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Comment by pram | Hacker News Reader

We’re at the audiophile stage of LLMs where people are talking about the improved soundstage, tonality, reduced sibilance etc

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Note GPT-5's subtle mouthfeel reminiscent of cranberries with a touch of bourbon.

Explains why I find AGI fundamentalists similar to tater heads. /s

(Not to undermine progress in the foundational model space, but there is a lack of appreciation for the democratization of domain specific models amongst HNers).

Every bourbon tastes the same unless it's Weller, King's County Peated, or Pappy (or Jim Beam for the wrong reasons lol)

Tbh, a mid-shelf Four Roses gets you 90% of the way to a upper shelf Weller.

I'm being hyperbolic but yeah four roses is probably the best deal next to Buffalo trace. All their stuff is fairly priced. If you want something like Weller though, you should get another wheated bourbon like Maker's Mark French oaked.

Buffalo trace is ridiculously overpriced nowadays. Good bourbon, but def not worth $35-40 for 750ml.

> you should get another wheated bourbon like Maker's Mark French oaked

I agree. I've found Maker Mark products to be a great bang for your buck quality wise and flavor wise as well.

If you can find Buffalo Trace for msrp which is $20-30, it's a good deal. I think the bourbon "market" kind of popped recently so finding things has been getting a little easier.

Yep! I agree! At MSRP BT is a great buy.

> I think the bourbon "market" kind of popped recently

It def did. The overproduction that was invested in during the peak of the COVID collector boom is coming into markets now. I think we'll see some well priced age stated products in the next 3-4 years based on by acquaintances in the space.

Ofc, the elephant in the room is consolidation - everyone wants to copy the LVMH model (and they say Europeans are ethical elves who never use underhanded mopolistic and market making behavior to corner markets /s).

I can already see LLMs Sommeliers: Yes, the mouthfeel and punch of GPT-5 it's comparable to the one of Grok 4, but it's tenderness lacks the crunch from Gemini 2.5 Pro.

Isn't it exactly what the typical LLM discourse is about? People are just throwing anecdotes and stay with their opinion. A is better than B because C, and that's basically it. And whoever tries to actually bench them gets called out because all benches are gamed. Go figure.

You need to burn-in your LLM by using for 100 hours before you see the true performance of it.

Well, reduced sibilance is an ordinary and desirable thing. A better "audiophile absurdity" example would be $77,000 cables, freezing CDs to improve sound quality, using hospital-grade outlets, cryogenically frozen outlets (lol), the list goes on and on

I feel sorry for audiophiles because they have to work so much harder to get the same enjoyment of music that I get via my laptop speakers

That's just the other extreme, which is not that much less silly. It's not unreasonable to spend 300$ on a good pair of headphones.

The "audiophile" attitude is such that that "work" is enjoyment. It's a game, a hobby. I'm not defending the extremes of it, but it's not like these people are miserable, they enjoy doing it even if it rapidly becomes completely insane nonsense entirely detached from reality.

I've never thought it that way, thanks for mentioning it.

I now wonder if I have any such hobbies. Probably not to the same extend as audiophiles, but some software-related stuff could come close.

Always have been. This LLM-centered AI boom has been my craziest and most frustrating social experiment, propped up by the rhetoric (with no evidence to back it up) that this time we finally have the keys to AGI (whatever the hell that means), and infused with enough AstroTurfing to drive the discourse into ideological stances devoid of any substance (you must either be a true believer or a naysayer). On the plus side, it appears that this hype train is taking a bump with GPT-5.

Come on, we aren't even close to the level of audiophile nonsense like worrying about what cable sounds better.

We're still at the stage of which LLM lies the least (but they all do). So yeah, no different than audiophiles really.

Informed audiophiles rely on Klippel output now

The empirical ones do! There's still a healthy sports car element to the scene though, at least in my experience.

You're right, it's hard to admit you can buy a $50 speaker and sub and EQ it to 95% maximum performance.

This is and isn't true.

The room is the limiting factor in most speaker setups. The worse the room, the sooner you hit diminishing returns for upgrading any other part of the system.

In a fantastic room a $50 speaker will be nowhere near 95% of the performance of a mastering monitor, no matter how much EQ you put on it. In the average living room with less than ideal speaker and listening position placement there will still be a difference, but it will be much less apparent due to the limitations of the listening environment.

Absolutely not true.

You might lose headroom or have to live with higher latency but if your complaint is about actual empirical data like frequency response or phase, that can be corrected digitally.

You can only EQ speakers and headphones as far as the transducer can still respond accurately to the signal you're sending it. No amount of EQ will give the Sennheiser HD-600's good sub-bass performance because the driver begins to distort the signal long before you've amplified it enough to match the Harman target at a normal listening level.

DSP is a very powerful tool that can make terrible speakers and headphones sound great, but it's not magic.

> You might lose headroom

Pretty much my first point… At the same time that same DSP can make a pretty mediocre speaker that can reproduce those frequencies do so in phase at the listening position so once again the point is moot, effectively add a cheap sub.

There is no time where you cannot get results from mediocre transducers given the right processing.

I’m not arguing you should, but in 2025 if a speaker sounds bad it is entirely because processing was skimped on.

This varies wildly with what frequency range you're talking about. Bass region, yes - room geometry makes a big difference. The rest of the range, DSP is your friend. Loudspeakers and Rooms by Floyd Toole is an awesome resource here.

Ah, the aforementioned snake oil.

It’s always been this way with LLMs.

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