[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_Mineral_Supplement
I used to consider these to be pretty worthless things too. After a while I started to realise that a lot of these things provide a lot of the same random platitudes that therapists typically provide too.
Given that therapists are a bit of a dice roll as far as the quality of advice you get, why not just instead make the advice given itself a dice roll. At that point, there’s a non negligible probability that the advice given by a half decent palm / star / tarot reader might actually be relevant.
Sure, it’s all just chance and luck, but when the advice ends up being relevant (or becomes self fulfilling in its relevance) and actually helps the receiver, why not?
(These learnings are brought to you by my ex who very patiently explained to me one of the ways I was an asshole when we were together. I’m now a bit more open minded and keep my eye rolls to myself behind my sunglasses)
In most cases, the advice those people give probably isn't random at all. It's likely tailored to the client, based on "cold reading" techniques, the practitioners general experience with life and people, maybe the practitioner secretly scouring social media for information about the client, etc.
If you're going to the fortune teller or priest for advice, that's what you're getting and the quality of the product might even be good in some cases. If you're going to the fortune teller or priest to receive magical services, then obviously you're getting scammed.
It's like homeopathy: still a mixture between fraud, pseudoscience and sometimes outright dangerous advice, the ratio depending on the provider. And people can and do lose entire life savings to that shit. Just because someone's cold "went away" after downing a ton of sugar pills, it doesn't mean the homeopathy caused that - it was the person's own body all along.
The worst thing about all pseudoscience stuff is that accepting it as a society means that non-scientific opinions are accepted as an equal in democratic discourse - and that is the foundation on which quackery, vaccine denialism, MMS and a whole lot of conspiracy myths grow.
Besides: there's a reason why therapists (at least in Europe) generally have to be licensed similar to doctors... bad advice can literally kill people.
We, as a society, should push for equitable and accessible actual mental health care for everyone, provided by trained and continuously educated professionals - not for quackery.
You're jumping to call it quackery without having an open mind. That's not science, that's prejudice.
1: https://www.academia.edu/442955/Tarot_As_a_Projective_Techni...
2: https://psychcentral.com/pro/using-tarot-in-psychotherapy
Tarot reading goes hand in hand with reading people's fortune. I don't see how you can separate the 2 and therefore have an ethically acceptable treatment, and that's assuming the placebo isn't entirely based on the fortune reading expectation.
Tarot as fortune telling is only something I've seen used for entertainment purposes. In the clinical setting I've only seen them used as projectives.
Denying that is like walking around with a swastika armband telling anyone who calls you a nazi that it's got nothing to do with the Nazis. Even if you're a Buddhist you still have to accept there an association there.
That is the problem with tarot cards. Some people are going to think you are reading their fortune, no matter how much you preface it.
It is because alternative practitioners with bad bedside manners don't stay in business very long.
If you have a minor problem, sitting down with someone who you trust and talking about it for half an hour (much longer than the 5 or maybe 10 minutes you'll get with a traditional doctor), who then gives you some sugar pills and some other good advice (get up and stretch very half an hour), is almost always going to result in an improvement of symptoms.
A lot of problems, including pain, measurably improve when a patient feels they have been listened to, and that advice they are given is tailored to them.
Those longer, and often more frequent, appointments, also means the practitioner gets to know the patient better, which means underlying lifestyle problems can be identified. If the alternative doctor finds out someone is eating a lot of canned food, recommending they switch to "fresh natural vegetables" is a damned good way to lower someone's sodium and potassium intake.
The actual treatments are woo bullshit, but the care setting makes a huge difference.
The solution to the severe understaffing is not enabling quackers that end up recommending their patients MMS or against chemoterapy like they did with Steve Jobs.
I agree it isn't the solution.
> We could have actual doctors giving that device and detecting symptoms early,
One potential lesson is that we don't need full on doctors giving advice. We need people trained to forward to a real doctor if something really wrong is going on, but for a crap ton of problems, someone with basic medical (or just lifestyle/health) training is enough.
Heck there was one study that showed that elderly folks talking to each other about their arthritis pain while getting an evening drink at their local watering hole served to reduce pain symptoms.
Chatting with local bartenders and barbers can be nearly as good as professional therapy for some issues.
Having someone trusted just listen and parrot back common sense advice works really damn well.
Trusting the source of the advice, and believing it will work, has a huge impact on treatment.
Tarot readers are selling a fake good. You can't really escape the ethical implications of that.
I know many people who use them but none believe they have a magical power. They're projectives, like a Rorsach test.
The card will give you something abstract and you fill in the blanks. What your mind fills in can be quite elucidating. Your feeling as well, in terms of gladness or disappointment at what card you pull, can also give you insight into what issues you'd rather think about.
The demonization of tarot in my mind mostly stems from internalised misogyny and a desire on the societal level to paint anything which appeals mostly to women as "kooky," "overly emotional,". "illogical" and "unscientific" (projectives are well studied and used in clinical settings).
Yes, absolutely. The patriarchy likes to dunk on magic future telling cards.
But I don't think power structures have most of the blame for the fact that every single advocate of tarot reading I've seen until today said the cards were magical.
" The I Ching insists upon self-knowledge throughout. The method by which this is to be achieved is open to every kind of misuse, and is therefore not for the frivolous-minded and immature; nor is it for intellectualists and rationalists. It is appropriate only for thoughtful and reflective people who like to think about what they do and what happens to them -- a predilection not to be confused with the morbid brooding of the hypochondriac. As I have indicated above, I have no answer to the multitude of problems that arise when we seek to harmonize the oracle of the I Ching with our accepted scientific canons. But needless to say, nothing "occult" is to be inferred. My position in these matters is pragmatic, and the great disciplines that have taught me the practical usefulness of this viewpoint are psychotherapy and medical psychology. Probably in no other field do we have to reckon with so many unknown quantities, and nowhere else do we become more accustomed to adopting methods that work even though for a long time we may not know why they work. Unexpected cures may arise from questionable therapies and unexpected failures from allegedly reliable methods. In the exploration of the unconscious we come upon very strange things, from which a rationalist turns away with horror, claiming afterward that he did not see anything. The irrational fullness of life has taught me never to discard anything, even when it goes against all our theories (so short-lived at best) or otherwise admits of no immediate explanation. It is of course disquieting, and one is not certain whether the compass is pointing true or not; but security, certitude, and peace do not lead to discoveries. It is the same with this Chinese mode of divination. Clearly the method aims at self-knowledge, though at all times it has also been put to superstitious use."
https://www.iging.com/intro/foreword.htm
By his "pragmatism", I understand something along the philosophical pragmatism of Wittgenstein and his "usage is meaning" line of thought. Jung is saying it is not clear how or why this stuff works, but subjectively a "thoughtful" and "reflective" person seems to discern meaning and gain (personal) insights through the process. In other words, a psychological phenomena.
He also touches on the point of your well aimed remark in noting "misuse". I personally think Jung is understating the dangers involved. (For relative reference, think of the not-so-hot topic of "dangers of meditation" to understand the underlying common pschological issue of probing your culturally protected taboo zones that keep you "normal"/"stable").
The fact of the matter is that occult "divination" tools are dangerous, more dangerous than even "scripture". They have been consistently proven to be culturally corrosive as they undermine rational thought and provide shelter for charlatans, undermine decision faculties of the diviner, and undermine the necessary coherence between our inner life and our outer reality. And the symbolism involved require deep study to avoid misunderstandings. People also seriously discount the inevitable impact of 'divination' on the mind of the inquirer, the careless and ignorant dabbler in occult tools. So promoting them as if they are harmless little nothings is very irresponsible. One has to be very thoughtful and reflective (to say nothing of the erudition required) to not misuse such tools. Very few people meet the required standard. I personally think it has been an error to promote esoterica to the masses. Its like giving guns and bullets to children.
Sources? Should be easy it's so consistent.
From what I understand of history this kind of fear mongering is much more harmful. It wasn't long ago that women were being burnt alive for using traditional medicines in Europe and the US.
Out of curiosity, would you say professional wrestling is culturally corrosive? I have to suspend my rational thought every time I enjoy watching that stuff.
> So promoting them as if they are harmless little nothings is very irresponsible
Has anyone done that here? They've only been defended for their therapeutic use as projectives. No one has said they're "nothings."
"defended for their therapeutic use"
Therapeutic means are to address 'ailments'. The ailments in this case are existential and psychological. Projectives are dangerous and require guided initiation. It is highly irresponsible to push these things.
Tarot Cards as self-administered "therapeutic" remedy on HN. We've been banging on the doors on paganism in the West for a few decades now. And here we are.
I can buy rorsach cards now on Amazon. There's no health warning on those. Maybe there should be but I think we can accept that most people buying them will use them responsibly. It seems very knee jerk to put a warning on every single thing that could be harmful if misused.
> Therapeutic means are to address 'ailments'. The ailments in this case are existential and psychological. Projectives are dangerous and require guided initiation
I understand the meaning of therapy and the types of ailments that can be helped by the use of projectives.
If you buy a set of tarot cards they inevitably come with usage instructions so that you can use them successfully and responsibly.
I'm not sure the danger is as great as you suggest. Have you got data showing the harm of using these cards?
> We've been banging on the doors on paganism in the West for a few decades now. And here we are.
Tarot cards have no basis in paganism, they are the creation of well educated men in the 19th century.
> But your quick response here indicates you did not really reflect on what was said.
This was uncalled for. I read your post and responded to the points you made.
Are you saying tarot cards are logical and scientific?
Fwiw, I associate them more with gypsies than women, so I guess I'm racist rather than sexist?
You can find a tonne of literature on the clinical use of projective. The famous rorsach test is based on the same psychological mechanism.
In terms of logic they do actually have an attempt at systematising both a range of common emotions and a number of archetypal points along life's journey. I know that's maybe not what you meant by logic, but a system that differentiates its output based on input like "Cups, 6", "Coins, 2" etc. works for my definition of logic.
Lastly, and I know you asked in jest, but If your association between the cards and a specific ethnic group is what leads to you judging them as unscientific without first checking then there probably is a level of racism at play. That's nothing to be ashamed of, as everyone carries internalised racism (thanks society). As long as you can recognise it when it comes up in yourself like this and you do the work to combat it then you have nothing to worry about.
How can you ethically give a tarot reading knowing that X% will understand it as a prediction of their future?
>If your association between the cards and a specific ethnic group is what leads to you judging them as unscientific
Why don't you apply the same nuance when deciding whether sexism is at play?
They're almost always used as tools for self reflection, which is supported by the science I linked to.
I've only seen fortune telling done on an entertainment basis or on television shows.
> Why don't you apply the same nuance when deciding whether sexism is at play?
Can you tell me how I could do this?
You keep trying to separate tarot reading as fortune telling/ entertainment and tarot reading as a legitimate tool. It may be both but you can't split the 2.
>I've only seen....
And I've only seen tarot cards used as a tool for fortune telling. Is my experience unique? Is my experience less valid than yours?
> In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It's just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It's like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that's now been taken away and hidden. The graphite's not important. It's just the means of revealing their indentations. So you see, astrology's nothing to do with astronomy. It's just to do with people thinking about people.
FWIW I'm also fond of the Tarot, and the I Ching, and find both surprisingly insightful and useful (me of 10 years ago would not believe that I just wrote that).
For the low, low price of $3800, you can be the proud owner of an audiophile grade, 100Base-T network switch: https://innuos.com/phoenixnet/
UDP is another story and it’s normal to hear things.
A patch cable or its connectors would need to be in a dreadful state to get packet loss though, i.e. physically damaged or defective.
For lossless CD-quality audio you need about 160kbyte/s.
So on a gigabit network (125Mbyte/s), you'd need over 99.999% packet loss in order to not keep up.
So they're comparing to an almost completely faulty cable.
I feel like a lot of audiophile stupidity is not understanding scale.
There is a difference between the fancy speaker cables and acceptable cheap ones, but it's so ridiculously minuscule as to be completely inaudible compared to, say, whether or not the listener is wearing socks or not.
And that's not an exaggeration, that difference will literally be more than the difference in cables, probably by an order of magnitude.
The only real difference between the cables will be at frequencies over, say, a GHz. ie RF frequencies 50x higher than cats might be able to hear.
But the audiofool will say, "see, there's a difference - I want my system to sound the best".
And they focus so much on ridiculously overkill cables, amplifiers and stupid stands, yet seem to often ignore room treatment which could really make a difference. It's often massive speakers in horribly reflective minimalistic rooms, driven by amps running at 0.1% of their power rating.
Another thing is not understanding tradeoffs. Everything is a compromise, so when you buy the amp that's rated at 2000W but only run it at 2W, it won't measure as well as the same quality amp that's rated at 50W, also running at 2W.
Similarly a speaker with a max rating of 500W running at 2W won't be as accurate as a speaker with a max rating of 50W running at 2W, because physically the material the speaker is made out of has to be more resilient/less flexible to handle that kind of maximum power.
But they focus on one particular thing (usually the expensive thing) to the detriment of other things.
Also not understanding wattage.
Because sound is logarithmic, it is really eye-opening how little power you need for quite loud audio. Most systems you wouldn't want to listen to at over 5W.
Eg for, say two Kef R7 speakers which have a sensitivity of 88dB, at only 5W, from 3m away is 94.4dB.
That is LOUD.
At 2W, it's 90.5dB. Also LOUD.
https://mehlau.net/audio/spl/ (+6dB for two speakers)
You don't need a 5000W amp. But they don't understand any of this so they just think higher number and more expensive equals better.
It's like buying a Mack truck because you heard it carries more than a hatchback when you're going to the supermarket, and thinking it must be better because it's more expensive.
My FLAC files live on a SSD attached to a Raspberry Pi that serves them up over NFS. The data passes through three gigabit switches before arriving at another Raspberry Pi running Volumio, which is connected to my DAC.
There's enough there to keep an audiophile awake at night, but the bit tests have passed perfectly whenever I've run them. No expensive cables, linear mode power supplies, or audiophile switches would make the tests pass any better.
Storage -> TCP Stream -> Sound output.
However, it never works like this, except maybe in some rare live conditions (in which case, why are you even running this on TCP?). In reality, it goes:
Storage -> TCP Stream -> Ring buffer -> Sound output
Unless you manage to empty your ring buffer (which, in the case of modern hardware can easily be 32+MB, or multiple seconds of audio), you will not hear a single bit of difference. And if you do, it won't come in "after you were meant to hear it", you'll either get a massive gap, or repeats. There is no such thing as "data coming in too late/out of order".
If you’re getting audible errors from your network then literally everything you do on that network would feel like 90s dial up days and with lots of corruption. Most websites wouldn’t even load due to TLS errors.
The problem such arguments as yours is that people have subjective experiences that can be influenced by a multitude of personal emotional states and they then retrofit pseudo-technical explanations for why they perceived those experiences. Or in layman’s terms, you basically just buy an expensive placebo.
The are lots usecases for nearly live audio where TCP stalls cause problems you would never notice browsing the web and would not be a TLS error (which is ushally how networks are 'tested' leaving the problems unfixed).
And before you comment about listening to live performances at home: the broadcaster would be compressing your audio stream anyway. That would be far more impactful to your audio quality than a few dropped networking packets.
Source: I used to work in broadcasting.
Edit: and just to be clear, the biggest reason that live performances are sensitive to latency isn’t because of sound quality. It is because latency is distracting to the performers (eg if their ear piece is ahead of the speakers) and annoying to the viewers if different systems aren’t in sync (like with a movie where the sound is half a second behind the video). So it’s got naff all to do with satisfying audiophiles.
If you want trouble free audio streaming it is worth checking the network.
https://www.wired.com/2008/06/snake-oil-alert/
(unfortunately this was from Denon who I've had great luck with an entry-ish-level AVR from for years)
> For the low, low price of $3800, you can be the proud owner of an audiophile grade, 100Base-T network switch
That buys you a seriously good piece of switching gear with 10GBe (or even higher) fiber optic links to whatever devices you could possibly want in a home. Heck, even a little over $100 buys you a switch with 4 SFP+ (Mikrotik CRS305).
I guess audiophiles will claim that the optical transceivers introduce latency and _they can hear it_
Jitter on the Ethernet transferring the file will have no effect.
The audio isn't played directly from the ethernet packets. It has to be decompressed, decoded, buffered. In the end of it all the audio goes into a ring buffer and it is played very precisely by the sound card.
The playback itself is a hard-real-time process that needs time guarantees. Failure to fill the ring buffer by any reason can cause audible skips, but not jitter. But most players in practice will simply stop the playback.
You could 100% design a network switch to be good for audio.
- ensure periodic packets like say arp don't introduce jitter
- do qos on audio streams vs other data
- favor latency over throughput
- maybe tune things like MSS to keep packet sizes smaller, but no fragmentation
etc..
For one thing, timing is important. A simple example would be getting video in sync with audio. You could go deeper and manage timing for speakers side to side or front to back. It would get lots harder if a microphone was introduced - then latency would be a big big deal.
These sorts of things are probably why bluetooth isn't used as much with a/v systems.
(lol, here I am arguing the merits of an audiophile network switch)
So long as the amount of audio sent in a packet is larger than how long it takes the next packet to get there, you'll be transfering audio data faster than it is playing, making minor fluctuations in timing between packets irrelevant.
Bluetooth isn't used because BT audio transmission is lossy, audio gets recompressed. Newer BT standards have good quality compression, but you are still recompressing the audio. BT isn't meant to be a high bandwidth protocol.
BT's latency around audio is because 99% of BT implementations suck. Latency can be as low as 50ms or so, but it is often in the 100s or even 200s of ms.
Even major fluctuations. Not talking about the quality here (but the received quality is identical to what is being sent), but just think about Netflix & Co, Imagine if they had to maintain an "ideal network, with no packet loss and constant ping" to your device or otherwise audio and video would be out of sync?
There are protocols that shuffle more or less raw audio streams over the network (Dante for example). In that case yes, you do things to make sure the variables are within a certain range by (usually) segregating the traffic etc, but even then if the timing is off the playback will stop until the stream is reestablished properly. Theoretically it's the same as with any other media stream, just much more sensitive to fluctuations as it is real time (i.e. delay so low you are unable to hear it).
Should you buy an audiophile network switch? God no.
Please don't. You'll make Nyquist sad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli...
On its way to your speakers, a audio file sampled at 192khz will ideally be identical to a recording done at 44.1khz, except over sampling can introduce audio artifacts that degrade audio quality so you can end up with worse audio.
So, please, don't unnecessarily over sample.
The main place you will see this issue is playing audio in something like a video game due to an action like pressing a button, firing a weapon, etc then it can be very noticeable if you're buffering too much audio because it wont sync to what you're seeing and the game will feel laggy even if it's running at a high frame rate.
Excepting subs, it seems many speaker systems are hardwired together downstream from the dac, but there should be a good way to have multiple independent speakers networked together that could be time consistent. and audio <-> video consistent with whatever display you have.
and bnc cables.... would be another whole network.
Is not that every packet is "output" as soon as it arrives to the PC.
Or I didn't understand what are you saying.
A playback device creates a stream of audio and video data that is consistent and together. But if there's a network involved, say you have stereo wifi speakers, then the video and audio streams are separated. Maybe the playback device sends the data to the display using hdmi, and that device sends data over the network to the speakers. Now there are two delays - one for decoding and presenting video, and a second separate one for transmitting and then decoding audio. The second one is variable depending on the network.
But it's delay, and not integrity of the data being played back. If the network sucks and there are retransmissions, your data might still be integrous without loses (depending on the protocol).
It also happens for musicians on stage. They play and after some delay they hear their own sound back. So they use monitors to hear themselves and the rest of the band.
While in lockdown people gathered together to play music with special software. That tells you something about how this problem is well known and how it can be solved in every situation.
Audio data frames are interleaved, ie RLRLRL. There's no point managing timing of network packets because after going over the network, all the data goes into a buffer at the other end before being played.
To do the same with ethernet you would have to use an industrial ethernet implementation of which I know at least three and they are all incompatible with each other and even then you would most likely benefit from an audio focused implementation.
All of this is much harder than just buying a better switch and claiming it improves the sound. Your audio playback device and speaker would have to support the same implementation of industrial internet.
But it’s comically small and solvable much more easily than spending this kind of coin.
I was expecting an AVB switch with locking connectors and redundant power. You know, like a pro audio mission-critical device. Instead it’s basically like using stacks of hundreds to vibration insulate your CD player. It might technically improve things, but the return on investment is poor.
I haven't used a scope, but I have had some laughs plugging things into the same circuit as high gain guitar equipment.
Yes please, let's amplify those audible frequencies to audible levels. A good PSU goes a long way.
To me it really highlights the difference of those who seek to understand deeply, and those who interact with the world only in superficial and aesthetic ways. The latter really want to depend on the "magic" within the machine, and can get upset if you try to shed light on how these things really work.
My PC is very electrically noisy on account of the GPU. This noise was coming out of all the ports, including the Ethernet port. It was making it through that port, by CAT-6 cable, to my switch. The switch then sent it to my Raspberry Pi I was using as a streamer, then into my DAC, amplifier and finally speakers. You could hear it, it was loud when a game started up.
The solution - swap out the CAT-6 with CAT-5 cable which doesn't connect the ground planes. Instantly solved.
I'm considering putting a sacrificial switch from my junk box inline to that one computer so maybe the rest of the network can survive its crashes.
You could verify this by running Wireshark on another machine, or try disable sending pause frames on the machine before it crashes via eg ethtool
In my case just a few weeks ago I had an AP that went bananas, and was directly connected via ethernet to a RPi4, and made the Raspbian kernel panic on the Broadcom driver, randomly. Not long after the AP stopped working completely.
I've also heard it in the 2000s.
There was one song around 1999 that included the sound and also had my ring tone.
It was a very confusing time.
Found it: https://youtu.be/y8ClVMzt9Dw
[edit: added link]
Memcpy can have second order effects due to EMI radiated by CPU, motherboard or coupled via power fluctuations.
There are audible and measurable effects of audio system clock jitter which in turn depends on oscillator power quality.
Someone mentioned that ethernet has isolation transformers. But isolation transformers have parasitic common mode coupling which can inject the noise to ground plane if interference is strong and device is susceptible enough
Watch the EEVBLOG on company which designed scope capable of measuring 1kV common mode signals. (present in EV electronics) https://youtu.be/I7ppDNLlEL4
Audiophile stuff is a weird mix of real effects and snake oil.
If a $10,000 power cable makes your amp sound better to you, who’s to say it doesn’t?
on the other hand, they spent hundreds of dollars for nothing and if they eventually recovered they'd tell other sufferers about it, dragging them down too.
does the victims glimmer of hope justify her scam?
background: she herself suffered from an "incurable" illness for months, where she paid other angel conjurers (that's where she got the idea from). turns out it was just iron deficiency and easily cured with iron supplements. at that point she'd already paid several hundred dollars to those charlatans.
Looking over the product page, it's marked as S/FTP
At least that’s what I was told once upon a time since EE is definitely not my forte.
I'd definitely prefer a DAC with good filtering on its inputs so I wouldn't need to use a middleman, but that is expensive. One with a proper USB module with complete isolation can run ~$5000.
And anti-audiophiles are sometime becoming even worse than manical audiophiles - because of their deep blind belief in their educated superiority (while in reality it's a bit .. untrue).
AVB is a set of IEEE standardized 802.1 extensions that provide better control over bandwidth and latency. This is important when you're playing multiple audio and/or video streams to multiple endpoints connected at different points in the network and they need to be low latency and still kept synchronized.
I've seen professional switches from a large vendor where the AVB license cost as much as the rest of the switch.
It is a one or zero, it will checksum and TCP either gives the correct packet or drops it. Also I do not know many audio streamers that do not buffer since TCP works way faster than a song can play. Plenty of time to make sure the packets are correct.
I have no idea why the audiophile network switches irritates me the most. At least with audio cables I guess you can do measurements that show the signal is cleaner, even though there is zero chance of you hearing a difference most of the time (I just make sure cables have good shielding and if the cable has to be seen it better look cool too, haha).
Ya know there are even audiophile USB cables.......not a joke google it.
one amongst the many ways to signal status to 'peers'
Had they said "I bought these expensive network cables because I like the way they look and they match my furniture" that would be an entirely different thing.
I have however been shocked by how good a meal was with a proper wine pairing--having it being a firework of taste in my mouth and wishing I had the knowledge to know how to pick wines for meals.
The problem is that a small percentage of people don't stop there and start chasing smaller and smaller 'improvements' in the experience until they're forced to make things up and delude themselves to find a new 'high'.
The problem with testing Hifi using Metal is that only the recording engineer really knows what it originally sounded like. Metal recordings are also generally very compressed and so not a good test of dynamics and transients. A good test of a Hifi would involve acoustic instruments, violins, cellos, pianos, orchestras etc. You also need very well recorded source material.
Is matching the original recorded sound really the purpose of a good hifi system ? From what I understand, studio monitors as used in production / mastering have this goal (to sound "neutral").
Hifi speakers are supposed to add their own character to the recorded sound, no?
When talking about acoustic instruments, doesn't each one sound different? Like you could buy two violins from the same manufacturer and they wouldn't have the same exact sound, esp as the years go by. Same goes for analog synths & drum machines, and that's the good thing about them, the fact that they develop their own character.
Yes, at least it used to. Hifi means High Fidelity, which means a high degree of exactness in reproducing the music, as the artists and recording engineers intended.
> Hifi speakers are supposed to add their own character to the recorded sound, no?
I would argue they should not. But consumer "Hifi" certainly does often colour the sound. This is why many audiophiles had to seek out "studio" monitors and earphones. However, even this term has lost its meaning. You will not find "Beats Studio" earphones in any studio.
> When talking about acoustic instruments, doesn't each one sound different?
Maybe slightly yes, but only in certain ways. A bad audio system might make them sound unnatural. Pianos and violins certainly have much less variation than electric guitars.
I did not attempt to define Metal. I only tried to point out that it is often heavily compressed, as is pop music, see for example:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/sep/17/metallica.guit...
I certainly find the idea of playing this stuff on a 10K Hifi amusing, which was perhaps your original point?
EDIT:
You can check your favourite albums, by using this resource: https://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list/1/dr/asc?artist=Epic...
Compare with e.g. some classical music recordings: https://dr.loudness-war.info/?artist=Berliner%20Philharmonik...
That seems like a huge claim. There used to be different mixes for vinyl, radio, and cd. It’s hardly inconceivable that streaming would have a dedicated mix (I’d assume something which “pops” so it’s noticeable as standalone in the middle of a streaming session, whereas the CD would be part of the album flow)
It would make sense since this is the way most people listen to music these days.
Knowing almost nothing about DSP is this something you can do?
It's close with using hybrid anc but still too many variables to claim no sonic difference.
Today a lot of them are checking on Airpods and the like.
On mastering it is completely usual to have extra compression/limiting, some light EQ and even extra "color". It is supposed to be subtle, but that hasn't been the case for quite a while.
Mastering is also when you get the final "bits" that go into a CD, so you need two different mastering sessions to get two different sounding CDs.
Sometimes I noticed older people going into tech discussion about things which were super important once but no longer is relevant.
Most are able to recognize their nostalgia as such and are willing to accept it (e.g. by doing cb radio or retro game development on deliberately limited hardware).
Lots of 60+ people trying to find the holy grail they dreamed about when they were kids. But HOW can a 2000, 1000 USD guitar be a "holy grail"?
So they end up with collections of six, seven, eight high-end Les Pauls, Strats, etc. Or perhaps buying USD 5000+ custom shop instruments. Some of them get to collections of 30, 50, 60.
Of course it's a lot of fun, and not as expensive as, say, a Cello or Oboe collection. So I get why they do it. But as someone who moves often, I'd rather have just one :D
I can imagine someone giving you a taste and you already assume it must be nicer so you confirm the lie. It is also possible that other variables like the fact it has been standing in a jug for longer allowing the chlorine to evaporate make people think that it tastes nicer for the wrong reason.
https://darko.audio/2018/03/for-the-audiophile-who-has-every...
"Think about that for a moment: the network streamer is directly connected to a router designed for functionality but with zero made concession to audiophile sensitivities."
When it comes to hardware: if you have a great and clean signal chain, good ears, decent monitors +/ good room, good headphones, you can record and hear the difference of good gear (diminishing returns though, you are paying for throughput (channels), latency, or even just build-quality/brand (Apple esque) etc at some point).
Of course marketing adds hyperbole and takes certain aspects into woo territory. At the software level: sampling rate can (depending on programming of individual plugins) make a difference in your mixing session (you get nasty artifacts, like EQ cramping, in plugins that don't have internal over-sampling).
This is all the professional gear with a track record rather than the "prosumer" gear (maybe that's the definition of audiophile you were connotating).
Most audiophiles seem to be men in their 50s+, which makes their claims of exceptional hearing extremely dubious. Degradation of hearing with age is a virtual certainty.
If audiophiles tended to be teenagers I'd be more inclined to believe them. But old guys? Old guys with a long habit of listening to loud music? Their ears are not golden.
All of that was gone when we arrived in our twenties. I couldn't hear the TV anymore (younger people: That applied to analog CRT TVs back in the neolithic). I was tested in the military when I was 22. They didn't even bother testing anyone up to more than maybe 14kHz - intense volume would anyway be needed to hear that.
I can't imagine even very careful people will be able to hear a particularly wide audio range when they're 50+, not even people who walk around with ear plugs all the time for protection (some audio engineers do).
And then there are people who buy vinyl records of video game sound-tracks, in which case it doesn't even make sense to remove sampling artifacts since those would be present in the original game.
Isn't the point to actually reduce quality by using imperfect media so recording has more oldschool vibe? Kinda like all the lo-fi mixes being so popular today. At least thats what I always thought, I didn't really research that at all.
Back in the day music was definitely less compressed, but I thought that was more due to different mixing philosophies.
Digital allows for far higher compression - historically digital released have been compressed to hell into a "brick" with very little actual dynamic range. This is so that when they're played on radio they're going to sound louder than anything else. Vinyl doesn't allow for this same amount of compression. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
Modern streaming services will recompress songs to a common standard, negating all of the loudness war stuff, but I haven't looked at new releases to see if heavy compression is still common practice on the master releases but I'd assume they still do it because practices change slowly. In that case they're just throwing away bit depth for no reason.
I assume good mastering engineers create dedicated masters for each major streaming service because of their different requirements.
I am not going to debate if one is better than the other, but they will sound different just due to mastering. So it is not a direct apples to apples comparison.
I think most people buy video game vinyl just to display them, haha.
...Unless you happen to like the particular brand of distortion that every song you loved growing up happened to have.
Was totally worth it!
Here's some pictures of my amps: https://www.bursonaudio.com/pa03-gainclone-power-amp-by-pave...
/s...maybe
But I have met at least one genuine flat Earth believer, who was a Biblical literalist and considered it must be true to match his other beliefs.
I don't do it, but IMO it's totally fine to spent thousands on a speaker or even hundreds on a cable if it brings you joy and doesn't cause financial problems, but you don't have to justify it to anyone, even (and especially) to other audiophiles. The problem is when you somehow believe that you have to justify your purchases and come up with crazy excuses. :(
Because a lot of them went to that.