Why We Need Audiophiles

http://i.gizmodo.com/5213042/why-we-need-audiophiles

by robg • 17 years ago

19 24 17 years ago

i.gizmodo.com

crescendo• 17 years ago

I'd love to see this guy try to answer James Randi's speaker cable challenge.

ShabbyDoo• 17 years ago

Yeah. Doesn't this guy want a million dollars? That's what annoyed me about the gizmodo article -- the audiophile's claims about better AC cables making a difference, etc. are all easily tested.

I did notice one thing of interest in the photos: The guy had some sound dampening foam on a wall behind some components. Let's say I wanted to spend $10K on good sound in a room. Would I be better off buying $10K in components, or $5K in components and $5K in the services of an acoustician to fix up my room to have better acoustic qualities? Or, for that matter, are there any medical interventions that would improve my hearing? [Just kidding...sorta]

anigbrowl3• 17 years ago

Draw a floorplan/make photos. Go to Guitar Center and say you have a home recording studio and you need some acoustic foam and some bass traps (for the corners). Depends on your room, but $500 will buy you a lot of foam.

Basically you want to break up the standing waves between parallel reflective surfaces. Hardwood floors are the worst culprit, along with windows. A sofa helps a lot. So do big heavy wall hangings if you're into that.

Lastly, don't put your speakers in the corners or right back against the wall. It makes them sound boomy and results in muddy bass. The same is true if they're too near the floor. Also, try soundonsound.com for tips on acoustic improvement. Learn your room first: if you can make cheap speakers sound better then so will the pricey ones.

Spend most of the money on speakers. If you absolutely must have control over the tone color via an equalizer, Manley is a good choice.

anigbrowl3• 17 years ago

I hate the phrase 'jumping the shark', but Gizmodo is doing it. That week-long listening special was the most naked display of commercial self-abasement I've seen in a while.

tesseract• 17 years ago

> going from 98.6 to 99.1 by swapping out a $2,600 AC power cable for a $4,000 one becomes a justifiable end.

No. Spending substantially more on an AC power cable than your electrician did on the 30¢/ft Romex that connects your breaker panel to your wall outlet is not justifiable. Besides, if you want to completely eliminate any chances of ground loops, AC hum, and so forth, all you have to do is power your system from a battery.

dmix• 17 years ago

"-it would only take $3,000 to $5,000 to build a system that will be deeply satisfying to most music fans"

I am a burgeoning audiophile, I'd love to have a guide on how to start building a system in that price range... and slowly get to that point. My 2.0 Bose system needs an improvement.

Side note: the first production site I built was a competitor to this magazine, thats what got me interested. :)

m0digital• 17 years ago

Bose and Audiophile do not belong in the same sentence :)

Check http://audiogon.com/ for equipment.

My friends basement looks just like his basement. However I would trade his solid state amps for otl.

anigbrowl3• 17 years ago

If you have some money to spend and you really care about the sound^, you'll get the most bang for your buck by going to a professional music store and buying the kind of gear used in studios. Strangely (or not), you'll be hard put to find singe channel/speaker cables costing more than $50 in any recording studio unless it's in a huge room needing a long run.

I know nothing about your home of course, but when it comes to speakers you basically want them to be heavy and have big woofers. Many studio monitor speakers are powered, with an amp built into the speaker cabinet. In practice, this usually gives better results than a separate amplifier. Mackie Truth monitors will fill an average room and are very accurate for about $1000. At the higher end, Genelec and ADAM are considered the truly desirable names to have. I particularly love the sound (and look) of KRK speakers. If using a subwoofer, 18 inches is fine. More is for reinforcement, not fidelity.

Buy good stands which you can fill with sand to damp vibrations. Speakers should be around the same height as your head in the room's sweet spot, and basically form a triangle with your head as the third point. The bigger the sweet spot, the better the speaker. You must have carpet; a bare wood floor defeats the purpose.

Nor do I know what gear you own, but prefer things which offer 'balanced outputs' - they reject interference and electrical noise far better. If you like records, get a technics SL1200 turntable and an Ortofon needle, for about $1500 altogether. If it's good enough for the world's best DJs, it's good enough for you. CD players from Marantz or Denon are excellent. Ask in the store about your mixing/source selection options, or we'll be here all day :-)

^ First, ask yourself honestly if looks matter. I love the look of studio gear, but that's because of my background as a sound engineer. Not everyone shares my utilitarian sensibility.

davidmathers2• 17 years ago

you'll get the most bang for your buck by going to a professional music store and buying the kind of gear used in studios

I agree. I have a pair of Mackie HR624s sitting on my desk: http://www.mackie.com/products/hrmk2series/

phugoid• 17 years ago

Totally agree. In fact, it would be interesting for someone to measure the difference in a room's acoustics from having your body in it. Then measure the difference due to swapping cables.

mynameishere• 17 years ago

Come on. You aren't going to get better than a high-end pair of studio headphones. I mean, unless you think you can improve upon what the mix engineer heard.

stan_rogers2• 17 years ago

Headphones are really bad at resolving space for anything that should appear near the centre of the "soundstage". Even the good folks at HeadRoom will admit that. (I'd like to mention here that those guys are the most honest folks I've run across in the audio world -- they'll tell you when the cheaper model is the better buy, and they'll point you to outside sources for things they really like but can't sell, like custom-fitted in-the-ear monitors.) Cross-feeding helps, but the "inside the head" effect for centred sound is unavoidable unless the original recording is binaural. I love 'phones, but if you want the experience of musicians in front of you, cans can't.

JereCoh2• 17 years ago

Arguments without much substance. I'm still not convinced and I'm young with great hearing. I wish I could vote down this story.

colomon• 17 years ago

Particularly dissing all of digital recording based on comparing a Bowie LP (engineered to be an LP) with a compressed version of the same music, presumably ripped from a CD pressing. I don't know anything about that particular album, but the world is full of old albums that were poorly transferred to CD in the rush to get CDs out in the early days. Many of which were then re-released on CD using crappy over-compressed mastering 15 years later so they would "sound better".

You want to do a fair analog versus digital comparison? Play that record album on that uber-fancy stereo and record it using a high-end digital recorder patched into the system. (You can get excellent ones for less than the price of his freaking power cord.) Then compare playing back that digital recording with playing the album.

justokay• 17 years ago

(Sorry for the incoherent rant that starts now) I've built high-end loudspeakers for about 9 years, and I'm of two minds when reading this article. While it's nice for a mainstreamish outlet to describe the experience of listening to a high-end audio system, there exists so much dis/misinformation in this article that it makes my skin crawl. So I will attempt to explain what I think high-end audio is (or should be) all about without all the journalistic BS (both from the gizmodo and the stereophile guy).

The purpose of a high-end audio system is to create music that is indistinguishable from live sound. This is a really hard thing to do and my guess is at best, we are only 20% of the way there. But, given that most consumer-level stuff is probably at 0.42%, listening to a good high-end audio system is generally nothing short of incredible. The thing that really gets people when they first listen to the "good stuff" is that on a good high-end audio system, there will be sounds that don't seem to be coming from the speakers themselves, but from somewhere else in the room. The good stuff really is better, but you really can spend a ton of money and get shitty products (to be honest, I've listened to the $65k MAXX3's featured in the article and its more expensive sibling, the $125k X1s, and I thought they were decent speakers, but certainly not worth more than $8k).

The problem with high-end audio, especially from a business perspective is two-fold. 1) How do you make better speakers than your competitors if the best you can do is 20% and you don't even know how to get to that 80%? and 2) How are you supposed to differentiate yourself from your competitors when the end goal is that every single speaker is supposed to sound exactly the same?

Enter the magazines Stereophile and The Absolute Sound. These journalists with "golden ears" will purportedly tell us mere mortals what differences there are between speakers. The ones who do the best (like the Wilson Audio's featured in the article) will also get the most money.

So, every manufacturer will push to get the best reviews from these magazines, and will even go to a sort of soft corruption to garner a strong review. During the review process, an equipment manufacturer will send his/her component to the reviewer for a few months so the reviewer can demo it in his/her own demo room. In an ideal world the reviewer will review the product accurately and send it back. What actually happens is that the "demo" unit will become available to the reviewer indefinitely without a need to return the product. The reviewer, however, already has a component in his own listening room, so why does he want another one? Well, because the review can sell it and make some extra money on used equipment (30% of a 10k CD player is still a lot of money). If the review pans the product, though, then the resale price will be far less than if the reviewer praises the product. So voila, instant good review. (If you read stereophile for a few months, you will see every other issue that the reviewer has found the best component he has ever listened to).

This sort of practice seems to have been going on for at least a couple decades. Instead of trying to solve the insanely difficult problem of making speakers sound better, high end audio manufacturers spend their money on branding and shenanigans with reviewers. Their equipment (more for speakers than say CD players) will always be better than consumer grade stuff because no one has worked on the problem of making a better speaker and consumer grade speakers are made to be manufactured as cheaply as possible. The high end audio industry is a real mess because everyone forgot why there are here in the first place.

Btw, it would be interesting if the less financially strapped members started designing speakers (you're all smart enough to do as good a job as Wilson Audio). The drivers for these speakers are available to people like us, because driver manufacturers do not do enough volume to stop selling to the DIY community. For instance, the drivers for the MAXXs break down roughly as follows: ~$150/ea for the Focal tweeters, ~$175/ea for Scanspeak midranges, ~$350/ea for the smaller Focal woofer, and ~$500 for the bigger one. While that ~$3000 for the drivers alone, that still a lot less than $65k (and besides, you could actually do better with a lot less money).

jerf• 17 years ago

"The purpose of a high-end audio system is to create music that is indistinguishable from live sound."

That's your idea of the purpose, and it's my idea of the purpose. But is it just me, or is there a lot of people at the "higher end" actually putting together an analog system that introduces distortion that they like, or sounds good to them, rather than reliably relaying the signal?

What some people call "flat" and "lifeless", I call "free of analog distortion". I've been in real concerts with no electronic gizmos to be found (orchestras and such), and if I close my eyes, it sounds more like a (good) CD than a vinyl record.

(At least, on old CDs from the mid-1990s. Clipping's another story entirely, of course. Digital could and should be better, and perhaps the argument would be over, had digital not simply given up entirely on acoustic accuracy...)

Despite the loaded and leading nature of my question, I'm serious about the question above. Does that sound right to anyone else?

aston• 17 years ago

Yeah, the "warmth" of analog recordings is just another word for "pleasing aural distortion," not unlike applying some blur and raising the brightness on photos for glamour shots.

JereCoh2• 17 years ago

This is the best argument I've ever read regarding the BS of analog sound recording.

stan_rogers2• 17 years ago

Remember that the "flat and lifeless" digital experience that Fremer was talking about was a long time ago.. Yeah, he's a bit of a nut, and I'm sure that some of what he hears is as much psychological as physical (especially as it regards such things as power cords _sans_ isolating filters and so forth), but the man has a point where digital is concerned. Or rather, as far as digital _was_ concerned.

Remember the old days? When the digital recording involved brick-wall filtering of the analog source at 20KHz before digital sampling? I sure do. Sure, the clicks and pops were gone, but the filter introduced such distortion as to make the music nearly unlistenable for anyone who could hear anything over about 16KHz. High harmonics were so far out of phase with the fundamental that anything that has a percussive component (piano, xylophone, cymbals, etc.) would hurt my teeth. We've gotten past that problem with higher sampling rates during the recording phase, and digital processing can reduce the bitrate without inducing those phase errors.

Redbook CD still has one major problem, though. Nyquist says that a 2F+k (where k is some small value) sampling rate is sufficient to encode an analog waveform unambiguously. For audio, that means that the 22.1KHz rate that CDs use for each channel ought to be enough. And it would be, but for the fact that there is a hidden encoding in stereo audio, and that encoding is the temporal difference between the signal's arrival at each of our two ears (or our two microphones, as the case may be). While no component of the audio signal may exceed 20KHz, proper spatial encoding may require a temporal resolution that requires the sampling rate capable of resolving a difference in arrival times of less than 50us. And yes, I understand that that's getting really finicky, and that the phase errors in most output transducers (speakers) will be greater than that, but the best equipment can _just_ make the difference perceptible. And for smaller ensembles (chamber music, acoustic jazz, folk, and that sort of thing), that spatial accuracy can take the listening experience to a level most people are completely incapable of imagining.

SACD and DVD-A solve the fundamental problems of Redbook, but they came to the game just a little too late. People had already decided to settle for cassettes again. Not literally, mind you -- today's cassette is the MP3 file. Even at the highest bitrates (256 or 320Kbps), MP3s are audibly inferior even to Redbook, but damn they're handy, eh? They are Good Enough(TM) for most people, and you can carry a half a billion of the things on something smaller than the crappy pocket transistor radios we had when I was a kid.

The upshot is that now that we can readily and cheaply produce recordings that are light years beyond anything anybody dreamed of in the '60s, the mass market that would have supported it has become irrevokably attached to yet another great leap backwards. That's really a pity.

rms2• 17 years ago

When you say live music, I assume you mean true, unamplified live music, such as a symphony playing in an acoustically perfect concert hall? That's true that we're not quite there (there will be no <20 hertz standing waves in my living room), but for those of us that listen to music designed to be amplified, such as rock music, a high end audio system regularly beats poorly mixed rock concerts.

Where does your 20% measure come from? I would think speakers with appropriately high end source (reel to reel tape?) versus a symphony, both in a concert hall, would be indistinguishable in a double blind test more than 20% of the time to the above-average audiophile. Has this ever been done?

derefr• 17 years ago

And what of electronic music, that has never touched an analogue input other than through purified samples? It's probably mixed to sound best on the monitors the sound editor was wearing, so what speakers best replicate that experience (besides the monitors themselves?)

davidmathers2• 17 years ago

The purpose of a high-end audio system is to create music that is indistinguishable from live sound.

The irony of ultra high end audio is that for the amount of money these people spend they could pay to have actual live musicians play at their house every week. And get all the best symphony/opera/concert/recital seats.

rms2• 17 years ago

Why don't the driver manufacturers make their own speakers? Seems like a vertically integrated high-end audio company focused on competing with super-end high-end speakers at 1/4 the price could be a paradigm shift in the industry. The "super high end home audio system in three or four boxes".

gcv• 17 years ago

I wish I had a reference handy, but I've skimmed Stereophile magazine in the past --- I remember reading that the people this article writes about have adamantly refused to perform double-blind tests on their swapping of $1000 speaker cables for $4000 cables.

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