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A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

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Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#231

Post by toast0 »

jamiek88 wrote: post #199
floren wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cables are all well and good, but the quest for perfect audio will continue until somebody invents a gadget which makes you 15 years old again, hanging out in your friend's basement, having just tried pot for the first time and hearing Led Zeppelin III on a cheap Sears record player. I don't know exactly what this gadget will look like, but it's the only thing that will get audiophiles the sound they've been chasing.

Yes, there’s deffo something to that. Hence the cassette revival for those of us of a certain vintage.

I think I'm in the right vintage for that, but did cassettes ever sound good? I could get nostalgic for the sound (especially fast forward/reverse, which is lovely), and I probably never had good equipment, but tapes were always kind of warbly for me. I had access to older records too, which could sound good when there wasn't too much hissing and popping and they weren't skipping. Some records were maybe off balance? and wouldn't play at consistent speed either. Again, I didn't have great equipment.

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#232

Post by creakingstairs »

peanut_worm wrote: post #176

Audiophiles are funny. I remember seeing some guy on the internet was selling expensive “sound crystals” that you would put near your stereo that would make the sound “warmer” or “clearer”.

Someone shared this link last time there was a thread about audiophiles. This person claims their custom memcpy makes the sound better.

https://www.audioasylum.com/forums/pcaudio/messages/11/11997...

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#233

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

Sporktacular wrote: post #188
NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. A CD audio recording can contain literally all the information in the audio spectrum with enough dynamic range to capture human breathing and a jet flyover simultaneously. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist–Shannon_sampling_theor...

You are not understanding his point. Linear PCM systems encode quiet parts of music with a lower signal to noise level than louder parts. So by over-engineering the bit depth, you keep the quantisation noise further from perceptibility than without it. I think everyone gets sampling theory by now, your response was to an audio engineer.

But with typical production flow for a CD, you don't really have any classic quantization noise because you dither (probably with noise shaping) during downsampling to 16 bit; the effect is a perceptually-weighted 120dB dynamic range.

It doesn't matter that the poster is an audio engineer: there is simply no good science or objective evidence that people can hear the difference between well-recorded music played back with 24 vs. 16 bit media.

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#234

Post by peapicker »

conradfr wrote: post #159
smnc wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any recommendations?

The hotly debated P42 https://www.pulsarmodular.com/product/p42-climax-line-amp/ The popular Kelvin Tone Shaper https://www.toneprojects.com/kelvin-tone-shaper.html Maybe you want tape? London Acoustics Tapei https://www.londonacoustics.com/product/taipei-studio-tape-r... As for freeware, the comeback of Variety of Sound with https://varietyofsound.wordpress.com/2021/11/30/tesslase-mki... or the less subtle https://k…

Not from 2021, but in May 2020 Fabfilter’s update to Saturn 2 is great, and the original was already a fantastic Saturation plugin I’ve used a lot.

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#235

Post by [deleted] »

Maursault wrote: post #53
nerfbatplz wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only can you not tell the difference between analogue and digital, you also cannot tell the difference between lossless and properly transcoded MP3. Most audiophile mania is poorly informed at best and astrology at worst. http://abx.digitalfeed.net/

> you also cannot tell the difference between lossless and properly transcoded MP3 I'm not sure what you mean by "properly transcoded," as though there's a scourge of bad encoders out there and everyone has nutty encoding practices, but I really, really bet you can. Listen to an mp3 of a rock/pop track. Try to focus on the cymbals. See if you can isolate them aurally from the rest of the music. Can you hear how mp3 e…

[deleted]

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#236

Post by bobbylarrybobby »

bigiain wrote: post #224
taylorportman wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An instrument amplified by vacuum tubes does have a distinct sound, "vinyl" also has its own signature.. magnetic tape is pretty analog too. All of these signature sounds can be digitized/discretized at sampling rates that preserve the vinyl crackle or tube warmth or combinations. To me it seems like marketing and the consumers justification of their susceptibility.

> An instrument amplified by vacuum tubes does have a distinct sound Only if it’s pushed into distortion. Guitar players (generally) like tube Amos because of the way they distort compared to transistor amps. If you are not pushing the amps into distortion, they will only sound different if they’re badly designed.

Not necessarily (well I guess it depends what you mean by "pushed"), but I think tube amps naturally boost the even-numbered harmonics at all volume levels. This sounds good but is distortion.

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#237

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

allears wrote: post #3
gwern wrote: post #2

"The fallout of the MoFi revelation has thrown the audiophile community into something of an existential crisis. The quality of digitized music has long been criticized because of how much data was stripped out of files so MP3s could fit on mobile devices. But these days, with the right equipment, digital recordings can be so good they can fool even the best ears. Many of MoFi’s now-exposed records were on Fremer and…

That's a little simplistic. You can certainly tell the difference between a good analog recording played on a high quality system vs. an MP3. But once you throw enough samples and bit depth at it (more than are on a standard CD), you get quality that's equivalent to, or better than, most analog media.

The highest-of-high end analog tape with Dolby SR and the works is still objectively inferior to vanilla 44.1 kHz / 16 bit PCM.

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#238

Post by CamperBob2 »

JJMcJ wrote: post #163
ryukoposting wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely despise most of the vinyl community. Don't get me wrong, I love my records. I have hundreds of them and I play them regularly. For some reason, almost everyone I come by has this delusion that vinyl is objectively better than a good digital recording. Anyone who dissents from that narrative gets gaslit: "oh what kind of turntable do you have? oh that's not good enough, there's your problem right there."…

I remember when CDs were very very new the first review of them in an audiophile magazine a friend subscribed to. The reviewer was quite unhappy. The next month he reviewed a different player. He basically retracted his opinion of CDs but said the player from the previous month was obviously terrible, at least the particular one that he did his review on, if not the entire brand. And for audiophiles themselves, I not…

The next month he reviewed a different player. He basically retracted his opinion of CDs but said the player from the previous month was obviously terrible, at least the particular one that he did his review on, if not the entire brand.

He could have been right both times. Many early CDs were just plain awful. Same with the first couple of generations of CD players, even some pricy ones. The early development of MP3 and other lossy audio codecs recapitulated the history of digital audio pretty well: lots of truly crappy recordings got passed around.

Like do you really need $50,000 of equipment and sand weighted speakers that weigh 700 pounds each to play 1968 bachelor pad music?

I've never understood audiophiles. How can it make sense for me to spend more money on my equipment than the freaking recording studio spent on theirs? Do these people think studios use $10,000 power cords on their sound boards, and atomic clocks to drive their ADCs?

Re: A Phoenix record store owner set the audiophile world on fire

#240

Post by Syonyk »

mrandish wrote: post #115
Edman274 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A digital recording has to be mastered with the understanding that it could end up getting played on a car stereo, on a bluetooth boombox, on cell phone speakers, in bluetooth earbuds, at a dance party with a DJ or on a hi-fi stereo setup that looks like the one from the old Maxell "blown away" ad. A recording on a vinyl record doesn't. The person mastering a record doesn't need to care about bluetooth earbuds, car s…

> They can tune their mixing and mastering decisions to just the case of a hi-fi stereo setup with an enthusiast listening. This is what audio purists should be asking for. Let's pay the creative production team to create and release a high-fidelity digital mix optimized for us. No concerns about radio play, boomboxes or loudness wars. Just their original creative intent.

If there's a "high bitrate" (24-bit, 96kHz FLAC or something like that) master, often enough that will be the case. You can reasonably assume that someone who's buying that version of the track has something capable of playing it back sanely. Same with the "high def audio" formats (SACD, there was another one...) - they often did, in fact, sound better. Not because of the high resolution, so much as because they were mastered to be listened to on a competent system, not on the subway on earbuds.
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