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Comment by fermienrico | Hacker News Reader

It is refreshing to see these types of articles.

Of all disciplines of human interests and hobbies, Audiophiles are one of the most stubborn, misinformed, anecdotal and delusional bunch. Of course I am generalizing, but every time I engage in a discussion about audio quality, it is a losing battle. Not because of lack of data or supporting evidence, but because of the fundamental dissent for data driven arguments. You cannot argue reason when the first step is to be born with "audiophile ears".

Why is it hard to understand that we have sophisticated metrology and instrumentation that can analyze things better than human ears can? I can understand a separate discussion about personal opinions regarding how "warm" a particular sound is, but that should remain distinctly as - subjective and that's perfectly OK.

It feels like the entire audio industry is promoting pseudoscience barring a very few vendors that actually care. We have a $8500 mp3 player from Sony claiming all kinds of things to the overwhelming abundance of cheap Shenzhen exports. There is just so much noise.

I absolutely abhor audiophiles.

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Your generalisation is unfair. Most Audiophiles just want to listen to music the way the artists intended. This is not easy in a industry where colouring the sound is even celebrated, e.g. 'Beats by Dre'.

I recently tried the latest noise cancelling headphones by Sony (1000XM3). The noise cancelling was excellent, but the bass was +5db overblown, boomy and drowned out most of the mids, the treble was dark to hide the NC hiss. It was unlistenable for jazz and classical without EQ. But the mainstream tech press think they are wonderful, even "WhatHifi" gave them 5 stars. An Audiophile is simply someone that cares about sound quality, most people don't.

As far a noise sound quality for cancelling wireless closed headphones go, the Sony's are the best along with Sennheiser Momentum 2.0 on-ear.

There are of course much better headphones, and I wouldn't call them audiophile headphones, but I haven't found other wireless ones that do noise-cancelling and isolation as well and still manage to sound acceptable.

I swear by B&W PX. I prefer them to the more expensive B&O H9i, which are also not bad at all.

If in-ear headphones work for you, you can find both very good isolation and excellent sound quality. I like my Shure SE530's for some peace and quiet on airplanes, and often find myself just enjoying the sound of them (or rather the original recording).

Yes the noise surrounding headphones is incredible (pun not intended), even stranger I find the denigration of 'studio monitor' quality very odd. Recently I bought a nice pair of headphones, naturally enough I wanted the ones that colour the music the least, went looking in the headphone section at the nearest consumer electronic shop for the ones that were on their web site and couldn't find them. There were stands of beats, and Sony etc at crazy prices. I asked the guy where they were and they were poked away in the corner in a different section. I laughed - the best headphones that were cheap were hidden away and all the overpriced plastic nonsense were displayed prominently.

Right; and there are real studio monitors, like https://meyersound.com/product/hd-1/ (popular for film) and the Yamaha NS10 https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/yamaha-ns10-story , popular because it's so bad that if it sounds right on the NS10s, it'll sound right on anything. You don't always want a near-field critical listening device, and most studio headphones must be durable first, leak as little sound as possible second, be cheap third, and sound amazing fourth. Watch some videos of {your favorite artist} recording and look at what they use: it's probably something like a Beyerdynamic DT880 Pro (~$200), Sennheiser HD 280 ($100), or Sony MDR7506 (~$75). Professional musicians on-stage will use something like a Sennheiser ew 300 personal monitor system with custom in-ear monitors (JH, Westone, Sensaphonics, or something cheaper and universal-fit like Senn IE 40 Pro or Shure SE series). Aside from DJs getting paid to wear them at shows, most professional musicians aren't using gear from big-box retailers...they're using stuff from Guitar Center / Sweetwater / zZounds / Musicians Friend / that little music shop around the corner, who sell actual professional equipment.

Well of course, you went to a consumer electronic store. The kit they sell there isn't really meant to be for "professionals".

It's the same for everything they sell at those shops. They are there to upsell shiny shit to people who don't know what they want. Try finding a decent laptop for a decent price at one of those stores.

It wasn't so much that, sure, a consumer electronics shop wouldn't have professional equipment, it was the disconnect between reality and what was being presented as the best.

I've been a bit of an audio enthusiast for about 30 years and back then the expensive stuff was definitely better (mostly). Now its the opposite, the more expensive the stuff is, the worse it is and the dialog surrounding it has become cargo cult mumbo jumbo. I find it disturbing.

In general for laptops performance/cost is still vaguely linear, even in consumer shops, with audio its just a lot of noise even from supposedly professional shops.

> Your generalisation is unfair. Most Audiophiles just want to listen to music the way the artists intended.

That is not my experience at all. Audio gear that is 'flat', in that it outputs as close a representation to the recording as possible is largely shunned in audiophile circles. They mostly want to listen to something that 'sounds good', with all the psychoacoustic baggage that comes with such a statement. As an example if the end goal is accurate reproduction then a tube amp is objectively worse than almost any other amp built in the last 30 years, yet they sell!

>audiophile circles >They mostly want to listen to something that 'sounds good', with all the psychoacoustic baggage that comes with such a statement

TL;DR the technology is so good and so cheap now that what you get from a $150 set-up today rivals stuff costing much more from a decade ago. I still recommend spending 90+% of your budget over a few hundred dollars on better actual reproduction equipment, be it speakers or headphones.

Not in my audiophile circle (which is mostly head-fi). There are all different price points, and different goals within those. Most reviews I've read in the past decade talk about if the headphones / IEMs are more targeting accuracy or a "fun" sound, but most of the reviews I've ever read on head-fi are very concerned with accuracy and true-to-recording representation. FWIW I'm very much not alone in my interest in things like super low distortion class D, solid-state headphone amps with digital volume control (so you don't introduce a potentiometer / stepped attenuator / LDR into the signal path), ear measuring mics (e.g. https://www.minidsp.com/products/acoustic-measurement/ears-h... ), digital parametric EQs to adjust for not-perfect frequency response, room correction, etc.

The technology in modern decent (decent = what most people would call "high-end", but I'm talking few-hundred-dollar Class D for amps and something along the lines of a properly-engineered ESS 9018-based DAC, maybe $100-200, OR a ~$200-300 headphone DAC+AMP combo, think Oppo HA2-SE level) equipment is so good IMO that headphones / speakers / IEMs make a MUCH MUCH bigger difference than jumping to equipment 10x the cost at the DAC or amp level does. $200 headphones are not bad, but $1000 headphones are damn amazing comparatively. I've owned a dozen pairs of IEMs, and while my gaming 'phones are Shure SE215s, they're not in the same league as my Westone ES60s. Even with that said, most people who have never owned any serious music gear would likely be blown away by just how good the SE215s are, coming out of something like a Fiio K1 or a smartphone / laptop / desktop with a decent DAC+AMP.

Tube amps are still fun to play with, but maybe aside from some 300B snobs, I don't think many people really believe that they're more accurate than modern solid state. Some people also still like vinyl, and will happily spend $10k+ on a record player.

There are also the high-sampling-frequency crowd and the high-bitrate geeks. It's fun to think about, but I personally can't hear a difference between 192kHz/24bit and Spotify "high quality" 44.1/16 with an RME ADI-2 Pro and HD 800S headphones or the ES60s (both balanced, which does sound slightly better to me in both cases). I actually showed up to a headphone meet in Tokyo and pulled out Spotify to demo some flagship IEMs with, and the guy was trying to explain to me how that was like ~eating caviar on a donut.

> ear measuring mics (e.g. https://www.minidsp.com/products/acoustic-measurement/ears-h.... )

That one sounds suspect but the only way to correctly measure headphones is on a binaural head.

Just curious, how do you feel about the Schiit Stack?

generalizing what "audiophiles" want is like trying to generalize what the "blacks" want or what "canadians" want. it makes no sense. what sounds 'good' entirely depends on the source and the listener. so immediately you can see there is no right answer. if you want to listen to old elvis records maybe they sound best on old 60s gear. theres supposed to be some noise. all the girls goin crazy listening to it back in the day -- they were listening on the AM radio! the noise was part of it. listening to classical though -- have you ever been? no speaker can reproduce that experience. some come close; they are not noisy speakers. then there is bass, some people love to have lots of it layered thick on top of everything they listen to. some do not. etc, etc, etc

> listening to classical though[]

Yeah.. I vastly prefer a real concert. But some people prefer their home audio setup instead. Even my old aunt.. I heard a guy (self-certified audiophile) complaining about the "bass response" when (apparently for the first time) he went to a classical concert. According to him the orchestra's "bass response" (whatever that means) was sub-standard. I prefer the real concert though (although I mostly go to small avenues). I should add that I have a tiny hearing problem in my left ear - normally I'm not bothered about it at all, but that ear is extremely sensitive to harmonics and quickly turns it into distortion if there's anything not quite right (whatever that is. I have no idea. But I noticed at one time that I can listen at much louder levels with certain high-end speakers. Of the type I could never buy.) Real concerts are bliss though. My ear never complains.

The noise cancelling was excellent, but the bass was +5db overblown, boomy and drowned out most of the mids, the treble was dark to hide the NC hiss

Had pretty much the exact same experience with some noise-cancelling in-ear pair of Bose. I was actually amazed at how good the noise cancelling was, but sound reproduction even in absence of any outside noise was very sub-par. Now I can't imagine the engineers didn't measure this thing, so I'm assuming it was done on purpose, maybe aimed for pop music or so?

Yes I'm sure it was done on purpose, just like over-saturated colours on TVs and cameras.

Someone I know was recently trying to have a conversation with an audiophile about the possibility of re-purposing some audio equipment to make noise floor measurements for another system that had similar frequency and dynamic range characteristics.

The technique worked just fine, but man, that guy was loony. He was trying to claim, with a straight face, that a GPS disciplined oscillator wasn't stable enough for his audiophile-grade Rube Goldberg machine.

Oh god, jitter... If ever there was a more pseudoscience audio term, I haven't heard it.

I wish there was a separate term between audiophiles who just want to spend a lot of money on hocus pocus, and audiophiles who want the measurably best performance.

Then the audiophile forums would not be polluted with people who spend thousands on cables and other rubbish, when the room response/treatment and speaker selection has a million times more effect on the actual sound.

Of course they’re anecdotal - listening to music is a subjective experience. If someone really thinks their music sounds better after adding $100 cable lifters and taping $50 bags of rocks to their $10,000 system, they are automatically correct. Their ears, their hobby.

It would be like saying that something can’t work because it’s a placebo - even if all they’re getting is a sugar pill, if the symptoms went away, that’s not really something that you can argue with.

I put audiophiles on the same level as sommeliers. The best wine is the one that tastes best to the drinker. You can haul out your GCMS to test the wine and your ABX testing software to test the audio and tell someone their subjective experience is Wrong, but this misses the point. We’re not talking about medical efficacy here, we’re talking about artwork.

>We’re not talking about medical efficacy here, we’re talking about artwork.

if only audiophiles see it this way themselves...

Placebo effects are real.

Ears are easy too fool by visuals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0

Placebo effects are real profitable.

The issue is I have is that people are being convinced they need to spend $100's and $1000's of dollars to get the placebo effect. If it is indeed just placebo it should be acheivable for free.

Instead what you have is not placebo effect, but perceived value effect.

After working in high-end audio for many years it became apparent that the (high) price tag was in fact the benefit.

Some people just want what there neighbor cannot afford.

Please don't lump all audiophiles in with some sort of distorted (irony...) stereotype.

I don't have a $10k system, or anything close to it, but yes, my system that I put together for about $1000 is way way way way better than what you're listening onm because I care enough to have a good external DAC, and feed that into a good amp paired with either a set of decent used speakers or one of a couple of sets of good headphones.

No "cable lifters" in sight.

Your external dac is indistinguishable to your ears from the internal one in whatever device you are using to supply it with bits. This is precisely what OP is talking about.

No it isn’t, because if it was internal it would be inside my PC... which is pretty electrically noisy. I can run from my PC to the amp directly and here audible clicks every time I move the mouse or the one of the hard drives spins up.

There’s a huge gap in quality between most onboard DACs and externals. It’s not necessarily because the onboard is worse at C-ing the Ds to the As, but because they’re not isolated from the noisy electronics that share the power supply.

My laptop emits different squeals when I scroll a window, for example.

That's just shitty grounding. Try putting one of those 3-to-2 prong adapters on your charging cable and you'll see right away.

Nope, occurs even just on battery.

Shitty circuit layout maybe, but it's much easier to move the dac outside the noisy box than to fix the cicuit layout. Most computers today can manage a digital audio output, either through HDMI, spdif from the sound card, or via USB. Keeping the analog path away from noise is sensible in a way that 96kHz and oxygen free cables are not.

That’s not the DAC.

Right, but it makes the onboard DAC useless. So sidestepping that and shipping the bits out to something else is worth doing.

It's not so much all audiophiles as all humans. Confirmation bias is very real. Sometimes it matters. Sometimes it doesn't. But we all suffer from it.

I have $2000 speakers and I use a $60 2nd-hand amp from 1999 and a $20 bluetooth dac with them. Audiophiles hate me. Bluetooth is the greatest sin, apparently.

I have AB tested my amp with newer models and while there was a difference, it was very minor and not worth upgrading IMO

If you're listening to uncompressed (losslessly compressed) audio, you're mostly fine with Bluetooth. But if your source is already lossily compressed, they you're multiplying the artifacts of MP3 or AAC by the artifacts of aptX or SBC, and that becomes very audible if you know what to listen for.

It’s not even placebo...contextual stimuli actually will change how things sound. If you have decent speakers at your computer, listen to a passage with your monitor on, then the same passage with it off, it will sound quite different.

Another example from audio production, adjusting signal processors while processing is bypassed, and being convinced the sound is changed.

Another one I’ve been noticing is how the resolution of the gain control affects perception of the “power” of the amp. If the resolution of the volume knob is high, meaning it takes more turning motion for the same level increase, the amp “feels” weaker to me, biasing my perception of sound.

The mother of all dilemmas when it comes to comparing audio gear is that the louder source always sounds “better.” This a very powerful perceptual distortion.

So while I think stereotypical audiophile practices are non-sensical, I have no doubt that they really make the systems sound better to the practitioners!

Nothing wrong with vinyl, that’s more about physically handling the media, reading the sleeves, listening to an album the whole way through etc. Than the audio quality. No vinyl enthusiast would say the quality is objectively better, but the experience arguably is

Yea, I removed the Vinyl argument. That's for another time. Nothing wrong with Records but I've had the same issue talking to people about Records wrt to audio quality.

I own Records and like you, I enjoy the experience. There is something amazing about listening to the entire album without distractions and in the sequence that the artist intended. You could do this with mp3/CD, but Records get me in the right mood :-)

There are objective reasons to favor vinyl even today. The 'audio quality' if measured in terms of SNR is objectively much worse than any modern medium, however the mixes used for vinyl tend to not be compressed to death so the dynamic range can offset this shortcoming.

In that case you're comparing mixes, not media.

Yes, but the two are intertwined. You often can not get a flac file from source with the same mix that was put on vinyl, just the unfortunate reality of it. This is exactly what I'm saying, people will say that vinyl "sounds better", and they aren't wrong in a lot of cases. Not because vinyl is a better medium, but because a good mix isn't available in any other medium.

You have a good point and I've heard of this before. The problem is that it depends on the artist/mixing engineer and production process. There is no guarantee.

It is ironic that higher quality mastering is done on a vintage outdated (barring recent resurgence) and objectively lower fidelity medium. It'd be nice to see CD's having great mastering and may be some of them do?

> It is ironic that higher quality mastering is done on a vintage outdated (barring recent resurgence) and objectively lower fidelity medium. It'd be nice to see CD's having great mastering and may be some of them do?

It's because there is a very limited number of people whom care about accurate sound reproduction. The _vast_ majority of listeners use garbage sound reproduction systems (Beats headphones, bluetooth cannon speakers, almost everything Bose makes now, etc). The small segment that cares is also heavily dominated by the audiophile sub-segment, selling vinyl to them is icing on the cake. The segment that _really_ cares about audio quality, those that care but are not 'audiophiles', is _extremely_ small and not worth targeting at the consumer level.

A little OT, but in my little home town the last CD shop disappeared a year or so ago. But you can still buy vinyl in town..

Yes

Also hunting (in stores, second-hand places etc) for particular records is quite an enjoyable experience and the climatic moment of finding something special compared to clicking a couple of buttons, and waiting for the download to finish

What I miss are the album notes. It's easy to include a booklet with massive information in the CD jewelbox, but instead "they" dropped the notes. And these days, you can't even determine who wrote the song, as the track copyright information is missing. It's like ebooks, which often omit the year of publication.

Bingo.

And what I often crave is the less accurate vinyl sound, that coupled with different production values.

Not better, just resonant with me. Easiest way to explain it.

There's also the chance that microphones and signal analysis aren't the best metaphors for how ears and brains process sound. But if the audiophiles you're talking about are endoring $8500 mp3 players, maybe we're talking to different people. That does sound silly.

(EDIT: Parent deleted argument about Vinyl) Vinyl has a few more dimensions than the "quality" aspect. I totally agree that there is no argument for vinyl offering superior quality. However, I have bought a few records simply because they were actually the _easiest_ way for me to buy something I could play back for a few albums/tracks that never saw a proper online release.

It's also easier to display a 12" sleeve as "art" than a CD or a FLAC download ;). Turntables are better decorative living room items than CD players or tape decks, but that's also subjective ;).

This is a Quora answer of mine from (sigh) 2011:

I _like_ vinyl, but I'm happy to admit its almost certainly due to non-audio non-hifi reasons. I like the "ceremony" associated with cleaning the disk, dropping the needle on the lead in track, and getting up to flip it over and do it again every 5 or 6 songs. I like the cover art - there is arguably a loss to the world of a beautiful art form due to the demise of the 12" record and it's large art-work ready packaging. And, as you'll hear on a lot of '90's CDs - I like the 33 1/3 rpm flaws, the clicks, scratches, and wow and flutter - when I hear the opening bars of Tear Drops from Massive Attack's Mezzanine, I get nostalgic, not for the late nineties when it was released, but for the early eighties - that scratched, fuzzy, played-too-much vinyl sound they used - that was the soundtrack to my late teens. Whatever the minor differences in the audio reproduction, those 33 1/3 and 45 rpm noises bring back some wonderful memories... Which is enough reason for me to keep the turntable set up and occasionally spin some discs...

In the late 90's & early 2000's, I bought a ton of vinyl. The majority of it was techno, house, and drum n' bass singles. It was quite literally the only format to buy it in.

Then, the "digital revolution" came to music, and you could buy it online. Which, for nearly every case, was better. Especially for people who weren't in driving distance of a major city.

However, once I started to get a digital collection going, the size was overwhelming. Especially in regards to dj'ing. With vinyl, your entire collection isn't always available. You make little stacks, shift things in and out, and it's much more organic. Digital misses that. Plus, I never really knew track names. I just remembered album or record artwork. It was easier to find things that way.

Much of this is cultural driven by a historical time when we didn't have the tools to measure this stuff, and reproduction was so bad that nearly anything that changed the sound in any way could be argued to be an improvement.

Those days are long gone, but the culture remains.

Getting good sound out of an old victrola--which were very expensive--truly is an art. Getting passable sound out of today's average off-the-shelf electronics doesn't take much at all. But many audiophiles act like are living in the late 1800s.

> Much of this is cultural driven by a historical time when we didn't have the tools to measure this stuff, and reproduction was so bad that nearly anything that changed the sound in any way could be argued to be an improvement.

[citation needed]

State of the art distortion measuring techniques resolved something like 0.002 % in the 70s.

Which is quite a bit later than the timeframe the parent is referring to.

> one of the most stubborn, misinformed, anecdotal and delusional bunch

I've had professional recording artists tell me they won't use MIDI over USB because the volume is lower than the old 9-pin connectors.

Wait, what? The “volume” of MIDI? I’m guessing they’re not referring to cc#7...?

(Also, I’ve never encountered a 9-pin MIDI connector. 5-pin maybe?)

I usually see midi as a 5-pin DIN, but some sound-cards used a DB-9 which required an adapter.

Ah, the joystick port as I called it.

Must be the 5-pin. Been a while since I've used one of the old MIDI connections.

why generalize like this? indeed discussing virtually any subject with virtually anybody (except perhaps within academic circles) usually reveals how "stubborn, misinformed, anecdotal and delusional" their beliefs are

if i had to guess, it sounds like you have poor hearing ;P

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