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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
#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.
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.
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.
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.
honestly if you use speakers 90% of the sound quality is in your room and where you put your speakers, not the speakers themselves. the room is where your money should go.
for the speakers, get active speakers, as big as you can, and connect them to a dac that costs more than 100usd, and you're good to go. after that it's diminishing returns land.
also by virtue of you having 2 spaced ears, stereo speakers will have sound cancellations (in the ~1k hz region? i dont remember very well) for mid signal.
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.
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...
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 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:
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.)
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."
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.
> 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.)
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 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 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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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).
crims0n|16 days ago
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!)
Youden|16 days ago
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.
atoav|16 days ago
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.
bayindirh|16 days ago
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.
Youden|16 days ago
2) Absolutely and it's constantly getting better.
FireBeyond|16 days ago
Music lovers buy audio equipment to listen to their music.
Audiophiles buy music to listen to their audio equipment.
EnPissant|15 days ago
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.
cbg0|16 days ago
alexchantavy|16 days ago
wccrawford|16 days ago
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.
throwworhtthrow|15 days ago
tom_m|14 days ago
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.
rayiner|15 days ago
gambiting|16 days ago
dubeye|16 days ago
lucyjojo|12 days ago
for the speakers, get active speakers, as big as you can, and connect them to a dac that costs more than 100usd, and you're good to go. after that it's diminishing returns land.
also by virtue of you having 2 spaced ears, stereo speakers will have sound cancellations (in the ~1k hz region? i dont remember very well) for mid signal.
wiredpancake|14 days ago
[deleted]
lproven|15 days ago
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.
kergonath|13 days ago
Out of curiosity, what did you get?
gorgoiler|16 days ago
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.
toast0|16 days ago
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.
kachapopopow|16 days ago
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...
mmmattt|16 days ago
So yes, the “good” audio is good.
pseudohadamard|15 days ago
I dunno, it reproduced my Muddy Waters LPs perfectly.
ungreased0675|16 days ago
nkrisc|16 days ago
helsinkiandrew|16 days ago
https://www.audiotherapyuk.com/product/oephi-reference-inter...
rsynnott|16 days ago
wat10000|16 days ago
anonym00se1|16 days ago
amluto|16 days ago
- 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!
ssl-3|16 days ago
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.)
calmbonsai|15 days ago
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.
just6979|14 days ago
"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.
unknown|16 days ago
[deleted]
lich_king|16 days ago
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.
kraussvonespy|16 days ago
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
magicalhippo|16 days ago
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
mrguyorama|16 days ago
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.
wat10000|14 days ago
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.”
bob1029|15 days ago
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.
pseudohadamard|15 days ago
LorenPechtel|15 days ago
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.)
metalman|16 days ago
RedShift1|16 days ago
serf|16 days ago
it's sustainable, apparently. I don't know anything about it really.
londons_explore|16 days ago
Can today's audio systems do that? How much money do I have to spend to get there?
input_sh|16 days ago
Usually you only get some specially-crafted demo files that are capable of fooling you.
Slow_Hand|15 days ago
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.
ozim|16 days ago
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 :)
nkrumm|16 days ago
hulitu|15 days ago
RupertSalt|13 days ago
throwawaypath|13 days ago
jrhizor|16 days ago
snvzz|15 days ago
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.
sheepscreek|15 days ago
hackingonempty|16 days ago
I would guess that this experiment is under powered and no conclusions can be drawn from it.
spaceport|16 days ago
impish9208|15 days ago
https://archive.is/6XsTA
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4b2IOOhJmxw
type0|16 days ago
codpiece|15 days ago
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.
4gotunameagain|15 days ago
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.
nurettin|15 days ago
Of course, nothing will change.
TiredOfLife|15 days ago
pseudohadamard|15 days ago
112233|15 days ago
"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...
kraussvonespy|16 days ago
dubeye|16 days ago
cheschire|16 days ago
AngryData|16 days ago
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.
tcoff91|16 days ago
whackernews|15 days ago
porcoda|16 days ago
RedShift1|16 days ago