kwkarth
Electronics guys... we have our plusses and minuses. With advent of digital everything, we're being phased out
- Joined
- Sep 30, 2001
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Quote:
In my personal experience, even crappy recordings will benefit greatly from quality gear, so I don't agree with the mentality that if someone was listening to lossy files, they shouldn't waste their money on quality headphones. For example, I have some really old cassette recordings that friends in high school made for me that are muffled, full of noise, distortion, azimuth irregularities, and so on, and some are artists I still haven't been able to identify to this day, so I have no way of tracking down better quality recordings of those songs. During the evolution of my listening habits and studio setup, these old crappy recordings have been played on a variety of equipment in the last couple of decades. With each improvement of gear, I was able to hear more detail in those crappy recordings than before, which means those details were always there, just that the crappy earbuds and boomboxes I started with as a teenager weren't able to resolve those details. Now that I have the most ideal studio setup I can afford, I'm hearing a lot of stuff in these old recordings that I never did in the past. Instead of what people commonly refer to as "better equipment will make lower-quality recordings unbearable because the flaws will become too obvious" I experienced the opposite. The better gear actually made the crappy recordings far more enjoyable because now I have a neutral platform for those old recordings to stand on.
Most inferior gear (not the same as cheap, since some cheap gear can be excellent) have unacceptable coloration, and what happens when you listen to bad recordings on them is that those colorations will exacerbate the deficiencies of the bad recording. The frequency anomalies are often exaggerated, the stereo imaging collapses, and the distortion and noise are amplified. When you use quality gear that's as neutral as possible, at the very least you are providing no exaggeration and distortion, and the inferior recording will simply stand on its own, without having its flaws amplified, while whatever fidelity that has remained in the recording can now be heard more clearly. In fact, I was surprised by how much information was actually contained in those crappy old cassettes--certainly far more than I could have predicted, and I have been listening to them for decades and know them like the back of my hands. So if crappy old cassette dubs can sound much better on good gear, so can lossy files (but read on--this has a catch).
But, I also need to mention that if you have lossy files that were encoded a long time ago using old algorithms (for example, old inferior mp3 encoders from the 90's, and encoded at 128 kbps constant bitrate), then yes, their flaws will become even more evident when you listen on quality gear. The smear of the transients, the lack of resolution, the distortion, the metallic fakeness...etc will all become more evident with good gear--to the point of being a bit annoying. This is because digital encoding using inferior algorithm will cause very different kinds of undesirable artifacts than old analog recordings like the cassettes I mentioned. So if you have really old lossy files with low bitrate, I highly suggest you re-rip those files with modern quality encoders. I find that with the latest stable iteration of the LAME engine using variable bitrate and set to even just standard quality, it will already sound vastly superior to those old rips. With even higher settings, you will get essentially transparent lossy files that only those with dog-like hearing will be able to tell apart from the lossless version, and even among those people, the subtle differences can only be heard via concentration. In normal everyday situations, if you simply played a piece of music for a golden-ear friend to listen to, I doubt the person will be able to tell they are listening to a high quality lossy files if you didn't tell them.
My name's Rob too, so that's two Rob's saying much the same thing.
I absolutely agree about the comment regarding common sense, and it's usually the lack of common sense that's the fuel for me long rants. In a way, I spend time writing these long posts because I want to shake some sense into as many members who might benefit from a dose of pragmatism as possible, so that the overall head-fi culture will stop breaking people's wallets and bank accounts with alarming frequency--especially that very often these unnecessary purchases really don't add up to anything truly meaningful.
When I see posts where a typical college student has something like half a dozen different headphone amps and buying expensive balanced custom cables, it just makes me a little sad, because they could've spent that money on something else such as actually eating healthy instead of eating instant noodles all the time. I even know someone who's on welfare, but because of all the brain-washing from this community, he ends up constantly buying and selling headphones and amps and his spending continues to escalate, despite the fact he can't afford any of it. He could've been perfectly happy had he stayed with the first headphone that had really blown him away and cost very little (The M50), but he keeps reading the forum and keeps being tempted by all the posts where people crap on what he was already very happy with, saying how much better this and that is, or that he NEEDS this and that amp for the "synergy" and so on. It's often a bunch of ass-backwards advice and suggestions that only makes things worse for someone financially, instead of helping them achieve satisfaction without them having to break their bank accounts.
I have more than a few times received PM's from members who are afraid to speak up publicly in the forums about their findings, but in the PM's, they admit to me that when they compared this and that expensive piece of gear against the much cheaper one, they really couldn't hear any meaningful differences. These members are afraid to speak up about it because they know they'll get attacked and ridiculed. The fact that this community culture has caused that kind of fear and intimidation is a part of this so-called "tragedy" I've been talking about.
Lunatique,
What you've described is the nature of humanity. There are elements of any population sample who have addictive personalities, there are elements in any population who seem to be completely focused on what others think about them, there are elements of any population sampling who freely offer advice to others, while know little to nothing whereof they speak.
Such is life and the larger the sample size the greater the frequency of such sightings. Don't let it get you down. Just keep offering your wisdom and insights, and realize there are some who will hear what you say and put your principles to work. Realize that Skylab is also a very reasonable fellow and provides tons of great and good advice to Head-Fi readers. There are those who reject, those who hear and benefit and there are those who hear and pervert. Thank you for wanting to help our little community.
Cheers,
Kevin (aka kwkarth)
