Audiophiles are simply after the ability to recreate a personal concert, on demand, in their homes. It must have all the detail, the dynamic range, and the three dimensionality of the real thing. Once you’ve heard that, it’s sometimes difficult to go back to listening to noise. mere noise. Unfortunately, acoustic perfection is sometimes difficult to achieve, and so people sometimes misallocate their budgets with amusing results.
What a roundabout way of writing “impossible”.
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I’m linking to this page strictly for the links mentioned in this paragraph.
First off, cheap cables will produce the exact same picture and sound quality as expensive cables. Check out our HDMI cable trilogy: " Why all HDMI cables are the same ," " Why all HDMI cables are the same, Part 2 ," " Still more reasons why all HDMI cables are the same " and " 4K HDMI cables are nonsense ." These articles go into extensive detail about how HDMI cables work, and why by their very nature, you’re either getting a perfect image, or no image at all.
which, I suppose ,is why it’s so lucrative.
Since I started listening critically to hifi, I’ve realised there are a very limited number of recordings that attempt to capture a live performance exactly as it sounded. Early on in the history of sound engineering the focus switched to an ‘enhanced’ reproduction of a performance, something that emphasises here, cuts back there, to make it sound more real than real.
Of course with modern production the engineering is virtually the main performance.
So I guess my goal with audio over the last few years has been getting a system that delivers the engineer’s experience as closely as possible. I want to get behind their desk.
I’m on a tiny budget though, I’ve got no idea what audiophiles are thinking.
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Lol, gold is gold …
Monitor headphones sound flat. They aren’t necessarily the best for music.
And here’s a classic BoingBoing article: Do coat hangers sound as good as Monster cables?
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Sure but right there you’re talking about colouring the sound to your liking. Its far removed from any notion of an accurate reproduction of a live performance, its more about creating that perception. Psychoacoustics and so on.
Not necessarily tho most relaxing place in the world, but then again, I do spend a good portion of my leisure time sitting behind a computer desk.
I’m into sound, but the whole esoteric angle is silly. There are
I’d say there are a few fairly reasonable things that improve sound quality to a whole new level if you’ve never tried them before. A few room treatments to absorb some of the reflections, you can easily make your own not-unsightly ones with some fabric and cheap foam audio tiles. A decently-sized set of speakers that are well constructed - they don’t have to be very expensive. A decent old amp, like a NAD or similar, they last pretty much forever and are cheap on eBay and often tossed out in estate sales. For impact, a really good subwoofer is a helluva thing, adding tactile thwack to drumms and bass, and making your music feel much larger.
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Also, don’t skimp on the codec. In a quiet room, there absolutely is audible artefacts in MP3 at less than 64kbps per channel @44.1kHz.
You don’t need lossless, but 64kbps AAC SBR and that kind of low bitrate garbage will absolutely sound awful on a decently good setup.
It’s important to use codecs that have some semblance of transparency. I personally use FLAC anytime I can get it, but 160kbps and above on most modern codecs is where the transparency really starts.
64kbps? I haven’t seen an MP3 that crap since the early 2000s.
But yes, I do rip all my CDs to FLAC and then transcode LAME VBR MP3 copies for portable devices.
There’s not a huge difference, you really have to listen for it (I hear it in the cymbals and low bass mostly) but it’s good enough. There’s a lot more difference between mastering jobs of the same album than between codecs.
Well, this is very much an “of the moment” thing. I’m dipping my toe into it myself, so I’m trying to listen critically a lot of the time. Its certainly not a broad recommendation!
The first few CDs I ripped in the 00s, I used 128kbps VBR, but I quickly switched to 192kbps – I was assuming that was 128 was good enough, but disk space didn’t seem to be much of an issue. I couldn’t tell the difference between 128kbps and 192kbps.
Come to think of it, this reminds me how I used to get frustrated with gamers who’d boast about getting over 100 fps in their games. And I’ve had several arguments with my kids that the claims about the polling rates for “gaming mice” are fraudulent, since USB can’t handle more than 85 hZ, and that’s faster than the screen refresh rate already.
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Audiobooks.
But then, those usually don’t need a good sound setup to listen to.
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Yes, it looks like I was completely wrong. Here’s more.
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