I consider myself an enthusiast/hobbyist, not an audiophile, and hold a pretty high level of scepticism about the truly devoted tbh.
That said I've never had the pleasure of listening to anything north of around the £10k mark, so I would love to be convinced of a genuine move-the-dial listening benefit of the really high end gear!
This becomes a curse if you practice it too often. Yes, if you strain your ears during cymbal crashes, you'll hear warbly bits in compressed audio, especially if that's all you're looking for. And then you'll start hearing it everywhere. In terms of casual playback, it's not terribly important, and if you don't tune your ears, it won't matter. (Lossless is important for archival copies though, IMO)
My favorite/worst example of falling into this trap occurred for me when I was mixing an EP by my band. We had terrible recording equipment, so I was trying my 22-year-old best to carve something workable out with EQ and panning and whatnot. On the kick drum, I wanted the 'click' of the beater hitting the head, but it accentuated this squeak that my pedal made every time I hit it. I spent a little too long trying to cut this squeak out, to little avail. It was like an icepick in my ears, but no one else in the band could hear it.
Later that day, I got in the car and put in a CD by the band Cake (this being the early 2000s) - one that I'd heard countless times. On this playthrough though, clear as day, I heard the squeak of the drummer's kick pedal.
I switched to pure electronic music for weeks just to cleanse my palette.
I worked on a big studio in the late 90s/early 2000s, and it was kinda funny how professionals have (or at least had) an attitude of just not caring about those things. Try to fix with a gate in about 10 seconds, if it doesn't work just turn it down a bit. Or not ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think I scored worse than a coin flip when it came to 320 files
If you cannot distinguish, you will be the same as a coin flip; i.e. random.
Anyway, not to take this sub-thread too seriously, but obviously it depends how reproducible your deviation from 50-50 is :-)
Some really nice floorstanding speakers though offer a jaw dropping improvement that’s measurable.
Be a while before I can justify even contemplating that sort of hifi spend anyway so I shall proceed in blissful ignorance for now :-)
Is that in USD?
https://shop.martinshifi.co.uk/products/b-w-nautilus?variant...
Can be yours for the bargain price of GBP 57,750
I think the gentleman is looking for something a bit more high class sir.
https://hifi-products.com/Transmission-Audio-Transmission-Au...
That's the price of a Yamaha HS5 and some other speakers in that range.
And yep after that you definitely start getting diminishing returns.
https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/Yamaha-HS5-Active-Monitor-Spea...
Only reason to spend more is aesthetics, features, and SPL (fair enough).
Most of the budget in high end production facilities goes into room design and acoustics.
1. Studio monitors are chosen for their flat response curve over a given range not because they: a) accurately cover a large frequency range including bass, b) have exceptional clarity and ultra low distortion. 2. Bookshelf speakers can get really good but they ultimately require subwoofers to cover lower frequencies and that requires not only a good subwoofer with excellent clarity. 3. The vast, vast majority of studios master audio to sound good on a wide range of devices ranging from smartphone speakers to earbuds to $50 soundbars. And ultimately with the "loudness wars" still in full swing, dynamic range compression is widely used.
I don't disagree with you that room treatment is of paramount importance. But there is a very, very noticeable difference hearing a good recording over a pair of floorstanding full range speakers with excellent tweeters+woofers and a decent amp. My point a good setup including subwoofer+crossovers+bookshelf speakers that hits the point of diminishing returns tends to approach the $10-15k mark including amp.
Some things are a total waste of money. Fancy power cables, super-expensive amps with zero measurements to justify the cost. Snake oil stuff like special ethernet cables, etc.
But speakers, as the highest distortion element of the audio chain, absolutely improve noticeably even up to $10-15k or so. I purchased some GoldenEar Triton One.R speakers a few years ago and they still blow people's minds when they listen to them. Everything from the bass to the treble are crystal clear yet not fatiguing.
Except, they don't. The only reason to buy a 15k speaker is to gain a higher SPL before distortion kicks in, or you want some cool feature or aesthetics.
For a home user just seeking good (accurate) music reproduction, there is not much point to spending more than a couple grand on a 2.1 system.
Beyond that, you are best to spend money on EQ, then room treatments and extra subs to try and sort out the low end (the most challenging aspect of music reproduction).
Great. So I really don't need the expensive stuff then. It will actually be a distortion of what the engineer intended
Additionally, a few genres (notably some jazz and Western classical) as well as select recordings here and there actually do not have "loudness war" issues and might actually have good dynamics. For these, it's nice to have a system that can handle, say, the full blown volume swings of a Romantic-era symphony.
You can probably fulfill these requirements with a system far under $15K. :)
I actually was under the impression that the audiophile market (at least the stereotypical) was fairly "dead"; it was more of a thing in, say, the 1970s-1980s phenomenon (with a follow-up in the late 1990s with the home theater boom) when the gap between consumer electronics and hi-end electronics was a lot bigger, and there was a lot less technical information out there (so mythology over things like cables and flowery descriptions of sound were more rampant).
There’s also many other brands in high end production facilities like for example ATC which easily exceed 10-15k a pair.
I often see fairly high quality floor speakers for near free at thrift stores, etc.
To be fair, I am talking about things that were probably $1-2k new, and I don't feel that I could personally tell the difference from that and something $10k new. Especially with the real world high noise floor- vehicles outside, pets, kids, etc.
That said I've never had the pleasure of listening
to anything north of around the £10k mark
Ultimately, we're talking about signal reproduction here, and inexpensive gear can put out some seriously accurate sound thanks to onboard DSP processing that uses software to compensate for less than amazing hardware. As long as the sound reaching your ears is correct, doesn't matter how it was achieved.
The one thing you can potentially gain once you get in to the realm of paying thousands of dollars is oodles of power from the amplifier and oodles of power handling from the speakers, which may or may not let you begin to approximate the sound of live music.
If you have ever had the pleasure of hearing an orchestra perform live, the average SPL (sound pressure level) may not be that high, but the fleeting momentary peaks from something like a timpani might be north of 100dB. That's a bit of a feat for your stereo system to pull off and there's no substitute for horsepower there.
But even then, this doesn't necessarily cost megabucks.
I heard this system in person at this event. A million dollars of objectively great gear, and the end result was it sounded like the PA system at a high school football game.
https://www.stereophile.com/content/vac-statement-452iq-powe...
The reflections in that room were a nightmare. Look at the giant glass wall behind the seating area, perpendicular to the speakers. Holy jesus. So you have the speakers putting out some massive waves, and then you have waves reflecting off of the glass wall with nearly equal energy, and then you have everything coming together and canceling out and/or creating resonances... right at the seating area. Absolutely insane, absolutely pathological.