Any audiophile skeptics here?

[HarryKeogh]

it just seems alot of stuff out there is based on bad science.

for example, directional arrows on speaker cable, stabilizing rings for cds (or painting the edges green, or spraying them with armor-all!), electrical line conditoners, etc. I'm sure most people who read these high-end mags are fairly intelligent but my baloney detector goes off when i read about some of this stuff

and i wish i could set up a listening test with a $5,000 cd player and a $200.00 model (all other parameters being equal) to see if a statistically significant number of people could tell a difference.

i just wonder how much of the difference people swear they hear between equipment costing thousands of dollars more than "average" equipment is a placebo effect. (i'm a firm believer that the bulk of the money should go towards speakers, i've always found that's where the noticeable differences seem to be). I mean, are our ears capable of noticing these differences? (especially the ears of middle aged men who seem to buy most of the highend stuff)

any comments?

 

[Occasional Chemist]

stabilizing rings for cds (or painting the edges green, or spraying them with armor-all!)

Heh - a friend of mine once cleaned his CDs with acetone.

After that, the sound was REALLY clean.

 

[arcticpenguin]

I think jj and andonyx both have professional experience in the field.

Yes, much of what you read is crap. There used to be magazines that published real test results and objective reviews (e.g. Stereo Review of the early 1980s) but most of those have folded due to lack of support.

 

[Andonyx]

You should probably talk to JJ, he's got some great stories and links.

He handles DSP audio engineering. I'm a recording engineer, and I get into unpleasant discussions all the time with people. They hear that I'm an audio guy and then come up and start talking about audioquest cables, or monster cables.

I've learned to just grit my teeth and smile politely because for these people it's like a religion. Telling them that they would not be able to tell the difference between $0.35 / foot zip cord and $25 / foot audio quest cables is like I just told them their first born child is ugly.

They always come back with stuff like, "But in stereophile magazine, they showed the lab reports and the writer who is an engineer said they're better!"

I see, a professional writer for a magazine that makes its money by advertising to the very same people that you buy cables from? A magazine devoted to ridiculously priced audio gear in an industry that relies for its very existence on hype and mis-applied science? No way!

What they fail to realize is that most of the difference in cables occurs in parts of the frequency spectrum that you can't hear, and even if you could, your speakers cannot reproduce accurately anyway.

I finally just tell people, if you wann drop a crapload on monster cable, do it because they'll last you for a while and they're color-coded. Pay for convenience and reliability, but please don't think you're paying for sound quality.

Edited to add:

Oh yeah, here's a really good article JJ turned me onto:

http://www.roger-russell.com/wire.htm

 

[AmateurScientist]

Good questions, Harry.

I'm sold on the well-researched notion that there is little appreciable difference among speaker wires, given low enough resistence for the actual impedance of the speakers.

I've heard plenty of pseudoscience in this area as well. Besides the crap I read in the home theater and audiophile magazines, I once had a client who built custom speakers give me a simple mechanical device he invented and built which would score a serrated edge into CDs. The reason, he explained, was that it cut down on the reflective properties of the edges of the plastic CDs, and thus reduced timing errors induced by the player's laser hitting the edge and bouncing off, whatever that means. It is apparently the same theory subscribed to by those who put green magic marker on their CDs' edges.

I was a sucker. For a few years, I dutifully scored all my CDs and even DVDs with serrated edges on the theory that I was reducing timing errors. I thought sometimes I could hear a slight difference in sound detail after scoring them, although sometimes I couldn't. I don't think there is any difference, really. I certainly don't understand the theory behind the idea. I don't know enough about how laser driven media like CDs and DVDs work to even know what "timing errors" refers to, if it even exists. I don't know what that has to do with what I hear or see either. Anyway, I think doing so is harmless, as the serrated edges do not affect the play negatively.

I'm more interested in the differences in entry level, moderately priced, and higher end components, like receivers, amps, and preamps. Certainly, one can find build quality differences between certain price points. How much actual performance difference is there between moderately priced components--say a $1,500-$2,000 receiver--and high end components--an $8,000-$10,000 amp and preamp combination, for instance?

Also, are the $5,000 Meridian DVD players that much better in observable performance than a good $500 Toshiba or Sony player? I don't doubt that the Meridian player is better engineered and built. I don't doubt that it uses higher quality components and materials. Ultimately, assuming I'm something of an audiophile and videophile, can I really see or hear the difference?

AS

 

[Occasional Chemist]

I finally just tell people, if you wann drop a crapload on monster cable, do it because they'll last you for a while and they're color-coded. Pay for convenience and reliability, but please don't think you're paying for sound quality.

These days, you'll be hard pressed to find anything BUT Monster Cable in consumer electronics stores. I found this out when I needed to get an s-video cable a few months ago. I had to go all over town to find one that DIDN'T have that monster markup. ($50 for a friggin' 6 foot s-video cable???)

On a different note, I remember hearing for a while about optical vs. coaxial digital cables. Now I have both optical and coaxial digital inputs on my preamp, but I can't hear a bit of difference between the two. Am I supposed to?

 

[Andonyx]

I'm more interested in the differences in entry level, moderately priced, and higher end components, like receivers, amps, and preamps. Certainly, one can find build quality differences between certain price points. How much actual performance difference is there between moderately priced components--say a $1,500-$2,000 receiver--and high end components--an $8,000-$10,000 amp and preamp combination, for instance?

Also, are the $5,000 Meridian DVD players that much better in observable performance than a good $500 Toshiba or Sony player? I don't doubt that the Meridian player is better engineered and built. I don't doubt that it uses higher quality components and materials. Ultimately, assuming I'm something of an audiophile and videophile, can I really see or hear the difference?

AS

Ultimately, yes, and no.

Again, one of the biggest differences between moderate components and high-mid components is the way it handles power. Having an adequate power supply is absolutley key to reproducing a signal faithfuly once it has been amplified. My amp is a Rotel, that I've been happy with for years, not because of the sound quality, necssarily but because it can handle the power ooutput to all five of my speakers adequately and undistorted even in the high dynamics of a movie soundtrack. It has five separate transformers and signal paths to deliver up to 150 watts / channel. This means I'm never really in danger of the singal slapping the upper end of the amp's power reserves and distorting. The separation in signal paths is supposed to prevent cross-talk, which is what happens when the signals from one channel in an amp or receiver interfere with the signals in another channel. But this is really only an issue on the crappiest of crap equipment, and shouldn't even be audible on a 200 Toshiba receiver, let alone the Rotel, or the Marantz AV 560 I have.

Oddly enough, TV's also have a lot to do with the adequacy of their power supply. AS the screen shows more white, the total out put of the electron gun the CRT unit increases, increasing load on the power supply. If the power supply is inadequate to handle the load, the geometry of the screen eventually shifts, rounding out what should be straight lines towards the outside edges of the screen. This is because the power supply cannot get a full spread out of the electron gun / s for a picture that bright.

But here's the catch. As far as video or audio is concerned, all the other components in your system have to go through your TV and your speakers ultimately. So your entertainment system can only ever be as good as those two components. If you blow 10,000 bucks on a mark levinson amp, which I would never do in a million billion years, it's probably gonna sound exactly the same as your $200 yamaha amp did, if you're running them both through $45 / unit radio shack bookshelf speakers.

Likewise, an Arcam Alpha 9 DVD player for $3000 playing through an RF modulator on a 15 inch RCA is gonna look the same as a $150 apex DVD player.

When you're talking about the difference between say the Denon upper medium range receiver / amp, and the Meridian Separate components, the differences in quality will be small enough to be only appreciable on a truly kick ass pair of speakers, like a B&W nautilus 800 series which will run you about another $9-14,000.

Now do you really want to jump from say $3000 for your entire home theatre to $30,000 to be able to hear your highs a little clearer and your bass a little more transient?

 

[Andonyx]

These days, you'll be hard pressed to find anything BUT Monster Cable in consumer electronics stores. I found this out when I needed to get an s-video cable a few months ago. I had to go all over town to find one that DIDN'T have that monster markup. ($50 for a friggin' 6 foot s-video cable???)

On a different note, I remember hearing for a while about optical vs. coaxial digital cables. Now I have both optical and coaxial digital inputs on my preamp, but I can't hear a bit of difference between the two. Am I supposed to?

You probably shouldn't because digital is digital is digital is digital.

It's all the same one's and zero's. A lot of places peddle some psuedo-claptrap about clock-jitter, which is similar to ASs "timing errors". Look, in an error corrected digital signal, the 1s and 0s simply either get there or they don't. Word length and sample rate should be enough to correct for any problems with the clock.

There are only two things to consider then in choosing the input you use:

1. Optical cable costs a crapload more, even the cheap generic stuff.

2. Electrical cable, being still electrical cable IS subject to certain types of intereference, which obviously, optical is not. But still, it's carrying a digital signal. It gets there or it doesn't. So even really funky intereference, or really hideously bad power problems will manifest themselves as dropouts, not a degredation in signal quality.

 

[mjv]

Also, are the $5,000 Meridian DVD players that much better in observable performance than a good $500 Toshiba or Sony player? I don't doubt that the Meridian player is better engineered and built. I don't doubt that it uses higher quality components and materials. Ultimately, assuming I'm something of an audiophile and videophile, can I really see or hear the difference?

AS

Yeah, the $5,000 player MIGHT have some minimal improvement over a good $500 player and possibly more bells and whistles, but is it $4,500 better? I doubt it.

Plus, a $500 DVD player in my personal system would be more in line with what I have. My TV is no where near the price range of a Meridian system! And I'm sure plugging a high end DVD into my somewhat budget 32-inch TV would negate a lot of the "improvements".

Don't even get me started on the records v. CD nonsense...

 

[Occasional Chemist]

You probably shouldn't because digital is digital is digital is digital.

It's all the same one's and zero's. A lot of places peddle some psuedo-claptrap about clock-jitter, which is similar to ASs "timing errors". Look, in an error corrected digital signal, the 1s and 0s simply either get there or they don't. Word length and sample rate should be enough to correct for any problems with the clock.

That makes sense. A friend of mine was telling me I shouldn't use optical cables because of "jitter". Since I don't read the audiophile magazines, I boggled a bit at that.

(Not that it makes a difference to me personally - my PS2 and my DVD player have only the optical outputs. If I want to hook them up, it's optical or nothing.)

There are only two things to consider then in choosing the input you use:

1. Optical cable costs a crapload more, even the cheap generic stuff.

2. Electrical cable, being still electrical cable IS subject to certain types of intereference, which obviously, optical is not. But still, it's carrying a digital signal. It gets there or it doesn't. So even really funky intereference, or really hideously bad power problems will manifest themselves as dropouts, not a degredation in signal quality.

At my old home in the upstate of SC, I lived next to an AM transmitter tower. I never knew what I'd hear when I turned on the stereo. Sometimes, it was the AM station. Never mind that I was trying to play a CD ...

 

[Occasional Chemist]

Yeah, the $5,000 player MIGHT have some minimal improvement over a good $500 player and possibly more bells and whistles, but is it $4,500 better? I doubt it.

One thing I find odd about high end components. With the possible exception of preamps, the high-end models actually seem to have LESS bells and whistles than the lower-end stuff.

 

[jj]

it just seems alot of stuff out there is based on bad science.

for example, directional arrows on speaker cable, stabilizing rings for cds (or painting the edges green, or spraying them with armor-all!), electrical line conditoners, etc. I'm sure most people who read these high-end mags are fairly intelligent but my baloney detector goes off when i read about some of this stuff

and i wish i could set up a listening test with a $5,000 cd player and a $200.00 model (all other parameters being equal) to see if a statistically significant number of people could tell a difference.

i just wonder how much of the difference people swear they hear between equipment costing thousands of dollars more than "average" equipment is a placebo effect. (i'm a firm believer that the bulk of the money should go towards speakers, i've always found that's where the noticeable differences seem to be). I mean, are our ears capable of noticing these differences? (especially the ears of middle aged men who seem to buy most of the highend stuff)

any comments?

Unh.... Audiophile Skeptic? That would be me, Harry. I've had people who didn't like what I have to say about solid-unobtanium cables, green ink on CD's, etc, call my wife, my employer, mail fake legal documents via email at me, et c....

Some of the high end is RABID, Harry, rabid.

Check out my 'www' button for more info.

 

[Andonyx]

One thing I find odd about high end components. With the possible exception of preamps, the high-end models actually seem to have LESS bells and whistles than the lower-end stuff.

That's actually one thing I really agree with.

If you're gonna make something, just use all your production resources to make it do what it's supposed to do, well.

I don't need a bunch of BS surround sound pre-sets. I don't need funky echo effects, I don't even need A/B switching. I just want something that has component video switching, six sets of inputs all with S-video, component, and digital audio, and that's it. That's all I need. I don't care how many Radio Stations I can program, or how many other components its remote will control.

And I think while splashy things like stadium, jazz and rock pre-sets might be cool for the completely unaware consumer, stuff like that is the antithesis of an audiophile perspective which is, I wanna hear it as close as possible to the original signal.

When you add crap like custom EQs (other than properly adjusted room EQs) or pre-set surround "enhancements" all you're doing is distorting the signal, not helping it. Why spend 10,000 dollars to take some bodys recording of the Boston Pops and make it sound like an echoey crappy mess? You can do that on a $150 Aiwa mini-system.

 

[jj]

These days, you'll be hard pressed to find anything BUT Monster Cable in consumer electronics stores. I found this out when I needed to get an s-video cable a few months ago. I had to go all over town to find one that DIDN'T have that monster markup. ($50 for a friggin' 6 foot s-video cable???)

On a different note, I remember hearing for a while about optical vs. coaxial digital cables. Now I have both optical and coaxial digital inputs on my preamp, but I can't hear a bit of difference between the two. Am I supposed to?

Around here, Home Depot carries cheap, decent gold-plated connector cables for reasonable prices. They have new speaker wire that has a conductor ID and doens't turn green, too. I own some.

For speaker wire you care about gauge, gauge, and gauge. You also have to be able to connect it to the device in question.

For other cables, there are some requirements on the wires as far as shielding, but the key is good connectors. RCA connectors are not nice, hard-contact connectors. They can corrode. So gold plated connectors connected to gold-plated jacks makes a great deal of sense. Do not, though, connect gold plating to tin plating. It does "interesting" things in the long term.

 

[jj]

That makes sense. A friend of mine was telling me I shouldn't use optical cables because of "jitter". Since I don't read the audiophile magazines, I boggled a bit at that.

Gotta butt in here. it's not QUITE total BS. Close, but not quite.

There are some SPDIF and AES/EBU recievers that do a spectacularly bad job of clock recovery, and having a narrow-bandwidth cable seems to make them worse.

The DIGITAL information is recovered fine, it's the reproduction clock that occasionally may be dirty.

For that matter, bad power supply bypassing in cheap CD players is somewhat epidemic, too.

We are, for *some* signals in *some* setups, perhaps talking about an audible effect. We are not talking about large effects.

 

[Andonyx]

Gotta butt in here. it's not QUITE total BS. Close, but not quite.

There are some SPDIF and AES/EBU recievers that do a spectacularly bad job of clock recovery, and having a narrow-bandwidth cable seems to make them worse.

Why would that apply to an optical cable and not a simple copper cable?

 

[jj]

Why would that apply to an optical cable and not a simple copper cable?

Apparently the optical cable and the send/recieve pair have a bit of a lower bandwidth. Either that, or it's a bypassing issue and the circuitry pulls more in the way of transients...

The effect at the output was visible sometimes (in terms of THD or sidebands in the spectrum), but I just swapped to a better DAC. I didn't want to have to fix stuff.

 

[Occasional Chemist]

I just want something that has component video switching, six sets of inputs all with S-video, component, and digital audio, and that's it. That's all I need. I don't care how many Radio Stations I can program, or how many other components its remote will control.

Of course, a lot of the higher-end stuff is short on inputs/outputs as well. My Lexicon DC-1 has fewer s-video inputs and outputs than my old Pioneer VSX-9700S receiver did.

Thankfully, s-video autoswitches are only $50 these days.

One of these days, I hope to worry about component video switching.

As for the remote, I figure that the manufacturer bets if you're going to spend $5K per component, you'll also drop the $100-$800 for a fancy remote later.

 

[Occasional Chemist]

Around here, Home Depot carries cheap, decent gold-plated connector cables for reasonable prices. They have new speaker wire that has a conductor ID and doens't turn green, too. I own some.

Sadly, the nearest Home Depot is 160 miles round trip. Lowes apparently stopped carrying any home theater cabling except for in-wall Monster Cable.

I ended up at, of all places, Wal Mart.

Do not, though, connect gold plating to tin plating. It does "interesting" things in the long term.

A little electrochemistry never hurt anyone!

 

[Rocky]

I used to be an audio and video engineer for a company making a TiVo like product. We had test equipment that could “see” and “hear” (measure) FAR better than human ears and eyes can. We tried out the expensive cables, the good ones and the really cheep ones (that get shipped out with every piece of consumer electronics). There was no practical difference between any of them except for a few of the very cheep cables that would pick up some interference, some of the cheep ones were indistinguishable from the extra pricey ones. The digital signals going through coax or optical both wind up going into the same clock recovery circuit so there is no difference to the final sound. Digital compression used in cable TV or satellite will do more to destroy quality than any cable ever did. DVDs are usually at much higher data rates and with much better compression equipment (It does not need to be compressed on the fly) so they do have pretty good quality. I used to piss off our marketing people by setting up blind tests where they couldn’t see what they were evaluating before they had to pass judgment. Anyone that thinks they can’t be fooled has never used good test equipment.

For some fun, go to the Consumer Electronics Show and listen to the super high-end audio stuff. You can listen to $250,000 and up systems; for that kind of money I think it should sound indistinguishable from sitting on-stage with the band, but it still sounds just like a CD playing in a living room.