I am surprised there aren’t more mentions here of AudioScienceReview.com
For anyone interested in buying speakers (or other audio products), it’s a fantastic resource and an essential one to avoid getting ripped off with severely overpriced and underperforming products; sadly, the high fidelity speaker space is crowded with such products (many of which are borderline scams), using a ton of pseudoscientific marketing babble to push products ranging from “snake-oil” bunk, to mediocre garbage that still costs the price of an exotic car for no good reason.
If you’re curious to cut through the garbage, and learn how to achieve the best sound quality for the best price with a no-nonsense approach, AudioScienceReview is the place to go. They have the highest quality objective measurements on many speakers (that goes far beyond frequency response, before you brush it off thinking that’s what I’m talking about) and tutorials on the well-established science of what makes a speaker sound better than others, and how we design and evaluate this.
It turns out you can get sound quality ~90% as good as it gets for just a few hundred dollars, and ~95% as good as it gets for a few thousand dollars (obviously just rough numbers here). Beware of speakers sold for exorbitant prices and exotic visual designs that tout how they are built, rather than what measured performance they achieve objectively.
B&W speakers are not bad, and I enjoyed mine very much when I had them. But there exist far better speakers at a fraction of the cost, and this includes their high end (like the Nautilus).
> it’s a fantastic resource and an essential one to avoid getting ripped off with severely overpriced and underperforming product
Yeah, you need to whip off the rose tinted glasses. ASR is a step in the right direction, but there are no shortage of issues with the quality and consistency of Amir's testing, or his ludicrous hyperbole.
ASR is good for graphs and stuff if you know how to interpret things.
One thing worth bearing in mind for people new to Hi-Fi audio is that the experience is very much subjective. That people’s tastes, wants and desires in music and listening experience differ wildly.
That while a loudspeaker pair or headphone may measure or perform objectively well, it may not pair up well with your particular taste, or with your music.
As an example Sennheiser’s HD800 is a well regarded high end headphone that does particularly well with the fine details of orchestral music, but lacks the low end punch required for Hip-Hop or other styles of bass heavy music, and it’s elevated treble can make the heavily distorted guitar of Black Metal incredibly grating on the ear.
Of course everyone is different. If you know the equipment you like, and how it’s sound signature translates to graphs you can use the measurements and commentary on ASR to discover other equipment knowing how it differs within that context.
Never heard these myself, but I remember that Nautilus speakers were used in an MP3 listening test by the German c't magazine in 2000[1]. Conclusion:
> In plain language, this means that our musically trained test listeners could reliably distinguish the poorer quality MP3s at 128kbps quite accurately from either of the other higher-quality samples. But when deciding between 256 kbps encoded MP3s and the original CD, no difference could be determined, on average, for all the pieces. The testers took the 256 kbps samples for the CD just as often as they
took the original CD samples themselves.
This article made me (1) never worry about "lossy audio encoding" again and (2) ignore everyone starting about "better equipment" wrt compressed audio.
Granted, they used the cheaper Nautilus 803 rather than the 801 in the test. But they also had Sennheiser Orpheus available in the listening test.
My honest and unscientific opinion is that the difference _is_ discernible but the listener needs to know what to hear for. Also, the reproduction quality is impacted by several factors like room, equipment, and recording quality (not just speaker quality).
[Anecdotal] One example of the difference between MP3 and lossless: the "image" [1] on 256kbps MP3s is worse compared to the the original uncompressed, lossless, versions (but the listening room must be appropriately prepared to reproduce a good image).
This is a highly subjective topic. IMO we'll never reach full agreement. Personally, I listen MP3 while on-the-go and lossless music at home.
Important to keep in mind the "size" of the experiment. Two interesting quotes from the article in c't magazine:
> twelve participants would be asked to come to Hanover.
> It's true that the data we collected does not support watertight
conclusions, but they do provide interesting insights.
I believe Fraunhofver did a pretty rigorous scientific test that established the CD transparency quality to be around 256kbps mp3. I don't dispute or doubt that.
However, obvious encoding artifacts abound on Spotify. Do I have a superhuman hearing?
Probably not. My hypothesis is that not everyone authors lossy files as meticulously as Fraunhofver. Also, the performance of mp3 depends on a highly linear and faithful reproduction after decoding. Mp3 is painfully obvious on crappy, processed-to-hell speaker systems like the iMac.
I think the real question is, why bother with lossy codecs? FLAC streams are lightweight by today's standards, and it's just so much simpler.
Note that the quality of MP3 encoders has changed significantly since 2000, and differed significantly between encoders at the time. (Does anyone not use LAME these days?)
After a certain point, lossy compression doesn't create any perceptible loss in audio quality as long as the rip is done well (with a good encoder, etc.), and you don't know every part of the piece in question.
e.g. in classical music, you can tell subtle differences if you've listened the piece live or performed it inside an orchestra. However, that's a pretty edge case. There are always differences if you know where to look for, otherwise it's pretty insignificant.
I got to hear the sennheiser orpheus a few years ago. Honestly it was kind of underwhelming.
It is a very physically beautiful headphone but in terms of sound, it's kind of warm with a slight haze and indistinctness in the treble. That might be pleasant for some people, but I think any modern electrostat like the L700 or SR009 would outperform it significantly if you put them side by side. I assume its value is due mostly to its rarity.
A long time ago when I had younger ears, I heard these at an audio show in London, in a "sound proof room" and I will never forget the experience. I was working for TagMclaren at the time, having just left dCS Audio and I thought I had heard a lot of high end speakers by then, but these blew my socks off and left a lasting impression.
I half believe it was the presentation - dramatic, but also extremely clever choice of SACD source content with some theatre thrown in for good measure. However, that 12 minutes in a room in conference hall in London with the Nautilus speakers was something I will never forget for a "this is what money buys you" experience. Warm, huge dynamic range, concert hall experience - comfy chair and dim lights helped as well :)
At Tag, we built the "tag mclaren speakers f1" that had a lot of elements I feel borrowed from the B&W industrial design (but made F1 grade) - I used these daily for several years, but was never able to convince myself they were as good as that one time experience.
I am a firm believer that you can get too hi-fi. Listening on B&W cans as we speak and they are undeniably hi-fi but not what you call meaty for drum & bass.
There is no such thing as the sound of an electric guitar; the pick-ups amp and choice of speaker and cab are what makes it rock.
Ortofon recently made this mistake with a full new range of carts and needles with higher range, volume and spec all round. Nobody likes them with their existing records because they don't sound "fat". Maybe new records will be produced that presume new needles but I ain't sure that any of this is progress over hitting your favourite tree trunk with your favourite stick.
I have different speakers for different music, until B&W give these cabs out free to the yoot in Brixton there aint gonna be any good music to play one them. They will always be adequate speakers for the fabulously rich.
I started building speakers some years back, using high-end drivers and rather esoteric ... topologies: Voigt pipes, back-loaded horns, etc.
My takeaway from the several years as a hobbyist building and listening to these: full-range was the one commonality that made all the difference in the world. The two-way, three-way speakers I grew up with were crap for "sound stage" (never mind the loss in efficiency with all the crossovers).
A pair of good quality full-range drivers will sound like you are wearing headphones when you are not. Throw in a sub for the bottom end that "full" range drivers cannot carry — possibly add super-tweeters for the extra brilliance of a cymbal crash.
Fortunately low frequencies are not "spatial" since our ears are not physically very far apart so the sub does not step all over the phase information coming from the full-range. Super-tweeters are so far up in the audio spectrum that there is little competition with the full-range drivers in that regard either.
There really was not much reason, to my ears, to spend any additional energy or money on speakers at that point.
I used to work in boutique audio retail. One of the big challenges of the business is how big and heavy good speakers are. In the old days we would need to crate the speaker to customers’ house for audition as every room has a different acoustic, and try a few different speakers with more crates with a upfront fee/credit to purchase, but it doesn’t happen nearly as often anymore. Showrooms nowadays also mostly do not have the right environment and setup for the speakers to perform well as they were before. In fact most people do not have an opportunity to listen to half decent audio from a heavy passive speaker and the type of sound they could make relative to homepods is becoming more of a myth now. And the direct implication of this is speaker makers need to make more profit per sale and the price increase for Klipsch Heresy and Forte for each revision is bananas. There are still software company making solutions to emulate speaker sounds before a purchase calibrated to common headphone models, I don’t know how they function but every customer who’d tried one of those would walk away for almost certainty as it sounds crappy.
I work in high-end AV. Perceptually, in a good space, those fantastic speakers often do not make the sound people associate with "loud", no distortion, no top end becoming hissy, just the concert-level bass to clue you in to how loud it is.
People who have paid a lot for their system want that "wow" factor that immediately makes anyone think it's loud.
The other issue is that different listening material definitely needs different amplifier and processor settings - there is no setting that "just works". We find many customers do not wish to get engage with those settings these days.
I haven't listened to the Nautilus but I have listened to the B&W 800 (RRP £23500) speakers and they really have to be experienced to be belived. I was listening in a studio environment that had just installed them, as an upgrade from the already very nice Quested setup they had. When we switched to the 800's the effect was profound. The speakers just disappeared leaving this seamless soundstage where noises just happened within it, rather than relative to the L/R points of the spectrum like most speakers. It was incredible.
I'm a former audio engineer turned dev, still producing music. These babys rocketed to the top of my "if my options are ever worth anything" bucket list.
You can DIY high-end speakers, saving thousands. Sounds weird, but its true. Here is one example that is popular, there are others: http://www.donhighend.de/?page_id=3212
I demo'd the 800 D3 at a hifi shop and was very impressed. What impressed me most was that it sounded utterly effortless like they were utterly effortless. They were powered by a pair of 1KW monoblocks and every peak in the music was reproduced without a hint of strain even at concert levels.
I will say that there was a lot of treble. Stereophile's measurements (which I did not see until after the demo, so please don't think they colored my impressions!) show some big 5dB humps in the upper treble which I would say correlates to what I was hearing. https://www.stereophile.com/content/bampw-800-diamond-loudsp...
I think this boosted treble is generally a part of B&W's secret sauce across their product range. I really believe their speakers are tailored for middle-aged and elderly guys with some degree of high frequency hearing loss. Makes sense; those are the guys with enough cash to blow on speakers like these.
I am one of those guys (well, the hearing part... not the cash part) but I prefer maybe 2-3dB of boosted treble and not a full-on tweeter assault. =)
The speakers just disappeared leaving this seamless soundstage where noises just happened within it, rather than relative to the L/R points of the spectrum like most speakers. It was incredible.
This make me curious about this whole situation: speaker change equals physical location change, would that have played a part in it? Because what you describe here is exactly what (at least for me) is the effect of proper speaker placement vs suboptimal placement. I.e. this 'you don't hear the speakers anymore, instead it sounds like you're sitting in the sound' effect. Which definitely isn't there if placement is off, no matter how good speakers are. Then again, I'm not really an audio engineer so maybe you're talking about a different level of soundstage..
You can get damn close to the performance of the halo products with stuff as humble as Polk Audio floorstanders and some Emotiva amps.
Any dumbass with a table saw, glue and a bunch of clamps can make speakers that rival the highest end for pennies on the dollar. There are lots of online resources for this sort of thing.
If you think this hobby is about the most precise listening experience (bit rates, conversion, etc), you would be wrong in my eyes. It's more about the presence/power you get from a system that can saturate a 20A circuit with transients. The effective dynamic range in a real world listening room. Having your walls rattle a bit when the depth charges explode is an experience. You don't get that with sound docks/bars, headphones, etc.
>On the other hand this is why the hi-fi hobby is dying.
The actual hobby (active music listening) is dying because it has a lot of competition in the entertainment space. That's why these days good speakers often part of home theater or computer setups, with a screen in between instead of standalone systems just for music listening.
>The happy reality is that excellent audio reproduction can be achieved without spending much money;
Indeed. But people often buy for social reasons, to boast in forum threads or to belong to a circle of elitist in those communities, it's also a status game.
Studio monitors and HiFi equipment seem like different categories and use cases to me. HiFi speakers should fill the room. To get a good sound from studio monitors you need to be positioned well. Just moving a little bit can make a big difference in the sound.
I once got to listen to a pair of these at Abbey Road studio in London as a teenager. They blew me away. I was already a burgeoning audiophile (working in a branch of Sevenoaks Sound & Vision if anyone knows) but these speakers really started a love affair with audio.
Ah, Sevenoaks. I got a very good set of separates from them in ’98 (Arcam, Myryad, and B&W speakers), but I did spend a lot more money than I’d originally planned as I was young and rather susceptible to hard-sell techniques. Ended up buying everything else from Richer, who were dramatically better in that regard.
Perhaps the primary goal of Nautilus as a product is to sell other B&W speakers. It is so extraordinary and easy to remember that it can be the reason for people to choose a pair of normal looking and affordable speakers from B&W. Nautilus was for sure how I have first encountered B&W.
It's a show of engineering prowess. It's like Nikon's f0.95/50mm lens. Almost perfect, but impractical for most.
Moreover, these kind of show pieces allow technology creep to lower levels, allowing the know-how to practically improve other products down the road. I think it's necessary to have products like these.
A bit like the Bugatti Veyron. When it first came out it was explained that several companies had been trying to build this mythical car (1000HP, 400Km/h, trying to stick F1-like performance in an easy to drive "consumer" car) and all failed.
Then VW decided they'd buy the brand and do whatever it takes to make it work, result being that it's sold at a loss. Even at a million bucks. According to Wikipedia the production cost is 5 million and "Volkswagen designed the car merely as a technical exercise"
I'm surprised there's no mention of the cochlea in this article... I always assumed the design was inspired by it. Surely there's some analogy in how the human ear breaks down frequencies in the cochlea and how a speaker produces them in a similar shape?
Not necessarily; it's the (inverse) horn shape that is important here (see the higher-frequency speakers), and the woofer would simply be too long to be practical without coiling.
> Surely there's some analogy in how the human ear breaks down frequencies in the cochlea and how a speaker produces them in a similar shape?
A false analogy, at best. The sound is produced entirely by the speaker, which sits at the front of the speaker; the "nautilus" shape is simply a resonant chamber.
My father has had a pair of B&W 7xx loudspeakers for almost 30 years now.
Once you get something like that there's no reason to ever look at anything else again unless you've got issues.
I've spent a ton of time listening to them. They're really amazing.
Funny thing is he spent so much money he never could figure out what to do about home theater when that became a fad. Now Home theater is pretty much gone but his setup is still fantastic for music.
I'm probably in the minority here, but companies: please just call it the Nautilus. It's a product, not a person, and I don't care how much time or effort or personality was put into your product. I paid money for it, I own it now. It will be called "The iPad", not "iPad". It outright annoys me when companies try feigning familiarity like that.
Not a fan of how these look (subjective) but am generally a massive fan of B&W speakers. They are a class apart. Truly stunning sounding. You can listen for hours on end with zero fatigue. My bro has has pair of bookshelf (CDM1?) hooked up to Arcam pre and power amps and the sound is out of this world.
I use Bowers & Wilkins P5 (series 1) headphones after having tested every other pair in the shop and found these to sound nicest. Really like the sound, but the discoloring is pretty bad (I got the white ones).
(Could have something to do with the shop being a somewhat noisy environment and these being the only headphones without active noise cancelling that still shut out most noise, so YMMV.)
[+] [-] electrograv|4 years ago|reply
For anyone interested in buying speakers (or other audio products), it’s a fantastic resource and an essential one to avoid getting ripped off with severely overpriced and underperforming products; sadly, the high fidelity speaker space is crowded with such products (many of which are borderline scams), using a ton of pseudoscientific marketing babble to push products ranging from “snake-oil” bunk, to mediocre garbage that still costs the price of an exotic car for no good reason.
If you’re curious to cut through the garbage, and learn how to achieve the best sound quality for the best price with a no-nonsense approach, AudioScienceReview is the place to go. They have the highest quality objective measurements on many speakers (that goes far beyond frequency response, before you brush it off thinking that’s what I’m talking about) and tutorials on the well-established science of what makes a speaker sound better than others, and how we design and evaluate this.
It turns out you can get sound quality ~90% as good as it gets for just a few hundred dollars, and ~95% as good as it gets for a few thousand dollars (obviously just rough numbers here). Beware of speakers sold for exorbitant prices and exotic visual designs that tout how they are built, rather than what measured performance they achieve objectively.
B&W speakers are not bad, and I enjoyed mine very much when I had them. But there exist far better speakers at a fraction of the cost, and this includes their high end (like the Nautilus).
[+] [-] js2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rodgerd|4 years ago|reply
Yeah, you need to whip off the rose tinted glasses. ASR is a step in the right direction, but there are no shortage of issues with the quality and consistency of Amir's testing, or his ludicrous hyperbole.
[+] [-] JohnJamesRambo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tsiklon|4 years ago|reply
One thing worth bearing in mind for people new to Hi-Fi audio is that the experience is very much subjective. That people’s tastes, wants and desires in music and listening experience differ wildly.
That while a loudspeaker pair or headphone may measure or perform objectively well, it may not pair up well with your particular taste, or with your music.
As an example Sennheiser’s HD800 is a well regarded high end headphone that does particularly well with the fine details of orchestral music, but lacks the low end punch required for Hip-Hop or other styles of bass heavy music, and it’s elevated treble can make the heavily distorted guitar of Black Metal incredibly grating on the ear.
Of course everyone is different. If you know the equipment you like, and how it’s sound signature translates to graphs you can use the measurements and commentary on ASR to discover other equipment knowing how it differs within that context.
[+] [-] em500|4 years ago|reply
> In plain language, this means that our musically trained test listeners could reliably distinguish the poorer quality MP3s at 128kbps quite accurately from either of the other higher-quality samples. But when deciding between 256 kbps encoded MP3s and the original CD, no difference could be determined, on average, for all the pieces. The testers took the 256 kbps samples for the CD just as often as they took the original CD samples themselves.
This article made me (1) never worry about "lossy audio encoding" again and (2) ignore everyone starting about "better equipment" wrt compressed audio.
Granted, they used the cheaper Nautilus 803 rather than the 801 in the test. But they also had Sennheiser Orpheus available in the listening test.
[1] https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?topic=27324.0
[+] [-] vatican_banker|4 years ago|reply
[Anecdotal] One example of the difference between MP3 and lossless: the "image" [1] on 256kbps MP3s is worse compared to the the original uncompressed, lossless, versions (but the listening room must be appropriately prepared to reproduce a good image).
This is a highly subjective topic. IMO we'll never reach full agreement. Personally, I listen MP3 while on-the-go and lossless music at home.
Important to keep in mind the "size" of the experiment. Two interesting quotes from the article in c't magazine:
> twelve participants would be asked to come to Hanover.
> It's true that the data we collected does not support watertight conclusions, but they do provide interesting insights.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereo_imaging
[+] [-] vnorilo|4 years ago|reply
However, obvious encoding artifacts abound on Spotify. Do I have a superhuman hearing?
Probably not. My hypothesis is that not everyone authors lossy files as meticulously as Fraunhofver. Also, the performance of mp3 depends on a highly linear and faithful reproduction after decoding. Mp3 is painfully obvious on crappy, processed-to-hell speaker systems like the iMac.
I think the real question is, why bother with lossy codecs? FLAC streams are lightweight by today's standards, and it's just so much simpler.
[+] [-] brnt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bayindirh|4 years ago|reply
e.g. in classical music, you can tell subtle differences if you've listened the piece live or performed it inside an orchestra. However, that's a pretty edge case. There are always differences if you know where to look for, otherwise it's pretty insignificant.
[+] [-] voldacar|4 years ago|reply
It is a very physically beautiful headphone but in terms of sound, it's kind of warm with a slight haze and indistinctness in the treble. That might be pleasant for some people, but I think any modern electrostat like the L700 or SR009 would outperform it significantly if you put them side by side. I assume its value is due mostly to its rarity.
[+] [-] jfrunyon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrlambchop|4 years ago|reply
I half believe it was the presentation - dramatic, but also extremely clever choice of SACD source content with some theatre thrown in for good measure. However, that 12 minutes in a room in conference hall in London with the Nautilus speakers was something I will never forget for a "this is what money buys you" experience. Warm, huge dynamic range, concert hall experience - comfy chair and dim lights helped as well :)
At Tag, we built the "tag mclaren speakers f1" that had a lot of elements I feel borrowed from the B&W industrial design (but made F1 grade) - I used these daily for several years, but was never able to convince myself they were as good as that one time experience.
[+] [-] teknopaul|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JKCalhoun|4 years ago|reply
My takeaway from the several years as a hobbyist building and listening to these: full-range was the one commonality that made all the difference in the world. The two-way, three-way speakers I grew up with were crap for "sound stage" (never mind the loss in efficiency with all the crossovers).
A pair of good quality full-range drivers will sound like you are wearing headphones when you are not. Throw in a sub for the bottom end that "full" range drivers cannot carry — possibly add super-tweeters for the extra brilliance of a cymbal crash.
Fortunately low frequencies are not "spatial" since our ears are not physically very far apart so the sub does not step all over the phase information coming from the full-range. Super-tweeters are so far up in the audio spectrum that there is little competition with the full-range drivers in that regard either.
There really was not much reason, to my ears, to spend any additional energy or money on speakers at that point.
[+] [-] bwang29|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ninjaoxygen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StavrosK|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] te_chris|4 years ago|reply
I'm a former audio engineer turned dev, still producing music. These babys rocketed to the top of my "if my options are ever worth anything" bucket list.
[+] [-] MrBuddyCasino|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnBooty|4 years ago|reply
I will say that there was a lot of treble. Stereophile's measurements (which I did not see until after the demo, so please don't think they colored my impressions!) show some big 5dB humps in the upper treble which I would say correlates to what I was hearing. https://www.stereophile.com/content/bampw-800-diamond-loudsp...
I think this boosted treble is generally a part of B&W's secret sauce across their product range. I really believe their speakers are tailored for middle-aged and elderly guys with some degree of high frequency hearing loss. Makes sense; those are the guys with enough cash to blow on speakers like these.
I am one of those guys (well, the hearing part... not the cash part) but I prefer maybe 2-3dB of boosted treble and not a full-on tweeter assault. =)
[+] [-] stinos|4 years ago|reply
This make me curious about this whole situation: speaker change equals physical location change, would that have played a part in it? Because what you describe here is exactly what (at least for me) is the effect of proper speaker placement vs suboptimal placement. I.e. this 'you don't hear the speakers anymore, instead it sounds like you're sitting in the sound' effect. Which definitely isn't there if placement is off, no matter how good speakers are. Then again, I'm not really an audio engineer so maybe you're talking about a different level of soundstage..
[+] [-] JohnBooty|4 years ago|reply
On the other hand this is why the hi-fi hobby is dying.
With products like this, we promote the idea that high fidelity audio requires all sorts of exotic equipment that few can afford.
The happy reality is that excellent audio reproduction can be achieved without spending much money; certainly less than a modern game console.
One example would be JBL's excellent entry level studio monitors. While they don't play super loud, they measure nearly impeccably and sometimes go on sale for as little as $200/pair. https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/j...
[+] [-] bob1029|4 years ago|reply
Any dumbass with a table saw, glue and a bunch of clamps can make speakers that rival the highest end for pennies on the dollar. There are lots of online resources for this sort of thing.
If you think this hobby is about the most precise listening experience (bit rates, conversion, etc), you would be wrong in my eyes. It's more about the presence/power you get from a system that can saturate a 20A circuit with transients. The effective dynamic range in a real world listening room. Having your walls rattle a bit when the depth charges explode is an experience. You don't get that with sound docks/bars, headphones, etc.
[+] [-] deltron3030|4 years ago|reply
The actual hobby (active music listening) is dying because it has a lot of competition in the entertainment space. That's why these days good speakers often part of home theater or computer setups, with a screen in between instead of standalone systems just for music listening.
>The happy reality is that excellent audio reproduction can be achieved without spending much money;
Indeed. But people often buy for social reasons, to boast in forum threads or to belong to a circle of elitist in those communities, it's also a status game.
[+] [-] k-mcgrady|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e17|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robin_reala|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] john61|4 years ago|reply
https://www.boesendorfer.com/en/pianos/disklavier-edition
If you do not have the time and talent to play it yourself, you can listen to Horowitz or others playing live in your home on a real piano.
[+] [-] mixedbit|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bayindirh|4 years ago|reply
Moreover, these kind of show pieces allow technology creep to lower levels, allowing the know-how to practically improve other products down the road. I think it's necessary to have products like these.
[+] [-] sudhirj|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stef25|4 years ago|reply
Then VW decided they'd buy the brand and do whatever it takes to make it work, result being that it's sold at a loss. Even at a million bucks. According to Wikipedia the production cost is 5 million and "Volkswagen designed the car merely as a technical exercise"
[+] [-] tcmb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] askvictor|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duskwuff|4 years ago|reply
A false analogy, at best. The sound is produced entirely by the speaker, which sits at the front of the speaker; the "nautilus" shape is simply a resonant chamber.
[+] [-] louwrentius|4 years ago|reply
I have a pair of B&W 683s, not even that fancy or anything but they are more than good enough for my 40+ year old ears.
[+] [-] ben7799|4 years ago|reply
Once you get something like that there's no reason to ever look at anything else again unless you've got issues.
I've spent a ton of time listening to them. They're really amazing.
Funny thing is he spent so much money he never could figure out what to do about home theater when that became a fad. Now Home theater is pretty much gone but his setup is still fantastic for music.
[+] [-] dave_sullivan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smoldesu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vstrien|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iampivot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wodenokoto|4 years ago|reply
Maybe this link is more ergonomic to other users as well.
[+] [-] alias_neo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giuliomagnifico|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rorykoehler|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qiqitori|4 years ago|reply
(Could have something to do with the shop being a somewhat noisy environment and these being the only headphones without active noise cancelling that still shut out most noise, so YMMV.)
[+] [-] senbarryobama|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]