Stereophile: A Personal Odyssey

https://www.stereophile.com/content/stereophile-personal-odyssey

by collate • 7 years ago

43 57 7 years ago

mbell4• 7 years ago

Stereophile routinely recommends $20,000 'power conditioners' and multi-thousand dollar cables. FFS they've claimed CD players 'sound better' sitting on 'special' racks. (https://www.stereophile.com/standsracks/206finite/index.html)

This is the history of a successful charlatan.

xhroot• 7 years ago

And my favorite: Coloring CD edges with a green marker to improve sound https://www.stereophile.com/reference/590jitter/index.html

sertsa• 7 years ago

Was a subscriber for a few years until they started talking about green highlighter on CD edges. There was even a specific model from a certain store that was supposedly the best. A basic understanding of how a CD works tells you this is nonsense.

SketchySeaBeast• 7 years ago

The trick is to make sure the green markers are the super smelly sort, and to do it in a confined space. For some reason without the fumes you can't hear a difference.

dsr_• 7 years ago

Shakti Stones.

http://www.shakti-innovations.com/product/shakti-stone/

mbell4• 7 years ago

This one is even more fascinating: http://www.shakti-innovations.com/product/hallograph/

smhinsey• 7 years ago

"The SHAKTI Electromagnetic Stabilizer (aka “the Stone”) has three internal trap circuits (Microwave, RF and Electric Field) to absorb the broadest spectrum of EMI. Placement on automotive CPUs has measurably increased engine horsepower."

Sheesh.

dan_quixote• 7 years ago

If only the Shakti Stone could absorb all that JPEG in its product pic...

SlowRobotAhead4• 7 years ago

This is the history of a successful charlatan.

Agreed.

Its tough though... I know of a couple times in my life I've thought something was OK until I saw something else.

Examples, Glass. Binoculars, camera lenses, rifle scopes, telescopes. Glass differences are very real. You might be A-OK with some Bushnell Binos, but USE Swarovski or Vortex Razor or something lower-highend and you'll get it. Now, I didn't write LOOK THROUGH, I wrote USE. This has an obvious point of diminishing returns. I would never buy higher-highend glass.

Another example is something like TV black levels. If you don't notice black levels - good for you! Don't look for it. Because once you have a dark room and notice it, you'll see it forever. I notice soap opera effect, black levels, local/regional dimming, burn in, and it all removes me from the material. Again, Sucks. I wouldn't buy a higher-highend TV, but I pretty much can't get by with low end anymore.

So... I KIND OF WANT to believe there is a serious quality range with audio gear, but I guess the difference is in glass or TV black levels, I can snap a picture and prove a difference. Audio is only ever perception. I can't prove a wave on an oscilloscope is more pleasing than another exactly within reason.

That said.... You're right. Sterophiles and Audiophiles seem to be people with too many dollars and not enough cents/sense, and lots of people taking advantage of that. But maybe I just haven't used the right gear yet.

janekm3• 7 years ago

You can measure all the differences in TV picture you described (and you didn't even mention colour gamut & dynamic range). You can measure the differences in optical glass. You can't measure the difference between a $10/m speaker cable and $10000/m speaker cable (usually... some of the expensive speaker cable is so crazy it may mess up the sound), or an amplifier sitting on a $5000 stand. And $1000 power cables, plugging into your usual wall outlet...

ip262• 7 years ago

If swaros are low-highend, what's high-highend?

mikeash• 7 years ago

Audio is subjective but differences in quality can still be objectively measured. You play the same music through different equipment and have the listener rate them without knowing what they are. Consistent improvements will show up across different listeners, and differences that come down to personal taste will still show up across different sessions with the same listener.

The most telling thing about the audiophile world is how allergic they are to anything that resembles this sort of blind testing.

criddell• 7 years ago

Being able to enjoy something even though you know something better is out there is something that I've managed to achieve in many areas of my life.

For example, I love a great beer. I'll go out of my way to try something new. But when I'm sitting in the sun watching baseball with my wife, I'll get a Budweiser with my hot dog and it will be glorious.

There was a time in my life where I would complain about the lack of craft beers at the ballpark. I was an idiot and enjoyed life less.

smolder3• 7 years ago

There is certainly a range of quality in audio gear, but it's a complicated thing.

Some things that are reasonably easy to notice with a stereo system:

1) Dynamic range: how loud does it get, how quiet does it get? Does it sound good when its loud? does it sound good when it's soft? Small/inefficient speakers will struggle at high volumes, resulting in high distortion. That's measurable and often not hard to hear. Big speakers with the powerful amps needed to drive them which sound good at high volume often suffer from audible hiss at lower volume, short distance listening, due to inadequate power supply noise rejection relative to the gain. Big speakers also will generally have further-spaced drivers, and that bigger geometry can have a noticeable effect on spacial coherency, especially at short distances. (Ideally you want your speakers to be a point source, not different frequencies coming from different angles)

2) Flatness in frequency response: this is easy to measure with equipment, but also quite easy to hear by playing a sine wave that slowly sweeps the audible range. If the amplitude of the wave in the signal is consistent, there shouldn't be a ton of variation in volume of the reproduction. It can be heavily effected by the room they're in, usually in the bass & mid-bass range where the wavelengths are similar to room dimensions, but some speakers will be much more consistent than others across the rest.

3) Dispersion characteristics: when you move your ears around relative to the speakers, does the frequency response change dramatically? Some speakers don't sound very good in the high frequencies once your ears go a few degrees off axis from the source.

This stuff gets a lot more obvious when doing A/B comparisons. You're right that you can't really tell how good a system is just by listening to a random song and judging it's sound quality like you can with video on a TV, and I think that stems from an inherent difference between hearing and vision. The sound you hear is ALWAYS heavily effected by the space its in, reflections and sympathetic vibrations, the angle you hear it from, and so on. Source material varies wildly in quality and recording/mastering technique. It's much harder to perceive "wrongness" in audio because it's so varied to begin with.

lb1lf2• 7 years ago

Its tough though... I know of a couple times in my life I've thought something was OK until I saw something else. Examples, Glass. Binoculars, camera lenses, rifle scopes, telescopes. Glass differences are very real.

-Aye. I had a rather absurd discussion with a colleague here the other day; he keeps a pair of el cheapo grande binoculars in his office, some 10x50 monsters which he proudly announced cost less than $100.

The colour cast was so bad that even I (being tritanope) immediately spotted it and found it annoying. Colour fringing like you wouldn't believe. A tiny, reasonably sharp spot in the centre of one pupil, the other was nowhere near acceptable. Light falloff and softening was quite aggressive as you approached the edges.

I then brought out my Zeiss Victory 8x32s, as they happened to be in my office that day after a field trip. His first impression? 'The colours are off, and it looks unnaturally sharp.'

Sigh. Never mind that one could read the (comparably) small print on a sign across the sound on the 8x Zeiss whereas even the headline was a smudge on the 10x cheapos.

At the risk of sounding elitist, I think that for some people, low cost makes for excellent quality in the same way as high cost equates same for others.

at-fates-hands2• 7 years ago

This is the history of a successful charlatan.

For two summers in college, I worked at a Home Theater company. They did custom home theaters, distributed audio, and a ton of mixed AV stuff. Needless to say, the majority of our clients were very rich and most of the theaters we installed were in the 300K-500K range.

The funny part was the owner constantly talking about how much better a $25K pair of speakers sounded than a $15K pair of speakers. I've heard a lot of great speakers, but was never good enough to tell the difference at that level. I finally asked the owner's son why he would push something that didn't seem to be a big upgrade from 15-25K for these speakers.

The answer was simple. His margins on the more expensive ones were better. His rich clients never questioned his expertise, it was pretty eye opening. The next summer, I finally realized everything he pitched his clients on were always about maximizing his own profit, not necessarily designing the perfect bespoke theater for his clients.

johnvanommen3• 7 years ago

The funny part was the owner constantly talking about how much better a $25K pair of speakers sounded than a $15K pair of speakers.

The funny thing is that it's actually the complete opposite. Due to the law of vanishing returns, the difference between a $25K unit and a $15K unit can be subtle.

It is astonishing how good speakers are these days. I'm running a set of Behringers that cost $300 and they exceed anything you could buy for a $1000 in Y2K.

Of course, this assumes that you buy new. If you buy used, there's a lot of great stuff under $1000.

smacktoward• 7 years ago

I know we all love to marvel at the idiocy of audiophiles, but the actual article we're discussing here says next to nothing about audio gear. It's a reflection by a copy editor on the craft of copy editing, and (IMO) a well-written one. I liked this bit, for instance:

We like to think, or at least we like to say, that each writer's voice is unique, but it isn't. Too often, what a writer most fondly feels is his unique voice is actually a combination of bad habits and received language and tones shared with all too many other not-very-good writers. The inspired copyeditor's task is to bend an ear finely tuned to hearing the least hint of unique music in a writer's voice, strip away the accretions of junk language and tone picked up in a life drenched in TV and marketing and promotional copy and political obfuscation and bureaucratese, and then revise, even rewrite the piece in whatever authentic voice remains. The job is to produce a final edited article written in the writer's own voice, but in language and tone more consistently and authentically the writer's very own than that writer can produce herself or himself.

As someone who's done a little writing myself, I can relate to this. A good editor is someone who can cut the thing you're actually trying to say out of the tangle of spaghetti you carry around inside your head. And this passage would apply just as well to an editor working at any other magazine, it has nothing to do with Stereophile's particular editorial bent or the relative merits of green Sharpies.

compiler-guy• 7 years ago

Stereophile is a terrific view into a culture of pseudo science and science denialism, but with extremely low stakes: it's just rich people wasting their money.

It's worth reading because the prose is actually quite good and you can also see just how people determined to believe things can ignore or dismiss rational arguments.

SlowRobotAhead4• 7 years ago

“It's morally wrong to allow a sucker to keep his money.” - W. C. Fields

My first impression most "audiophile gear" and specifically on ShakiStones below is "well, that's so ridiculous it shouldn't be legal" but on better consideration, good for them. If someone is that dumb, they need to be relieved of their money before they do something dangerous with it.

im_down_w_otp• 7 years ago

Does this sentiment only apply to rich dumb people, or does the "good" of exploiting people's gullibility for profit also extend to taking advantage of the poor and vulnerable?

I ask because I've often wondered if this trait of American culture, wherein we've decided that defending oneself against predators & charlatans is up to the individual and not up to society (and if the individual fails at this, then "good for" the predator), might be the key difference between the U.S. and other first world nations which tends to land the U.S. at or near the bottom of various social goods & services metrics (balanced against the relative cost and our relative wealth). Because if the bias is toward rewarding predators for having been successfully predatory, then the result of the incentive seems like it will be that the ecosystem will be dominated by predators.

hsitz• 7 years ago

The people who purchase these products may also end up quite happy, experience increased enjoyment in listening to their music (or should it be "listening to their equipment"?), and feel like they got their money's worth. If so, one way of looking at it is that nobody's been taken advantage of at all.

smolder3• 7 years ago

I think the saddest aspect of the pseudoscience around high end audio is these nonsense gimmicky products dilute the market for actual premium audio equipment.

Typical mass produced consumer stuff is often pretty awful, but there are so many disingenuous or foolish reviews of equipment out there, the lesson people learn is that anything more expensive than the current deal on massdrop or at best buy is just a waste of money.

I have figured out through a lot of research and consultation with honest experts what gets you good bang for the buck in the "higher quality" audio space, and what is purely gimmick, but it should not be so hard.

ghaff2• 7 years ago

I subscribed to it for a year or two ages ago because there was some deal and I think it came with an audio calibration disk or something like that.

I think it was around the time people were arguing about using a green felttip on CDs. Yes, it was quite a window into the high-end audio mindset--something I can't begin to appreciate even when there are legitimate differences between gear (which, of course, there often isn't with high-end audio).

brigade• 7 years ago

Interestingly, it’s also one of the few sources of comprehensive objective measurements of high-end speakers and other equipment.

They’re just careful to never let the actual measurements influence the glowing prose of their main review; at most Atkinson gets off a mild shot or two in the conclusion to the measurement section (“somewhat idiosyncratic measured behavior”, “even with its rather lively cabinet”, “don’t measure as well as they could”)

johnvanommen3• 7 years ago

John Atkinson is what sets Stereophile apart from all the other mags.

Basically Stereophile has tons of articles that are clearly nonsensical, like reviews of $100,000 tube amps. But they also do objective measurements of equipment, which most magazines do not.

That data is an absolute treasure trove; it's one of the best places to develop insight into the engineering of quality loudspeakers.

W-Stool• 7 years ago

There is literally no limit to the insanity of the audiophile universe. You can spend a thousand dollars on a three foot "reference quality" ethernet cable. I've seen "audiophile" SATA cables, USB cables, and USB signal conditioners. There's a whole sub-culture around removing the stock fuses in equipment and replacing them with "audiophile" fuses. I actually once saw two guys comparing a song ripped by two different CD rippers and discussing which one sounded better - despite the fact that the MD5 checksum on both files was the same.

After a while it starts to look like an extremely dysfunctional religious cult.

Hamuko• 7 years ago

SATA cables? USB cables? Try audiophile electricity poles.

https://www.engadget.com/2016/08/15/japan-audiophiles-instal...

thefounder• 7 years ago

I wonder what's a fair price for a pair of tower speakers? Is $10k crazy expensive? $5000?

People pay crazy amounts of money for some paintings so I don't see an issue paying crazy amounts of money for audio gear that looks and sounds nice.

I visit Stereophile from time to time to see what's new but never bothered to read all the crap. If you are into audio gear/hifi there is 10% useful content though(i.e pictures, price range and measurements)

https://www.listenup.com/shop/media/catalog/product/l/i/lili...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_9_8lCDuL3Q

krautsourced• 7 years ago

Having owned speakers in that range and listened to numerous pairs in the 5k range: a fair price is the price the speaker that sounds good to you costs. Measurable differences do not matter, what matters is your ear and your taste, both of which change over time. So whatever you do, don't buy anything based on reviews, go into a hifi store with a CD (or usb or whatever) with your favourite songs that you have a good idea of how you would like them to sound, and ask them to have a listening session with a number of different models. Then buy the pair that sounds best.

mbell4• 7 years ago

You can get a pair of Ascend Sierra towers for ~$2k. From an objective measurement standpoint you won't find anything substantially better than these at any price point.

fmajid• 7 years ago

Coincidentally Onkyo is in talks to sell its audio business to the US owner of Denon+Marantz, after having rescued Pioneer. Hi-Fi as a whole seems to be in a downward spiral, just like cameras, and most of the growth is in mobile audio.

Stereophile: A Personal Odyssey

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