
Why We Need Audiophiles - robg
http://i.gizmodo.com/5213042/why-we-need-audiophiles
======
tesseract
> going from 98.6 to 99.1 by swapping out a $2,600 AC power cable for a $4,000
> one becomes a justifiable end.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
davidmathers
_you'll get the most bang for your buck by going to a professional music store
and buying the kind of gear used in studios_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

