Testing audiophile claims and myths

[FunkyBassMan]

There are reasons for this.

First of all, what does "better sound" mean? I am pretty sure people don't interpret the term the same way. For a sound engineer "better sound" means most likely the same as "more accurate/faithful/transparent sound." For a vinyl enthusiast "better sound" means sound that for whatever reason is perceived as more pleasant/engaging.

Secondly, a lot of audiophiles lack proper understanding of the theoretical, mathematical, technical and physical aspects of audio or they have a grasp on only some areas. This easily leads to false conclusions as to why they perceive sound as they do. In my opinion the main mistake vinyl enthusiast typically make is to assume that the more pleasing sound they experience with vinyl is due to greater faithfulness of the signal compared to digital formats. Their theory is that the analog process is capable of reconstructing the original signal more precisely than digital formats and this is why the the sound is more pleasant to them. This of course is a false theory. CD is way superior compared to vinyl when it comes to accuracy of the original sound. Also, the pleasantness of vinyl people experience is born from the inaccuracies if vinyl: Vinyl seems to be very good at distorting the signal in pleasant ways. We can learn from it what sound pleasant and apply the knowledge on digital side.

Thirdly, many CD releases are simply bad! Early CD masters had often harsh sound and when those issues where sorted out, loudness wars started to ruin things. However, these things have nothing to do with the full potential of CD format.

Vinyl (and other analog formats) tend to make recordings sound the same as the same kind of distortions are added to everything. This probably contributes to certain cosiness effect. Digital format mean more variation in the sound between different recordings.

Agree with 1oad3r - well said.

 

[solid12345]

And, why do you seem to think that musicians “more than likely” have a tube amp in their home system, you think musicians are not interested in fidelity?

If they care about utmost fidelity & measurements then logically you won’t find a record player either, but are you really going to assert musicians don’t listen to vinyl anymore lol it should just be a common sense thing with no controversy.

 

[bigshot]

I think he can’t separate the equipment from the artistry. As someone who works with artists, I see that a lot. Instead of asking, “how do you draw like that?” people ask “what kind of pencil lets you draw like that?”

 

[bigshot]

The musicians I know are more focused on buying a really good guitar, not buying esoteric stereos. The stereos they buy are just for monitoring while recording demos at home.

 

[1oad3r]

I think he can’t separate the equipment from the artistry.

I’ve made it very clear what I believe the relationship between the two is. You on the other hand appear to be grasping at straws in response.

If you honestly believe that equipment has no bearing on how music is perceived and how it can affect the listener emotionally, then I can only conclude you are very in-experienced in the use of said equipment. Or genuinely, you have serious hearing issues.

 

[bigshot]

The thing is, there is no relationship between emotion and electronics. DACs and amps don’t add any creative mojo to music. They just reproduce it, either well or to some degree of degradation.

Emotion is purely the product of the creative decisions of people in charge of composition, performance, or mix. If you are emotionally touched, thank the people who made it, not the black box playing it.

I have 78rpm records of Caruso that were recorded without microphones or electricity. I play them back on a phonograph with a needle that looks like a nail and a horn. Even though the sound quality is primitive, the music can still bring me to tears. Would I prefer it if it was a digital recording of Caruso on a CD? Sure. But it wouldn’t change my emotional response. Caruso was Caruso and M’appari is always M’appari. If you are listening to equipment, you’re listening to the wrong thing.

 

[Ryokan]

Well some gear is better at conveying nuance than others.

 

[bigshot]

If an amp or DAC is audibly transparent, it can’t reproduce nuance any better than any other transparent DAC or amp.

Electronics either reproduce well or they don’t. There’s no better, only worse.

 

[gregorio]

There’s zero evidence to support that. Your statement was very clear, unambiguous and either ignorant of facts or intellectually dishonest - you confirm which below…

Nonsense. You stated my assertions suggested to you I had little experience of tube amplifiers which is obviously false, based on the evidence that I’ve been a professional audio engineer for about 30 years and have worked with numerous tube amplifiers of various different types, as well as worked quite a bit with software emulations of them. As I have plenty of evidence that I have significant experience of tube amplifiers (probably much more experience than you) and your assertion was false, therefore your reasoning was fallacious. How does that logic escape you?

That’s correct. There are other elements too of course, but harmonic distortion is a significant reason. Bravo, a far more nuanced perspective. Although that’s quite a pivot from your earlier position.

If that’s what you think, then you need to re-read what I stated and gain a better understanding of my earlier position, which is the same as my current position. How is harmonic distortion “a signifiant reason” if it’s inaudible?

So wasn’t ignorance then.

How is believing false marketing not ignorance?

Yes, tech has advanced.
But the essential evaluation of how good a mix is has not.
Sure there are new tools to look into and tweak the technical aspects of a recording. But at the end of the day the criterion that overwhelms all others is that the mix subjectively sounds as awesome as possible.

But that’s worthless because engineers/producers have always tried to create “mixes that subjectively sound as awesome as possible”, even when there were no mixing tools/tech besides just moving the musicians around in front of a horn when recording early wax cylinders. Obviously the evaluation “of how good a mix is” has changed significantly over the years in response to massive advances in mixing technology/tools. And incidentally the new tools available, even going back to the mid 1970’s, are NOT limited to “new tools to look into and tweak the technical aspects of a recording”, the new tools can hugely alter pretty much every aspect of the composition and musicality as well. A trend that started in the 1960’s of which Geoff Emerick was a pioneer and whom you ironically cited as your tutor!

Every form of recording and reproduction, digital or analog, does a substantially flawed job of capturing sound. It's just bad in its own different way.

Huh? Digital does indeed do “a substantially flawed job of capturing sound” in fact an infinitely flawed job of capturing sound, because it cannot capture sound, it can only “capture” (convert and store/transmit) analogue signals! And how is achieving that task audibly perfectly “just bad”? You proclaim to be an industry professional, even to have been tutored by one of the great engineers, and yet you don’t even seem to know the basics of what digital audio does or it’s accuracy/fidelity.

Wow, really? Seems like another really ignorant comment. Isn’t this a “science” forum?

Yes, it is a “science” based discussion forum, it’s not a forum of what assertions “seem” or “suggest to you” based on your own lack of knowledge and experience!

If they care about utmost fidelity & measurements then logically you won’t find a record player either, but are you really going to assert musicians don’t listen to vinyl anymore lol it should just be a common sense thing with no controversy.

That’s a strawman argument and how is that indicative of this being a “science forum”? Musicians do indeed typically care about fidelity although not often about measurements and therefore logically musicians do sometimes have record players, as a good record player/setup is capable of high fidelity. However, as digital is both cheaper and higher fidelity, many/most musicians indeed do not listen to vinyl anymore. The proportion might have increased somewhat in recent years, in line with the fashion/trend for vinyl but this is a strawman argument as a tube amp is not required for vinyl playback.

It should indeed “be a common sense thing with no controversy” that relatively few musicians use outdated, superseded/inferior tube technology, as should not employing strawman arguments in a science discussion forum, but in your case, apparently not!

G

 

[71 dB]

Well some gear is better at conveying nuance than others.

Nuance has to be defined technically before we can tell how well given gear conveys it. As a listener "nuances" are some kind of feeling you get from the sound, but audio gear does not operate on the realm of feelings. It operates on technical realm. The question is, what are nuances on technical terms? Lack of distortion? Flat frequency response? Linear phase response? How to measure nuances? They may not even be real, but some kind of placebo effect the listener experiences.

 

[71 dB]

Sure but then much of what would make it “better” cannot be done by the consumer. Can’t improve the recording quality for example.

People want unrealistic and impossible things. The fact that something can't be done doesn't make me want/wish it any less.

That “ping pong stuff from the early days of stereo” typically did not “have bad spatially even with speakers”! Firstly, in the early days of stereo there pretty much was only speakers as far as consumers were concerned and secondly, consumer stereo speakers were typically placed very close together in the early days of stereo, often in single cabinet/unit with only the space of the turntable between them, so “ping pong stuff” typically sounded fine.

Having the stereo speakers closer together probably helps with getting better soundstage that sounds fine out of ping-pongy stuff, but it hardly is the best we can do and that's why it hasn't really been done for decades.

Sure but how do you think that started?

Does it matter how it started? It started and that's all that matters, isn't it? Anyway I think the loudness war started when record company bosses read about how louder is heard as better and they started to instruct their sound engineers to produce louder mixes to have an advantage over other songs on radio. However, I am not an expert on this historical aspect, so I may be wrong.

Sure they can, a tube amp for example adds audible distortion, according to how to how it’s been designed and how hard it’s driven. A decent SS amp (or a well designed tube amp without audible distortion) does not add anything beyond gain. What decides whether the reproduction of recordings have that additional tube distortion is obviously an audio product (tube amp) which applies that tube distortion.

Yeah, but that is a built-in property. A tube amp can't one day decide to add less or more distortion to the sound (apart from the electrical parts getting slowly older of course).

Again, sure, obviously Bach did not intend his music to be listened to as a recording in an average consumers’ sitting room or on HPs, but then the recording artists (musicians, conductor, producer and engineers) obviously did.

Yeah. We don't know if Bach would have approved that, but does it even matter?

But even the charming music of Fauré and many others relies on some non-charming parts, even if that’s only some relatively mild dissonance which is then resolved.

G

Obviously resolving mild dissonances are charming then (to some listeners anyway as concepts such as "charm" are of course subjective impressions)... ...why would Fauré and many others have used "non-charming parts" if the goal was to create charming music?

 

[Ryokan]

Nuance has to be defined technically before we can tell how well given gear conveys it. As a listener "nuances" are some kind of feeling you get from the sound, but audio gear does not operate on the realm of feelings. It operates on technical realm. The question is, what are nuances on technical terms? Lack of distortion? Flat frequency response? Linear phase response? How to measure nuances? They may not even be real, but some kind of placebo effect the listener experiences.

It wasn't dacs and amps I was actually referring to but earphones, (which is why I didn't reply as haven't used many). The sound with some of my earphones is strikingly nuanced. But I know here we're talking about dacs and amps.

 

[MrHaelscheir]

I’ve made it very clear what I believe the relationship between the two is. You on the other hand appear to be grasping at straws in response.

If you honestly believe that equipment has no bearing on how music is perceived and how it can affect the listener emotionally, then I can only conclude you are very in-experienced in the use of said equipment. Or genuinely, you have serious hearing issues.

I repeat, can you understand that your perception of the sound is or can be a separate thing from the content of the electrical or acoustical signals passing through your equipment chain?

As I like to repeat, the point of "objectivism" in this case is to determine the actual cause of audible phenomena. Technically speaking, bigshot's wording of equipment having no effect on people's perception of music may be a touch extreme to the point of misinterpretation. First, you as any other are obviously "really" perceiving the effects that you hear on your music. The problem is when that "subjectivism" jumps to the conclusion of making an objective claim about the physical properties of the equipment and how it modifies (or doesn't) the electrical or acoustic signals as they make their way from the recording to your ears.

Now, looking at your second paragraph, it could be interpreted as either your belief that (1) the equipment is "literally" affecting the listener's perception and emotions by some yet to be discovered mechanism, else that (2) it is doing so through some yet to be understood modification of the electrical or acoustical signals, else that (3) perceptual awareness or knowledge of the equipment being used is inducing a psychological response affecting your perception, sometimes called "placebo" or "perceptual/expectation bias". I like to think that most "subjectivists" who argue here either believe one of the first two or conflate the three into one causal connection between gear and perception. The objectivist stance is that since we cannot measure audible differences between the gear to which is being ascribed astronomical sonic qualities, then the third possibility must be the case where the equipment is indeed through your extrasonic perception (e.g. visual or abstract) of it affecting your perception of the music through a psychological mechanism rather than actual effects on the electrical or acoustical signal; to me, bigshot's wordings can appear to additionally discount the third mechanism, which I don't think they mean.

Amps and DACs or cables and fuses and whatever objectively cannot induce emotions or inject those into electrical or acoustical signals, but semantically, it could be accepted that they are extrasonically inducing those effect on your music perception and emotions. Given that, it is highly disingenuous to call someone's hearing in-experienced, damaged, or impaired due to their happening to at this time not be as susceptible to perceptual influence by extrasonic factors. Say, I auditioned the Sennheiser HE-1 and Stax SR-X9000 and I found that I preferred my EQed Meze Elite, or the nice silver cables I bought for 4.4 mm terminations and looks have no audible or measurable differences to me, or I auditioned a few more expensive amps and DACs yet none of these brought my perception any closer to the live classical concert hall sound I am now much more intimate with, yet measuring my personal HRTF and using DSP to simulate neutral speakers in an anechoic chamber really did mind drastically improved imaging in a manner backed by sound localization science, does that mean I have "serious hearing issues"?

 

[71 dB]

It wasn't dacs and amps I was actually referring to but earphones, (which is why I didn't reply as haven't used many). The sound with some of my earphones is strikingly nuanced. But I know here we're talking about dacs and amps.

How does "strikingly nuanced" sound differ from less nuanced sound? I think it is about having a frequency response that shapes the perceived sound into something that appears more nuanced to the listener, but again we are not defining anything technically. It is all subjective impression. On technical level some earphones just have the type of frequency response that makes the sound "more nuanced" to the listeners. I believe emphasis on frequencies around 1 kHz or so leads to such impressions, but I don't know if you or others agree.

 

[Ryokan]

How does "strikingly nuanced" sound differ from less nuanced sound? I think it is about having a frequency response that shapes the perceived sound into something that appears more nuanced to the listener, but again we are not defining anything technically.

When I go from listening with a '$500 iem' to the Oriolus Mellianus which are crystal clear and revealing.