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.”
Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud
51–60 of 153 posts
Re: Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud
#52The 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…
> Main upside of those live music shows is that they are not "perfect" like playing a record
That's a very different metric. How good the sound is vs. what the sound is.
Re: Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud
#53One 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…
A difference that long cables make can be heard in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SorO-QpqYRU .
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.)
Re: Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud
#54Probably 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…
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.
2) Absolutely and it's constantly getting better.
Re: Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud
#55It'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 com…
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.
Re: Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
That's how sound works in general. Even doubling is only +3dB.
Re: Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but if people believe they can hear a difference in their $1000 cables, and they enjoy purchasing and testing them, I'm inclined to let them enjoy themselves. I have a basic hi-fi setup with rational cables, and enjoy the cost savings, but to each their own. I feel the same way about wine. At a certain point, it's not really about objective improvements, it's about vibes and lore.
Yes, but there is a negative societal cost to allowing quacks, frauds, and hucksters to exploit the naive.
Capitalism be that way, sometimes. We can't have the good parts without also taking some of the bad parts.
(And yet: They still make inexpensive cables in factories every day.)
Re: Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud
#58I 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…
The experiment compared .wav files directly ripped from the cd to these same files played through copper/banana/mud.
So yes, the “good” audio is good.
Re: Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud
#59One 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…
A difference that long cables make can be heard in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SorO-QpqYRU . 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.)
Hah, that AM-receiving cable was at a theater and only a couple hundred feet long.
In general, with low-level analog audio and non-ridiculous lengths, additive noise effects are likely to become audible long before attenuation or especially frequency-dependent attenuation. As a decent heuristic, as long as the DC resistance is small compared to load impedance, the cable impedance is unlikely to be a problem. For the connection from the amplifier to the speaker, additive noise is unlikely to be a problem, so the DC resistance is even a decent heuristic: keep the round-trip resistance below half an ohm or so and you should be fine with most speakers.
Re: Audiophiles can't distinguish audio sent through copper, banana or mud
#60The 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 $100-300k (~2015 dollars), and those sound remarkably close. Not all sound/bands can be reproduced, and it really depends on the recording. Could you do it for less, also? Probably. But it was pretty fun to hear the highest end.
My 500$ KEF Q150 setup sound like the band is here when I close my eyes. The sound will be shaped more by the acoustics of the room than by the actual speakers anyway.