How much does it cost to be an audiophile?

[gmgraves]

15 hours ago, Jud said:

@mansr also mentioned a very prosaic electrical reason that balanced cabling (which could easily cost less than the cables they replace) can eliminate ground hum if that's a problem.

Nobody is arguing about ground loops, but yes, that's one of the things balanced connections exist for, to eliminate ground loops

[gmgraves]

43 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

what's wrong with France?  ?

It's full of silly Frenchmen? You don't think Frenchmen are silly? Have you ever seen a 2CV? But I kid. Being quirky is part of what it means to be French. God bless 'em! and remember what Jeremy Clarkson calls the French: "Cheese-eating surrender monkeys."

[gmgraves]

52 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

careful  -   the Normans may invade again (not for the food or culture, obviously)

If you are talking about British food, might I remind you that Britain got the reputation for lousy food during WWII when American G.I.s were stationed there. Hardly the best time to explore any nation's cuisine, but especially then for the British as they had nothing to eat. It's easy to have a great cuisine when you have good ingredients. The British had strict rationing and were lucky to get a tin of corned beef or Spam per month. People often forget this (and many never knew it) but here in the USA, rationing ended as soon as the war ended, but in England it continued into 1953! As for British culture, any country that can produce Shakespeare, Thomas Tallis, Handel, Elgar, Gainsborough, Turner, Vaughan-Williams, The original Morris Mini-Minor and the E-Type Jaguar, and the Mini-Skirt, needn't take a back-seat to anybody; culture wise.

[gmgraves]

54 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

careful  -   the Normans may invade again (not for the food or culture, obviously)

The Norman idea of food back in 1066 was salted cod and stinky cheese.

[gmgraves]

1 hour ago, Ralf11 said:

 

Wrong in general, tho xlnt cheese was made.

 

In general, French food did get a big boost from the Arabs - one good thing to come out of the Crusades.

 

Here is a quote from a History of the Med. period: "The tastes of the Norman nobility were far more sophisticated than the English."

Doesn't say much for the English, then, does it?

[gmgraves]

2 hours ago, semente said:

 

The food is rubbish here, a gastro-invasion would be most welcome.

I have visited England many times, and I've always enjoyed the food. From a Ploughman's lunch to fish and chips at a pub to a hearty English breakfast to Chicken Vindalu. I've enjoyed every meal. 

[gmgraves]

36 minutes ago, Audiophile Neuroscience said:

 

I am looking at any and all possible reasons that may effect a change in SQ with a change of cable. I don't need to know the explanation to hear the change. Conversely, some people need an explanation before they can hear a change. This assumes a change is there in the first place which as you say in most cases is unlikely. Paraphrasing @Jud it is the "doctrine" espoused in competing views that sends up red flags for me.

 

I don't get it. A change in tonality would be a cable characteristic, but a ground loop is a fault that has nothing to do with a cable's construction or the materials used.  

[gmgraves]

16 hours ago, opus101 said:

Ground loop 'faults' are guaranteed when unbalanced ICs are in use between non-isolated-from-mains-at-AC audio components.

I've never had the problem. But I do know that they can be difficult to run down and correct.

[gmgraves]

5 hours ago, mansr said:

I have never been to a place where you couldn't find bad food.

There's an awful lot of bad food available right here in the good-ol' USA. For instance, I find McDonalds to be inedible. Might as well be eating out of a garbage can. Taco Bell isn't much better and neither is KFC. Those are just the fast food outlets. There are plenty of one-off restaurants that are greasy spoon joints with terrible food as well. When I was in college I and my roomie had an apartment over a restaurant run by an old Greek woman. Her hamburgers were mostly bread filling and her fries were served with half the (rancid) cooking oil still clinging to them!

[gmgraves]

9 hours ago, Jud said:

 

Hope you enjoyed it.    A lot to like besides the food, too.  (The Stereophile offices were in Santa Fe once upon a time - their leaving may be considered a disappointment or improvement, depending on your point of view.  )

That's right, when I wrote for them, that's where they were. Gordon Holt lived in Santa Fe, as did Larry Archibald (the magazine's then owner) and several of their writers. The last time I was there (for S'phile) John Atkinson had moved there and bought one of those quaint faux-adobe hogan style homes with the round poles sticking out of the roof! Gordon's home was an older, more traditional craftsman style. Every time I went to New Mexico, I spent the entire time I was there with altitude sickness (being from sea level). Now That I live at almost 5000ft, I can probably handle it better. Others said that the food in Santa Fe was wonderful, but as you can probably guess, I was in no shape to appreciate it.

[gmgraves]

2 minutes ago, fas42 said:

Well, I've just listed some key distortions - they're very audible, but they don't have a nicely recognisable name ...  as far as I know. Some people might call them noise, signal modulated noise, interference, etc - for simplicity I just call them, distortions.

That's interesting Frank. And where do these "key distortions" come from. What causes the interference and signal modulated noises you speak of? And once you have found these gremlins, what do you do to eliminate them? I ask because my system doesn't have any of these faults. My mains is as clean as a whistle on the secondary side of my hospital-grade power transformer/filter. If I put my oscilloscope on my speaker cables with nothing playing and turn the gain (on the 'scope) waaaaayyyy up and time-base way out to see any VHF and UHF noise, the line is perfectly clean. If I turn the amplifier gain way up, I see something like 0.01% of 120 Hz ripple, which is normal with any AC powered system.  My interconnects between components are likewise noise free. I don't see any noise, signal modulation (except when playing MP3 signals, but that's just part of the digital compression process) or interference. when listening, I don't hear any noise, signal modulation or interference. All I can glean from your words is that where you live the mains is very dirty, and you have a lot of interference. To what do you associate your signal modulation? 

[gmgraves]

2 hours ago, Ralf11 said:

California's a Garden of Eden

A paradise to live in or to be

Sure, If you make $250K a year or more. If not, it's a miserable place to live. $1500/mo for a single ROOM, $4000/mo for a STUDIO apartment. Broken-down shacks selling for over a million bucks, and in some places (like Morgan Hill in south Santa Clara County), real estate prices are increasing by more than $800/day! What a shame. California used to be ideal. Great weather, lots to do. I could drive for 20 minutes and be on some of the best sports car driving roads in the world, drive for 45 minutes and be on the Pacific Coast Highway heading for Monterey or San Francisco. Two hours to the east, and I was in ski country. Everything that any person could desire. Not any more. Many people's entire paycheck goes for a place to live. The state has become very business hostile (left-wing government) and companies are leaving in droves for places where workers can afford to live and buy a house. The whole mess is heading for a giant collapse. It can't happen too soon.  

[gmgraves]

6 hours ago, GUTB said:

So, a couple of things.

 

1. California is a failed state. Lifestyle homeless everywhere, gangs / crime, most neighborhoods are bombed out urban decayed trash. A few places like Orange County and the high-tech enclaves, etc, are still very nice but horrendously expensive— essentially a third-world gutter with a minority of haves doing thier best to stay out of the majority of have-nots.

 

2. Are there any places in the UK which are both not decayed urban trash and not horrendously expensive to visit?

Such places are everywhere and will continue to get worse as the delta between the poor and the rich gets larger. The middle-class American is a dying breed. You either migrate up to the upper economic class or you fall into poverty. But you are wrong about California neighborhoods being bombed-out urban trash. Most are quite upscale. Why, even a horrid Eichler home (concrete slab, tilt-up walls with no insulation, and a flat roof (also no insulation) which was built to sell for <$5K in the early 1950's now costs over a million bucks! Some go for 2 million!

[gmgraves]

2 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

From all those causes I've mentioned many times: mains power, RF, power supply inadequacies, vibration sensitivity, triboelectric behaviours, poor quality connections, 'useless' parts of circuitry being in the signal path, parts which are not good enough for the job, etc. How they are eliminated is done by the simplest, cheapest method that's good enough, at that moment, to see whether I've nailed a cause - and ways of doing that have been discussed ad nauseum on numerous websites and forums.

 

I don't use diagnostic gear to measure, observe anything. And I don't listen for noise when no signal is present. But I hear a lot of noise, signal modulation, interference when music signal is passing through - those symptoms I mentioned just earlier. To me, they're as clear cut, as informative as any readings on instrumentation.

 

Semente mentioned he listens to a rig, by someone else, that produces sound that's "mindblowing". Well, that's the sound of the recording, or very close to it - if you're not getting that subjective quality, then you're listening through, yes, a veil of distortion ... the real job is to track the causes of that "veil", and sort them ...

Again, my system has none of those problems. It sounds as close to real music as a recording played through a stereo system can sound. Sure, there are systems with better bass, but none with more dynamism and realism. When you can play a recording of a Steinway grand piano and it sounds like it's in the room with you and the reproduction is so precise that you can tell it's a Steinway Concert Grand and not a Bosendorfer Grand, then brother, you're pretty much there.

[gmgraves]

5 hours ago, opus101 said:

 

Poor design normally, the areas which are designed the poorest in my experience of taking lids off kit is power supplies (insufficient attention to load-induced ripple, insufficient PSRR at HF in regs) and a close second is poor layout/routing of PCBs (use of indiscriminate ground-fills, no hygiene observed between power and signal grounds).

Then, don't buy that stuff! I think that Frank's problem is that he starts with cheap kit, then spends the rest of his time trying to correct the cheap equipment's shortcomings in power supply design and audio path components.

Now, that's certainly an ok, and possibly a rewarding aspect of this hobby, Sort of halfway between Alex's home brew equipment approach and my "buy good and connect properly", with a well filtered an isolated mains supply approach.

[gmgraves]

12 hours ago, beerandmusic said:

 

any wages on when?

 

I usually respect your knowledge and opinion, not on this one...and why would you wish ill will on anyone.

 

California has one of the best steady and stable growth rates nationwide, and is projected to grow to 50 million by 2050....businesses will continue to follow to cater...

 

 

My point is that it's not sustainable. You can't have real-estate values rising by $800/day forever. At some point it has to stop. Also, at some point nobody except for the extremely rich will be able to live in a state with such insane real-estate values. You can't be an assembly worker, a technician, a store clerk, a McDonald's worker, etc. and live in an area where rent on a studio apartment (one room and a bath) is $4000 a month! Already many businesses are leaving. Tesla built their huge battery factory outside of Reno NV and Apple built their server farm nearby. Neither built these things in Silicon Valley. 

I don't wish Ill will on anyone. But it's happening. People are moving out of the Bay Area faster than they are moving in. I have engineering friends who have moved to towns in the Central Valley, more than 60 miles from San Jose/Palo Alto to places like Tracy and Modesto and Manteca because they cannot afford to live in Silicon Valley. They get to commute 120+ miles a day to work and back. That's what I wouldn't wish on anybody. That's no way to live. In the Bay Area, there's a shortage of every kind of worker you can imagine from postal workers to waiters and waitresses at restaurants to health workers. These people simply don't make enough money to be able to live there and it's not worth a long commute for what their jobs pay. 

I left Silicon Valley more than 3 years ago when my landlord doubled my rent for a two bedroom upstairs flat in an older building from $1800/Mo to $3600/Mo. So, I'm speaking from experience here, not just speculation. I have many friends who work in the tech sector in Silicon Valley and I have friends who live in places like Santa Barbara, the LA basin and San Diego, so, I think I know what I'm talking about. Sure I'd love to move back, but it isn't going to happen in my lifetime. But the bubble will burst at some point That's why I say it's not sustainable.

[gmgraves]

13 hours ago, beerandmusic said:

I am all for an all-in-one with less need for expensive cables, band-aids, and accessories to improve what should be engineered into the product....the days are not far behind.

I'm with you! both of my amps are integrateds. I use a network player with attached storage and, of course, a quality DAC. 

[gmgraves]

55 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

wow - had no idea Sanitary is still there

 

 

BTW, George if "a giant collapse" happens to the world's 5th largest economy, no one will be talking about their home stereo any more

The only collapse I'm talking about is the real-estate bubble. Every few years, Silicon Valley goes through a  cycle of cutbacks and layoffs, and I expect that will continue. It's probably during one of those that the real-estate market will "self adjust". 

[gmgraves]

10 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

 

 

very little storage space is needed for the robots that will perform those tasks

And what happens until these robots are perfected? That's not right around the corner, you know. And what happens to the people displaced by these robots? Assuming that you are a Liberal*, You "Progressives" puzzle me. You advocate for open borders and "sanctuary cities" while prognosticating a robot filled society where there is no place or need for the entry-level and low skill jobs that new immigrants traditionally fill. 

* if you are not a Progressive Liberal, I apologize for assuming.

[gmgraves]

47 minutes ago, Audiophile Neuroscience said:

 

You are not alone in suffering inflated housing costs and cost of living. Sydney repeatedly comes up as one of the most expensive cities to live on the planet, https://www.elle.com.au/culture/most-expensive-cities-to-live-in-list-2018-16103,  more than New York or London. The real estate bubble looks like it may be due to bust but suffice to say ordinary Aussies cannot afford to buy in Sydney. Overseas investors have pushed prices to staggering levels and are not afraid to over pay.

 

 

You just basically hit the nail squarely on the head. It's the speculators in all these markets that have sent real estate prices through the roof. These greedy scum don't care that people need affordable housing. They only know that if they pay premium prices for properties and flip them, they can make a healthy profit. Get a bunch of peculators doing that and real estate prices in any given area quickly go through the roof cutting most home buyers out of the market. 

[gmgraves]

31 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

 

 

In limited use, yes.

31 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

 

pointing out a likely effect does NOT mean one likes or dislikes that effect

Indeed it does not

31 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

 

I have never advocated for open borders or sanctuary cities.

In this country so-called Progressive Liberals or "Social Justice Warriors" do advocate those.

31 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

 

I like Progress.  It is largely created by scientists & engineers.

Agreed, but you'd be surprised how many think that it's politicians advocating progress that accomplish those things. Of course it isn't. Politicians F***-up everything, always!

[gmgraves]

31 minutes ago, GUTB said:

My work takes me to southern LA a few times a year, and sometimes to Silicon Valley. LA and SF are trash heaps with no-go areas. The nice neighborhoods are priced into the stratosphere. There’s great food, great shopping and wonderful lifestyle aspects to these places but you can get most of that in Texas and Arizona at a fraction of the cost — which is why Californians flood into these areas. Some of the upper end neighborhoods in the Phoenix area are just as nice as the better California neighborhoods so why would anyone rob themselves living in a failed state?

What keeps people out of places like the Phoenix Arizona area is the 120°F+ (49°C) summer daytime temperature. They have to spray a fine mist of water continuously, all day to get people to shop downtown! 

31 minutes ago, GUTB said:

If I was the king of California I’d clean out the sanctuary cities, eradicate the shanty towns, crack down on the real estate market and send my goons after all the corrupt state apparatchiks. All the useless bloat would be eliminated — the displaced government workers can get a real job or leave the state I don’t care. Once the cancerous tissue is cut out I can work on getting business back into the state.

Great Idea. Unfortunately, the kind of government needed to invoke those kinds of changes would be a government that would violate most of the US Constitution and as King of California, you'd have to grow a little "Charlie Chaplin" mustache and wear Jodhpurs and Puttees with your brown military coat and belts!

[gmgraves]

9 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

the border with California 

And trap those poor people into staying in a state where there are no decent living facilities unless you are rich? Not nice!

[gmgraves]

16 hours ago, semente said:

 

Then there's this:

 

42 people hold as much wealth as the 3.7 billion people who make up the poorer half of the world’s population, compared with 61 people last year and 380 in 2009. At the time of last year’s report, Oxfam said that eight billionaires held the same wealth as half the world’s population.

The charity added that the wealth of billionaires had risen by 13% a year on average in the decade from 2006 to 2015, with the increase of $762bn (£550bn) in 2017 enough to end extreme poverty seven times over. It said nine out of 10 of the world’s 2,043 dollar billionaires were men.

No doubt that the world's wealth is being more and more concentrated with each passing year. It's that which is causing the erosion of the middle class. We are quickly migrating to a world-wide two class society, the very wealthy and the very poor. The thing that bothers me is that we are also moving toward a society where more people are on the public dole than are working. Since the dole comes from taxes, how can a shrinking tax base support a growing welfare* base? 

 

* By welfare I mean all forms of governmental assistance, from actual public welfare to unemployment compensation to Social Security, to socialized medicine. 

[gmgraves]

14 hours ago, beerandmusic said:

that's a bit "softer" than your first statement..." companies are leaving in droves for places where workers can afford to live and buy a house. The whole mess is heading for a giant collapse. It can't happen too soon "

 

It might sound a bit softer, but, basically it's the same thing. These tech recessions are devastating (at least the ones I've lived through have been). The whole "mess" is heading toward a giant collapse and tech companies are leaving California in droves. Here in Northern Nevada, they're building huge plants for Tesla, Apple, Amazon, and other companies who have basically already said that they will expand in California no more.