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Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud

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Re: Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud

#31

Post by analog31 »

anonym00se1 wrote: post #4
ungreased0675 wrote: post #2

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.

If nothing else it shows those high end $1,000+ cables they buy are nothing but placebo effect.

My hypothesis is that the $1000 cables help sell the $300 cables. I’ve seen comments to the effect of: “I’m not fooled by those $1000 cables, so I saved my money and got the $300 cables instead.”

In other words, they got fooled.

What’s happened in electronics is that there’s a cutoff, above which the audio quality doesn’t get any better, but that cutoff is much lower than anybody can believe. So the psychological cutoff is higher than the physical one, and a role of marketing is to raise that cutoff even further.

Re: Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud

#32

Post by nkrumm »

londons_explore wrote: post #29

The perfect speaker system is indistinguishable from having a live band in the room with you (when blindfolded). Can today's audio systems do that? How much money do I have to spend to get there?

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.

Re: Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud

#33

Post by wtallis »

kelipso wrote: post #10
nkrisc wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It depends on the experiment done… You need every intermediate point between the wires to be low distortion too. As in, audiophiles cannot distinguish between distortion and distortion+distortion is not really an interesting result. You need source, digital to analog conversion, pre-amp, amp, speakers to have low distortion too, and you need the room to be appropriately treated too. I didn’t look at whether they did…

Did you really mean to say that audiophiles can distinguish between no distortion and some distortion, but cannot distinguish between more distortion and less distortion?

Re: Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud

#34

Post by wccrawford »

crims0n wrote: post #26

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…

#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.

Re: Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud

#35

Post by alexchantavy »

crims0n wrote: post #26

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…

Dumb question but what's the difference between headphones and over the ears? I looked it up but I'm still confused

Re: Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud

#36

Post by toast0 »

gorgoiler wrote: post #15

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.

Re: Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud

#37

Post by consp »

RedShift1 wrote: post #12
porcoda wrote: post #8

This seems like a business opportunity. “Ethically sourced organic mud speaker wires for a clean, organic, pure sound.” /s

Forged under blue moon light for perfect electron alignment inside the wires.

Ah, that's why Paix Dieu is such good beer. The electrons are aligned.

Re: Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud

#38

Post by amluto »

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!

Re: Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud

#39

Post by ozim »

londons_explore wrote: post #29

The perfect speaker system is indistinguishable from having a live band in the room with you (when blindfolded). Can today's audio systems do that? How much money do I have to spend to get there?

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 :)

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