“I genuinely can't hear what audiophiles hear”

Often they can’t, either, as blind listening tests show.

I used to think the same until I got my first set of 300$ headphones (QC 35). There is very real difference between those and any 30$ earbuds. You hear the music in a very different way.

The difference between $30 and $300 headphones is significant, but the difference between $300 and $3000 headphones is likely pretty small.

Yes and No. There are so many preferred sounds out there that a $300 and a $3000 headphone are likely to be quite different, and you would expect the $3000 headphone to be technically better, but it comes down to preference. I have a $1000 pair of headphones, and they do just about everything really well, but I also have cheaper headphones that are more accurate (to different target curves, but that is getting into psychoacoustics), or more enjoyable for certain genres.

Price doesn't necessarily correspond to audio quality very well. For example, Ultrasone sells some objectively terrible headphones for $3000.

Probably, I haven't tried those myself tho.

An audiophile would spend more than $25k on a pre-amp, amp, and two speakers. A single speaker cable might cost more than $1000. $300 headphones are vastly better than $30 pair. That is a difference an untrained ear can hear. However they don’t even scratch the surface of high-headphones much less something an audiophile would purchase. A pro level reference headphone might be in the range of 2 or 3k. Pros can hear the difference and properly identify characteristics. A 10k or 15k headphone? Many would conclude that the unbelievable pricing of some ultra expensive audio is snake oil because claims are subjective/unsubstantiated and the science behind them are flimsy or nonexistent.

You forgot the ones who get their direct electricity feed to get pure sine wave.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJJy6VJvSCk

My hearing is somewhat damaged from years of driving with the windows down. I can't hear any difference, so why bother paying for it.

So because there is a real difference between two pieces of equipment, you no longer think that often audiophiles deceive themselves about differences among other pieces of equipment? I don’t understand the reasoning.

I can't name what I do hear. And there are A-B comparisons that I can't call the winner of but my wife can. I can't imagine reproducibly labeling various audio qualities with terms reminiscent of the "citrus notes" that wine people use. I can tell if I need external speakers instead of the monitor's internal speakers and I pretty much always do.

So is it mostly a scam like wine then? I just tune it to what sounds good and I'm off. I just managed to do it for 40$ lol

There's probably some price point below which there is a perceptible difference in quality, but, yes, a lot of it is a scam. At a minimum, you there's no guarantee of bang for buck above a certain fairly low price ceiling.

Not technically scams, obvious ones aside (ie, hundred bucks for a wooden knob or "directional" cables); audiophile gear is indeed top quality, but the excellence they aim to would never be recognizable by any human ear on the planet because the incredibly small improvements, if any, would be measurable only by lab instruments.

One can spend ten times less and still not hear any difference, but as any psychologist could confirm, once someone spends a fortune in something he believes it will sound better, he will surely hear that difference. Too bad nobody else will, unless they also fall in that trap.

What I like from higher end equipment is volume controls that don't have scratchy spots.

It's only a scam if you don't enjoy it.

That's actually a very fair take. Placebo isn't fake.

I will nod to your choice of using a reciever and "conventional" speakers. In addition, you can get amazing value on that stuff used.

Nobody wants, say, pre-HDMI AV recievers, so you can buy top-of-the-line units that sold for $1000 in 1995 for $30 today, and it's perfectly capable for 2-channel PC audio. Go back a few more years and you get into the domain of vintage 70s silver gear-- not so much cheap anymore, but a lot of of it has truly impressive build quality and servicability.

Same with the big old speakers which predate the "tiny satelites + subwoofer" designs. I think you could set up an empty Goodwill in a sealed enclosure, never let a person into it, and several sets of Fisher and Technics speakers with 12" or 15" woofers and $19.95 price tags would spontaneously generate.

I splurged a bit and got the Pioneer "Andrew Jones" floorstanding speakers (about USD250 per pair) like 5 or 6 years ago, and power them with a 1980 JVC A-X4 amplifier (about USD100 used, but I put about 75 more in rebuilding it) Since it's in a 10x15 room, you don't need a remote to change sources.

I never considered that, but I can totally see major discounts in pre-HD era equipment. Has there not been a lot of gains (like going from 420P to 4k) in the audio-side of things in that past 10 or 20 years? If not, can I use that same reasoning and buy some top shelf old speakers? I've always wanted to do it but I didn't want to be ripped off.

Uncompressed digital audio hit the limits of human perception around the turn of the century. The big things affecting people’s perceived quality were bad compression, noise due to things like poor shielding on low-end computers, or using something like Bluetooth where bandwidth constraints forced heavy compression. If you get a decent DAC (which isn’t a ton of money - USB devices are quite mature) a 20-30 year old system is going to sound great. Newer ones might be smaller or use less power but sound reproduction has been mature for many decades.

not too sure what you mean by uncompressed because digital audio is always lossy by its very nature

All recordings have loss, nothing unique about digital in that regard. The point I was making was simply that once CD quality (16-bit, 44hz) became mainstream and only modestly more expensive hardware could get into 24-bit / 96khz range you were past the point where almost anyone – even trained “golden ears” listeners — could notice a difference from further improvements in that regard. Given real-world limits, the threshold was lower for most people.

The reason I mentioned compression is because you’d find people who’d say digital recordings didn’t sound good but misattributed why: the problem wasn’t digital, it was either low-quality codec implementations, constricted bit-rates[1], or technical flaws like the MP3 format’s inability to precisely handle sharp attack sounds like cymbals. If you did an A/B test with those, yes, people would notice a difference but the same was true of uncompressed audio or compression using newer codecs.

1. e.g. pre-VoLTE cell phone audio sounded terrible on most carriers unless you edited your phone’s settings to increase the bitrate, because the carriers were trying to fit more customers onto each cell tower. A little more bandwidth and it sounded much closer to landline calls.

It's true due to sampling, but anyway nowadays all music source is digital so can't be a problem.

Sampling only limits the highest possible frequency, it doesn't quantize over time like a lot of people expect it to. Unless frequencies above 22khz are somehow an integral part of your listening experience you can use 44khz and suffer no ill effects.

Anyone talking about sampling and showing you a graph with stair steps is misleading. No DAC would be able to produce such a perfect stair step in the first place, let alone be tuned to do so on purpose.

There was no major change in the speaker itself for a long while - a top of the line speaker from the 80 is probably still good... if the material aged well. The elasticity of the membrane probably suffered more than anything else for example. That’s why modern speaker still cost a lot.

My take on this: Some advances, but nothing that noticeable for large or medium-sized home speakers, compared to other advances.

Related story: until not long ago I used some inherited 70s Kef HiFi speakers with a cheap modernish amp, and they sounded lovely, even against more modern equivalents (which I also had).

A mid-70s TV, though...

I’ve wondered about this for a while after hearing an impressive setup visiting someone’s house using mostly equipment from the 90s.

Are there any particular brands or models to look for?

Honestly, the short answer is to google model numbers and look at discussions on sites like Audiokarma.

The TLDR is that most Japanese "name brands you've heard of" from the 1970s are pretty good. After the mid 1980s, the build quality starts to nosedive. Top-of-range models are often still impressive, but more of the BOM cost ends up on things like decoding defunct Surround Sound formats and rear-channel amplification. This often corresponds with the change from silver-alumiuum faceplates to black plastic, and the expression "Black Plastic C*p".

Speakers are a lot more subjective and also more subject to material degredation-- the foam ring that attaches the speaker cones to the casing can go brittle or crack or fall apart. This can be fixed with rebuild kits for many models, but this is a situation where new kit has some benefits with improved materials science.