The Great Wall of Better Audio

[Summit]

9 hours ago, GUTB said:

Is price.

 

It's been a while since I last posted here the last haven of actual audiophiles outside of Audiogon.

 

The great majority of "audiophile" gear is mass-consumer junk. Toys. The industry and segregated itself into two sides of the wall -- extreme prices on the good side and low prices on the junk side. There is not a middle-ground in the market. There is no "pretty good" for low prices. There's switching-mode powered, class D, plastic driver shovelware junk in the low price segment. When the average audio consumer comes onto Reddit, some forum, or whatever, and asks "are these $100 speakers good enough my budget is up to $300" the answer is...there are no good speakers in that price range.

 

The problem is in my view is that no one will continue their journey to better audio if they're stuck in the shoevelware toy realm because those products sound bad. Bad sound will burn people out on the pursuit of audio. 

 

You can offer advice based on years or decades of audiophile experience to get great sound at a very decent price, but that "decent price" is still going to be in the thousands of dollars range. There's no way around this and there is no one in the market that wants to do "good audio for a low price". Everyone just has to have their big markups so they put out compromised crap.

 

Welcome back. I see that you like to present your view in the same old (GUTB) confrontation style.  

 

I agree on one thing thou; Bad sound buy experience can burn people out on the pursuit of audio.

[Summit]

14 hours ago, bluesman said:

 

You're speaking my language!  It's not only possible, it's simple - there are now so many great products out there that the only reason to spend a lot more is to gratify the desire (or the need, if you suffer from that pathology) to spend a lot more. 

 

I'm just finishing up the next article in my Audio Value Proposition series.  This one's about the front end, featuring my 6+ month comparison of 30 open source players on Win10, MacOS Mojave, and multiple Linux distros.  I installed each on every box I have that would take it, including a 2018 full tilt boogie HP PC, simpler current PCs (i3, Ryzen, Celeron), multiple SBCs (including Pis, Beagles, and an Asus Chromebox), and a few of my legacies (e.g. a 2006 Toshiba Satellite U205 and a 2007 Athlon X2 64 Gateway "media" laptop).  You can pump fine music into your electronics from pretty much any half decent computer made in the last decade, and I'm still amazed at how easy it is to get great sound from a bit perfect player running on a capable machine that costs under $100.

 

Electronics & speakers are also falling in line.  Excellent DACs with proper gain control and high res capability can be had for under $300, some with balanced outs and/or very nice remotes.  My SMSL SU8 is great, and (apart from issues with a few design problems and the manufacturer's abysmal customer support) my iFi iDSD nano LE does everything well.  A very nice pair of powered monitors like JBL 305s or KRK 5s will set you back about $250 when on sale (which is every other week at one of the big retailers), and a nice 8" sub like my Yamaha is regularly $150. 

 

Emotiva and similar contemporary makers offer a never-ending stream of better and better products at bargain prices compared to top names offering little or no marginal advantage.  And many of the current crop of innovators offer great customer service, e.g. I've had fantastic interaction with Emotiva on everything from timely delivery of promised future products to a waranteed repair with 5 day turnaround on my Stealth DAC 5 years after purchase (USB on the C-Audio chip died).

 

I'll be adding an article about each category of product above over the next few months to help those searching for such prizes.  And although I'm not writing about video, I'm playing with it a bit and it's just as accessible from a lot of the players and devices I'm evaluating.  As I type this, I'm watching an HD video of my blues band's gig from yesterday on a Pi 3b+ running VLC player with no compromises in what I see or what I hear.  It's a wonderful world for audiophiles!!

 

Here's a sample of what I've been looking at since January...

 

 

It is great that good sounding audio gear can be bought cheap today, but that a budget gear would sound as good as good high end gear is not my experience.  In other word with a bigger wallet you can get better sounding gear. You will need to choose well and get electrical and sonically matching gear. The outcome of upgrading to better gear is kind of cumulative and bottlenecks in the audio chain can prevent you from perceiving the difference.