Equipment and room acoustics play a great deal in how much information you perceive from an audio wave. It's shocking when you step into a treated room from high-end speakers. I've done a lot of damage to my ears over the years as a sound engineer, tour manager, musician. I have mild tinnitus. I can still walk into a treated room and listen to audio from a high-end sound system and have a bunch of "OH SHIT" moments where I perceive so much more information than I do through headphones, car stereos, high-end home systems.
The last 1-2 decades of computer audio have been a race toward the bottom of punchy bass and air'y high end. It's the equivalent of motion smoothing on TVs. Except nobody talks about it, you can't turn it off, and 'good sound' is just stuff that has a tight thump. This is true of every range of products from Airpod Max's, to high-end Bang & Olufsen to Sonos systems.
Anyway, my point with that is...Sure this stuff may not get preference in a blind test. That's missing the point tho. The audiophile's pursuit is to limit points in the signal path that create distortion and cause loss of fidelity.
Do these cables do much? Probably not compared to another pair of cables with gold plated connectors and high-quality copper. That said, the real test in high-end gear is not a blind test of one song, it's doing something like listening to the snare drum ring in 10 different songs, something with a lot of resonance and overtones, and see if you can actually perceive more information across a set of songs.
If all these cables offer is high-quality materials, construction, and quality control and the cost to produce them is 60-80% of that. Then great, I am glad they exist and I hope they make a buck making them.
Absolutely. A quality audio level spectrum analyzer in a few grams with this incredible output system. Nature is amazing at every turn.
> Equipment and room acoustics play a great deal in how much information you perceive from an audio wave. It's shocking when you step into a treated room from high-end speakers. I've done a lot of damage to my ears over the years as a sound engineer, tour manager, musician. I have mild tinnitus. I can still walk into a treated room and listen to audio from a high-end sound system and have a bunch of "OH SHIT" moments where I perceive so much more information than I do through headphones, car stereos, high-end home systems.
Good for you. But just being able to listen closely - the kind of thing that makes the difference between a good sound engineer and a not-so-good one - is hard work and requires your undivided attention. Most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a master, a digitized version of the same master and an MP3. Which is fine.
> The last 1-2 decades of computer audio have been a race toward the bottom of punchy bass and air'y high end. It's the equivalent of motion smoothing on TVs. Except nobody talks about it, you can't turn it off, and 'good sound' is just stuff that has a tight thump. This is true of every range of products from Airpod Max's, to high-end Bang & Olufsen to Sonos systems.
Indeed. But: compression alone, streaming artifacts, synthesis of the sound back from whatever junk the compression algorithm introduced, all of these are such enormous sources of distortion that all a high end system will do is accentuate the junk. Less clarity may well be a blessing in that case.
> Anyway, my point with that is...Sure this stuff may not get preference in a blind test. That's missing the point tho. The audiophile's pursuit is to limit points in the signal path that create distortion and cause loss of fidelity.
Yes. And these cables are bullshit.
Funny enough this bugged me at the start, but now I no longer care or notice it and actually dislike when TVs have it turned off. We all got used to a certain video standard and now it's a different standard and it's Just Fine.
Sure if you are comparing a single speaker to another single more expensive speaker you might not feel the difference. But if you are comparing a poorly put together setup to a well done one, you will absolutely hear the difference. And I am not audiophile at all saying this.
You can put a quality setup together for $2K and you can put an extremely poor one together for 10 times that.
Yeah, your ears change over time - you will lose sensitivity. That, however, will not make crap headphones or speakers suddenly sound good. It just means you want headphones or speakers that match up well with your current hearing.
Note that I did say good headphones.
And yes, with quality headphones, the equalizer can do some of the work. But it's generally better to have headphones that match your hearing, so you can focus on the fine tuning with the equalizer instead of trying to brute force against a major difference.
I took a long time to decide which digital piano I would buy because I could not find one that felt close enough to the real thing to make me happy to practice on it but eventually found the Yamaha P-515 and it is as close as it gets feel wise and sound wise (but not on the built in speakers, but a set of external monitors). Especially in the low end that gets nasty quickly if you hit a couple of notes with sustain.
But that's not a regular listening to music situation.
Agreed on trying to 'match your hearing' the problem there is that matching your hearing and physical comfort are not always to be found in the same brand, and when you're wearing headphones for 8 to 12 hours per day physical comfort becomes a major factor.
We are in a thread about audiophiles. Which I personally identify as (though in the sense of "I care about sound over style", not "I'll spend $5000 power conditioner, I mean, power regenerator").
> the problem there is that matching your hearing and physical comfort are not always to be found in the same brand
There's thousands of brands, each with dozens of offerings. It's easier than you might think to find a set of comfortable headphones that sounds good out of the box. The first trick is to avoid the style brands, since they will favor exceptionally heavy bass since it "sounds good". Beats, Skullcandy, Bose (which is a shame, they used to sound a lot better until recently), etc. Bass is rarely where you lose hearing first.
Personally, I recommend starting here, and look for a "Neutral" or "Bright Neutral" signature.
I hope you are saying that partially in jest.
Audiophiles tend to care so much about the gear (and especially about what it cost them) they tend to forget about the music. I've seen a couple in my life to date and it was always quite amusing to see them utterly flounder when it came to defining what they like in music if it doesn't help them to show off their gear.
By the time the music has been recorded and reproduced it is so far away from the original that I suspect that the true audiophiles are the people who go to the concerts rather than to sit at home. Nothing like a front row seat to a chamber orchestra or a nice symphony orchestra. And a lot cheaper than high end audio gear, but maybe not quite as practical. Still, for quality and lack of distortion it can't be beat.
Not at all. "An audiophile is a person who is enthusiastic about high-fidelity sound reproduction." That describes me fairly well, IMO. Those who spend thousands on silly things are a sub-group of the larger group.
It may seem self-defeating to assign myself a label so sullied by marketing sillyness, but I'm beyond being bothered by that. I love audio.
> By the time the music has been recorded and reproduced it is so far away from the original
I'd like to offer a counter point to this. Just like Charles M. Russell's photographs, the raw recording does not reflect the final vision of the artist. Even the sounds heard at a live rock concert have been manipulated by effects pedals, digital synthesizers, overdriven analog amplifiers, and so forth.
So in a way, the final mix as heard through studio headphones or monitors and approved by the artists is the most authentic version of a song available. As such, what I need to do to hear their version is merely reproduce the equipment they used (which doesn't require a ton of money).
Ok then.
Let's just say that I find something very funny about people listening to 128 K MP3s or streaming services on high end audio. I wonder if they're trying to nail down that extra bit of distortion the compressor introduced or to re-create the missing frequency bands from the carefully compressed MP3s.
> And I'd bet that over 95% of the population can do the same.
I'm pretty sure 95% of the population would be able to guess correctly, in a blind test, who is Joshua Bell and who is me playing some stuff on the violin, and I'm actually quite alright at it. Still doesn't mean they'd stop on the subway for either one of us...
I'd still call bs on GP's father being able to tell between a 700 and 4000 set of speakers on a REAL double blind test, but between a 100 and the others? I don't see why not. There's lots of crappy cheap hi-fis on that price range.
Of course some of those people were probably in a hurry to not be late for the evening's performance ;)
I'm all for debunking audiophile snake-oil but you're going too far in the other direction, like saying that above 30 you can't hear differences "no matter how bad", which is as cuckoo and anti-scientific as audiophile snake-oil. Sorry.
As for the differences over 30, it's annoying because I very much wished it wasn't true but high attenuation is so well documented I wonder why anybody would even try to argue with it, to all intents and purposes your ability to distinguish the finer points of that violin concerto in the 15KHz+ range (where a violin still puts out plenty of harmonics): you won't. Especially not if it has been recorded and then played back, doubly so if it was compressed along the way. Of course you're going to hear major differences, but the kind of subtlety that requires high end audio gear will be lost on you.
If it makes you feel better to spend $20K on a turntable or a set of speakers, by all means. But realize that it most likely won't move the needle (pun intended).
Again: and...? The claim put forth by you and challenged by default-kramer wasn't about wanting to own audiophile gear or wanting to hear high quality music, but rather being able to differentiate between low-quality and higher quality equipment. You claim that one can't hear differences "no matter how bad" the equipment is. Both of us said that's bs. Read again what you wrote yourself: "no matter how bad". That's obviously hyperbolic bs.
> to all intents and purposes your ability to distinguish the finer points of that violin concerto in the 15KHz+ range (where a violin still puts out plenty of harmonics)
And that's exactly the same bullshit that audiophiles say when they make claims about things like "only vinyl preserves the super important finer harmonics over 20k that CD cuts". Harmonics over 15k don't really make much of a difference, especially on something like a violin. I bet one could get away with putting a smooth low-pass filter in quartet recording around 15k and releasing it. There is A LOT of music under 15k hertz. And also a lot to go wrong under 15k, that people could use to identify bottom-shelf vs non-bottom-shelf in a blind test.
> If it makes you feel better to spend $20K on a turntable or a set of speakers, by all means. But realize that it most likely won't move the needle (pun intended).
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, most of my music listening is made in a $20 set of Apple Earbuds rather than on a $20k turntable. I never even ever owned anything in the audiophile realm! But thanks for confirming my suspicions that you'd make such an assumption followed by an attack :)
Also, you're the one writing audiophile-style marketing copy like "the kind of subtlety that requires high end audio gear will be lost on you", not me. How the turntables... :)
Asserting that a scientifically controlled blind test would reveal something is not the same as actually performing that test. Have you?
My favorite and bigger system has a sound signature so distinct, I can easily differentiate it from other systems with ease. Its sound also much more detailed than other systems, and have the capability to paralyze me in front of it while listening albums.
None of the systems I have are slouches in terms of sound reproduction capability, but human ears do not turn into muffled receivers the day you turn 30.
The established literature begs to differ.
> Our hearing does evolve in the ultra high frequency range, at 12kHz and above, but I'd argue that's not a very useful part of our range anyway, unlike the octaves our human voice ranges in.
If only it were all that simple. For starters, 12KHz isn't 'ultra high', and past 50 8 KHz should still be doable but sensitivity is what matters it this is a gradual process, not a hard cut-off from one day to the next. As you age the various components of your hearing mechanism stiffen, dry out and calcify making it harder to hear tones that you could hear easily before. So the ability to perceive an 'x' frequency may never go away but your ability to detect frequency 'x' at loudness level 'y' definitely does change.
Human voices have overtones just as instruments do, and those help in determining timbre and may help to recognize words and particular speakers (as in: people speaking, not the electromagnetic devices).
> I'd say hearing and especially listening gets better with age
The first is definitely not supported by data, in fact the data all points the other way: reduced sensitivity over time, especially in the highs.
As for listening: listening is an art and like any art you can get better at it over time but without good input it gets harder even if you get better.
> so investing in better acoustics is always a great experience.
Up to a point. And that point lies well below where audiophilia begins.
Good equipment will often sound better, to what amount is the question. And yes some things are just fake and don’t deliver better sound, so listening yourself is very important.
Surely that has much more to do with artistic skill than frequency response of their ears. Having excellent hearing won't make you intrinsically skilled at audio mixing.
> Most people won’t hear good audio gear but that’s not related to age ;)
The relationship between age and hearing loss is incontrovertible. Hearing loss is cumulative, it increases with age. Some people lose their hearing faster or younger than others for a wide array of reasons, but nobody is completely immune to it.
Anyway, no need to believe me, just go and do a test and see how well you can still hear and you'll come away even more impressed with your brain than with your ears. Your ears degrade and your brain works very hard to make up for that degradation.
Composing and directing music are two very different activities. I'd expect the first one to work way better than the latter given strong deafness. I don't know about a successful deaf conductor in the modern times.
Yet I think we are agreeing in the core - hearing music is more than just ears, it is also perception, which is why some people get wrong ideas about and if something sounds better (see the original topic here). Yet that does not mean there is not better gear than other and that no one can hear the difference between anything. Actually better hifi gear will sound better, even to older people.
Personally I don't like to assume that I will be the only person to listen to my hifi!