Sanity Check

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Yes the famous chair test that gets trotted out by hardcore objectivists. The test was interesting but not for the purposes of proving the sameness of audio gear but rather how the stress of these kinds of tests degrades people's listening discernment. Unless you are a serious non-audiophile of the most toxic sort you can at least admit amps and DACs can sound significantly different from one another.

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1 minute ago, plissken said:

 

Ahhhh. The old "I can turn invisible only if no one is watching"

 

That trope never gets worn out

 

So the question is -- does better audio interest you, or not?

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17 minutes ago, plissken said:

 

Sure do. I start by dismissing what ever you think is a good idea. 

 

Of course I don’t have anything to do with better audio or your interest in it.

 

If you’re interested in better audio why did you deny better audio exists?

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I’ve owned and auditioned in-home 7 stereo amps, and around 10 headphone amps. They all sounded different. They all have different strengths and weaknesses. Of those, three were class D, three were A/B, and one was A (DHT). The class Ds all sucked in terms of soundstage, but differed greatly in other ways — for example, the Crown XLS (Drivecore 2) is very unresolving while the D-Sonic (Pascal) is the most resolving amp I’ve had in my system. 

 

There is no possibility that I could not tell the difference between my Linnenberg Allegros and the Teac AI-301 (ICEPower). In amp terms they are like day and night. With a good track selection I would find it hard to believe anyone could fail a blind test between them, let alone prefer the Teac.

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7 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

covetousness causes stress

 

Which reminds me I need to get around setting up the Apple TV for critical listening.

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This should be obvious but modern hi-fi doesn’t actually have much to do with high fidelity. First of all, speakers are totally incapable of it...well, recording equipment is also incapable of it. What we’re doing is chasing a form of sonic art. A Norman Rockwell painting doesn’t look like anything like real life. But you can appreciate the mastery of the art and derive pleasure from it.

 

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5 hours ago, marce said:

Or how much your system cost...

 

The issue is performance. The relationship between price and performance isn't linear, but in general they follow the same upward trend.

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Everyone knows most of the little hotel rooms suck, and you go there mainly just to check out gear, look at prices and talk to the vendors. But you have to STOP using that as an excuse not to go to a show if you’ve never heard high-end audio before. There’s always at least a few big ballrooms set up by a big name like KEF, VAC, Mark Levinson, MBL, etc where you can hear a fair respresentation of high end sound. Someone will have a super high dollar system setup for show.

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2 hours ago, gmgraves said:

I knew someone who had a pair of Watt/Puppies/Wow (don't remember the series) and I thought that they were the best sounding Wilson speakers I'd ever heard - but ONLY if the owner turned off the Wilson Wow (subwoofer) which muddied-up everything (in my opinion). the Watt/Puppy combo was actually excellent, but at US$15K at the time, there were other speaker, for less, that sounded just as good or better (Magnepan MG20.7, Martin-Logan Vista/Vantage, etc.). 

 

In a life full of uncertainty, you can only count on death, taxes and that a Wilson will obliterate a Magnepan.

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1 hour ago, Spacehound said:

Wilson speakers (and a few others) are made purely to take advantage of the many people on this planet who equate 'goodness' with high price . Absolutely nonsensical price in Wilson's case. It's only a simple box with a few equally simple drive units inside, some of which they don't even make themselves, like the bought in engine fitted to an  home-made car.

 

If  Wilsons  were priced at 3,000 dollars tops  nobody would pay them the slightest attention. That's how Magico got started, if they cost 2,000 dollars a pair  they would never have reached the front pages of hifi magazines and so would have gone bust in a couple of  months,  never to be heard of again, like so many others. Wilson and Magico (who had no track record at all so had to do something just to gain attention)  STARTED by setting the nonsense price, and went from there.

 

Wilsons  remind me of Elizabeth Taylor's ridiculous diamonds and fit well in an 'insanity' thread.

 

In fact, Wilsons and speakers in that class are extraordinarily fine-tuned pieces of equipment, not "drivers in a box". For example, Magico uses a medium-format camera to inspect their speakers for the slightest defect that would escape inspection by the naked eye.

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Obviously, nothing justifies the price of something like the WAMM Master Chronosonic — except that if you want peak performance you have to pay peak price. 

 

There is a belief system that DIY speakers can compete with the high end. Sadly, you can’t buy some parts of Madisound, some boards from Home Depot and produce high-end results. When we’re talking about Wilsons and Magicos we’re talking about special alloys, custom materials and often custom parts built with highly specialized manufacturing systems. Very high standards. The engineering aspects of high-end speakers are something that are well outside a DIY’ers capabilities — completely eliminating resonant frequencies, millionths of a second time accuracy, etc and so on. Meanwhile a DIY’er is looking down MDF boards at Home Depot trying to find one that isn’t warped, lol.

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A quick google search shows that "aircraft-grade aluminum" refers to a 6061 aluminum alloy, a high quality alloy developed in the 30s. I guess "aircraft-grade" is a cooler way of saying "high-quality".

 

BTW, go ahead search youtube for high end speaker factory tours and see how likely a DIY’er can replicate it.

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Fine watches are status symbols which have lost most of thier status due to the proliferation of high quality fakes. A few hundred dollars can get you a Chinese fake that is indistinguishable from an original by the naked eye.

 

Audio isn’t about status, it’s about performance. China has some high end replicas (Accuphase, Goldmund, Mark Levinson, etc) but these are older product copies. 

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Others have pointed this out but I’ll repeat it here. I bet most of the non-audiophiles here are operating on more than just class envy — its that they live in tiny lifestyle coffin apartments and not in houses, so they can’t get good sound no matter what they do. Some of them are just class warfare operators, but only a few. 

 

Meanwhile....I just came back from riding a bike for the first time in over 15 years...probably close to 20 (it’s true what they say about never forgetting how to ride) and now I’m off to re-arrange my speakers yet again..

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Sound needs room to behave properly. Not only that, it needs symmetry of space. Volume of space can be adjusted somewhat with quality acoustic treatments...but if you’re living in a tiny coffin apartment you won’t have that space, nor the correct geometry (rectangular). I actually tried to turn an a-symmetrical room into a listening room and no matter how many traps and diffusers and panels I set up, the room could not be satisfactorily transformed. The treatments helped a lot but the end result fell short. After extensive research online and book reading I found out the truth at last — these kinds of rooms won’t sound good. They can be improved but not corrected.

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20 hours ago, Spacehound said:

 

The house I'm typing this in is in Europe. The smallest room apart  from the 'rest room' as Americans call it is 18 feet by 14.

 

And we've got another one too, bigger than this. It came with my wife, as did a Sony music system and lots of pirated CDs   

 

You're either wealthy (in which case you wouldn't have the opinions you do because you could afford good gear), living in some kind of passed-down farm home -- or just lying.

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I was in a jazz club last night. They had one of these little tiny pianos, don’t know what you call them. Anyway, it was definitely a point-source, no dimension to it could be heard.

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I don’t have respect for recording engineers — unless they are also audiophiles, their opinions on sound are junk.