[JaeYoon]

Doesn't anyone dislike it when a snobby audiophile is like
"What a waste of an audio player, if you are using lossy encoding just your phone or a crappy ipod instead.

Yet no one who makes that snobby remark has any proof they have surpassing evolutionary ears beyond the normal human being to consistently show that they can hear the difference between a lossless and a lossy encoding in a noisy urban environment.

Yes that would be fantastic if someone has a ABX test log of them listening to lossless vs lossy in a urban environment and pass the test consistently.

 

[bigshot]

The crappy iPhone or iPod might very well have better specs than what they're using.

 

[Argyris]

It's been a while since that sort of stuff bothered me. I've written off the entire segment of the hobby that says stuff like that—there's no convincing them otherwise, and it's not like the rest of the world doesn't already think they're off the path, so any newcomers who wander in and end up believing that guff probably already wanted to believe it. They definitely had advance warning that this hobby is filled with unsubstantiated bunk.

 

[reginalb]

Not worth a thread, but I spotted a couple new Blue Note releases of music that I didn't own yet, since I stream most of my music (John Coltrane Blue Train and Miles Davis Take Off: The Complete Blue Note Albums) they advertised the DTS-HD, Dolby TrueHD, and PCM Stereo, so I ordered them. Multi-channel is all I buy separately at this point - Play Music All Access (which also comes with YouTube Red) provides all the music I could need. But if it's music I really like, and it's in multi-channel, I do pick that up from time to time.

They're in stereo. They used the DTS-HD and TrueHD containers for 2 channels. I guess that's a common thing with Pure Audio blu-rays, but I didn't realize that. So annoying. Just venting, I should have done more due diligence and not assumed those would be multi-channel, but I didn't, and that's my fault.

 

[bigshot]

There's a lot of that. I got tricked with a Japanese SACD that had a 5.1 track, but it had gone out of print and when it came back into print, it was 2 channel only. The cover looked identical. I bought it and got a similar nasty surprise.

 

[reginalb]

There's a lot of that. I got tricked with a Japanese SACD that had a 5.1 track, but it had gone out of print and when it came back into print, it was 2 channel only. The cover looked identical. I bought it and got a similar nasty surprise.

Frustrating stuff. But we're in the minority if we're looking for multi-channel. I think that's the most frustrating part of the hobby for me, that there are areas where we could really have real improvement - instead we get ever higher bit-rates, re-releases of the same 2 channel masters of the same old albums, but now they're in DXD!

Anyway, it's still good music.

 

[bigshot]

I have a theory about the impedance experts... I think outside of sound science, half baked paraphrases of concepts with buzz words fly. People say, "Wow! I don't understand that, so that guy must know his stuff!" They judge knowledge against their own ignorance. Then the armchair expert stumbles into a place where people actually know what the words mean and they're shocked to find out they aren't an expert at all. That sends them running back into the safety of their box. They think they are the outside world and we are the box, but it's the other way around... or perhaps they're right and the world runs on ignorance and half baked paraphrasing of ideas.

 

[Argyris]

...or perhaps they're right and the world runs on ignorance and half baked paraphrasing of ideas.

This sounds depressingly accurate.

 

[bigshot]

It's interesting though. You can get them to run for the door faster by just asking them for a simple specific answer than by burying them in technical details. They're used to piles of meaningless technical details. They just vomit them back to you filtered through a funhouse mirror.

 

[castleofargh]

explain something technical to someone who knows nothing of that domain, and listen to him tell what he thinks he understood. that's often enough to go from legit stuff to science fiction. and the worst part is that nobody is trying to fool anybody.

 

[reginalb]

This sounds depressingly accurate.

I'd say it's better or worse in different domains. And I've never seen it as bad as it is in audiophilia.

 

[Zapp_Fan]

I'd say it's better or worse in different domains. And I've never seen it as bad as it is in audiophilia.

As far as hobbies that are regularly discussed online go, I think audiophilia is one of the worst. A close analogy: I used to be quite active in audio production forums, and there is a significant amount of superstition and mumbo-jumbo (audiophiliac ideas creep in, like a digital summing algorithm being "warmer" than another ... didn't know a plus sign had tonality, but OK) but it's nowhere near as bad. I think it's because people trying to create music usually have much bigger problems than e.g. the phase accuracy of their EQ - like their mics being crap, or their room being crap, or their song not being very good, etc. Also, in music production there are occasional cold showers of reality, where some 15-year-old kid comes along and blows all the gearheads out of the water with some free software and hand-me-down Sony cans for mixing. Talent/skill can't be ignored, so people tend to stop talking about gear and get back to work.

At the pro level I've heard a few people get deep into audiophile superstition, but at the amateur level, an extreme focus on gear is secondary to trying to figure out how to use the gear.

 

[danadam]

At the pro level I've heard a few people get deep into audiophile superstition

This reminds me, The Lowdown on Downloads (wav vs flac strikes again):

I was also not enamored of the .flac format in which the vendors delivered their downloads. While called a “lossless” way to reduce file size, making for convenient, faster download times, the results were not so lossless according to everyone participating in the comparison tests we ran in my studio. (Based on what I see on the Internet and in many printed audio journals, it seems many listeners are not bothered by flac. In our tests however, the results were unanimous—everyone heard a difference between the source .aif masters and the .flac files created from them.)

and later:

So what about zipped music? We’ve used zipped music files before, such as those on the Format Comparison page of the Soundkeeper Recordings website. And when unzipped, no one who participated in our tests could differentiate between the source file and the copy that had been zipped.

 

[Niouke]

I can see the comparison "test" already, Everyone is blunted and the hosts plays a flac - "It's crap right? can't you hear the soudstage?" - "Yeah I'm down bro!"

 

[Zapp_Fan]

I can see the comparison "test" already, Everyone is blunted and the hosts plays a flac - "It's crap right? can't you hear the soudstage?" - "Yeah I'm down bro!"

That's probably what happened. The most generous explanation is they resampled from (say) 96khz to 44.1 with the worst possible converter and generated a lot of artifacts by accident while transcoding to FLAC.