New Year: My Best Advice In Regards To Audio is...

[wgscott]

Enjoy and appreciate what you already have.

[wgscott]

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Get Better Sound - Get Better Sound

 

That's a great book, and the accompanying DVDs are well worth obtaining as well.

 

If you have the cash, you can even fly the author out for a visit.

 

It's like the hi-fi equivalent of the dog whisperer.

[wgscott]

Buy Jim Smith's "Get Better Sound".

 

That reminds me, it was you who first recommended that to me. Again, thank you.

[wgscott]

Here's another Forrest-inspired bit of advice:

 

Build it yourself.

 

I built my own Class D amp. The basic guts cost about $300, and the final product with pimped-out custom face plate was about $1K (well, I added a second amp board, so probably make that $1.2K now). Although it is by no means perfect, I made it myself and it sounds (to me at least) way better than anything I have heard in the $1K price range (as of 3 or 4 years ago anyway). At some point I might try to build my own DAC/pre.

[wgscott]

Become a real audiophile

 

(1) Choose an audio file format (24/480, DSD-HQX, GCQ-WTF, etc.) and be a total dick about it and refuse to listen to any music not available in your chosen format.

 

(2) Make at least one claim that involves a palpably absurd physical impossibility, post this claim in every thread on every audio forum website, and develop a huge persecution complex whenever the people you relentlessly stalk have the temerity to call your claim into question.

 

(3) Sell redundant organs like a kidney or eyeball (or ear?) to raise more cash for your next purchase of a new DAC that can play your chosen format (see #1) and that a reviewer on the take has stated punches above its veil-lifting potential.

 

(4) Display your cables like jewelry. After all, you paid DeBeers Cartel prices for those things. An invisible wad of cable spaghetti in a corner cabinet is not what this hobby is all about.

 

(5) Be totally obsessive about everything. Your compatriots/competitors in the hobby will think you are more bad-ass if your audiophile compulsive delusions precipitate a divorce. She will get the house, but you will get a new place with a dedicated listening room.

 

(6) Claim to be discovering new physics. Those boys at CERN don't really know what they are talking about. New physics can be discovered by any late middle-aged bald guy with a liberal arts degree and a Zerostat from the comfort of his listening room chair.

[wgscott]

Now you begin to talk some sense. The mono part of it anyway. Redundancy is distortion. Any natural sound can only come from one source, and that source has to match the physical location. More than one channel by physical necessity causes comb filtering. Since we can't match enough channels so that each source has its own channel the only way to remove the distortion from playback is for everything to be in mono. Only then can we have true natural sound capability of any sort. And no crossovers either. No hifi product can use a crossover.

 

Sounds like Owsley Stanley.

 

 

So DSD-SQUARED_AMQ (180.6336 mhz Authenticated Mono Quality assuring it was recorded using only one microphone and no mixing) done the original natural way with only 1 bit (you have to rid your system of distorting redundancy at all levels) played over one full range speaker is the only possible way to be an audiophile. Way of the ONE is the ONE way.

 

It actually isn't so far off from the home theatre center channel ideology.

[wgscott]

Would that be on or off LSD?

 

In his case, I don't think there was much of a distinction.

 

cf: For the unrepentant patriarch of LSD, long, strange trip winds back to Bay Area - SFGate

 

By conservative estimates, Bear Research Group made more than 1.25 million doses of LSD between 1965 and 1967, essentially seeding the entire modern psychedelic movement.

 

Less well known are Bear's contributions to rock concert sound. As the original sound mixer for the Grateful Dead, he was responsible for fundamental advances in audio technology, things as basic now as monitor speakers that allow vocalists to hear themselves onstage.

 

His heart attack several years ago had nothing to do with his strict [pure carnivore] regimen, according to Bear, but more likely the result of some poisonous broccoli his mother made him eat as a youth.

 

As a sound mixer, Bear holds equally strict viewpoints, insisting that the most effective rock concert systems should have only a single source of sound, his argument quickly veering into the realm of psycho-acoustics.

 

"The PA can only be in one spot," he says. "All the sounds have to come from a single place because the human brain is carrying around the most sophisticated sound processing of any computer or living creature. It equals the bats that fly by echo. It equals the dolphins. It equals the owls that hunt at night without any daylight at all. It is a superb system for locating and separating one sound from everything else."

[wgscott]

I have to say I found this post hugely entertaining. Bill, you should compile your "best-of" curmudgeonly posts, and publish a book (or at least an e-book).

 

I'd like to say more, but I have to get back to my comparison of the SQ of different eSATA cables.

 

--David

 

Thanks!

 

I'll be here all week.

 

Don't forget to put a tip in the jar for Chris.