It's difficult to read an audiophile guide as an analogue engineer

https://hackaday.com/2023/03/28/its-difficult-to-read-an-audiophile-guide-as-an-analogue-engineer/

by zdw • 3 years ago

98 145 3 years ago

sacnoradhq• 3 years ago

Hahaha. The title says it all. My dad was one of these who should've known better making a living at electronics.

I recall an urban legend about an audio engineer who added a "richness" control to a piece of studio equipment that did absolutely nothing but allowed some rich person to feel like they engineered an album.

Over a long enough distance (~30 m), it's better to use ADC <-HDMI-> DAC usually than send line-level signals due to losses involved unless one wishes to spend zillions on the most perfectly engineered and widely-incompatible shielded coaxial cable imaginable.

Another is denial of Nyquist–Shannon. If you can't hear over 8 kHz, then you don't need 256-bit @ 96 kHz sampling. It's more likely a badly-chosen lossy compression codec (or it's parameters), a nonuniform DAC, or some other source of analog signal loss is causing loss of fidelity by the time it reaches ears.

Further is the belief that lossless codecs cannot be replaced compressed lossless or sufficient parameters of some lossy formats.

Obsession with vacuum tubes and/or vinyl. I get the ceremony of vinyl, but it's not going to improve over perfect digital reproduction.

smeyer• 3 years ago

If you can't hear over 8 kHz

Can't most folks hear frequencies higher than 8 kHz? I don't disagree with your conclusions since I don't care much about audio quality, but I feel like I'm missing something here.

causality0• 3 years ago

Is there anything pleasant to hear over 8khz?

JohnBooty25• 3 years ago

Yeah I think parent poster confused a detail or two.

20hz-20khz is the human range, more or less. For most adults it's more like 15khz.

The 44.1khz sampling rate of CD audio was chosen because it can represent frequencies up to 22.05hz (44.1khz / 2) which safely covers the frequency range of human hearing with a bit of headroom for good measure.

spamizbad• 3 years ago

Yep, but 8kHz is nearly twice the frequency of a piano’s high C (rightmost key). There are vocalists that can sing G10s (which is around 10k?) but they’re rare and not musically useful

h2odragon• 3 years ago

The common quoted range is something like 20hz to 20khz; most people aren't able to discern much beyond "sound is present" above 12khz to 16khz.

There are however some folks who have much higher top ends, 24k to 32k and maybe more. hard to test. They hear bats talking.

There's also things like hyperacusis which add an extra dimension of sensitivity to things others can dismiss completely like dynamic range and even phase.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperacusis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperacusis

wl• 3 years ago

Yes, humans can detect sounds up to about 20 kHz when they're younger. That number goes down with age and noise exposure. But if you ever have taken a hearing test, you might notice they stop testing at 8 kHz. If you look at equal loudness curves, 8 kHz is around the point where sounds have to get much, much louder to be perceived as the same volume as sounds at lower frequencies. You can hear those higher frequencies in cymbals and a few other things in music if your hearing isn't thrashed, but in a practical sense, 8 kHz is the upper limit of useful human hearing.

Exmoor• 3 years ago

I get the ceremony of vinyl, but it's not going to improve over perfect digital reproduction.

As a millennial, I'm always slightly amused (and maybe a little horrified) to see my peers spend endless time and more than a little money hunting down vinyl releases of the music of our generation. I also listen to a lot of music from earlier generations and have noted that older collectors were and are thrilled to see that music get well-transferred and mastered releases on a digitally perfect and durable medium and generally consider those to be the definitive release.

primax• 3 years ago

I'm quite fond of suggesting to them they just play a track of pops and hiss quietly over the digital recording to get the same effect.

Syonyk6• 3 years ago

What if they're right?

https://dr.loudness-war.info/?artist=Taylor+Swift&album=Red - one fairly recent album I found in which the vinyl version seems to have quite a bit more dynamic range than the digital or CD versions.

There's also the benefit of vinyl in that a single sale will typically send quite a bit of money actually to the band - vs streaming sending fractions of a penny, if that, per play. One of the best ways to actually support a band you like is to buy the LP, even if you don't have a turntable.

JohnBooty25• 3 years ago

    Another is denial of Nyquist–Shannon

Yeah. I'm in the camp that understands it. Well, maybe I don't totally understand it, but I understand its implications and was certainly unable to differentiate between "high-res" audio and redbook audio even in pathological cases. For consumer use, anything over CD quality (44.1khz / 16bit) is a waste.

    Over a long enough distance (~30 m), it's better to use 
    ADC <-HDMI-> DAC usually than send line-level signals 
    due to losses involved unless one wishes to spend zillions 
    on the most perfectly engineered and widely-incompatible 
    shielded coaxial cable imaginable.

Or, for a simpler and more affordable option, just use balanced wiring. It is effectively interference proof. =)

https://www.aviom.com/blog/balanced-vs-unbalanced/

    Further is the belief that lossless codecs cannot 
    be replaced compressed lossless or sufficient parameters 
    of some lossy formats.

There are some details, particularly percussion, that are just not well represented by lossy formats. It's like trying to represent sharp text at small point sizes with a JPEG.

Don't get me wrong. High bitrate lossy codecs are almost always good enough for nearly everything. It's what I listen to most of the time.

    I get the ceremony of vinyl, but it's not going to 
    improve over perfect digital reproduction.

Agree, although I actually don't see much of that -- people really perpetuating the myth that vinyl is technically superior to lossless digital -- these days.

The one kink here is that sometimes vinyl releases are mastered better than their digital counterparts; many releases these days have that "brick wall" loudness wars mastering applied that smashes out all of the dynamic range. So sometimes there are vinyl releases that actually do sound better (though it has nothing to do with the format itself)

smilekzs• 3 years ago

FWIW oversampling allows you to have simpler analog anti-aliasing (low pass) filters.

Syonyk6• 3 years ago

Further is the belief that lossless codecs cannot be replaced compressed lossless or sufficient parameters of some lossy formats.

I'm a bit fuzzy as to what you're arguing here, but I think most people would agree that, at some bitrate, you're going to be effectively lossless with various compressed codes. That bitrate, though, is high enough that you're no longer saving that much over something like FLAC. Disk is cheap enough these days.

I just tossed Dark Side of the Moon into a test. It's all 16 bit, 44.1kHz sample rate (CD quality).

wav: 434MB flac: 249MB mp3 (-V0): 80MB

A factor of 3 savings for MP3 vs lossless, with no generation losses, seems worth doing for audio.

Tubes, the point isn't the "perfect reproduction" over digital, because a fairly cheap digital (relatively speaking) manages acoustically transparent reproduction (as long as the headphones or speakers can keep up). People just like how tubes sound. It's also a bit of a rejection of the digital, consumer tech, "can't build it, can't repair it, don't really own it" world we live in. I've got a Bottlehead kit half assembled on my workbench right now...

Vinyl, similarly, I think is a rejection of that which has become background noise and digital and data-logged. Also, in terms of sound quality, be careful not to compare "The technical capabilities of a CD" with "The technical capabilities of vinyl." Compare albums, as delivered - https://dr.loudness-war.info/ is a useful resource here.

In many cases, the CD mastering of an album is a brick wall compressed bit of rubbish, "optimized" for listening on earbuds on a subway. With both vinyl and the various "high def audio" formats, you're far more likely to find a master that's actually designed for a competent living room system - with the dynamics to match.

https://dr.loudness-war.info/?artist=Boston&album=Boston - look at the difference in dynamic range between some of the older vinyl pressings of the album and some of the newer CD pressings. One may very well find that the vinyl sounds "better" - because it's got dynamic range. The problem is that the capabilities of the CD aren't being used, because someone was told, "Compress it and make it louder."

matheusmoreira2• 3 years ago

Over a long enough distance (~30 m), it's better to use ADC <-HDMI-> DAC usually than send line-level signals due to losses involved unless one wishes to spend zillions on the most perfectly engineered and widely-incompatible shielded coaxial cable imaginable.

This is something I ask every audiophile I ever meet. Why not use digital audio at all times and convert to analog as late as possible in the audio pipeline instead lf buying ten thousand dollar cables? No one ever gave me a good answer...

If you can't hear over 8 kHz, then you don't need 256-bit @ 96 kHz sampling.
Further is the belief that lossless codecs cannot be replaced compressed lossless or sufficient parameters of some lossy formats.

The added precision is good for archival purposes and audio production though. It's easy to reduce quality later if necessary but the reverse is not true. Artist performances are unique, singular points in time. I think they should be captured with as much precision and quality as possible.

Obsession with vacuum tubes and/or vinyl. I get the ceremony of vinyl, but it's not going to improve over perfect digital reproduction.

Isn't this due to the fact that older vinyls were mastered differently compared to modern releases? Nothing stops a digital audio recording from sounding just as good but the loudness war in the music industry resulted in masters with less dynamic range. Older music certainly has a different quality to my ears.

bobleeswagger3• 3 years ago

This is something I ask every audiophile I ever meet. Why not use digital audio at all times and convert to analog as late as possible in the audio pipeline instead lf buying ten thousand dollar cables? No one ever gave me a good answer...

If they want to keep the signal pure analog, that is enough of a reason.

munificent5• 3 years ago

We’d suggest that better reviews would come from a truly independent publication giving the only HiFi verdicts that matter, blind tests and measurements from a high-end audio analyser, but we suspect that the industry lacks the courage to do so.

It's not a lack of courage. The subjectivity is the point. Copy/pasting a comment of mine from last week:

Whenever I think of audiophiles, I imagine a couple of older guys hanging out on a weekend. Because they're the kind of dudes who love maximizing and making numbers go up, it needs to have something to do with optimizing performance. Because they're somewhat wealthy and their success is a big part of their identity, it needs to be something expensive.

Then, because they're friends who want to feel useful to each other, it needs to be riddled with inscrutable lore. That way there's always some handy bit of research, some nuggets of wisdom that they can share with each other. That's what this is really about: feeling like they can bond by sharing expertise about some complex hard to optimize problem.

The actual problem itself is essentially arbitrary and subjective. In fact, it's better if it is arbitrary. Because any problem that can actually be solved means reaching an end to the ability to kibbitz and geek out. That's why bringing up objective metrics is such a faux pas in the audiophile world: it kills the game. And the whole point is to play the game together, forever.

x0x0• 3 years ago

There's places like audio science review which are exactly that, I think.

eg their review of the Loxjie A30

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/l...

JohnBooty25• 3 years ago

I can vouch for ASR. A very data-driven, engineering-driven view.

The site's owner has several hundred thousand dollars worth of measurement gear - Audio Precision analyzer, GRAS headphone rig, Klippel NFS rig, etc.

JohnBooty25• 3 years ago

Some people definitely do the hobby that way, but there are at least as many who take a more empirical approach. The hobby is divided between objectivists and subjectivists and I'm in the former camp.

The audio industry is over a century old, and we've poured zillions of dollars into it. We know (on an objective, measurable level) what sounds good.

AstralStorm8• 3 years ago

And this is why people still use tube amplifiers with design from 70s, just with modern high quality power supplies and EMF practices, right? /s

(Actually SET is a valid topology and can be done well. As can be a pure transformer amplifier, transformerless tube, BJT, FET, current mode in a variety of classes. Even open loop, funnily enough. They have different strengths and sometimes applications.)

The challenge to "mr. objectivist" is always the ABC-HR test. It's similar to ABX (or double blind randomized controlled trial) but you also assign comparative number rating at each pairwise comparison like in MUSHRA. It detects people who cannot rate things or detect a difference but lie about it too. Preferably with a known total garbage device as a low anchor or two to keep the rating scale honest. Needs a digitally controlled relay switch box for amplifiers, a bit of programming, a lot of amplifiers, potentially multiple loads and a lot of time with material that may expose flaws. The test has been used to tune psychoacoustic codecs with great successes. (It's easier with software only.)

It's next to impossible to run one of these unless you're super rich and/or an audio shop.

If you have not done that, you are a number chaser not an objectivist. A Pythagorean.

Amplifiers are often enough roughly audibly different based on their topology, especially when driving weird loads, even if our minimalistic measurements show they supposedly should not be.

And on the other hand, people have made amplifiers that pass the number checks but produce sound with an obvious annoying signature. (And the fun part is, these are either chip amps or sold as random audiophile equipment to people who are supposed to have ears and know what high fidelity means.)

We don't know what to measure and how, besides a few total fail checks.

IIAOPSW2• 3 years ago

I kept reading expecting there to be some sort of metaphor, a literal thing in your story that they were both working on together. Like show me what old-dude Calvin-ball actually looks like.

ajmurmann• 3 years ago

I love your comment. I think it could apply to any number of hobbies and probably says something about how we build community. Maybe your description in large part applies to every successful community.

10729287• 3 years ago

I've been thinking a lot about that lately and a lot of communities, especially those with users lying to themselves labelling their will to always buy more stuff as "Hobby", are just big Circle Jerks. I've been part of it, and still am, but let's face the reality, those forums became the field of brands playing with consumers.

pelagicAustral• 3 years ago

play the game together, forever.

Basically, the story of every Gentoo userbase.

freitzkriesler2• 3 years ago

I feel attacked ( ╬ д ⊙ ) ⊰ ⊹ฺ

michaelsbradley• 3 years ago

Gentoo is rice?

esperent• 3 years ago

I'm happy your wealthy older male friends have found a way to waste money that enables them to play the status game and bond. No really, it sounds totally harmless.

The problem is, for the rest of us, who just want to buy decent audio equipment and don't have lots of disposable wealth, their hobby fills the space with so much noise. Try searching for reviews of a pair of decent bookshelf speakers. Even add the word "budget" to your search. You'll get all these WhatHiFi style mags who are also playing this inscrutable status game trying to convince you that you'll need to spend thousands of dollars on speakers, even budget speakers. And they're experts so of course most people believe them.

The reality is that once you go over a few hundred dollars for small home speakers you'll get massively diminishing returns. I would say basically zero return in fact between 500 and 10,000 dollars. You should spend money on furnishings to make the space sound better instead.

JohnBooty25• 3 years ago

    The problem is, for the rest of us, who just want to 
    buy decent audio equipment and don't have lots of 
    disposable wealth, their hobby fills the space with 
    so much noise

Amen. Soooo much noise.

While not perfect, and while they don't provide as much objective data as I'd like, I have always sound Wirecutter's coverage of audio equipment to be of a very high caliber. No snake oil.

On the hobbyist side of things Erin's Audio Corner and Audio Science Review have some great data driven reviews.

    I would say basically zero return in fact 
    between 500 and 10,000 dollars

Wow! That's a spicy take. Are we assuming that these theoretical speakers will be properly crossed over to a subwoofer or two, and properly EQ'd?

If so, then yeah, I think I'm almost on board with you. My main system is basically a pair of < $500 JBL studio monitors crossed over to a couple of subs.

If not, then bass and total output are definitely going to be lacking with that $500 system. Most $500 small, commercial speakers are going to struggle to hit 40hz with any kind of authority.

Another thing that a lot of speakers get wrong is off-axis performance. Most of the sound we hear is reflected so it helps if speakers are doing the right thing in as wide of a cone as possible. Paying more tends to get you better performance in this regard but it's a rather weak correlation.

syntheweave• 3 years ago

It's a relatively straightforward dichotomy in this instance: either get the most popular consumer option(because then you are getting something exactly as shitty as everyone else), or get something professional music producers are using(because they have sunk in the effort to have a precise, neutral setup that lets them find every error, and definitionally, that means that you aren't getting much of a practical improvement with audio fairy dust - not one that you couldn't achieve with a bit of EQ or "enhancement" DSP).

This kind of dichotomy often occurs throughout tech product categories: sometimes you want the consumer thing that has optimized its defaults to mid-market taste, other times you want an unbiased, configurable professional tool. Rarely do you want a hybrid of both.

yread• 3 years ago

Get the D12. It has a high wife-approval-factor

piva00• 3 years ago

WhatHiFi is not the most egregious case, they put out a lot of fluff with higher-priced speakers but also give pretty decent reviews of more budget options.

I found out about Audio Pro through some WhatHiFi-esque publication, checked WhatHiFi's reviews and those were raving about Audio Pro's speakers even though they are pretty inexpensive relative to the whole audiophile environment.

davidhyde2• 3 years ago

Just buy a pair of KRK 5 studio monitors and be done with it. They are ugly as sin and a little on the large side but they are excellent things. Built-in amp and they turn themselves off when no audio is playing. Repairable too.

brianmcc• 3 years ago

I was literally about to write this same comment, more or less, so will just upvote you instead.

I really truly want to objectively know whether the £X,000 I might commit to an "upgrade" is actually an upgrade, even if "objectively" in fact means just "subjectively by a clear majority of a large ish sample".

Obviously any serious purchase needs a personal listening audition first, but I want to know I'm not wasting time by even shortlisting certain candidates.

Otherwise it's - where to even start from literally hundreds of amps and speakers?

op00to2• 3 years ago

Agree on zero return over $500 or so! If your point isn't to spend money on "cosmetics", any cheap bookshelf stereo system is more than good enough.

That said, it's ok to blow your money on whatever someone wants. We don't need to judge others for doing what they want, it comes off as jealousy.

JohnFen3• 3 years ago

their hobby fills the space with so much noise

Oh, man, this is so true. I recently bought some audio gear. I wasn't going for "cheap" as much as "good value" -- but it was extremely difficult to figure out what's good and what's not, mostly because the hobbyist crowd (where I would expect to find out the ground truth) generates so much noise.

In the end, I got a decent recommendation here on HN and was very happy with it.

brokenmachine6• 3 years ago

their hobby fills the space with so much noise

100%.

But the good news is that speakers have never been better or cheaper, and there's more good measurements of speakers out there than ever. For $500 you can get better speakers than you ever could, if you ignore the audiofool noise.

Also the electronics are much better as well. Room calibration makes a huge difference, Dirac and Audyssey are great.

zero return in fact between 500 and 10,000 dollars

For me, the tipping point is around $2k for speakers.

I aim for measurable accuracy when I'm looking for speakers. I mean, if you don't care about accuracy, then what are you buying?

There are measurable (and audible) differences up until $2k. After that in most cases it's aesthetics, questionable "sound signatures", and ridiculously overpriced and useless stands.

I agree the room should be treated, no matter what speakers you're using.

msla• 3 years ago

That's the nice version of all of this.

The less nice version is that it's all marketing and for-profit woo: Buy these gold cables with 20% nitrogen and your MIDIs will sound crisper! Buy these fiber optic cables made with Genuine Himalayan Sea Salt and your bits will be better-formed! Buy my optoelectric isolator or you might as well be hooking your speakers to your turntable with a rusty wire coat hanger!

"Riddled with inscrutable lore" is a prime diagnostic feature of all this; it recurs in pseudoscience of all kinds, and the audiophile experience is pseudoscience-adjacent at least whenever it makes claims about reality. It's motte-and-bailey, to some extent: This sounds "Better", where "Better" is either completely subjective, or the result of objectively untrue and blatantly impossible claims they make about the gear they're selling.

If everyone knows it's just pretend, sure. But false advertising and lying are morally wrong.

munificent5• 3 years ago

I try pretty hard these days to seek the most charitable interpretation for human behavior. It's a useful counter-balance to all of the outrage click-bait, bad news survivorship bias, and other emergent forces in play in the modern world that make people look horrible. It makes me less anxious and pessimistic.

In general, yes, I agree with you that false advertising and lying are wrong. I'm also a pretty rational, skeptical person who is "anti-woo".

At the same time... in the past couple of years I've become much more open-minded about the positive psychological value of just choosing to believe some shit in the absence of evidence. It's good to know that you've chosen that belief for non-evidentiary reasons. Maybe put it in a different mental bucket.

But I no longer believe that the "things I believe but can't justify" bucket should be empty. The world is huge and scary and uncertain and awful things can happen without any notice or any ability to control it. I could get a traumatic brain injury. My wife could realize she no longer loves me. My kid could get hit by a car.

I have no evidence to justify a belief that those things won't happen. But I need some level of faith that things are gonna be OK (even if they might not) so that I can function.

If someone is selling kelp and claiming it cures cancer, that's a deep evil because it prevents someone from seeking an actual effective cure to a real material problem.

But if someone has some disposable money and wants to spend it buying the subjective illusory experience of better sound and the identity of a person who is really into audio, I won't judge a company who wants to satisfy that demand.

We all just need some fucking comfort sometimes, you know? And if a $400 HDMI cable gives it to someone, I sure as hell won't judge them for it.

m4632• 3 years ago

All this reminds me of a FUN product review I read in Consumer Reports, the magazine.

It was a review of shampoo. Basically lumped all those high end shampoos and the common brands you find in the grocery store together.

It basically said to me -- shampoos really don't matter, many get your hair clean and shiny.

EDIT: hmmm... I think it might be September 2000 issue of consumer reports magazine. Can't seem to read it on archive.org.

AstralStorm8• 3 years ago

Unless you happen to have an atopic skin condition, psoriasis, etc.

A bunch of the "shampoos" are combined with conditioner which means they're neither a good shampoo nor a conditioner. (Because those two are contradictory. Shampoo is to remove stuff from hair and skin, conditioner is to deposit.)

It also happens that quite a few shampoos have a lot of aggressive alcohol or phenolic preservatives. Certain people are sensitive to these (most are not).

Some "men" shampoos also have wrong pH, way too acidic, causing skin and hair problems in the long run. Some even with pH of < 3. (Properly should be between 3.5 and 5.5)

And then there is the difference in strength of surfactant (SLS etc.) but that should affect just the dose.

So yes, they're definitely all the same. /s

The actual grift there is using weird oils, fruit additives which do nothing or just make the shampoo worse.

thinkpad13• 3 years ago

So is a mechanical keyboards snobs

dogleash• 3 years ago

Then, because they're friends who want to feel useful to each other, it needs to be riddled with inscrutable lore. That way there's always some handy bit of research, some nuggets of wisdom that they can share with each other. That's what this is really about: feeling like they can bond by sharing expertise about some complex hard to optimize problem.
The actual problem itself is essentially arbitrary and subjective. In fact, it's better if it is arbitrary. Because any problem that can actually be solved means reaching an end to the ability to kibbitz and geek out. That's why bringing up objective metrics is such a faux pas in the audiophile world: it kills the game. And the whole point is to play the game together, forever.

Oh, so it's just like sports or politics. Makes perfect sense in retrospect.

tlb• 3 years ago

And by all objective metrics, there are many $500 sound systems that sound as good as any system at any price. You can't be both objective and high-end.

brailsafe• 3 years ago

I'm convinced this is the same with coffee. Everyone is watching the same YouTube videos and buying the same expensive shit, but nobody actually knows what they're talking about and probably can't make good coffee or explain how to.

davidgerard• 3 years ago

As a some time rock journalist, I wish I could write about music as soaringly as audiophiles write about wires.

JohnBooty25• 3 years ago

It was "journalists" themselves who got us into this mess, in a way.

Audio magazines were dependent on advertisers, of course, and many of those advertisers were the sorts of companies selling bullcrap gear like magic speaker cables and other such snake oil.

So you had the "journalists" in these magazines writing all this ridiculous crap singing the praises of magic speaker cables or whatever.

The cycle continues today, in a way, with some Youtubers equally dependent on the income from those sorts of sources.

The hobby as a whole has, THANKFULLY, largely moved away from the snake oil though. Lots of solid objectivists out there now. Snake oil salesmen can sway a magazine or an individual with money, but not an entire community. Lots more truth these days.

ggm2• 3 years ago

It would be easier to read if you'd used polarity aligned fonts. These new quadrophonic, crystal annealled, polarised Times fonts, impart legibility especially in the legato middle section of an audiophile debate, the part where the recording needle was at 90 degrees vertical before the decline into the inner track.

I only read using crystal aligned fonts. I recommend you do too. Available from bitstream, only $30,000 per letter. Ligatures not included.

kps• 3 years ago

The best fonts are made of lead, tin, and antimony.

ggm2• 3 years ago

78s do sound fantastic on the right player. I hope you're using a wooden needle not the modern steel kind.

FpUser• 3 years ago

OMG. Thank you. I would consider it to be the best comment.

steponlego2• 3 years ago

I love all the anecdotes from people about audiophiles, it reminds me of the early days of the Randi forum. But OTOH there are very real subjective and objective ways to discover the truth, which is that a LOT of consumer audio products are trash. Take Class D amplifiers, for instance. They're complete and total trash until you get into the $1000+ market. Or many popular DACs (the chip, not the integrated product) which just sound, for lack of a better term, trashy and cold. Nasty.

JohnBooty25• 3 years ago

    Take Class D amplifiers, for instance. They're complete and 
    total trash until you get into the $1000+ market

Naaaaaah, this isn't true at all.

Here's one with state of the art performance for $800: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/t...

Lots of ones with totally acceptable performance for $100-$200 from Topping, SMSL, etc. By "totally acceptable" I mean they measure the same as affordable Class AB amps in the same price range. I've got loads of both in my house and have spent many hundreds of hours with each.

One unfortunate reality for Class D amps is that admittedly, the power ratings tend to be wildly inflated. If something is advertised as "100W into 8ohms" you can bet that it's more like 40-50W before distortion rises massively in a hockey stick curve like graph. However if the buyer understands this, they still often deliver very competitive value. After all, any amp sounds bad when pushed into distortion.

mellavora4• 3 years ago

I thought class T amplifiers were trash. Class D are more along the lines of "dogs*t".

moogly• 3 years ago

You really think companies like Genelec would put Class D amps in their products if they were "trash"?

steponlego2• 3 years ago

Heh, yeah.

brokenmachine6• 3 years ago

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/a...

Class D, $72 and measurably better than a LOT of amplifiers out there.

dietrichepp2• 3 years ago

I’ve been reading reviews of studio gear on gearspace recently and it’s been driving me crazy. It’s not like the audiophile space, not exactly, because the whole point of studio gear is to impart some kind of unique character (unless you’re talking, like, cables). So it’s a bunch of subjective opinions on things which are mostly subjective to begin with. What does a revision D 1176 sound like, and do you like a different revision better? What type of transformers do you prefer on your preamps?

mellavora4• 3 years ago

Torroidy, with the steel shield to reduce hum.

https://sklep.toroidy.pl/en_US/index

dietrichepp2• 3 years ago

Those are not the types of transformers I’m talking about.

You use signal transformers to isolate inputs / outputs, like these:

https://cinemag.biz/mic_input/mic_input.php

https://cinemag.biz/line_input/line_input.php

They’re directly in the signal path of a preamp, and when overdriven, change the sound.

regpertom• 3 years ago

Not just studio but also live sound, from the perspective of people who use it for work. And so there is no ideal. What does it sound like? Ask yourself. Also ask yourself what your objectives are. Is it reliable and consistent? Does it play well with others? What, how, and when are your choices and everyone’s weaker when things get boiled down to ‘the best’ in such a space. So I like gearspace because enough people there understand that. I love when the first reply to ‘what’s the best mic?’ Is ‘what are you going to do with it?’ Instead of fawning over some ideal. You only put a LDC on vocals? Well I get by fine with a 58 so how essential is it really? Budget and priorities, very few things in the professional realm are actually trash, but boy is it fun and easy to say things like all class d amps are trash. Maybe they aren’t the best at reproduction, but they’re also light and cheap. You gonna spec 20k$ gear for a single Vox, acc gui, stomp gig to 30 people? Or is the pair of 500$ Yamahas gonna be fine? Solo or with a crew? 18kg vs 36kg for a 12 inch top box can make a difference. Blah blah blah sorry I’m rambling.

JohnBooty25• 3 years ago

I mention this on every "audiophile" thread, but there are a lot of data- and engineering-driven audiophiles.

There are folks (and associated communities) out there with engineering backgrounds and sophisticated industry-standard measurement gear: AudioPrecision analyzers, GRAD headphone measurement rigs, Klippel NFS scanners.

https://www.erinsaudiocorner.com/

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?reviews/

I realize it's fun to dunk on all of the "crazies" who are tweaking their sound with crystals or whatever, but they are the lunatic fringe.

Ultimately it's not too different from a lot of industries. Of course, folks hawking their products make some ludicrous claims at times. Just like car ads promise you a happy life with your family and dog if you buy a Subaru or Ford or whatever, there are some wild claims about audio equipment at times. However, there's also a very solid bedrock of actual engineering going on that can be understood and appreciated. And in my experience that's how most people do this hobby.

inconceivable2• 3 years ago

seems like salvaging the audiophile label is a lost cause. i think most people just call those types audio engineers now. maybe audio quant will become en vogue in the future. or audio data scientist.

JohnBooty25• 3 years ago

I think "audio enthusiast" or "audio hobbyist" would probably be a good alternative. I am certainly enthusiastic about audio! However as a hobbyist it would be outrageous to call myself an audio engineer or scientist.

Although, part of me I guess stupidly would like to reclaim "audiophile" as well.

brandall104• 3 years ago

I’m someone who spent 15 years on Head-fi before discovering Audio Science Review 5 years ago. I’ll admit it, I move away from using the term audiophile, it’s such a loaded term.

That said, I still have a set of Buchardt A500s that measure anechoically flat down to 25hz. I paid $4500 for these. I also have a set of Shure KSE1200 that I tune to Harman with PEQ using my lifetime subscription to Roon. These were $1650 as an open box.

Aspirational ASR setups using high end studio monitors can push $10k. I believe the owner of ASR has a system exceeding $30k.

None of these purchases are within the realm of normal, they just have backing by measurements of being pretty great… things that matter in the service of verifiably good sound.

It would be wonderful to snatch that term back. The objectivism in the audio space seems to be taking a bigger mindshare as the years roll on.

officeplant• 3 years ago

Audio-engineer: professional setting up live and studio environments.

Audiophile: crackpot with a $2000 bundle of boutique digital audio player and headphone amp hooked up to some head cans worth more than my monthly income riding the subway.

smackeyacky• 3 years ago

The craziness isn't confined to the dirt box owning, crystal hanging, power conditioning nut jobs. It's actually the "OMG jitter" guys that ruin audio discussions everywhere, all the time.

JohnBooty25• 3 years ago

I agree with your larger point that there can definitely be an overreliance on objective measures that are also objectively inaudible - like jitter, in just about any real world scenario.

Another example is distortion. You've got guys obsessing over 120db SINAD vs. 110db when CD quality audio only has 96dB of dynamic range, the average room has a noise floor of 30-40dB, and the dynamic range of most recordings is like 30dB at most. I think ASR tends to have a fairly realistic view there; some guys just like chasing "engineering excellence" even if it's not audible and as long as they're realistic that's fine.

(There's at least some small basic for reality there: distortion is cumulative along the audio chain, so if you want X dB of SINAD you need > X dB SINAD at each step of the way)

But, I haven't seen folks obsessing about jitter too much in general. I believe that you've encountered it though!

dymax78• 3 years ago

Big fan of ASR and former HeadFi member (back when they actually had a sub-forum dedicated to measurements, data, and science). My only 'criticism' (and it's primarily directed at older reviews) would be Amir often using SINAD as a single metric to determine the quality of a product. I'd guess this was intentional, as a means to address how "convoluted" (aka batshit crazy) the hobby had/has(?) become, e.g. how you feel about your $1k audiophile switch is of no importance to anyone other than yourself.

JohnBooty25• 3 years ago

Yeah, I think that's true. For DACs he doesn't even listen to them.

For DACs, I think SINAD (for those unfamiliar, this is equivalent to THD+N) really does tell something very close to the whole story. Call it 95%, 99%, 99.9%, whatever you will. The remaining N% is stuff we probably don't yet have reliable measurements for. I'm not saying it's magic and unmeasurable stuff, just that we don't have a solid set of measurements to capture it.

For headphone amps, or DAC+amp combos, there are definitely things not well represented by SINAD. I think most of this is related to power delivery (which he does measure) and I think the rest is probably related to slew rate or something thereabouts. But that's just a wild-ass psuedo scientific guess on my part.

rodgerd• 3 years ago

ASR are absolutely not science-driven. See the thread where Amir tested a speaker, trashed it, when others couldn't reproduce the result fought with them, kept trashing it, fought with the designer, and then it turned out that the speaker was broken, quite likely in shipping with incorrect packaging.

Amir refused to retract or correct the review.

Similarstory with his review of a broken Anthem AVR.

JohnBooty25• 3 years ago

It sounds like you're describing some bad judgement calls.

And I agree with you. I remember the ELAC speaker review you're referring to. In fact, a friend of mine had a friendly business relationship with the speaker designer. He spent (wasted) a lot of time doing damage control thanks to that review. And while the speaker designer remained professional and polite in public, I am told that he had some much spicier remarks in private as one would suspect. So I think Amir was quite wrong there.

But I don't think some isolated bad calls mean that ASR is not science-driven. By and large, he gets it right and his contributions have been tremendous. We're talking about a handful of controversial moments... versus literally thousands of quality objective reviews and a real wealth of data.

bobleeswagger3• 3 years ago

ASR aren't science driven because of two cherry picked examples?

You can dislike Amir's methods, but you can't deny that he has transformed the audiophile space by just creating a website for his life passion and sharing his thoughts.

I feel a lot better buying hardware that has been thoroughly tested by ASR. I've even sent Amir some gear to be measured, he's the best of the bunch.

ChancyChance• 3 years ago

That's it? <300 words and one quote? What a disappointment. I was expecting some analogue takedown of OP's claims to pseudoscience, instead of a not-even-long-enough-to-be-called-a-rant vapid puff piece.

yelling_cat• 3 years ago

What snares a lot of well-meaning music fans into wasting money on audio woo is that the first upgrades can be mind-blowing. Let's stick with headphones for simplicity. Pairing, say, a $400 set with a well-mastered album you've listened to hundreds of times and you'll discover sounds in it you've never noticed before - the singer's breathing, whispered background vocals, a guitar string's squeak. It even feels like each instrument is playing from physically distinct places! If the headphones are wired you might next add a $90 DAC/amp combo and - wow, you really feel the bass and sub-bass now! So what will take you to the next level?

The honest answer is that absolutely nothing will provide improvement like what you've just experienced. Tripling your headphone budget gets you a number of beautiful, well-engineered cans with sound signatures tailored to your favorite sorts of music, but with improvements on the order of "that midrange has more detail, nice" than "holy crap!"

Woo-selling companies target anyone still convinced at that point there is some next, higher level of audio bliss they can reach with the perfect combination of kit. Cables made from exotic materials, fancy power conditioners, rocks and stickers have glowing "reviews" and marketing pseudoscience about sonic transparency and skin effect. They do nothing and give the audiophile industry a bad name, but they'll be with us until suckers stop paying for them.

AstralStorm8• 3 years ago

DIY part of the community is much more reasonable because the circuit diagrams are provided, and usually also build notes or examples.

You can quickly make a reasonable guess at what the amplifier will do (or fail to) even before you build it with a bunch of EE knowledge and a few datasheets.

2b3a51• 3 years ago

I'm sitting here as the sun begins to set listening to Colin Carr playing Bach's Cello suites in an Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum recording from possibly a couple of decades ago on my cheapie headphones (Grado SR 80 open backed) coming off a mechanical hard drive via Linux and PulseAudo. The mp3 recorded at 128 kbit/s (they went to 192 kbit/s in later podcasts).

I've got a real sense of the cello, and a feeling for the audience (little coughing!) and the size of the ISGM's room. Some breathing noises (Professor Carr is putting the work in) but the music is flowing.

In terms of a transfer function this chain must be far from perfect but it sounds ok if a little 'chocolate'.

I think it is all a bit subjective this stuff.

srcreigh• 3 years ago

My sound system project is pretty scientific. I have a mic to measure sound pressure, a program RoomEqWizard to measure the response of the system. A parametric EQ module to process the output against polynomial reductions.

I also have a subwoofer box project. I modeled the response of my unit with a physics program WinISD. It incorporates properties of the subwoofer and the box to predict sound pressure levels.

WinISD also predicts air velocity from the port, which if too high will produce fart noises. Farting is solved by making the port cross sectional area larger, and making the port channel longer to maintain the resonant frequency of the port.

I have spent about $300 on supplies for the box. I’ll get a membership at a woodworking club to finish building it ($200/year, storage, tools, training). My 4.3cubic foot, 20-21Hz tuned sub box will enhance the response of the lowest audible 10-15Hz compared to the same speaker in a smaller box. It’ll fit nicely in my sedan trunk too.

With respect to measuring response, an O(n) sine sweep can measure basic response. I’ve found many speakers can’t handle combination of bass and midrange, but can handle either or somewhat fine. I’m not sure how to measure this aspect. Maybe diff the original track from measured response somehow.

It's difficult to read an audiophile guide as an analogue engineer

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