Cafe Sceptico: The Objectivist Cafe - Page 26

This? http://www.head-fi.org/t/293165/my-cat-tore-up-my-virtual-dynamics-power-3

 

It's a hilarious thread about certain power cables being regular old garden hose filled with sand.

It was an enlightening read.

Reading through it now it looks like it was a long, slow and torturous process to rid HF of VD.

Snake oil warning: The same Rick Schultz who was behind VD is back with his new company out of Texas called High Fidelity Cables. He even has a patent for this crap and already has some of the hifi press shilling for him. Steel cables with magnets in the connectors and with his high end cable in the middle as well.

 

The patent is U.S. Pat. No. 8,272,876. He's got some test results towards the end of the garbage which indicate the "benefits", such a load of old tripe.

 

Here's the website for HFC with a bunch of the usual hifi press pandering reviews: http://www.highfidelitycables.com/technology.html.

Ongoing test of mine that some of you might be aware of: 6 DACs compared.

Slightly OT, but I'd like to vent here, if you'll allow me: I absolutely love my Shure SE425 IEMs with the Comply P-series tips. Isolation is way beyond what I thought was possible; I used to be a big fan of the Bose QuietComfort 15s (which do work quite well and sound quite good, IMO), but those tips achieve much greater isolation than the QC15s can ever hope to. Sound quality is excellent, it's everything I could ask for.

I also found myself using the Clip+ much more often ever since I got the Shures. Objectively, the Clip's low output impedance makes it more suitable for them than my iPod Classic, but the truth is, the reason I've come to use it so often is because of how convenient it is: it boots up fast, file access and loading is instantaneous (compared to the iPod's HDD), and I can clip it to the exterior of the front pocket of my jeans, giving me permanent and direct access to the controls (play/pause, volume up/down).

The more I learn about audio, and the more I think about it, I'm more and more convinced that audiophiles are chasing ghosts and wasting both their time and money. I have many hours of listening time on both my Clip+, which measures well but nothing extraordinary, and my O2/ODAC, which is pretty much perfect and measures way beyond audibility. Frankly, they're both 100% suitable for listening to music (CD rips), which happens to make up for, maybe, 95% of "sound quality", if not more.

The files I play on my Clip+ are Ogg Vorbis files, encoded with the AoTuV version at quality 5, which is the setting at which I stop being able to ABX it. The files average at about 160 kbps. And it sounds excellent, very clean. 24/192 WAV files? on a DAP? What a ridiculous waste of space.

I have no more illusions about what makes a recording sound good.
Edited by skamp - 2/4/13 at 11:13am

I have a Zip (Rockboxed) and I absolutely love it (actually I have 2.) One plus thing about it for me is that it can play a wide variety of formats which adds to the convenience factors you already mentioned. SanDisk have an absolute winner with this little player. Paired with a set of KSC-75 the Sansa player is great. Unfortunately, I have painful ear wax build up issues with IEMs, but I agree some of them are superior to my Koss headphones.

 

I wouldn't say that audiophiles are chasing ghost with higher end expensive models though. I have heard some very high end rigs and they are definitively superior to the Sansa players. That said, many worthy high end rigs require more space, and commitment (time and cash.) Definitively, most (if not all) of these rigs are not nearly as practical as a Sansa player paired with IEMs.

 

A Sansa DAP can do wonders in bringing the diminishing returns threshold closer to the sub-40 dollar range. But IMO, for folks who are obsessed with getting the best in terms of audio, the Sansa players are definitively not the end goal. Again, it is very good, and in fact, it is the player that currently I use most (other than my laptop - after I fixed it's craptastic drivers.)

Edited by ultrabike - 2/4/13 at 12:46pm

There was an interesting article in the LA Times about audiophiles, LPs, and high res tracks. "Perfection kills music..."  along with some other profoundly deep observations, especially the parting thoughts. Its worth a read.

All I see is a big steaming pile of misinformation.

 

Like this:

"Yes, but the process of upgrading to high-definition digital is no small thing. To do it right, that can entail hooking up a decent DAC (digital audio converter) between your stereo and computer, then getting the proper adapters because USB ports won't carry the highest frequencies. And then it means you can't use iTunes or other popular music programs because they are designed only for lower fidelity. (Don't get me started on Apple's misuse of the term "lossless," which still involves compression when you copy CDs.)"

Headphonia couldn't have sqeezed more bollocks into a paragraph even if they had teamed up with Neil Young.

Hey everyone. Would someone mind explaining to me how to interpret a "polar response" graph of a loudspeaker or microphone? I tried reading through the polar patterns section on Wikipedia but I still don't quite know what to glean from these sorts of graphs.

 

http://www.zaphaudio.com/SR71-modeled-polar-1500blue-2500red-100step.gif

 

This is a graph labeled as "Vertical Polar Response" under the "Modeled Response" section of the ZaphAudio SR71.

 

http://www.audio-technica.com/cms/wired_mics/5879a6ca22e5aa7e/index.html

 

This one's the "Polar Pattern" under the specs of the AT2020 condenser mic.

If it's like antennas, I think it's the mic gain as a function of mic pointing angle.

I'd assume most boxed speakers have a roughly cardoid distribution pattern, with a null at the back and max sound pressure at 180°, and dipoles, as the name implies, have a bi-directional pattern.

The graphs just tell you what SPL you get at various angles to the speaker, and sometimes also what frequency response.

Some speakers, like a line array, will have narrower sound field (smaller 'sweet spot' in 'filia-lingo) than your average box. It can be useful to know

 

It boggles the mind, doesn't it?

 

se

 

My tentative belief is that it's pointless looking for a better player than a Sansa until you start driving headphones that it won't drive at an acceptable volume, but that with current technology the very best headphones do fall into this category.

 

Wax.... Ugh. I rarely use my IEMs now. I don't miss them either because I found that the HD25-i-ii slaughters the hell out of the Etys and Yamaha FOTM iems I was using. And the HD25 is too big even for my insane tomcat to eat, which is a comfort. And my Rockboxed Clip+ drives it perfectly, after some fiddling with EQ and Crossfeed.

 

But earwax... I even tried the bicarb thing and all that happened was - oh, you don't won't to know. But it was horrible, horrible!