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Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

> We’d suggest that better reviews would come from a truly independent publication giving the only HiFi verdicts that matter, blind tests and measurements from a high-end audio analyser, but we suspect that the industry lacks the courage to do so.

It's not a lack of courage. The subjectivity is the point. Copy/pasting a comment of mine from last week:

Whenever I think of audiophiles, I imagine a couple of older guys hanging out on a weekend. Because they're the kind of dudes who love maximizing and making numbers go up, it needs to have something to do with optimizing performance. Because they're somewhat wealthy and their success is a big part of their identity, it needs to be something expensive.

Then, because they're friends who want to feel useful to each other, it needs to be riddled with inscrutable lore. That way there's always some handy bit of research, some nuggets of wisdom that they can share with each other. That's what this is really about: feeling like they can bond by sharing expertise about some complex hard to optimize problem.

The actual problem itself is essentially arbitrary and subjective. In fact, it's better if it is arbitrary. Because any problem that can actually be solved means reaching an end to the ability to kibbitz and geek out. That's why bringing up objective metrics is such a faux pas in the audiophile world: it kills the game. And the whole point is to play the game together, forever.

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I'm happy your wealthy older male friends have found a way to waste money that enables them to play the status game and bond. No really, it sounds totally harmless.

The problem is, for the rest of us, who just want to buy decent audio equipment and don't have lots of disposable wealth, their hobby fills the space with so much noise. Try searching for reviews of a pair of decent bookshelf speakers. Even add the word "budget" to your search. You'll get all these WhatHiFi style mags who are also playing this inscrutable status game trying to convince you that you'll need to spend thousands of dollars on speakers, even budget speakers. And they're experts so of course most people believe them.

The reality is that once you go over a few hundred dollars for small home speakers you'll get massively diminishing returns. I would say basically zero return in fact between 500 and 10,000 dollars. You should spend money on furnishings to make the space sound better instead.

    The problem is, for the rest of us, who just want to 
    buy decent audio equipment and don't have lots of 
    disposable wealth, their hobby fills the space with 
    so much noise

Amen. Soooo much noise.

While not perfect, and while they don't provide as much objective data as I'd like, I have always sound Wirecutter's coverage of audio equipment to be of a very high caliber. No snake oil.

On the hobbyist side of things Erin's Audio Corner and Audio Science Review have some great data driven reviews.

    I would say basically zero return in fact 
    between 500 and 10,000 dollars

Wow! That's a spicy take. Are we assuming that these theoretical speakers will be properly crossed over to a subwoofer or two, and properly EQ'd?

If so, then yeah, I think I'm almost on board with you. My main system is basically a pair of < $500 JBL studio monitors crossed over to a couple of subs.

If not, then bass and total output are definitely going to be lacking with that $500 system. Most $500 small, commercial speakers are going to struggle to hit 40hz with any kind of authority.

Another thing that a lot of speakers get wrong is off-axis performance. Most of the sound we hear is reflected so it helps if speakers are doing the right thing in as wide of a cone as possible. Paying more tends to get you better performance in this regard but it's a rather weak correlation.

Well, one can build damn good top tier quality speakers for $1500 per easily. It takes knowhow of course to design (but there's literature) and tune it, so feel free to charge double.

Anything beyond that is brand and greed with minimal returns, unless it's a truly exotic design which may not necessarily be better. (Ribbon speakers, electrostatic, isodynamic...)

>bass and total output are definitely going to be lacking with that $500 system

Definitely. OP was talking about bookshelves. Personally I'd definitely want a sub to go with any bookshelf speaker.

>Most of the sound we hear is reflected so it helps if speakers are doing the right thing in as wide of a cone as possible. Paying more tends to get you better performance in this regard but it's a rather weak correlation.

There's differing opinions/preferences on that, and what you might prefer will also depend on the room size.

What experts generally do agree on is that the dropoff should be smooth with no peaks or resonances off-axis.

The classic examples I'm aware of are Revel vs Kef.

Revel aims for wider dispersion than Kef but other than that, they're pretty similar in terms of specs, both are very linear on-axis with a smooth dropoff.

A lot of bookshelves get you meaningful response down to ~40hz or a little below with the help of some boundary reinforcement, which is enough for a lot of people and/or music.

The number of subwoofers I own has become a running joke between my brother and I, so I don't need to be sold on their value but they definitely add bulk, cost and complexity so I never want newcomers thinking they absolutely need them to have fun in this hobby.

That's a good point.

I enjoy a lot of bass-heavy music so I do feel I need one, but if I only had the budget for average speakers and a sub, or great speakers without a sub, I'd go for the great speakers without a sub.

I'd probably go for good speakers with a cheap sub rather than great speakers without a sub though.

Audio Science Review has a good database of reviews with a ton of measurements

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php

It's a relatively straightforward dichotomy in this instance: either get the most popular consumer option(because then you are getting something exactly as shitty as everyone else), or get something professional music producers are using(because they have sunk in the effort to have a precise, neutral setup that lets them find every error, and definitionally, that means that you aren't getting much of a practical improvement with audio fairy dust - not one that you couldn't achieve with a bit of EQ or "enhancement" DSP).

This kind of dichotomy often occurs throughout tech product categories: sometimes you want the consumer thing that has optimized its defaults to mid-market taste, other times you want an unbiased, configurable professional tool. Rarely do you want a hybrid of both.

I almost always want something in between those two. Electronics aimed at consumers tend to be unacceptably awful, but I rarely need something actually high-end.

Just buy a pair of KRK 5 studio monitors and be done with it. They are ugly as sin and a little on the large side but they are excellent things. Built-in amp and they turn themselves off when no audio is playing. Repairable too.

I wouldn't recommend audio monitors for casual listening. That's not what they're designed for: they're for production. It would be like lighting your living room with shop floor lighting. Yes, it will fully illuminate every square inch of the room so that you can see every speck of dust on the carpet, but that doesn't mean it will make it look good.

I've never appreciated that argument.

Colored speakers will color anything you play through them.

Possibly that means that some genres or particular albums could sound better, but the flipside of that is that others will sound worse.

That's not what I want, since you never know how a particular album might be mixed. I want to have the widest range of "sounding good".

Maybe if I wanted to have multiple speaker setups in the living room for different genres, but otherwise...

If you're not aiming for accuracy, then what are you aiming for?

I chose my analogy deliberately.

One way to think of monitors is that they don't bias or color the sound. That's technically true, I suppose.

But another way to think of monitors is that they're designed to be the superset of all possible listening experiences. If there is any flaw in your sound that could show up on some set of speakers, you should be able to perceive that flaw on your monitors too, so that you can fix it.

Of course, if a mix sounds good on some particular sound system, it's nice if they sound good on the monitors too. But that's less of the point. Monitors are intended to provide actionable feedback for audio production decisions. They're trying to shine a bright light on every dark corner of your mix so that nothing is hidden from you that might show up for a listener.

From that perspective, monitors are sort of the worst speakers for casual listening: They're designed to emphasize as many production flaws as possible.

It's also important to think about how the music you're listening to was mixed and mastered. The people who made production choices for the music you listen to are targeting a range of listeners with mostly average speaker setups. If your speakers are consumer-oriented and middle of the road, then they're more likely to be in the sweet spot for how the album was mixed.

For example, if the mix engineer knows that most speakers overly boost the lows to make things more hyped, they might tame those lows in the mix to get a more balanced result. Now if you listen to that mix on "unbiased" monitors, the lows will be weak.

It's sort of a Keyne's beauty contest: speaker purchasers are trying to pick speakers that make recordings sound good, while engineers are trying to make recordings sound good on the speakers they picked. There isn't really a fixed ground truth. An accurate reproduction of a record deliberately engineered for biased speakers won't necessarily sound good.

>They're designed to emphasize as many production flaws as possible.

That's one way to think of it.

I like to think of it as "revealing every production detail". I want to hear the skill of both the musician and the production.

I'm personally very heavily biased toward well-produced music though.

The alternative is masking details, which is not what I want.

I could get that with cheap speakers in a crappy room, or in the car with the engine running.

Great mixing with a great performance on revealing speakers is an amazing experience.

>they might tame those lows in the mix to get a more balanced result

So you buy speakers with extra lows, and then when you change music to something mixed with neutral bass, it's overpowering?

I'd rather have neutral, calibrated speakers and have most music be balanced and then I can EQ the badly mixed music if I want.

It's a moving target, but I'd much rather have a zeroed rifle. Yes I know the analogy falls apart when the target changes distance but it's the first thing I thought of.

lol I'm not that you even need to spend this amount of money, I think the deep house bros just like signalling to each other that they're in the yellow woofer gang. Just buy Behringer and be done with it!

But KRKs are nearly the cheaper monitors out there.

They're still costing you at least 2 to 3x what you'd get from Behringer and I reckon most bedroom producers won't be able to tell the difference. I also think it's ludicrous that people think they need anything bigger than a 3 inch monitor in a home bedroom studio but marketers going to market.

is there any benefit to getting the 7 inch or 8 inch?

I would imagine that you would get deeper bass from the larger models but I found the bass to be nice and tight with the 5 inch woofers and low enough for me. I think that anything over 5 inches would be too overkill for a living room. I am aware that studio monitors are meant for studios and not living rooms but I really like the flat response. Can’t stand boomy speakers with exaggerated tweeters.

WhatHiFi is not the most egregious case, they put out a lot of fluff with higher-priced speakers but also give pretty decent reviews of more budget options.

I found out about Audio Pro through some WhatHiFi-esque publication, checked WhatHiFi's reviews and those were raving about Audio Pro's speakers even though they are pretty inexpensive relative to the whole audiophile environment.

>their hobby fills the space with so much noise

100%.

But the good news is that speakers have never been better or cheaper, and there's more good measurements of speakers out there than ever. For $500 you can get better speakers than you ever could, if you ignore the audiofool noise.

Also the electronics are much better as well. Room calibration makes a huge difference, Dirac and Audyssey are great.

>zero return in fact between 500 and 10,000 dollars

For me, the tipping point is around $2k for speakers.

I aim for measurable accuracy when I'm looking for speakers. I mean, if you don't care about accuracy, then what are you buying?

There are measurable (and audible) differences up until $2k. After that in most cases it's aesthetics, questionable "sound signatures", and ridiculously overpriced and useless stands.

I agree the room should be treated, no matter what speakers you're using.

I was literally about to write this same comment, more or less, so will just upvote you instead.

I really truly want to objectively know whether the £X,000 I might commit to an "upgrade" is actually an upgrade, even if "objectively" in fact means just "subjectively by a clear majority of a large ish sample".

Obviously any serious purchase needs a personal listening audition first, but I want to know I'm not wasting time by even shortlisting certain candidates.

Otherwise it's - where to even start from literally hundreds of amps and speakers?

> their hobby fills the space with so much noise

Oh, man, this is so true. I recently bought some audio gear. I wasn't going for "cheap" as much as "good value" -- but it was extremely difficult to figure out what's good and what's not, mostly because the hobbyist crowd (where I would expect to find out the ground truth) generates so much noise.

In the end, I got a decent recommendation here on HN and was very happy with it.

Agree on zero return over $500 or so! If your point isn't to spend money on "cosmetics", any cheap bookshelf stereo system is more than good enough.

That said, it's ok to blow your money on whatever someone wants. We don't need to judge others for doing what they want, it comes off as jealousy.

> We don't need to judge others for doing what they want, it comes off as jealousy.

I agree that you "shouldn't yuck someone else's yum" -- but I don't think it comes off as jealousy. Accusations of jealousy always come off (to me, anyway), as a ridiculous position taken by people who feel defensive but have no defense.

I like the "shouldnt yuck a yum"! Thanks for that!

Get the D12. It has a high wife-approval-factor

> Then, because they're friends who want to feel useful to each other, it needs to be riddled with inscrutable lore. That way there's always some handy bit of research, some nuggets of wisdom that they can share with each other. That's what this is really about: feeling like they can bond by sharing expertise about some complex hard to optimize problem.

> The actual problem itself is essentially arbitrary and subjective. In fact, it's better if it is arbitrary. Because any problem that can actually be solved means reaching an end to the ability to kibbitz and geek out. That's why bringing up objective metrics is such a faux pas in the audiophile world: it kills the game. And the whole point is to play the game together, forever.

Oh, so it's just like sports or politics. Makes perfect sense in retrospect.

Some people definitely do the hobby that way, but there are at least as many who take a more empirical approach. The hobby is divided between objectivists and subjectivists and I'm in the former camp.

The audio industry is over a century old, and we've poured zillions of dollars into it. We know (on an objective, measurable level) what sounds good.

And this is why people still use tube amplifiers with design from 70s, just with modern high quality power supplies and EMF practices, right? /s

(Actually SET is a valid topology and can be done well. As can be a pure transformer amplifier, transformerless tube, BJT, FET, current mode in a variety of classes. Even open loop, funnily enough. They have different strengths and sometimes applications.)

The challenge to "mr. objectivist" is always the ABC-HR test. It's similar to ABX (or double blind randomized controlled trial) but you also assign comparative number rating at each pairwise comparison like in MUSHRA. It detects people who cannot rate things or detect a difference but lie about it too. Preferably with a known total garbage device as a low anchor or two to keep the rating scale honest. Needs a digitally controlled relay switch box for amplifiers, a bit of programming, a lot of amplifiers, potentially multiple loads and a lot of time with material that may expose flaws. The test has been used to tune psychoacoustic codecs with great successes. (It's easier with software only.)

It's next to impossible to run one of these unless you're super rich and/or an audio shop.

If you have not done that, you are a number chaser not an objectivist. A Pythagorean.

Amplifiers are often enough roughly audibly different based on their topology, especially when driving weird loads, even if our minimalistic measurements show they supposedly should not be.

And on the other hand, people have made amplifiers that pass the number checks but produce sound with an obvious annoying signature. (And the fun part is, these are either chip amps or sold as random audiophile equipment to people who are supposed to have ears and know what high fidelity means.)

We don't know what to measure and how, besides a few total fail checks.

    And this is why people still use tube amplifiers 
    with design from 70s, just with modern high quality 
    power supplies and EMF practices, right?

I don't see how that follows from anything I've said. What I said was that the field of audio engineering is 100+ years old and we know what sounds good. What I did not say is that we've ceased making progress. (A lot of the progress we've made has been negative, IMO, sacrificing sound quality for miniaturization, but that a whole other tangent)

In a nutshell, "what sounds good" to the most people most of the time is accurate signal reproduction, plus some tweaking of the output to conform to a house curve like the Harman target response.

There is some room for personal preference, of course. And of course some kinds of distortion can sound pleasing such as even order harmonic distortion.

    If you have not done that, you are a number 
    chaser not an objectivist. A Pythagorean.

This is hogwash of the highest degree on a couple of different levels.

It's like saying you can't believe the moon exists unless you've been there. I've read the controlled research by Toole et al, and while he could certainly be lying, I haven't seen a credible refutation. Haven't ever seen an electron with my own eyes either but there's some pretty compelling research proving they exist.

    We don't know what to measure and how, besides a few total fail checks.

What a remarkable claim.

Let me turn this around. How do you feel it's possible that we're 100+ years and many generations of audio engineers into this multi-trillion dollar industry and we still don't know what sounds good? According to you we literally haven't even figured out how to measure this stuff? What a laugh.

That would be an absolutely remarkable state of affairs.

How about photographs and video displays? Same thing? We're just spitballin' it there, too? Got a bunch of artistes in the TV factory just sort of tweaking each set till it looks good enough?

The existence of the moon is not a metric someone invented. It can be detected by many (at least 5 available to general populace) means, its shape and features too. Stop making bad analogies and howaboutism.

Our "distortion metrics" are barely validated garbage that has not been corrected since 60s. (Including THX standard which uses them, a pretty funny joke. It does better at room and speakers.) Hence, they are only useful as a check not a rating.

We do know what sounds good, obviously it is an application of a bass boost knob. /s

What's under the question is what sounds accurate (or accurate enough) and high fidelity. And the metrics we have typically do not answer it in the positive, only in a weak negative. People designing amplifiers typically do not chase these numbers too hard either, since that ends subjectively audibly poorly. We do not happen to have perfect amplifiers, it turns out.

The metrics are not psychoacoustic for one, nor have been correctly validated. Better ones have been proposed but not applied. There are some definitive statements like "distortion 80 dB lower than signal cannot be heard in headphones" but there's no validation of it. (Plus it seems suspicious compared to what we know about psychoacoustic masking and absolute thresholds of hearing. Plus time domain behavior might be audible too in some cases, we just don't have an audio metric for that.)

Some people have taken to plotting harmonic distortion graphs for multiple orders separately already, but it is way rare and still hard to interpret and it still does not differentiate audibly different (and differently annoying) kinds of distortion.

My goodness. How spectacular of you to claim this area hasn't been researched! There has been massive amounts of research on the audibility of various aspects of audio reproduction. Literally tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of papers. For starters:

https://www.google.com/search?q=audibility+site%3Aaes.org

https://www.google.com/search?q=preference+site%3Aaes.org

This discussion is over.

Oh come on. I namedropped AES papers almost by name. (The response to it in particular.) And definitely by name in another post. Nobody uses that metric, because industry Does. Not. Care. It's also still an integral unvalidated metric - it has not been subjected to listening tests to evaluate the thresholds nor figure out its limitations.

If I missed a paper, point it out in a less lazy way. The last one that did something was in 1984 by Edward Cherry with a funky tunable distortion generating ampliifer. Even that was not a panel evaluation.

There are more or less two benchmark quality amplifiers out there (I know of, and happen to be Benchmark) done by chasing the numbers, oscilloscope traces (because metrics are insufficient), a lot of modern error correction maths (90s era) in addition to validation by ear. I gave up trying to decode their feedforward plus feedback topology in detail, it's hard and not the usual example. These cost serious money. Trades some power efficiency too. One could use one of these to evaluate any and new metrics more easily, but nobody does that.

There's places like audio science review which are exactly that, I think.

eg their review of the Loxjie A30

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/l...

I can vouch for ASR. A very data-driven, engineering-driven view.

The site's owner has several hundred thousand dollars worth of measurement gear - Audio Precision analyzer, GRAS headphone rig, Klippel NFS rig, etc.

> several hundred thousand dollars worth of measurement gear

Isn’t this the point though? Does it actually require that much gear to get measurements that are accurate enough that no human can perceive the difference? With harmonic distortion for instance, we know what is inaudible and yet people keep lauding companies that push ever farther past it.

To be clear, absolutely zero of this is required for a hobbyist. This is all if you want to do professional level, repeatable, objective measurements/reviews.

    Does it actually require that much gear to get 
    measurements that are accurate enough that no 
    human can perceive the difference?

Yeah and no.

For speakers, yes, you need some of this sophisticated gear if you want to do objective (as opposed to purely subjective) reviews.

The Klippel NFS is an automated rig that measures a speaker's output from many different angles and uses some nifty math to subtract the room's influence, giving results more reliable than a physical anechoic chamber. That rig costs something like $100K; I forget.

Getting a 360 degree picture of a speaker's sound output is pretty important. The majority of sound we hear indoors is reflected. You are, essentially, hearing the sum of what your speaker is doing at every single angle all at once so if we're going to characterize a speaker's performance in an objective way we need something like that.

Of course, you don't need need a $100K rig. You can measure a speaker in your suburban back yard (or better, an open field) from a few different angles and get a pretty decent approximation of all of that. I've done it quite a few times! All you need is a $60 calibrated mic, a protracter, a tape measure, and some free software. And the willingness to annoy your neighbors with loud tone sweeps. Usually takes me a few hours to measure a speaker; most of the time spent is just dragging things around so I can do 20 minutes of measurements from 5 or 6 different angles.

However, if you're looking to do this with large numbers of speakers and have lots of money like Amir does, the Klippel certainly starts to look attractive.

For measuring DACs and amps, no, I guess you don't need a professionally calibrated AP analyzer. I think you can spend a couple hundred bucks and get pretty close. Maybe less.

For measuring headphones, yeah, I think you need something like the GRAS headphone measurement rigs that are $6K-$13K. Or maybe the $299 one from MiniDSP is just as good. I don't know!

Unfortunately, even a $500 scope will typically almost bottom out with good-ish yet audibly different amplifiers, even with averaging. These tend to do -100 to -106 dB or so.

The calibrated microphone is good for correcting some rough low frequency room reflections and frequency response unevenness and measuring spatial response, but not really measuring other distortion and noise. It's only typically -60 to -80 dB SNR. Even though distortion adds, it'll end up in the noise, and cheap ADC plus microphone preamplifier are typically not as high quality as DAC and speaker amplifier either adding its own cruft.

The headphone measurement couplers are more of an art than science for the moment. You can, in fact, make a decent-ish rig for a thousand or so, but MiniDSP one is not it. For plain equalization I'd trust your own ears with sine tones and some bandlimited noise instead. For measurements, it's just poor.

Klippel NFS is something I have personally seen exactly once, and I cannot attest the quality of its measurements (esp. room subtraction) personally. Almost nobody has it.

> All you need is a $60 calibrated mic, a protracter, a tape measure, and some free software.

You also need a crane to hoist the speaker 20 meters into the air, or you have ground reflections to contend with. (You could bury the speaker so its front is flush with th ground for a hlaf-space measurement and do some math with that, of course.)

You can use gated measurements to skip the crane and eliminate those reflections... to an extent.

https://www.minidsp.com/applications/acoustic-measurements/l...

There are limits to that, admittedly. You're still going to get that bounce below a certain frequency (height dependent) so you'll still want to get it off of the ground as high as possible. At 2 meters you can get accurate measurements down to 90hz-ish IIRC. Actual in-room bass response is highly room dependent anyway so that's not totally the end of the world, but of course it's not ideal, and overall it goes to show you how impressive and valuable the Klippel is.

All this reminds me of a FUN product review I read in Consumer Reports, the magazine.

It was a review of shampoo. Basically lumped all those high end shampoos and the common brands you find in the grocery store together.

It basically said to me -- shampoos really don't matter, many get your hair clean and shiny.

EDIT: hmmm... I think it might be September 2000 issue of consumer reports magazine. Can't seem to read it on archive.org.

Unless you happen to have an atopic skin condition, psoriasis, etc.

A bunch of the "shampoos" are combined with conditioner which means they're neither a good shampoo nor a conditioner. (Because those two are contradictory. Shampoo is to remove stuff from hair and skin, conditioner is to deposit.)

It also happens that quite a few shampoos have a lot of aggressive alcohol or phenolic preservatives. Certain people are sensitive to these (most are not).

Some "men" shampoos also have wrong pH, way too acidic, causing skin and hair problems in the long run. Some even with pH of < 3. (Properly should be between 3.5 and 5.5)

And then there is the difference in strength of surfactant (SLS etc.) but that should affect just the dose.

So yes, they're definitely all the same. /s

The actual grift there is using weird oils, fruit additives which do nothing or just make the shampoo worse.

sorry, should say: I interpreted *the article* to say shampoo didn't matter.

Not that I buy into that conclusion myself.

I buy shampoo (and toothpaste) without SLS.

>"men" shampoos also have wrong pH, way too acidic

  'pH of dog shampoo'

That's the nice version of all of this.

The less nice version is that it's all marketing and for-profit woo: Buy these gold cables with 20% nitrogen and your MIDIs will sound crisper! Buy these fiber optic cables made with Genuine Himalayan Sea Salt and your bits will be better-formed! Buy my optoelectric isolator or you might as well be hooking your speakers to your turntable with a rusty wire coat hanger!

"Riddled with inscrutable lore" is a prime diagnostic feature of all this; it recurs in pseudoscience of all kinds, and the audiophile experience is pseudoscience-adjacent at least whenever it makes claims about reality. It's motte-and-bailey, to some extent: This sounds "Better", where "Better" is either completely subjective, or the result of objectively untrue and blatantly impossible claims they make about the gear they're selling.

If everyone knows it's just pretend, sure. But false advertising and lying are morally wrong.

I try pretty hard these days to seek the most charitable interpretation for human behavior. It's a useful counter-balance to all of the outrage click-bait, bad news survivorship bias, and other emergent forces in play in the modern world that make people look horrible. It makes me less anxious and pessimistic.

In general, yes, I agree with you that false advertising and lying are wrong. I'm also a pretty rational, skeptical person who is "anti-woo".

At the same time... in the past couple of years I've become much more open-minded about the positive psychological value of just choosing to believe some shit in the absence of evidence. It's good to know that you've chosen that belief for non-evidentiary reasons. Maybe put it in a different mental bucket.

But I no longer believe that the "things I believe but can't justify" bucket should be empty. The world is huge and scary and uncertain and awful things can happen without any notice or any ability to control it. I could get a traumatic brain injury. My wife could realize she no longer loves me. My kid could get hit by a car.

I have no evidence to justify a belief that those things won't happen. But I need some level of faith that things are gonna be OK (even if they might not) so that I can function.

If someone is selling kelp and claiming it cures cancer, that's a deep evil because it prevents someone from seeking an actual effective cure to a real material problem.

But if someone has some disposable money and wants to spend it buying the subjective illusory experience of better sound and the identity of a person who is really into audio, I won't judge a company who wants to satisfy that demand.

We all just need some fucking comfort sometimes, you know? And if a $400 HDMI cable gives it to someone, I sure as hell won't judge them for it.

I'm convinced this is the same with coffee. Everyone is watching the same YouTube videos and buying the same expensive shit, but nobody actually knows what they're talking about and probably can't make good coffee or explain how to.

> play the game together, forever.

Basically, the story of every Gentoo userbase.

Gentoo is rice?

I feel attacked ( ╬ д ⊙ ) ⊰ ⊹ฺ

I love your comment. I think it could apply to any number of hobbies and probably says something about how we build community. Maybe your description in large part applies to every successful community.

I've been thinking a lot about that lately and a lot of communities, especially those with users lying to themselves labelling their will to always buy more stuff as "Hobby", are just big Circle Jerks. I've been part of it, and still am, but let's face the reality, those forums became the field of brands playing with consumers.

Fortunately Hacker News is different

And by all objective metrics, there are many $500 sound systems that sound as good as any system at any price. You can't be both objective and high-end.

I kept reading expecting there to be some sort of metaphor, a literal thing in your story that they were both working on together. Like show me what old-dude Calvin-ball actually looks like.

So is a mechanical keyboards snobs

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