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talove | 3 years ago
Equipment and room acoustics play a great deal in how much information you perceive from an audio wave. It's shocking when you step into a treated room from high-end speakers. I've done a lot of damage to my ears over the years as a sound engineer, tour manager, musician. I have mild tinnitus. I can still walk into a treated room and listen to audio from a high-end sound system and have a bunch of "OH SHIT" moments where I perceive so much more information than I do through headphones, car stereos, high-end home systems.
The last 1-2 decades of computer audio have been a race toward the bottom of punchy bass and air'y high end. It's the equivalent of motion smoothing on TVs. Except nobody talks about it, you can't turn it off, and 'good sound' is just stuff that has a tight thump. This is true of every range of products from Airpod Max's, to high-end Bang & Olufsen to Sonos systems.
Anyway, my point with that is...Sure this stuff may not get preference in a blind test. That's missing the point tho. The audiophile's pursuit is to limit points in the signal path that create distortion and cause loss of fidelity.
Do these cables do much? Probably not compared to another pair of cables with gold plated connectors and high-quality copper. That said, the real test in high-end gear is not a blind test of one song, it's doing something like listening to the snare drum ring in 10 different songs, something with a lot of resonance and overtones, and see if you can actually perceive more information across a set of songs.
If all these cables offer is high-quality materials, construction, and quality control and the cost to produce them is 60-80% of that. Then great, I am glad they exist and I hope they make a buck making them.
jacquesm|3 years ago
Absolutely. A quality audio level spectrum analyzer in a few grams with this incredible output system. Nature is amazing at every turn.
> Equipment and room acoustics play a great deal in how much information you perceive from an audio wave. It's shocking when you step into a treated room from high-end speakers. I've done a lot of damage to my ears over the years as a sound engineer, tour manager, musician. I have mild tinnitus. I can still walk into a treated room and listen to audio from a high-end sound system and have a bunch of "OH SHIT" moments where I perceive so much more information than I do through headphones, car stereos, high-end home systems.
Good for you. But just being able to listen closely - the kind of thing that makes the difference between a good sound engineer and a not-so-good one - is hard work and requires your undivided attention. Most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a master, a digitized version of the same master and an MP3. Which is fine.
> The last 1-2 decades of computer audio have been a race toward the bottom of punchy bass and air'y high end. It's the equivalent of motion smoothing on TVs. Except nobody talks about it, you can't turn it off, and 'good sound' is just stuff that has a tight thump. This is true of every range of products from Airpod Max's, to high-end Bang & Olufsen to Sonos systems.
Indeed. But: compression alone, streaming artifacts, synthesis of the sound back from whatever junk the compression algorithm introduced, all of these are such enormous sources of distortion that all a high end system will do is accentuate the junk. Less clarity may well be a blessing in that case.
> Anyway, my point with that is...Sure this stuff may not get preference in a blind test. That's missing the point tho. The audiophile's pursuit is to limit points in the signal path that create distortion and cause loss of fidelity.
Yes. And these cables are bullshit.
mmastrac|3 years ago
Funny enough this bugged me at the start, but now I no longer care or notice it and actually dislike when TVs have it turned off. We all got used to a certain video standard and now it's a different standard and it's Just Fine.