Why are audiophiles the biggest suckers for snake oil?

Why are audiophiles the biggest suckers for snake oil?

Other urls found in this thread:

gizmodo.com/obsessed-audiophiles-in-japan-are-installing-their-own-1785291714
engadget.com/2016/08/15/japan-audiophiles-install-own-electricity-poles/
wsj.com/articles/a-gift-for-music-lovers-who-have-it-all-a-personal-utility-pole-1471189463
tera-player.com
m.youtube.com/watch?t=1142s&v=H07NpWk_Xf8
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

No pun intended

IT JUST SOUNDS BETTER, OKAY?!

Is he running a Windows VM?

It's a skin

Poorfags without golden ears ITT.

>that image
What do they think happens inside the wall?

The initial equipment upgrades are very noticeable, going from $5 headphones to $200 headphones is awe inspiring.

They don't realize they'll never get that again, and they keep finding ways to justify their increasingly diminishing returns.

these guys are into a lifestyle hobby
they want something that blatantly shows, and integrate in their "designer" interior, and sheeeit
while the proper way to get actual returns is spending only 10% of their budget in hardware, and 90% in room treatment (which is quite hardcore, to be done properly: box in a box room over dampened concrete floor, tall ceilings [think at least 3.5m tall, with other bigger dimensions to go with], massive room loss through walls treatment, no furniture, except thin-ish seats without leather or headrest, in wall boring pro-speakers, separate control room, etc)

proper acoustics isn't even remotely what they're chasing
they're much more into sound crafting, than high fidelity (in which case, they'd be trying to replicate studio monitor rooms)

THEY ARENT [REALLY] they are just stuck in the past

What "it is" - is that shit used suck, digital audio just got good recently.

Back in the 70's and 80's good turntables were expensive, good amps were expensive, good speakers were expensive. Cassettes did not sound good and music simply was not available on 1/4inch Reel to Reel. If you wanted good sound you had to spend lots money !

A whole lot of technology and complexity was developed to make stuff cheaper to manufacture like

- op amps (no more discrete)
- extreme negative feed back loops
- class b and c amps (crossover and intermodulation distortion)
- switching power supplies
- less power supply filtering
- intergrated chip amps (shit)
- more integration (lots to learn)


And alot of it simply didnt sound good compared to a discrete component amp even though it measured fine. So basically you had to spend big on components to get good sound.

Then there was the whole push to digital which was new technology and a lot of bugs had to be ironed out like - sixteen bit bit depth was low but the best we could do , early use of oversampling technologies for aliasing was problematic, digital jitter and its audible effects was practically unknown, clock design was a big thing as well digital switching noise poluting the analogue side of the board

I went to hifi shops in the 80' 90's and 00's and heard things progress myself ! digital only really just got good in the last decade (true 24bit sources and mature tech) and cheaper amps and speakers arent bad - it never used to be that way. My iphone 6 sounds better than a $2000 DAC i bought in 2000... So yeah audiophiles are just used to spending money and showing off and havent realised how good things have got. Thats all it is.

[pic is my system from 2007 10 years ago ask me anything]

>he doesn't lubricate his drivers with snake oil every 75 hours if playback to maintain their responsiveness
Enjoy your mud

...

Sometimes I feel bad that this guy is associated with delusional audiophiles because he was just trying out some other guy's setup.

2 close 2 home 2bh

Because it's probably the easiest thing to justify by bringing up personal biased opinions, like homeopathy and bullshit like that: it doesn't matter if measurements, and third grade physics and chemistry, and science tell you that no, all that you're saying is bullshit, and you're spending ridiculous amount of money on borderline scams, because you will always take their anecdotic evidence and elevate it to proof that the placebo works as an actual medicine.

>black text on black background
tard

Audiophile lack education on audio engineer,physics,electronic,musical instrument,singer or compositor.

Audiophiles build a lot shit terminology or ideas to justifique high price audio equipment, several people begin on business sell shit to audiophiles.

Audiophiles give bad name to whole audio industry.

this. i got into that expensive headphone meme once just to see the difference. it's indeed noticeable, the material is of higher quality, the sound is more soothing and less scratchy, but for everyday usage this is more than enough if you aren't a musician or something.

This. Unless you just don't give a shit at all, it's very worth going from a clock radio or "whatever shitty earbuds came with my phone" to something that's actually decent, but the diminishing returns set in very quickly above that level.

Make sure you use drives that minimize the effects of rotational velocidensity

>inuit throat singing
just burst out laughing at work

10/10

i don’t have anything to say in response to this but i’m giving you a (you) because this was a good post

Going from a cheap Sennheiser headset plugged into my laptop to an Art DAC and a pair of ATH-M50x's was a HUGE jump.

Gonna throw a Topping NX4 in the mix soon.

Neat. Do you still have most of that equipment for the novelty or have you sold most of it?

its photoshopped

I still have it because its crazy ass bespoke because its based around hardware 24/96 digital crossovers. Its stereo but its has 6 channels ! Each speaker - The sub, mids, ribbon tweeters are all DRIVEN BY THEIR OWN 24/96 dac and amplifier.

The Digital crossover lets you input infinately variable crossover curves, and delays to each speaker so it is hyper accurate in the time domain for each room. Impossible to do in speaker hardware with coils and capacitors.

Add to that my hardware digital room equaliser and a measurement mic and i have a Hi-res system that is more accurate than anything i can buy in a shop because its tuned to my room and corrected in the frequency domain and time domain. You cant do any of that with normal gear ! I walk into some HI FI shops and the guys cant believe what i have done.

You just dont build it though. You really need to know how to program the boxes. Crossover Design has huge complexity with phase issues and group delay and room eq is a very black art. I have moved house a few times and every time i have to set it up again and align and eq i learn something new...

The best thing about my digital crossover system is that it was amazingly future proof music format wise . When i first built it all i had 16bit cd to drive it and now i have 2tb of 24/192 and DSD all from the torrents. This is truly a golden age of hi-res music.

>digital room equaliser and a measurement mic
>tuned to my room and corrected in the frequency domain and time domain
lol

>24/96
Placebo.

It's the poor / uneducated man's snobbery

Good post user

My brother calls himself an "audiophile" he has an iphone, apple watch, windows 10, and just built an expensive gaming computer. He is unemployed and still wants to buy over priced faggy looking "STUDIO GRADE" black and red headphones. I regularly hear him say things like "can your android do THIS?" If I converted an obviously lossy file to flac and gave it to him to play on his sound system, he would probably say things like "now THIS is why I only get music in flac, and choose extreme quality on spotify, I bet this wouldn't even sound as good on your crappy linux! true audiophiles use itunes. theres a difference in audio quality"

The other day he asked me what the difference is between sample rate and bitrate.

There is no problem with negative feedback.
Even at the beginning digital audio was leagues ahead of analog means. Jitter is bugbear given the errors present in analog media. Oversampling itself was an expensive solution to reconstruction filters at the time. So on and so forth.

>The other day he asked me what the difference is between sample rate and bitrate.
What is the difference?

>difference is between sample rate and bitrate
Not him, sample rate represents how clear the sound is while the bitrate represents how much dynamic the volume of the sound

>So yeah audiophiles are just used to spending money and showing off and havent realised how good things have got.

Eh this statement is as true as it is false.

There are still plenty of garbage DACs, amps and speakers out there. Also most people listen to audio at garbage bit rates. Most consumer products even today are not as good as the good stuff 10 years ago, companies realized people don't want to pay a little more for a good integrated DAC.
A lot of audiophile products are scams but a good DAC paired with good speakers is still night and day difference from what the commoners buy. Problem is once you hear that difference it's hard to go back. You hear that shitty radio in your car and now you know it doesn't have to be that way.

When you look at the digital waveform of an audio file, each point on that "graph" is a sample. With more datapoints, you can represent a wider range of frequencies. Bitrate on the other hand refers strictly to lossy audio codecs. It refers to the speed at which the data is read from the file to represent sound. Lossy compression algorithms will drop some datapoints (samples) that are similar enough to be dropped. This improves data compression algorithms and allows you to save less data to a file or stream. Some lossy codecs even use simple math curves to represent some waves instead of keeping every single datapoint.

>digital audio
but my ears are analog user

I exclusively listen to music on my PMP at 64kbps Opus with shitty earbuds. It's "good enough."

Well what "sounds good" is kind of subjective. I can say for a fact that my monitors with a good DAC feeding balanced audio sounds better than my old cheap eight inch jack speakers.

That said, do I need class A tube maplified turn tabled music for it to sound good? No, modern solid state electronics is something EE dreamed of 50 years ago. Tons of linear gain for uncolored amplification which is what you want for accurate play back.

Now if we are talking amps for instruments that a different ball game. The non-linear characteristics of tubes are considered desirable, at least in my opinion. I like my tube guitar amp's sound. I want that coloration. I wouldn't listen to music through it though.

Audiofools who want to run vacuum tubes in a in a clean way are wasting there money. Fragile harmonics are not crushed in the crystal lettuce, just the money of the gullible.

There was this thread on /x/ from a scientist going crazy about frequencies, Tesla, his project in some black ops site, etc.
One thing that got me thinking was that he said that the only good music is real live music that never got trough the amplifier or any kind of electronics.
As in it is better to listen to your gf sing to you than listening to the recording of someone singing reproduced by a computer.
He called all youtube and recorded music, dead music.

>inside the wall
Wall?
What's that?

And ofc you'll have to have your gf sing to you in the middle of the desert, carpeted ofc, in order to avoid distortion from surrounding buildings.

>It's the poor / uneducated man's snobbery

That's owning an iFone and craft beer.

the lower right hand side of your shelving there looks like it curves downward, why is that?

true audiophiles have their own utility poles and mains cabling for their audio system.

gizmodo.com/obsessed-audiophiles-in-japan-are-installing-their-own-1785291714
engadget.com/2016/08/15/japan-audiophiles-install-own-electricity-poles/
wsj.com/articles/a-gift-for-music-lovers-who-have-it-all-a-personal-utility-pole-1471189463

a lot of them also run on batteries (lead sounds best), especially the headphone autists that don't need as much power

Why not just use battery banks or something? AC power gets turned into DC anyway, so why would it matter?

full retarded omg

power consumption for the most part.
can't run your incredibly inefficient single ended class-a otl amps for a worthwhile time without having a basement full of batteries

That being said it's heartbreaking that 90% of the time you go to someone's place. They are listening to music on Bluetooth speaker and they think it's hi-fi because it's not from their laptop.

Older audiophiles are fucking retarded, do they realize a child with $5 headphones will always hear a richer sound than their 60 year old ears and $20,000 setup?

I love chifi thought. Earbuds has never been that good. Dap are improving at an incredible pace. And the stuff is still decent price.

tera-player.com

That is legit snake oil

this.
the era where everyone had a decent-ish set of mid sized brown boxes set up in the living room in a not completely retarded way is gone.
now it's either not giving a fuck at all and going with soundbars and bluetooth speakers or spending 8k on cables
the healthy middle ground is completely gone for most normie consumers

Currently using bluetooth insignia speakers that I got for $50. I want to upgrade. On some songs the bass is too low for them to handle so it ends up cutting everything else. I'm not sure what that effect is called but I hate it.

Also is it bad to use bluetooth? I've noticed that when using my phone's bluetooth with the speakers I can affect the sound by moving the phone closer or further away from the speakers. If I get in between them it also will affect the sound. Is this present in all bluetooth speakers?

>he's not using audiophile grade gold-plated Ethernet cable to download his music
I would get earbleeds instantly

You guys havent seen Michael Fremer.
m.youtube.com/watch?t=1142s&v=H07NpWk_Xf8

The density and tonal richness, the sheer amount of detail the arm digs out of the initial transient and the body of the note, its fundamentals and its harmonics both above and below the note itself are something to behold. Anyone who has a reasonably developed system will know how hard it is to get an audibly and quantifiably better sound from their system. So often we start thinking "well yes, there's more detail" only to realize it's actually a midband dip artificially boosting the transients or instruments like cymbals. Not with this arm. It seems to be actually delivering the real thing.

Overall, I have a strong suspicion this could well be sonically one of the top air bearings around. In terms of its particular strengths (a combination of separating each instrument within a distinct background; detail without edges; density and vividness; and perhaps the most convincing soundstage I've heard), I wouldn't be unduly surprised if this one turns out to contend for top of the class. The key could be in the overall lightness of the arm wand and the way its carbon structure is sandwiched between metals. This is just speculation, but I can tell you I'm no longer hankering after a Kuzma Airline, which used to be top of my air-bearing wish list.

I must know how fucking old you are, and how you fell into Sup Forums

>go totally anti-audiophile
>end up listening to static from my speakers cause of rfi/emi
>even when thats not an issue i get music sounding better from my smartphone

I need the red pill on quality sound systems that arents snake oil but dont sound like shit either

Does audio equipment really need watercooling?