High-end or not high-end? - Page 2

There are many factors that go into building high end equipment & not all of them relate to sound.

 

Sound is very important in most highend equipment but what that company considers as high end sound quality can be different from what anouther company conciders high end. Most shoot for a very revealing sound that has lots of seperation in the sound field where as others  go more toward making all recordings sound pleasant without sacrificing too much of the details.

 

Just as important in high end equipment as sound is the pride of ownership. Not only must it have impeccable sonic characteristics but must have impeccable build qualty. Be visually stunning to look at & use top notch parts in the electronics though some manufacturers have gotten thier best results using parts that are poo pooed by many audiophiles but are none the less higher grade than the so called audiophile parts. Not only are many of these parts higher qualty but are mor economical to use. I had a tube amp with some audiophile grade caps in it that proved to be in fact low grade & improperly speced for the application that they were being used for. I substituted some Sprague Orange Drop film foil caps rated for 600 volts in the place of these caps that were rated fo 400 volts. These caps had over 200 volts of D.C voltage on them  but also had to contend with over 200 volts of A.C (program material, I.E. music) on them so 400 volts was not enough. The caps leaked current as a result & caused the bias to shift upwards in the output tubes.These problems ended when i put the mil-spec 600 volt D.C. rated Spague Orange Drops in thier place. The amp even sounded better, This was true even if the bias was adjusted to match. Audiophile parts are no bargain in many cases as proved here but many look for these name brand parts anyway as a sign of qualty & in some cases may be if used apropriately.

 

Souncards are not normally considered high end not neccessarily due to sound which can rival highend componants but they just don't have that pride of ownership thing down.There is no fancy case to look at, all the controls that they have are gotten to though a host computer not the device itself in most cases. Even though there are some high end parts used in some of them some of the other parts in them do not meet the standards that many have for what they think of as high end parts even if they are the best parts for the job at hand.

 

sterling1 just be happy you've reached satisfaction with your listening experience! sit back, smoke a stogie or partake of an adult beverage of your choice and enjoy the music 

I think you're confusing hi-end with competent. It sounds as though the card does the job just fine = competent. But as other people on the thread have pointed out, high-end carries connotations of expense and rarity.

We need a new term to describe hardware that has the same SQ as "high-end", but without the luxury and that jazz associated with it. Competent sounds very much like looking down on something.

 

It also needs to come with a picture of dr dre telling you that you are not hearing all the music 

 

Don't worry about your sound card being high end or not, as long you like the way it sounds, its fine. High end Audiophile equipments can cost you up to 6 million dollars. Like rroseperry said, the soundcard competent and does the job fine. The X-FI HD is very high end when it comes to soundcards anyways.

The ipod is not seen as a high end portable player. The HifiMan DAPs are seen as high end portable players.

The ipod, from an objective viewpoint, beats 8 kinds of crap out of the HifiMan equivalent, which uses antiquated ICs in a NOS topology.

 

However, the HifiMan player uses audiophile-approved components and costs considerably more.

Edited by Willakan - 8/3/11 at 3:07am

Well, if your sound card is high-end, as in, high quality, then it should be able to distinguish

music with low bitrates and lossless music. But I go with whatever sounds good to me.

I think some of the people here in head-fi takes things too seriously.

 

I can understand those who go to lengths to modify their Grados, that seems like a cool hobby,

but those who live on 1 meal a day just to save up on that Pico amp, or people who put their

headphones on for 8 hours a day, wow, lol.

 

 

If someone sits infront of a desk for 8 hours a day doing nothing but listening to music, they wouldn't need more than one meal a day 

 

If a high end product is based the looks or price, then every head fi'er would go and buy a pair of beats and companies like STAX would go out of business. Thankfully that is not the case. From what I've learnt, high end is when a product is good in every aspect, including build quality and looks. The high price tag just comes with the high end products because they cost more to manufacture. Although occasionally a product comes along with good high end characteristics but without the price tag, they tend to disappear for odd reasons (The whole vintage headphone market seems very interesting, I'd like to try some vintage orthos if I ever get a chance)

@Roller, since competence is so rare, I think of it as praise, but YMMV.

Point taken :)

 

An interesting question would be if the random middle priced product appeared on the market with significantly high quality performance, praised across the board, but from a humble (audio) origin, with huge amounts of people purchasing and happily using it, would this "bringing HQ to the masses" diminish the value and worth of what's considered to be high-end?