciters were used before the tape to get a certain, pleasing distortion. Sounded bad when people started switching to ADAT from analog tape.
Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture saying that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any parody of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied.
Comparison is the thief of joy, and the only thing audiophiles do is compare.
It may be true, but the audiophile in question didn't bother to do any blind test.
And I believe that actually most of the audiophiles don't do any blind tests, otherwise they'd use twisted coatangers as cables and save themselves a lots of money.
An example would be https://www.audiosciencereview.com - he has reviewed a few thousand projects using industry standard measurement gear like Audio Precision analyzers, Klippel scanners, etc.
Same with Erin's Audio Corner: https://www.youtube.com/@ErinsAudioCorner/videos
Most of the audio-related subreddits hew to this approach as well.
After living through the past several years in the US, this is not a question I ask.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Engineers_and_woo
> "also most players use malloc to get memory while new is the c++ method and sounds better."
I think they must be the guys who understood the Matrix visuals.
I like to think that isn’t the same madness as thinking a different memcpy, because I figured different implementations would map different inputs to different outputs and thus could definitely affect the sound, but any context or knowledge would be appreciated!
All you could want to know about audio encoding, including listening tests (with original posts from the heyday) is still online at the Hydrogen Audio forum.
There are some great threads there, and they've been debunking audiophile snake-oil for decades. Enjoy the rabbit hole ;)
https://hydrogenaud.io
Humans are not rational. This is easy to say, and hard to swallow - so, pretty similar to when you'd confront anyone's beliefs with rational refutation.
You don't have to be clever to be a software engineer. It's not that difficult.
By the by : I'm almost certain this has to be satire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ofq_nl366VM
this is why IQ tests are BS. You can be smart in one thing (taking IQ tests) but not another.
Wow...
I'm guilty as charged.
I think having a look at the current political climate answers this by itself.
Knowledge has lost much value, and anecdotal reasoning is at pre-education system levels.
Intelligence are declining in all ages [1]. And now top that with hallucinating AI:s that people without contextual knowledge can't even spot when they are making things up.
We're in for a good ride.
1: https://phys.org/news/2023-03-online-iq-scores-century.html
The listening experience differs from person to person, depending on everything from hearing, to noise to the individual listener's preferences and tastes. The audiophiles you mention try to justify that individual experience using whatever argument available, including false ones.
I consider myself an audiophile because I hear a difference between no amp+dac sennheiser hd650 vs with amp+dac. so when you ask "How can audiophile continue to exist" ? thats a bit of a dumb take aint it?
A colleague on a Zoom call noticed I had audio equipment in my room, and excitedly asked what my headphone setup was. He didn't recognize the Sony MDR-7506 cans on my head, which were running out of a Focusrite audio interface that I use for multitrack recording. Sometimes I listen on my Yamaha MSP7 monitors. He went on to rattle off some absurdly expensive equipment that I forgot immediately upon Googling. I forget if his amp cost four figures or five figures.
I didn't have the heart to say: I'm just using what they use in recording studios.
I understand chasing fidelity, it's driven me to upgrade my own equipment over the years, but capital-a Audiophile stuff is kind of its own thing. People extracting outrageous amounts of money in return for a certain kind of marketing copy and bespoke physical presentation. It feels cynical to me, but it seems to be an ecosystem that exists on its own without much harm to the rest of the world.
Today's PCs and cables aren't particularly well shielded. In fact I switched routers because an unshielded USB cable inside the router had a significant impact on Wifi performance if I used the USB for connecting storage.
I also bought a USB connected SDR (software defined radio) and I can tell you that position relative to my PC and the quality of the shielding of the USB cable was directly visible on the waterfall display. Moving the SDR (but not the Antenna) showed significant changes in reception across large swaths of the frequency range.
I've definitely had fan, coil whine, and related interference with different CPU utilization before. I've also had speakers, even wireless speakers get interference from my computer that varies with load, not to mention things like an incoming cellphone call.
Doesn't seem that crazy that different memory allocation and memcpy implementations could impact sound quality of any local audio equipment. Or that playing from ramdisk could sound better than from disk (assuming said disk is emitting noticeable RF).
So maybe in a sense it does "sound" different, but it's more because what they are thinking about leaks into their aural experience.
It strikes me as plausible that there might be differences in how the compiler treats goto vs whatever other loop. Pretty sure GCC can't optimize goto in the same ways.
I'm speechless. I wanted to write a witty comment but I just can't.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
You ever discussed religion with anyone?
Because not all audiophiles are gullible
But then again I actually met a person who believed the moon landings were fake.. brilliant guy otherwise, but too young to (unlike myself) having lived through the time period. He (and some others) seemed to believe that it was all CGI, not realizing or grasping that the watch he was wearing had way more computing power than the whole space program at that time. And that every illustration of the moon surface before Apollo 8 (they didn't land, they just took photos) were so very different from the real thing.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
People need to feel superior. So they choose a subjective field and claim to be objectively correct. Audiophiles are a relatively harmless version of this; other sorts of "truther" become actively dangerous.
I would get messages from customers that were completely insane. And if you say "yo, that's insane" word gets out and it damages your brand. So you're rewarded for perpetuating these weird myths.
If I could build these really cool headphones without having to deal with audiophiles, I probably would. It was challenging and a lot of fun, and I was pretty good at it.
I guess if that's your thing, go for it?
If memory serves, there was somebody saying that exiting the program cleanly sounds worse, you need to crash on a page fault reading the input buffer instead, and that's your end of file behavior.
Someone else said FLAC makes it sound worse, but I suspect they just couldn't figure out how to use libflac.
In other words they were bad programmers writing buggy, half baked shit, and they explained away their broken code as sounding better.
Even the snippet I see in the linked post, right off the bat they start their loop with WaitForSingleObject, that's kind of suspect; the first thing they do is enter the kernel to block at every loop. I suspect they aren't doing that in an optimal way.
Honestly, that's not so ridiculous. Lossless will sound different from lossy, and someone may prefer the lossy version.