Blind ABX tests consistently show that most things audiophiles think make a difference to sound quality, don't. Almost nobody can hear the difference between decent bitrate MP3 and lossless...
Blind ABX tests consistently show that most things audiophiles think make a difference to sound quality, don't. Almost nobody can hear the difference between decent bitrate MP3 and lossless codecs, for example. But this is the most extreme, and to be honest genuinely surprising, example I've seen for a while.
When I used to sell hifi, high end interconnects were something we were heavily inventivised to upsell customers on because the markups on them were the highest in the shop and given we sold hifi, that was a pretty high bar! In my experience they make zero noticeable difference to audio quality.
Somehow some way that gets me millimeters closer to understanding the artists' true intention!! The analog (haha) that I can't not mention is CRTs for vintage games today. Really, that glow is not...
Somehow some way that gets me millimeters closer to understanding the artists' true intention!!
The analog (haha) that I can't not mention is CRTs for vintage games today. Really, that glow is not worth the gigantic, overpriced tube you're hauling across the city. Shaders, scan lines and emulators, baby, and even then, there's no climbing back in the womb.
The search for the purest experience possible and plain old nostalgia are divisible by one another 90% of the time.
CRT displays are silly for a variety of reasons, but nobody with even half-functioning eyes will ever confuse the image from one with an LCD (no matter how sophisticated a CRT simulation shader...
CRT displays are silly for a variety of reasons, but nobody with even half-functioning eyes will ever confuse the image from one with an LCD (no matter how sophisticated a CRT simulation shader you're running). I would say gaming on a CRT is more akin to vinyl—maybe dumb, but not literally undetectable the way a lot of audiophile equipment is.
I wouldn't argue that CRTs and LCDs are even close, but the approximation of their most meaningful qualities is good enough, I'd say. Like, would you go to the trouble and expense of playing a...
I wouldn't argue that CRTs and LCDs are even close, but the approximation of their most meaningful qualities is good enough, I'd say.
Like, would you go to the trouble and expense of playing a generation or two of old titles like that when shaders almost get you there?
I say this as a reformed CRT guy who had a couple and even played with a PVM for a while. Once the chase is over, it's hard not to realize that there's no meaningful way to dress-up a game you can already play, and (as stated above) no climbing back into the body of your 10 year old self.
When I can bust out my NES, hook it up to my OLED and play some Duck Hunt, I'll buy this argument that CRTs are not worth it... Until then, long live my Commodore 1702! Still going strong nearly 5...
When I can bust out my NES, hook it up to my OLED and play some Duck Hunt, I'll buy this argument that CRTs are not worth it... Until then, long live my Commodore 1702! Still going strong nearly 5 decades on now and function aside it's still quite difficult to recreate the image qualities of CRT on modern displays.
I can't tell you that it'll work with the NES, but I've been playing Duck Hunt with full gun recoil on my large LCD via the Retro Shooter Reaper 3. ...then switching to Time Crisis in a heartbeat....
I can't tell you that it'll work with the NES, but I've been playing Duck Hunt with full gun recoil on my large LCD via the Retro Shooter Reaper 3.
...then switching to Time Crisis in a heartbeat.
Just saaaayin!
And though they're not perfect, have you played with Retroarch shaders that reproduce scanlines, bloom, flicker and glow? They're pretty good!
I've played with every modern attempt to recreate CRT geometry and scanlines aside the $700 Retrotink 4k, and I think anyone who thinks they're getting pretty close is seeing what they want to see. 🤷
I've played with every modern attempt to recreate CRT geometry and scanlines aside the $700 Retrotink 4k, and I think anyone who thinks they're getting pretty close is seeing what they want to see. 🤷
I believe it, but my question is just "what's it worth to have that"? It's all preference, but I'll listen to FLAC or Mp3 at 320kbps over CDs because the difference is negligible and the...
I believe it, but my question is just "what's it worth to have that"? It's all preference, but I'll listen to FLAC or Mp3 at 320kbps over CDs because the difference is negligible and the convenience is paramount.
There's a major difference between audio playback equipment enthusiasts and people who work with audio production. The gold plated cable crowd (which is also the group that falsely thinks analog...
There's a major difference between audio playback equipment enthusiasts and people who work with audio production. The gold plated cable crowd (which is also the group that falsely thinks analog equipment is better) might be oblivious to a lot of things, but people who work with mixing/mastering absolutely pick up on MP3 artifacts when listening on familiar monitors or headphones.
I'm hardly a professional, and I had to bump my mobile Spotify bitrate when I bought a new car, because the improved speakers made a nasty "sharpness" in cymbals more apparent.
I can also often identify when a song has a sidechain compressor in use, while "most people" would have no clue what that is. Or pick out the timbre of a 909 and make some educated guesses about the effects chain used to treat it. I also know how to work a synthesizer and can listen to a sound and make assumptions about the basic properties of it (waveform, unison, filter, ADSR, etc).
Ear training for audio engineering isn't any different than training for pitch. You don't need gold cables, but you do need decent speakers. If you spend enough time behind an EQ, you'll also start to pick up on things like sibilance (a piercing high-pitched noise when people pronounce S, TH, etc sounds), and you'll never be able to stop hearing it.
Entirely agree, and that is why I caveated my comment with "almost nobody" and "decent bitrate". If you're hearing compressors and so on then yes, you're absolutely listening at the "almost...
Entirely agree, and that is why I caveated my comment with "almost nobody" and "decent bitrate". If you're hearing compressors and so on then yes, you're absolutely listening at the "almost nobody" level and you probably can hear the differences.
I can just about spot the difference between Google Music's standard and "high quality" streams on well mastered albums I know well on headphones I know well (particularly Morcheeba's Big Calm on my ancient but still wonderful HD600s). But then I can't tell the difference between the lossless or CD versions and the high quality streams at all.
Sounds like a nightmare. If I can enjoy 96 kbps MP3 over shitty speakers, why would I spend thousands upon thousands on equipment to ruin that experience? I assume it's your job to do that, so...
and you'll never be able to stop hearing it.
Sounds like a nightmare. If I can enjoy 96 kbps MP3 over shitty speakers, why would I spend thousands upon thousands on equipment to ruin that experience?
I assume it's your job to do that, so this question isn't really for you. But I know there are audiophiles who are just regular dudes with too much cash.
It's a hobby. Learning to produce music necessarily means learning to listen critically to be able to correct flaws. Sibilance is not something you should be hearing in a professionally mixed...
It's a hobby. Learning to produce music necessarily means learning to listen critically to be able to correct flaws. Sibilance is not something you should be hearing in a professionally mixed song...but it's something that will drive you crazy in raw recordings. You hear it, you do surgery with a multiband compressor or EQ, and then the problem is gone in the mix.
Spending a little money on decent speakers is like going to the optometrist and getting your vision corrected: there's a whole world of stuff that gets obliterated by low-tier equipment. There are obviously diminishing returns. (I mostly just use Sony MDR-7506s for mixing—a staple of studios and radio stations due to their flattish frequency response—and AirPods Pros for daily use.)
Sibilance is something you should hear whenever an s is pronounced for that sound to be legible at all. The problem is rather that it places a lot of energy around 6-9 kHz and comes across as...
Sibilance is not something you should be hearing in a professionally mixed song...
Sibilance is something you should hear whenever an s is pronounced for that sound to be legible at all. The problem is rather that it places a lot of energy around 6-9 kHz and comes across as louder than lower frequency sounds when you sing directly into a microphone. But it's not something you shouldn't be hearing, at least if you want sibilant consonants to be audible, just something that should be relatively lower in the mix than it is on the original microphone recording, if you want a pleasant sound.
Because the experience is that much better. It's a different world. But it's possible and better to start small - headphones or especially in-ears can sometimes be bought really cheaply if you...
If I can enjoy 96 kbps MP3 over shitty speakers, why would I spend thousands upon thousands on equipment to ruin that experience?
Because the experience is that much better. It's a different world. But it's possible and better to start small - headphones or especially in-ears can sometimes be bought really cheaply if you know what you're doing and fix their frequency response with EQ. Headphones are always a compromise though, and speakers cost more, but even there the prices fell sharply in the last decade. Some studio monitors for less than 500 USD can be pretty great.
Unfortunately the difference between 500 USD studio monitors and good 6k USD hifi loudspeakers is also pretty big and clearly audible for a normal person without hearing damage. But the fact is that you can get actual, real hifi sound for sub 500 USD, and okay sound for even lower, that wasn't a thing 15 years a go and it's pretty great.
It's worth adding that this applies to lower bitrates, certainly including any non-maximum settings on Spotify, but not really to 320k (the highest quality MP3 setting ingeneral). There are some...
people who work with mixing/mastering absolutely pick up on MP3 artifacts when listening on familiar monitors or headphones.
I'm hardly a professional, and I had to bump my mobile Spotify bitrate when I bought a new car, because the improved speakers made a nasty "sharpness" in cymbals more apparent.
It's worth adding that this applies to lower bitrates, certainly including any non-maximum settings on Spotify, but not really to 320k (the highest quality MP3 setting ingeneral). There are some people here and there who are able to successfully ABX a 320k MP3 and present evidence, which is really easy these days when using a computer as an audio source, but those are rare. It really is pretty much indistinguishable even for most trained ears.
For anyone who wants to try it, there's a plugin for Foobar2000 called ABX Comparator, it's a free way to do rigorous ABX testing. You take a lossless file, encode it to various bitrates of MP3 and then do ABX test with each vs the lossless file. The goal is doing it 7 times in a row (that way the probability that it was random chance gets miniscule).
Personally the highest I managed was either 224 or 256 kbps VBR, which was with nearfield monitors - it's probably easier with good headphones, but also my years are almost a deacde older now, so who knows - and that was with highest concentration, letting my hearing rest a few times inbetween (really helps), and I used one specific sound to discern it: a singer breathing in in a quiet part at the beginning of a song. As soon as the full band started playing, even though it was a high quality and dynamic recording, I couldn't discern shit. Cymbals were a very obvious sign with lower bitrates that automatically cut off everything over 16 kHz, which I'm not sure I could hear now, but I did then.
I can also often identify when a song has a sidechain compressor in use
This on the other hand is extremely audible. Or, actually, most records these days use sidechain compression in some way, but you probably mean when it's pushing too hard and creates pumping or instruments artificially "moving away" to create space for drum hits etc. I hate it as well.
This is actually a major reason why I can't stand SiriusXM. Their audio compression is terribly noticeable and it drives me up the wall, especially because the people around me can't seem to tell....
This is actually a major reason why I can't stand SiriusXM. Their audio compression is terribly noticeable and it drives me up the wall, especially because the people around me can't seem to tell. People spend money on a service that at times actually sounds worse than the FM radio they get for free.
...Z0MDonkey yes!.. ...i can understand them broadcasting thirty-year-old bitrates on their satellites of equivalent age (even though in my opinion they should be cutting bandwidth from all the...
...Z0MDonkey yes!..
...i can understand them broadcasting thirty-year-old bitrates on their satellites of equivalent age (even though in my opinion they should be cutting bandwidth from all the talk channels to improve music fidelity, although that ship apparently sailed with the merger) but there's absolutely no excuse for their internet streams to suffer the same compression...
...i've consistently double-blinded 320 VBR vs lossless codecs; of course it depends on the source material, but with the some audio the difference is immediately apparent...that said, while my...
...i've consistently double-blinded 320 VBR vs lossless codecs; of course it depends on the source material, but with the some audio the difference is immediately apparent...that said, while my ears are far, far from golden, my cognitive hearing typically scores at the top of listening tests, so i don't doubt that many people would neither notice nor care about the differences, and in many environments you'd be hard-pressed to hear them anyway...
...at work where i'm listening to lossy bluetooth driving a low-fidelity bone-conducting headset, or driving eighty miles per hour in a top-down roadster, i just consider myself fortunate when my imagination fills in the missing information...
edit: ...last night i listened to siriusXM on my commute home for the first time in a very long while, "high-quality" stream through my phone rather than satellite broadcast, and its compression still sounds awful even at eighty miles per hour with the top down; i don't know what codec they use but it's not significantly better than a 128kpbs MP3...
I don't remember what it was I ABX tested, but it was either decent bit rate lossy (probably MP3 V0 or AAC 256) vs FLAC and had a pretty good hit rate too. No idea about cognitive hearing or any...
I don't remember what it was I ABX tested, but it was either decent bit rate lossy (probably MP3 V0 or AAC 256) vs FLAC and had a pretty good hit rate too. No idea about cognitive hearing or any of that.
Source material makes a big difference. Super compressed pop or EDM is going to suffer a lot less than deftly recorded and mastered orchestral prog rock or something like that for example.
I think people just need to do the tests themselves to believe it. Take a lossless and lossy version of something and listen to it side by side. I have a huge FLAC library for archival purposes...
I think people just need to do the tests themselves to believe it. Take a lossless and lossy version of something and listen to it side by side.
I have a huge FLAC library for archival purposes since I have a big hard drive, but on my portable devices? Everything is in opus for space efficiency (it's even more efficient than mp3). I have done multiple listening tests with all my audio peripherals and cannot tell the difference, and at the end of the day that's what matters.
The audiophile space is truly where snake oil salesmen thrive.
Right, my FLACs are (hopefully) pure archives of the originals discs. While I may listen to them, it isn't because they sound to me over 320 or v0 MP3s. The FLACs are useful when you want to burn...
Right, my FLACs are (hopefully) pure archives of the originals discs. While I may listen to them, it isn't because they sound to me over 320 or v0 MP3s. The FLACs are useful when you want to burn an actual CD (I swear this still comes up for me).
But if you run the test yourself, it's pretty difficult not to placebo effect yourself. Especially when comparing exactly two things -- even when given two identical things to compare, if a person...
But if you run the test yourself, it's pretty difficult not to placebo effect yourself. Especially when comparing exactly two things -- even when given two identical things to compare, if a person believes they're different they'll often subconsciously make up differences between them.
Maybe it's one of those fancy things where, believing you have the superior really truly does boost enjoyment and that extra placebo enjoyment is the worth paying for? :p good to know my banana...
Maybe it's one of those fancy things where, believing you have the superior really truly does boost enjoyment and that extra placebo enjoyment is the worth paying for? :p good to know my potato banana quality mp3s are just as good.
There's absolutely an element of that. Nobody's brain wants to admit their 99.999% pure silver hand braided oxygen-free cables don't make things sound better because otherwise they'd also have to...
There's absolutely an element of that. Nobody's brain wants to admit their 99.999% pure silver hand braided oxygen-free cables don't make things sound better because otherwise they'd also have to admit they were a complete idiot for spending the kind of money which could otherwise pay for a really pretty nice holiday (check out the price on the 10m ones) on some bits of useless wire.
I did once encounter one guy (they're almost always men) who spent tens of thousands of pounds building a specially designed room to keep his hifi in, then far more on the gear itself to go in there, only to then complain that most of the recordings he listened to sounded bad because the studio they were recorded in "obviously wasn't using quality equipment"
Well to be faaaaaaair you really do start hearing when something is a bad recording much more with good quality audio. Things you had no idea existed are suddenly obvious. I think every audiophile...
Well to be faaaaaaair you really do start hearing when something is a bad recording much more with good quality audio. Things you had no idea existed are suddenly obvious. I think every audiophile needs to go through a phase in which they decide whether they prefer listening to music for the music or to be impressed by the realism and acoustic illusion. The latter is sometimes mockingly called "listening to equipment", and this is true in some cases, but I think that enjoying a mindblowingly realistic acoustic illusion with nice music can be great on its own and shouldn't be mocked. I like both of those approaches.
I mean it depends. I can still enjoy crust punk or Darkthrone. Some amateur live recordings with average camera sound became clearer and a bit easier to listen to. But some overly loud popular...
I mean it depends. I can still enjoy crust punk or Darkthrone. Some amateur live recordings with average camera sound became clearer and a bit easier to listen to. But some overly loud popular music recordings became quite annoying, which I consider a feature, not a bug.
The only thing I dislike is that Rick Rubin fucked up a few albums that I enjoy with loudness wars, like half the Slayer discography or Californication by Red Hot Chilli Peppers. And those became even more tiring to listen to than before. It pissed me off so much that I started coding an audio declipper to remove all the clipping distortion and make my own remasters that are easier to listen to, still in progress - that is the weirdest audiophile thing I've ever done by far.
I admire your dedication! I really just meant that I have plenty of poorly mastered/compressed (often popular) music that I wouldn't want to start disliking. If a declipper were in my skill set,...
I admire your dedication! I really just meant that I have plenty of poorly mastered/compressed (often popular) music that I wouldn't want to start disliking. If a declipper were in my skill set, who knows?
You mentioning a specially designed room made me remember this article from 2024 about a home stereo that ended up costing around $1 million apparently, but was sold after his death for a total of...
You mentioning a specially designed room made me remember this article from 2024 about a home stereo that ended up costing around $1 million apparently, but was sold after his death for a total of $156,800, piecemeal. The real value it had was to that guy, not to anybody else, and if anything it was a bit of an albatross around the neck of the house it was in, because the houseprice was inflated because of it. It was a fascinating piece and one I always think of when I'm putting in hours to make my smart home work better. I might appreciate it, and sure, some lights come on automatically, but I'd better not fall into the trap of thinking that there's a linear relationship between the hours (and money) I sink into my home automation hobby and its value to a hard-nosed third-party buyer.
Over at Headfi, they won't even let you mention double blind tests except in one small, ignored subforum. I suspect it causes havok among their advertisers and sponsers. It really is difficult to...
Over at Headfi, they won't even let you mention double blind tests except in one small, ignored subforum. I suspect it causes havok among their advertisers and sponsers.
It really is difficult to wade through all the crap spouted at Headfi when trying to find good information about headphones. Take nothing, absolutely nothing at face value there.
Someone once suggested I start selling "haunted" jewellery, which commands a terrifying price markup, but my worry would be someone would buy something hoping it would cure their illness or help...
Someone once suggested I start selling "haunted" jewellery, which commands a terrifying price markup, but my worry would be someone would buy something hoping it would cure their illness or help their addiction or something and I couldn't live with myself thinking that had happened. But audiophiles are the only group of people I would feel completely happy ripping off with some made-up bullshit woo-based product. Because at least you know they're only spending money they can afford to waste. Nobody is choosing between speaker cable holders (yes, they exist and they are FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY FUCKING POUNDS FOR THREE) and paying for grandma's care home bills or whatever.
A friend of my dad's made a "mains cleaner" which was pretty much just a 19" box with a capacitor, a switch and an LED. You flicked the switch and the LED came on. He then, to his own surprise as much as anyone else's, won a What Hi-Fi gold award for it and sold a load of them at ÂŁ750 each (and this was in the late 90s!). The parts cost less than ÂŁ15 and almost all of that was the case itself.
fwiw What-Hifi's headphone reviews are pretty decent. They have a rolling "best wireless/best earbud/etc" pages which is constantly up to date. I check there every time I need some new cans - although I usually just buy whatever Sony or Sennheisers fit my budget because I know they make things my ears like. Good audio gear is worth spending a little money on. "Audiophile" gear is not.
Need a spreadsheet for this? And two sentences to say the same thing? Also, looking at the table they posted, there were 5 correct answers, not 6? Off topic, sorry
As we can see in the image above, there are only six correct answers out of 43 guesses. We put these numbers in a spreadsheet, which showed that only 13.95% of the answers were correct.
Need a spreadsheet for this? And two sentences to say the same thing? Also, looking at the table they posted, there were 5 correct answers, not 6?
all this stuff has been around for ages. I can easily tell between a 16/44 FLAC and a 320 MP3 using ABX testing in fb2k --- but for cables, I don't know why there would be a dramatic difference or...
all this stuff has been around for ages. I can easily tell between a 16/44 FLAC and a 320 MP3 using ABX testing in fb2k --- but for cables, I don't know why there would be a dramatic difference or any at all.
See also: guitarists and their obsession with "tone woods" for electric guitars. Most of them are fooling themselves that they can tell the difference and if it matters.
See also: guitarists and their obsession with "tone woods" for electric guitars. Most of them are fooling themselves that they can tell the difference and if it matters.
I expected the capacitive properties(if any) of Banana and Mud to distort the signal, so I was surprised that their effects are inaudible, the distortion could be very minimal that it is...
I expected the capacitive properties(if any) of Banana and Mud to distort the signal, so I was surprised that their effects are inaudible, the distortion could be very minimal that it is inaudible.
There’s a reason audiophiles get nicknamed audiofools sometimes.
I'm not an audiophile but I did try getting into higher quality audio equipment a few years ago and I feel like there's a lot of things similar to this where the difference is so minor that the...
I'm not an audiophile but I did try getting into higher quality audio equipment a few years ago and I feel like there's a lot of things similar to this where the difference is so minor that the average person won't be able to make out the difference. I am shocked that there's little difference even with this extreme example though, especially the mud.
A lot of things seem to follow a logarithmic graph, at least if you take the brand name premium out of the equation: double the price at the low end and you get a big jump in quality, double it...
A lot of things seem to follow a logarithmic graph, at least if you take the brand name premium out of the equation: double the price at the low end and you get a big jump in quality, double it again and you get a smaller but still really noticeable improvement, double it a third time and you’re pretty much at the top end, and then everything above that is huge increases in cost and/or effort fighting for the last few percent. Almost nobody’s going to notice the difference past the first few steps, and even fewer will really get value out of the later jumps in cost.
Audio equipment in general definitely follows that, but audiophile stuff does also seem to have an unusually high concentration of really expensive stuff that’s just total snake oil. Literal magic crystals and shiny stickers selling for hundreds if not thousands, that kind of thing.
I used to have a pair of Raycon earbuds and lost one of them when walking home from a night out drinking. The Earfun ones I bought to replace them cost about a third of the price and honestly had...
I used to have a pair of Raycon earbuds and lost one of them when walking home from a night out drinking. The Earfun ones I bought to replace them cost about a third of the price and honestly had comparable sound quality. The only thing I didn't like about them was that they'd sometimes lose connection with my device.
This may be more of a dig at Raycon because I found their earbuds to be overpriced and actually quite bad in quality, but I thought I'd see more complaints about them, given how many YouTubers shill their brand for sponsor revenue.
I've since switched to Denon PerL Pro and the difference in audio quality has been subtle. But the best part about the new pair I got is that it comes with an app where I can enable noise cancelling.
I'm deeply attached to my Denon PerL Pros because I have the exact opposite of high-frequency hearing loss and didn't really know it until I saw the profiles on those things. Messing around with...
I'm deeply attached to my Denon PerL Pros because I have the exact opposite of high-frequency hearing loss and didn't really know it until I saw the profiles on those things. Messing around with digital equalizers to moderate the apparent shrillness and sharpness of recordings has helped over the years, but the Denon earbuds do it automatically and seamlessly, in the precise frequency range where I'm more sensitive than average. It's been an interesting experience revisiting music the way most others hear it.
It's frustrating that Denon isn't releasing updates, but maybe other manufacturers will pick up the technology. Crazy that it's taken this long for audio engineering to address the physiological variability of sound response directly, and not just hearing loss prosthesis.
I am not joking. I run all my audio through ceramics. It is somewhat important to choose decent ceramics and you would definitely hear the difference in bass if you used not enough of it. Learn More
I am not joking. I run all my audio through ceramics. It is somewhat important to choose decent ceramics and you would definitely hear the difference in bass if you used not enough of it.
Blind ABX tests consistently show that most things audiophiles think make a difference to sound quality, don't. Almost nobody can hear the difference between decent bitrate MP3 and lossless codecs, for example. But this is the most extreme, and to be honest genuinely surprising, example I've seen for a while.
When I used to sell hifi, high end interconnects were something we were heavily inventivised to upsell customers on because the markups on them were the highest in the shop and given we sold hifi, that was a pretty high bar! In my experience they make zero noticeable difference to audio quality.
Well if the copper wire had been gold-plated, the difference would've been obvious.
Russ? That you? Here I am, sitting on a spike to make my headphones sound better. It's not comfy but oh the clarity. The sweet sweet clarity.
Somehow some way that gets me millimeters closer to understanding the artists' true intention!!
The analog (haha) that I can't not mention is CRTs for vintage games today. Really, that glow is not worth the gigantic, overpriced tube you're hauling across the city. Shaders, scan lines and emulators, baby, and even then, there's no climbing back in the womb.
The search for the purest experience possible and plain old nostalgia are divisible by one another 90% of the time.
CRT displays are silly for a variety of reasons, but nobody with even half-functioning eyes will ever confuse the image from one with an LCD (no matter how sophisticated a CRT simulation shader you're running). I would say gaming on a CRT is more akin to vinyl—maybe dumb, but not literally undetectable the way a lot of audiophile equipment is.
I wouldn't argue that CRTs and LCDs are even close, but the approximation of their most meaningful qualities is good enough, I'd say.
Like, would you go to the trouble and expense of playing a generation or two of old titles like that when shaders almost get you there?
I say this as a reformed CRT guy who had a couple and even played with a PVM for a while. Once the chase is over, it's hard not to realize that there's no meaningful way to dress-up a game you can already play, and (as stated above) no climbing back into the body of your 10 year old self.
When I can bust out my NES, hook it up to my OLED and play some Duck Hunt, I'll buy this argument that CRTs are not worth it... Until then, long live my Commodore 1702! Still going strong nearly 5 decades on now and function aside it's still quite difficult to recreate the image qualities of CRT on modern displays.
I can't tell you that it'll work with the NES, but I've been playing Duck Hunt with full gun recoil on my large LCD via the Retro Shooter Reaper 3.
...then switching to Time Crisis in a heartbeat.
Just saaaayin!
And though they're not perfect, have you played with Retroarch shaders that reproduce scanlines, bloom, flicker and glow? They're pretty good!
I've played with every modern attempt to recreate CRT geometry and scanlines aside the $700 Retrotink 4k, and I think anyone who thinks they're getting pretty close is seeing what they want to see. 🤷
I believe it, but my question is just "what's it worth to have that"? It's all preference, but I'll listen to FLAC or Mp3 at 320kbps over CDs because the difference is negligible and the convenience is paramount.
There's a major difference between audio playback equipment enthusiasts and people who work with audio production. The gold plated cable crowd (which is also the group that falsely thinks analog equipment is better) might be oblivious to a lot of things, but people who work with mixing/mastering absolutely pick up on MP3 artifacts when listening on familiar monitors or headphones.
I'm hardly a professional, and I had to bump my mobile Spotify bitrate when I bought a new car, because the improved speakers made a nasty "sharpness" in cymbals more apparent.
I can also often identify when a song has a sidechain compressor in use, while "most people" would have no clue what that is. Or pick out the timbre of a 909 and make some educated guesses about the effects chain used to treat it. I also know how to work a synthesizer and can listen to a sound and make assumptions about the basic properties of it (waveform, unison, filter, ADSR, etc).
Ear training for audio engineering isn't any different than training for pitch. You don't need gold cables, but you do need decent speakers. If you spend enough time behind an EQ, you'll also start to pick up on things like sibilance (a piercing high-pitched noise when people pronounce S, TH, etc sounds), and you'll never be able to stop hearing it.
Entirely agree, and that is why I caveated my comment with "almost nobody" and "decent bitrate". If you're hearing compressors and so on then yes, you're absolutely listening at the "almost nobody" level and you probably can hear the differences.
I can just about spot the difference between Google Music's standard and "high quality" streams on well mastered albums I know well on headphones I know well (particularly Morcheeba's Big Calm on my ancient but still wonderful HD600s). But then I can't tell the difference between the lossless or CD versions and the high quality streams at all.
Sounds like a nightmare. If I can enjoy 96 kbps MP3 over shitty speakers, why would I spend thousands upon thousands on equipment to ruin that experience?
I assume it's your job to do that, so this question isn't really for you. But I know there are audiophiles who are just regular dudes with too much cash.
It's a hobby. Learning to produce music necessarily means learning to listen critically to be able to correct flaws. Sibilance is not something you should be hearing in a professionally mixed song...but it's something that will drive you crazy in raw recordings. You hear it, you do surgery with a multiband compressor or EQ, and then the problem is gone in the mix.
Spending a little money on decent speakers is like going to the optometrist and getting your vision corrected: there's a whole world of stuff that gets obliterated by low-tier equipment. There are obviously diminishing returns. (I mostly just use Sony MDR-7506s for mixing—a staple of studios and radio stations due to their flattish frequency response—and AirPods Pros for daily use.)
Sibilance is something you should hear whenever an s is pronounced for that sound to be legible at all. The problem is rather that it places a lot of energy around 6-9 kHz and comes across as louder than lower frequency sounds when you sing directly into a microphone. But it's not something you shouldn't be hearing, at least if you want sibilant consonants to be audible, just something that should be relatively lower in the mix than it is on the original microphone recording, if you want a pleasant sound.
Because the experience is that much better. It's a different world. But it's possible and better to start small - headphones or especially in-ears can sometimes be bought really cheaply if you know what you're doing and fix their frequency response with EQ. Headphones are always a compromise though, and speakers cost more, but even there the prices fell sharply in the last decade. Some studio monitors for less than 500 USD can be pretty great.
Unfortunately the difference between 500 USD studio monitors and good 6k USD hifi loudspeakers is also pretty big and clearly audible for a normal person without hearing damage. But the fact is that you can get actual, real hifi sound for sub 500 USD, and okay sound for even lower, that wasn't a thing 15 years a go and it's pretty great.
It's worth adding that this applies to lower bitrates, certainly including any non-maximum settings on Spotify, but not really to 320k (the highest quality MP3 setting ingeneral). There are some people here and there who are able to successfully ABX a 320k MP3 and present evidence, which is really easy these days when using a computer as an audio source, but those are rare. It really is pretty much indistinguishable even for most trained ears.
For anyone who wants to try it, there's a plugin for Foobar2000 called ABX Comparator, it's a free way to do rigorous ABX testing. You take a lossless file, encode it to various bitrates of MP3 and then do ABX test with each vs the lossless file. The goal is doing it 7 times in a row (that way the probability that it was random chance gets miniscule).
Personally the highest I managed was either 224 or 256 kbps VBR, which was with nearfield monitors - it's probably easier with good headphones, but also my years are almost a deacde older now, so who knows - and that was with highest concentration, letting my hearing rest a few times inbetween (really helps), and I used one specific sound to discern it: a singer breathing in in a quiet part at the beginning of a song. As soon as the full band started playing, even though it was a high quality and dynamic recording, I couldn't discern shit. Cymbals were a very obvious sign with lower bitrates that automatically cut off everything over 16 kHz, which I'm not sure I could hear now, but I did then.
This on the other hand is extremely audible. Or, actually, most records these days use sidechain compression in some way, but you probably mean when it's pushing too hard and creates pumping or instruments artificially "moving away" to create space for drum hits etc. I hate it as well.
This is actually a major reason why I can't stand SiriusXM. Their audio compression is terribly noticeable and it drives me up the wall, especially because the people around me can't seem to tell. People spend money on a service that at times actually sounds worse than the FM radio they get for free.
In the UK at least, good FM on the equivalent station is noticeably better than the same station on DAB and you can do A-B listening quite easily.
That's a shame. But I heard that there is supposed to be some newer standard for digital radio available in the UK, too; is that any better?
...Z0MDonkey yes!..
...i can understand them broadcasting thirty-year-old bitrates on their satellites of equivalent age (even though in my opinion they should be cutting bandwidth from all the talk channels to improve music fidelity, although that ship apparently sailed with the merger) but there's absolutely no excuse for their internet streams to suffer the same compression...
...i've consistently double-blinded 320 VBR vs lossless codecs; of course it depends on the source material, but with the some audio the difference is immediately apparent...that said, while my ears are far, far from golden, my cognitive hearing typically scores at the top of listening tests, so i don't doubt that many people would neither notice nor care about the differences, and in many environments you'd be hard-pressed to hear them anyway...
...at work where i'm listening to lossy bluetooth driving a low-fidelity bone-conducting headset, or driving eighty miles per hour in a top-down roadster, i just consider myself fortunate when my imagination fills in the missing information...
edit: ...last night i listened to siriusXM on my commute home for the first time in a very long while, "high-quality" stream through my phone rather than satellite broadcast, and its compression still sounds awful even at eighty miles per hour with the top down; i don't know what codec they use but it's not significantly better than a 128kpbs MP3...
I don't remember what it was I ABX tested, but it was either decent bit rate lossy (probably MP3 V0 or AAC 256) vs FLAC and had a pretty good hit rate too. No idea about cognitive hearing or any of that.
Source material makes a big difference. Super compressed pop or EDM is going to suffer a lot less than deftly recorded and mastered orchestral prog rock or something like that for example.
I think people just need to do the tests themselves to believe it. Take a lossless and lossy version of something and listen to it side by side.
I have a huge FLAC library for archival purposes since I have a big hard drive, but on my portable devices? Everything is in opus for space efficiency (it's even more efficient than mp3). I have done multiple listening tests with all my audio peripherals and cannot tell the difference, and at the end of the day that's what matters.
The audiophile space is truly where snake oil salesmen thrive.
Right, my FLACs are (hopefully) pure archives of the originals discs. While I may listen to them, it isn't because they sound to me over 320 or v0 MP3s. The FLACs are useful when you want to burn an actual CD (I swear this still comes up for me).
But if you run the test yourself, it's pretty difficult not to placebo effect yourself. Especially when comparing exactly two things -- even when given two identical things to compare, if a person believes they're different they'll often subconsciously make up differences between them.
I know it isn't what Sheep described, but you can run blind ABX tests in your browser.
https://abx.digitalfeed.net/
huh touché, guess I should've figured someone would've made a tool like that
Maybe it's one of those fancy things where, believing you have the superior really truly does boost enjoyment and that extra placebo enjoyment is the worth paying for? :p good to know my
potatobanana quality mp3s are just as good.There's absolutely an element of that. Nobody's brain wants to admit their 99.999% pure silver hand braided oxygen-free cables don't make things sound better because otherwise they'd also have to admit they were a complete idiot for spending the kind of money which could otherwise pay for a really pretty nice holiday (check out the price on the 10m ones) on some bits of useless wire.
I did once encounter one guy (they're almost always men) who spent tens of thousands of pounds building a specially designed room to keep his hifi in, then far more on the gear itself to go in there, only to then complain that most of the recordings he listened to sounded bad because the studio they were recorded in "obviously wasn't using quality equipment"
Well to be faaaaaaair you really do start hearing when something is a bad recording much more with good quality audio. Things you had no idea existed are suddenly obvious. I think every audiophile needs to go through a phase in which they decide whether they prefer listening to music for the music or to be impressed by the realism and acoustic illusion. The latter is sometimes mockingly called "listening to equipment", and this is true in some cases, but I think that enjoying a mindblowingly realistic acoustic illusion with nice music can be great on its own and shouldn't be mocked. I like both of those approaches.
Sounds like a bug, not a feature!
I mean it depends. I can still enjoy crust punk or Darkthrone. Some amateur live recordings with average camera sound became clearer and a bit easier to listen to. But some overly loud popular music recordings became quite annoying, which I consider a feature, not a bug.
The only thing I dislike is that Rick Rubin fucked up a few albums that I enjoy with loudness wars, like half the Slayer discography or Californication by Red Hot Chilli Peppers. And those became even more tiring to listen to than before. It pissed me off so much that I started coding an audio declipper to remove all the clipping distortion and make my own remasters that are easier to listen to, still in progress - that is the weirdest audiophile thing I've ever done by far.
I admire your dedication! I really just meant that I have plenty of poorly mastered/compressed (often popular) music that I wouldn't want to start disliking. If a declipper were in my skill set, who knows?
You mentioning a specially designed room made me remember this article from 2024 about a home stereo that ended up costing around $1 million apparently, but was sold after his death for a total of $156,800, piecemeal. The real value it had was to that guy, not to anybody else, and if anything it was a bit of an albatross around the neck of the house it was in, because the houseprice was inflated because of it. It was a fascinating piece and one I always think of when I'm putting in hours to make my smart home work better. I might appreciate it, and sure, some lights come on automatically, but I'd better not fall into the trap of thinking that there's a linear relationship between the hours (and money) I sink into my home automation hobby and its value to a hard-nosed third-party buyer.
*Edit: spelling
Thanks for making me feel better about using the cheapest wire and bananas I could find on Amazon.
Over at Headfi, they won't even let you mention double blind tests except in one small, ignored subforum. I suspect it causes havok among their advertisers and sponsers.
It really is difficult to wade through all the crap spouted at Headfi when trying to find good information about headphones. Take nothing, absolutely nothing at face value there.
Someone once suggested I start selling "haunted" jewellery, which commands a terrifying price markup, but my worry would be someone would buy something hoping it would cure their illness or help their addiction or something and I couldn't live with myself thinking that had happened. But audiophiles are the only group of people I would feel completely happy ripping off with some made-up bullshit woo-based product. Because at least you know they're only spending money they can afford to waste. Nobody is choosing between speaker cable holders (yes, they exist and they are FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY FUCKING POUNDS FOR THREE) and paying for grandma's care home bills or whatever.
A friend of my dad's made a "mains cleaner" which was pretty much just a 19" box with a capacitor, a switch and an LED. You flicked the switch and the LED came on. He then, to his own surprise as much as anyone else's, won a What Hi-Fi gold award for it and sold a load of them at ÂŁ750 each (and this was in the late 90s!). The parts cost less than ÂŁ15 and almost all of that was the case itself.
fwiw What-Hifi's headphone reviews are pretty decent. They have a rolling "best wireless/best earbud/etc" pages which is constantly up to date. I check there every time I need some new cans - although I usually just buy whatever Sony or Sennheisers fit my budget because I know they make things my ears like. Good audio gear is worth spending a little money on. "Audiophile" gear is not.
Headfi is hilarious sometimes. They definitely lean for more into the "feels" rather than the "reals", but hey them seem somewhat happy about it.
Need a spreadsheet for this? And two sentences to say the same thing? Also, looking at the table they posted, there were 5 correct answers, not 6?
Off topic, sorry
all this stuff has been around for ages. I can easily tell between a 16/44 FLAC and a 320 MP3 using ABX testing in fb2k --- but for cables, I don't know why there would be a dramatic difference or any at all.
On the other end of things, here's comparing different levels for lossless files -- https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
See also: guitarists and their obsession with "tone woods" for electric guitars. Most of them are fooling themselves that they can tell the difference and if it matters.
I expected the capacitive properties(if any) of Banana and Mud to distort the signal, so I was surprised that their effects are inaudible, the distortion could be very minimal that it is inaudible.
There’s a reason audiophiles get nicknamed audiofools sometimes.
I'm not an audiophile but I did try getting into higher quality audio equipment a few years ago and I feel like there's a lot of things similar to this where the difference is so minor that the average person won't be able to make out the difference. I am shocked that there's little difference even with this extreme example though, especially the mud.
A lot of things seem to follow a logarithmic graph, at least if you take the brand name premium out of the equation: double the price at the low end and you get a big jump in quality, double it again and you get a smaller but still really noticeable improvement, double it a third time and you’re pretty much at the top end, and then everything above that is huge increases in cost and/or effort fighting for the last few percent. Almost nobody’s going to notice the difference past the first few steps, and even fewer will really get value out of the later jumps in cost.
Audio equipment in general definitely follows that, but audiophile stuff does also seem to have an unusually high concentration of really expensive stuff that’s just total snake oil. Literal magic crystals and shiny stickers selling for hundreds if not thousands, that kind of thing.
I used to have a pair of Raycon earbuds and lost one of them when walking home from a night out drinking. The Earfun ones I bought to replace them cost about a third of the price and honestly had comparable sound quality. The only thing I didn't like about them was that they'd sometimes lose connection with my device.
This may be more of a dig at Raycon because I found their earbuds to be overpriced and actually quite bad in quality, but I thought I'd see more complaints about them, given how many YouTubers shill their brand for sponsor revenue.
I've since switched to Denon PerL Pro and the difference in audio quality has been subtle. But the best part about the new pair I got is that it comes with an app where I can enable noise cancelling.
I'm deeply attached to my Denon PerL Pros because I have the exact opposite of high-frequency hearing loss and didn't really know it until I saw the profiles on those things. Messing around with digital equalizers to moderate the apparent shrillness and sharpness of recordings has helped over the years, but the Denon earbuds do it automatically and seamlessly, in the precise frequency range where I'm more sensitive than average. It's been an interesting experience revisiting music the way most others hear it.
It's frustrating that Denon isn't releasing updates, but maybe other manufacturers will pick up the technology. Crazy that it's taken this long for audio engineering to address the physiological variability of sound response directly, and not just hearing loss prosthesis.
Is there any kind of mud that isn't wet?
Dried mud or frozen mud come to mind. Though dried mud could just be called clods.
Or... ceramics?
I am not joking. I run all my audio through ceramics. It is somewhat important to choose decent ceramics and you would definitely hear the difference in bass if you used not enough of it.
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