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Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

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Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#351

Post by trashcan »

myrandomcomment wrote: post #63
Bud wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is what I was thinking. Why not just install a solar roof and a Tesla Powerwall? Way-ass cheaper and a lot more benefit.

I had the Tesla guys out the day after xmas doing the survey for the roof! Looking forward to power off the grid (PGE has 15 outages this year). For my audio equipment I did the sane thing an used a good PDU. 40K for a power pole is silly money for no really use. I have a reasonably priced tube amp, speakers and record player. There is some point where I just cannot hear the difference. This is stuff is here is just…

Are you going to get a powerwall? If not be aware that in some (all?) states if you don't have your own battery source, your power will be designed so it is interrupted during an outage.

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#352

Post by atoav »

ladzoppelin wrote: post #292
AdrianB1 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't understand the power of naivety, placebo effect, dreams and stupidity composed (multiply all). Not in any way intended to insult these people, I know a few (not as rich) and they simply do not want to understand the basic principles behind digital signals, error corrections etc. I know people that work in IT and still pretend that audio transmission over USB can add jitter to music and that a DAC can "open"…

Power, DAC'S and headphones are pretty much all that matter when it comes to sound quality. Power matters the most. "You don't understand the power of naivety, placebo effect, dreams and stupidity composed (multiply all)." Its not that simple.

If you use speakers add amplifiers, speakers and (most important) acoustics

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#353

Post by justtopost »

seandougall wrote: post #64
bayindirh wrote: post #59

I don't understand this type of audiophiles. I also have a fairly high end, vintage audio system at home, but I'd never do anything like that in the name of audio quality. There's a quote I love about these people: A normal person uses the audio system to listen music, while an audiophile uses music to listen to his audio system.

That's a very apt quote. The way I look at things like this is: Do recording studios go to the same lengths? After all, if the effect is real, and the studio didn't do something to mitigate it, then it's going to be on the track regardless of what you do in playback at home. Much more so, even, because of the gain stages involved when recording a microphone signal. (Spoiler alert: Recording studios do not install the…

Most larger studios have a huge isolation trasformer for the whole set of studio circuits, and then smaller local filters like furmans. Balanced wiring as noted, also occasionally makes an appearance, but is less common. I run a dedicated ground. I personally use 3 transformers, and 3 filters (one capacitance, 2 mot). Not all in series mind you, but digital and analog gear are on seperate circuits, and a 3rd for hybrid designs (yay 80s synths). Analog recoding is sensitive to power in a huge way, but listening is seldom as affected. Note all studios use balanced audio, while most 'audiophile' crap is still unbalanced.

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#354

Post by deltron3030 »

fvdessen wrote: post #310
deltron3030 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good DACs and ADCs are useful for recording studios who have a lot of analog outboard gear (where the signal leaves and enters their digital setup multiple times). But for normal listening where there are only one or a few conversions, the point of diminishing returns is pretty low. Most of the perceived gains in quality of higher end equipment (DACs, Amps etc.) come from the higher voltage of the outputs (where you…

I have a decent hi-fi audio system at home, and there is a clearly audible difference between playing from my high-end CD player, and playing FLAC from the audio out of my Macbook. The difference is not one of loudness but of 'energy'. A snare hit played from the high-end cd player sounds like someone actually hitting a snare; you can feel there's actual energy in the hit, while the macbook out sounds flat, even at h…

It can be the case that the output of your Macbook isn't really flat, or that you have some kind of software processing enabled. You could test a $20 class compliant Behringer UCA202 USB interface against it, which is flat, and try to disable processing or use a software which just passes the signal to the interface.

It can also be your room. If you're not exactly located in the same listening position the listening experience can change a lot, even with the same setup.

Your room is basically an equalizer and should be regarded as a part of your audio system. That's how some Hifi sellers can trick you into more expensive setups, they just change the speaker positions or your location to optimized defaults. It's crazy how they can trick people.

A harder hitting snare can be caused by changes to the upper mids and lower highs, by anything that is located between you and the speakers, and then the later reflections of the room which also add up.

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#355

Post by themodelplumber »

reaperducer wrote: post #237
themodelplumber wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would love to hear about the hardware she's using for this! It's very cool.

Nothing crazy geeky. She picked up the transmitter at Goodwill for $5. It’s one of those “talking house” things that real estate agents use to tell people about houses when bobody’s around. http://talkinghouse.com Looking at that web site now, I think I misremembered the 15 watt figure. That seems way too high. But whatever it is puts out a clean signal across the neighborhood. It came with just a long wire for an an…

That's really cool, I didn't know those transmitters existed. Thanks for the tip. :-)

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#356

Post by hwillis »

jonsen wrote: post #301
hwillis wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Batteries have significant and unavoidable source impedance. When the current goes up and down, as it does once per cycle, tens of thousands of times per second, the voltage of the power bus would move up and down slightly. You can obviously regulate it, but the whole point of what these guys want is an absolutely clean input. The voltage of the grid will fall MUCH less when you pull current.

Power from the grid is AC. It falls to zero a hundred times a second.

Sure, but it doesnt depend on the load. Two different kinds of voltage variance.

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#357

Post by KozmoNau7 »

tinco wrote: post #274
fyfy18 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding your usage of 'cheap', I would read this as the difference between a 50c or $5 component. I can understand spending more to get a reputable brand compared to buying the cheapest no name item from AliExpress. However audiophiles are a whole different level. People spend tens of thousands of dollars on items that have questionable difference in quality. I guess people do the same with cars though, a Toyota Co…

Yeah, and sometimes one car is better than another car, even if they have the same engine ($5 wolfson DAC), because more love is given to everything around the engine. If you just want to put together a cheap car with a good engine, that's a different thing from wanting to build a comfortable or speedy car with a good engine. Someone who isn't in the market for that extra level will just be a sceptic and say "this Au…

"More love" in this case doesn't have to mean more than maybe a retail price of $50 or so, to get a DAC with a frequency response so flat and a noise level so low that any difference to more expensive items is purely academic.

Digital to analog conversion is a solved problem, with inexpensive commodity parts. Even if you buy an expensive DAC, the studio gear used to produce the music you listen to has gone through dozens of A->D->A conversions, all done using standard commodity parts. No one builds fancy audiophile-approved DACs and ADCs into mixer or studio gear.

In my home setup, I'm using a DBX DriveRack PX as a DSP EQ and crossover between my main monitors and subs. It's almost a decade old, but its signal/noise ratio is on par with the newest gear you can buy. Any competently built pro gear from the last ~10-15 years with 24-bit conversion can be plugged right into any analog signal chain and be 100% audibly transparent.

People worry way too much about the electronics, and way too little about their speakers and rooms.

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#358

Post by hakfoo »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #261
hwillis wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> say, a $1,000 bottle of wine (which cannot be distinguished in a blind taste test from a $5 bottle)? Well for one thing, that's wrong- distinguishing wine is easy. Even people who are just pretty into wine can identify different vinyards etc. and actual sommeliers can nail wine down to the year it was bottled and the conditions it was stored[1]. The thing you're referring to is that when you line up regular people…

> Normal audiophiles will typically aim for objective metrics like THD, but the extreme guys are often aiming for subjective/vague things like timbre, color and soundstage. They should probably be using $200 equalizers to get that, not buying $10000 components where more than half of them couldn't possibly change the sound.

What I find interesting is that equalization seems to be looked down on among a lot of audiophiles. If you don't like how your $2000 amplifier is voiced, get a different one instead of dropping a cheap equalizer inline.

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#359

Post by intopieces »

reaperducer wrote: post #139

The 82-year-old lawyer already had a $60,000 American-made amplifier, 1960s German loudspeakers that once belonged to a theater, Japanese audio cables threaded with gold and silver, and other pricey equipment. Meanwhile, my wife plays her Dean Martin records through her own personal 15-watt AM radio station in the closet, picked up on vintage tube radios scattered around the house so the music sounds like it was inte…

I take it you didn’t grow up in church. Hear me out: Audiophilia is a combination of technophilia and ritual, and it’s no surprise that Japan is the center of the audio technology world, given its culture.

All sound perception is subjective. In “MP3: The Meaning of a Format,” the author sites a study that showed college students preferred the sound of 128 MP3 over “lossless” or “HD” audio, probably because that’s what they cut their teeth on. This is why we have mastering with blown-out loudness and compression, even on CDs.

For others, though, even secular people, music is sacred. The quest for the perfect sound through fiddly nobs and fancy cables is like building a personal cathedral. It’s all subjective, but there’s no denying that ritual enhances it.

Re: Audiophiles in Japan Are Installing Their Own Power Poles

#360

Post by village-idiot »

GuB-42 wrote: post #176
village-idiot wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll pay a bit extra for a nicely wrapped cable with really good anti-tangle and strain relief properties, because that’s convenient.

And that's exactly what real high quality cable is. Professional cables are usually flexible, with robust insulation and connectors. They may also be fire rated. Quality control ensures that cables will always be up to specs because people doing the installation have other things to do than dealing with defective cables. Like most pro stuff, pro cables are not "better", they are cables that won't be a problem.

Sometimes “professional” just means “designed to handle a lot of abuse”.
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