He spent his life building a $1M stereo

I'm struck by this man's wishes and the wishes of my late family members. They are so similar in that they built these monoliths, only to have them fade into the sand as well. Ozymandias.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias

c0pium• 3 years ago

The irony of that reference is that Ozymandias is one of the most famous people in all of history when called by his Egyptian name. Ramesses II.

notso4112• 3 years ago

Spends all this money to listen to the highest quality vinyl crackle.

Builds his own speaker cabinets with no thought of acoustics.

Spends thousands trying to get “clean” power.

Doesn’t treat his room.

Classic audiophile.

Few 00$ on acoustic foam, some good room EQ (there is software to do this for you) and some non chinesium speakers is all you need.

ElongatedMusket• 3 years ago

Link to sample software? The only room EQ I ever used was built into an Onkyo receiver and it was terrible at balancing the sound.

Also, obligatory paywall archive link: https://archive.is/nR1VQ

plg• 3 years ago

https://housecurve.com/

juancn• 3 years ago

https://mathaudio.com/room-eq.htm

karmakaze2• 3 years ago

My desktop setup uses the KRK GoAux 4 which have built-in EQ.

Room EQ Wizard[0] was quite easy to use for other speakers.

[0] https://www.roomeqwizard.com/

roblh• 3 years ago

People have linked some cheap app things, which may work, but the real deal stuff is something like a Trinnov rack unit, or Neumanns DSP room correction system, which is what I use. Both are somewhat pricey, but this stuff isn’t audiophile junk, it’s meant for studios that really need the room to get out of the way, and it’s usually paired with quite a bit of treatment. The difference is insane. It’s not like a “this one has a tiny bit more sparkle” difference, it’s a +-15db at a couple of points in the low end kind of difference.

Someone also linked RoomEQWizard, which is an awesome tool, but dialling in a flat sound with it using just an EQ is going to send you to phase hell, and you’ll also need a halfway decent measurement microphone to get the most of it.

ariendj3• 3 years ago

https://drc-fir.sourceforge.net/

auxym2• 3 years ago

REW (free, but not FOSS): https://www.roomeqwizard.com/

A calibrated measurement microphone can be bought for 79$: https://www.minidsp.com/products/acoustic-measurement/umik-1 or https://cross-spectrum.com/measurement/calibrated_umik.html

michaelbuckbee• 3 years ago

There's the apocryphal story of the audiophile who when asked what the biggest upgrade to their system was replied with "getting the impacted earwax out of my head"

brianwawok• 3 years ago

People will spend $10,000 to upgrade to a carbon fiber bike and save 4 pounds of weight while having a giant beer gut

scrlk2• 3 years ago

Doesn’t treat his room.

From the article, it sounds like he did have some room treatment:

In the 1980s, Fritz launched his project by blowing up the living room into a listening room, a 1,650-square-foot bump-out based on the same shoe box ratio, just under 2 to 1, that worked magic in concert halls from the Musikverein in Vienna to the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. The idea was that the acoustic waves would similarly roll off Fritz’s long, cement-filled walls and 17-foot-high, wood-paneled ceiling to bathe the listener in music.
He got his older son, Kurt, to help pour the concrete floors. Then he worked alongside a construction crew to put up the 12-inch-thick walls and the sound panels to line them.

TheOtherHobbes2• 3 years ago

Wood-panelled concrete sounds like the opposite of treatment. You may get a nice reverberant mess off that, but it's not going to be controlled. If the walls are parallel you will absolutely get standing waves at the room modes.

This doesn't happen so much in concert halls because the walls aren't usually parallel and orchestras aren't loud enough to excite the modes for long.

But if you put a big PA in a large concert hall and kick it with sine waves, there are always a few frequencies that make the room ring.

adrianmonk• 3 years ago

Doesn’t treat his room.

He definitely did treat his room!

There's a documentary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b2IOOhJmxw . He starts talking about the room about 7:00 and then again about 8:50.

It is a custom-built room. It has cinder block walls, but inside them are 2x6 studs spaced 12 inches apart with purlins for extra bracing, then two layers of 5/8-inch drywall.

From the video, you can see that the ceiling of the room is sloped. The front and back walls are curved and have curtains hanging on them. Although the side walls seem to be parallel, there are a lot of irregular surfaces that should break up the sound, including a big fireplace that juts out. The floor is wood but is mostly covered in rugs.

And as far as acoustic treatment, he had a local manufacturer of acoustics products come out and measure the room's acoustics, and then they installed sound panels. The company's blog talks about working with him on it: https://acousticsfirst.info/tag/ken-fritz/

lancesells2• 3 years ago

It's the journey, not the destination.

seanhunter4• 3 years ago

I worked with a guy who was crazy rich and wanted to build a great stereo. He went to a super high-end stereo shop and persuaded them to lend him a bunch of different speaker cables to "try out in his apartment". He was a phd engineer though, so rather than just listening to them he decided to do an experiment. He got some thick pure copper wire as a reference (got it from a hardware store because it's used to wire up domestic ovens and that kind of thing) and took his oscilloscope and measured the frequency response across all the cables. He found (as he expected) that the pure copper cable gave the best response so that's what he used to wire up his speakers. He did measure the acoustics in the room and put his speakers on metal pins on concrete blocks[1] to minimize mechanical interface between the speakers and the floor so the floor wouldn't clamp the bottom of the speakers.

His stereo sounded great and he was super smug about it, including taking the super expensive audiophile cables back and telling the shop they weren't as good as plain thick copper wire.

[1] This kind of thing https://images.homedepot-static.com/productImages/97a91edb-a...

TheOtherHobbes2• 3 years ago

The shops know this. High-end hifi is full of grift. It literally relies on people with more money than sense who can be persuaded to spend a fortune on components and extras that either make no difference to the sound or make it objectively less accurate.

Which is why you get nonsense like directional cables, cable supports to keep cables off the floor, cables with magic insulation, magic rocks that go on top of components, magic knobs, magic creams, "quantum" anything, grounding boxes full of pebbles that don't ground anything, and so on.

Also, most of the people who can afford this hobby are rich old boomers who often can't hear much above 7k on a good day.

m3kw94• 3 years ago

To be slightly fair it’s like food, make it look better and it tastes better, but this dials it to 11

kibwen• 3 years ago

High-end hifi is full of grift. It literally relies on people with more money than sense who can be persuaded to spend a fortune on components and extras that either make no difference to the sound or make it objectively less accurate.

Replace "hifi" with any other product and the sentiment remains the same. High-end houses, high-end cars, high-end clothes, high-end food, high-end technology... the ostensible quality of the product is entirely divorced from the price, because the actual product isn't the speaker or the handbag or the smartphone or etc; the real product is social signaling via conspicuous consumption.

ansible• 3 years ago

I had previously toyed with the idea of marketing "organic" audiophile speaker cables. The ad copy would have been that the cables were harvested from veins of copper dragons that lived in faraway mountains. That the sound would be warmer and richer than ordinary, industrially produced artificial speaker cables, which tend to sound harsh.

ErneX• 3 years ago

And "audiophile" network switches that are rebranded tp-links

LastNevadan• 3 years ago

I remember being an electronics store once and seeing some cables intended for audio that described themselves as being "low oxygen" cables. My god, the nonsense that people fall for!

PaulHoule• 3 years ago

It's bad enough that some audiophiles make it a point to not talk about being an audiophile because they don't want to be the associated with that foolishness.

ThinkingGuy• 3 years ago

I had a friend in college who worked part-time at a shop that sold and installed audiophile gear. He was a music engineering major, so he was aware of how much of what they sold was snake oil. Example: a 3-foot RCA cable that sold for several thousand dollars. The jacks were gold-plated. Not just with ordinary gold, but "special" gold. From a particular mine in South Africa. He told me once "If I ever sell that cable, I don't know how I'll live with myself."

One time he and another guy had just completed an installation in a very wealthy customer's home. Hundreds of thousands of dollars on an ultra-high-end amplifier, CD player, speakers, etc. He started playing one of the customer's CDs on the systems. The customer went on and on, lavishing praise at how "warm" and "crisp" his music sounded on the new system. Suddenly my friend's co-worker leaned over and whispered, "Do you hear that?..." My friend knew exactly what he was referring to: they had accidently wired the speakers out of phase.

bluescrn• 3 years ago

The age factor is so real. Once you're in your 40s, there's just no point, your ears are probably the limiting factor.

The positive is that you can just embrace the convenience of 'good enough' compressed audio and wireless headphones.

seanhunter4• 3 years ago

Yup. When I used to do studio recordings as a musician, most studios have A/B/C speakers for mixing. They have the nice speakers usually on concrete breeze blocks which is what you do your first mix on, and those are equivalent to entry-level-ish audiophile speakers but not super-expensive, then they have the B speakers which are a bit worse and then they have the depressing C speakers which represent what people usually have at home. Even super-expensive studios that will happily drop 10s of thousands on a valve preamp or Neumann mic don't use any kind of fancy cable or unobtanium plugs or anything. Just regular hard-wearing well-shielded audio/speaker/whatever[1] cables depending on application.

[1] There are some differences based on whether the cable is going to carry just audio or audio+phantom power and also whether it's line level or speaker level or whatever it's called. It's been a while.

hedgehog3• 3 years ago

My favorite from when I used to be around this stuff was a CD demagnetizer.

drewcoo• 3 years ago

Wait, wait, wait! There's stereo cream?

Do I apply it to the speakers or the walls or the listeners or what?

willcipriano• 3 years ago

magic creams

Hifi hand lotion: Deep down you know spending this much for better audio is masturbatory, skip the middle man.

notso4112• 3 years ago

I have a sneaking suspicion they already knew that!

amelius2• 3 years ago

Were these wires shielded in any way?

fsh• 3 years ago

Speakers are high-current, low-impedance loads. They won't pick up any significant noise, so shielding is entirely unnecessary.

rsync2• 3 years ago

Just some food for thought…

If you are doing long speaker cable runs and are using 12 gauge wire anyway… At some point it occurs to you, why not just use Romex ?

And, in fact, it’s a very good choice. 12/3 romex - typically used in three Way lighting circuits - gives you two speaker pair in one nice package.

Two downsides:

First, it can be confusing for future electricians, etc., who do not expect romex in the wall to be used for low voltage.

Second, stereo terminal connectors are not typically designed for solid copper and that can get a little frustrating and complicated.

… but then you think about it a little more and it occurs to you:

why not just build terminal blocks and make connections with WAGO lever nuts ?

jeffbee3• 3 years ago

Romex is grand at audio frequencies but what's even better is just sticking the amplifier in the speaker.

What you get from vanilla integrated speakers today is something that would have cost tens of thousands in the 90s and would not have been available in the 70s: dedicated amplifiers for each speaker element, with electronic crossovers and, if you want it, room correction.

amluto7• 3 years ago

A lot of professional audio gear uses 5.08mm connectors. I bet WAGO makes some of them!

But be careful with NM-B cable. I didn’t find an exact reference in the NEC, but I bet that Article 200 and friends would not approve of the reuse of the bare conductor for anything other than ground and might also disapprove of using the white conductor for anything other than neutral. (If you’re not installing the cable in the wall, maybe it’s not subject to the NEC.)

Get some nice TC cable instead.

jasonpeacock• 3 years ago

I used 14ga (IIRC) security wire to wire all the ceiling speakers in my house back to the central amp.

It’s stranded copper with 2 conductors. Easy to run, fits in all the connectors, is cheap, and comes on big spools.

auxym2• 3 years ago

Here's a frequency response test pitting a coathanger against premium audio cable:

https://www.soundguys.com/cable-myths-reviving-the-coathange...

Spoiler: the difference between the coathanger and the premium cable is probably inaudible, and the difference between anything better than a coathanger (ie, literally any sort of copper wire) and the premium cable is certainly inaudible.

kenhwang6• 3 years ago

I had the same thought when I was building out my home theater system. Cables are cables, they're all just copper runs with gold plated ends, I'll just get whatever.

Well, I was dead wrong. Cheap cables hiss and hum like crazy when there's no signal.

Turns what you're paying for with expensive cables is better shielding around the copper. Unless you have perfectly air gapped cables that don't touch anything electrically conductive, they'll pick up some static charge and interference over a long enough run, and it's very audible.

So yeah, get half decent shielded cables for long unbalanced runs to passive speakers. Or just use balanced cables with active speakers.

Nition2• 3 years ago

I'm a little sad that they didn't link the obvious original inspiration for that test - this classic Audioholics forum post by Bob Dean from 2004: https://forums.audioholics.com/forums/threads/speakers-when-...

As far as I know, that post is where the coathanger wire test idea originated.

Another thing I really love about it when viewed in context is, right after he destroys the entire idea of expensive cables in one post, the immediate follow-up post is "Is your speaker system time coherent?" Some people will never be convinced.

jbluepolarbear• 3 years ago

The part where they had a poll was very unscientific, it left comparisons to random audio equipment on the listeners end. Results would be based on the listeners situation more than the source.

mtillman• 3 years ago

The guy in the article could have saved a lot of money by learning what SINAD is before building a stereo that even looks noisy. I’m a little shocked when I see audio nerds who don’t know about audiosciencereview. Far too many people in the world are still buying line conditioners and fancy cables.

CommieBobDole• 3 years ago

I seem to remember an article some years back that determined that CAT5 network cable made excellent speaker wire; though very thin, the wires were entirely capable of carrying the electrical signal, and the twists prevented interference from nearby electrical fields.

searealist14• 3 years ago

Interference isn't a problem in speaker cables because it is an amplified signal, so any added noise is too little to be audible.

vhcr• 3 years ago

Just use balanced audio.

GuB-42• 3 years ago

Speaker wire? Are you sure? Network cable has it all wrong for speaker cable.

Speakers are typically around 4-8 ohm. With long cables, it is easy to get several ohms of resistance, meaning a significant part of the current is going to end up heating the cable instead of producing sound. Not only it is a waste, but impedance is frequency-dependent, so sound quality will be affected. It is not audiophile bullshit, you can hear it clearly. What you need are the thickest and shortest cables that you can reasonable use. For very long distances, active speakers are preferable, or a high voltage (typically 100V) line and transformers.

Interference doesn't matter. You are putting lots of power in these wires, enough to move the speaker membranes, then move the air, then move your eardrums. Compared to that, what you get from external sources is negligible. If you hear humming, that's a ground loop, and your speaker wires are not at fault.

Now CAT5 cable could make great subwoofer cables. I don't know, but it kind of makes sense. Subwoofer cables are low current, and therefore more likely to pickup parasites. They also tend to be longer than typical interconnects. So shielding and twisting may help.

stephen_g• 3 years ago

Not for speaker wire I wouldn't think, but it can carry balanced audio very well - people make converters to XLR or jacks that carry four balanced signals over a single CAT6 cable (using the shield also for ground). Given it's pretty close to the right impedance it can carry microphone or line level balanced audio very well.

It's a bit humorous to think audiophiles might be spending thousands of dollars on speaker cables to listen stuff that could have passed through literally $5 cables in the studio.

ridgeguy• 3 years ago

Piker. A rich, truly obsessive audiophile wouldn't use copper, but rather 6nines annealed silver wire for those speakers.

dtgriscom• 3 years ago

At MIT, I had a friend who wired his speakers with flat ribbon cable, alternating conductors so as to minimize impedance.

Me, I used 150 foot 18-gage twisted pair when I put my speakers down in the courtyard. I can't say the sound was perfect, but it was at least pretty good, which tells me 20 feet of the same would be plenty good inside a room.

(Yes, IANAaudiophile...)

m3kw94• 3 years ago

Maybe don’t disclose where a boat load of expensive audio equipment is located.

monotux• 3 years ago

Had you read the article you’d known that he is dead, and that his system was sold of for close to nothing.

m3kw94• 3 years ago

To be fair most articles doesn’t have plot twists like that

datavirtue• 3 years ago

It's worthless.

m3kw94• 3 years ago

And then you can get close to it with a 20k head phone setup

logiduck• 3 years ago

doubt that headphone can make your body feel the vibrations also. Listening to music is a full body experience not just through the ears.

happycube2• 3 years ago

Subwoofer and/or chair-mounted bass shakers?

In any case $x00 and the ability to say 'eh, good enough' in the end should do...

... OTOH my quixotic project was figuring out RF capture of Laserdiscs which involves digging pretty deep, but it's all open source and it's not just my thing anymore.

This all makes me think of Kermit talking about dreams that get better the more people you share them with.

fomine3• 3 years ago

I sometimes think that headphone + subwoofer should be the best for most people who can't adjust room enough for speakers. I'd like to see such setup but I don't see much.

asylteltine• 3 years ago

Headphones are nothing compared to speakers. You can never experience music like you can with speakers.

karmakaze2• 3 years ago

This story hits literally so close to home. I grew up in a stereo-obsessed family. I went along with it but wasn't quite as involved, merely enjoying the ever-evolving family stereo, many stereo shows and electronics conferences. I probably bought an average amount of stereo gear, though typically spending more than average.

I didn't realize how much of a problem it was until our family bought a very modest house rather than renting for the first time--because the stereo-spending never allowed saving for a downpayment. The stereo-spending resumed with both my father and sibling starting separate stereo companies. They weren't good at it because they were in it for the fidelity and not the busine$$ aspects. My dad passed and it's all shut down now, but infrequently a call will come (on the number that was kept) from someone who's trying to service a unit that they'd been searching for, missed out on, then finally got but wasn't quite working right. If we have a small part to fix it, we'd just send it to them with instructions.

paulpauper• 3 years ago

my granddad also had the 'big stereo system'. I'm glad that my hobbies are cheap and don't take up much room.

jareklupinski2• 3 years ago

I recently threw myself down the rabbit hole of cassette tapes

Currently using an off-the-shelf cassette deck mechanism with the magnetic heads connected directly to an op-amp and a Dayton Audio DSP so I can tune all those Dolby B/C / Noise Reduction / Biases / equalizations myself in software while watching / listening to the results live

it's awesome how many hobbies you can tease out of music

nemo44x• 3 years ago

What a sad story. Men can certainly get carried away with their hobbies. I know I can at times. But you must prioritize your family over them and not make your hobby a burden to them.

This guy had a great stereo but it cost him much more than money.

hiAndrewQuinn• 3 years ago

Audiophilia is one of those things I very intentionally steered clear of as a teenager. It didn't seem well advised to get into a hobby that will eventually cost me thousands of dollars to get serious about. Nevertheless, I'm glad there's a market out there of people pushing the envelope which eventually makes next year's Skullcandies better on the margin.

dundarious2• 3 years ago

I originally read about this story from https://aftermath.site/the-worlds-best-stereo-system-what-ha... in Dec 2023.

I was happy to start reading another treatment, with a new perspective, and from WaPo, who might have the funds to spend even more time on research. However, I found OP to be ignorantly disparaging on the tech side, and quite cold and glib in the human interest side.

Audiophiles are often foolish, and fathers are sometimes cruel, cold, and dictatorial. In my opinion this story doesn't justify its criticisms on either front. The author hears the stereo at its worst and can't get the wow factor. We have the story of one son who himself has truly cruel words for an ill old man, and for the rest, there were no vacations, there were lots of early mornings, etc.

To me, the above doesn't justify the depressive and dismissive subtext and resolution of the article.

The aftermath post is explicitly from the perspective of a fellow hobbyist obsessive, so it is not attempting to accurately state whether it was "worth" it, in an objective sense, as a listening experience. It has a prior that hobbyist obsession can be fulfilling for oneself, and most importantly, others that you share wtih. It also completely ignores/avoids his family life. But in spite of that, to me it provides a richer portrait.

Aloha2• 3 years ago

It's a cautionary piece about the price of obsession - you can make the greatest niche thing in the world - but without others who share your passion, or passing that passion on, it often comes for naught.

dundarious2• 3 years ago

The fact that the stereo is separated in the end does not conclusively mean that it was all for naught. To glibly boil down the aftermath post, what about "the journey and the people you met along the way"? He was enmeshed in a community of like-minded hobbyists. None of them were able to take the entire behemoth system as a unit, but he seems to have made a lot of fellow hobbyist obsessives happy with pieces.

On the "people" aspect, the family story can be hugely significant. But Fritz doesn't seem to have alienated anyone except one son, and the story itself seems to resolve to he-said, he-said on that relationship.

faeriechangling• 3 years ago

I don't know, I feel like the story hit quite close to me as somebody who has had a life full of things rather than a life full of people.

Sometimes the truth is cruel.

WarOnPrivacy2• 3 years ago

> However, I found OP to be ignorantly ... quite cold and glib in the human interest side.
I don't know. I feel like the story hit quite close . . .

I agree. I've been on both ends of bad parenting. I've been the parent who crafts bad parenting notions out of empathy-free theory.

When covering intra-family mistreatment, cold and clinical is a good method. The outcomes are naturally striking. I feel anything beyond a witness adds little and risks much.

mmmpetrichor• 3 years ago

He quite obviously alienated his entire family.

justin66• 3 years ago

However, I found OP to be ignorantly disparaging on the tech side, and quite cold and glib in the human interest side.

Interesting. I was discussing the article with a friend who is a bit of an audiophile (I'm not) this morning and we both agreed that the article was a lot more gentle towards its subject than it might have been.

It also completely ignores/avoids his family life. But in spite of that, to me it provides a richer portrait.

Sad.

Aloha2• 3 years ago

A cautionary piece about the price of obsession.

asimpletune• 3 years ago

Not stereo stuff, but there's a YouTuber named 'Jim Lill' https://www.youtube.com/@JimLill/videos who has proven, beyond a doubt in an accessible way, where sound comes from in a guitar, an amplifier, and now he's doing microphones. It's super interesting and highly entertaining. I definitely recommend.

PaulDavisThe1st• 3 years ago

The thing that I find most amusing (and also distressing) about audiophiles is that they rarely seem aware of the conditions or equipment used during the creation of the recordings they work so hard to perfect the playback of.

The system described in TFA costs substantially more than the gear used to record, mix and master probably at least half of the record collection. There are studios with insanely "high end" playback systems, but they are not common - the gear in most recording studios is very good, but any audiophile would find faults with it (whether they exist or not, heh).

And then there's Ye Olde RIAA equalization curve for vinyl, which is a complete abomination if you're going to view things through the lens "I want to hear exactly what was recorded" - you just never can, because the curve was applied when the vinyl master was created.

jareklupinski2• 3 years ago

yes! there are two tracks i love to play at the speaker store / audiophile's house:

Korn's "Freak on a Leash", to test the low end

Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song", to watch the implementer's reaction to source hiss

imo "Stairway to Heaven" is one of the dirtiest recordings of all time w.r.t. airtime; maybe that 'noise' is what actually made it so successful...?

dharmab• 3 years ago

Billie Eilish's No Time To Die revealed a whole bunch of issues with my theater room rattling :)

I figure as long as I haven't sorted those out, the Monoprice Monolith speakers I'm using are totally fine

mtreis86• 3 years ago

I like so use Aja by Steely Dan, the album is just so precise and delicate

mr_toad2• 3 years ago

yes! there are two tracks i love to play at the speaker store / audiophile's house

A normal person uses their sound system to listen to music. An audiophile uses music to listen to their sound system.

wiredfool2• 3 years ago

Dazed and Confused has the bass playing a descending scale, 8 notes. If you turn off the mains, it's useful to tell how well the subwoofer works.

For vocals -- Paul Simon's Graceland or Cowboy Junkies Trinity Sessions.

chrisdhoover2• 3 years ago

I worked at the hi fi shop in the late 70s. Aja was the best sounding demo record. The Cars record sound like trash. We had speakers with 5 plus drivers. Playing a Beatles record, McCartney’s voice was emanating from a single driver. It was not great imagining Paul inhabiting the speaker cabinet.

kobalsky2• 3 years ago

I’m nowhere near audiophile level but I’m slowly upgrading my stuff

one thing I learned is to appreciate a lot of new music by how good it was mastered.

I mean yes, there’s a lot of good but badly recorded music, you don’t upgrade for those.

repler• 3 years ago

the album Folk Singer by Muddy Waters was an ear opener for me. (1964!)

I had always thought Clapton Unplugged was really nicely mastered and then after I heard Folk Singer, I realized they were trying to replicate it almost in its entirety.

NoPedantsThanks3• 3 years ago

And if you're talking about any popular music mastered (or "remastered") in the last 20 years, you're utterly wasting your time because it has been crushed into a wall of grating noise with dynamic compression.

hakfoo• 3 years ago

Going to a further degree, one would hope that they are testing to make sure the recordings sound good on middle ground equipment.

What good is a record that requires a $50k system to enjoy?

Slow_Hand5• 3 years ago

Record producer here. I can confirm that while audio fidelity is an important consideration to us, the gear we use ranges from insanely pricey to utter trash and both are equally valued. Everything is fair game. More often than not the gear that is compelling was specifically designed to impart sonic color and vibe. To distort the audio in a way that is pleasing. A ruler-flat frequency response is rarely what's called for. Most music is far more colored than people realize. Even the recordings that sound "natural".

Fidelity often comes second to simply sounding cool. Sources recorded on $6k microphones will often get overloaded, distorted, and then re-amped through a tin can because the sound is compelling. If it sounds good it is good.

In my experience the place that fidelity is most important is in the monitoring. An accurate listening environment is critical to ensure that the choices we're making will translate to listeners at home. If our listening environment is flawed we will have to fight much harder to realize our intentions.

E39M5S622• 3 years ago

What are your thoughts on using studio monitors for home listening? It seems like you'd want the playback at home to impart the least color possible, so that it does match what the recording engineer wanted it to be.

dsubburam• 3 years ago

In my experience the place that fidelity is most important is in the monitoring.

Some high-end headphones are marketed as "studio" headphones. Meaning for professionals such as you when doing the monitoring at the recording studio, and not for the consumer at home.

I never managed to understand why what's good for the pro is not good for the consumer. Might you be able to help explain?

Dah00n4• 3 years ago

Playing audio on a $1mill system, recorded with $100 Shure SM58's (or 57's)!

isolli2• 3 years ago

As they say, and audiophile is someone who spends more on his stereo system than his records. For a music lover, it's the opposite.

lvl102• 3 years ago

Very relevant: https://www.nowadaysmagazine.com/magazine/japaneseaudiophile...

I think being an audiophile is the ultimate rabbit hole. I am glad my ears were “dulled” from listening to loud music on IEMs in my younger days. I have a pair of excellent studio monitors and that’s as good as it gets for my ears.

schrijver2• 3 years ago

If you prefer listen to music on excellent studio monitors that already makes you more discerning than 99% of the general public. You could very well apply the label audiophile to that, no?

Maybe we need two words, one for people like you and me that care which speakers they listen on (because for most, whatever small bluetooth speaker is at hand will do), and one for the people that buy $500 cables?

BTW I feel everyone is affected by differences in audio reproduction. Like how much you can get into a the music at a party will be affected by the sound quality, it’s just going to be subconscious for most.

amanzi2• 3 years ago

Yes! I posted a similar comment above - in my mind an audiophile is someone who is enthusiastic about audio. But you can have a lot of fun in the budget audiophile space without getting into the crazy side of audiophilia.

By the way, I recently went down a rabbit hole of speaker cables and $500 would be considered cheap for some people! Look up the Cardas Audio Clear Beyond Speaker Cables for examples of cables that cost tens of thousands of dollars.

ezconnect• 3 years ago

I don't like the music coming out of my studio monitors. I prefer the stereo speakers and a sound woofer, feels more alive.

kazinator2• 3 years ago

How else would you correctly reproduce something that came from a $40,000 studio, whose equipment is chock full of $0.10 op-amps, and whose output is stamped onto a $0.05 worth of plastic?

Dah00n4• 3 years ago

Most of it recorded with Shure SM57 and SM58s I bet!

kazinator2• 3 years ago

Which, by the way, are basically the same mic except for the different screens.

dekhn6• 3 years ago

I'm not an audiophile. I found the bare minimum that would make me happy a long time ago and it's not expensive (basically a decent amp that doesn't add a lot of hiss, and live lossless recordings from groups like Phish). I get more out of reducing sources of artifacts (hiss from poor amps, cover walls with sound-absorbing panels) than I do maximizing the performance of the components (like minimizing THD). I'm actually more interested in getting a good sound image (like the article mentions, if you set things up right, it sounds like the band is "in the room" with you).

For fun and pedagogy, I did build some speakers recently and it was educational. I bought full-spectrum speakers (IE, a speaker that handles both highs and lows, rather than using tweets and woofers and a crossover) and a simple stereo amplifier breakout board from Adafruit. 3D printed some speakers, and did all the soldering/wiring/enclosing myself.

What did I learn? That building good speakers is hard! There definitely are parts of the spectrum the speakers don't handle well (low frequencies; I can't hear above 15khz any more). But what I really noticed is that because I didn't do any isolation (no padding inside the speaker enclosure, the speakers are directly on my wooden desk) I can hear a lot of artifacts. I'm actually glad I can notice them, because in some sense it validates my own sense of hearing, as well as my understanding on how to improve sound.

If I were to do it again, I'd add a crossover, subwoofer, tweeters, and a ton of physical isolation (replace the 3d printed speakers with wood, add padding, and a mount under the speakers to reduce the table vibration.

One of the best speaker systems ever was an absurdly simple system: the Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound. Because large auditoriums with PAs had terrible sound, they did something nobody else tried: a huge array of speakers, each band member with their own subset of speakers (no mixing). It was absurdly expensive but it had a very high quality sound field even at low volumes (very clear 1/4 mile away).

amanzi2• 3 years ago

I think you are an audiophile, in the same way I am - you're enthusiastic about audio. I don't like the term only referring to those that pursue the foolish end of high-end audio. I love buying budget audiophile gear and trying to get a nice, clean sound out of equipment. On my desk now I have a couple of dongle DACs, a Topping DAC/amp, some cheap Micca speakers and a bunch of headphones, ranging from budget Sennheisers up to my most expensive purchase ever - a pair of Focal Clear headphones, which I bought on sale with a further discount due to a damaged box. :-)

dekhn6• 3 years ago

I expect to buy the same Sennheiser HD280 (possibly a clone) headphones over and over (the earcups eventually wear out). The only thing that made a big difference was getting a headphone amp because some audio is mixed really quiet.

archi422• 3 years ago

1. Fullrange speakers are great, don't underestimate them! The ones I looked at need some help at the low end, but you get away with a much lower crossover frequency compared to a tweeter. Since they can have a relatively big diameter (compared to tweeters) they have a stronger "beam"/focus; annoying when moving or having multiple listeners (off-axis sound is horrible), but for solo listening the stage/imaging gains a lot from not being disturbed by those pesky reflections.

2. Don't add a crossover if you don't have to. They mess with the phase at the crossover point and are hard to get right anyway. Just do it all in a DSP and have an amp for each speaker. You can actually combine room correction (often via parametric equalizer) and the crossover itself into one big FIR, if your DSP is big enough. You can also play with crossover frequencies, slope, sacrificing headroom for a deeper frequency response etc. - in the analog domain, the costs for the passive components quickly add up. That's why MiniDSP + array of amps can have a huge impact.

3. While I'd go with MDF any day, most designs will sound terrible without padding (or too much!). For your 3D printed design I'd expect proper padding to be the lower hanging fruit.

Anecdata: My 4" full range speakers are fully active stereo speakers: 4" FR + 4" woofer per cabinet (based on "Double Four", but with a different FR), 4 amps and an ADAU145x DSP for crossover & room correction (Beocreate 4). They play down to IIRC 40Hz (-3dB, or was it 0dB?) with ultra precise voice/instrument locations. (Not all that glitters is gold: IIRC they're limited to 92 or 95dB and I still need to redo the DRC since we moved).

Edit: For prototyping, there is the free Windows "Equalizer APO" I used to output the four channels using the onboard sound card and fed them into an older 5.1 receiver (with 5 integrated amps) connected to the speakers. That way I could rapidly swap the FIR filters and compare them to insanely large filters. This is nice for experimenting, and with a decent sound card can eliminate the need for a DSP when used to build dedicated PC speakers.

dekhn6• 3 years ago

Thanks, this is very helpful and motivating!

In this situation, I sit directly in front of the speakers with only a single listener. And the full-range cones are quite small (100mm?), we're not talking 4" here (it all has to fit on my desk with my monitor).

isolli2• 3 years ago

I'm actually more interested in getting a good sound image.

This is the goal. The best image I've ever heard was from a pair of Bang & Olufsen Beolab 5 [0], set up in their shop (due to their acoustic lens, I suspect).

I have a pair of JBL LSR305 (bought for 1% of the price of the B&O pair) [1]. They feature an "Image Control Wave Guide" inherited from a more expensive JBL line. The image can be stunning, but you have to sit in the right place.

[0] https://www.beoworld.org/prod_details.asp?pid=800

[1] https://jblpro.com/products/lsr305

workingdog• 3 years ago

No amount of music can make up for a lost life with a son.

zitsarethecure• 3 years ago

A million bucks could have got him and his family many great trips to see the best musicians in the world play in beautiful places with amazing acoustics. In that scenario, when he died he would not have had the "best stereo in the world", but he would have been surrounded by people who loved him and all of them would have had memories of those experiences that would last far longer than the short period of time it took them to part out his "masterpiece".

lovegrenoble• 3 years ago

Paywall (

bookofjoe2• 3 years ago

https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/interactive/2024/ken-fr...

https://archive.ph/XYKOY

yedava2• 3 years ago

If you spend your whole life obsessing over material things, you can miss the things that matter.

I care about audio quality, but not to the extent where I can call myself an audiophile. For me, the goal is the music. When a symphony clicks with you, when you find the time to listen to it all in one go, and when you are in the right state of mind to take it in, it's a rare experience. No amount of equipment will get you that. What will get that absolute high is making life decisions that carve out the space to engage with the music.

HKH22• 3 years ago

When a symphony clicks with you, when you find the time to listen to it all in one go, and when you are in the right state of mind to take it in, it's a rare experience.

I don't think it's rare. Engagement happens when there is a balance between what is familiar and what is foreign. You might look at all the cover art, names and reviews, but if it's too familiar or too foreign, it won't click.

So music you like should be sorted by familiarity. If you're not switched on, you can tell your system, 'don't play this in a while' and the next time it chooses to play it to you, it'll be far more interesting.

yedava2• 3 years ago

With symphonies, I'm already familiar with them after listening to them the first few times. Like I've listened to individual movements separately several times, but if I listen to all them together, fully concentrating on the music , and not distracted with anything else, the whole is a lot more than the individual components. In busy lives hyper focused on always being productive, maximizing for status or money, getting the time to listen to hour plus long symphony in one go is hard. And having a settled mind to do that is even harder.

sundvor• 3 years ago

Yup. I was quite into this when I was younger, obsessed with research etc. Then with a new well paying job as a web developer/programmer I spent something like $9k or so in 1997 (in NOK, that's the USD conversion for that year) on a Rotel + Infinity 5.1 system, including a projector and a screen, VHS / CD / Cassette / LD - and then, best decision every, went completely cold turkey on the research/equipment obsession - I just checked out.

So from then on I have just been enjoying content instead, slowly over the years peeling down the input side to just a HTPC with a high end soundcard (with a multi channel RCA to DB25 cable), and the playback to now a Samsung QLED (2016).

So yeah, that was a lot of money back then, but I still use the base Rotel pre/amp + Infinity speakers (refurbished once), and the sound is absolutely lovely. (A no-name, cheap but big subwoofer was added along the way too, and it fills in the bottom end just right).

Divided by 26 years, I think I did pretty well. Some titles such as the new Dune movie still gives me goosebumps audio wise. Amp needs a service now, lost a channel, but once done I reckon it'll be good for many more years.

el_snark• 3 years ago

Unfortunately he has 80 year old ears.

sgt• 3 years ago

My dad is 75.. very good ears. He is also an audiophile. Remember, these ears have been trained for decades.

WalterBright4• 3 years ago

I was an audiophile when younger. Today I can't hear the cassette tape hiss anymore, whereas it used to bother me.

I no longer have a need for an audiophile stereo.

Last week I attended a dinner club that had a local jazz band playing. The music was painfully loud, as expected. I brought earplugs which distort the sound, but bring it down to an unpainful level. As far as I could tell, I was the only one with earplugs, other than the lead singer.

How are these people not deaf, especially the band?

NoPedantsThanks3• 3 years ago

I think they are, which is why much of the public accepts absolute shit-quality mastering now.

I take earplugs almost EVERYWHERE. Restaurants, pubs, obviously clubs, and even movies. I saw Dune on the WB lot and didn't think to bring them; it was literally PAINFUL. I sat with my fingers in my ears for most of the movie. Disgraceful.

You should look into "musicians' earplugs." I have numerous sets of Alpine ones that claim to suppress the whole spectrum equally. Try these: https://www.alpinehearingprotection.com/products/musicsafe

unglaublich• 3 years ago

Awareness.

Like with smoking, it'll take a long time for the general public to accept that loud noise is unhealthy and causes permanent damage.

How are these people not deaf, especially the band?

They are, but going deaf is gradual, and the brain is good at compensating. So it's only when the signal ratio gets so low that you start having trouble understanding others that people notice it.

pengaru• 3 years ago

https://old.reddit.com/r/audiophile/comments/17ubsaz/ken_fri...

and avsforum link therein for posterity:

https://www.avsforum.com/threads/need-advice-on-how-to-sell-...

ddingus11• 3 years ago

When I was a high schooler, I built a system in my room. Like this amazing thing, it was something I felt needed to stay intact. I can identify with the guys last wish and also know for sure it won't ever happen.

Honestly, it was OK. We did not have a lot growing up and so I had scrounged this and that often building things custom to take advantage of the room and passive acoustics to get good sound.

I, and friends and family, listened to a lot of music on it.

Then I did something one day that would turn out to be special!

Just for kicks, I wondered whether recording using the same speakers that would play the recording back would sound good.

Turns out yes! It was a little like a hologram. If you played those recordings in my room, you would hear the house! Mom cooking in the kitchen, living room TV, complete with CRT wine, in the living room, people talking...

It was all there! And one could place the sounds as if they were really happening. Listening in, say the middle of the night, was dramatic. With eyes closed, it was like midday. Hard to tell otherwise.

And those recordings only worked on that system, in that room.

Today, I bet software would tease out what I did on a wider range of listening scenarios. But back then, some considered it magic, and only in that room.

So when I left home, I left it all and some tapes and encouraged anyone wanting to hear family life from some years ago to go and listen before it all gets torn apart.

My mom sold the house and that was the end of an era. Sadly, the tapes have been lost too.

All I know is you can use a capable preamp to record through your speakers and when that recording is played on that system, it will be magic!

pizza2• 3 years ago

That's an amazing idea..

ddingus11• 3 years ago

Turns out it was! But, the amazing outcome was limited to playback on that system.

Playback on another one sounded good, even better than mine, but the illusion I described was not there.

kenhwang6• 3 years ago

It's like a multi-speaker version of binaural recordings!

Binaural recordings already have very realistic playback on headphones. So I'd imagine using multiple speakers would be a trip for everyone in the room.

I assumed you flipped the speakers around to record?

ddingus11• 3 years ago

Nope. Left them in position. Moving things tends to break the illusion.

Nition2• 3 years ago

What a cool idea. I'm really surprised that using big speakers as microphones still let you pick up the CRT whine way up at nearly 16KHz! I would have thought you'd be mostly picking up bass. I guess the size of a tweeter at least, isn't that much bigger than what's in a dynamic microphone.

ddingus11• 3 years ago

I had smaller 3" drivers mounted high, near the ceiling. In the cabinet with them were even smaller tweeter type, dome shaped that I am sure picked up the high end.

I am not sure I used the big drivers at all for recording. Hard to remember.

kevindamm• 3 years ago

Reminds me of how you can get a mold of your ears made to put over a mic, then the recordings sound more like they're coming from outside your ears when you hear them even with in-ears.

flyinghamster• 3 years ago

Binaural recordings can also be made with small in-ear mics (be careful, they'll pick up clicks from your eardrum when you swallow), or a close approximation by clipping omnidirectional mics to your glasses.

Or, if you're made of money, there are purpose-built dummy heads like this: https://www.neumann.com/en-en/products/microphones/ku-100/

tomcam• 3 years ago

Magical! Never thought I’d apply that term to a Hacker News post

smallhands• 3 years ago

recording through the speaker!! please explain how is that possible!!!!

kadoban• 3 years ago

Speakers and a certain kind of microphone are exactly the same thing at the basic level. Sound hitting the diaphram (the bit that moves to produce sound) of a speaker will cause a voltage to be produced on the speaker wires that can be recorded.

HelloNurse• 3 years ago

Most types of speaker are a microphone, they just need to be wired up correctly (hence the mention of a "capable preamp") to be used as one. For example, a piezoelectric device that deforms when driven by an electric current produces a little current when deformed by external forces.

ddingus11• 3 years ago

Look at dynamic microphones.

Check this out: (this is where I got the idea of recording through speakers)

In 8th grade, I took apart a dynamic microphone I had picked up from radio shack. It was essentially a tiny speaker! Naturally, I went ahead and connected it to the headphone jack of a portable cassette recorder and...

Heard some of the BEST sound I had ever heard out of small electronics! It was not loud, but it was detailed and full so long as one held the mic right against the ear.

I bought another one and mounted both of them inside some hearing protection type ear covers, essentially turning them into a sort of weird headphone.

Later on, a friend showed me a Walkman type radio / cassette player and the little open air type speakers it came with looked a whole lot like the dynamic mic "speakers" did and had a similar sound too.

I had come close to producing open air type listening gear on my own. My first attempt at stereo listening failed because I just did not have a great head mount. Went with the ear protection gear because that fit well and did make the most of the great, but somewhat quiet sound the little plastic cones in the cheapo dynamic mic could deliver.

Had I been able to come up with a suitable mount, it was extremely likely I would have ended up with two small speakers resting right on my ears Walkman style.

In any case, that is when I realized speakers can be microphones and that lead up to the point of discussion here now.

mprovost• 3 years ago

I'm sure there are many more examples but famously Groove Armada recorded the trombone parts of "Superstylin'" and "At the River" through a speaker because they didn't have a microphone in the studio.

rcxdude2• 3 years ago

This concept is quite general: most sensors and actuators are transducers: i.e. they work in both directions as a sensor and an actuator. It varies from one to the other how well something designed for one role can work as another, but in the care of speakers they are actually reasonably good microphones.

Another fun example: solar panels are LEDs and LEDs are solar panels. You can detect light with an LED (and in theory power something from it, but you'd need a lot of light and not need much power) and you can emit light with a solar panel. Most solar panels will only emit light in the infrared, though. I have seen a triple-junction solar panel being back-driven by others in parallel with it, and it glowed a deep red, which is pretty cool.

shiroiuma• 3 years ago

Most speakers are basically a linear motor: there's a coil (the stator) and a diaphragm with iron in the middle (the "rotor"). When you apply an AC waveform to the coil, it moves the diaphragm in and out, producing sound. But it also works in reverse: moving the diaphragm in and out with sound produces a voltage in the coil. So fundamentally, a speaker and a microphone are really the same thing, just wired differently (and usually scaled differently: speakers are typically larger, and microphones typically have tiny diaphragms to be more sensitive).

antongribok• 3 years ago

Reading this for some reason reminded me of the Virtual Barber Shop:

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

(Use headphones and close your eyes.)

ddingus11• 3 years ago

That is a great soundscape

ncr100• 3 years ago

Turning a cute tragedy of an obsessed man into a significant eavesdropping technology exploit and privacy nightmare... Peak hacker news discussion!

ddingus11• 3 years ago

I identified with that guy having made something similar that would only work where it was made.

I am not sure many of us find ourselves having done that.

NoPedantsThanks3• 3 years ago

Every time I see a story about audiophiles today it makes me mad and depressed, because I like popular music. And I like to expand my collection with good new music.

But that pursuit is dead now for anyone who loves music or high-quality sound, because the record labels have utterly destroyed all new music with dynamic compression since the late '90s. Even worse, they've busily ruined their back catalogs with "remastering."

Now we have a generation of people who have never heard how good music can and should sound. The "loudness war" is so monumentally stupid that it must stand as one of the greatest crimes against art of all time. It's so insidious that even some of the musicians complaining about sound quality now have failed to recognize that the real problem is NOT data compression or sampling rate.

Apple and Spotify, as gatekeepers to hugely popular music services, are the only sort of entity that has any hope of "fixing" this problem by setting dynamic-range requirements, the way Netflix sets technical requirements. But while dynamic-range measurements (specifically LUFS) have gained adoption, Apple has instead brought us the degrading gimmick of Atmos.

It's really depressing for music lovers.

Slow_Hand5• 3 years ago

It's hard to ascertain from this write up, but I don't see anything in the way of acoustic treatment in Ken's listening room.

A common shortcoming I see in the setups of many hi-fi enthusiasts is a lack of attention to the acoustic response of their room. Or if they do appreciate the problem their treatment betrays a profound misunderstanding of how to address it. The room we listen in has a profound effect on how we hear the audio coming from our speakers and it is mostly negative interference.

Treatment like absorptive ceiling clouds, absorptive panels at the early reflection points, and a means of neutralizing low-end room modes are severely under-valued relative to their influence on performance and their ROI.

If you want to hear the influence your room has, use a signal generator like this (https://onlinetonegenerator.com/) to play a steady sine wave at 60 Hz. You'll need speakers low enough to produce them. A higher frequency (100Hz) would suffice if your speakers don't go that low. Now, with that steady tone playing, walk around your room and listen to what happens. It will fluctuate wildly in volume, becoming much louder or nearly disappearing entirely, while only moving by a matter of feet.

Now imagine this phenomena happening at every single audible frequency in your room (low to high).

Getting the acoustic treatment right in your listening space is the single biggest thing that you can do to improve the listening experience; on par with your choice of speakers. And I'll argue that it's not worth investing in high-end speakers until your room is sorted, or else the room will distort your perception far too much for to appreciate much difference.

I won't pick on hi-fi enthusiasts who obsess over choices of wiring, de-coupling, and clean electricity (that's beyond the point), but solving those problems is fighting for gains in inches while your choice to address the room modes and time-domain issues is going to gain you yards in how you perceive records. It must be addressed before anything else.

Source: I manage a high-end studio-design consultancy: https://www.unfckprojects.com/

diego_sandoval• 3 years ago

Would you say that headphones have a drastically better sound quality ROI over speakers at low budgets (under $1000) for recreational listening?

AirMax98• 3 years ago

For even like, $500 you can have an absolutely kicking sound system. There’s no way that you’re going to get the range of big ass speakers in small headphones, but regardless this is kind of apples to oranges.

Slow_Hand5• 3 years ago

Yeah. Headphones will introduce their own issues like a lack of cross-talk between ears, absence of body feel for the low end, and a skewed frequency curve, but yeah they do remove the room from the equation. Your perception of the record won't change when you turn your head or step back two feet. They've got that going for them.

I should stress that most casual listeners probably don't need to fret about this stuff unless they're really committed to the experience. My work studio may be well-optimized, but when I listen to music in my living room there is zero room treatment and it doesn't get in the way of a pleasurable listening experience.

__mharrison__• 3 years ago

What gives the biggest bang for the buck for home office treatment?

Slow_Hand5• 3 years ago

Good speaker placement, a good listening position, and then covering the first reflection points in your room with 4" of absorptive paneling from a company like GIK acoustics. Doing so will cut down on room mode interference in your midrange and your high-end (300 Hz - 20 kHz) while dramatically tightening up both the stereo imaging and the time-domain response (ringing/echo) in your room. This applies to your listening position only.

SPEAKER POSITIONING:

In 9/10 cases I would push your speakers against the front wall firing longways down the longest dimension of your room. You can safely ignore most people warning you about SBIR reflections if the topic arises.

With your speakers against the back wall, space them symmetrically between the walls to the left and right of your listening position, but avoid placing them in positions that fall 1/4 or 1/3 of the width between your side walls.

For Example: If your front wall is 8' wide, your speakers should not be placed 2' from each side wall (1/4 of the room width) and they should not be placed 2' 8" off of each side wall (1/3 of the room width). Place them somewhere in between these nodes to minimize destructive interference from room modes.

LISTENING POSITION:

With your speakers against the front wall, place your listening position (your chair) in between both speakers in the spot that is 38% of the room length off the front wall. So if your room is 100 inches deep from front wall to back wall your chair should be located 38" away from the front wall that has your speakers.

Ideally, your listening position should be dead center between the walls to the left and the right of your listening position.

For Example: If your room is 8' wide your listening position should be located in the center, 4' from the walls to your left and to your right.

COVERING YOUR FIRST REFLECTION POINTS:

Covering your first reflection points means hanging at least a 4' x 4' cloud on your ceiling and hanging an equivalent amount of coverage on both the wall to the left and to the right of your listening position. Specifically these should be placed at your first-reflection points.

When ordering absorptive panels don't bother with features like diffusor panels or any hard reflective surfaces. They're mostly pointless. Just get the simple soft absorptive panels (4" thick) and don't worry about the add-ons and up-sells.

Covering your first reflection points will dramatically improve the performance of your listening position from roughly 600 Hz up to 20 kHz. If you mount the panels off of the wall with an air gap equal to the panel thickness it will extend your midrange coverage by an additional octave. So mounting your 4" thick panel on the wall with a 4" air gap behind it improve it's performance by absorbing as low as 300 Hz (instead of 600 Hz). This is good. There is no additional benefit for mounting with a larger air gap.

Locating your early reflection points for your ceiling and side walls is beyond the scope of this reply, but you can look up other explanations of how to find them in your room.

FINAL NOTES:

This (very rough) guide will only treat the midrange and high-end in your listening position (from 300 Hz - 20 kHz) and only for your listening position. Building a room that can manage low-end cancellations and also sound balanced in every position (not just the main listening position) is not a trivial thing, and cost-prohibitive for 99% of people. So you'll have to accept that these solutions are out of reach unless you want to tear down your room and rebuild it.

The fact is, learning acoustic principles to do this yourself is not something that is practical for 99% of people. So don't drive yourself crazy trying to sort it unless you feel very well-versed in physics AND professional audio.

Unfortunately the acoustics space is full of hacks and cargo-cult acousticians who don't truly understand the physics or the practical needs of listeners. It's a lot of voodoo and a great way to waste money unless your designer really knows what they're doing. Unfortunately most people aren't qualified to understand what they need, which makes it that much more difficult to find clarity in an already tricky problem-space. Our team has almost given up trying to make a dent in the field, but the fact is a lot of clients don't know what they don't know and hire people whose expertise is at best outdated and at worst complete nonsense.

te_chris• 3 years ago

In the article it sounds like he wanted it to sound and behave more like a concert hall. Interesting choice.

chubot• 3 years ago

Holy crap! I watched the YouTube documentary a couple years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b2IOOhJmxw

Something definitely felt "off" about it ... but they seemed to show that this wasn't a crazy loner holed up in his house by himself.

I guess they were trying to drum up publicity to sell the stereo. And announce the completion of the project.

After reading this article, he does seem crazy. Not quite a loner, but very troubled

The video obviously didn't mention the part about his estranged son Kurt, which this article described

I like audio and big speakers too, but this is way beyond audio. 20-30 years of "engineering", taking over the family home, and alienating much of the family

Engineering is done within constraints, and this project had no constraints

No surprise that nobody really wants it

thih9• 3 years ago

“Nobody wanted to come to our house, because he wanted to put them to work,” said his daughter Patty, 58. “I think we went camping twice, never took vacation. It was just work, work, work.”
“Growing up, I had to get up at 6 in the morning to work,” [son] Kurt, 55, said. “I basically was his slave.”
Judy drank too much in those days. She also was unimpressed by her husband’s music. When he played “Swan Lake,” she’d call it “Pig Pond” in front of the kids and crank up the TV to annoy him.

ThinkBeat3• 3 years ago

Having been an audiophile earlier in my life, until other priorities and lower income but a stop to it.

I got to the point where I discovered you cannot built the ultimate stereo that is suitable for "all generes".

On a typical audiophile setup extremely well recorded music is an enormous joy. The soundscape is amazing, the small details you can hear.

Sadly, there are fewer and fewer genuinely great recordings seen from that perspective.

Listening to metal, industrial or rap (with some exceptions), was painful. You could not get the extra resolution because there was nothing to get.

The frequency range was not there. The drums adjusted for maximum bass, the guitars had little dynamic ranger, and the sometimes shouted lyrics where not a joy either.

But.. If you had a stereo that was optimized for listening to this kind of music, which fit the soundscape the record expected, is sounds much better than "high end audiophile stereo".

You really need more than one stereo so you can play the record at its best.

ThinkBeat3• 3 years ago

It seems to me that his system considered of 6 speakers, possibly with a subwoofer (Since in one place they talk about a 7.1 system). Left, right of the mid to high range frequencies. That gives a 5.1 or 5 system.

To me its odd if you are building out such a system to try to make it surround sound system since it will not enhance anything for classical music on vinyl

Two much more conventional looking ones, which appears to be good at the lower end, either source bass and / or surround speakers. Then there is the center channel.

In one photo they are on either side of the fireplace. (Another potential acoustic disaster.) I think.

In this image there are

I dont get concrete walls. I dont think that is common as the first wall in most general spaces for philharmonic or opera is heard.

The two giant grandfather clocks in the background also makes no sense. Those panes of glass would be joining in on the vibration and sound annoying.

Perhaps he had super treated them to avoid it. They way they are positioned and the fact that he has two of them symmetrically placed indicates it was purpose.

Porcelain dogs are rather surprising aswell. perhaps they are the proud participants in being sonically optimized two.

[1] https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://...

peteforde• 3 years ago

What, you never heard of them doing big concrete pours when building the classic performance houses in the 1800s?

Lifelong passion projects really resonate with me (sorry) and frankly, I have no doubt that this guy knew 10x more about sound systems than both of us put together.

My frustration is that I think this kind of extreme audiophile stuff is a legitimate mental illness. The sad truth about the fireplace and the porcelain dogs is that no, it literally doesn't make any difference that a human could perceive. Put them in or take them out, there's no way a 70+ year old man could tell you if he was blindfolded.

Still, I'm glad that he finished his project. Getting 4-5 years to enjoy something like this puts him in an incredibly rare demographic of human.

Squint, and I see Colin Furze's ever-growing tunnel system under his house in the same light.

lelanthran• 3 years ago

Lifelong passion projects really resonate with me (sorry) and frankly, I have no doubt that this guy knew 10x more about sound systems than both of us put together.

Probably. He would also probably fail a double-blind test in telling the difference between an ultra-hi-end system and a merely adequate high-end system.

IOW, he spent all that money on equipment and environment, but he almost certainly would have gotten the same result with less spend on equipment.

My frustration is that I think this kind of extreme audiophile stuff is a legitimate mental illness.

Maybe some is and some isn't, but in this case he really was mentally ill. By his own account, he worked his children hard in pursuit of his happiness, and then when one of them wanted a keepsake worth a $100 or so, he disinherited them.

This man is genuinely mentally ill.

paganel• 3 years ago

In cases like this one I think it is more about the journey than the destination, and I know it sounds cheesy and all but I think it best describes situations like these. I'm surprised that he even got to "finish" it all, for me those "finishes" come with associated existential dread, as in "what should I do now with my life that I've finished my long-pursuit project?".

ThinkBeat3• 3 years ago

Knowing more than me is not difficult.

The porcelain dogs would vibrate and create an easy to hear extra noise. Unless as I pointed out they were modified. Perhaps by making them heavy and letting them sit on a robber mat or some such.

Noise from a good bass makes all manner of things vibrate. Some of which is noticeable.

About the fireplace. An open fireplace would be noticeable. Perhaps he has filled it in. even with some absorbing material.

I am not convinced about his skill level on matters like acoustics. I dont think he could sit down and the do all the math. What he could do was to try things out, and incrementally make improvements.

Ultimately, he created a system he thought was great and that was what mattered.

In my day I would spend endless hours moving things down to a mm here or there. Moving acoustic treatments all around, all such stuff. Aside from the general rules, I did not have the math, so I tried to find a solution that I loved.

DeathArrow• 3 years ago

The height of my HiFi adventure was buying some used good quality speakers for cheap and some decent cheap chipamp from Amazon.

pastrami_panda2• 3 years ago

I sold a pair of pretty renowned speakers with 6" woofers for a much smaller pair of DSP controlled close range studio monitors that came with a calibration microphone. Even though I liked my old speakers I could tell they couldn't shine in my room (mainly the bass couldn't be controlled, which impressed everyone except me that just wanted to hear what the audio engineers intended).

I'm super happy how good my mostly untreated room sounds now with some calibration and careful monitor placement. I'm a somewhat critical listener having had basic ear training and always protected my hearing at live shows. My room is very bad in terms of acoustics, so of course proper room treatment would greatly improve the setup, but not everyone is in a position where room treatment is feasible, so to me this is a great way to get maybe half way there.

aidos• 3 years ago

Can I ask what you ended up buying?

pastrami_panda2• 3 years ago

Sure, it was a used pair from the brand IK Multimedia, the model is named MTM. I still can't believe such a small speaker can punch this hard above its weightclass in terms of bass. When I have people over they think my air purifier by the desk is a subwoofer.

Dah00n4• 3 years ago

As a former PA system engineer, I get twitches when looking at the cable management in those pictures. Could have used a tiny amount more on that part in my opinion. Might actually make a bigger difference than... well, a lot of the other items.

jalapenos• 3 years ago

One take is that this article is about an expensive stereo.

A more accurate perspective would be it's about a man with a severe personality disorder, the stereo being just a symptom of it.

krzat• 3 years ago

The best thing I did for my music enjoyment was meditating. Working with audio receiver instead of emitter.

It makes sense to me that audiophiles spent so much money, each new purchase gives a dopamine hit and a temporary illusion of better sound, there is probably also a bit of hallucinatory effect from intense focus.

tristor• 3 years ago

For anyone taking this as inspiration, I would recommend spending good money on a comfortable ergonomic chair and a decent headphone setup instead. 95% as good as an S-tier speaker and room setup, for about 0.005% of the price, and you can go from nothing to audio bliss in 6 months or less instead of 60 years.

urbandw311er• 3 years ago

I am sad for this guy that he has this horrible neurological disease. But it's also hard to ignore the irony that this will now prevent him from enjoying the thing he spent his life building at the expense (it would seem) of giving love and attention to his family.

AtlasBarfed• 3 years ago

Isn't the best stereo system in the world a pair of decent headphones?

He spent his life building a $1M stereo

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