Probably going to make some people mad... but I went down the Audiophile rabbit hole last year before ultimately coming to the conclusion that it just isn't worth it. I understand the appeal, especially someone who values a nice piece of hardware. There is so much to choose from... DACs, DAPs, amps, fancy looking balanced cables in quality braiding, headphones with solid wood accents, IEMs that look straight outa sci-fi.
A few things I learned that may save someone time:
(1) Sound quality is in the medium, not the build. Speakers almost always sound better than a pair of cans (headphones), headphones almost always sound better than IEMs, IEMs almost always sound better than over the ears.
(2) The difference in sound quality between something that is a few hundred dollars, and something that is a few thousand is so small that "diminishing returns" as a phrase doesn't do it justice.
(3) The stack of DACs, EQs, preamps, and neatly managed RCA/XLR cables looks cool on your desk - but they take up a lot of space and cost a lot of money for something that sounds maybe 10% better than a pair of AirPods Max (provided you remember to turn on lossless in apple music, which I forgot to!)
The thing I've learned is that headphones and IEMs can sound completely different to different people, just because of differences in the shape of your ears and ear canal.
I bought some custom IEMs and had the opportunity to test ~10 of the super high-end options from several different brands. I found that there was no correlation whatsoever between price or even brand and how good they sounded to me. The technician I was working with said he observed the same thing all the time in the professionals he worked with. He'd have musicians on the same instruments in the same roles in the same group come in and all walk put with completely different products.
IEMs are the most personal but even headphones have the problem.
Because of this, my recommendation is that you make purchasing decisions in one of two ways:
- Learn how to EQ to get a sound you like. Purchase based on objective measurements like frequency response curves to find products that require minimal EQ to match your preference.
- Only buy after listening, or buy, listen and return if that's an option for you.
I recommend avoiding purchases based on reviews that make subjective judgements about the sound.
If you want to learn more, I like the videos/articles/forums of Headphones.com and Crinacle.
I came to the same conclusion a while ago. You can get a lot of mileage by tweaking EQ. For me almost all headphones felt flat until I tried a bunch of studio monitors. They are not portable but I’ve been using a cheap AKG K72 pair at home and it has been great. Your experience may vary but do try a bunch of options, as suggested by parent.
As someone who still occasionally mixes for a living, designs and builds audio hardware: Audiophiles are full of shit and this has been scientifically shown probably since the 90s (various AES studies conducted on the perception of CD quality).
Of course there is a difference between cheap gear and decent gear. But the difference between decent gear and audiophile gear is non-perceptible in a blind ABX test. And here is the thing: especially in the elctronics side (so amps) decent gear has become increasingly cheaper.
Audiophiles also tend to have downright naive claims about sound, like the silver cable sounding more clear and "silvery" while something with gold would then sound warmer and richer. All while they measure the same down to inperceptable differences. And of course the device with the walnut case sounds warm because wood is warm and so on.
It would be funny if it wasn't auch a successful con.
> It would be funny if it wasn't auch a successful con.
sometimes i remember about this space and laugh. i guess i found thinking i would find some data for a speaker i was looking for back in the days but it turned out into audiophiles typing their absurd: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php
another funny demographics is mechanical keyboard enthusiasts by rating sound of switches and discussing over minimal numbers of gf (grams-force) in same type of switches (linear, clicky etc.). often times there are videos showing sounds of hundreds of USD keyboards with owners hunting and pecking hahaha
Yup, there's been a ton of experiments like this done over the years where people ran A/B tests between golden-ears audio gear and the cheapest garbage they could find, for example wire coathangers used to connect the speakers up. In blind tests, people couldn't tell the difference.
As others have pointed out, the biggest thing to focus on is the speakers or headphones, at least up to a point: $70,000 Woo-woo Labs Reference Monitor speakers aren't going to sound any better than the decent set of Wharfedales you found on eBay.
Unfortunately, (1) is not always true. I have in ears surpass some speakers, over the ears which surpass some IEMs, etc.
For (2), again it depends. Some companies build amazing things for cheap, some companies build crapshoot for tons of money. The trick is to find the sound you like for the cheapest price.
For (3), the simplest chain is the best(est) chain. I used to have a high-end 2x10 band eq which sat between pre and power stages. I removed it, and I'm happier. Unless I'm listening vinyl, I bypass loudness and tone circuits even.
There's a funny thing in audio. When you increase the resolution too much, the problems in old/remastered sources become apparent, and you can't enjoy that material anymore. A good Hi-Fi system is meant to create enjoyment, not motivation to spend more money on more equipment or sources.
Lastly, for casual listening, even the basic airpods provide plenty of resolution and detail.
> When you increase the resolution too much, the problems in old/remastered sources become apparent, and you can't enjoy that material anymore.
It doesn’t need to even be that old. I’ve got stuff from small musicians and they don’t have the equipment to make perfect recordings. You can’t tell with good headphones, but you put it through an amazing pair of speakers and it gets fuzzy.
> even the basic airpods provide plenty of resolution and detail
My information might be outdated, but aren’t those the kind that sort of sit loosely at the outside of your ear canal (like the original iPod headphones)? If so, those are the one kind of headphones that I find basically worthless. I’m not an audiophile by any stretch of the imagination, but in the iPod era I could never understand how people tolerated those when you can get vastly better sound for a few bucks. I figured the distinctive apple-brand headphones were kind of a status symbol.
I personally dislike wearing isolated earphones for longer periods of time since they short-circuit the ear canal and I hear every bone in my jaw area and neck after some point.
3rd generation Airpods, while don't isolate, sound pretty epic for what they are. When sitting at home, I can listen to some music and genuinely enjoy it, and I like their non-isolating nature because it helps me to hear traffic around while walking with them. The only problem is, talking on the phone with them might get a little noisy for the other party, but I believe phone hardware filters some of it.
When compared to their rivals, they really have higher resolution, and enjoyable sound balance. Also, iPhone scans your ears with FaceID camera to profile them, so they are also tuned for your ears from get go. This makes positional audio really shine, too.
The original iPod buds were pretty flat and tinny. I used to use a pair Sennheisers (I don't remember the model but they were pretty high end) to be able to enjoy what iPods had to offer, back in the day.
1) I wouldn't 100% agree with this. It's not that speakers sound "better" than headphones, it's that speakers don't require any tuning to match a person's specific physiology (e.g. shape of their ears, ear canal) but the other things do. When you use headphones, you still use your whole ear canal but the sound is distorted by how the headphones interact with your ears, particularly the pinna. When you use IEMs, you only use part of your ear canal and skip the pinna entirely, so the sound can't sound as natural as speakers do unless you compensate to reintroduce the effect of the pinna/canal. This is all possible to varying degrees. EQ helps a lot and there are ways to measure HRTF as well.
> it's that speakers don't require any tuning to match a person's specific physiology
But they do interact with the environment. Having walls which reflect the sound can mess with the sound. Changing speakers won't help. Changing headphones can help.
The equipment definitely makes a difference but you're right about diminishing returns. In fact, at a certain point it's zero returns and all gimmick unfortunately.
That said, you don't need to break the bank for good stuff and it does make a huge difference. There's also a lot of marketing out there for bad equipment. Apple air pods and beats headphones and more.
For 3) I would argue all that stuff is where you should spend the least of your money. The biggest improvement comes from the speakers or headphones themselves.
Then I think I disagree with the specifics of that statement, or am I reading this wrong? The porta pros have to sound better than the average IEM, or think of the KSC 75 for another quite nice option in that space. Especially for the price. And I'm not even sure that speakers sound better than headphones most of the time.
+1 though for the thought that the medium makes the biggest part of the sound quality.
Interesting, even with Yaxi pads I could not get the Porta Pros to my liking. Compared to the average IEM I thought the IEMs sounded much cleaner and more technically accurate. Stepping up to something like Letshuoer S12s absolutely blew them out of the water (more expensive, I know). Maybe I just falsely attributed that to an inherent advantage of sealing off the ear canals. Will give the Porta Pros another try.
Porta pros specifically seem to be a subjective thing, many describe them as a bit muddy, while some like that as an easy listing mode. The KSC 75 though really impressed me, for me they replaced the ath-m50x. Less base (partly because of no clamping pressure, I read, so changeable with a headband). I do have a cheap chinese hifi IEM I do like and would understand if someone preferred that one to the kSC 75, to further complicate things, but I stuck to them.
Also read positive things about the moondrop old fashioned, to mention an alternative to the porta pro in a very close form factor, not the strange ear clips that are the KSC 75.
I'd argue that the additional space should give the form factor an advantage, though sure, being closer to the ear might also be one. And no doubt, given the huge popularity of IEMs the technology must have seen a lot of progress, so I might be wrong.
Fair point. It's a huge field and I have no defensible option there. I was thinking of the wireless Anker IEM and the various older ones that accompanied my phones, even though as mentioned in the other comment I'm aware of higher class (and sometimes even cheap) IEMs that do exist. But still, I wouldn't generalize it like that, I really do like the KSC 75 a lot and think those kind of headphones are too often overlooked despite their quality, which collides with classifying them so low.
#2 - Can be. Or it might actually make a difference.
We had 2 "living room" setups for a while, upstairs and down. We eventually realized how dumb that was, and condensed to 1.
Doing that, we stopped using some really expensive speakers and started using some that were 1/5 the price because we couldn't tell the difference.
Then, one day, I brought those expensive speakers down and set them up. Wow. There was a definite difference after all. I'm not an audiophile and can't tell you what that difference was, just that both of us could immediately tell the expensive speakers were better, and we were not going back to the cheaper ones. Nothing else in the setup changed.
Also, I eventually upgraded the receiver to something that could better drive those speakers. An upgrade from $600 to about $900. And there was a definite difference there, too. The older box should have been enough, but it just wasn't.
Do I recommend that someone on a budget spend $4000 instead of $1500? Nope. It's not enough difference. But for stuff we already had, or for someone that really cares, it's definitely better.
You can't make a bad speaker good, but also: people spend lots on gear, but forget the room. The room can break a good speaker easily.
Also... 'good' is something you first need to agree on when talking with people. Some people like to have 'distorted' playback (compared to the original), because they "like" that better. That is the moment retailers can sell objectively worse but overpriced stuff.
Genelecs for instance are very detailed, neutral etc (there is a reason you see them everywhere in professional settings), but consumers don't necessarily have an appetite for 'objectivity'.
Your hot takes are all wrong. Especially your last parenthetical. I mean, I'm not doubting that you may have forgotten to turn on lossless audio! But what I think you're implying, that lossless audio is clearly distinguishable from 256kbps-ish streaming audio when played over bluetooth, has not been supported by many listening tests of AAC even at much at lower bitrates.
I don’t have Airpods, but I turned on my stereo the other day after listening to music through the speakers in my monitor and it was quite a difference.
I get the aspect of "shiny things are shiny and I like shiny things so I buy them" but the things that piss me off, like actually genuienly make me mad at the whole thing are actual scams like "audio tuned" ethernet switches or "designed for music" SSDs. These are actual products that sell for a lot of money, and they physically cannot make any difference to the audio played from/through them. It's worse than snake oil.
It's worse than that, some of them are actually dangerous! Amazon seems to have removed this review but here's a copy of the original text:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Reviewed in the United States on November 15, 2010
We live underground. We speak with our hands. We wear the earplugs all our lives.
PLEASE! You must listen! We cannot maintain the link for long… I will type as fast as I can.
DO NOT USE THE CABLES!
We were fools, fools to develop such a thing! Sound was never meant to be this clear, this pure, this… accurate. For a few short days, we marvelled. Then the… whispers… began.
Were they Aramaic? Hyperborean? Some even more ancient tongue, first spoken by elder races under the red light of dying suns far from here? We do not know, but somehow, slowly… we began to UNDERSTAND.
No, no, please! I don’t want to remember! YOU WILL NOT MAKE ME REMEMBER! I saw brave men claw their own eyes out… oh, god, the screaming… the mobs of feral children feasting on corpses, the shadows MOVING, the fires burning in the air! The CHANTING!
WHY CAN’T I FORGET THE WORDS???
We live underground. We speak with our hands. We wear the earplugs all our lives.
Do not use the cables!
8,955 people found this helpful
Around COVID lockdown #1 I did a lot more walking outside, pushing a pram and listening to music on headphones.
For years I'd been using cheap wired headphones from exhibition swag and things.
I put a pair through the washing machine. Top tip: this is really not good for them.
I looked online and found I could buy a brand new pair of my preferred Sony in-ear ones for $NotALot.
I bought the absolutely top of the line most expensive bass-boost in-ear buds.
They cost the equivalent of $20 (about £15) and the sound is amazing.
The point being here: because all the fashion-victims want Bluetooth, wired headphones have got really cheap and top quality premium grade ones cost less than a modest meal, or alternatively perhaps, less than I could easily drink in beer while listening to 1 CD or album.
Shun wireless. Go back to wired. Get an adaptor if your phone doesn't have a socket. You can get really good earphones for very little money now, they never need charging, never go flat, never need pairing, are compatible with every OS able to play sound, and they come with a handy tool to stop them falling out and you losing them, called "a cable".
Also: the microphone is great as well. I've recorded podcasts with them. The quality is way better than my £300 over-ear sound-cancelling premium Bluetooth headset, which I now only use while onboard aeroplanes.
The classic fable round these parts is Quad (and/or Cambridge Audio?) demo-ing their latest and greatest at a 1970s Heathrow Expo using mains cables as speaker wire.
It’s the least important part of any system and indeed my Quad amp and CA R50s are wired with twisted, braided, brown lamp cable as a nice aesthetic homage.
Why wouldn't mains cable make good speaker wire? Probably much larger diameter than needed for audio and therefore more expensive if fairly priced, but if you've got to wire speakers and that's what you've got, should be fine.
About the only things you could do wrong would be using wire that's too small to carry the load, is frayed/broken/severely corroded, or is coiled in a way that inductance becomes a real issue. Running parallel and near electrical or signal wires is problematic, and largely different run lengths can make a difference.
In the past, there was no special speaker wire. It was all mains wire, because all was 100% copper. Today, finding 100% copper cable having the cross-section stamped on it is pretty rare. Electronics being more efficient hence drawing less power allows manufacturers to run 3-4 copper clad aluminum strands as mains cable in some cases.
Today, I'd still use "mains wire" if I can find it in a 100% copper form with the correct cross section. The reason I used "speaker wire" in my set is because the recommended cable was thicker than the standard stuff, and I didn't believe that I'd be able to get 100% copper wire easily.
Where do you live? In the US, there a lot of widely available brands of UL-listed (or equivalent) wire with clearly marked specs and the cross section in ridiculous units of AWG. If it says it’s copper and it’s not an outrageous counterfeit, it’s copper. (And it will have a resistance that is in spec, because this is important for code-compliant electrical installations, and it won’t corrode when terminated properly.)
And the UL-listed stuff is fantastic, because UL cares about the insulation and jacket. There is plenty of “speaker” wire with crappy insulation that degrades after a few years, but I’ve never seen an actual CL2 or CM or CL3 (or their R or P variants) or THWN(2), TC(-ER) etc, cable, from the last 30 years, with any such issues.
16AWG CL2 cable is fantastic speaker wire, and it’s cheap and you can buy it at any store that sells electrical supplies. TC-ER is great if you need something bigger than 16AWG (the longer the run, the thicker the cable you need to keep resistance below 1 ohm or so), but it’s a bit harder to find.
The thing that can be genuinely hard to find is nice twisted-pair or shielded twisted-pair cable in any format other than category (Ethernet) cable, and that tends to max out at 22-23AWG and may have the wrong number of conductors for whatever you’re doing with it. For making up an RCA cable, this is completely unnecessary — use RG59 or RG6 cable if you need particularly good shielding. But for long runs of balanced audio cable, you want actual twisted pairs, 23 AWG is plenty, but you may need those pairs shielded from each other to minimize crosstalk. So you end up with commercial snake cables, and those are not cheap. Some people use digital stage boxes these days, because an effectively transparent ADC and all the electronics needed to make it work can be cheaper than the fancy cables.
Yet, it's way thinner than the manufacturer of my speakers recommend, which start at 13, and only go up. In my case I need 12 or 11. I don't remember honestly.
The good thing is, I managed to get a roll of the correct cable made by Acoustic Research. While the cable is not "fancy", it's copper, has the correct thickness and it's jacket still feels like day 1, and that thing is 10+ years old at this point.
For RCA cables I still use the factory default set came with my amplifier. Japan made, with very flexible jackets and gold plated connectors. That provides more than enough clarity for me.
> Please always use a good quality loudspeaker connection cable from an audio dealer. To prevent impairment of sound quality, we recommend cables with cross-sections of at least 2.5 mm² for lengths up to 3 m and at least 4 mm² for lengths above 3 m.
Interestingly, the table present in the printed manual is not present in the one on the internet. IIRC, recommendation for 100W up to 3m was 3mm² or 4mm² at minimum.
From what I looked at, 14AWG is ~2mm² and 16AWG is 1.3mm². Way too skinny for what the manufacturer says.
Unless you're running speaker cables parallel to some power cables, shielding is not a requirement from my experience. The cable I use is at [0]. I have a roll like this. Mine is thicker than 2.5mm² though.
> To prevent impairment of sound quality, we recommend cables with cross-sections of at least 2.5 mm² for lengths up to 3 m and at least 4 mm² for lengths above 3 m.
Those numbers are also ridiculous. They’re recommending 13AWG or higher for a 3m run. That’s about 20 feet round trip, which is about 0.04 ohms. The speaker should be 8 ohms nominal, but let’s call it 1 ohm at some very audible frequency to be conservative. So you might lose 2% of your power or maybe 0.1dB. Keep in mind that you cannot hear frequency-independent attention at all (the volume knob fixes it), so you’ll only hear the frequency-dependent part, which will be smaller, and your speaker plus room already has frequency dependence far in excess of 0.1dB. Note that the speaker power doesn’t even factor in to the calculation — as you supply more power, you’re increasing the current and voltage accordingly, and the effects cancel out.
At very high power you may care about heating. That recommended cable has an NEC ampacity of 15A or more, and 15A^2 * 8ohms = 1800W. Derate a bit because you’re at higher frequencies than 60Hz and you are just fine — in fact, the voltage will become a safety problem at silly power long before the resistive heating matters.
I will admit that there is a good reason to use at least 18AWG cable or so: speaker cable terminations are utter crap, and the crappiness seems to get worse as the fanciness goes up. A thicker wire is more likely to survive being terminated, within limits.
Buy some 16AWG two-conductor CL2 or CL2R or CL2P cable at your home improvement store and be done with it.
> Unless you're running speaker cables parallel to some power cables, shielding is not a requirement from my experience.
I have never heard mains hum coupled from a passive speaker cable. That’s not really a thing — there just isn’t enough power to make it audible under normal conditions.
You can get hum from ground loops which, given how hard it can be to track down, could end up being blamed on nearby mains wiring because you'll always have some sort of mains wiring in the vicinity of the audio gear in order to power it.
Right. I’ve never heard hum from a loop in the amplified wiring to a passive speaker. I did do the math, and it is certainly possible to arrange to couple in enough power to hear it without amplification, but this isn’t the norm.
I don't know... this test is unscientific... clearly mud and banana can have an unintended side effect that makes audio sound better and needs to be investigated immediately.
on a more serious note.. doesn't seem like the "good" audio was good? there is a huge difference between noise free audio and garbage integrated audio / speakers with hizz imbalance and peaking... if the "good" audio is bad then there obviously won't be a difference between any of them.
which makes me think... banana and mud are noise filters... hmm...
Well ot is very easy to figure that out using the Null method.
You have the original recording (A) and play through whatever chain recording it at the end, resulting in recording (B).
You now place A and B into seperate tracks of the DAW of your choice and align them in time. You flip the polarity on B and adjust the levels till the output level is minimized (to account for level changes in your playback/recording chain).
The mixed signal is the difference. If it is imperceptibly silent, the difference is in fact imperceptable.
And with this simple method you can demask a metric ton of bullshit, like differences in wire materials or capacitors materials.
Small addition: you can also run the signal through a different chain C and then compare B and C. And since they ran through the same DAC, output filters, output connectors, input connectors, preamp and ADC, aside from noise the only measuable (relevant for human ears) difference should be the chain inbetween. This allows you to compare any magical device against a simple conductor.
So next time someone tries to sell you chemicalliy pure copper with zero oxygen handbraided by virgins for a thousand bucks test it that way against a cheap pro audio cable, then turn your system up to the loudest listening volume you usually use and litterally listen to the difference. It will unsurprisingly be the sound of silence, your own personal 4'33".
Bonus point for using an double-blind ABX process where you and potential others don't know whether you're listening to the expensive or the cheap gear. Turns out often anything short of that won't stop you from wanting to fool yourself, or others from influencing you, which is a big part of the audiophile schtick and the reason why even otherwise pretty smart people are routinely fooled by this.
While I believe a significant portion of audiophile gear is unscientific nonsense, in this case it’s not clear how adding different materials into the circuit would add distortion or change the audio in any way.
I think that’s the point, that according to audiophile “lore” higher quality materials enhance the sound, thus mud should sound bad under that assumption, but they (apparently) can’t tell the difference.
I'm not sure it's a really great experiment though?
Outside of the hyper-crazies, no one is really stating that a 6-12 inches of conductor is going to make a giant difference in audio quality. Yes, I'm aware of the super-premium-gold-plated-platinum-encrusted 12" audio patch cords available. But almost no one really makes serious arguments those do anything.
I don't think running a 50ft banana is going to have similar performance to a 50ft properly-sized copper conductor though.
Where you get into the "debate" is the difference between buying a spool of 12ga stranded copper wiring from Home Depot, or buying the same thing only with de-oxygenated or whatever silliness some audiophile brand is selling for 10x the cost.
There are levels to things. I imagine copper speaker wire to be essentially fungible. Just size it to your length of run and max power needs. Calculate the total resistance for your wire run and done/done. All professional level sound installations for venues and what-have-you do this already.
This sort of test just seems to prove nothing in either direction other than provide bait for folks to point and laugh (or defend) in comment sections. Consider me baited, I suppose!
It depends on the experiment done… You need every intermediate point between the wires to be low distortion too. As in, audiophiles cannot distinguish between distortion and distortion+distortion is not really an interesting result.
You need source, digital to analog conversion, pre-amp, amp, speakers to have low distortion too, and you need the room to be appropriately treated too. I didn’t look at whether they did all that but I seriously doubt they did.
Did you really mean to say that audiophiles can distinguish between no distortion and some distortion, but cannot distinguish between more distortion and less distortion?
I think the (unstated) point of the article is that if banana/mud can’t be differentiated from copper wire then the audiophile/fool level cable is also nonsense, for example:
I have always said and will always say the same thing:
Up to a point, there's an easily distinguishable sound and detail difference between cheaper and more expensive gear, given that you don't cheat (i.e. put cheaper gear in expensive enclosure), but that difference indistinguishable well before these "true audiophile" level stuff.
For example: I run a pair of Heco Celan GT302s. They are not something exotic. 100W per channel, adequately detailed speakers with great soundstage. The manual gives you a table: Wattage -> Recommended wire gauge. I got a high quality, 100% copper cable (from Acoustic Research, so nothing fancy) at the recommended gauge, and connected them. You can't convince me to get a better cable. It's pointless.
Do I enjoy the sound I get, hell yeah. Do I need to listen to my system instead of listening to the music, hell no. I feed the amplifier with a good turntable (which is 40 years old, shocker!) and a good CD player (which is pretty entry level for what's out there), and that's it.
That set will nail any person who likes to listen to the music to its chair. That's the aim of a good system. Same for personal DAPs and DACs. If you enjoy what you have, who cares!
> Up to a point, there's an easily distinguishable sound and detail difference between cheaper and more expensive gear, given that you don't cheat (i.e. put cheaper gear in expensive enclosure), but that difference indistinguishable well before these "true audiophile" level stuff.
I don't understand how that is cheating. Isn't it a better controlled experiment if the equipment looks the same?
No, I mean "cheating at the market". Some companies sell literal snake oil for 10x the price, then they make the market unreliable for everyone, and nobody believes a company which really uses more expensive components can get better sound.
If you want a good controlled experiment, create a literal black box, without any distinguishing features, or lose the box completely and give them an output (speakers or headphones) only.
Another bad thing is, sound is so subjective and experience changes between brands a lot. For example: headphone "burn in" is considered an hallucination, it mostly is. However I have bought a set of RHA MA750i earphones which changed from "This is not what it says on the box" to "am I sure that these are the RHAs I hated" in a month, because it's sound character changed so immensely. No other headphone I had in my life did that.
So, everything is so muddy, subjective and unreproducible. When a room's organization or floor carpet density can change its frequency response, you can't control anything. Moreover, every human's ear profile is different, so you can't be sure that their ear is hearing that the same (e.g. one of my ears have a notch in its hearing curve around mid frequencies. we don't know why it happened).
While the £25.000 price tag on that preamp is literal snake-oil level and the builder has the audacity to erase the model numbers of the ICs (and OpAmps) he uses, some of the methods he uses are legit and Mark explains them exceptionally well.
Like the Synergistic Audio network router that is quite clearly even labeled as a Mikrotik Routerboard Hex S -- inside of a nice box with a (fancy, admittedly) power supply, and some light pipes glued on so the status LEDs shine differently?
I mean, I like Mikrotik products just fine. I happen to have a Mikrotik Hex S on my desk in front of me as I write this.
They even tell that the core is coming from Mikrotik in the review, yet the ignorance is... oof.
Also, this explains why I hear some birds chirping and bees buzzing in the beginning of the Pink Floyd's High Hopes (from Pulse). It's possible that the sounds from outside imprint on my wireless signal while streaming it.
Maybe I should buy this Micro^H^H^H^H Synergistic box and connect via it while listening to music. Of course I'll need Cat8 shielded cables, but it'll clear the sound, probably, I hope. /s
My hypothesis is that the $1000 cables help sell the $300 cables. I’ve seen comments to the effect of: “I’m not fooled by those $1000 cables, so I saved my money and got the $300 cables instead.”
In other words, they got fooled.
What’s happened in electronics is that there’s a cutoff, above which the audio quality doesn’t get any better, but that cutoff is much lower than anybody can believe. So the psychological cutoff is higher than the physical one, and a role of marketing is to raise that cutoff even further.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but if people believe they can hear a difference in their $1000 cables, and they enjoy purchasing and testing them, I'm inclined to let them enjoy themselves. I have a basic hi-fi setup with rational cables, and enjoy the cost savings, but to each their own.
I feel the same way about wine. At a certain point, it's not really about objective improvements, it's about vibes and lore.
I also don't need to storm these people's homes and tear up their expensive audio setups. Life is hard, and if you find something to enjoy, I'll let you have it.
That said, think there is value in putting out facts that let people make informed decisions and not spend tons of money on things that don't actually work.
The chosen propagation media (wire substitute) wouldn't have significant frequency responses differences for those lengths for that level of power in the audio frequency range.
You'd need to have transmission-line effects kick-in which would occur at higher frequencies and/or if a cross-section of the signal propagation paths would have a significant difference in impedance. All three of the chosen medium act like simple power-sink resistors in this scenario--attenuating the signal consistently across the power frequency spectra.
Seriously, just do a frequency sweep and plot the log of the output responses! But no, that would be far too straightforward an experiment.
What really matters is the signal source, any amplified distortion in the signal, final sonic transducer (speaker), transmission medium (air density), transducer orientation (for higher frequencies), and the individual listener's ear.
"However, the tester surmised that introducing the materials into the circuit is just like adding a resistor in series, and they’re unlikely to distort the audio too much, except by lowering the signal level."
It's really a terrible write-up (AI?), pure click bait.
The final sentence is just garbage:
"They then tried various materials like mud and banana, which, although they’re pretty poor conductors, still seemed to introduce imperceptible changes to the signal, at least for the average person."
One could modify this experiment to have very obvious effects. For example:
- Run the amplifier output through a banana or mud. Even if this somehow works and you can hear the sound, you’ll probably smell it as you cook and/or electrolyze your conductor :) (The banana likely works because the load impedance is very high in the experiment they did. The load impedance with an actual speaker is typically in the ballpark of 8 ohms. I admit I haven’t stuck a pair of multimeter probes in a banana lately, let alone done a proper I-V or AC impedance measurement.)
- Use really long cables. It’s not especially rare to be able to hear and even understand AM radio that gets accidentally picked up on a long cable and converted to baseband by some accidental nonlinearity in the amplifier.
- Use the actual outdoor mud on a rainy day as your conductor. I bet you can get some very loud mains hum like that.
Even audiophiles can probably identify these effects!
Therein, audio from a microphone is sent through progressively-longer cables until the length reaches ~6 miles. It gets pretty muffled-sounding... eventually.
(The longest pair of wires I've sent analog audio through was in the realm of 37 miles, stretching across the countryside. AMA, I guess.)
Hah, that AM-receiving cable was at a theater and only a couple hundred feet long.
In general, with low-level analog audio and non-ridiculous lengths, additive noise effects are likely to become audible long before attenuation or especially frequency-dependent attenuation. As a decent heuristic, as long as the DC resistance is small compared to load impedance, the cable impedance is unlikely to be a problem. For the connection from the amplifier to the speaker, additive noise is unlikely to be a problem, so the DC resistance is even a decent heuristic: keep the round-trip resistance below half an ohm or so and you should be fine with most speakers.
I used to have a fairly nice Rotel preamp that would receive CB radio transmissions sometimes. Whatever it was that was behaving as an AM detector must have been near the output of it because the intensity was unaffected by the volume control.
That was almost certainly the result of illegal transmitters, but it was annoying. One time I heard a man shouting through the stereo and the signal was hot enough in RF land that it made my X10-controlled lights flash on and off.
Later, I got DirecTV and it became differently-annoying: The noise of the satellite receiver switching bias voltage to select between different LNB polarities was sufficient to make a loud pop through the speakers (again, unaffected by the volume control). This made channel surfing very noisy. I was able to reduce it rather substantially with some very deliberate choices in audio cabling construction.
But with better gear (and with the differential[1] signalling that every avenue of pro audio seeks to use by default), this kind of stuff is usually a complete non-issue.
[1]: We popularly call this kind of connection "balanced," but we're wrong about that since there's usually hardly any concern about impedance matching. But it's definitely consistently differential, so I find this less-popular nomenclature to have the right amount of specificity to ~fit reality.
Land-mobile radio stuff. Analog, voice communication.
Our sales guy had sold a remote node for a voter system to improve receive coverage for a central dispatch system. (Signal-to-noise voters are pretty neat: They can continuously compare two or more related audio signals and [ideally!] pick the one that is best for use while discarding the others.)
That node wasn't all that far away as the crow flies, but it was a very long way out in telephone cabling miles. It spread across two different telco LATAs.
So we rented this very long series of bits of wire held together by scotchloks and punch blocks and whatever else in telephone world to use, and we used it. It was not a conditioned circuit: Just wire.
The specific endpoints of that wire were kind of neat, too: There was some basic EQ that could be used to help compensate, and (IIRC) some impedance adjustment to dial in the circuit itself.
And there was a continuous pilot tone used to set gain: Apparently, when wire gets really long like that, atmospheric conditions can dynamically change its attenuation.
Putting a pilot tone near the middle of the voice range (to be notched it out later) and using its level to set gain helps to improve consistency.
That wireline stuff all worked pretty well.
(The remote node was ultimately a bust. The sales guy also tried to cram too much shit into one feedline and antenna, and the gear to combine and separate all of those signals ate too much energy to make any of it an improvement over doing nothing at all.
Which is... well, that's exactly what the engineering told him would happen, but he did it anyway.
It's fashionable to dunk on audiophiles because many of their beliefs are silly and there are businesses that prey on them selling them "oxygen-free" cables and stuff like that. And some of their beliefs are auto-suggestion. But here's another way to look at it: some audio setups will sound better than others in your living room, because of a million variables you can't really control for. Maybe one manufacturer compensates for speaker characteristics in a different way and that accidentally works better with the speaker you have and the room you're in. Maybe it's the deficiencies of the amplifier that prevent resonance from a nearby bookshelf. Or a ceiling lamp. Or maybe they cause resonance that actually sounds good to you.
So yeah, audiophiles are in over their heads and tend to attribute near-mystical properties to individual electronic components, but the only tool they can rely on is trial and error. So if you can afford it, and if some of it seemingly sounds better... have fun? You're going to make mistakes, but that's not the end of the world.
Or they could buy equipment with active room conditioning like Dirac. I have Dirac receivers in two rooms that are absolutely terrible listening areas, and running the full Dirac calibration on the room creates a soundstage where you don’t hear individual speakers anymore.
But it’s much more fun to spend crazy money on magic rocks and snake oil that make your rich audiophile friends want their own magic rocks.
I would advise against systems that apply complex EQ curves on the outputs to compensate for distortions caused by the room. These systems can only optimize for a single listening position in the room (the sweet spot).
The problems are multiple;
1. When you move out of the sweet spot to listen anywhere else in the room, the music becomes distorted because you can are now hearing an EQ curve that is compensating for the sweet spot, but has nothing to do with the frequency response in the other listening positions.
2. These automatic systems tend to apply dozens of small EQ bands to the output, which smears the phase relationships of the record and dulls transient response. The feeling is of the record being mushy and dull.
3. These systems cannot account for time-domain ringing issues in the listening room. So a corrective EQ boost to compensate for a dip in the sweet spot will become a loud ringing at that frequency elsewhere in the room.
4. Corrective EQ cannot compensate for the deepest frequency nulls, no matter how much of a compensatory boost you make. A heavy handed boost to compensate this way will cause massive ringing elsewhere in the room.
I could go on.
These automatic room correction devices cause far more problems than they solve. There are ways to apply some EQ correction, but you will get 10x larger returns on performance by addressing acoustic issues introduced by the room, rather than trying to compensate on the speaker outputs.
Source: I design and build high-end recording studios for working audio professionals and tune speaker rigs for Grammy-winning artists.
Dirac won't be able to fully solve the room issues AKA it's not a replacement for proper room treatment, but at least it can reliably make the sound in the room not terrible.
Yes. In my experience, hi-fi enthusiasts almost entirely overlook the importance of addressing acoustic issues caused by the room. The ones that do, often do too little and in ways that are ineffectual.
Granted, the space is not easy for people to intuit on their own. It opens the door to a lot of terrible ideas that get propogated by people who don't know any better.
Source: I design and build high-end recording studios for audio professionals.
> Or they could buy equipment with active room conditioning like Dirac.
You realize that the pitch for this is basically the same as the pitch for magic pebbles? It's a cure-all box you put on the wire to make things sound better, for a low price of $1,500 or something like that.
I know enough about signal processing to know that magic pebbles probably work worse, but I can think of many reasons why it might not produce the audio you subjectively like better. I suspect it can't really even correct for many of the real-world issues you might have, because equalization doesn't fix echoes, resonance, etc.
In any case, it's a bit of a strawman, because most audiophiles are not buying pebbles in the first place. They're trying vacuum tubes instead of ICs, or are trying out different op-amps, or stuff like that.
> some audio setups will sound better than others in your living room, because of a million variables you can't really control for
Erin over at Erin's Audio Corner did a really nice video[1] recently which focuses on room treatment, but dives into some of these variables which gives a good insight in why something that works well for you might be horrible in my living room.
This presupposes that audiophiles are finding real improvements in sound quality in their cases.
They aren't. They aren't even seeing statistical noise. There is nothing an "oxygen-free" cable can do to your sound, regardless of your unique particulars. They will still insist it sounds better.
But trial and error is not the only tool. So many of these audiophile scams fall apart with even the most basic knowledge. You don’t need to be an audio engineer to understand that an expensive audiophile SATA cable won’t make your music sound any different. Analog components are less obvious, but it doesn’t take too much to know that speaker cable is a lot less important than the speakers, and special deoxygenated cables are a waste of money, or that there’s dozens or hundreds of miles of wire between your outlet and the power plant so spending a thousand dollars on a power cable for the last two feet is unwise.
One problem is that they will try to convince other people to follow in their obvious nonsense. Convincing someone to spend a bunch of money on an Ethernet cable to make their sound better is victimizing them.
It’s also just symptomatic of a general failure of critical thinking that can become properly dangerous. There’s little fundamental difference between “I swapped in an expensive USB cable and it sounded better so high end USB cable is worth it” and “my kid got his shots and then he got diagnosed with autism so vaccines caused it.”
I was never too fanatical about the signal chain. The room and the loudspeakers were always more important to me. There was a time when things like SACD and high res audio were interesting, but it became clear this stuff has negligible impact compared to concerns like the dimensions of the room.
My preferred equipment today is a MiniDSP 2x4HD, a pair of 8" studio monitors on floor stands, a 12" subwoofer and a tape measure. The whole setup cost maybe $1200 and is nearly indistinguishable from my prior setup which cost easily 10x as much.
If you've got a bunch of money to spend on audio gear, the best thing you can probably buy right now is some rockwool and the time of a construction crew.
Hey, don't diss SACD. I have a DVD player that happens to do SACD that I'm hoping to resell to an audiophile for five or more times what I paid for it at some point, I just have to wait another ten years or so for it to become a rare piece of classic audio hardware, so far it's only about 20 years old.
Thought here: I think they're missing the issue here.
I am not an audiophile by any means, but the thing is cables are more than just resistance. Cables radiate energy, cables absorb ambient energy, cables are both capacitors and inductors (both of which will exhibit a frequency-dependent response). Perfect shield, I can't imagine it mattering. Imperfect shield--I can easily see it mattering, although not to the extent they claim.
Don't test against a banana and mud, test against quality wire vs a heap of wire. Test a straight wire with a coil of wire. Test kinked wire. (I'm sure many of us have had bad experiences with network wires that get kinked.)
The total number of people surveyed was ~6 I believe. That's a really small and insignificant sample for any reasonable deduction. So yes, these audiophiles had a hard time deducing the original source - the result cannot be generalized beyond that. From the point of scientific rigor, even for an amateur experiment, the experiment falls short. Interesting idea. I wonder if LLMs can tell any difference.
I spent 3 years in school studying to be an audio engineer, and have built all my own
stereo set ups from random equipment and home made bits and bobs, but I am fussy about a clean signal and carefull speaker placement, do silly things like wash a record in the sink with soap and water, and since I run missmatched speakers, amps that are not built tough, die quickly, just occured to me to impidence match sides by daisy chaining random speakers till I get a match, liking that.
But yep!, we are not whales, and cant hear at 200khz and dont need to hear the difference between mud and bananas, but I think a whale would.
I'd recommend AudioScienceReview for anyone looking for measurements-based evaluations of audio equipment instead of the weird and wrongly incentivized audio review ecosystem.
A cheap pair of Sennheiser HD600 for headphones will last effectively forever and sound great paired with a very competitively priced Topping DX3Pro+ for external soundcard/amplifier.
I remember Technics used to advertise with amplifiers that used bamboo somewhere in the capacitors? Always wondered if there was actual bamboo in there somewhere and what the electrical effects were...
The sound system isn't the limiting factor there, the recording itself is. If the input wasn't recorded with that in mind, no amount of money wasted on the outputting system can fix that.
Usually you only get some specially-crafted demo files that are capable of fooling you.
I have a background in bands, producing records, mixing, and designing high end studios, tuning speaker rigs, etc. In my experience, a record has never truly sounded like being in the room with a band. And that's okay. To me, they're different experiences.
I think people overlook how artificial records are. Even the ones that are ostensibly "natural". Records are "hyper real" in that they are usually crafted to give you an ideal perspective of the entire ensemble. In a sense you can hear "everything" or at least hear everything perfectly balanced and crafted with intention. This could be as simple as dynamic control (compression), artificial spaces (reverb), and distortion or saturation that the average listener will interpret as "natural". In that sense it's an illusion.
Again, this is okay.
Even classical records, which often strive for naturalism use these tools to sculpt the record. Even when they do not employ these techniques I've still never heard a classical record that sounds as good as sitting in a hall in front of a world class orchestra. It's unreal how vivid the sound is when you're in the room with the orchestra. It's breathtaking and something that everyone should aspire to experience at least once.
> I've still never heard a classical record that sounds as good as sitting in a hall in front of a world class orchestra.
Never heard a SACD but a CD doesn't have the dynamic range of a live symphonic orchestra. And there is the recording equipment charateristics which matters.
I am quite sure live band will definitely sound worse than most sound systems.
My experience is I hanged out with one band in a garage where they were practicing and I attended couple live music shows in pubs.
Main upside of those live music shows is that they are not "perfect" like playing a record and each one of the gigs will be off here or there, tempo somewhere will be off or a tune will be off - or you are just having enough beers you don't care pick your way :)
I've been in demo rooms that priced in about $100-300k (~2015 dollars), and those sound remarkably close. Not all sound/bands can be reproduced, and it really depends on the recording. Could you do it for less, also? Probably. But it was pretty fun to hear the highest end.
My 500$ KEF Q150 setup sound like the band is here when I close my eyes. The sound will be shaped more by the acoustics of the room than by the actual speakers anyway.
This article and these comments make a caricature of audiophiles, akin to mocking aeronautics because of a flat earther steam-powered rocket pilot.
Audio equipment is produced by engineers and they create elegant solutions to physical constraints. There is a huge difference in quality when hearing a pair of Allison One speakers, or AKG K1000 headphones over an airpod.
Some engineers believe in speaker wire improvements, most don't. Some even openly acknowledge they don't believe but use premium wires to satisfy customers' demands. Most audio forums outright ban the discussion of speaker wire because it's so contentious.
Dismissing the industry that supports audio engineering is dismissing the disciplines of circuit, materials, and sound engineering.
Sure, there are extremes and charlatans out there like the guys who sell magic rocks, but wtf, some of you pay for skins to play in a mmog.
Nobody is saying that your 1000 euro speakers sound the same like the earbuds that came with your mp3 player in 2005. You know, the ones with the injection mold ports still there, that would dig into your ears.
This is to expose the people that buy gold wires for USB, a digital protocol.
You are free to spend your money how you like, but extreme diminishing returns are a very much overlooked thing in the "audiophile" circles.
There are definitely better headphones and worse ones, that is elementary. But there are also very real limits to human senses which the industry seems to have ignored for a very, very long time in order to profit off of a niche self-indulgent audience who can afford it.
Except that they're not mocking audiophiles, or calling them flat earthers. They're presenting the results of an experiment in a detached and fairly clinical manner. It's not the most rigorously-controlled experiment because they were having a bit of fun, but it's an experimental result nonetheless, and that's all it is, they're not judging people over it or calling them names.
The point about haughty attitude is an important, but rarely mentioned. No one has convinced me to reexamine and change my views by calling me stupid, mocking me, and pointing a finger. If anything, it makes me avoid both that person and their whole group.
"the industry that supports audio engineering" though — are you sure this support is welcome? It is not unlike asking to treat counterfeit drug producers with dignity and respect because they support medical professionals.
I really do not see how any actual engineer producing audio equipment would not be there if not for a company selling one-directional ethernet cables for 1000/m that improve sound, with a plastic bag filled with gravel that also improves sound... I mean...
I don’t question that audiophiles hear different things on expensive equipment, but I think it’s all placebo. “If I spend a stupid amount of money on this, my brain will gin up the sound to satisfy my expectations.”
it's definitely pointless over the age of 40. mostly pointless prior to that too. a 20 year old listening with young ears is hearing vastly better audio
I cant pack wet mud into a tube and run it in the attic and it stay wet. Same with bananas unfortunatly as that would give banana plugs a lot more meaning.
Yeh, to zoom out a bit, this is a pattern with all products. It’s all a scam. The only thing you should ever pay for is build quality (you should buy something once, that you can hand down to your kids) and staff wages (something that is made in your own country so you’re not undermining your own economy, this is more of a moral reason).
The biggest problem with audio hardware businesses is 95% of what they say about their products is marketing bullshit. It doesn't take a lot of money to get really good gear, if you put in the research, but its very easy to get ripped off if you don't, spending multiple times more than you need to get a worse result.
Just look at the boxes for half this stuff, quoting peak power for speakers instead of RMS, which is the equivalent of saying "This LED hits 50 watts for .00001 seconds during startup! Wow so amazing! (but don't look at the average 1 watt of output past that)"
The speakers, the cables, the AMPs, even digital source cables nearly all have 90% marketing budgets which drive up the price of many products without increasing quality at all.
Right now I got Presonus Eris studio monitors, however studio monitors might not be to everyones taste because they have a flat response. But I use them because they help hearing speech in modern movies because they don't drown out the mid range.
The very best deals change every few years though. As soon as word of mouth catches and something becomes too popular the business suits look for ways to take advantage. Scrolling old school style forums for audio enthusiast s can lead you to some good lesser known (and thus cheap) brands though.
It really depends on the music you listen to and what your ears are already use to.
I thought my fathers old setup always sounded amazing when I was younger. Coming back to it 20 years later though, it sounds stupidly scooped to my ears. Same speakers but what has changed is the music I was playing on them and what my ears expect to hear. 20 years ago I was more into guitar/bass/drum/vocal music that these speakers were made for.
There is really no such thing as "sound quality". There is just different EQ, frequency range, etc.
Probably going to make some people mad... but I went down the Audiophile rabbit hole last year before ultimately coming to the conclusion that it just isn't worth it. I understand the appeal, especially someone who values a nice piece of hardware. There is so much to choose from... DACs, DAPs, amps, fancy looking balanced cables in quality braiding, headphones with solid wood accents, IEMs that look straight outa sci-fi.
A few things I learned that may save someone time:
(1) Sound quality is in the medium, not the build. Speakers almost always sound better than a pair of cans (headphones), headphones almost always sound better than IEMs, IEMs almost always sound better than over the ears.
(2) The difference in sound quality between something that is a few hundred dollars, and something that is a few thousand is so small that "diminishing returns" as a phrase doesn't do it justice.
(3) The stack of DACs, EQs, preamps, and neatly managed RCA/XLR cables looks cool on your desk - but they take up a lot of space and cost a lot of money for something that sounds maybe 10% better than a pair of AirPods Max (provided you remember to turn on lossless in apple music, which I forgot to!)
The thing I've learned is that headphones and IEMs can sound completely different to different people, just because of differences in the shape of your ears and ear canal.
I bought some custom IEMs and had the opportunity to test ~10 of the super high-end options from several different brands. I found that there was no correlation whatsoever between price or even brand and how good they sounded to me. The technician I was working with said he observed the same thing all the time in the professionals he worked with. He'd have musicians on the same instruments in the same roles in the same group come in and all walk put with completely different products.
IEMs are the most personal but even headphones have the problem.
Because of this, my recommendation is that you make purchasing decisions in one of two ways:
- Learn how to EQ to get a sound you like. Purchase based on objective measurements like frequency response curves to find products that require minimal EQ to match your preference.
- Only buy after listening, or buy, listen and return if that's an option for you.
I recommend avoiding purchases based on reviews that make subjective judgements about the sound.
If you want to learn more, I like the videos/articles/forums of Headphones.com and Crinacle.
I came to the same conclusion a while ago. You can get a lot of mileage by tweaking EQ. For me almost all headphones felt flat until I tried a bunch of studio monitors. They are not portable but I’ve been using a cheap AKG K72 pair at home and it has been great. Your experience may vary but do try a bunch of options, as suggested by parent.
As someone who still occasionally mixes for a living, designs and builds audio hardware: Audiophiles are full of shit and this has been scientifically shown probably since the 90s (various AES studies conducted on the perception of CD quality).
Of course there is a difference between cheap gear and decent gear. But the difference between decent gear and audiophile gear is non-perceptible in a blind ABX test. And here is the thing: especially in the elctronics side (so amps) decent gear has become increasingly cheaper.
Audiophiles also tend to have downright naive claims about sound, like the silver cable sounding more clear and "silvery" while something with gold would then sound warmer and richer. All while they measure the same down to inperceptable differences. And of course the device with the walnut case sounds warm because wood is warm and so on.
It would be funny if it wasn't auch a successful con.
> It would be funny if it wasn't auch a successful con.
sometimes i remember about this space and laugh. i guess i found thinking i would find some data for a speaker i was looking for back in the days but it turned out into audiophiles typing their absurd: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php
another funny demographics is mechanical keyboard enthusiasts by rating sound of switches and discussing over minimal numbers of gf (grams-force) in same type of switches (linear, clicky etc.). often times there are videos showing sounds of hundreds of USD keyboards with owners hunting and pecking hahaha
Yup, there's been a ton of experiments like this done over the years where people ran A/B tests between golden-ears audio gear and the cheapest garbage they could find, for example wire coathangers used to connect the speakers up. In blind tests, people couldn't tell the difference.
As others have pointed out, the biggest thing to focus on is the speakers or headphones, at least up to a point: $70,000 Woo-woo Labs Reference Monitor speakers aren't going to sound any better than the decent set of Wharfedales you found on eBay.
Unfortunately, (1) is not always true. I have in ears surpass some speakers, over the ears which surpass some IEMs, etc.
For (2), again it depends. Some companies build amazing things for cheap, some companies build crapshoot for tons of money. The trick is to find the sound you like for the cheapest price.
For (3), the simplest chain is the best(est) chain. I used to have a high-end 2x10 band eq which sat between pre and power stages. I removed it, and I'm happier. Unless I'm listening vinyl, I bypass loudness and tone circuits even.
There's a funny thing in audio. When you increase the resolution too much, the problems in old/remastered sources become apparent, and you can't enjoy that material anymore. A good Hi-Fi system is meant to create enjoyment, not motivation to spend more money on more equipment or sources.
Lastly, for casual listening, even the basic airpods provide plenty of resolution and detail.
> When you increase the resolution too much, the problems in old/remastered sources become apparent, and you can't enjoy that material anymore.
It doesn’t need to even be that old. I’ve got stuff from small musicians and they don’t have the equipment to make perfect recordings. You can’t tell with good headphones, but you put it through an amazing pair of speakers and it gets fuzzy.
> even the basic airpods provide plenty of resolution and detail
My information might be outdated, but aren’t those the kind that sort of sit loosely at the outside of your ear canal (like the original iPod headphones)? If so, those are the one kind of headphones that I find basically worthless. I’m not an audiophile by any stretch of the imagination, but in the iPod era I could never understand how people tolerated those when you can get vastly better sound for a few bucks. I figured the distinctive apple-brand headphones were kind of a status symbol.
AirPod pro sounds fine, though.
I personally dislike wearing isolated earphones for longer periods of time since they short-circuit the ear canal and I hear every bone in my jaw area and neck after some point.
3rd generation Airpods, while don't isolate, sound pretty epic for what they are. When sitting at home, I can listen to some music and genuinely enjoy it, and I like their non-isolating nature because it helps me to hear traffic around while walking with them. The only problem is, talking on the phone with them might get a little noisy for the other party, but I believe phone hardware filters some of it.
When compared to their rivals, they really have higher resolution, and enjoyable sound balance. Also, iPhone scans your ears with FaceID camera to profile them, so they are also tuned for your ears from get go. This makes positional audio really shine, too.
The original iPod buds were pretty flat and tinny. I used to use a pair Sennheisers (I don't remember the model but they were pretty high end) to be able to enjoy what iPods had to offer, back in the day.
1) I wouldn't 100% agree with this. It's not that speakers sound "better" than headphones, it's that speakers don't require any tuning to match a person's specific physiology (e.g. shape of their ears, ear canal) but the other things do. When you use headphones, you still use your whole ear canal but the sound is distorted by how the headphones interact with your ears, particularly the pinna. When you use IEMs, you only use part of your ear canal and skip the pinna entirely, so the sound can't sound as natural as speakers do unless you compensate to reintroduce the effect of the pinna/canal. This is all possible to varying degrees. EQ helps a lot and there are ways to measure HRTF as well.
2) Absolutely and it's constantly getting better.
> it's that speakers don't require any tuning to match a person's specific physiology
But they do interact with the environment. Having walls which reflect the sound can mess with the sound. Changing speakers won't help. Changing headphones can help.
> they do interact with the environment.
Yup. Got plaster walls, vinyl flooring, narrow room, different sizes of rattling single-pane windows…
Neighbors with leaf blowers…
I really like my noise canceling headphones. :)
> The stack of DACs, EQs, preamps, and neatly managed RCA/XLR cables looks cool on your desk
Music lovers buy audio equipment to listen to their music.
Audiophiles buy music to listen to their audio equipment.
> provided you remember to turn on lossless in apple music
I love that you ended your rant with an audiophile myth :)
Lossless isn't even diminishing returns better. People can't tell the difference in an ABX test.
The equipment definitely makes a difference but you're right about diminishing returns. In fact, at a certain point it's zero returns and all gimmick unfortunately.
That said, you don't need to break the bank for good stuff and it does make a huge difference. There's also a lot of marketing out there for bad equipment. Apple air pods and beats headphones and more.
For 3) I would argue all that stuff is where you should spend the least of your money. The biggest improvement comes from the speakers or headphones themselves.
Dumb question but what's the difference between headphones and over the ears? I looked it up but I'm still confused
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headphones#Ear_adaption
Not a dumb question... I phrased it badly. I was referring to over the ears as something like Koss Porta Pros or similar.
Then I think I disagree with the specifics of that statement, or am I reading this wrong? The porta pros have to sound better than the average IEM, or think of the KSC 75 for another quite nice option in that space. Especially for the price. And I'm not even sure that speakers sound better than headphones most of the time.
+1 though for the thought that the medium makes the biggest part of the sound quality.
Interesting, even with Yaxi pads I could not get the Porta Pros to my liking. Compared to the average IEM I thought the IEMs sounded much cleaner and more technically accurate. Stepping up to something like Letshuoer S12s absolutely blew them out of the water (more expensive, I know). Maybe I just falsely attributed that to an inherent advantage of sealing off the ear canals. Will give the Porta Pros another try.
Porta pros specifically seem to be a subjective thing, many describe them as a bit muddy, while some like that as an easy listing mode. The KSC 75 though really impressed me, for me they replaced the ath-m50x. Less base (partly because of no clamping pressure, I read, so changeable with a headband). I do have a cheap chinese hifi IEM I do like and would understand if someone preferred that one to the kSC 75, to further complicate things, but I stuck to them.
Also read positive things about the moondrop old fashioned, to mention an alternative to the porta pro in a very close form factor, not the strange ear clips that are the KSC 75.
I'd argue that the additional space should give the form factor an advantage, though sure, being closer to the ear might also be one. And no doubt, given the huge popularity of IEMs the technology must have seen a lot of progress, so I might be wrong.
What is an average IEM for you? I had a Porta Pro in the past, but IEM got so much better in the last 10 years that your statement made me curious
Fair point. It's a huge field and I have no defensible option there. I was thinking of the wireless Anker IEM and the various older ones that accompanied my phones, even though as mentioned in the other comment I'm aware of higher class (and sometimes even cheap) IEMs that do exist. But still, I wouldn't generalize it like that, I really do like the KSC 75 a lot and think those kind of headphones are too often overlooked despite their quality, which collides with classifying them so low.
#2 - Can be. Or it might actually make a difference.
We had 2 "living room" setups for a while, upstairs and down. We eventually realized how dumb that was, and condensed to 1.
Doing that, we stopped using some really expensive speakers and started using some that were 1/5 the price because we couldn't tell the difference.
Then, one day, I brought those expensive speakers down and set them up. Wow. There was a definite difference after all. I'm not an audiophile and can't tell you what that difference was, just that both of us could immediately tell the expensive speakers were better, and we were not going back to the cheaper ones. Nothing else in the setup changed.
Also, I eventually upgraded the receiver to something that could better drive those speakers. An upgrade from $600 to about $900. And there was a definite difference there, too. The older box should have been enough, but it just wasn't.
Do I recommend that someone on a budget spend $4000 instead of $1500? Nope. It's not enough difference. But for stuff we already had, or for someone that really cares, it's definitely better.
You can't make a bad speaker good, but also: people spend lots on gear, but forget the room. The room can break a good speaker easily.
Also... 'good' is something you first need to agree on when talking with people. Some people like to have 'distorted' playback (compared to the original), because they "like" that better. That is the moment retailers can sell objectively worse but overpriced stuff.
Genelecs for instance are very detailed, neutral etc (there is a reason you see them everywhere in professional settings), but consumers don't necessarily have an appetite for 'objectivity'.
Your hot takes are all wrong. Especially your last parenthetical. I mean, I'm not doubting that you may have forgotten to turn on lossless audio! But what I think you're implying, that lossless audio is clearly distinguishable from 256kbps-ish streaming audio when played over bluetooth, has not been supported by many listening tests of AAC even at much at lower bitrates.
I don’t have Airpods, but I turned on my stereo the other day after listening to music through the speakers in my monitor and it was quite a difference.
I get the aspect of "shiny things are shiny and I like shiny things so I buy them" but the things that piss me off, like actually genuienly make me mad at the whole thing are actual scams like "audio tuned" ethernet switches or "designed for music" SSDs. These are actual products that sell for a lot of money, and they physically cannot make any difference to the audio played from/through them. It's worse than snake oil.
It's worse than that, some of them are actually dangerous! Amazon seems to have removed this review but here's a copy of the original text:
My teacher said headphones were superior to speakers, easier to control
[dead]
Small side note...
Around COVID lockdown #1 I did a lot more walking outside, pushing a pram and listening to music on headphones.
For years I'd been using cheap wired headphones from exhibition swag and things.
I put a pair through the washing machine. Top tip: this is really not good for them.
I looked online and found I could buy a brand new pair of my preferred Sony in-ear ones for $NotALot.
I bought the absolutely top of the line most expensive bass-boost in-ear buds.
They cost the equivalent of $20 (about £15) and the sound is amazing.
The point being here: because all the fashion-victims want Bluetooth, wired headphones have got really cheap and top quality premium grade ones cost less than a modest meal, or alternatively perhaps, less than I could easily drink in beer while listening to 1 CD or album.
Shun wireless. Go back to wired. Get an adaptor if your phone doesn't have a socket. You can get really good earphones for very little money now, they never need charging, never go flat, never need pairing, are compatible with every OS able to play sound, and they come with a handy tool to stop them falling out and you losing them, called "a cable".
Also: the microphone is great as well. I've recorded podcasts with them. The quality is way better than my £300 over-ear sound-cancelling premium Bluetooth headset, which I now only use while onboard aeroplanes.
> I bought the absolutely top of the line most expensive bass-boost in-ear buds.
Out of curiosity, what did you get?
The classic fable round these parts is Quad (and/or Cambridge Audio?) demo-ing their latest and greatest at a 1970s Heathrow Expo using mains cables as speaker wire.
It’s the least important part of any system and indeed my Quad amp and CA R50s are wired with twisted, braided, brown lamp cable as a nice aesthetic homage.
Why wouldn't mains cable make good speaker wire? Probably much larger diameter than needed for audio and therefore more expensive if fairly priced, but if you've got to wire speakers and that's what you've got, should be fine.
About the only things you could do wrong would be using wire that's too small to carry the load, is frayed/broken/severely corroded, or is coiled in a way that inductance becomes a real issue. Running parallel and near electrical or signal wires is problematic, and largely different run lengths can make a difference.
In the past, there was no special speaker wire. It was all mains wire, because all was 100% copper. Today, finding 100% copper cable having the cross-section stamped on it is pretty rare. Electronics being more efficient hence drawing less power allows manufacturers to run 3-4 copper clad aluminum strands as mains cable in some cases.
Today, I'd still use "mains wire" if I can find it in a 100% copper form with the correct cross section. The reason I used "speaker wire" in my set is because the recommended cable was thicker than the standard stuff, and I didn't believe that I'd be able to get 100% copper wire easily.
Where do you live? In the US, there a lot of widely available brands of UL-listed (or equivalent) wire with clearly marked specs and the cross section in ridiculous units of AWG. If it says it’s copper and it’s not an outrageous counterfeit, it’s copper. (And it will have a resistance that is in spec, because this is important for code-compliant electrical installations, and it won’t corrode when terminated properly.)
And the UL-listed stuff is fantastic, because UL cares about the insulation and jacket. There is plenty of “speaker” wire with crappy insulation that degrades after a few years, but I’ve never seen an actual CL2 or CM or CL3 (or their R or P variants) or THWN(2), TC(-ER) etc, cable, from the last 30 years, with any such issues.
16AWG CL2 cable is fantastic speaker wire, and it’s cheap and you can buy it at any store that sells electrical supplies. TC-ER is great if you need something bigger than 16AWG (the longer the run, the thicker the cable you need to keep resistance below 1 ohm or so), but it’s a bit harder to find.
The thing that can be genuinely hard to find is nice twisted-pair or shielded twisted-pair cable in any format other than category (Ethernet) cable, and that tends to max out at 22-23AWG and may have the wrong number of conductors for whatever you’re doing with it. For making up an RCA cable, this is completely unnecessary — use RG59 or RG6 cable if you need particularly good shielding. But for long runs of balanced audio cable, you want actual twisted pairs, 23 AWG is plenty, but you may need those pairs shielded from each other to minimize crosstalk. So you end up with commercial snake cables, and those are not cheap. Some people use digital stage boxes these days, because an effectively transparent ADC and all the electronics needed to make it work can be cheaper than the fancy cables.
> Where do you live?
Somewhere far w.r.t. US. :)
> 16AWG CL2 cable is fantastic speaker wire,
Yet, it's way thinner than the manufacturer of my speakers recommend, which start at 13, and only go up. In my case I need 12 or 11. I don't remember honestly.
The good thing is, I managed to get a roll of the correct cable made by Acoustic Research. While the cable is not "fancy", it's copper, has the correct thickness and it's jacket still feels like day 1, and that thing is 10+ years old at this point.
For RCA cables I still use the factory default set came with my amplifier. Japan made, with very flexible jackets and gold plated connectors. That provides more than enough clarity for me.
Wouldn’t SOOW (or THHN/THWN-2 )in 14 or 16 gauge be appropriate for this?
My speaker's manual says the following:
> Please always use a good quality loudspeaker connection cable from an audio dealer. To prevent impairment of sound quality, we recommend cables with cross-sections of at least 2.5 mm² for lengths up to 3 m and at least 4 mm² for lengths above 3 m.
Interestingly, the table present in the printed manual is not present in the one on the internet. IIRC, recommendation for 100W up to 3m was 3mm² or 4mm² at minimum.
From what I looked at, 14AWG is ~2mm² and 16AWG is 1.3mm². Way too skinny for what the manufacturer says.
Unless you're running speaker cables parallel to some power cables, shielding is not a requirement from my experience. The cable I use is at [0]. I have a roll like this. Mine is thicker than 2.5mm² though.
[0]: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71Jr0vhSTsL._AC_UF1000,1...
> To prevent impairment of sound quality, we recommend cables with cross-sections of at least 2.5 mm² for lengths up to 3 m and at least 4 mm² for lengths above 3 m.
This is just a unit issue. See:
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/wire-gauges-d_419.html
Those numbers are also ridiculous. They’re recommending 13AWG or higher for a 3m run. That’s about 20 feet round trip, which is about 0.04 ohms. The speaker should be 8 ohms nominal, but let’s call it 1 ohm at some very audible frequency to be conservative. So you might lose 2% of your power or maybe 0.1dB. Keep in mind that you cannot hear frequency-independent attention at all (the volume knob fixes it), so you’ll only hear the frequency-dependent part, which will be smaller, and your speaker plus room already has frequency dependence far in excess of 0.1dB. Note that the speaker power doesn’t even factor in to the calculation — as you supply more power, you’re increasing the current and voltage accordingly, and the effects cancel out.
At very high power you may care about heating. That recommended cable has an NEC ampacity of 15A or more, and 15A^2 * 8ohms = 1800W. Derate a bit because you’re at higher frequencies than 60Hz and you are just fine — in fact, the voltage will become a safety problem at silly power long before the resistive heating matters.
I will admit that there is a good reason to use at least 18AWG cable or so: speaker cable terminations are utter crap, and the crappiness seems to get worse as the fanciness goes up. A thicker wire is more likely to survive being terminated, within limits.
Buy some 16AWG two-conductor CL2 or CL2R or CL2P cable at your home improvement store and be done with it.
> Unless you're running speaker cables parallel to some power cables, shielding is not a requirement from my experience.
I have never heard mains hum coupled from a passive speaker cable. That’s not really a thing — there just isn’t enough power to make it audible under normal conditions.
You can get hum from ground loops which, given how hard it can be to track down, could end up being blamed on nearby mains wiring because you'll always have some sort of mains wiring in the vicinity of the audio gear in order to power it.
Right. I’ve never heard hum from a loop in the amplified wiring to a passive speaker. I did do the math, and it is certainly possible to arrange to couple in enough power to hear it without amplification, but this isn’t the norm.
The type of wire I suggested is easily found in the U.S. (apologies for my bias there) as large as 6g. 10-12g would be in the right range I believe.
The shielding might not be needed, the low cost for single conductor wire is why I mentioned it.
The person I was responding to was mentioning they can’t find appropriate “main power” cable. (So probably not in the USA )
Does aluminum not conduct electricity?
Yes, and it is also useed for certain applications, if you don't care for the need of thicker wires to get the same resistance.
Like cheap UPSes where the transformers... aluminium wire... pseudo-soldered not crimped... shudder.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIEM2bG8mOQ
Yes. Around 60% of copper. You need much thicker cables to carry the same power.
I don't know... this test is unscientific... clearly mud and banana can have an unintended side effect that makes audio sound better and needs to be investigated immediately.
on a more serious note.. doesn't seem like the "good" audio was good? there is a huge difference between noise free audio and garbage integrated audio / speakers with hizz imbalance and peaking... if the "good" audio is bad then there obviously won't be a difference between any of them.
which makes me think... banana and mud are noise filters... hmm...
The experiment compared .wav files directly ripped from the cd to these same files played through copper/banana/mud.
So yes, the “good” audio is good.
less about the files, more about the audio equipment in between
Well ot is very easy to figure that out using the Null method.
You have the original recording (A) and play through whatever chain recording it at the end, resulting in recording (B).
You now place A and B into seperate tracks of the DAW of your choice and align them in time. You flip the polarity on B and adjust the levels till the output level is minimized (to account for level changes in your playback/recording chain).
The mixed signal is the difference. If it is imperceptibly silent, the difference is in fact imperceptable.
And with this simple method you can demask a metric ton of bullshit, like differences in wire materials or capacitors materials.
Small addition: you can also run the signal through a different chain C and then compare B and C. And since they ran through the same DAC, output filters, output connectors, input connectors, preamp and ADC, aside from noise the only measuable (relevant for human ears) difference should be the chain inbetween. This allows you to compare any magical device against a simple conductor.
So next time someone tries to sell you chemicalliy pure copper with zero oxygen handbraided by virgins for a thousand bucks test it that way against a cheap pro audio cable, then turn your system up to the loudest listening volume you usually use and litterally listen to the difference. It will unsurprisingly be the sound of silence, your own personal 4'33".
Bonus point for using an double-blind ABX process where you and potential others don't know whether you're listening to the expensive or the cheap gear. Turns out often anything short of that won't stop you from wanting to fool yourself, or others from influencing you, which is a big part of the audiophile schtick and the reason why even otherwise pretty smart people are routinely fooled by this.
I run $100 speakers and some airpods, but this was a good read!
>I don't know... this test is unscientific..
I dunno, it reproduced my Muddy Waters LPs perfectly.
While I believe a significant portion of audiophile gear is unscientific nonsense, in this case it’s not clear how adding different materials into the circuit would add distortion or change the audio in any way.
I think that’s the point, that according to audiophile “lore” higher quality materials enhance the sound, thus mud should sound bad under that assumption, but they (apparently) can’t tell the difference.
I'm not sure it's a really great experiment though?
Outside of the hyper-crazies, no one is really stating that a 6-12 inches of conductor is going to make a giant difference in audio quality. Yes, I'm aware of the super-premium-gold-plated-platinum-encrusted 12" audio patch cords available. But almost no one really makes serious arguments those do anything.
I don't think running a 50ft banana is going to have similar performance to a 50ft properly-sized copper conductor though.
Where you get into the "debate" is the difference between buying a spool of 12ga stranded copper wiring from Home Depot, or buying the same thing only with de-oxygenated or whatever silliness some audiophile brand is selling for 10x the cost.
There are levels to things. I imagine copper speaker wire to be essentially fungible. Just size it to your length of run and max power needs. Calculate the total resistance for your wire run and done/done. All professional level sound installations for venues and what-have-you do this already.
This sort of test just seems to prove nothing in either direction other than provide bait for folks to point and laugh (or defend) in comment sections. Consider me baited, I suppose!
It depends on the experiment done… You need every intermediate point between the wires to be low distortion too. As in, audiophiles cannot distinguish between distortion and distortion+distortion is not really an interesting result.
You need source, digital to analog conversion, pre-amp, amp, speakers to have low distortion too, and you need the room to be appropriately treated too. I didn’t look at whether they did all that but I seriously doubt they did.
Did you really mean to say that audiophiles can distinguish between no distortion and some distortion, but cannot distinguish between more distortion and less distortion?
That's how sound works in general. Even doubling is only +3dB.
I think the (unstated) point of the article is that if banana/mud can’t be differentiated from copper wire then the audiophile/fool level cable is also nonsense, for example:
https://www.audiotherapyuk.com/product/oephi-reference-inter...
I have always said and will always say the same thing:
Up to a point, there's an easily distinguishable sound and detail difference between cheaper and more expensive gear, given that you don't cheat (i.e. put cheaper gear in expensive enclosure), but that difference indistinguishable well before these "true audiophile" level stuff.
For example: I run a pair of Heco Celan GT302s. They are not something exotic. 100W per channel, adequately detailed speakers with great soundstage. The manual gives you a table: Wattage -> Recommended wire gauge. I got a high quality, 100% copper cable (from Acoustic Research, so nothing fancy) at the recommended gauge, and connected them. You can't convince me to get a better cable. It's pointless.
Do I enjoy the sound I get, hell yeah. Do I need to listen to my system instead of listening to the music, hell no. I feed the amplifier with a good turntable (which is 40 years old, shocker!) and a good CD player (which is pretty entry level for what's out there), and that's it.
That set will nail any person who likes to listen to the music to its chair. That's the aim of a good system. Same for personal DAPs and DACs. If you enjoy what you have, who cares!
> Up to a point, there's an easily distinguishable sound and detail difference between cheaper and more expensive gear, given that you don't cheat (i.e. put cheaper gear in expensive enclosure), but that difference indistinguishable well before these "true audiophile" level stuff.
I don't understand how that is cheating. Isn't it a better controlled experiment if the equipment looks the same?
No, I mean "cheating at the market". Some companies sell literal snake oil for 10x the price, then they make the market unreliable for everyone, and nobody believes a company which really uses more expensive components can get better sound.
If you want a good controlled experiment, create a literal black box, without any distinguishing features, or lose the box completely and give them an output (speakers or headphones) only.
Another bad thing is, sound is so subjective and experience changes between brands a lot. For example: headphone "burn in" is considered an hallucination, it mostly is. However I have bought a set of RHA MA750i earphones which changed from "This is not what it says on the box" to "am I sure that these are the RHAs I hated" in a month, because it's sound character changed so immensely. No other headphone I had in my life did that.
So, everything is so muddy, subjective and unreproducible. When a room's organization or floor carpet density can change its frequency response, you can't control anything. Moreover, every human's ear profile is different, so you can't be sure that their ear is hearing that the same (e.g. one of my ears have a notch in its hearing curve around mid frequencies. we don't know why it happened).
If anybody wants to learn some of the tricks which can be done to get better sound, please watch Mend it Mark's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RJbpFSFziI
While the £25.000 price tag on that preamp is literal snake-oil level and the builder has the audacity to erase the model numbers of the ICs (and OpAmps) he uses, some of the methods he uses are legit and Mark explains them exceptionally well.
Got it, thanks for the explanation!
Always! Don't mention it. :)
> That set will nail any person who likes to listen to the music to its chair. That's the aim of a good system.
We all know that the aim of a good system is to blow your clothes off ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNZ-nEGHDKk
Like the Synergistic Audio network router that is quite clearly even labeled as a Mikrotik Routerboard Hex S -- inside of a nice box with a (fancy, admittedly) power supply, and some light pipes glued on so the status LEDs shine differently?
I mean, I like Mikrotik products just fine. I happen to have a Mikrotik Hex S on my desk in front of me as I write this.
But scroll down and zoom in on the money shot here: https://hifi.nl/artikel/32753/Review-Synergistic-Research-Ne...
And then, for comparison: https://openwrt.org/_media/media/mikrotik/rb760igs/pcb_top.j...
The difference in price between the Mikrotik box and the Synergistic box with the board is north of $2,500.
They even tell that the core is coming from Mikrotik in the review, yet the ignorance is... oof.
Also, this explains why I hear some birds chirping and bees buzzing in the beginning of the Pink Floyd's High Hopes (from Pulse). It's possible that the sounds from outside imprint on my wireless signal while streaming it.
Maybe I should buy this Micro^H^H^H^H Synergistic box and connect via it while listening to music. Of course I'll need Cat8 shielded cables, but it'll clear the sound, probably, I hope. /s
Magic cables are a _huge_ thing in the audiophile nonsense world.
You make it sound like these two ideas are somehow opposed.
If nothing else it shows those high end $1,000+ cables they buy are nothing but placebo effect.
My hypothesis is that the $1000 cables help sell the $300 cables. I’ve seen comments to the effect of: “I’m not fooled by those $1000 cables, so I saved my money and got the $300 cables instead.”
In other words, they got fooled.
What’s happened in electronics is that there’s a cutoff, above which the audio quality doesn’t get any better, but that cutoff is much lower than anybody can believe. So the psychological cutoff is higher than the physical one, and a role of marketing is to raise that cutoff even further.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but if people believe they can hear a difference in their $1000 cables, and they enjoy purchasing and testing them, I'm inclined to let them enjoy themselves. I have a basic hi-fi setup with rational cables, and enjoy the cost savings, but to each their own.
I feel the same way about wine. At a certain point, it's not really about objective improvements, it's about vibes and lore.
I also don't need to storm these people's homes and tear up their expensive audio setups. Life is hard, and if you find something to enjoy, I'll let you have it.
That said, think there is value in putting out facts that let people make informed decisions and not spend tons of money on things that don't actually work.
Absolutely. I'm glad the linked article exists! Hopefully it can prevent someone who really can't afford it from splurging on expensive cables.
Yes, but there is a negative societal cost to allowing quacks, frauds, and hucksters to exploit the naive.
Capitalism be that way, sometimes. We can't have the good parts without also taking some of the bad parts.
(And yet: They still make inexpensive cables in factories every day.)
The vendors of such snake oil often make specific, incorrect claims. Fraud is still fraud, even if the victim enjoys it.
it also puts a market value on said placebo effect...
Well, duh.
The chosen propagation media (wire substitute) wouldn't have significant frequency responses differences for those lengths for that level of power in the audio frequency range.
You'd need to have transmission-line effects kick-in which would occur at higher frequencies and/or if a cross-section of the signal propagation paths would have a significant difference in impedance. All three of the chosen medium act like simple power-sink resistors in this scenario--attenuating the signal consistently across the power frequency spectra.
Seriously, just do a frequency sweep and plot the log of the output responses! But no, that would be far too straightforward an experiment.
What really matters is the signal source, any amplified distortion in the signal, final sonic transducer (speaker), transmission medium (air density), transducer orientation (for higher frequencies), and the individual listener's ear.
They even mentioned this in the article:
"However, the tester surmised that introducing the materials into the circuit is just like adding a resistor in series, and they’re unlikely to distort the audio too much, except by lowering the signal level."
It's really a terrible write-up (AI?), pure click bait.
The final sentence is just garbage:
"They then tried various materials like mud and banana, which, although they’re pretty poor conductors, still seemed to introduce imperceptible changes to the signal, at least for the average person."
What does that even mean? It's trash.
One could modify this experiment to have very obvious effects. For example:
- Run the amplifier output through a banana or mud. Even if this somehow works and you can hear the sound, you’ll probably smell it as you cook and/or electrolyze your conductor :) (The banana likely works because the load impedance is very high in the experiment they did. The load impedance with an actual speaker is typically in the ballpark of 8 ohms. I admit I haven’t stuck a pair of multimeter probes in a banana lately, let alone done a proper I-V or AC impedance measurement.)
- Use really long cables. It’s not especially rare to be able to hear and even understand AM radio that gets accidentally picked up on a long cable and converted to baseband by some accidental nonlinearity in the amplifier.
- Use the actual outdoor mud on a rainy day as your conductor. I bet you can get some very loud mains hum like that.
Even audiophiles can probably identify these effects!
A difference that long cables make can be heard in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SorO-QpqYRU .
Therein, audio from a microphone is sent through progressively-longer cables until the length reaches ~6 miles. It gets pretty muffled-sounding... eventually.
(The longest pair of wires I've sent analog audio through was in the realm of 37 miles, stretching across the countryside. AMA, I guess.)
Hah, that AM-receiving cable was at a theater and only a couple hundred feet long.
In general, with low-level analog audio and non-ridiculous lengths, additive noise effects are likely to become audible long before attenuation or especially frequency-dependent attenuation. As a decent heuristic, as long as the DC resistance is small compared to load impedance, the cable impedance is unlikely to be a problem. For the connection from the amplifier to the speaker, additive noise is unlikely to be a problem, so the DC resistance is even a decent heuristic: keep the round-trip resistance below half an ohm or so and you should be fine with most speakers.
I used to have a fairly nice Rotel preamp that would receive CB radio transmissions sometimes. Whatever it was that was behaving as an AM detector must have been near the output of it because the intensity was unaffected by the volume control.
That was almost certainly the result of illegal transmitters, but it was annoying. One time I heard a man shouting through the stereo and the signal was hot enough in RF land that it made my X10-controlled lights flash on and off.
Later, I got DirecTV and it became differently-annoying: The noise of the satellite receiver switching bias voltage to select between different LNB polarities was sufficient to make a loud pop through the speakers (again, unaffected by the volume control). This made channel surfing very noisy. I was able to reduce it rather substantially with some very deliberate choices in audio cabling construction.
But with better gear (and with the differential[1] signalling that every avenue of pro audio seeks to use by default), this kind of stuff is usually a complete non-issue.
[1]: We popularly call this kind of connection "balanced," but we're wrong about that since there's usually hardly any concern about impedance matching. But it's definitely consistently differential, so I find this less-popular nomenclature to have the right amount of specificity to ~fit reality.
Ok I’ll bite…
37 miles?!? Why??
Land-mobile radio stuff. Analog, voice communication.
Our sales guy had sold a remote node for a voter system to improve receive coverage for a central dispatch system. (Signal-to-noise voters are pretty neat: They can continuously compare two or more related audio signals and [ideally!] pick the one that is best for use while discarding the others.)
That node wasn't all that far away as the crow flies, but it was a very long way out in telephone cabling miles. It spread across two different telco LATAs.
So we rented this very long series of bits of wire held together by scotchloks and punch blocks and whatever else in telephone world to use, and we used it. It was not a conditioned circuit: Just wire.
The specific endpoints of that wire were kind of neat, too: There was some basic EQ that could be used to help compensate, and (IIRC) some impedance adjustment to dial in the circuit itself.
And there was a continuous pilot tone used to set gain: Apparently, when wire gets really long like that, atmospheric conditions can dynamically change its attenuation.
Putting a pilot tone near the middle of the voice range (to be notched it out later) and using its level to set gain helps to improve consistency.
That wireline stuff all worked pretty well.
(The remote node was ultimately a bust. The sales guy also tried to cram too much shit into one feedline and antenna, and the gear to combine and separate all of those signals ate too much energy to make any of it an improvement over doing nothing at all.
Which is... well, that's exactly what the engineering told him would happen, but he did it anyway.
No part of this was inexpensive.)
It's fashionable to dunk on audiophiles because many of their beliefs are silly and there are businesses that prey on them selling them "oxygen-free" cables and stuff like that. And some of their beliefs are auto-suggestion. But here's another way to look at it: some audio setups will sound better than others in your living room, because of a million variables you can't really control for. Maybe one manufacturer compensates for speaker characteristics in a different way and that accidentally works better with the speaker you have and the room you're in. Maybe it's the deficiencies of the amplifier that prevent resonance from a nearby bookshelf. Or a ceiling lamp. Or maybe they cause resonance that actually sounds good to you.
So yeah, audiophiles are in over their heads and tend to attribute near-mystical properties to individual electronic components, but the only tool they can rely on is trial and error. So if you can afford it, and if some of it seemingly sounds better... have fun? You're going to make mistakes, but that's not the end of the world.
Or they could buy equipment with active room conditioning like Dirac. I have Dirac receivers in two rooms that are absolutely terrible listening areas, and running the full Dirac calibration on the room creates a soundstage where you don’t hear individual speakers anymore.
But it’s much more fun to spend crazy money on magic rocks and snake oil that make your rich audiophile friends want their own magic rocks.
https://www.machinadynamica.com/machina31.htm
I would advise against systems that apply complex EQ curves on the outputs to compensate for distortions caused by the room. These systems can only optimize for a single listening position in the room (the sweet spot).
The problems are multiple;
1. When you move out of the sweet spot to listen anywhere else in the room, the music becomes distorted because you can are now hearing an EQ curve that is compensating for the sweet spot, but has nothing to do with the frequency response in the other listening positions.
2. These automatic systems tend to apply dozens of small EQ bands to the output, which smears the phase relationships of the record and dulls transient response. The feeling is of the record being mushy and dull.
3. These systems cannot account for time-domain ringing issues in the listening room. So a corrective EQ boost to compensate for a dip in the sweet spot will become a loud ringing at that frequency elsewhere in the room.
4. Corrective EQ cannot compensate for the deepest frequency nulls, no matter how much of a compensatory boost you make. A heavy handed boost to compensate this way will cause massive ringing elsewhere in the room.
I could go on.
These automatic room correction devices cause far more problems than they solve. There are ways to apply some EQ correction, but you will get 10x larger returns on performance by addressing acoustic issues introduced by the room, rather than trying to compensate on the speaker outputs.
Source: I design and build high-end recording studios for working audio professionals and tune speaker rigs for Grammy-winning artists.
Dirac won't be able to fully solve the room issues AKA it's not a replacement for proper room treatment, but at least it can reliably make the sound in the room not terrible.
Yes. In my experience, hi-fi enthusiasts almost entirely overlook the importance of addressing acoustic issues caused by the room. The ones that do, often do too little and in ways that are ineffectual.
Granted, the space is not easy for people to intuit on their own. It opens the door to a lot of terrible ideas that get propogated by people who don't know any better.
Source: I design and build high-end recording studios for audio professionals.
> Or they could buy equipment with active room conditioning like Dirac.
You realize that the pitch for this is basically the same as the pitch for magic pebbles? It's a cure-all box you put on the wire to make things sound better, for a low price of $1,500 or something like that.
I know enough about signal processing to know that magic pebbles probably work worse, but I can think of many reasons why it might not produce the audio you subjectively like better. I suspect it can't really even correct for many of the real-world issues you might have, because equalization doesn't fix echoes, resonance, etc.
In any case, it's a bit of a strawman, because most audiophiles are not buying pebbles in the first place. They're trying vacuum tubes instead of ICs, or are trying out different op-amps, or stuff like that.
> some audio setups will sound better than others in your living room, because of a million variables you can't really control for
Erin over at Erin's Audio Corner did a really nice video[1] recently which focuses on room treatment, but dives into some of these variables which gives a good insight in why something that works well for you might be horrible in my living room.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTshtgikT7Q
This presupposes that audiophiles are finding real improvements in sound quality in their cases.
They aren't. They aren't even seeing statistical noise. There is nothing an "oxygen-free" cable can do to your sound, regardless of your unique particulars. They will still insist it sounds better.
But trial and error is not the only tool. So many of these audiophile scams fall apart with even the most basic knowledge. You don’t need to be an audio engineer to understand that an expensive audiophile SATA cable won’t make your music sound any different. Analog components are less obvious, but it doesn’t take too much to know that speaker cable is a lot less important than the speakers, and special deoxygenated cables are a waste of money, or that there’s dozens or hundreds of miles of wire between your outlet and the power plant so spending a thousand dollars on a power cable for the last two feet is unwise.
One problem is that they will try to convince other people to follow in their obvious nonsense. Convincing someone to spend a bunch of money on an Ethernet cable to make their sound better is victimizing them.
It’s also just symptomatic of a general failure of critical thinking that can become properly dangerous. There’s little fundamental difference between “I swapped in an expensive USB cable and it sounded better so high end USB cable is worth it” and “my kid got his shots and then he got diagnosed with autism so vaccines caused it.”
I was never too fanatical about the signal chain. The room and the loudspeakers were always more important to me. There was a time when things like SACD and high res audio were interesting, but it became clear this stuff has negligible impact compared to concerns like the dimensions of the room.
My preferred equipment today is a MiniDSP 2x4HD, a pair of 8" studio monitors on floor stands, a 12" subwoofer and a tape measure. The whole setup cost maybe $1200 and is nearly indistinguishable from my prior setup which cost easily 10x as much.
If you've got a bunch of money to spend on audio gear, the best thing you can probably buy right now is some rockwool and the time of a construction crew.
Hey, don't diss SACD. I have a DVD player that happens to do SACD that I'm hoping to resell to an audiophile for five or more times what I paid for it at some point, I just have to wait another ten years or so for it to become a rare piece of classic audio hardware, so far it's only about 20 years old.
Thought here: I think they're missing the issue here.
I am not an audiophile by any means, but the thing is cables are more than just resistance. Cables radiate energy, cables absorb ambient energy, cables are both capacitors and inductors (both of which will exhibit a frequency-dependent response). Perfect shield, I can't imagine it mattering. Imperfect shield--I can easily see it mattering, although not to the extent they claim.
Don't test against a banana and mud, test against quality wire vs a heap of wire. Test a straight wire with a coil of wire. Test kinked wire. (I'm sure many of us have had bad experiences with network wires that get kinked.)
The total number of people surveyed was ~6 I believe. That's a really small and insignificant sample for any reasonable deduction. So yes, these audiophiles had a hard time deducing the original source - the result cannot be generalized beyond that. From the point of scientific rigor, even for an amateur experiment, the experiment falls short. Interesting idea. I wonder if LLMs can tell any difference.
I spent 3 years in school studying to be an audio engineer, and have built all my own stereo set ups from random equipment and home made bits and bobs, but I am fussy about a clean signal and carefull speaker placement, do silly things like wash a record in the sink with soap and water, and since I run missmatched speakers, amps that are not built tough, die quickly, just occured to me to impidence match sides by daisy chaining random speakers till I get a match, liking that. But yep!, we are not whales, and cant hear at 200khz and dont need to hear the difference between mud and bananas, but I think a whale would.
I'd recommend AudioScienceReview for anyone looking for measurements-based evaluations of audio equipment instead of the weird and wrongly incentivized audio review ecosystem.
Yup. Measurements are king.
And an objectively good setup is not expensive.
A cheap pair of Sennheiser HD600 for headphones will last effectively forever and sound great paired with a very competitively priced Topping DX3Pro+ for external soundcard/amplifier.
I remember Technics used to advertise with amplifiers that used bamboo somewhere in the capacitors? Always wondered if there was actual bamboo in there somewhere and what the electrical effects were...
they use bamboo in the production of special carbons used in capacitors in a lot of devices.
it's sustainable, apparently. I don't know anything about it really.
The perfect speaker system is indistinguishable from having a live band in the room with you (when blindfolded).
Can today's audio systems do that? How much money do I have to spend to get there?
The sound system isn't the limiting factor there, the recording itself is. If the input wasn't recorded with that in mind, no amount of money wasted on the outputting system can fix that.
Usually you only get some specially-crafted demo files that are capable of fooling you.
I have a background in bands, producing records, mixing, and designing high end studios, tuning speaker rigs, etc. In my experience, a record has never truly sounded like being in the room with a band. And that's okay. To me, they're different experiences.
I think people overlook how artificial records are. Even the ones that are ostensibly "natural". Records are "hyper real" in that they are usually crafted to give you an ideal perspective of the entire ensemble. In a sense you can hear "everything" or at least hear everything perfectly balanced and crafted with intention. This could be as simple as dynamic control (compression), artificial spaces (reverb), and distortion or saturation that the average listener will interpret as "natural". In that sense it's an illusion.
Again, this is okay.
Even classical records, which often strive for naturalism use these tools to sculpt the record. Even when they do not employ these techniques I've still never heard a classical record that sounds as good as sitting in a hall in front of a world class orchestra. It's unreal how vivid the sound is when you're in the room with the orchestra. It's breathtaking and something that everyone should aspire to experience at least once.
> I've still never heard a classical record that sounds as good as sitting in a hall in front of a world class orchestra.
Never heard a SACD but a CD doesn't have the dynamic range of a live symphonic orchestra. And there is the recording equipment charateristics which matters.
I am quite sure live band will definitely sound worse than most sound systems.
My experience is I hanged out with one band in a garage where they were practicing and I attended couple live music shows in pubs.
Main upside of those live music shows is that they are not "perfect" like playing a record and each one of the gigs will be off here or there, tempo somewhere will be off or a tune will be off - or you are just having enough beers you don't care pick your way :)
I’ve noticed that the average guy mixing for house bands usually doesn’t care about making it sound good, just doing the minimum necessary.
If you’re in a band and care about sound quality, bring your own mix guy!
> Main upside of those live music shows is that they are not "perfect" like playing a record
That's a very different metric. How good the sound is vs. what the sound is.
That’s my point.
I've been in demo rooms that priced in about $100-300k (~2015 dollars), and those sound remarkably close. Not all sound/bands can be reproduced, and it really depends on the recording. Could you do it for less, also? Probably. But it was pretty fun to hear the highest end.
My 500$ KEF Q150 setup sound like the band is here when I close my eyes. The sound will be shaped more by the acoustics of the room than by the actual speakers anyway.
Live bands can also have crappy sound systems or play in crappy rooms.
> As we can see in the image above, there are only six correct answers out of 43 guesses
I would guess that this experiment is under powered and no conclusions can be drawn from it.
This reminds me of Ken Fritz, a man who spent decades perfecting his living room’s acoustics and building custom gear for it.
https://archive.is/6XsTA
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4b2IOOhJmxw
This article and these comments make a caricature of audiophiles, akin to mocking aeronautics because of a flat earther steam-powered rocket pilot.
Audio equipment is produced by engineers and they create elegant solutions to physical constraints. There is a huge difference in quality when hearing a pair of Allison One speakers, or AKG K1000 headphones over an airpod.
Some engineers believe in speaker wire improvements, most don't. Some even openly acknowledge they don't believe but use premium wires to satisfy customers' demands. Most audio forums outright ban the discussion of speaker wire because it's so contentious.
Dismissing the industry that supports audio engineering is dismissing the disciplines of circuit, materials, and sound engineering.
Sure, there are extremes and charlatans out there like the guys who sell magic rocks, but wtf, some of you pay for skins to play in a mmog.
Nobody is saying that your 1000 euro speakers sound the same like the earbuds that came with your mp3 player in 2005. You know, the ones with the injection mold ports still there, that would dig into your ears.
This is to expose the people that buy gold wires for USB, a digital protocol.
You are free to spend your money how you like, but extreme diminishing returns are a very much overlooked thing in the "audiophile" circles.
There are definitely better headphones and worse ones, that is elementary. But there are also very real limits to human senses which the industry seems to have ignored for a very, very long time in order to profit off of a niche self-indulgent audience who can afford it.
Of course, nothing will change.
Audiophiles ARE the same thing as flat earthers
Except that they're not mocking audiophiles, or calling them flat earthers. They're presenting the results of an experiment in a detached and fairly clinical manner. It's not the most rigorously-controlled experiment because they were having a bit of fun, but it's an experimental result nonetheless, and that's all it is, they're not judging people over it or calling them names.
The point about haughty attitude is an important, but rarely mentioned. No one has convinced me to reexamine and change my views by calling me stupid, mocking me, and pointing a finger. If anything, it makes me avoid both that person and their whole group.
"the industry that supports audio engineering" though — are you sure this support is welcome? It is not unlike asking to treat counterfeit drug producers with dignity and respect because they support medical professionals.
I really do not see how any actual engineer producing audio equipment would not be there if not for a company selling one-directional ethernet cables for 1000/m that improve sound, with a plastic bag filled with gravel that also improves sound... I mean...
I don’t question that audiophiles hear different things on expensive equipment, but I think it’s all placebo. “If I spend a stupid amount of money on this, my brain will gin up the sound to satisfy my expectations.”
it's definitely pointless over the age of 40. mostly pointless prior to that too. a 20 year old listening with young ears is hearing vastly better audio
I cant pack wet mud into a tube and run it in the attic and it stay wet. Same with bananas unfortunatly as that would give banana plugs a lot more meaning.
I've recently been wondering if audiophilia is so polarizing a topic for reasons related to concept that some folks hear Laurel instead of Yanny.
I connect my speakers with audiophile grade banana connectors, I don't like mud connectors since the sound becomes muddy
Yeh, to zoom out a bit, this is a pattern with all products. It’s all a scam. The only thing you should ever pay for is build quality (you should buy something once, that you can hand down to your kids) and staff wages (something that is made in your own country so you’re not undermining your own economy, this is more of a moral reason).
The biggest problem with audio hardware businesses is 95% of what they say about their products is marketing bullshit. It doesn't take a lot of money to get really good gear, if you put in the research, but its very easy to get ripped off if you don't, spending multiple times more than you need to get a worse result.
Just look at the boxes for half this stuff, quoting peak power for speakers instead of RMS, which is the equivalent of saying "This LED hits 50 watts for .00001 seconds during startup! Wow so amazing! (but don't look at the average 1 watt of output past that)"
The speakers, the cables, the AMPs, even digital source cables nearly all have 90% marketing budgets which drive up the price of many products without increasing quality at all.
What are some affordable speakers that sound great?
Right now I got Presonus Eris studio monitors, however studio monitors might not be to everyones taste because they have a flat response. But I use them because they help hearing speech in modern movies because they don't drown out the mid range.
The very best deals change every few years though. As soon as word of mouth catches and something becomes too popular the business suits look for ways to take advantage. Scrolling old school style forums for audio enthusiast s can lead you to some good lesser known (and thus cheap) brands though.
It really depends on the music you listen to and what your ears are already use to.
I thought my fathers old setup always sounded amazing when I was younger. Coming back to it 20 years later though, it sounds stupidly scooped to my ears. Same speakers but what has changed is the music I was playing on them and what my ears expect to hear. 20 years ago I was more into guitar/bass/drum/vocal music that these speakers were made for.
There is really no such thing as "sound quality". There is just different EQ, frequency range, etc.
This seems like a business opportunity. “Ethically sourced organic mud speaker wires for a clean, organic, pure sound.” /s
Forged under blue moon light for perfect electron alignment inside the wires.
Don't forget to use the full moon to recharge the quartz crystals in that analog gear
Ah, that's why Paix Dieu is such good beer. The electrons are aligned.