How much does it cost to be an audiophile?

[Jud]

12 minutes ago, mansr said:

The former are, to a large extent, actually trusting their eyes, eyes fixated on the price tag.

 

Data?

[Jud]

1 minute ago, mansr said:

Every post ever made by GUTB and his ilk.

 

What do you have against his ilk?

 

 

[Jud]

16 hours ago, mansr said:

That's an elk.

 

Yes, but I don't really caribou-t such details.

 

 

[Jud]

8 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

 

You'll get kicked out of the audiophile union! You must constantly think about what to upgrade next in your system. And each upgrade must cost more than the previous. And you must believe that every piece of wire, each component, feet, casing and even paint color has an effect on sound quality, and therefore is subject to all the above upgrade rules.

 

 

What I particularly enjoy doing is learning more in order to get better sound without having to spend much, or anything at all.  Learning about room placement or digital filters “don’t cost nothin’,” as a friend of mine used to say.  Any  associated measurement equipment needed can be quite inexpensive as well.

[Jud]

2 minutes ago, mansr said:

I didn't mean to imply you'd only every buy one set of audio components. You might not hit the mark on the first attempt, but two or three iterations of targeting specific aspects you find lacking really ought to be enough to end up with something satisfactory. What I find puzzling is the obsession with constantly "upgrading" to ever more expensive gear. Audiophiles are often accused of focusing more on the equipment than the music. Some seem, to me, still more concerned with buying new equipment than listening to what they've got.

 

Audiophiles gonna talk about equipment.    I went through a period of 20 years without upgrading anything and was very happy.  The only reason I changed was when I heard modern DACs fed by files through player software, and thought these sounded better than what I’d had.  And the only reason I listened to the new stuff was because my disc player gave out.

 

 I have cables that are likely older than some people on this thread.

 

But even though I seldom change equipment, I enjoy reading discussions about what might be new in the world.

[Jud]

1 minute ago, mansr said:

Buying new equipment to keep up with shifts in technology isn't what I'm talking about, nor is replacing faulty items.

 

Right, I understood what I was talking about wasn’t what you were pointing out.

 

We’ve probably all been exposed to folks with “upgrade-itis” or similar afflictions, whether it’s to do with audio or some other hobby.  The one that really left me shaking my head was a record collector in Miami.  He had all sorts of old music on vinyl.  But to keep maximum value he hadn’t opened the plastic shrink wrap on any of it.  After years of Florida humidity getting through micro-holes in the wrap, the cardboard LP covers had expanded against the shrink wrap and curved.  There sat thousands of albums of some really wonderful music, none of it ever listened to, and all warped beyond playability even if he had wanted to listen.

[Jud]

4 minutes ago, semente said:

 

There is a time in most audiophiles' lives when we obcess with equipment and accessories, when we listen ad nausea to the same audiophile-approved couple of tracks and live off magazine reviews.

 

It's a sad time but the spell can be broken and we will be able to enjoy music and life once more.

 

I did pore over reviews and obsess over equipment more in my early days.  But I never restricted my listening to “audiophile-approved” albums.  I’ve always liked a wide variety of music far too much for that.

[Jud]

51 minutes ago, mansr said:

I was studying electronic engineering in my early 20s.

 

And here you are on an audio forum.  Where did you go wrong?

[Jud]

22 minutes ago, Audiophile Neuroscience said:

Only if you redefine the definition based on audiophiles with that behaviour. 

But you can still find quality gear that is value for money right.you can choose to ignore products that you have deemed rip offs.

I get there is a bigger political picture here,the grand scam, but in the scheme of things there are more important things to worry about imo. .its just audio and like with many products as they say, buyer beware .

 

When I went to a couple of dozen audio dealers around 30 years ago researching my first high end digital system, they seemed to me to follow a bell curve - a very few straight rip-off artists, many clustered slightly to the better or worse side of mediocre, and a very few very good or excellent ones.  I think the marketplace is still like that, but we’ve got a lot more than a couple of dozen to choose from due to the Internet.

[Jud]

3 hours ago, Nordkapp said:

A la Dan D'Agostino products. My God. 

 

On the other hand, for at least some folks a bling factor as part of overall house decor is important.  Not my thing, but can’t blame someone for wanting to be surrounded by beauty (that also plays music) either.

[Jud]

3 hours ago, mansr said:

I never said anything remotely like that. There are, however, many who insist that the expensive gear sounds significantly better than cheaper products. Let's assume, for sake of argument, that they are right. Some of the expensive stuff does use unusual circuitry too, so it's not entirely implausible that it at least sounds different. The problem I see is that you can't get the supposedly good electronics without paying through your nose for the bling casework etc.

 

As with other hobbies, there are a couple of different approaches to this.  If you’re a car nut you can take the brute force approach and buy a Ferrari (expensive casework!), you can mod your Honda (Fast and Furious, anyone?), or you can go high tech and blow both off the line with a Tesla.

 

What I particularly like about computer audio is that for a little knowledge and a relative pittance you can get equal or superior digital filtering to what you’d formerly have to pay dCS or MSB money for.  In that way software has been a tremendous democratizing force in this hobby.

[Jud]

3 minutes ago, Audiophile Neuroscience said:

 

me too, 20 + ...42 ?

 

If you count from when I bought my first “stereo system” and got really interested in music reproduction, 50.

[Jud]

22 minutes ago, Nordkapp said:

Damn. That's some time served!

 

Enjoyed it all.  

[Jud]

1 hour ago, mansr said:

Engineering is the art of knowing what to ignore.

 

But not the science?  

 

A friend who won an award a few years ago for best civilian engineering project for the Department of Defense has many stories of fellow engineers who felt various factors could be safely ignored in their work, and were proved wrong when the end product failed.

 

Of course those make the best stories; I'm sure there are also  plenty of examples of people obsessing over things that ultimately don't matter.

[Jud]

24 minutes ago, mansr said:

Science gives us the tools to calculate everything in minute detail. The trouble is that for real designs, such a detailed analysis is unpractical. Engineering is all about simplifying the science to make it practical while still resulting in a working product. For example, a complicated calculation can often be replaced with a much simpler approximation guaranteed to be greater (or smaller) than the exact value. Suppose the task at hand is to choose a wire capable of carrying the current required by some apparatus. Calculating the exact current might be hideously complicated, so instead we use an approximate value that is at least as large as the real one and pick a wire accordingly. If the wire gauge we arrive at is still practical from a mechanical (and cost) perspective, we're all good. It doesn't matter that a slightly smaller wire could have worked.

 

A famous case of ignoring the wrong thing is, of course, the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse of 1940:

 

Modern bridges include damping elements to prevent such uncontrolled oscillations.

 

Yes, this forum is full of them.

 

I was able to make a reasonable engineering approximation of your response.

[Jud]

1 hour ago, accwai said:

 

The following isn't Ferrari, but it's been making the rounds in the local media lately. Supercars are what they are for reason. Show some respect or suffer:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsUWk4prWZw

 

That was Joe Walsh, wasn't it?

 

1 hour ago, accwai said:

 

... from Ferrari to ricing Honda eh?

 

http://carphotos.cardomain.com/ride_images/1/1827/3041/4566520021_large.jpg

 

 

 

That was excellent.   

 

1 hour ago, accwai said:

It's interesting something that's widely known to be able to blow both Ferraris and modded Hondas off the line would be doing 10 minute lap time at Nürburgring's north loop, if it finishes a lap at all. That's the kind of lap time for delivery vans. What would sleight of hand like that be called around here at CA? Two word term starts with 'S' and 'O', can't quite remember the whole thing...

 

He did say he was pretty much keeping up with a GT3 until it went into reduced power mode.

 

You didn't happen to see the episode of The Grand Tour where Richard Hammond almost killed himself in an electric supercar, did you?  Thing was *fast*.

[Jud]

2 hours ago, gmgraves said:

Engineering is like anything else. Some failure is inevitable. Same with medicine. We count on our physicians to make the correct diagnosis and we rarely question his/her sage advice. But mis diagnosis is actually fairly common. When engineers err, buildings collapse and bridges fall down in strong winds because the engineer on the project failed to take into account the strong winds in the Tacoma Narrows and designed his bridge span accidentally to resemble an upside-down airfoil. Bernoulli's principle then took over and a dog died! 

 

In my experience, most jobs, including the professions, grade out on a bell curve - a few really bad ones, most somewhere in the middle, a few really good ones.

[Jud]

3 hours ago, accwai said:

Unless there is a big breakthrough in battery technology in the future, EVs would have a serious weight disadvantage.

 

https://www.axios.com/battery-pioneer-1528047409-d0515380-1881-4e96-891f-3763eaa84666.html

 

It smells more than a little of snake oil, though.

 

But that's not saying there won't be considerable improvements in years to come, perhaps eventually something that from the vantage point of today would look like a breakthrough.

 

P.S. Apologies for the continued OT, though since the thread has gone back to playing the third least fun unwinnable game after tic-tac-toe and rock, paper, scissors (subjective vs. objective, that is), I don't feel too bad about it.

[Jud]

5 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

Now, where are the listening tests?

 

Listening tests are nowhere.

[Jud]

15 minutes ago, mansr said:

There is also this possibility:

 

Yes, I got five out of five on a cable directionality test @esldude put up on the site some time ago, but I agreed with him at the time (and still do) that it was a lucky guess.

 

Because of the limitations of echoic (audio) memory, because much that we feel quite strongly on a subconscious level never makes it to conscious realization and verbalization (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_gambling_task - in a gambling game, many rounds before consciously realizing they had a bad deck, players were already uncomfortable enough to literally break out in a cold sweat), and for a number of other reasons, ABX testing really has no shot at a valid positive response for most of the subtleties we're driving at without a great deal of training and/or experience.

 

So for example, how many of you have extensive experience or training with the differences in sound caused by varying levels of jitter?  I certainly don't.  How would you ever expect to recognize something like that if you don't know what to listen for?  And if you want to compare two sources/files, our hearing limitations I referred to earlier mean the difference has to be profound enough that you'd clearly, consciously recognize it within about 4 seconds.  Good luck.

[Jud]

1 hour ago, pkane2001 said:

 

Good point on training, Jud. I suspect there's a lot of room for better tools and materials for those who are curious. Know of any that can simulate various distortions, jitter, etc? 

 

 

I believe @yamamoto2002 developed software that can add simulated jitter to files.

[Jud]

37 minutes ago, gmgraves said:

Physics tells us that there are three characteristics of coaxial cable: DC resistance, capacitive reactance, and inductive reactance.

 

Reductive physics, yes.  But as anyone who's ever experienced a ground loop knows, there are other characteristics of that bit of cable's behavior as part of a system that can on occasion be plainly audible.  Can a different type of cable in the same orientation change something like a ground loop?  They were RCA rather than coax, but yes, I've had the experience of significantly diminishing a ground hum just by switching out RCA cables to my turntable.

 

Now rather than diminishing an audible ground hum to a less plainly audible ground hum, could different cables change something like, for example, a ground loop current from subconsciously irritating to undetectable?  Conceivably.

[Jud]

9 minutes ago, mansr said:

There's nothing mysterious about that. There's always some amount of capacitive coupling between the chassis and the mains input. When components are connected together, small ground currents will form. These can be amplified into audible hum, especially by high-gain phono preamps. This is one reason for using balanced interconnects with the shield connected to one end only.

 

Overpriced.

 

This is exactly why fights like "Cables don't matter! Yes they do!" don't help, and why simple explanations like the one you just gave can allow anyone who pays attention to get better sound without spending a hell of a lot.

[Jud]

1 hour ago, pkane2001 said:

 

I was thinking of a tool that can let me adjust jitter level, and to apply correlated or uncorrelated jitter to a music passage of my choosing would be the way to test my own ability to detect various types and levels. If Yamamoto's utility doesn't quite do that, I'll have to think about how to build it. 

 

Seems to me that a utility that can introduce IMD, various levels of even/odd harmonics, frequency response variations, jitter, phase changes between left and right channel, etc. with some adjustable controls could be very useful in finding out what is truly audible. Maybe with some ABX functionality built in

 

And to possibly train yourself to consciously recognize what was perhaps only subconsciously noticed before.

 

Don't expect quick results.  Academic work indicates a week of training is probably not enough. (In the experiment I'm thinking of, memory was tested for a trope common to Western but not South Asian music.  As expected, Western test subjects did better than South Asian.  A week of training did not enable the South Asian subjects to do any better.)

[Jud]

44 minutes ago, sandyk said:

 

 Hi Jud

The extra points from John Kenny and myself were posted in a U.K. forum some time back. Barrows has also posted an excellent explanation in C.A. some time ago.

Regar4ds

Alex

 

 

 

On the other hand, there was a test posted on CA with three or four pairs of music files, asking members to pick the one that had the least jitter in each pair.    @bluesman a professional musician with decades of experience (as well as being an accomplished physician), whose ears are so well trained he was able to discern the size of the piano used in one of @Mario Martinez' high res recordings purely by listening, picked the file with more jitter in each case as sounding more natural.  (As did I, but I'm not a musician and make no claim to golden ears.). So it's no good having an idea of what sounds better or more natural to you.  First you need the training to know quite specifically what the distortion sounds like, *then* you may be able to recognize music that has less of this added distortion.