In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud
https://www.tomshardware.com/speakers/in-a-blind-test-audiophiles-couldnt-tell-the-difference-between-audio-signals-sent-through-copper-wire-a-banana-or-wet-mud-the-mud-should-sound-perfectly-awful-but-it-doesnt-notes-the-experiment-creatorOpen linkView original on feddit.org1615
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I'm lightly active in the headphone enthusiast space. Even in the more light-hearted circles there is still an elevated amount of placebo bullshit and stubborn belief in things that verifiably make zero difference.
It's rather fascinating in a way. I've been in and out of various hobbies over the course of my life but there is just something about audio that attracts an atmosphere of wilful ignorance and bad actors that prey on it.
I've been in the audio enthusiast community for like 17 years now. When I was fresh, the internet commentators had me thinking there was some audio heaven in the high end compared to the mid range priced gear. Now I know better and the gear community is not so high end price evangelicals like it used to be. I feel like there was a before and after the $30 Monoprice DJ headphones and the wave of headphones since. Then especially IEMs. Once ChiFi really got rolling with IEMs and amplifiers and DACs, $1000+ snake oil salespeople got to deal in a way more competitive market
Same with speakers. Internet changed everything. No more at the whim of specialty audio stores stock and Best Buys. Now you got the whole worlds amount of speaker brands at a click of a finger plus craigslist/offerup. Also again ChiFi amplifiers and DACs. Also improvements in audio codecs whether for wireless or not. Bluetooth audio was awful until it stopped being awful as standards improved
These days I mostly see the placebo audio arguments in streaming service and FLAC/lossless encode fanboys. Headphone and speaker communities these days seem a lot more self aware and steeped in self-deprecating humor over the cost, diminishing returns, placebo, snake oil they live in today compared to 17 years ago. I want my digital audio cables endpoints plated with the highest quality diamonds to preserve the zeros and ones. No lab diamonds. Must be natural providing the warmth only blood diamonds that excel in removing negative ions. I treat my room with the finest pink himalayan salt sound absorbent wall panels to deal with the most problematic materials used by homebuilders. Authentic himalayan salt has been shown to be some of the highest quality material in filtering unwanted noise and echos while leaving clean pure audio bliss
The clamour for lossless/high-res streaming is the audiophile community in a nutshell. Literally paying more money so your brain can trick you into thinking it sounds better.
Like many hobbies, it's mainly a way to rationalize spending ever increasing amounts on new equipment and source content. I was into the whole scene for a while, but once I had discovered what components in the audio chain actually improve sound quality and which don't, I called it quits.
The push for lossless seems more like pushback on low bit rate and reduced dynamic range by avoiding compression altogether. Not really a snob thing as much as trying to avoid a common issue.
The video version is getting the Blu-ray which is significantly better than streaming in specific scenes. For example every scene that I have seen with confetti on any streaming service is an eldritch horror of artifacts, but fine on physical media, because the streaming compression just can't handle that kind of fast changing detail.
It does depend on the music or video though, the vast majority are fine with compression.
My roommate always corrects me when I make this same point, so I’ll pass it along. Blu-Rays are compressed using H.264/H.265, just less than streaming services.
🤓☝️ many older blu-rays also used VC1
Or worse. I think it was the original Ninja Turtles movie that I had owned on DVD and the quality of it kind of sucked. Years later I got it on blu ray and I swear they just ripped one of the DVD copies to make the blu ray disc.
Sadly, that basically feels like what happened with The Fellowship of the Ring's theatrical cut blu ray, too. It just doesn't look that great.
Then the extended edition has decent fidelity but some bizarro green-blue color grading.
Higher bitrate though init
Significantly, streaming is 8-16Mbps for 4K, whereas 4K discs are >100
People don't like hearing this, but streaming services tune their codecs to properly calibrated TVs. Very few people have properly calibrated TVs. In particular, people really like to up the brightness and contrast.
A lot of scenes that look like mud are that way because you really aren't supposed to be able distinguish between those levels of blackness.
That said, streaming services should have seen the 1000 comments like the ones here and adjusted already. You don't need bluray level of bits to make things look better in those dark scenes, you need to tune your encoder to allow it to throw more bits into the void.
Lmao, I promise streaming services and CDNs employ world-class experts in encoding, both in tuning and development. They have already poured through maximized quality vs cost. Tuning your encoder to allow for more bits in some scenes by definition ups the average bitrate of the file, unless you're also taking bits away from other scenes. Streaming services have already found a balance of video quality vs storage/bandwith costs that they are willing to accept, which tends to be around 15mbps for 4k. That will unarguably provide a drastically worse experience on a high-enough quality tv than a 40mbps+ bluray. Like, day and night in most scenes and even more in others.
Calibrating your tv, while a great idea, can only do so much vs low-bitrate encodings and the fake HDR services build in solely to trigger the HDR popup on your tv and trick it into upping the brightness rather than to actuality improve the color accuracy/vibrancy.
They don't really care about the quality, they care that subscribers will keep their subscriptions. They go as low quality as possible to cut costs while retaining subs.
Blu-rays don't have this same issue because there are no storage or bandwith costs to the provider, and people buying blu-rays are typically more informed, have higher quality equipment, and care more about image quality than your typical streaming subscriber.
It's funny that you are trying to make both these points at the same time.
You don't hire world class experts if you don't care about quality.
I have a hobby of doing re-encoding blurays to lower bitrates. And one thing that's pretty obvious is the world class experts who wrote the encoders in the first place have them overly tuned to omit data from dark areas of a scene to avoid wasting bits in that location. This is true of H265, VP9, and AV1. You have to specifically tune those encoders to push the encoder to spend more of it's bits on the dark area or you have to up the bitrate to absurd levels.
Where these encoders spend the bitrate in dark scenes is on any areas of light within the scene. That works great if you are looking at something like a tree with a lot of dark patches, but it really messes with a single light person with darkness everywhere. It just so happens that it's really easy to dump 2mbps on a torch in a hall and leave just 0.1mbps on the rest of the scene.
I can tell you that this is simply false. And it's the same psuedo-scientific logic that someone trying to sell gold plated cables and FLAC encodings pushes.
Look, beyond just the darkness tuning problem that streaming services have, the other problem they have is a QOS. The way content is encoded for streaming just isn't ideal. When you say "they have to hit 14mpbs" the fact is that they are forcing themselves to do 14mbps throughout the entire video. The reason they do this is because they want to limit buffering as much as possible. It's a lot better experience to lower your resolution because you are constantly buffering. But that action makes it really hard to do good video optimizations on the encoder. Ever second of the video they are burning 14mb whether they need those 14mb or not. The way that'd deliver less data would be if they only averaged 14mbps rather than forcing it throughout. Allowing for 40mbps bursts when needed but then pushing everything else out at 1mbps saves on bandwidth. However, the end user doesn't know that the reason they just started buffering is because a high motion action scene is coming up (and netflix doesn't want to buffer for more than a few minutes).
The other point I'd make is that streaming companies simply have a pipeline that they shove all video through. And, because it's so generalized, these sorts of tradeoffs which make stuff look like a blocky mess happen. Sometimes that blocky mess is present in the source material (The streaming services aren't ripping the blurays themselves, they get it from the content providers who aren't necessarily sending in raws).
I say all this because you can absolutely get 4k and 1080p looking good at sub-bluray rates. I have a library filled with these re-encodes that look great because of my experience here. A decent amount of HD media can be encoded at 1 or 2mbps and look great. But you have to make tradeoffs that streaming companies won't make.
For the record, the way I do my encoding is a scene by scene encode using VMAF to adjust the quality rate with some custom software I built to do just that. I target a 95% VMAF which ends up looking just fantastic across media.
I fail to see where TV calibration comes in here tbh. If I can see blocky artifacts from low bitrate it will show up on any screen unless you turn the brightness down so far that nothing is visible.
Blocky artifacts typically appear in low light situations. There will be situations where it might just be blocky due to not having enough bits (high motion scenes) but there are plenty of cases where low light tuning is where you'd end up noticing the blockyness.
The thing is, dynamic range compression and audio file compression are two entirely separate things. People often conflate the two by thinking that going from wav or flac to a lossy file format like mp3 or m4a means the track becomes more compressed dynamically, but that's not the case at all. Essentially, an mp3 and a flac version of the same track will have the same dynamic range.
And yes, while audible artifacts can be a thing with very low bitrate lossy compression, once you get to128kbps with a modern lossy codec it becomes pretty much impossible to hear in a blind test. Hell, even 96kbps opus is pretty much audibly perfect for the vast majority of listeners.
In a distant past I liked to compare hires tracks with the normal ones. It turned out that they often used a different master with more dynamic range for the hires release, tricking the listener into thinking it sounded different because of the high bitrate and sampling frequency. The second step was to convert the high resolution track to standard 16 bit 44.1 kHz and do a/b testing to prove my point to friends.
Yeah the enshittification did this IMO, we can serve 196kbps but chose to serve 128 or 96 so you really hear how shitty it sounds. Or pay extra!
Uncompressrd FLAC and other unnecessarily good recordings are useful when mixing, if I have understood it right, as it degrades quality. Otherwise I bet nobody can tell the difference between a 320 mp3 and a wave file. Guess 256 is all okay but why bother when the difference is so small?
Usually when I hear someone swear by lossless audio one service provides compared to another, I swear the reality is either placebo or one service is just using a better masterering of an album compared to another. The service that has on their service the better version album mix and mastering. Like they could serve it as 192kbps MP3 and sound better than a lossless encoded album version with the non ideal mix and mastered release
Oh, 100%. I actually tested this by recording bit perfect copies from different streaming services and comparing them using Audacity.
I found that they only way to hear a difference between the same song played on two different platforms was 1) if there was a notable difference in gain or 2) if they were using two different masters for the same song. If two platforms were using the same master version, they were impossible to tell apart in an ABX test.
All of this is to say that the quality of the mastering is orders of magnitude more important than whether or not a track is lossy or lossless, as far as audible audio quality goes.
Not here to argue I can hear the difference, because I can't. But in audio collecting where the size and burden of even large lossless files isn't much different from lossy files, why care? I download the flac files and compress upon delivery to the client where the space might be of a larger concern.
I do the same, as it happens, so I won't argue with you.
As for "why care?", I'd say it's about making informed decisions and not spending money unnecessarily in the pursuit of genuinely better sound quality.
Yeah, I don't get too deep into that game. I do have some higher-ish quality headphones and speakers though. I also find that subwoofers are largely underrated by audio snobs.
I think it depends on your source.
If we are talking about a downloaded good high bit rate MP3 and a FLAC, then yeah, I can't hear a difference.
For streaming, I CAN hear a difference between the default spotify stream and my locally stored lossless files. That difference might come down to how they are mastered or whatever spotify does to the files, but whatever it is the difference is pretty perceptible to me and I don't have especially sensitive ears.
If we're talking free tier Spotify, then it could actually be due to the bitrate (96kbps OGG vorbis, IIRC). However, if you're a premium subscriber then the standard bitrate is 160kbps, which is definitely not audible to 99.99% of people.
In fact, after much ABX testing, I found that a noticeable audible difference between a local file and the same song on a streaming service is almost always due to either a loudness differential or because the two tracks come from different masters.
I really noticed when I switched from Spotify to Tidal that there is something different about Spotify's sound quality that makes it worse even at the highest streaming quality. I was surprised since I fully admit that in 99% of cases I can't tell the difference between a 128kbps MP3 and a FLAC of the same file.
Could be poor mastering. You can't always just take a track and squish it down to a low bitrate without tweaking some settings.
I'm a person with sensitive hearing and mp3 always sounds muddy to me compared with a flac or wav rip. My coworker poo-pooed this notion, but I proved it to him. Mp3 does alter the sounds, most people won't notice, but for somebody that does hear the differences its annoying. I would not spend 10k or anything. I paid $15 for an old 5.1 system, and max $80 for a pi2 with a DAC hat. LOL
For me its like if you stood outside a persons house and heard them talking vs their words coming over their TV. There is a noticable signature that let's you hear its the TV or real people, and that's what mp3 vs wav is like for me.
I can also hear my neighbours ceiling fan running in the connected town home. That almost inaudible drone of the motor running, drives me nuts
I don't about you, but in my country Tidal is cheaper than Spotify. But that might be placebo
/jk, though tidal is actually cheaper here. I can't tell the difference in blind testing between 320 kbps mp3 exported in Reaper and the original wav; they're indistinguishable to me. Actually, I can tell them apart with some airwindows dithers, but that is a pretty esoteric exception.
I couldn't agree more. I got interest in higher-end audio equipment when I was younger, so I went to a local audio shop to test out some Grado headphones. They had a display of different headphones all hooked up to the "same" audio source.
60x vs 80x sounded identical. 60x to 125x, the latter had a bit more bass. 125x to 325x, the latter had a lot more bass and the clarity was a bit better. Then I plugged the 60x into the same connection they had the 325x in. Suddenly the 60x sounded damn similar. Not quite as good, but the 60x was 1/3 the cost and the 325x sure as hell didn't sound 3x better. They just had the EQ set better for it.
Picked up a bose system test cassette once. It sounds amazing at first listen on anything because they overhype the high and low end, much like most bad modern music. And its actually fatiguing over time and stresses people out. Big reason I hate a lot of (popular) modern music is the over hyped non natural eq.
Friends will show me songs and they grind on my ears with that unnautural 3k boost to make everything "radio sounding", gross. I don't want modern radio polish (and the sampled kick drums, awful) I want good sound.
Commodores, night shift, 1985, one of the best sounding albums of all time because they knew what they were doing. And funnily enough one of the first digital tape recordings on a Mitsubishi! Also the nightfly.
Yeah and the loudness wars. It never ended eh.
Yeah sadly. Studies have shown modern music causes fatigue and I think some people at least realize that now. Radio rock is always going to be a sausage waveform. Gotta go underground for good stuff usually.
What's a sausage waveform 😋??
Maybe that's why I'm stuck on soma.fm "eighties underground" all day long (not very underground, just good eighties/early nineties music), when I listen to other radios it's quite tiring in the long run, especially if they jump from say -92 to -98 or 2010 and back, the sound is completely different and saturated.
I like lossless compression. But not because I'd be a audio nut. I prefer it from a data retention and archival viewpoint. I could cut and join lossless data as often as i like, without losses accumulating.
Do you often cut and join audio that you did not record yourself?
I would not call it often, but it happens.
Gotta love those people with fiber optic cables with gold plated connectors.
But don't forget the quality of the optic fibers used is also absolutely crucial. Most important factor here is to prevent light scattering along the cable run. So that the zeroes and ones don't get irritated and upset. You don't want the amplifier's error correction to get in a bad mood. So better buy that pure diamond cable that was produced on a full moon night. The captured moon light can can soothe the negative effects of scattered light.
I remember in 2017 going into an audio store near where I worked, and the guy was emphasizing how clear the audio sounded on certain (expensive) setups, and how it was streaming in from "Norway" which was better than what you'd find on Spotify or YouTube. It took me a while to piece together what he was on about.
Dude was talking about Tidal. All he meant was they streamed lossless formats via Tidal. As if anyone could tell the difference between, say, stereo 192kbps AAC and flac.
Also, remember the supposed amazing quality of MQA? What a shitshow. It's rather remarkable that a pair of Airpods Pro 2, when fit into your ears properly, are essentially perfectly tuned headphones for only $250 or less compared to some of what the competition sells. Not to say I don't love my Sennheiser HD650.
You sound like the right person to ask then—how much should I spend on a soundbar for a tv? Or at least do you know a place to ask these questions that give realistic answers with less fanboyism and faux-intellectuals?
I would never recommend a soundbar unless you're absolutely stuck to that form factor for spacial reasons. Bookshelf speakers are still superior and don't take up that much space. But I'm also not familiar with any I just got tower speakers that sounded really good at a friend and been loving them.
Honestly I just want something that sounds better than tv speakers that won’t break the bank. It seems like everything everyone recommends is $400+, which isn’t crazy compared to the price of a tv but I just need the most basic thing possible that’s better than built-in for occasional movie nights with friends and family
I bought a pair of Edifier powered bookshelf speakers (R1280T model, I think) for my living room setup and they work fine for casual TV and movie watching. Cost about $110 total. No subwoofer necessary, but I would add one if I had movie nights with more than just me and my partner (and didn't have downstairs neighbors, lol).
I get that but is a 400 dollar soundbar really any good? Even the 1000 ones sound tinny and small to me but maybe I'm just spoiled.
You can use this to connect your TV to bookshelf speakers through an optical cable. Just need some speaker wire or banana plug cables to go with it
https://a.co/d/06KEUx7E
This one has HDMI ARC which most sound bars use for connection along with optical
https://a.co/d/0cKQrMAZ
Then offerup/craigslist/marketplace for used bookshelf speakers. Practically anything will be far better than your TV. Like $50 used polk, klipsch, and sony speakers are real common on the second hand market. They may be old but speakers last a real long time if you're not blasting them at super high volumes. Go for speakers that have 5.25"-6.5" woofers. You'll appreciate them for music too
There's a bunch of brands and you really can't go wrong compared to TV speakers. Edifer powered speakers don't require a separate amplifier. Other major brands like ELAC, Kef, wharfdale, paradigm, ...
There's a difference though, it's just that gold plated cables doesn't change anything.
I'd love testing a Sennheiser hd600 series, to see if I hear some difference, from my 598 headset. But they are so expensive so I'm all okay with my refurbished 40€ ones :-)
A DAC for the PC is a nice step up though IMO (there are crap ones too ofc). Not everything is audiofoolery.
I'll agree that sound quality doesn't seem to be consistent but I will say that Bose is a very nice quality sounding company. Never been disappointed by them.
Bose the bass enhancing company? Euw...
Must be why I like it.
Then don't listen to me and enjoy your headphones 🫡!
Bose is famous for unnatural sound boosting. This appeals to the masses and fits to modern listening habits.
Well their A20s are still top of the list and the most common brand you'll see during your travels... Must be a good reason.
As I said, that appeals to the masses.
I remember when we'd say, no highs no lows, must be Bose. They must have over-corrected.
I fucking love audio and have an extensive collection of equipment. The last thing in the chain before your ears (so headphones and speakers) will absolutely make a difference and the thing that provides power to that can make a difference. But the cables? The fucking cables?! Absolutely no impact once you're above like $10. Turns out, electrons are electrons and they behave like electrons. Shockingly that doesn't change in copper, gold plated copper, pure silver, or mud. Doubly so for the non analog part of the chain. Hell I've even seen "audiophile grade" ethernet cables.
The other part of the equation is if the differences made by the things that do make a difference actually matter to the listener. They do to me, but my dad is more than happy to just use the speakers on his Dell monitors.
Well, that's not entirely correct. Given a long enough run, attenuation will absolutely cause bad cables to perform poorly. Like your not getting a 10 meter run on bananas. That said, for any modern cable, that run has to be greater than 50 meters for it to even start mattering. So if your wiring up a warehouse, you probably need to care about the type of wire your using.
Source? /s
I don't think I've ever seen a 10 metre banana.
That's what she said
Oh yeah, definitely. The wiring needs for an industrial space or event venue are different than a domicile, but I don't think anyone's buying audiophile snake oil for those. They really seem to market that kinda crap to the fool and their money crowd.
A lot of it comes down to a mix of snobbishness, sunk cost fallacy, and tribalism.
You can't admit that your $5,000 pair of headphones sound exactly the same as a $300 pair, because:
You'd no longer be able to pretend that you're better than the people who have $300 headphones.
You'd have to admit to yourself that you completely wasted $4,700.
You'd have to realize that the tight-knit community you've formed with other $10k headphone people isn't really bettor or even really distinct from communities of people with $300 headphones.
I buy headphone cables based on how nice the cable feels, if it transmits noise when it rubs against stuff, and how well the connectors fit into the devices I am using.
My favorite is when people get picky about cabling for digital transfer. The ones and zeroes either get there or they don't, nothing in-between. They work or they don't.
I think the best thing to do is to assess your ability to hear difference. I can absolutely hear the difference between my Bluetooth earbuds and a decent wired IEM, so I use wired headphones for listening to music. I CANNOT hear a significant qualitative difference between the $25 Chinese IEMs that I use and more expensive options that I have tried, so I use the cheap ones.
To be sure, there ARE perceptible differences between wired headphones, but those are more a matter of EQ and personal preference. I can achieve my maximum perceivable level of quality with pretty inexpensive hardware. It doesn't mean that other people cannot, that isn't my problem.
My favorite is when people get picky about cabling for digital transfer. The ones and zeroes either get there or they don't, nothing in-between. They work or they don't.
Around the time when HDMI was released my friend bought some "super-high-end "cable that cost over 200$, since he wanted the "best possible performance " out of his system. I tried to explain that the cheapest cables would give the exact same results if they're not faulty from the start. We had a loud argument about this, even though the guy is a goddamn tech PhD. He just could not admit he got scammed and tried to give me a lecture about "how the gold plated connectors make all the difference".
I had a salesperson who said that with This more expensive HDMI cable, the picture almost looks three-dimensional!
For IEMs, the price difference typically goes towards comfort rather than sound quality. As a professional audio technician, a custom-molded IEM will be infinitely more comfortable than a cheap set. But not everyone can justify spending $2000 for custom molds, because they don’t use them for work every day.
Regarding digital, quality spdif cables absolutely matter. One tiny mistake and they crackle out and don't work. I've gone through many pairs of cheap ones until I just spend the money to never have issues again.
Now will the 1 dollar one sound the same as the 80 dolalr one? Yes. It won't last or hohld up to dust or abuse at all though.
I'm a musician. I swear by Beyerdynamic DT700. Fucking great headphones for like an insanely reasonable price
Awesome headphones. If you don't mind the beyer peak. My favorites are my grado rs2. But I prefer music on speakers not headphones, so much space is lost on headphones. Hear a pair of magnepans in a room and you'll be blown away. Got some original SMGa's from 1989!
Real audio enthusiasts know the room is the most important, followed by the speaker itself, followed by the actual source. Then the amp etc.
And when you record and mix music you realize how much of it is bullshit in the end. The source is all that matters, really.
Isn't it more of the weakest link? Bad amp and you can have the nicest room etc.
Stereo is overhyped IMO too 😋 except if you have a dedicated listening room.
Yeah it is. Right, room is very important. Ive always been able to designate a listening area where I am, thankfully.
I think a lot of it is a sort of sunk cost fallacy.
They bought the expensive shit, so they have to believe it's better.
Apple Syndrome
It’s been like this for decades, according to my dad. Well before the internet.
I worked for Philips Research 30 odd years ago (weeps)... It was a source of great amusement then that we could sell two pieces of equipment that were identical in every way except one had a Marantz label and cost twice as much as the Philips one, and the Marantz would get 5 stars in the audiophile magazines, and the Philips would get 3 or 4.
That's amazing. It's almost hard to believe, yet it sounds about right.
It's a rich playground for the price-equals-value fallacy, and there are plenty of well-heeled rubes that'll fall for the technobabble.
The one time I was absolutely blown away by a pair of headphones that are not in the insano area, are the beyerdynamic dt1990. They aren't cheap by any means but not insanely expensive. When I listened to music I've listened to hundreds of times, somehow they showed me even more detail I haven't heard before. For example a Nena 99 red balloons LP, the amp was still the same as always but I couldn't believe the amount of detail there was in the background, the soundstage those headphones were creating.
I have a set of Sony studio monitor headphones. I can hear more nuance and parts of the music I simply can't hear in any of my ear buds or noise canceling headphones. They aren't wireless, so I don't really use them that often though.
It doesn't matter the cable, the amp, shitty 128kbps mp3 or vinyl. I can hear much, much better with the drivers in them.
I'd say 90% of anything that matters is the driver. But past a certain midrange point, there just isn't really much or any improvement.
It mattered more back in the analog days, I think. Now that it's all digital, and going through dac's, its all just about being good enough for 1's and 0's to get through. "Noise" doesn't exist for digital audio. It either works, or it doesn't.
It definitely mattered a hell of lot more in analog days. Getting a properly calibrated reel tape machine through a properly calibrated tube amp in a properly dimensioned room with good speakers is a feat, and absolutely sounds amazing.
Nowadays, it's about how they mastered it. I can tell you for a fact Ozzy's no more tears CD sounds like shit and the double record mix is FARRRR better, because it doesn't have the life squished out of it from brickwalling. Is that digital vs analog? No. Its mastering.
Analog will sound better if you spend a SHIT ton and have an insanely good source. Digital will also sound amazing if you spend a lot. I myself very much enjoy listening to my original reels of 50s-70s music because you really can get so close to being in the studio and hearing everything, because they couldn't edit it to death.
Bridge over troubled water on a reel is a real experience.
This is 10000% true!! I worked as a mixing and mastering engineer for a while, and lemme tell you... the loudness wars never ended. This is why I still collect vinyl, the medium is kinda shit, but the masters are so much better that it's hugely worth it for a about 2/3 albums I own (1/3 are duds; I can live with that).
That's awesome! I got paid a few times but never really done it as a job. Always wanted to but I always wanted an organic approach while bands wanted to be absolute radio perfect periphery style and I'm just not into that.
Yeah exactly. I mean, vinyl is amazing for the art, and if you keep it super clean its going to sound very good. CD is fine if only they wouldn't destroy the damn master !!
A tube amp isn't necessarily expensive and they sound very good.
We transport audio digitally today but it still is all analog in the end.
True!
Happy cakeday! 🥳
Thanks!
Happy cake day
thanks!
I think it's the lack of a shared vocabulary.
Everyone likes some music better than other music, and so everyone think they can tell the difference between good and bad music. However, nobody can explain the difference in plain words.
This easily leads to the conclusion that it is fully subjective, and this is where the ignorance comes from. If nobody can explain what good music is, then my own voodoo explanation is as good as any.
However, we can talk about music theory, audio production and sound analysis in scientific terms to the point where we can even reproduce certain sounds based on the description. But we can't really understand the description without actually experiencing the sound.
It's similar to somebody saying "I don't like this cake" or someone saying "my taste receptors react to the umami in this cake", but I still wouldn't have a clue about how the cake tastes.
Sound is also different from other sciences in that there is very little proof of one thing being more correct than others. And that goal changes constantly. Whenever somebody does crack the code to what people enjoy, it'll get boring really quick.
I had a music teacher long ago who said that there is no bad music, only wrong audiences. His point was that the music that makes it through to the recording and publishing will already have passed the filter where someone made a decision if there is an audience for it. If you hear bad music, then you're just not the right audience.
Anyway, cables. Who cares. The end result is the most important part. However, I'd prefer to hook up the instruments on stage with thick cables instead of bananas. Same thing applies at home. Any wire will do, but cheap wires do break.
well obviously, all this proves is that copper wires are just as bad as wet mud. Every audiophile knows you need gold oxygen nitrogen purified wires blessed by a voodoo witch doctor.
I've got these cables. Yes, they are expensive but they are absolutely fantasti... wait, did you say voodoo witch doctor? Mine were blessed by just a witch doctor. Have I been ripped off?
Hoodoo is 3dB better than voodoo according to my tests.
Hoodoo? You do! Do what? Remind me of the babe!
Voo-doo hoo-doo what-you-don't-dare-doo...
Silver is the better conductor. Even if it is priced so that peons can afford it.
Sheeeit not recently, shot up to $120/oz recently, and it's back down to ~$80/oz right now, but that's still more than ~$35/oz last year. Not that gold didn't also follow that trajectory or anything, it's still more, but GODDAMN.
Fun fact: this is where the "banana connector" came from. Before copper was discovered, early humans used bananas for all their audio connections. The name stuck, even though wires are made of metal today.
Additional trivia: The term "banana republic" originates from countries best known for exporting high-end audio equipment back in the day.
"banana split" stems from a failed experiment where scientists tried to split audio frequencies by sticking the connectors into ice cream and running the audio through it
And Bananarama was so named for their high-fidelity recordings which were performed, mixed, and recorded entirely on bananas.
Banana boats were named for the ancient egyptian practice of drying and lashing together bundles of banana skins in what was, at the time, a highpoint in marine engineering. It did, indeed, play a role in the stealth technology used today, due to the naturally radio absorbent nature of the material. Dont believe the people who tell you they sealed the hulls with the pulp - itd just wash off once underway.
Yup. Failed spectacularly, which is why they went for mixing boards as a backup solution instead.
The ensuing explosion took out two thirds of New Jersey
Bosenana AudioBananica DolBananAtmos Bananaheiser
Bravo
This will now be a standard AI response. Well done.
O noes!
TIL! It’s fucking bananas that I never knew this.
They are often also used as a unit of measurement of relative scale, especially amongst practitioners of internet science.
Banana physicist here.
This is actually due to a really interesting phenomenon called banana dilation. Although they may appear different sizes to the eye, bananas distort local spacetime such that they are all physically identical dimensions. This makes them a perfect and consistent measure of size.
Makes sense. They always seem to appear slightly bent. Usually to the left, but not always.
Just ask an audiophile what they think about blind tests. If they argue against them you've found a snake oil salesman.
"You can't trust blind tests for audio, that's the wrong sense bro. You need double deaf studies, obvs."
But what's the point of having your newly-purchased $3000 wooden volume knob and polyatomic copper ring bus lift yet another veil from the soundstage if you're blindfolded?
HEY! I got my $3000 wooden volume knob because it’s pretty and I can’t take a blind test if it’s worth it. I need my eyes to see it!
All I want to know is just how many veils has that soundstage got‽ Here I am, just having a soundstage like a sucker, and they've got veils they can lift!
3k is obviously an exaggeration but goddamn why is woodwork so expensive?! I needed wooden set of some things that are normally made of plastic for about $100, the wood was $465 and literally only one guy on earth makes it. Fuck me!
You've identified why. If you are able get some tools doing stuff yourself is in general fun
I mean yeah if you're literally the only guy in the entire world making it (I'm not joking, literally the only one. Some others make the same class of thing that would physically fit, but in the wrong style and lord knows why but it was a deliberate, and bad, decision) then you can charge whatever you want. Dude doesn't even have it patented or anything, the designs are public (since like the 60s) and if I had any woodworking XP I could sell the exact same thing legally. 'Course, I've never worked wood in my damn life, so..
Still, $465 is a lot for these items.
What exactly is this thing, I'm curious now
Eh, I really didn't want to be specific because it's unfortunately both exceedingly nerdy and somewhat controversial (not that it should be imo but it is), but, you a Fallout: New Vegas fan by chance?
Let's just say I can now patrol the Mojave and not worry so much about the cazadores, (but I'd still almost wish for nuclear winter, of course.)
Now if they're deaf tests on the other hand...
Most people can’t tell the difference between a 320kbps mp3 and lossless, but hey if folks really want to waste their money on snake oil like gold-plated cables then I say let ‘em.
At that quality of MP3 you'd really need either a track that specifically pushes the limits of the codec on technicalities, or a one in a million hearing + high precision monitors.
Albeit FLAC is generally a better option still because it compresses things losslessly, reducing raw file size 50-70% (comparable to MP3 at 128kbps bitrate) and is a royalty-free, meaning it can be freely implemented as a hardware codec.
For example, a bunch of microcontrollers in the ESP32 family have built in FLAC codecs that outperform their MP3 counterparts, meaning a FLAC library can be directly streamed to them, and with the right DAC combo, one can build inexpensive, low power adapters to hook their existing AV systems up to Sonos-style streaming. And with many AV systems supporting bidirectional RS232 (or other serial) communications for controlling the system and querying it's state, you can literally smartify them completely AND provide high quality audio streams to them.
128kbps files are roughly 90% compression from raw, so not comparable. I'll admit that I haven't bothered with FLAC much, but in my limited experience it generally is pretty rare to see much above 50-55% compression from raw.
Anything that requires remuxing multiple times pretty much requires lossless compression. Else it'd become like screenshots of memes because the compression adds up.
That being said, last time I was working with professional audio people, they still preferred WAW as their intermediary format.
Probably because of habit?
Thing is, storage isn't at a premium anymore, so there's no reason not to use lossless even if you can't hear the difference.
U sure about that?
Old mp3 players used to measure space in megabytes, so yes, I'm sure of that.
Good for you, i had one of those.
Now go check the storage prices now and please define what "premium" is, 'cos last i checked they're being overhyped - not as much as RAM, but on a similar trend.
I think FLAC is considered lossless so the comparison should be with WAV; whereas for lossy you have MP3/Vorbis.
MP3 patents expired a while ago i think, but for the longest time i've used Vorbis because of that.
I did a blind test, and found it depends on the genre.
Slow, chill music is completely transparent when compressed, no matter how hard I “audio peep.” It’s not even a question.
But something “dense” like System of a Down has audible distortion. It loosely (not always) coincided with the bitrate of the flac files, which kind of makes sense, though even the extreme end is hard to notice unless you know the particular song very well.
Also… a lot of recordings kind of suck. It’s crazy to worry about tiny bits of distortion when a bit perfect master is already noisy and distorted.
Audio codecs like MP3 usually do a Fourier transform to move the sound into the frequency domain, discard any frequencies that you're unlikely to notice, and encode 'rate of change' for the remaining ones. So the encoding problem is usually sound with fast changes in intensity or frequency, which is basically what percussion is.
System is quite percussion heavy, so will sound bad.
Recently moved from Spotify to Qobuz, because fuck Dan Ek, and the fact that they've got better bitrates across the board really makes the difference for jazz and jazzy stuff. Neglected, sounds crap on Spotify. Sounds great on Qobuz. But that's the change from 'bad' to 'quite good' bitrates; additional bits are very much a case of diminishing returns.
That makes sense.
Heh. Spotify used to stream 384K Vorbis, which should be sufficient. But now the web app is apparently AAC. And the app-apps are conspicuously listed with "equivalent to" bitrates, whatever that means:
https://support.spotify.com/us/article/audio-quality/
Heavy classic music is a beast too, vivaldis energetic parts in the 4 seasons for example. Or Rimski Korsakoffs the flight of the bumble bee I'd wager. Or painkiller/turbo lover/... by judas priest 😁
I'd be surprised if anyone could.
However, 128kbps vs. 192kpbs+ is like night and day, and it's especially obvious with better equipment.
People who say 128kbps mp3 is fine, are full of shit. I've been to weddings where it's been so obvious that whoever's in charge of the music is just blasting 128kpbs mp3s and it's brutal.
The funny thing is that the people who can afford all that overpriced garbage are usually so old, they can't hear all that well anymore.
I found I can detect VBR but yeah at that bitrate I really can't tell the difference between 320 and flac, always thought it was just my ears!
Hell, I can't even tell the difference between 128kbps and flac. Realizing that saved me a whole lot of hard drive space :D
It's still a good idea to have your main music library in flac for future proofing, but yeah 128kbps opus or ogg is what I use on mobile devices.
Isn't Ogg a container format?
TIL that Opus replaces both Speex and Vorbis (the latter of which i was about to question on).
Yeah, it is. Vorbis is the actual codec.
My hearing isn't extraordinarily acute, bit I can hear the difference, especially in transient-rich sounds like cymbals.
With quality headphones, back to back, I'm confident that you could
And even if you can - is it worth it? I mean - do I care and should I care? Is the point of music detecting every detail of the recording or can I appreciate it without paying that much attention to production? For instance, I find it much more convenient to use Bluetooth headphones as it allows me to move around the house. Flac immediately stops being relevant, as Bluetooth codec is really bad compared to almost any codec. I recently tried ldac codec on my headphones - couldn't really tell the difference. Mp3 128kbps is just fine for me. Almost any situation. I care about musical content much more than production details. Other people might care more. I don't.
This is the other part. Idk if it's me, or my equipment, but like... I listen to music for the music. I might like certain genres (noise music comes to mind) more on higher end equipment, because that's the point, but also... Eh? Not why I'm here.
Most people don't have proper home stereo setups any more either, and they prefer shitty overcompressed music through earbuds. They don't know any better, sadly.
And Ive probably spent less than 400 dollars on my home setup. But it blows away anyone who hears it. Just takes some smarts in setting stuff up and getting good used equipment.
Just another part of the cheapening of everything in society , and why music isn't appreciated as much anymore. No wonder everyone has depression.
Reminds me of the lengths people go with their peripheral purchases to save 1-2ms of input latency for playing games with like a 20 TPS tick rate on a wifi connection
Depends on the song really, if it's just a standard pop song it's mixing will usually come through just fine on a shitty MP3. The more layers a song may have the muddier it gets at lower bit rates. Like I've found the noisier spectrum of punk always benefits from higher bit rates.
I downloaded the same track from soundcloud at 320kbps mp3 and bandcamp FLAC and played them at the same time in the VDJ changing from one song to the other and couldn't feel any difference (the graphic Soundwave was also exactly the same). I had not tried it in actual club environment, but when the mp3 is really compressed it shows visually on the Soundwave
I noticed something similar with video. Like, if I am paying attention, the difference between the highest quality encoding and the next level is usually visible.
However, I have a harder time telling the difference if I don't do a side by side comparison.
And even when I can easily tell the difference, once I'm watching the thing, I get into the story and I don't care anyways.
Obviously a slightly different criteria compared to music, but people do make a big deal out of stuff that even they don't actually care about.
I kinda want to start a snake oil audio cable company. It's gotta be one of the easiest paths to retirement
I recently switched from 320kbps to lossless, and there are very few moments where I can tell a difference. The biggest one is in the cover of "Tom's Diner" by AnnenMayKantereit. There's a section of the song at 320kbps where it goes almost silent, other than faint whispers of the band counting out the silence, but in lossless you can hear them actually singing the song quietly
Yep, and an especially fun fact is that people with high-end equipment prefer MP3 over lossless.
Behold:
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Electrical-conductivity-of-banana-at-different-ripening-stages-with-the-help-of_fig5_317486785
So a overripe banana is an interesting high-pass filter, kinda like a capacitor, though the big takeaway is the conductance vs ripeness.
So if you want to test if a banana is ready to eat, hook it up… preferably with several other bananas in series. If the music is too loud, they are ready. Too quiet, and it’s not time yet.
The moment you give me a link to a banana tree/MP3 player/ripeness tester/EQ:
I only listen to music with overripe bananas. It sounds best that way. Copper wire just doesn't sound as good. Believe me: My ears are very sensitive and superior to yours.
You get much better conductivity with plaintains because the cross-sectional area is bigger.
But because my ears are so discerning, I only put my audio jacks in jackfruit.
You are ears of very fine taste.
The advantage of good wire is isolating the signal from interference. However, if you aren't in an electrically noisy environment, anything that can conduct electricity will do just as well.
Something in my computer monitor isn't shielded and will alert me to a incoming cell phone call a second or two before the phone rings.
Your monitor is like the blinking stickers we used to put on our phones.
Yes my knees creak, why do you ask
Are you implying that gold isolates better from interference than copper?
He's talking about the electromagnetic shielding in a cable, not the contact-points. Usually a copper mesh sheath housed underneath the outer-most rubbery layer and runs around and along the entire length of the signal-carrying wires inside the cable. Works like a Faraday cage, helps prevent electromagnetic interference from large power sources, other unshielded cables running parallel, or anything else that can generate an electromagnetic field near the cable.
Very important to protect signal integrity, widely used even outside the audiophile world (although there are of course plenty of audiophile gimmicks related to shielding).
Basically, if you have a bunch of live unshielded cables bundled and zip-tied together along with your speaker wire, you'll definitely hear it. Run the signal through an oscilloscope, and you'll even see it
Seems like you know what you're talking about. If I may ask, how do ferrite beads figure into this? Do those actually help protect signal, or is it less effective?
Simply put, both protect against certain types of interference in different ways, and each is effective in ways that the other is not.
Mesh shielding is going to help prevent electrical interference from being introduced via the wire itself from an external source. Like other cables carrying signal and running very near/parallel, or electromagnetic fields generated from other devices, certain electrical components, household appliances, etc.
The ferrite beads protect against radio-frequency interference (RFI) via induction, acting like low-pass filters which attenuate specific bandwidths of very high frequency signals. Essentially, they intercept and absorb high-frequency electrical noise, and convert that energy into a small amount of heat instead of letting it pass through further down the signal path. This kind of interference can be from an external source, or generated internally from the various electronics/components in the signal path (which mesh shielding would do nothing to protect against). They also help dissipate any RFI that the mesh shielding itself may be carrying, so you often see both ferrite beads and mesh/foil shielding, like on laptop chargers or USB cables for example.
But the article is about what material is used as a conductor
Yeah, but the comment you replied to was making a point that the conductor doesn't really matter if there isn't any noise present. What makes a good cable has much more to do with proper shielding, because electromagnetic interference is what will muck up your signal, not a lack of gold plated connectors
The benefit of gold is that it doesn't corrode
As I understand it gold is used as it doesn’t tarnish or corrode - it’s not there to benefit the sound in any way.
Exactly, silver is a better conductor I believe, but tarnishes like copper does
To be fair, the signal is only going through these suboptimal conductors for a very short distance.
Try wiring up your stereo with 50 feet of bananas, and you might start having problems.
I thought audio quality was more to do with the source and the destination. If you have a shit needle on a record or a speaker made of wood then its gonna sound like ass.
I never once thought it had anything to do with the cables. Unless they were frayed or damaged in some way.
But i am not an audiophile, i record my own music and mix etc, but never worried about cable quality before.
I was buying a receiver and speakers in 2020 and when it came time to pick out speaker wire, the salesperson walked over to where the wire was and began the pitch...
Salesperson: so when the frequencies are higher the electrons end up traveling only on the outer layer of the wire instead of in the middle...
Me: yeah, skin effect, I did electrical engineering
Salesperson: ah, so I guess you know you don't need this then (pointing to gimmicky monster speaker cable that had a single strand of wire in a spiral around the main bundle with a clear jacket so you can see it)
Me: correct (grabs the cheapest 16awg)
Exactly this, the cables never mattered. They're the least significant part of an audiophile system and I doubt anyone could tell the difference between a crappy cable and a good quality cable. People get good quality cable for durability rather than sound quality.
As long as its not too crappy. Otherwise you’ll wonder why you’re picking up radio.
I’ve literally used lamp wire in a pinch before…sounded great 😆
Cable quality only matters in long distances, when the dumping of the signal is noticeable.
If the distance is so short that there is not any voltage drop and still out powering the external noise. There is in effect no influence
Oh yeah, for sure. I didn't include that part because an audiophile setup rarely has a need for long distances.
I think the term audiophile has changed in the last decade or two, because now i keep seeing being used to mean “someone who likes music more than the average person”. Before it was more “had an entire room dedicated to music listening and if you move their chair a millimetre they will literally murder you”
That’s the kind of person who swears that can tell s huge difference based on cable (but, of course, never in a blind test).
There are websites dedicated to selling them things they don’t need. A 1m audio cable can cost several tens of thousands of pounds/dollars. And they’ll buy them and swear that they make a significant difference to the timbre of the hi hats on track 3 of The Joshua Tree
Think I’m exaggerating? Here’s a cable, for home use. 8ft. Yours for the low, low price of £98,770
That’s not a pair, btw…
I do mean "person with a huge setup dedicated to music listening". An audiophile who actually knows what they're talking about will tell you to get any cable from a reputable brand.
But of course you also have "audiophiles" who have no idea whatsoever.
Even more than the actual contact with the media, the entire system breaks down at the ears. If your ears aren't well-trained, then you don't even know what to listen for. You might think loud bass is good, or booming drums, and never notice that you can't hear any mids.
So in a blind test like this, some people just might prefer a sound that this experiment has little impact on, so they wouldn't be able to notice any differences.
A well-trained ear might be able to detect differences between them, but still not have a real preference. Besides being able to hear all the different frequencies, you have to know what the instruments sound like in real life to know if those frequencies are reproducing accurately. Again, if you don't what it's supposed to sound like, you really don't know if ANY change in components makes a positive or negative difference in the natural sound, you only know the difference relative to your personal preference.
TL;DR: This "experiment" doesn't prove anything. It's just funny.
Interesting, do you know where I can buy a set of trained ears? - Audiophiles, probably.
Some of it is genetic, but a lot of it is years of training in hearing and teasing out all the frequencies.
I spent years in the audiophile record business back in the transition days from analogue LPs to digital CDs, and spent a LOT of time with beyond top-of-the-line audio gear, including high end stuff that wasn't even on the consumer market.
My ears got trained from many years in bands and orchestras, then recording sessions, then hearing the final recordings on CD, as well as thousands of other recordings, and many live performances by some of the greatest orchestras in the world. I know what it is supposed to sound like at every stage of the process.
Bottom line, cables aren't going to be a major issue. Guarantee you've got at least 10 other variables making a bigger difference, and most of them can't even be fixed.
Yes, so my well-trained ears prefer noisy sound, something like 48kb mp3s I downloaded from the web in my childhood (born 1996). Because that's less likely to cause migraine through them than a good record with some annoying sounds in it, preserved by a more precise lossy encoding. And things you want to hear are kept well enough even by 48kbit mp3s.
And this surprisingly keeps with analog things, like headphones and speakers. I prefer something cheap and noisy that makes sounds softer to something quality and with crisp sound, but somehow too crisp.
And I do have good ears, I can hear a lot of things, a cat walking on a neighboring plot in countryside during wind, things like that. Hence the migraines.
Speakers are made of wood, the good ones are at least.
Unless your referring to the actual drivers, then yeah wood wouldn't really work in that case.
Solid natural wood is a horrible material for loudspeaker cabinets. Granted, this fact isn't limited to just speakers. Wood expands and contracts with humidity, which means making boxes of any type out of solid wood complicated. Cabinet doors have floating panels in the center for exactly this reason. That's why you should use breadboard ends if you want to frame a wood table, otherwise your table will risk warping and cracking. There's also the whole non-uniform density thing. Most loudspeakers use something like MDF as a substrate and will veneer the outside. MDF is both stable and uniformly dense, which makes achieving a "dead" (or non-resonate) enclosure a lot easier.
Yes you're 100% right. Solid wood will warp and split, I did mean MDF and should have said as such
Well, paper is a very popular material in speaker cones, including high-end
Yeah, i meant the cone, not the case
Once in a while I come across shorts of this audiophile showing of his gear. The cables he uses look like under sea cables, like he's pulling 40kV out of his wall socket. It's so ridiculous
EDIT: This fucking shit. I guess that they're using XLR cables at the very least but cmon man what the fuck are those cables (especially the second setup)
It's not about sound quality, it's about wasting money and showing off. Maybe some placebo effect, too.
Yep cables only matter in terms of preference. Unless we are going so cheap it’s barely holding on
Cables give resistance... thats all...
I heard one guy talk about the importance of cable shielding and connector material and shit once, but the ones I actually know just talk about the other hardware (speakers, mixing pults, lots of terms I couldn't recite).
I love seeing this story… it reminds me of 30 years ago when I worked in the telephone industry. Heard about telephone copmanies rolling out service in very very rural areas - running signals over barbed-wire fences because it was too expensive to run dedicated cables. That did degrade the signal, but it worked.
I know it's a completely different thing entirely, but it just gave me nostalgia remembering hearing about that.
To be fair, "audiophiles" are morons.
I used to be an audiophile. I spent a lot of money on speakers, and amplifiers, and DACs. But I always found the audiophile cable crowd a bit nuts. And the people that are buying audiophile versions of stuff in the digital domain are full on delusional.
I say “used to be” for two reasons. One, hearing everything does not always mean better. A lot of the time it just reveals imperfections in the recording. And depending on the space, and ambient noise, more headroom can be worse because it just pushes the quiet stuff below the background. And, you are going to have to listen to music in places that you do not have your gear and it is going to sound bad if you get too used to the good stuff. So your music life may be worse overall.
But the biggest difference is that I am older. I just cannot tell the difference as well as I used to.
But most people spend too much money on the equipment and not enough on the sources. You do not need a $20,000 setup if you are listening to badly encoded MP3 or AAC files for example.
But if you have high quality FLAC or Opus sources (or really high-end analog), you do not have to be an audiophile to tell the difference. Same with linear power supplies. You can hear the difference even if you do not spend so much money.
Like wine, audiophiles often make it more about the money they spend than the quality they are getting or the experience they are having.
That said, I can still hear well enough to know that 80% of the people that play music around me turn it up past what their amp can handle and it clips like crazy. I do not know how people listen to that.
I'm jealous of people who can't tell the difference and have no need to buy audiophile grade SSDs
This just shows that bananas and mud are materials for excellent audio equipment. I am looking forward to my gold-plated banana.
Does dry mud exist? I'm pretty sure we just call that dirt xD
There is a certain crusted over and cracked look for dirt that is considered to be dry mud.
Holy shit english has so many specific terms for dirt! It's just jargon to urban dwellers.
I worked at an online shop for high end audio equipment. It was always both amusing and painful when customers asked about the sound characteristics of various power cables in the price range between $100 and $10,000 that we carried, or the same with USB and optical digital cables. Some came with the firm belief that they needed better power cables to enhance the bass of their setup. They even bought gold plated "audiophile fuses".
I mean yeah, audiophile cables are 100% a rip-off every time. You can spend thousands on a cable without it having any real benefits.
It makes more sense to just buy decent speakers and a decent amp, along with a good audio source (any CD player).
This is why I like to get mid level stuff. Once you get past the cheap rubbish it’s all the same imo.
This is about a digital signal right? Cause I'm pretty sure if I add a banana midway into my bass' pedalboard that I'd be getting a significantly different sound. I'm tempted to try and proof myself wrong tho lmao
The eye opening moments for me were
Listening to $35 Porta Pro headphones and realizing you don’t need a lot of money for great sound
ABX testing and realizing I couldn’t tell the difference AT ALL and certainly couldn’t remember the last sound bite well enough to make a real comparison anyway.
will be converting to bananas tonight, thanks op
The way audiophiles tell sound quality is 99.99% subjectivity and 0.01% objectivity.
Well, yeah. Everyone's ears are different.
Yes ears are different. And eyes. And preconceptions. That is subjectivity. If you want to know what is actually better you need to eliminate those biases. e.g. in audio the standard is an A/B test where the test plays audio from 2 sources at the same volume through the same headset and the recipient has to choose which is best without knowing anything else. Done properly you'll know if there is a measurable, objective difference between the two sources. Double blind is even better.
The issue for audiophiles is that this is not the way things are done. More often they're sold snake oil - hyper expensive audio cables, beech wood knobs, concrete turn table bases etc. Things that do precisely do fuck all to improve audio quality except in their imaginations.
Audiophiles get a lot of friction, but this kind of person exists in almost any hobby. People fascinated by equipment and ascetics who loose the plot about what their hobby is all about.
Why tf did they only test blind people?!
the removal of one sense hightens the other senses
I mean, electrically all of those things will just attenuate amplitude, not really effect signal oscillations, which is actually what sound is ...
All they're doing is effectively adding a small resistance to the signal which will just lower the volume in effect. Adding any amplifier will fix that
I see you also read the article
it could distort the signal or add noise
Most high end audio equipment is mostly just rich idiot tax. Though low to mid is a huge jump in audio quality.
i personally find bananna audio the most appealing
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So wait, did they send analoge or digital signals through? Because digital means you could send it through anything and as long as it gets through its the same. The cable only matters when you ARENT using digital signals.
If I read it correctly, it was analog and they found that only the signal amplitude was meaningfully changed, not the quality
Makes sense. As long as the transfer medium isn't highly capacitive or inductive, it doesn't matter as long as you compensate for the loss in signal strength.
..and now I fell into a research rabbit hole regarding mud capacitance.
EDIT: Mud is actually slightly capacitive. Source: "Static Dielectric Constant of Water and Steam", a 1980 journal article by M. Uematsu and E. U. Franck published in Journal of Physical and Chemical Reference Data
Analog, and what really matters for analog signal is if the wire carries load or not.
Like a phono cable from a record player or a analog signal cable from an old sound card matters, but it doesn't matter how you send the amplified signal to the passive speakers.
This means if you have a HDMI cable going into a decent AVR and speaker cables coming out, you basically can't do anything wrong.
Cost does no equal tperformance. Take a look at audiosciencereview.com (ASR). as well as Erin's audio other (YouTube channell). They both measure performance. I sold my £3k amp and replaced with one for £1k. My partner hated my speakers (too big and ugly), and so were sold to someone who wanted them and replaced by budget options that measure very well. My music sounds better (almost entirely down to the speakers) and we had a great little holiday and it all takes up much less space.
But did they use oxygen-free copper (OFC) wire? Because otherwise the results are skewed as regular copper sounds just as bad as a banana stuck in wet mud.
i'm into oxygen free listening lately
Nah, they used oxygen-free bananas though.
It was never about sound quality. Sound quality was the justification for spending money and showing off. Just like so much of consumerism.
Yep. Just like the fuckers walking around with $2500 sunglasses.
Those sunglasses don't do anything that a $20 pair can't do. And they don't even look all that different.
The important part is that they enable absolutely disgusting consumerist snobbery, allowing some very vapid people to think that they're better than other people because they have the expensive sunglasses.
In just about any kind of product you can think of, there are brands catering to this kind of conspicuous consumption.
I listen to QUAD 77-11L speakers from like a lifetime ago, and a cheap class-D thing from Aliexpress. It's fine.
HugeNerd is correct, 90+% of audio quality is in the mic and speakers. Transducers make electro acoustics real, everything else is support.
Get really great used speakers cheap and an adequate amp just good enough to drive them. Your shit will sound excellent for anyone.
Well, I'd argue the placement and room are an integral part of it as well.
In that sense the room is part of the transducer itself, yes, as the speaker cabinet supports the speaker driver, so do the walls and room size. Think of them as a system.
Pretty much, and I don't think my stylish cardboard and wood-shavings condo is going to make expensive Totem Acoustic speakers sound their best... I had a pair of affordable Paradigm floor-standing speakers, but everything sounded hollow. They sounded great in the store, that happened to be a field-stone and timber construction with corner room treatments, etc
In my dry-wall and toothpick chamber, the sound just bounces around randomly. So then I got rid of the big speakers and got tiny QUAD ones, and that's all I need. I can of course tell the difference from a premium setup, but I can't afford a nice home.
I can also tell Angus steak from grocery-store all-beef hot dogs, but ... money.
Hot dogs it is.
Yeah the room is like a meta-cabinet.
Your speaker strategy has to consider listening style (sitting, working, watching, ambient, etc.) and build from there: big stereo, small nearfield, flooded or point source, placement like height angle and and close or far to wall, audio style, resonance locations, materials in and on surfaces, etc..
So two big towers or a bunch of wee little Kantos can be great or lousy depending on all that.
Or you could just buy a couple of cheap pure silver speaker cables coated with gold and everything will be great.
Explains the Monster cable 'gold-plated banana.'
If you can't hear the difference, don't pay the difference
So, like the $5 Trader Joe’s wine tasting with wine enthusiasts.
Two buck Chuck!
What, price? There's good wine and not so good wine (and battery acid), that's it.
Freakonomics covered this back around their inception. The data shows wine tasters and critics generally rate expensive wine as better. In a blind trial where expensive was replaced with two buck chuck and a $5 option, researchers proved there’s not much difference in ratings when the price isn’t known. Tell them two buck chuck is the most expensive thing on the table and it’s then rated as such.
I believe this was part of their coverage on experts not being experts, iirc.
I've had tinnitus since I was maybe 4 or 5 years old. A high end sound system is cool to look at, but wasted on me. Those $30 computer speakers are just fine.
It is almost as if the human ear is much less precise than electronics.
Im certain I could tell the difference between a $50,000 setup, and the one i have cobbled together for a couple hundo over the past decade... And i would love to have that setup. But that cost to performance is only worth it if you have way too much disposable income. Eff the audiophile market.
One of my favorite audiophile doo-dads were wooden knobs being sold as upgrades to regular device knobs. They were super special wood with all sorts of magic properties and a bargain at hundreds of bucks.
This is the kind of info I would pay for
Delivery mechanisms and audio quality do not matter as long as it has a good beat that I can dance to.
I want some of that mud!
onion title 😭
Did the banana have gold plated contacts??
The only reason for reasonable quality speaker cables, is so that you get consistant volume between left and right channels if the volume is the same. That and so they don't break when you pull on them.
Nah it's literally only the latter.
Cheap and expensive will give the same volume. But cheap will snap if you look at them wrong, whereas expensive you could throw off the tallest building in the world and they'd have nothing happen to them when you fetch em.
I am referring to voltage drop consistency over distance.
Say you are running two 15m cable runs for rear surround speakers. If you run very cheap cable, the amount of voltage, and thus volume, will not be the same across the two channels. In short runs, not enough to notice, but on longer runs you can.
But there is no need for super expensive cable. You just need something durable and consistent enough.
I funnily enough ended up saying something similar 😁
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/19203668
It matters in digital signals more than I expected.
A bad-quqlity HDMI cable over a long run will start getting a bunch of noise on some of my displays that shows up as random green specs popping off due to signal loss, whereas better cables will give a clean signal.
And back when more broadcasts were analog and I ran tech for a road show, I'd occasionally pick up random stations on poorly-shielded cables that would get amplified by powered speakers. The cables essentially became antennas. Though I haven't run into that in over 20 years.
Poorly-shielded cables and speakers also used to have a lot of issues with cell phones. Anyone else remember the series of 3-beeps you could sometimes hear on speakers a few seconds before a phone in the room started ringing?
HDMI either works or it doesn't. It's not an analogue signal.
Edit: Well, nevermind lol.
Not true. Corruption happens in digital signals quite often. The effects are different of course: packet loss, garbled audio, the green dots the poster you replied to described. I have seen it all.
If it "worked or not" we wouldn't need things like checksums or error correction.
Source: did electrical engineering, then 25 years in networking.
I think the green specks they mentioned ARE the parts where it didn't work. It was not like an analog issue that might tint the color of all the pixels, it was a digital issue where more than 99% of the pixels were the EXACT correct color and then a handful of spots had corrupted data which manifests as green specks on that monitor.
I don't know what the specifications say should happen when data loss happens, but I'd much rather my screen show a random spot rather than refuse to display anything that's corrupted.
That's not true. Packet loss is a thing. It's the same reason some USB cables suck and others are awesome.
Again though, not to as much a degree as most audiophiles make out.
It's worth getting a better cable, but not a FANCY cable.
There's zero discernible difference between a cable that's £3/metre Vs a cable that's £10/m. There's a discernible difference between the £0.50/m and the £3/m though.
The speaker is what they hear, not the signal to it. Regardless how it's transmitted.
I just want DECENT audio quality and metal construction so that it lasts and the plastic doesn't break from light wear&tear
Without a good DAC, even the cleanest input gets muddy
Ewww, why dont you just jack into your private opera in your living room
/S
Had one for the last 20 years, but all good things must come to an end and so it was with mine. Got burned out due to all the power fluctuations the ice storms brought us. Surge protectors can only cope with so much I guess
Why have I bought airpods two months ago? I should’ve just stick bananas in my ears
Charlie the unicorn was right.
You get oxygen free copper because you install it permanently and don’t want it to rust and fail and have to rip out your ceiling and walls
So get the good stuff it’s not sound quality it’s so it lasts
Yeah, but then again normal 230v or 115v electrical wires are not OFC and they outlive you too so even that is questionable.
Copper wiring is protected from the elements (that is: oxygen) by its insulation. The gauge of the copper wiring is a far greater factor in audio quality than the voodoo science behind OFC.
You don't have to worry about corrosion in your speaker wiring unless your speaker installation is literally in the ocean.
I knew this fucking pineapple was too good to be true
Is this a joke? Like actually? If your speaker wire is "rusting and failing" I got bad news for your 120v/240v service and plumbing.
This is just dumb.
Also who the fuck would rip out celling and walls for low voltage speaker wire run. Being a bit dramatic there bud. Just use the old shit to pull the new wire through. Cut small holes where you can't.
Anybody else read the beginning of the title as "Blind taste test"?
would analog make a difference instead of digital?
I have a nice setup at my home. The one thing I noticed is when you have a high fidelity setup, EACH song needs a different volume setting. You can't just turn it on and go about your day. You have to run to the living room and adjust EACH song. It's a pain unless you just want to listen to JUST ONE song.
A couple of cheap speakers in the ceiling of the kitchen is "better".
I imagine it's more by album than by individual song
Ooh, you've got records.
Yea, that's right, by the album.
I started my day today with the song "In the Garden of Eden"...I'm sorry "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida". The full 17 minute version. That drum solo is INSANE.
Awesome song!!
That one sounds great on the reel.
What you're describing is called dynamics, which much music today lacks. You should listen to full albums. That's the point of a mastering engineers job, make the album flow Usually when you have a dedicated listening setup, albums are the point...
Or get a transparent rack compressor and put it inline with your amp. That will even it out for you. Supermarket muzak setups have this built in so music is always the same level. Its why you hear modern songs on supermarket speakers clipping, because the systems were made for 90s mixes. But for active listening, that kills a lot of the impact and enjoyment.
I had a compressor on my older setup. For what I listen to NOW that's a good idea.
THANKS!
Ya!! I get it, dynamic stuff can actually be annoying in loud environments (classical in a car, definitely not hahaha)
Good cables are shielded well. That she makes them expensive. That's not transmission, that's shielding. I don't think they tested that but for digital audio is not surprising
but what cables did they use; https://www.whathifi.com/best-buys/accessories/best-audio-cables
I consider myself an audiophile-light. I've never been one to nit pick over minor things, but I can just tell the slightest difference between some brands.
So which brand do you prefer? Chiquita or Dole?
hmm interesting, if guesses were completely random would expect more like %50 mistakes. does this mean that mud actually transmits audio better than copper (assuming everyone marked the best sound they thought was as copper).
Oehlbach knows.
They tested the stupid audiophiles apparently.
I love how autistic lemmy is.
Which are all of them who claim to hear a difference.
Try it yourself.
Have someone switch between them for you.
Bet you can't tell either.
We made test once with a friend, where we could hear a difference.
The setup was a Denon reciever, and one speaker was connected with a random cable, the other one is a pure copper, braided audiophile cable. The pc was connected with toslink to the reciever. Played the music as mono, and we switched between the left-right speakers.
The only difference we could hear were very high pitched glockenspiel sounds from a flac file. That's all. Any other music sounded the same. But the point was, there is a very little difference, even it's rare to find a song where you can actually hear it.
This was the song where it was clearly audible, but I guess you can't hear it on youtube, as mp3 already cuts off that high frequencies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Kh-3xkye6A
The Internet is a weird place where people know how to read without actually understanding what they're reading.
Reading everything literally has to be the most confusing thing in the world. Though it does make The Onion a bit better.