Ouch. Sad to see Neil Young hawking this shit to rubes who don't know any better.

What's sad about this is that there's plenty of room to really improve things with standard CD resolution audio, particularly getting your DAC outside of your computer and on its own power supply. This tends to give better bass and a lower noise floor.

I still have strong memories of the Pentium-class Dell box I used in grad school. I had bottom-of-the-line Grado Labs headphones plugged into the SoundBlaster card, and it was just awful. Every time I scrolled a window, the sound card exploded in noise. I could "hear" the graphics card working. When I switched to the audio jack on the built-in CD player, it was fantastic, clean and beautiful.

These days, I've got a Teac USB amp (related empeg thread from a year ago). I ditched my boomy bookshelf speakers and hauled up to my office a pair of beautiful VMPS RM2's that I bought years ago and hadn't been using recently because my lovely wife found them to be a visual eyesore. Well, that tiny little Teac drives those monster VMPS speakers with aplomb. And my home office isn't all that large, so I don't really need to crank the audio....

Agreed. I also want to start using an external DAC, which is why this NAD D7050 has been on my wishlist for quite some time.

Someday, someday...

I was just having an interesting conversation with my girlfriend about audiophile snake oil.

Of course it started with discussion of too-expensive over-engineered connector cables. And then into expensive audiophile gear and also Neil Young's Pono player.

The interesting thing to me is that some kinds of audiophile gear do make a difference. How big of a difference depends on the exact piece of gear. And whether or not a listener can hear the difference depends on the listener. For instance, I can usually hear the difference between a 128k MP3 and a 256k MP3. Many people can't hear that difference, but since I can, it bugs me to listen to badly encoded songs. Video is similar. I can see the difference between a Blu-ray and a DVD, but many people (including my girlfriend) can't tell the difference and don't care.

The Pono player is like that, I'm sure. I'm sure that certain parts of its performance can be measurably proved to be superior to anything else in its class. And I'm sure that there are people out there who could tell the difference in a blind test. And I'm also sure that there will be people among that group who, when they can hear the difference, would be irritated to have to listen to products of inferior quality. And that's who Neil Young is making that player for. I say, more power to 'em. I bought the Empeg because of all the things that made it superior, things that most people wouldn't care about. So I certainly can't throw stones in the audio device glass house.

But here's what I found particularly interesting about our conversation: My girlfriend said that she believed that most of the people out there who are buying audiophile gear (whether it be the Pono player, an expensive amp, or whatever), are making the purchases not because they can hear the difference, but rather, because they want to be snooty and look down upon those who use inferior gear.

I argued that sure those people exist, but there are also actual audiophiles, people who, for products where there is a measurable difference, can hear the difference. Her response really got me thinking: She said that yes, those actual audiophiles exist. But there aren't enough of them to justify mass production of any piece of gear. The majority of the market is probably the clueless snobs. If it weren't for them, we wouldn't have enough of a market for any mass-produced audiophile gear. The snobs are carrying the market for the true audiophiles.

Wow, I wonder if that's true? And if, from a market standpoint, it makes sense to encourage the snobs, just to keep the ball rolling? I'd hate to live in a world where every piece of A/V gear was built and marketed to the lowest common denominator.

Kinda like cars. How many people drive their SUVs off-road? Or hell, how many people have ever used those fancy pots and pans they have in their kitchen?

Snake oil.

The differences between DVD an BluRay are obvious and measurable (eg. 720x400 vs 1920x1080). Similarly, 128Kbit MP3 is the bare minimum for recognizable music, but not adequate to capture everything we might normally hear. Adding more bits makes a big difference, up to a point, assuming the amp/speakers are not the limiting factors.

These are things that have a basis in strong tech facts, not snake oil, and the differences they make are measurable by pretty much anyone with a bit of gear (or a large screen in the case of BR).

Cheers

This is the key bit of info that many forget about. There comes a point when adding more bits, or whatever, provides no perceivable* benefit.

*There might be a measurable benefit, but if a qualified user can't notice, then what is the point? Of course when one could argue about what is a "qualified user"

Low bitrate MP3 files have really awful artifacts. Most notably, they just cannot deal properly with cymbals. Also, I remember that many early codecs would filter out anything about 15kHz or thereabouts, because you might as well prioritize the lower frequency bits.

MP3 once you get to 200kb/sec or thereabouts is really, really good. I've made multiple attempts to distinguish them from uncompressed originals and I can't tell them apart. And this is with really good headphones, offboard DACs, etc. -- the same sorts of equipment that generally get me annoyed at places where the mastering engineers made mistakes.

I have a buddy who spends serious coin on his home stereo / theater. Many of his purchases are entirely defensible and logical (e.g., acoustic foam discretely tucked in corners to absorb reflections). Other stuff, less so. Notably, he's bought into the high bitrate fiasco, saying all these things about jitter and filtering and whatnot that he presumably will never be able to hear. So far as I can tell, all that really matters is that when you buy high-bitrate music, you're just getting bits that was mastered by people who care, versus, for contrast, the modern phenomenon of over-compression. (Factoid: I have two releases of Count Basie and Oscar Peterson's "Satch and Josh", one normal and one on XRCD. The differences are subtle but present, but largely boil down to better mastering. It's all still red book audio CD on the client end.)

The sad fact is that most users could do themselves the most good by simply buying decent speakers and setting up their room well. Now that virtually all home theater cabling is digital, you kinda wish that Monster would just wither away, but there they are with über HDMI cables. It's just so sad. Meanwhile, Home Depot sells really great 12ga speaker wire in bulk, and it's trivial to attach your own banana plugs or whatever else.

Returning to Pono and the phenomenon that Tony cites, the underlying pathology here is probably some variation on people needing to "perform their wealth", combined with a related pathology of "price signalling". The former is why you've got so many people sitting in traffic in their AMG Mercedes and BMW M cars. They don't buy those cars out of some rational need. It's all about exclusivity and projecting that, yeah baby, I've made it. The price signalling thing is something you see every time you look at a wine list in a restaurant. You've never heard of any of them, but some are much cheaper than others. Do you splurge for the more expensive bottle? How do you decide? Hey, why would you buy that cheap speaker cable when you can buy the Monster cable? It's worth it!

*sigh*

Agreed competely. I can tell an 128kb/sec from an 160. But I've also found that from 192 kbps and up, I can't tell the difference. Which is why I've ripped all my cd's back in the day at 192kbps. Storage space is cheap though nowaydays, which is why I currently rip at 320kbps. More a no harm, no foul attitude than anything else to be honest.

Yup. When I ripped all my CDs, I sprung for Apple Lossless, figuring that I could always transcode from that to whatever else, which is exactly what I did when Google Music came along.

Exactly. I may be wrong, but by "snake oil" I do not refer to some actual higher audio quality only interesting to/perceivable by some. that is actual quality, that is real.

I refer to non-existing higher quality that some clueless people believe in. There are speakers that cost tens of thousands of dollars that produce sound in any way measurably better then other speakers that cost on the hundreds, neither by using instrumentation, not by testing them by blindfolded expert listeners. Same happened with Monster cables, or "DAC with optic readers", as Audiphiles would call them (CD players).

I think I mentioned of an audiophile who claimed white walls would be best for listening to music, as they do not "emit" (what?!), while walls of any color (as if white is not one) do "emit" and therefore interfere with sound waves. Yes, if you're thinking in light terms, he even got it the other way round.

Or, I remember several threads here about digital cables supposedly producing "better sound".

These are all cases of snake oil: there's just nothing true to them.

Still one of my favorites - coat hangers!

-jk

I still love the audiophile store in my home town that sells tiny plastic stands designed to keep your speaker cables off the ground. I assume to reduce interference or something. They also sell $2000 interconnects and those floating magnetic turntables. I LOVE going into that place.

http://www.wired.com/2015/03/hot-stampers/?mbid=social_fb

Absolutely. Crazy.

Man, time to sell my unopened "Wish You Were Here"...

Ah, but was it an early pressing on fresh stampers?

Now if only there were some way to get virtually identical reproductions of a source signal, consistently, each and every time. Hi-fi and low cost. How could we do that?

I know, right? Precisely one of the things that made me call the whole thing just unbelievably crazy.

Well, it was pretty early in the morning when I bought it, so yes!

Wow, it's been 40 years. I should open it and play it. It's the first release, the one in the opaque plastic wrapper.

Good lord, at least the Pono sounds measurably better than a low-bitrate MP3. I can't believe after this long people still buy the "vinyl sounds better" BS.

Did we ever get confirmation that the new Sony Walkman would end up costing the insane amount of money we were hearing about? I recall that at CES they were saying it would cost something like $1200. Makes the Pono sound like a steal.

I can understand those prices for collectors (I have an uncle who paid like $1500 for a basketball card he really wanted), but since they focused on the sound quality, yeah... I guess as long as they are happy.

For a while, anyway. Of course, actually playing the record is a destructive process as the needle scrapes along through the grooves, removing minute bits of vinyl with each playing. How long before the sound degrades enough so that the record is no longer a "hot stamp" recording?

tanstaafl.

At that point they can just swap to one of the other half dozen different pressings of the album they own.

I thought you could get laser-scanning turntables these days?

Laser turntables? Yes! http://eandt.theiet.org/magazine/2011/11/lasers-get-groovy.cfm

Unfortunately...

For what it's worth, I have a lot of old jazz (vintage 1930's) in my collection. The digital remasters that came from 78rpm suck. Every once in a while, they manage to dig up the metal stamping parts, which yield radically better fidelity. Still, it wasn't until the 1950's that recordings had anything resembling modern high fidelity. To my ear, some of the jazz greats of the 1930's recording music in the 1950's, with master tapes redigitized in the 2000's and issued on CD, are as good as it gets.

A laser-scanning turntable introduces ADC - DAC in the chain, which I am sure vinyl loving Audiophiles will wholeheartedly despise. Or maybe not, what do I know.


P.S.: I suspected, but did not actually know, of the existence of Laser-turntables. Which are ironic in themselves, I think. Aren't they?

Wait, people are still using laser turntables at atmospheric pressure? Haven't they heard of Brownian motion? Vacuum-chamber turntables are where it's at.

Peter

Turning records always has a vibration component, so I use a special flatbed scanner, which is connected to an analog computer to reproduce the sound. I'll have to try this setup in a vacuum chamber, the advantages are obvious!