Why Do People Come To Computer Audiophile To Display Their Contempt For Audiophiles?

[jabbr]

5 hours ago, plissken said:

I'm not singling him out. They are all guilty when they don't back claims.

 

You can't claim an un-measurable change. Whether the incremented tape be of instrumentation or of properly bias controlled audience evaluation.

 

Yes. I agree. Some things are difficult to measure though. People show the easy stuff despite the fact it may not be appropriate. I feel that I'm sounding like a broken record, but I am harping on phase error measurements because they are sorely lacking despite all the discussion of "jitter" ... than and they are the other half of the Fourier transform that everyone seems to conveniently forget about ... I harp on close-in phase error because with reasonable clocks the far-out phase error is so low as to be much more likely to be inaudible. So it turns out that the noise that is the most difficult to measure is also the noise that has the highest amplitude... per physics.

[plissken]

31 minutes ago, Jud said:

 

It was a sincere and serious question, and not intended as a “redirection” of anything at all.  I was interested in what characteristics you look for in amplification to present your speakers to best advantage.  Why you should be coy about amplifiers I don’t know, but if you don’t care to provide any information in answer, I don’t suppose there’s really anything to do about that.

 

I'm not sure but I think the point AJ is making is that he just wants a competently designed amp.

[plissken]

7 minutes ago, jabbr said:

 

Yes. I agree. Some things are difficult to measure though. People show the easy stuff despite the fact it may not be appropriate. I feel that I'm sounding like a broken record, but I am harping on phase error measurements because they are sorely lacking despite all the discussion of "jitter" ... than and they are the other half of the Fourier transform that everyone seems to conveniently forget about ... I harp on close-in phase error because with reasonable clocks the far-out phase error is so low as to be much more likely to be inaudible. So it turns out that the noise that is the most difficult to measure is also the noise that has the highest amplitude... per physics.

 

In the absolute absence of instrumentation, if a manufacturer makes an audible claim, then by definition they have developed a solution BY EAR, damn the measurements or other analytics. That also means it can be solely evaluated by ear only also.

 

I've yet to even debate the type of measurement you are talking about. Why would I? Throw a powerful enough microscope on the most polished and perfect looking surface and I'll show you errors also.

[AJ Soundfield]

2 hours ago, Dragonfyr said:

Why can't you trust your ears? 

I do. That's why I take blind tests without fear. The definition of a blind listening test is trust your ears. That's all you can do in a blind listening test.

OTOH, the folks who bray endlessly about "trust your ears", are always the ones who have zero trust of the ears.

That is exactly why they shun blind tests and come up with every excuse to avoid them, preferring to stare at audio components for weeks to judge "sound", because their hearing stinks and have zero trust of their ears.

[beerandmusic]

5 hours ago, AJ Soundfield said:

 

Depends on the audience, since that's who I'm demoing for.

For my personal needs, Foobar and Audioengine D2s are suffice

 

I am mentally adding you to users opinions I trust (grin).  I agree wireless cheap dac will suffice!

[AJ Soundfield]

56 minutes ago, Jud said:

 

It was a sincere and serious question

And my answer was sincere jest. 

Are you asking what amps I prefer personally or say, would recommend to customers if they ask?

My personal preference is anything from Bruno Putzeys. I'm a bit green conscious, so Class D fills the bill there.

Hypex NCore based amps are my number one choice. However, if you've visited my site, you'll see a design that is very specifically designed for low power high output impedance amps, like typical SETs. So I design for the tastes of others as well.

[beerandmusic]

6 minutes ago, AJ Soundfield said:

And my answer was sincere jest. 

Are you asking what amps I prefer personally or say, would recommend to customers if they ask?

My personal preference is anything from Bruno Putzeys. I'm a bit green conscious, so Class D fills the bill there.

Hypex NCore based amps are my number one choice. However, if you've visited my site, you'll see a design that is very specifically designed for low power high output impedance amps, like typical SETs. So I design for the tastes of others as well.

I went to Los Angeles Audio show LAAS last month and saw a couple NCORE amps paired with focal sopra 2 and they sounded SUPERB!...and he was using a cheap wireless dac too....

[Jud]

38 minutes ago, AJ Soundfield said:

And my answer was sincere jest. 

Are you asking what amps I prefer personally or say, would recommend to customers if they ask?

My personal preference is anything from Bruno Putzeys. I'm a bit green conscious, so Class D fills the bill there.

Hypex NCore based amps are my number one choice. However, if you've visited my site, you'll see a design that is very specifically designed for low power high output impedance amps, like typical SETs. So I design for the tastes of others as well.

 

Thanks.  Yes, I’m quite interested in Putzeys’ designs myself, and have liked the NCore based amps I’ve heard.

[jabbr]

@Ralf11 -- here's another few for you regarding the physics of 1/f noise:

http://www.umsl.edu/~handelp/

 http://physics.princeton.edu/~mcdonald/examples/statistics/handel_pra_22_745_80.pdf

http://www.foresight.org/Conference/MNT8/Papers/Handel/

https://phys.org/news/2016-04-ligo-background-noise-due-gravity.html

http://www.tapir.caltech.edu/~teviet/Waves/gwave_spectrum.html

http://tgdtheory.fi/public_html/articles/qfluctgeomnoise.pdf

 

its really really wild stuff !

[fas42]

1 hour ago, beerandmusic said:

I went to Los Angeles Audio show LAAS last month and saw a couple NCORE amps paired with focal sopra 2 and they sounded SUPERB!...and he was using a cheap wireless dac too....

 

This is sorta relevant to understanding what competent playback is about - if a system is working correctly then it will "sound SUPERB!" - no if's or but's, it's a hole in one, all the time. If it just "sounds OK ..." then the reproduction is faulty - that's how one knows it has problems, and needs to worked on, to sort out what is causing the audible issues.

[beerandmusic]

16 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

This is sorta relevant to understanding what competent playback is about - if a system is working correctly then it will "sound SUPERB!" - no if's or but's, it's a hole in one, all the time. If it just "sounds OK ..." then the reproduction is faulty - that's how one knows it has problems, and needs to worked on, to sort out what is causing the audible issues.

 

I may not have sat and listened to all my test music in all the rooms at the show, but i would say only 4 or 5 really stood out to me from the moment i walked in the door and would say sounded superb to me.  I even heard wilsons, evolution, Audio Research, the best of the best, some rooms over $300K, and yet two of the rooms sounded awesome...both used class D amps with focal sopras....I also loved ATC, ryan brothers, and ESS speakers...maybe it was their source recordings, but it's the realization that I can easily live with not the best, or even a fraction of the best, and hear what i like....one was even using a very cheap wireless dac (i think it was like $300)...the fact that that some of the people in the business would trust a $300 wireless dac to demo their $4K amps with $20K speakers enforces my own opinion of over-hyped dacs.

[Ralf11]

1 hour ago, jabbr said:

@Ralf11 -- here's another few for you regarding the physics of 1/f noise:

http://www.umsl.edu/~handelp/

 http://physics.princeton.edu/~mcdonald/examples/statistics/handel_pra_22_745_80.pdf

http://www.foresight.org/Conference/MNT8/Papers/Handel/

https://phys.org/news/2016-04-ligo-background-noise-due-gravity.html

http://www.tapir.caltech.edu/~teviet/Waves/gwave_spectrum.html

http://tgdtheory.fi/public_html/articles/qfluctgeomnoise.pdf

 

its really really wild stuff !

 

Thx - seems pretty wild.  Parenthetically, my first non-manual labor summer job was as a young tyke in a physics lab trying to detect gravity waves.

[AJ Soundfield]

2 hours ago, beerandmusic said:

I am mentally adding you to users opinions I trust (grin).  I agree wireless cheap dac will suffice!

Well, to be fair it was $600 new, but I see now going for $400, so I'd say "inexpensive:, rather than "cheap".

Keep in mind it can also be used as a bit "transport", since it does have optical out, which can then be use with the fancy DACs.

I'm not one who hears big differences if any at all with DACs, regardless of price, though I must admit a recent comparison between the Chord Dave and Berkeley had me a bit puzzled, as the Dave indeed seemed to have a "sound" which I couldn't quite put my finger on. I will have to revisit, as being a non-believer, I cannot discount it being due to the "test" conditions, aka sighted...and my fallible perceptions!

I've done enough blind tests to know about witch effects.

[beerandmusic]

8 minutes ago, AJ Soundfield said:

I'm not one who hears big differences if any at all with DACs, regardless of price....

AMEN!

[esldude]

2 hours ago, AJ Soundfield said:

Well, to be fair it was $600 new, but I see now going for $400, so I'd say "inexpensive:, rather than "cheap".

Keep in mind it can also be used as a bit "transport", since it does have optical out, which can then be use with the fancy DACs.

I'm not one who hears big differences if any at all with DACs, regardless of price, though I must admit a recent comparison between the Chord Dave and Berkeley had me a bit puzzled, as the Dave indeed seemed to have a "sound" which I couldn't quite put my finger on. I will have to revisit, as being a non-believer, I cannot discount it being due to the "test" conditions, aka sighted...and my fallible perceptions!

I've done enough blind tests to know about witch effects.

A good example.  Often the complaint is people of a more objective bent don't hear differences.  Or if they every heard a good system they would understand.  Well, just like everyone else we hear these things too.  We just know not to implicitly trust what we heard under those conditions.  If the perception is strong or clear enough it is well worth investigating.  Yet even then much of the time it was nothing more than sighted bias/prior priming effecting what we heard.

[Lighthouse]

Price is not really ultimate reason why people became disliking audiophiles.

 

The main reason is that this whole industry is solely based on lies, delusion, nonsense and customer-hostile attitudes.

 

 

We still can't conclude debate that analog-tape masters are NOT high-res in any ways of the form.

 

We still have some bs video from industry that "compression is bad" which does not talk about dynamic range, but rather promoting high-res music (what's the point of high-res if dynamic range is less than 6?)

 

Still can't conclude debate that Vinyl is NOT 'high-res' or 'better quality' than CDs. No one outside of analog audiophile community accepts 'Vinyl is superior to CD' claim seriously. It is as ridiculous as flat earth theory at this point.

 

Still relentlessly suing customers and do whatever to enforce stuffs like DRM. MQA and latest UHD HDCP 2.2 are best example of these, and it is the prime reason why people stopped giving attention to owning UHD contents and high-res audio. I wonder if industry has realized that considerable size of Blu-ray buyers are entirely depended on whether AnyDVD HD is available or not.

 

 

"Price is TOO HIGH", "RIP OFF" indicate that such products are overpriced.

And people think those products are overpriced because those products do not give such values in the first place.

So why do audiophile/videophile products do not give enough vales to not being called "RIP OFF"? Answers are basically explained above points.

[Dragonfyr]

10 hours ago, AJ Soundfield said:

I do. That's why I take blind tests without fear. The definition of a blind listening test is trust your ears. That's all you can do in a blind listening test.

OTOH, the folks who bray endlessly about "trust your ears", are always the ones who have zero trust of the ears.

That is exactly why they shun blind tests and come up with every excuse to avoid them, preferring to stare at audio components for weeks to judge "sound", because their hearing stinks and have zero trust of their ears.

If you have to take blind tests then you clearly don't trust your ears. You trust blind tests more than your ears. You just can't trust your own hearing apparatus and it's very sad to hear.

How do you know other audiophiles don't trust their ears? You don't know them from a bar of soap. You don't know that they don't hear what they claim to hear. Very rude of you to assume that they lack trust in their hearing when *you* rely completely on blind testing in order to trust your ears. Real audiophiles just trust their ears without relying on other crutches - ie blind testing for example. 

Audiophiles can feel the emotion in the music and in the sound. That's what its all about. The sound and the emotion. The experience. Something you will never understand, non-audiophile heretic, blasphemer non-believer. 

[Jud]

8 hours ago, AJ Soundfield said:

Well, to be fair it was $600 new, but I see now going for $400, so I'd say "inexpensive:, rather than "cheap".

 

Mine cost $375 new, so plainly you overspent.

[Jud]

In a couple of the recent comments I think we see some of the emotion that helps to drive the logic of the more objective and more subjective views.

 

Subjectivists are seen as easy prey to a fundamentally dishonest industry, while objectivists use science to keep from being scammed.

 

Or on the other hand, subjectivists are those who can truly feel our shared human emotions when listening to music, while objectivists are seen as forcing themselves to be emotionless robots who deny our shared humanity.

 

Interesting that two groups of folks who both just want to get better sound without being ripped off see each other as so very different.

 

By the way: Nothing wrong with basing reasoning on emotion.  Studies on people who have had damage to centers of the brain responsible for emotion, who become to some extent creatures of pure reason, show such individuals have immense difficulty making decisions at all.  This can make even trips to the grocery store for a few items hours-long affairs.

[rickca]

54 minutes ago, Dragonfyr said:

Something you will never understand, non-audiophile heretic, blasphemer non-believer. 

 

3 minutes ago, Jud said:

Studies on people who have had damage to centers of the brain responsible for emotion, who become to some extent creatures of pure reason, show such individuals have immense difficulty making decisions at all.

 

Although I enjoyed the rhetoric in the first post, it's so much more polite to just call people brain-damaged. 

[beerandmusic]

5 hours ago, Lighthouse said:

 

Still can't conclude debate that Vinyl is NOT 'high-res' or 'better quality' than CDs. No one outside of analog audiophile community accepts 'Vinyl is superior to CD' claim seriously. It is as ridiculous as flat earth theory at this point.

 

That is debatable.  I would say at the high end audio show, more than a small minority demo their equipment with vinyl.  I do believe vinyl is less fatiguing, and suggest many times sounds more natural.   I am not going say that vinyl is superior to cd, but I certainly wouldn't say cd is superior to vinyl either.  You would have to define "superior" first.  Perhaps superior in conveniency and less ticks (although those can be filtered too), but many would argue superiority today.  Pro-ject sold 150K record players last year.  I am not suggesting I am on one side or the other, but i wouldn't say CD is superior to Vinyl, nor would many so-called experts in the business that demo their high end gear with vinyl.

[esldude]

11 minutes ago, beerandmusic said:

That is debatable.  I would say at the high end audio show, more than a small minority demo their equipment with vinyl.  I do believe vinyl is less fatiguing, and suggest many times sounds more natural.   I am not going say that vinyl is superior to cd, but I certainly wouldn't say cd is superior to vinyl either.  You would have to define "superior" first.  Perhaps superior in conveniency and less ticks (although those can be filtered too), but many would argue superiority today.  Pro-ject sold 150K record players last year.  I am not suggesting I am on one side or the other, but i wouldn't say CD is superior to Vinyl, nor would many so-called experts in the business that demo their high end gear with vinyl.

CD has superior fidelity to the signal when compared with vinyl. 

 

 

[beerandmusic]

^^^^ in regards to blind tests, I will never forget the story about how TEST B predominantly is better than TEST A regardless.  There is subjectivity at it's best.

 

 

 

[beerandmusic]

1 minute ago, esldude said:

CD has superior fidelity to the signal when compared with vinyl. 

 

 

hmmm...not sure i would agree with that. 

When you say fidelity, are you talking accuracy to original?

If a recording is analog, and you convert it, is it absolutely more accurate?

Woudn't the mastering have more to do with the accuracy?

 

I really don't know, so just asking. 

 

 

[mansr]

24 minutes ago, beerandmusic said:

hmmm...not sure i would agree with that. 

When you say fidelity, are you talking accuracy to original?

If a recording is analog, and you convert it, is it absolutely more accurate?

Woudn't the mastering have more to do with the accuracy?

Suppose you have a stereo analogue signal. You cut it to vinyl and simultaneously digitise it and store on a CD. Then you play back those recordings using suitable equipment and compare the analogue output to the original signal. The output from the CD player will be closer to the original than that of the turntable. This will be the case even if the turntable is the best money can buy and the CD player is a $50 "disposable" model.

 

Of course, if what you store on the CD is subjected to unnecessary mangling like dynamic range compression, it can end up being worse than the vinyl. However, that in no way means that vinyl is inherently superior, only that someone did a bad job mastering the CD.