In 2024, if your resistor vendor has even 5% tolerance, you need to find another vendor.
If you know what you're doing a 50 cent opamp will give you results that are beyond what a human could identify in a double-randomized blind test. Same goes for comparing two rusty pieces of wire against highly pure copper speaker cables.
For some reason audiophiles will use darn massive gold (or silver) RCA connectors instead of something like a balanced connection that would actually make sense.
For audio applications 1% resistors are fine. You can use still affordable 0.1% in places where you truly care. Below that it is getting ridiculous, as the influence of harder to match things will take over. Things like speakers or the room they are placed in. How about the speed of sound changing with air temperature and humidity? You better have a room that has uniform and stabilized air temperature and humidity.
A big part of the audiophile game is about psychological impact and the joy of personalized optimization. I spent a lot of money on audio equipment and a lot of time on researching it myself. It is an interesting thing. But in the end it is also physics that are interpreted by your brain and I can't help but feel bad for people who need to (incoming hyperbole) turn every part of their setup into gold in order to be able to enjoy listening to their equipment as music passes through it.
It's hard to find XLR (or even TRS) balanced connectors on most non-professional (=TV studios, expensive conference room setups, DJs/clubs/similar venues) equipment.
I think this is more of a cultural divide than anything, with tradition being a big part of it. In the olden days balanced I/O had to be done using specialized transformers. Unless you got really expensive well wound ones these could degrade your signal significantly — that might've contributed to a bad rep in audiophile circles. But today you can balance or unbalance electronically with indistinguishable fidelity and... ironically a lot of the analog "warmth" people love in old recordings came from the transformer on the inputs of old mixing desks.
There is really no reason to use unbalanced today other than being really pressed for money or running so short cables that it won't matter - and even then you could do better than RCA connectors.
Yeah but who outside of people already interested in DJing buys that kind of stuff. It just looks ugly, unlike your classic home theater setup.
Out of "looks decent (=passes the Spouse Acceptance Factor test)", "reasonably affordable" and "has decent quality", choose two... unless you got a partner accepting you literally putting up a 2m truss with lasers, movingheads and a strobe in your living room that could compete with a mid-range disco, and a 1.200W fogger on the ground. I'm lucky enough to have such a partner, but I'd say about 99% of people don't.
It is perfectly possible to build beautiful balanced equipment.
Balanced outputs have nothing to do with the aesthetics of the object. And I choose option 4 — build it yourself — then it can be done cheap and look however decent, massive, invisible, ridiculous or whatever the aesthetical ven diagram between your second half and you looks like. And it can have balanced I/O if needed ; )
The truth is that we sound engineers who use that stuff for work often do not have the luxury of caring for things that don't matter to the process or the outcome.
Professional AV equipment is expensive because it needs to be reliable on top of sounding as if it wasn't there, one of those units described above was running without fault for 15 years 24/7 in a room that was 30°C each summer (and it still works). Meanwhile my brother bought a silver RCA connector that broke off after a year of use — tip stuck in the amp, guess who had to fix it..
Is there a reason why they don't just use digital audio everywhere and convert to analog as late as possible? Inside the speakers for example? I mean, digital audio is pretty much perfect. Why are analog audio signals still a thing? People actually pay thousands of dollars for magical analog audio cables and it boggles my mind.
Many modern Studios run some form of digital audio network as well (Dante, Ravenna, etc) so you can go digital as early and close to the source as possible and do all the routing using network switches and some sort of managment software (e.g. Dante Domain Manager). So if you do that it makes sense to go digital all the way to the speakers and convert directly to analog there after running through a DSP that allows you to correct for the speakers position in the room.
Cables can matter. But more for mechanical reliability, good shielding and perfect handling after years of use than any other magical properties. If you want to run balanced audio signals at miniscule loss for a few thousand meters it turns out that you can just use CAT6 for that. These cable are made for far more challenging (speak: higher frequency) signals and they have a track record of working.
Stepping back for a moment… you see digital interconnects in high-end pro audio gear, using systems like Dante. These systems are NOT simple. When you have multiple digital audio systems connected together, you have to worry about whether they are all running from the same clock, or whether you can convert from one clock to another. Systems like AES solved this by having “word clock” running on separate coax cables with BNC connectors.
If you look at consumer digital audio stuff, like Bluetooth speakers, you find all sorts of weird problems. It turns out that for cheap consumer gear, you get better quality audio from simple analog connections anyway.
If you want speakers with digital inputs, you also need to power those speakers. That uses up more power outlets.
There are a lot of different parts involved—D/A converters, crossover networks, and amplifiers. Back in the day, good D/A converters were expensive, but they have gotten really cheap. If you have amplifiers that are cheap enough, you can put them after the crossover network and save money on the crossover network. If you have D/A converters that are cheap enough, you can eliminate the crossover network entirely and do it in DSP.
At that point you are comparing the cost of one more channel of D/A against the cost of an electronic crossover. It’s super easy to just buy a D/A with more channels. If you get to completely eliminate an analog crossover network, maybe that’s a win in terms of BOM cost.
It can be. But standard Bluetooth connections for audio can be terrible. Streaming from the internet, that is digital, and there can be delays and gaps in the sound.
I didn't mean to indirectly praise Bluetooth in my post. Bluetooth anything pretty much sucks. Bluetooth audio in particular is pretty bad and full of usability issues. It doesn't seem to have the bandwidth required since the audio gets transcoded to some lossy format.
I once set up an mpd music server on my local network and audio quality was perfect. However I encountered significant latency issues. Play and pause had a latency of one second which made it unusable. That was true even for uncompressed audio streams over the network.
I got bored before I was able to resolve the problem. Maybe the problem was my network. I should try it again now that I have a much higher performance router running OpenWRT which is capable of traffic shaping.
But what happens if you don't like the music coming out of your stereo? No gold-plated connectors can cure that.
I believe Vishay's ±0.2ppm/°C TCR is a materials science process specific to one of the companies they own, so that is also a reason they can charge quite high prices.
If you don't need that kind of TCR (i.e. your part is not going to space) the price should go down considerably for a thin film NiCr resistor (5 ppm - 25 ppm). There is actually a lot more direct sales and custom design volume than I would have expected when I started in this industry, so what you see on Digi-Key is not the entire market.
The resistors are manufactured so that they are "guaranteed by manufacturing" such that the outliers are 1%, 5%, 10%, etc. And they do statistical checks on batches, but not really looking for the 10% outlier (which is stupendously rare and very difficult to catch) but looking for slight drifts off nominal (which are much easier to spot) which would result in more outliers than expected.
As such, if you measure resistors, you tend to find that you get really close to nominal--much closer than you would expect for 10%, say. Resistors are so cheap that binning simply doesn't make economic sense.
There are all kinds of crazy parameter variations in optoelectronics. I understand that resistors are really close to nominal because the manufacturer's ability to tune the process controls are so much better than the standard 5% and 10% bins, but it seems that LED manufacturing is way more difficult and they can't always tune the process to get exactly what they want.
Let's assume that without binning you get 20% over cost of manufacturing. If it costs 5% more to bin-check all resistors, and you wind up selling 1% of them for an additional 100% mark-up:
No bin Bin
Cost to mfg: $ 1.00 $ 1.00
Cost to bin: .05
------ ------
Total cost $ 1.00 $ 1.05
Base price $ 1.20 $ 1.188 (99% sold at base)
Premium price 0.00 $ 0.022 (1% sold at un-binned cost x 2.2)
------ ------
Total revenue $ 1.20 $ 1.21
====== ======
Profit $ 0.20 $ 0.16Tester time FAR outweighs any gain you could get by binning.
if your temperature range is -40° to 85° and your resistance is +0.9% off nominal when measured at 22°, your temperature coefficient of resistance would need to be under +16 ppm/° to ensure that it was still below 1% even at 85°. a more typical tcr for ±5% thick-film resistors is +250ppm/° (see, e.g., https://www.vishay.com/docs/51058/d2to35.pdf) and so there is no hope of binning such a resistor as a 1% one
aging is another source of component value error that can prevent binning (the component value drifts over time, usually proportional to the square root of its age), and some kinds of resistors also have a significant voltage coefficient of resistance (mostly semiconductor types like carbon-film and the antediluvian carbon composition)
these phenomena sometimes lead designers to use expensive tight-tolerance resistors (±0.01% nowadays, 50¢–250¢ each) even in circuits that can easily be calibrated to handle component value error, just to keep the calibration from going off due to temperature or aging and to improve linearity
disclaimer: i'm not an electrical engineer, i just play one in ngspice