This reminds me of Ken Fritz, a man who spent decades perfecting his living room’s acoustics and building custom gear for it.
Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud
111–120 of 153 posts
Re: Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud
#112I'd recommend AudioScienceReview for anyone looking for measurements-based evaluations of audio equipment instead of the weird and wrongly incentivized audio review ecosystem.
Yup. Measurements are king.
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.
Re: Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud
#113Probably 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…
> provided you remember to turn on lossless in apple music
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.
Re: Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud
#114This 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.
Re: Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud
#115Probably 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…
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.
Re: Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud
#116Probably 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…
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.
Re: Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud
#117This 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 improvemen…
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.
Of course, nothing will change.
Re: Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
less about the files, more about the audio equipment in between
Well ot is very easy to figure that out using the Null method. You have the original recording (A) and play through whatever chain recording it at the end, resulting in recording (B). You now place A and B into seperate tracks of the DAW of your choice and align them in time. You flip the polarity on B and adjust the levels till the output level is minimized (to account for level changes in your playback/recording ch…
Small addition: you can also run the signal through a different chain C and then compare B and C. And since they ran through the same DAC, output filters, output connectors, input connectors, preamp and ADC, aside from noise the only measuable (relevant for human ears) difference should be the chain inbetween. This allows you to compare any magical device against a simple conductor.
So next time someone tries to sell you chemicalliy pure copper with zero oxygen handbraided by virgins for a thousand bucks test it that way against a cheap pro audio cable, then turn your system up to the loudest listening volume you usually use and litterally listen to the difference. It will unsurprisingly be the sound of silence, your own personal 4'33".
Bonus point for using an double-blind ABX process where you and potential others don't know whether you're listening to the expensive or the cheap gear. Turns out often anything short of that won't stop you from wanting to fool yourself, or others from influencing you, which is a big part of the audiophile schtick and the reason why even otherwise pretty smart people are routinely fooled by this.
Re: Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud
#119Probably 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…
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…
Yup, there's been a ton of experiments like this done over the years where people ran A/B tests between golden-ears audio gear and the cheapest garbage they could find, for example wire coathangers used to connect the speakers up. In blind tests, people couldn't tell the difference.
As others have pointed out, the biggest thing to focus on is the speakers or headphones, at least up to a point: $70,000 Woo-woo Labs Reference Monitor speakers aren't going to sound any better than the decent set of Wharfedales you found on eBay.
Re: Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud
#120Probably 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…
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 o…
It's worse than that, some of them are actually dangerous! Amazon seems to have removed this review but here's a copy of the original text:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Reviewed in the United States on November 15, 2010
We live underground. We speak with our hands. We wear the earplugs all our lives.
PLEASE! You must listen! We cannot maintain the link for long… I will type as fast as I can.
DO NOT USE THE CABLES!
We were fools, fools to develop such a thing! Sound was never meant to be this clear, this pure, this… accurate. For a few short days, we marvelled. Then the… whispers… began.
Were they Aramaic? Hyperborean? Some even more ancient tongue, first spoken by elder races under the red light of dying suns far from here? We do not know, but somehow, slowly… we began to UNDERSTAND.
No, no, please! I don’t want to remember! YOU WILL NOT MAKE ME REMEMBER! I saw brave men claw their own eyes out… oh, god, the screaming… the mobs of feral children feasting on corpses, the shadows MOVING, the fires burning in the air! The CHANTING!
WHY CAN’T I FORGET THE WORDS???
We live underground. We speak with our hands. We wear the earplugs all our lives.
Do not use the cables!
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