Comment by S_A_P | Hacker News Reader

Comment by S_A_P | Hacker News Reader

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Audiophilia is a study in contradiction. The ask is a flat "uncolored" accurate sound. The gear that sells for ridiculous prices is usually tube gear with limited bandwidth and makes ~15 watts at 5-10% (admittedly usually even order harmonic) thd. Hardly uncolored.

That said, and Ive mentioned this before on HN. My (now late) uncle had a bunch of audiophile friends in Dallas. He hung around folks who had spent upwards of 500,000 (yes you read that right) on audio gear. I can't forget the time I rolled up to a modest middle class home, only to find out that inside of this house was a pair of Focal Grand Utopias (selling retail for 250k at the time, though he said he paid around 60k for the pair). He had 2 750 watt tube amps, current era but the brand escapes me. For source material he had a heavily modified Technics SP-10 with 2 tone arm/cartridge combinations and a boutique tube phono preamp. This fed into a similarly heavily modified Dynaco tube preamp from the 1960s. When he really wanted to get serious, though, he had a studer 2" tape machine and a sizable collection of low generation master tape copies. If I hadn't seen this with my own eyes I would say my uncle was full of shit when he told me about it. You know what? it sounded freaking amazing.Im sure it is 90% placebo, and 10% the fact that he was able to play high bandwidth audio to concert levels with no stress or strain from the amplifiers. Was it worth 6 figures of money? not to me. But I am glad I got to hear it...

The three critical paths for high end sound reproduction are: loudspeakers, speaker placement, room acoustics. Of course all parts of sound reproduction matter, but those three are the ones that affect real systems in practice.

Most other factors are rarely an issue and/or inferior parts have a much lower magnitude of impact on sound quality. Sufficiently good source material (256kbps AAC or better) is widely available. Most amplifiers are fine. Almost all wire/cable is perfectly good. High quality DACs are more abundant than you might think (e.g. the digital inputs of any half-decent AV receiver made in the past decade).

Good speakers.

Good placement.

Good acoustics.

Those are the ones to focus on. They're the ones to spend money on. If you wanted to add a fourth to that list, I'd add an honourable mention to in-room calibration systems like Audyssey and DIRAC. Depending on the sorts of imperfections in a given system the opportunity for improvements with DSP might be substantial and dramatic, or marginal to the point of being irrelevant. (For most systems it's somewhere in the middle.)

You’re absolutely right about that. I didn’t even mention how all of the drywall was replaced strategically with acoustic wall board. The entirety of the living room was gutted and refurbished to be the ultimate listening room, complete with stadium seating. Another recollection I just had is that he had a separate electric circuit run to the house(as in a second set of wires coming off the utility pole) so he could properly condition the power feeding his audio gear.

Every aspect of the room was built around the grand utopias and their placement. If you’re not familiar with them check them out here. https://www.focal.com/en/home-audio/high-fidelity-speakers/u...

The subwoofer drivers are unique in that they use an electromagnet instead of the usual strontium or neodymium permanent magnet.

I think what impressed me the most was that this guy was not annoying or in to the hand wavy audiophile hocus pocus. Just super passionate about getting everything done to get the absolute best sound even if the bang per buck was low. He had a wall of vinyl and was happy to let me pick several selections to play. From what I understand, this guy would open his home to anyone interested in a listening session. If anyone is in the DFW area and you can get plugged in to that community it seemed like a great group of folks.

> Another recollection I just had is that he had a separate electric circuit run to the house(as in a second set of wires coming off the utility pole) so he could properly condition the power feeding his audio gear

In my limited experience, "clean power" (I know nil about this so I'm just repeating what I hear) was the most important difference people would "hear". My uncle used to have a Hi-Fi shop and I helped him sometimes. People hearing distortions in their existing setup used to make up for 90% of his customers. In those cases the number one step was to make sure that the power that comes to the system is clean. Being a certified electrician, he used to do his thing and you would almost always hear the "aaah" from the customers the moment you hit play. To me also the difference was generally night and day.

And yet such impressions conflict with how power supply circuits work and how THD measurement works. Wall power is incredibly noisy and there’s nothing much an electrician can do to change that. If this noise had any meaningful effect on the sound—it doesn’t—you would be able to measure it as a variance in THD.

(Now of course that might be less true for some poorly made vinyl/phono level equipment but if you actually cared about audible distortions you wouldn't be listening to the sound of a needle scratching its way across a fragile plastic groove in the first place...)

Maybe then it was because of the isolation that the audio cables got being away from all the chaos created by the random power cables. I don't know. Most of the time, it was a huge improvement. The next step was to fix/remove anything that caused distortions.

Would have been way better off with a bunch of car batteries, the internal resistance and cold cranking amps would have pissed on any utility supply regulation and power supply regardless of the capacitors he had.

I don't know can I judge him. I listen to music all the time. Every imaginable genre that I happen to like. I'm not putting hundreds of thousands to my setup, but a good pair of headphones and a good headphone amp is a must for me in every office I work. Put some cash for Beyerdynamic DT-1770 Pro and been having a handmade headphone amp for the last 15 years, still using it. The sound cards differ, but now I'm ok with a Dragonfly serving the system.

If you spend most of your day wearing headphones, you might invest to them a bit.

Have you checked out the O2 headphone amp by nwavguy? It is mentioned in a toplevel comment in this thread.

I have a Corda HA2 mk3 and it still gives everything I need: enough punch to drive 250ohm headphones and a crossfeed to prevent fatigue when using them hours every day.

Maybe in 50 years when it breaks I'll get a new one :)

The weakest "link" in the "audio-chain" (if you exclude the room) are passive speakers with distortion above 1%

The best speakers i heard to date are from a german company called Backes & Müller. Active crossovers, each speaker has its own poweramp and a sensor attached to the membrane. The signal of the sensor is fed back into a comparator which calculates the difference to the music signal, this is then used to force the speaker to follow the music signal exactly.

>On the basis of physical factors all drivers make mistakes, which one must accept in passive and uncontrolled systems. In contrast, all BM drivers are a part of active error correction systems.

>Active loudspeakers know no conduction loss, no impedance issues; have faultless crossover performance, exact phasing, an optimal amplifier-chassis ratio, more actual output stage power at their disposal, quicker impulse processing and higher dynamics. All of this produces active regulatory intelligence. A sensor system continuously compares and corrects the membrane movements with the actual music signal.

>B&M uses two types of negative feedback: inductive and capacitive. Intelligent electronic fuses ensure that the entire system is reliably shut down in the case of an impending overload. The BM electronic crossover splits the music signal into individual paths of respective frequency ranges and allocates these to their individual output stage. Every individual output stage drives to its respective driver, optimised for its frequency range.

from http://www.backesmueller.de/en/b-m-technology.html

Pricey and not DIY friendly, but you can pick them up used on ebay for "peanuts". W0as thinking about buying an BM8 (3-way) refurbished for 2800 Euros, BM10 (4-way) refurbished costs 10000 Euros, got a BM12 (5-way) used for 1400 Euros.

The company is now owned by http://ksaudio.com

Those look intriguing. I would like to hear them. One of the things I’ve lamented as time and technology march on is how high fi seems to have lost it’s mainstream appeal. It seems like when I was growing up there was a wide continuum of commodity grade to mid grade to prosumer to high end gear available. There was always ridiculous high end stuff but even companies like Sony pioneer and technics had a higher end line. Then there were the smaller companies like adcom, carver, McIntosh, etc that had a reasonably large product line. Now it seems that it’s just commodity or niche boutique gear. Most of those companies still exist, but with a far smaller product assortment or they were absorbed into an audio conglomerate like harmann and badge engineer from some other product line.

Its like cinema for the ears. Once started talking normally and i could not hear the music anymore because the volume was so low yet all the details and bass were still there. When i heard them for the first time there was opera playing, felt like the orchestra was in the same room. It was a small 2-way system.

We had some older B&Ms at our house back in the day (also an audiophile middle class household). As a musician myself, I'd say they're worth the money if you can afford it. (I think they were around $8000 each or something).

Not in that order though, unfortunately: Unless you are using really shitty speakers, room acoustics trumps everything else pretty quickly. For anyone who has never listened to music in a well treated environment I found https://youtu.be/dB8H0HFMylo?t=355 to be pretty eye opening.

Even in well treated environment , speaker placement is critical. I’ve been working in pro audio 30 years and still surprised at how much moving speakers affects their performance.

> Unless you are using really shitty speakers, room acoustics trumps everything else pretty quickly.

I agree completely, but emphasising that point tends to lead to flame-wars in most places on the internet. And it's such an imprecise subject to debate because everyone's room is different. Some rooms can be atrocious, while others can be unintentionally excellent. Some rooms can be easy to improve, some require knowledge and experience in order to improve. Some only require repositioning, some require treatment products that can cost a lot more than many enthusiasts realise.

My favourite video that demonstrates the effectiveness of acoustic treatment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cp56A6TcL1E

Apparently the iPhone 6 has a surprisingly high-quality DAC: https://www.computeraudiophile.com/forums/topic/22843-how-do...

They all do. The idea of bad quality DACs is mostly FUD. That’s not to say that there aren’t bad ones, but the impact on the sound is rarely anything other than its self-noise floor.

That thread contains little to no evidentiary merit and a boatload of technical ignorance.

It's very easy for an audiophile to start going down the slippery slope into madness.

It usually starts with amplifiers, then speakers, then source equipment... and then they start rearranging furniture, tearing out drywall and putting absorbers everywhere, and then it starts all over again in a cycle.

I find it best to stick with a nice comfy pair of headphones and keep expectations low for everything else. If you're only managing the volume of air between your ear drums and the headphone cups-- that can be done to an obsessive level for vastly less cost (and without divorce) than if we're talking about a whole living room.

I used to sell medium-high end audio visual equipment in Calgary during the height of the oil sands boom. Plenty of money moving around.

I knew customers who built the foundation of their homes around speaker placement, having separate foundations for their towers so that fewer resonant effects from the house would impact the speakers. Haha. Madness is right!

And that $500,000 number is easy when you’re dealing with those circles for sure.

I’ve heard such things. Two points to note:

1. Decent monitor headphones or speakers sound the same. That’s under $500. Even some Sennheiser HD25’s are literally up there.

2. The equipment used to record such music cost less and was lower quality. Adding $500k doesn’t add anything because there isn’t anything there.

Then again I have no problem with people who spend $500k on audio kit. That’s up to them. If it makes them feel good buying something in that range then fair play to them. It’s mostly just art.

What I object to is little bags of stones wrapped around cables, magic boxes which absorb non physical entities in the room and directional cables. Woo and such needs to be taken down.

Not actually true about recording equipment. Top end mixing desks cost > $1m. Top end engineers and producers usually have at least $100k of outboard processing on hand - everything from mic preamps to vintage compressors. Top end mastering studios will work with similar budgets.

Add exotic guitars, vintage synthesizers, and other esoterica, and the total hardware budget for a mainstream commercial hit album is comfortably high six/low seven figures.

Some genres - mostly electronica - are 100% "in the box", generated and mixed with software. But they're usually still mastered in a high end studio with a combination of digital and analog tools on reference-grade monitors.

But all of that equipment is used to produce recordings that "translate" - play well on everything from ear buds to high end systems. That requires processing of its own.

True hifi recordings that aim to be as transparent as possible are very rare.

There's no such thing as "transparent" in pop/rock because it's all artifice. But even in classical recordings the sound has usually been edited and significantly processed, so the abstract concept of fidelity doesn't really apply.

Yes but the point is the signal path in those probably less than $100 end to end. Instruments excepted.

A decent audio grade opamp is $2 for example.

I'm assuming you mean instruments and microphones excepted, because many high-end recording microphones cost $1000 and up. Yes, there are legends of a few albums being recorded with only a few SM57 (a $100 mic), but they're the exception - and most such albums aren't generally regarded as audiophile-quality.

But regardless, even just the input transformer on most mixing consoles costs at least $100. And many extremely high-end consoles use discrete opamps which can get really expensive. There's also a lot of tube-based outboard gear in studios.

Sure, you could build a mixing desk with only $2 opamps and no transformers, no tubes, etc. But that would sound bad. Unlike the audiophile world, recording isn't about doing everything possible to prevent distortion - if it was, all recording would be done with calibrated measurement microphones and other various lab equipment.

So how can distortion be good in recording if it's bad in reproduction? A few reasons. IM distortion, for starters - distorting every channel individually is going to sound much different (and in most cases, better) than distorting the mix of all the channels.

But also, in recording, the distortion is finely tuned to the exact song, by someone who gets paid hundreds of dollars an hour because they are very good at it (and yes, good at getting it to sound even better on a variety of different systems). A recording engineer can use exactly whatever mic preamp they think will sound best for the song. Yes, audiophiles do tend to adjust tiny settings for each song, but not to the degree that recording engineers do - no audiophile is going to own 20 different amps and switch them out for different parts of different songs (or at least not on a regular basis).

Recording engineers can also do so on an individual channel basis - use one preamp for the vocals, a different one for the large-diaphragm condenser over the piano, another different one for a small-diaphragm condenser pointed right at the piano hammers, etc. Unless they're using Dolby Atmos or some other multichannel format, an audiophile doesn't even have that option, no matter how much they enjoy tweaking minor settings.

So no, the signal path is certainly not way less than $100 worth of components - and it wouldn't sound nearly as good if it was.

Yes I exclude instruments and transducers. Those are where the investment should be if anything.

You have no idea what you are talking about regarding signal chain. Discrete opamps are inferior on every possible measurement. This is total nonsense. Utter rubbish.

Do you know what noise figure is?

Do you know what CMRR is?

Do you know what PSRR is?

The original directional cables, sans mythology, are a real thing. Grounding for cable shielding matters a lot, and is plainly audible in many circumstances. "Directional" cables only ground the shield at one end, preventing ground loops and interference from grounding both ends. This is electronics 101.

An interesting aside on cables... I play electric guitar a lot, which is far more sensitive to cables than hi-fi gear, because guitar pickups are high impedance, low output devices - enough that capacitance can have audio-frequency passive filtering, and grounding is a huge problem. With passive pickups, I can easily hear differences in various cables I own. But some of my guitars have active electronics onboard (EMG pickups or other preamps), and produce a low-impedance signal. I can't hear the difference with those guitars.

When it gets down to it, I use the cables that are most reliable and comfortable to handle. Sound quality doesn't even enter into it, whether or not it's audible.

The point that most people miss is it is not the cable, it is the connection, copper oxide is a rectifier (diode) and if you put it in the circuit it erodes the quality pretty quickly.

I don't think that your first paragraph is an honest assessment of the issue. People who buy tube gear are absolutely not looking for "flat, uncolored sound".

> 2750 watt tube amps

WOW! That's ~5% of a Ducati. That's ... insane for a sound system.

A Ducati is a sound system.

What did he listen to ?

The cannons from the 1812 overture, over and over again. Did you hear that? Did you hear that? wasn't that awesome? Hang on I'll play it again, let me just adjust this setting first....

In fairness, though, the 1812 ouverture IS a pretty impressive piece to listen to, if it is properly recorded and reproduced.

While my setup is somewhat (cough) less impressive/over-the-top than the one referenced above, there's no denying listening to a proper 1812 is a physical experience.

I'm partial to Kunzel's recording with the Cincinnati Pops - those cannons are LOUD. (Better be careful not setting the volume too high or you're likely to find yourself a couple of woofers short afterwards.)

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