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.
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.
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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.
Could be they were both shit lol. I couldnt see (on mobile) what playback system was used.
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.
I’m jealous of people who can’t tell the difference and have no need to buy audiophile grade SSDs
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
Coming soon to a retailer near you, this exact same price on a regular SSD.
Everybody say “Thank you AI!”
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.
It’s a little confusing to me how it could be physically possible that there’d be no difference.
I’m not saying I think I could tell which is which, but surely they can’t sound the same ? Or if they do, why do we even use copper, instead of just making cables out of the cheapest random conductive substance available ? Is copper just that substance ?
I’m lightly active in the headphone enthusiast space. Even in the more light-hearted circles there is still an elevated amount of placebo bullshit and stubborn belief in things that verifiably make zero difference.
It’s rather fascinating in a way. I’ve been in and out of various hobbies over the course of my life but there is just something about audio that attracts an atmosphere of wilful ignorance and bad actors that prey on it.
I’ve been in the audio enthusiast community for like 17 years now. When I was fresh, the internet commentators had me thinking there was some audio heaven in the high end compared to the mid range priced gear. Now I know better and the gear community is not so high end price evangelicals like it used to be. I feel like there was a before and after the $30 Monoprice DJ headphones and the wave of headphones since. Then especially IEMs. Once ChiFi really got rolling with IEMs and amplifiers and DACs, $1000+ snake oil salespeople got to deal in a way more competitive market
Same with speakers. Internet changed everything. No more at the whim of specialty audio stores stock and Best Buys. Now you got the whole worlds amount of speaker brands at a click of a finger plus craigslist/offerup. Also again ChiFi amplifiers and DACs. Also improvements in audio codecs whether for wireless or not. Bluetooth audio was awful until it stopped being awful as standards improved
These days I mostly see the placebo audio arguments in streaming service and FLAC/lossless encode fanboys. Headphone and speaker communities these days seem a lot more self aware and steeped in self-deprecating humor over the cost, diminishing returns, placebo, snake oil they live in today compared to 17 years ago. I want my digital audio cables endpoints plated with the highest quality diamonds to preserve the zeros and ones. No lab diamonds. Must be natural providing the warmth only blood diamonds that excel in removing negative ions. I treat my room with the finest pink himalayan salt sound absorbent wall panels to deal with the most problematic materials used by homebuilders. Authentic himalayan salt has been shown to be some of the highest quality material in filtering unwanted noise and echos while leaving clean pure audio bliss
These days I mostly see the placebo audio arguments in streaming service and FLAC/lossless encode fanboys.
The clamour for lossless/high-res streaming is the audiophile community in a nutshell. Literally paying more money so your brain can trick you into thinking it sounds better.
Like many hobbies, it’s mainly a way to rationalize spending ever increasing amounts on new equipment and source content. I was into the whole scene for a while, but once I had discovered what components in the audio chain actually improve sound quality and which don’t, I called it quits.
The push for lossless seems more like pushback on low bit rate and reduced dynamic range by avoiding compression altogether. Not really a snob thing as much as trying to avoid a common issue.
The video version is getting the Blu-ray which is significantly better than streaming in specific scenes. For example every scene that I have seen with confetti on any streaming service is an eldritch horror of artifacts, but fine on physical media, because the streaming compression just can’t handle that kind of fast changing detail.
It does depend on the music or video though, the vast majority are fine with compression.
The thing is, dynamic range compression and audio file compression are two entirely separate things. People often conflate the two by thinking that going from wav or flac to a lossy file format like mp3 or m4a means the track becomes more compressed dynamically, but that’s not the case at all. Essentially, an mp3 and a flac version of the same track will have the same dynamic range.
And yes, while audible artifacts can be a thing with very low bitrate lossy compression, once you get to128kbps with a modern lossy codec it becomes pretty much impossible to hear in a blind test. Hell, even 96kbps opus is pretty much audibly perfect for the vast majority of listeners.
In a distant past I liked to compare hires tracks with the normal ones. It turned out that they often used a different master with more dynamic range for the hires release, tricking the listener into thinking it sounded different because of the high bitrate and sampling frequency. The second step was to convert the high resolution track to standard 16 bit 44.1 kHz and do a/b testing to prove my point to friends.
My roommate always corrects me when I make this same point, so I’ll pass it along. Blu-Rays are compressed using H.264/H.265, just less than streaming services.
🤓☝️ many older blu-rays also used VC1
Higher bitrate though init
Significantly, streaming is 8-16Mbps for 4K, whereas 4K discs are >100
People don’t like hearing this, but streaming services tune their codecs to properly calibrated TVs. Very few people have properly calibrated TVs. In particular, people really like to up the brightness and contrast.
A lot of scenes that look like mud are that way because you really aren’t supposed to be able distinguish between those levels of blackness.
That said, streaming services should have seen the 1000 comments like the ones here and adjusted already. You don’t need bluray level of bits to make things look better in those dark scenes, you need to tune your encoder to allow it to throw more bits into the void.
Lmao, I promise streaming services and CDNs employ world-class experts in encoding, both in tuning and development. They have already poured through maximized quality vs cost. Tuning your encoder to allow for more bits in some scenes by definition ups the average bitrate of the file, unless you’re also taking bits away from other scenes. Streaming services have already found a balance of video quality vs storage/bandwith costs that they are willing to accept, which tends to be around 15mbps for 4k. That will unarguably provide a drastically worse experience on a high-enough quality tv than a 40mbps+ bluray. Like, day and night in most scenes and even more in others.
Calibrating your tv, while a great idea, can only do so much vs low-bitrate encodings and the fake HDR services build in solely to trigger the HDR popup on your tv and trick it into upping the brightness rather than to actuality improve the color accuracy/vibrancy.
They don’t really care about the quality, they care that subscribers will keep their subscriptions. They go as low quality as possible to cut costs while retaining subs.
Blu-rays don’t have this same issue because there are no storage or bandwith costs to the provider, and people buying blu-rays are typically more informed, have higher quality equipment, and care more about image quality than your typical streaming subscriber.
I promise streaming services and CDNs employ world-class experts in encoding
They don’t really care about the quality
It’s funny that you are trying to make both these points at the same time.
You don’t hire world class experts if you don’t care about quality.
I have a hobby of doing re-encoding blurays to lower bitrates. And one thing that’s pretty obvious is the world class experts who wrote the encoders in the first place have them overly tuned to omit data from dark areas of a scene to avoid wasting bits in that location. This is true of H265, VP9, and AV1. You have to specifically tune those encoders to push the encoder to spend more of it’s bits on the dark area or you have to up the bitrate to absurd levels.
Where these encoders spend the bitrate in dark scenes is on any areas of light within the scene. That works great if you are looking at something like a tree with a lot of dark patches, but it really messes with a single light person with darkness everywhere. It just so happens that it’s really easy to dump 2mbps on a torch in a hall and leave just 0.1mbps on the rest of the scene.
That will unarguably provide a drastically worse experience on a high-enough quality tv than a 40mbps+ bluray. Like, day and night in most scenes and even more in others.
I can tell you that this is simply false. And it’s the same psuedo-scientific logic that someone trying to sell gold plated cables and FLAC encodings pushes.
Look, beyond just the darkness tuning problem that streaming services have, the other problem they have is a QOS. The way content is encoded for streaming just isn’t ideal. When you say “they have to hit 14mpbs” the fact is that they are forcing themselves to do 14mbps throughout the entire video. The reason they do this is because they want to limit buffering as much as possible. It’s a lot better experience to lower your resolution because you are constantly buffering. But that action makes it really hard to do good video optimizations on the encoder. Ever second of the video they are burning 14mb whether they need those 14mb or not. The way that’d deliver less data would be if they only averaged 14mbps rather than forcing it throughout. Allowing for 40mbps bursts when needed but then pushing everything else out at 1mbps saves on bandwidth. However, the end user doesn’t know that the reason they just started buffering is because a high motion action scene is coming up (and netflix doesn’t want to buffer for more than a few minutes).
The other point I’d make is that streaming companies simply have a pipeline that they shove all video through. And, because it’s so generalized, these sorts of tradeoffs which make stuff look like a blocky mess happen. Sometimes that blocky mess is present in the source material (The streaming services aren’t ripping the blurays themselves, they get it from the content providers who aren’t necessarily sending in raws).
I say all this because you can absolutely get 4k and 1080p looking good at sub-bluray rates. I have a library filled with these re-encodes that look great because of my experience here. A decent amount of HD media can be encoded at 1 or 2mbps and look great. But you have to make tradeoffs that streaming companies won’t make.
For the record, the way I do my encoding is a scene by scene encode using VMAF to adjust the quality rate with some custom software I built to do just that. I target a 95% VMAF which ends up looking just fantastic across media.
I fail to see where TV calibration comes in here tbh. If I can see blocky artifacts from low bitrate it will show up on any screen unless you turn the brightness down so far that nothing is visible.
Blocky artifacts typically appear in low light situations. There will be situations where it might just be blocky due to not having enough bits (high motion scenes) but there are plenty of cases where low light tuning is where you’d end up noticing the blockyness.
I’m a person with sensitive hearing and mp3 always sounds muddy to me compared with a flac or wav rip. My coworker poo-pooed this notion, but I proved it to him. Mp3 does alter the sounds, most people won’t notice, but for somebody that does hear the differences its annoying. I would not spend 10k or anything. I paid $15 for an old 5.1 system, and max $80 for a pi2 with a DAC hat. LOL
For me its like if you stood outside a persons house and heard them talking vs their words coming over their TV. There is a noticable signature that let’s you hear its the TV or real people, and that’s what mp3 vs wav is like for me.
I can also hear my neighbours ceiling fan running in the connected town home. That almost inaudible drone of the motor running, drives me nuts
I think it depends on your source.
If we are talking about a downloaded good high bit rate MP3 and a FLAC, then yeah, I can’t hear a difference.
For streaming, I CAN hear a difference between the default spotify stream and my locally stored lossless files. That difference might come down to how they are mastered or whatever spotify does to the files, but whatever it is the difference is pretty perceptible to me and I don’t have especially sensitive ears.
If we’re talking free tier Spotify, then it could actually be due to the bitrate (96kbps OGG vorbis, IIRC). However, if you’re a premium subscriber then the standard bitrate is 160kbps, which is definitely not audible to 99.99% of people.
In fact, after much ABX testing, I found that a noticeable audible difference between a local file and the same song on a streaming service is almost always due to either a loudness differential or because the two tracks come from different masters.
I really noticed when I switched from Spotify to Tidal that there is something different about Spotify’s sound quality that makes it worse even at the highest streaming quality. I was surprised since I fully admit that in 99% of cases I can’t tell the difference between a 128kbps MP3 and a FLAC of the same file.
Could be poor mastering. You can’t always just take a track and squish it down to a low bitrate without tweaking some settings.
Usually when I hear someone swear by lossless audio one service provides compared to another, I swear the reality is either placebo or one service is just using a better masterering of an album compared to another. The service that has on their service the better version album mix and mastering. Like they could serve it as 192kbps MP3 and sound better than a lossless encoded album version with the non ideal mix and mastered release
Oh, 100%. I actually tested this by recording bit perfect copies from different streaming services and comparing them using Audacity.
I found that they only way to hear a difference between the same song played on two different platforms was 1) if there was a notable difference in gain or 2) if they were using two different masters for the same song. If two platforms were using the same master version, they were impossible to tell apart in an ABX test.
All of this is to say that the quality of the mastering is orders of magnitude more important than whether or not a track is lossy or lossless, as far as audible audio quality goes.
Not here to argue I can hear the difference, because I can’t. But in audio collecting where the size and burden of even large lossless files isn’t much different from lossy files, why care? I download the flac files and compress upon delivery to the client where the space might be of a larger concern.
I like lossless compression. But not because I’d be a audio nut. I prefer it from a data retention and archival viewpoint. I could cut and join lossless data as often as i like, without losses accumulating.
Do you often cut and join audio that you did not record yourself?
I would not call it often, but it happens.
Gotta love those people with fiber optic cables with gold plated connectors.
I couldn’t agree more. I got interest in higher-end audio equipment when I was younger, so I went to a local audio shop to test out some Grado headphones. They had a display of different headphones all hooked up to the “same” audio source.
60x vs 80x sounded identical. 60x to 125x, the latter had a bit more bass. 125x to 325x, the latter had a lot more bass and the clarity was a bit better. Then I plugged the 60x into the same connection they had the 325x in. Suddenly the 60x sounded damn similar. Not quite as good, but the 60x was 1/3 the cost and the 325x sure as hell didn’t sound 3x better. They just had the EQ set better for it.
Picked up a bose system test cassette once. It sounds amazing at first listen on anything because they overhype the high and low end, much like most bad modern music. And its actually fatiguing over time and stresses people out. Big reason I hate a lot of (popular) modern music is the over hyped non natural eq.
Friends will show me songs and they grind on my ears with that unnautural 3k boost to make everything “radio sounding”, gross. I don’t want modern radio polish (and the sampled kick drums, awful) I want good sound.
Commodores, night shift, 1985, one of the best sounding albums of all time because they knew what they were doing. And funnily enough one of the first digital tape recordings on a Mitsubishi! Also the nightfly.
Yeah and the loudness wars. It never ended eh.
Yeah sadly. Studies have shown modern music causes fatigue and I think some people at least realize that now. Radio rock is always going to be a sausage waveform. Gotta go underground for good stuff usually.
What’s a sausage waveform 😋??
Maybe that’s why I’m stuck on soma.fm “eighties underground” all day long (not very underground, just good eighties/early nineties music), when I listen to other radios it’s quite tiring in the long run, especially if they jump from say -92 to -98 or 2010 and back, the sound is completely different and saturated.
There’s a difference though, it’s just that gold plated cables doesn’t change anything.
I’d love testing a Sennheiser hd600 series, to see if I hear some difference, from my 598 headset. But they are so expensive so I’m all okay with my refurbished 40€ ones :-)
A DAC for the PC is a nice step up though IMO (there are crap ones too ofc). Not everything is audiofoolery.
You sound like the right person to ask then—how much should I spend on a soundbar for a tv? Or at least do you know a place to ask these questions that give realistic answers with less fanboyism and faux-intellectuals?
I would never recommend a soundbar unless you’re absolutely stuck to that form factor for spacial reasons. Bookshelf speakers are still superior and don’t take up that much space. But I’m also not familiar with any I just got tower speakers that sounded really good at a friend and been loving them.
Honestly I just want something that sounds better than tv speakers that won’t break the bank. It seems like everything everyone recommends is $400+, which isn’t crazy compared to the price of a tv but I just need the most basic thing possible that’s better than built-in for occasional movie nights with friends and family
I bought a pair of Edifier powered bookshelf speakers (R1280T model, I think) for my living room setup and they work fine for casual TV and movie watching. Cost about $110 total. No subwoofer necessary, but I would add one if I had movie nights with more than just me and my partner (and didn’t have downstairs neighbors, lol).
I get that but is a 400 dollar soundbar really any good? Even the 1000 ones sound tinny and small to me but maybe I’m just spoiled.
You can use this to connect your TV to bookshelf speakers through an optical cable. Just need some speaker wire or banana plug cables to go with it
This one has HDMI ARC which most sound bars use for connection along with optical
Then offerup/craigslist/marketplace for used bookshelf speakers. Practically anything will be far better than your TV. Like $50 used polk, klipsch, and sony speakers are real common on the second hand market. They may be old but speakers last a real long time if you’re not blasting them at super high volumes. Go for speakers that have 5.25"-6.5" woofers. You’ll appreciate them for music too
There’s a bunch of brands and you really can’t go wrong compared to TV speakers. Edifer powered speakers don’t require a separate amplifier. Other major brands like ELAC, Kef, wharfdale, paradigm, …
I’ll agree that sound quality doesn’t seem to be consistent but I will say that Bose is a very nice quality sounding company. Never been disappointed by them.
Bose the bass enhancing company? Euw…
Must be why I like it.
Then don’t listen to me and enjoy your headphones 🫡!
Bose is famous for unnatural sound boosting. This appeals to the masses and fits to modern listening habits.
Well their A20s are still top of the list and the most common brand you’ll see during your travels… Must be a good reason.
As I said, that appeals to the masses.
I remember when we’d say, no highs no lows, must be Bose. They must have over-corrected.
No more at the whim of specialty audio stores stock and Best Buys.
I remember in 2017 going into an audio store near where I worked, and the guy was emphasizing how clear the audio sounded on certain (expensive) setups, and how it was streaming in from “Norway” which was better than what you’d find on Spotify or YouTube. It took me a while to piece together what he was on about.
Dude was talking about Tidal. All he meant was they streamed lossless formats via Tidal. As if anyone could tell the difference between, say, stereo 192kbps AAC and flac.
Also, remember the supposed amazing quality of MQA? What a shitshow. It’s rather remarkable that a pair of Airpods Pro 2, when fit into your ears properly, are essentially perfectly tuned headphones for only $250 or less compared to some of what the competition sells. Not to say I don’t love my Sennheiser HD650.
something about audio that attracts an atmosphere of wilful ignorance
I think it’s the lack of a shared vocabulary.
Everyone likes some music better than other music, and so everyone think they can tell the difference between good and bad music. However, nobody can explain the difference in plain words.
This easily leads to the conclusion that it is fully subjective, and this is where the ignorance comes from. If nobody can explain what good music is, then my own voodoo explanation is as good as any.
However, we can talk about music theory, audio production and sound analysis in scientific terms to the point where we can even reproduce certain sounds based on the description. But we can’t really understand the description without actually experiencing the sound.
It’s similar to somebody saying “I don’t like this cake” or someone saying “my taste receptors react to the umami in this cake”, but I still wouldn’t have a clue about how the cake tastes.
Sound is also different from other sciences in that there is very little proof of one thing being more correct than others. And that goal changes constantly. Whenever somebody does crack the code to what people enjoy, it’ll get boring really quick.
I had a music teacher long ago who said that there is no bad music, only wrong audiences. His point was that the music that makes it through to the recording and publishing will already have passed the filter where someone made a decision if there is an audience for it. If you hear bad music, then you’re just not the right audience.
Anyway, cables. Who cares. The end result is the most important part. However, I’d prefer to hook up the instruments on stage with thick cables instead of bananas. Same thing applies at home. Any wire will do, but cheap wires do break.
A lot of it comes down to a mix of snobbishness, sunk cost fallacy, and tribalism.
You can’t admit that your $5,000 pair of headphones sound exactly the same as a $300 pair, because:
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You’d no longer be able to pretend that you’re better than the people who have $300 headphones.
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You’d have to admit to yourself that you completely wasted $4,700.
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You’d have to realize that the tight-knit community you’ve formed with other $10k headphone people isn’t really bettor or even really distinct from communities of people with $300 headphones.
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I fucking love audio and have an extensive collection of equipment. The last thing in the chain before your ears (so headphones and speakers) will absolutely make a difference and the thing that provides power to that can make a difference. But the cables? The fucking cables?! Absolutely no impact once you’re above like $10. Turns out, electrons are electrons and they behave like electrons. Shockingly that doesn’t change in copper, gold plated copper, pure silver, or mud. Doubly so for the non analog part of the chain. Hell I’ve even seen “audiophile grade” ethernet cables.
The other part of the equation is if the differences made by the things that do make a difference actually matter to the listener. They do to me, but my dad is more than happy to just use the speakers on his Dell monitors.
Well, that’s not entirely correct. Given a long enough run, attenuation will absolutely cause bad cables to perform poorly. Like your not getting a 10 meter run on bananas. That said, for any modern cable, that run has to be greater than 50 meters for it to even start mattering. So if your wiring up a warehouse, you probably need to care about the type of wire your using.
Like your not getting a 10 meter run on bananas.
Source? /s
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a 10 metre banana.
I think a lot of it is a sort of sunk cost fallacy.
They bought the expensive shit, so they have to believe it’s better.
Apple Syndrome
I have a set of Sony studio monitor headphones. I can hear more nuance and parts of the music I simply can’t hear in any of my ear buds or noise canceling headphones. They aren’t wireless, so I don’t really use them that often though.
It doesn’t matter the cable, the amp, shitty 128kbps mp3 or vinyl. I can hear much, much better with the drivers in them.
I’d say 90% of anything that matters is the driver. But past a certain midrange point, there just isn’t really much or any improvement.
I buy headphone cables based on how nice the cable feels, if it transmits noise when it rubs against stuff, and how well the connectors fit into the devices I am using.
My favorite is when people get picky about cabling for digital transfer. The ones and zeroes either get there or they don’t, nothing in-between. They work or they don’t.
I think the best thing to do is to assess your ability to hear difference. I can absolutely hear the difference between my Bluetooth earbuds and a decent wired IEM, so I use wired headphones for listening to music. I CANNOT hear a significant qualitative difference between the $25 Chinese IEMs that I use and more expensive options that I have tried, so I use the cheap ones.
To be sure, there ARE perceptible differences between wired headphones, but those are more a matter of EQ and personal preference. I can achieve my maximum perceivable level of quality with pretty inexpensive hardware. It doesn’t mean that other people cannot, that isn’t my problem.
For IEMs, the price difference typically goes towards comfort rather than sound quality. As a professional audio technician, a custom-molded IEM will be infinitely more comfortable than a cheap set. But not everyone can justify spending $2000 for custom molds, because they don’t use them for work every day.
I’m a musician. I swear by Beyerdynamic DT700. Fucking great headphones for like an insanely reasonable price
Awesome headphones. If you don’t mind the beyer peak. My favorites are my grado rs2. But I prefer music on speakers not headphones, so much space is lost on headphones. Hear a pair of magnepans in a room and you’ll be blown away. Got some original SMGa’s from 1989!
Real audio enthusiasts know the room is the most important, followed by the speaker itself, followed by the actual source. Then the amp etc.
And when you record and mix music you realize how much of it is bullshit in the end. The source is all that matters, really.
Isn’t it more of the weakest link? Bad amp and you can have the nicest room etc.
Stereo is overhyped IMO too 😋 except if you have a dedicated listening room.
Yeah it is. Right, room is very important. Ive always been able to designate a listening area where I am, thankfully.
It mattered more back in the analog days, I think. Now that it’s all digital, and going through dac’s, its all just about being good enough for 1’s and 0’s to get through. “Noise” doesn’t exist for digital audio. It either works, or it doesn’t.
It definitely mattered a hell of lot more in analog days. Getting a properly calibrated reel tape machine through a properly calibrated tube amp in a properly dimensioned room with good speakers is a feat, and absolutely sounds amazing.
Nowadays, it’s about how they mastered it. I can tell you for a fact Ozzy’s no more tears CD sounds like shit and the double record mix is FARRRR better, because it doesn’t have the life squished out of it from brickwalling. Is that digital vs analog? No. Its mastering.
Analog will sound better if you spend a SHIT ton and have an insanely good source. Digital will also sound amazing if you spend a lot. I myself very much enjoy listening to my original reels of 50s-70s music because you really can get so close to being in the studio and hearing everything, because they couldn’t edit it to death.
Bridge over troubled water on a reel is a real experience.
A tube amp isn’t necessarily expensive and they sound very good.
We transport audio digitally today but it still is all analog in the end.
True!
Happy cake day
thanks!
well obviously, all this proves is that copper wires are just as bad as wet mud. Every audiophile knows you need gold oxygen nitrogen purified wires blessed by a voodoo witch doctor.
I’ve got these cables. Yes, they are expensive but they are absolutely fantasti… wait, did you say voodoo witch doctor? Mine were blessed by just a witch doctor. Have I been ripped off?
Hoodoo is 3dB better than voodoo according to my tests.
Hoodoo? You do! Do what? Remind me of the babe!
If you can’t hear the difference, don’t pay the difference
To be fair, “audiophiles” are morons.
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.
But morons with money to spend! The best kind of moron.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
True! I love the retro look but the hair thing isn’t ideal
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.
Did they have good noise blocking? Good battery? Good delay? Microphone? Good warranty? Reparaibility? There’s so many reasons to spend a buck extra
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.
TBF if they’re uncomfortable you don’t use them, so that’s a breaking feature.
About as comfortable as plastic wrapped in a thin sponge can be
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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
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
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.
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.
