One of my favorite audiophile doo-dads were wooden knobs being sold as upgrades to regular device knobs. They were super special wood with all sorts of magic properties and a bargain at hundreds of bucks.
Ugh, in the guitar community there’s this myth that the wood type, body shape etc. of an electric guitar influences the sound. If it does, it’s immeasurably small. It’s almost entirely about the pickup circuitry and string position relative to the pickups.
I’ve had tinnitus since I was maybe 4 or 5 years old. A high end sound system is cool to look at, but wasted on me. Those $30 computer speakers are just fine.
The article isn’t clear on one thing : was it an analog or digital signal ?
The results are entirely unsurprising if the signal was digital. Also, I’d like to see a similar test in an environment with more electrical interference, I think the unshielded materials would fare less well there.
This is a really old test. There are forum posts of the same concept and some news articles with the test that are so old that they 404 now. An unshielded coat hanger is the most common. And yes, this is done frequently with analog signals. No, you can’t tell the difference.
I want some of that mud!
I can sell you audiophile quality mud with “quantum mineral particles” for $500 per ounce.
Does it come in a special container to attach to some huge headphones. So people can see how serious I am about perfect sound whilst on the underground trains.
If you can’t hear the difference, don’t pay the difference
I love seeing this story… it reminds me of 30 years ago when I worked in the telephone industry. Heard about telephone copmanies rolling out service in very very rural areas - running signals over barbed-wire fences because it was too expensive to run dedicated cables. That did degrade the signal, but it worked.
I know it’s a completely different thing entirely, but it just gave me nostalgia remembering hearing about that.
I know I has nothing to do with your story. But I just spent the weekend removing barbed wire fencing. And I just want to say, fuck barbed wire. Whoever thought it was a good idea to put that shit up should be wrapped in it and pushed down a steep slope.
And by whoever I mean my great grandfather. But also everyone else involved. All the way to the factory making it.
I’ve put barbed wire up, I’ve taken it down. It ain’t that hard. Just cut it into lengths you can easily coil by hand if you don’t have a winding machine.
Personally I think woven wire fencing is a bigger pain in the ass. All that grass and weeds growing through it and then rolling it back up.
I did use a winding contraption. I don’t hate it because it’s annoying to remove. I hate it because it’s terrible for the animals that get injured by it.
I used to be an audiophile. I spent a lot of money on speakers, and amplifiers, and DACs. But I always found the audiophile cable crowd a bit nuts. And the people that are buying audiophile versions of stuff in the digital domain are full on delusional.
I say “used to be” for two reasons. One, hearing everything does not always mean better. A lot of the time it just reveals imperfections in the recording. And depending on the space, and ambient noise, more headroom can be worse because it just pushes the quiet stuff below the background. And, you are going to have to listen to music in places that you do not have your gear and it is going to sound bad if you get too used to the good stuff. So your music life may be worse overall.
But the biggest difference is that I am older. I just cannot tell the difference as well as I used to.
But most people spend too much money on the equipment and not enough on the sources. You do not need a $20,000 setup if you are listening to badly encoded MP3 or AAC files for example.
But if you have high quality FLAC or Opus sources (or really high-end analog), you do not have to be an audiophile to tell the difference. Same with linear power supplies. You can hear the difference even if you do not spend so much money.
Like wine, audiophiles often make it more about the money they spend than the quality they are getting or the experience they are having.
That said, I can still hear well enough to know that 80% of the people that play music around me turn it up past what their amp can handle and it clips like crazy. I do not know how people listen to that.
I retired from being an “audiophile” when I had 5 drivers stuffed into one earbud. It does sound nice compared to a single driver though, especially for gaming.
Most people DO NOT hear the difference between FLAC and MP3s, which are 320kbs encoded. Most people that claim that do, can’t do it in the blind test.
Anecdotal, but… I’ve been a musician for 36 years and have fantastic hearing not just for my age but for any age. I know, I have to get it quantitatively tested twice a year!
I can’t tell the difference at all between FLAC and 320 kbps from the same source. I can tell a difference between FLAC and 128 kbps, but it’s not huge. It sounds a bit dull, but I have to be looking for the difference and comparing the two. If you just gave me one or the other with no reference, I might suspect the 128 if it was a simple recording of a single instrument or a song I’m intimately familiar with, and even then I wouldn’t be sure of it. It just sometimes “feels” weird.
So I converted over 4 terabytes of my music stash to 320 kbps and cut the total space into less than 2. Feels good.
Coworker found one of those website tests that does the blind tests of 30 seconds clips. I managed to get the high quality file better than 90%. Just like watching a poorly encoded video and seeing some of the blocky shadows the trick is finding out what audio compression artifacts sound like. Then it’s pretty easy to identify. I’ll also mention what you listen on makes a massive difference. If your collection is mostly for on the go listening it doesn’t need it.
I’m also one of those people with exceptional hearing though. To the point I have to wear earplugs in some daily activities. Like the grocery store is simply too loud for me.
Interesting. You’re saying you can tell the difference between 320 kbps and FLAC? How long ago was this?
But if you have high quality FLAC or Opus sources (or really high-end analog), you do not have to be an audiophile to tell the difference
The analysis showed that there was no statistically significant difference in quality between the un- compressed signals and AAC-LC 320 kbps compression, which means participants did not perceive difference between two formats
https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp-pdf-files/WHP384.pdf
I’ve done a handful of those online “tests” where it’s a 320kbps mp3 and flac or wav clips.
I could almost always tell the difference. The prob was that I would think the mp3 was the higher quality one. In a friends group years ago, another friend of mine had similar results.
A lot of those “tests” also are strategically designed such that the bitrate of the 320mp3 isn’t saturated enough to run into bitrate aliasing. A lot of people, myself included, sometimes lean on flac because we have heard it make a difference, and it’s so shitty that we just go to the higher quality when we want archival quality versions.
Also, if you start introducing eq or other processing for various reasons, when you start magnifying sections of lossy, or even lossless audio, you can start hearing missing data or compression artifacts.
I’m jealous of people who can’t tell the difference and have no need to buy audiophile grade SSDs
Coming soon to a retailer near you, this exact same price on a regular SSD.
Everybody say “Thank you AI!”That’s got to be a joke, right ?
Right?
depends on who you ask
that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen lol. I’d love the know how audiophiles think ssds work if they think this could actually make a difference.
If you think this is dumb wait until you find out about the audiophile network switches
I worked at an online shop for high end audio equipment. It was always both amusing and painful when customers asked about the sound characteristics of various power cables in the price range between $100 and $10,000 that we carried, or the same with USB and optical digital cables. Some came with the firm belief that they needed better power cables to enhance the bass of their setup. They even bought gold plated “audiophile fuses”.
I know a dude who has had me fix 2 separate 800$+ DACS and then listens to only YouTube music rips on his 500$ headphones through the DACS. he swears his 1300$ setup makes a difference on his 128kbps aac YouTube downloads…
I am in the wrong goddamn business, I need to be selling $9,000 kettle cords to music morons.
These people spend a crap ton of money to set up over priced equipment in untreated rooms.
No need to treat your room when you use headphones. No matter how good a speaker setup is, it always stinks compared to decent headphones for me.
Some of them even improve their rooms accordingly but are never satisfied.
Some search for the listening experience they had when they were in their twenties and discovered their special music for the first time. They think if they just spend enough money on improving the equipment, the goosebumps of the days of yore will come back automatically.
Music gives me goosebumps all the time. Even the things I’ve been listening to for over 30 years. I believe it’s a physical thing, not everyone has it. I didn’t know it could go away, at least that’s how I’m reading your last line.
I described it somewhat metaphorically. I also get goosebumps repeatedly and again.
I simply noticed during several customer interactions at the hi-fi shop that some people seem to be looking for idealistic audio experiences with a fixed idea of how it should be and believe that’s a purely technical problem. As if a certain cable or amplifier could solve that.
Someone once asked me which cable he should buy to make the music sound really captivating. I dunno, maybe listen to some other music?
To be fair, “audiophiles” are morons.
But morons with money to spend! The best kind of moron.
There’s a big difference between a $100 sound system and a $1000 sound system. I’ve gotten the “audiophiles are dumb” lecture for suggesting someone upgrade from 2x4" computer speakers to actual studio monitors for working on their music. But their speakers literally could not reproduce some of the frequencies thru were trying to make, so they mixed the bass WAY the fuck too loud.
But yeah, diminishing returns start to kick in around that point. Quickly becomes the eternal story of a Fool and His Money.
Depends. If you’re streaming Dire Staits on a $250,000 stereo. You’ve probably missallocated funds approaching a moronic level from a functionality perspective. However, if you’ve got half a billion in the bank, I’d say it’s a far more wholesome idiocy than for example, real estate. Money inherently means less to rich people. The difference of a few thousand to tens of thousands are, bewilderingly, fairly inconsequential to many people. I’d just assume they put that money into listening to music rather than super pacs or something. Hell, maybe they’ll actually hear what the musicians are saying and they’ll actually grow a little.
The issue with audio is the same issue with all hobbies. Spending a lot doesn’t make you an automatic expert, let alone even know what you’re doing. An expensive bat doesn’t make a bad player good, an expensive stove doesn’t make a bad cook good, expensive clothes doesn’t make an ugly person beautiful, an expensive running shoes don’t make an out of shape person healthier.
I find shitting on audiophiles particularly annoying because it’s smugness on both sides of the equation. The people who buy in think they’re better than everyone just like the people who see the con think they’re better than the rubes. If I had to pick a side though, I’d honestly pick the audiophiles, because at least they’re having fun.
What do you mean? I always pay extra for the audiophile version of vinyl records!
Can’t wait til 3d printers get good enough to make records so i can stock up on audiophile filament!
Don’t forget to also get the audiophile grade nozzle! Can’t have your expensive fancy filament squirted through some cheap hole-in-a-nut nozzle, what will give you a dull and wobbly sound.
Gonna turn an old vacuum tube into an extruder nozzle to keep that nice, warm analog sound.
The eye opening moments for me were
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Listening to $35 Porta Pro headphones and realizing you don’t need a lot of money for great sound
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ABX testing and realizing I couldn’t tell the difference AT ALL and certainly couldn’t remember the last sound bite well enough to make a real comparison anyway.
Returned them after they kept grabbing hairs
True! I love the retro look but the hair thing isn’t ideal
This was my issue with them, back in the day. I loved the sound (minus the leaking), however they were always getting caught in my hair.
The AutoEQ project is all I need for great sound.
Shit’s mindblowing with some headphones I’ve tried that need a heavy EQ. Porta Pros are fairly balanced already so not as mindblowing, but still worth at least checking out the demos on the webpage.
AutoEQ is open source. It’s just EQ settings from analyzing frequency responses of headphones.
There’s an extra “.” in your link. Here’s a corrected link for my fellow lazies: AutoEQ
Thanks! I also fixed my link.
Have you tried it?
Similar with mp3 bitrate. While I do think I noticed a difference going from 128kbps to 192kbps, anything beyond that I can’t hear a difference for.
Which clearly means I need to dump 15k into my sound setup because it maxes out somewhere between 128kbps and 192kbps!
Edit: dumb -> dump
aound -> soundWere they comfortable though?
I did get aftermarket pads for them but they are not made for long term listening. But that is beside the point - they show you don’t need to spend $1000 to get great sound and they are only one example of that.
About as comfortable as plastic wrapped in a thin sponge can be
Did they have good noise blocking? Good battery? Good delay? Microphone? Good warranty? Reparaibility? There’s so many reasons to spend a buck extra
TBF if they’re uncomfortable you don’t use them, so that’s a breaking feature.
They don’t block noise. No battery, this is mid-'80s wired tech. There’s a model with a very good microphone. Lifetime warranty. Repairable with super glue sometimes.
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will be converting to bananas tonight, thanks op
This just shows that bananas and mud are materials for excellent audio equipment. I am looking forward to my gold-plated banana.
That’s why they’re called banana plugs
To be fair, the signal is only going through these suboptimal conductors for a very short distance.
Try wiring up your stereo with 50 feet of bananas, and you might start having problems.
There’s always music in the banana chain… or something like that
Im certain I could tell the difference between a $50,000 setup, and the one i have cobbled together for a couple hundo over the past decade… And i would love to have that setup. But that cost to performance is only worth it if you have way too much disposable income. Eff the audiophile market.
