Are high-end stereo owners deluding themselves?

Factual Questions
1

After reading a recent article on randi.org, and follow-ups, I became rather surprised at some of the gimmickry- nay, quackery- that some “stereophiles” are foisting off on buyers.

I had thought that a user of a high-end audio system might be somewhat above buying overpriced green felt-tip pens or $300 CD “demagnetizers”, but that is apparently not the case.

I can see the use of power supply “conditioners”- like a large computer USP or battery backup- and high-dollar speakers… and possibly the difference between “solid state” and vacumm-tube amplifiers…

But a “Clock” you plug in to the system which somehow conditions the power? $1,800 cables that are marked as to which direction the “sound” is supposed to flow? CD “demagnetizers”? Dipping CDs in liquid nitrogen?

So what’s the Straight Dope? Do these things actually make a difference? In the Randi article, James apparently offered the $1M prize of Tice could prove his “clock” does what he says it does, but Tice mentioned that few could hear the difference, no test could easily differentiate, etc. and so forth.

When I read that- being something of a skeptic myself- I figured, okay, if it works, do the test and take the money. If it doesn’t work, then it’s a scam… right?

Can somebody with the so-called “Golden Ear” really tell the difference in sound if, say, someone plugs in some supposedly ‘electrically noisy’ appliance elsewhere in the house? How about if the $1,800 cables are replaced with mere $5 Radio Shack cables?

Now I don’t want to disparage stereo users in general. I fully understand that better- read that as ‘more expensive’- equipment will give a better sound.

I guess what I’m asking is, can some people really tell the difference in sound, using some of these devices, or are they being fooled into thinking they can by hucksters selling overpriced, useless gimcracks?

2

I was a musician in a past lifetime, and had a small recording studio in my house. Recorded all the local bands. I’m no expert, but I can definitely hear things in music that average people can’t, some faint instrument or some strange reverb or one instrument that is really three or whatever.

My opinion is “yes”; high-end stereo owners are deluding themselves, and in a big way. Maybe someone with super-sensative ears can tell the difference between a good sound system and really high-end equipment, but I can’t.

3

Forget it. While there are some very expensive things out there that sound good, the high-end hifi world is chock full O’ snake-oil salesmen, hucksters, and ‘inventors’ with little or no scientific or engineering training.

You can buy a 5’ power cord for $895. That’s just the CORD. And this isn’t some exotic high-frequency low-level signal, we’re talking about a cord to replace your generic black cord for AC power. A moment’s thought ought to tell you that by the time the power leaves the generating station, travels hundreds or thousands of miles through god-knows-how-many transformers, into your house, through your breaker panel, and into your wall socket, using an expensive power cord for the last 5’ isn’t going to do diddly. And even if there is some amazing multi-thousand dollar AC regenerator between the wall and the stereo, you’re not going to change anything with a different cable. Over that distance, at those frequencies, there’s no way you could induce any RF that would matter.
I’m sure some of the people that make this stuff believe in their own products, however misguided. But plenty more know exactly how they are screwing you.

What makes testing these things difficult is that the terms used by audiophiles for describing sound quality are so subjective as to be untestable. How do you put an oscilloscope on something to measure its ‘warmth’? Or its “three dimensional soundstage”? Couple unquantifiable measuring sticks with the placebo effect and/or the power of suggestion, and you are in huckster heaven.

Further complicating the problem is that standard double-blind testing is not easy to do when you’ve a mess of parts all strung together in complex ways and you want to change out components for A/B testing. You also have to level-match the two, because if two sounds vary in loudness, humans will almost always pick the louder sound as ‘better’. So yeah, maybe you can hear the difference between those monster cables that are thick as your wrist and standard 12-gauge ZIP cord, but maybe all you are hearing is a subtle volume change caused by the lower resistance of the monster cord. So instead of spending $5,000 on cables, just turn your stereo up a notch.

It’s all this kind of stuff that drives skeptics nuts. They keep asking for proof, the other side says, “LISTEN!”. Then, if you can’t hear what he’s hearing, you’re obviously a philistine with a tin ear, and your opinion is worthless. You can ask the guy to show you the measurements, but he’ll respond, “there are so many subtle changes that each one cannot be measured electronicaly. But the brain puts it all back together again, creating a warm 3-D soundstage with just the slightest hint of discoloration in the mid-bass.” Uh huh.

4

I agree, but it does help to have a nice set of speakers and definitely a sub woofer.

And… if you plan to set up a room for sourround sound(or loud parties), buy a reciever that is designed for it. Otherwise, if you try to run two sets of speakers out of each port, you will constantly throw the internal breaker, like I did :D. “Brownouts”, they call 'em.

5

I’m generally with Bill H. on this one. I can tell the difference between “sterophile” systems and mass-market stuff. I’ve been known to get a little snobbish, myself. But when we start talking super high-end ( i.e over $20,000 ) that discrimination ends for me. At that point I suspect very, very few are really hearing a significant change.

Of course for many of those people ( the merely self-indulgently rich excluded ) that own those sort of systems, fiddling with their gear is half the fun. It’s often seems almost ritualized.

If you have the spare cash and like playing with technological toys, regardless of efficacy, ( my father does ), more power to you, I guess :slight_smile: .

  • Tamerlane
6

Expensive speaker cables to my view are a marketing gimmick.

The manufacturers claim that cable capacitance comprimises frequency response, or mutual inductance does, or more often that the skin effect reduces cable performance at high frequencies.

This is all absolutes tosh, the values of frequency, inductance, capacitance are so small that to have any effect on the electrical impulses through the cables
would only occur at frequencies, way, way, way beyond the hearing of any known creature.

Poor connectors can make a differance but the ones you see on these cables are capable of carrying enormous amounts of current, certainly far more than will ever be put throught them.

Some will say that resistance plays a part but as soon as you get beyond a cable section of around 1.5mm[sup]2[/sup] again this is pretty much irrelevant.

If you look at an amp that has a maximum output of say 200W per channel and a rail voltage of maybe 50V then you will only get 4amps per channel and that cable I mentioned would carry 20 amps without too much trouble yet some of these cables have a cross sectional area in excess of 6mm[sup]2[/sup], enough for over 60 amps.

The idea of cable having one way or preferential direction of flow is laughable as the output of every audio amplifier is bi-directional, unless you are mistaking the fact that the cables are marked with regard to the polarity of the speakers because to get speakers connected in dynamic opposition to each other does have a very noticeable effect, I wouldn’t be surprised if cables were marketed as having a supposed current direction as there is a lot of bullshit offered and taken up in the credulous world of the hifi buff.

As for CD ‘demagnetisers’ this has to be tosh since the vast majority of CD’s have an aluminium film for the recorded track, though I’ve seen a few gold ones, in any case lasers do not, as far as I know, have anything at all to do with electrical properties since they are optical devices, indeed one of the reasons that research is being carried out on optical gate arrays for future computors is that they are not constrained by the effects of magnetic field among other things and fibre-optic cable is often used where signals have to pass in an electrically noisy environment.

I have seen pre-amps that use large rechargeable batteries and is is true that having separate supplies for the power amplifier and pre-amplifier can make a differance but a device that comes in line before the common to both mains tranformer, rather than replace it with separate ones will do nothing at all in terms of audio.

As for no test being able to differentiate, every change can be measured, and nowadays the equipment is not terribly exotic, most colleges of higher education will have it.
This stuff will detect differances that are way beyond the ability of the human ear.

It largely a type of snobbery, in that having expensive stuff is exclusive and even that appreciation of the subtle audio differances between components is somehow more intellectually sophisitcated.

When one thinks that to get that perfect sound involves consideration of the space in which it is to be reproduced, the number of people in the room, even your health you just have to think there are a lot of folk with too little technical knowledge and too much cash around.

When it comes down to it, if music is so important to you then you would go out and listen to the recital live, supporting the artist directly and feeling that which no sound reproduction equipment can ever come close to, the atmosphere and ambience.

7

Your post brings up a recollection from the past that I will never forget.
I once opened my home to a guy who had just gone thru a wrenching divorce, so that he would have a roof/bed until he figured out what to do.
This guy had a fairly “killer system” with speakers (wish I could remember brand) mounted on spikes, 350 watt Pioneer amp, and speaker cables that were at least 1/2" in diameter (royal blue in color…)
I, at that time had 2 stereos, my old “college” system and a more respectable system, that I had bought after working several years, and had a couple of bux in the bank.
For grins, we set up all three stereo systems in my den, with speakers wall-to-wall.
The interesting comparison was between my old college system and my friend’s 350 watt system…
18 wpc Technics receiver mated to no-brand-name 8" woofer 3-way speakers with astonishingly lightweight driver magnets, and using a portable walkman-type cd player as source…
We were both astonished at the complete lack of detectability of any perceptible sound quality difference between the two systems…
My friend harrumphed that the “big money is spent on the remaining 2% of performance”, which would somewhat dovetail with your point…big dollars chasing infinitesimal and very incremental improvements

8

I can assure you that high-end stereophiles are NOT deluding themselves. Sure, there is a lot of snake oil being sold (monster cables make a huge difference, but they are NOT unidirectional) and sure, there’s a point of diminishing returns. And most contemporary music is mastered so poorly that there’s no quality in there that even the best stereo could bring out. However, I have a friend who was a record producer in LA, he has the largest vinyl collection I’ve ever seen, and an $80,000 stereo rig, his favorite records are early direct-to-disc stereo recordings, and oh man, you ought to hear them, and you’d absolutely agree that a high-end rig makes a huge difference.
But to address the problem more specifically, I am probably one of the few people on earth who have extensive experience with A/B stereo component comparisons that actually work. I used to work for a stereophile shop, I worked with them to create a computer controlled switching system for A/B comparisons. All the systems were level-matched, we could use the computer to set up configurations out of a wide array of speakers, amps, etc, and change them with the press of a button. All the switching was done blind, we made a point of not biasing customer’s judgements by telling them what config was active, we let them hear it for themselves. And ALL the customers could easily tell the difference when we switched to better quality components. It was easy to add components to fill in weak spots in the sound profiles, and customers’ subjective judgements closely followed the measurements.

9

monstercable.com explains the unidirectional cables here.. It’s talking about patch cables though, not speaker cables.

Fine print: [sub]the poster of this URL does not nesissarily agree with the contents. Viewer discression advised. All rights reserved. Oh, for crying out loud, just read the next post already.

10

I certainly wouldn’t argue that high-quality components make a difference. I’d even agree that some people can tell the difference between a $20,000 stereo and a $100,000 stereo.

But we’re talking about the stuff up in the stratosphere. Like, a $2000 replacement TOSLink digital cable, that is supposed to make your sound ‘brighter’. This is a DIGITAL cable, folks. With errror-correcting circuitry on each side. There is NOTHING you can do to a digital signal to make it sound ‘brighter’. The only way a cable is going to affect the sound is if it is so crappy that it causes more errors than the ECC can handle, and you’ll hear that as clicks or just gaps of silence.

And I’d even agree that basic Monster Cable will sound better than cheap lamp cord for connecting speakers. But is there a difference between $2/ft monster cable, and some of the really exotic $500/ft cables that are out there? Not a chance. Certainly nothing that is audible.

I had a discussion a while ago with a guy who spent enormous effort making sure that his two speaker wires were exactly the same length. See, the high-end audio guy told him that if his speaker wires had different lengths, the differing propagation delays would cause a phase mismatch. This line of BS managed to sell another 10 feet or so of cable.

Sure, it’s true that mismatched lengths would cause a slight phase imbalance. But electrical signals propagate down speaker wire at close to the speed of light! And once the sound hits the air, it slows way down to the speed of, well, sound. That means that sitting 1 mm off-axis will create the same phase mismatch as having one speaker wire several kilometers longer than the other. A 10 ft difference in lengths is completely, utterly, inaudible, and even if you could hear it is completely overwhelmed by the changes made once the sound leaves the speaker.

This is the kind of pseudo-science we’re talking about here, and not necessarily the difference between your Pioneer amp and a quality amp like a Bryston, which WILL be an improvement.

11

I have a nice sound system and quality components, within limits, do make an audible difference but every time I hear some audiophile wax ecstatic over the latest
1000. "godzilla" cable or 4,000 magnetically levitated CD player he spent the rent money on I think of two things.

1: How technically oriented males (audio geeks are overwhelmingly male) who try to pride themselves on hard eyed reason and logic are really wish driven emotional puppets in hands of clever marketers and peer pressure and sincerely believe under these influences that the Emperor’s new clothes really do sound better.
2: The situation about 10 years ago where minimally functional autistic children where “found” to have vibrant and intellectually dynamic inner lives, despite their inablity to express themselves, by devoted parents and interpreters who used letter boards to let the child spell out his thoughts by assisted pointing. There were serious colleges giving people degrees in this “discipline”. In the end it all turned out to be about the interpreters hopes and wishes not the child’s but the “enablers” were sincerely and absolutely sure it was the child not themselves dictating the responses.

In sum people will believe practically anything, no matter how empirically unreasonable or farfetched if it reinforces their view of the world and makes them feel special or good about themselves. Super high end audiophile geeks are the surest proof of this on this planet.

12

Audiophiles are kind of like wine connoiseurs, through experience and effort on their part (not golden ears), they appreciate differences in audio reproduction that others do not notice. The differences in sound caused by a change in cables, for instance, is quite small, but might be important to them. Whether it is worth the hundreds to thousands of dollars spent, is another story altogether.

OTOH, there are snake-oil type of products out there for the audiophile to waste their money on. I find that they fall into 2 categories:

Products that can’t possibly affect the final signal. These are things like the CD pens that supposedly make the player read the CD better. Please, the CD reader outputs the bits encoded on the CD with almost 100% accuracy, improving it is of no value. Keeping that digital signal accurate afterwords may be of some value, but the initial read is already almost perfect.

Products that could affect the signal, but that the designers can’t adequately explain. Expensive disks and exotic cables and such that might actually do something, but often appear to just be stabs in the dark by the designers, hoping someone will believe and buy.

I’ve heard my share of high-end systems, some are truly amazing, worth every dollar, and some just suck toes, money flushed down the proverbial toilet.

13

I have never seen a better description of myself.
:smiley:

14

The thing about audiophiles is that they don’t like double blind tests. i.e. listen to these two things without knowing which is which and tell me which one sounds better. The reason they don’t like these is because they cannot tell the difference between the expensive stuff and the moderately priced stuff. If they say they can they are wrong.

15

casdave mentioned (in passing) gold CDs. How good are they? If the information encoded is the same as regular CDs a half decent system should be just as good as the highest of the high.

Is there a selling point other than the “cool gadget” effect?

BTW I have never heard one. I could never see the point of coughing out the extra $$

16

It’s not the size of the system, it’s what you play through it.

17

I agree with just about everyone here.

I’m a one-time audiophile, and have what you would call a “medium-end-that-thinks-its-a-high-end” system. At one time I was really into reading about the high-end stuff (that’s all I could afford to do), even to the point where I would purchase British audiophile magazines and dream about owning $150K speakers. (To this day, I am convinced all British audio reviewers moonlight as wine tasting judges/reviewers.) But my rational side eventually got the better of me and I realized that most high-end equipment is very over priced. And I mean grossly. Eventually I subscribed to more mainstream audiophile magazines such as Audio, but finally dropped it a couple of years ago.

Here’s why: I came to the conclusion that, no matter what type of components you purchase, and no matter how much money you spend, your stereo system will not even come close to sounding like a live performance. And isn’t that the goal? As “proof,” virtually any person can walk by any nightclub along the street and know instantly whether it is a) a live band, or b) the bar’s playing a CD through the sound system. Granted the house system might not be the finest quality, but I don’t think it matters.

Looking at it another way….

Let’s say a live performance can be graphically portrayed as follows:

|-------------------------------------------------------------|

If you spend $500 for an entire system, the realism will be

|-----|

If you spend $1,000 for an entire system, the realism will be

|---------|

If you spend $5,000 for an entire system, the realism will be

|-----------|

If you spend $50,000 for an entire system, the realism will be
|------------|
Notice three things:

  1. The more money you spend, the more improvement you’ll get
  2. For every incremental dollar you spend, the lower the incremental improvement will be (like a logarithmic function)
  3. No matter how much money you spend, your stereo system will never get close to sounding like a live concert.
18

re: audiophile snake oil salesmen – why is it that the reviewers for the high-end audio publications eat this stuff up? Take, for instance, the review at http://www.soundstage.com/revequip/esp_power_cord.htm. I’ll quote a little bit …

“The thing I noticed immediately about the sound of my system with the ESP products in use was a new kind of connection between noise and the music that emerges from it. I started with a pair of The Essence cords on my amps and immediately noticed that individual sounds – singers, instruments, spatial cues – emerged from a deep blackness and with a quick, immediate quality, perhaps due to a decrease in the noise floor of my system.” (Marc Mickelson, Soundstage)

Now, if you’ve got a $50,000 stereo system, the kind that you’d test $5,000 power cords on, the stock sound should not resemble a “deep blackness.” Reading between the lines, I see that you’re admitting the system is already pretty bad.

Anyhow, I digress. The equivalent to the stereo reviewers (a disproportionately large number of them British, as Crafter_Man eluded to) are performing a disservice to their readers. It’s as if a glowing review of Herbalife as a weight loss aid makes its presence in the New England Journan of Medicine – you would expect more.

Also, it seems like the conditions of the recording studio are never considered. The fact that a $1000 amp and $500 monitor speakers are used in the studio apparently doesn’t register to those reviewing $50,000 amps and $150,000 speakers. The quality of a recording is only as good as the ngineers in the studio make it – it won’t improve by magic if you have equipment that’s “better” than what can be found in the studio on your end.

19

First of all, I’d rather listen to good music on a mediocre system than mediocre music on a megabuck system. For some reason most musicians don’t really care about home stereos and usually have mediocre systems. My $1,350 (in 1995) Magnepan speakers made converts out of everyone who heard them (a taste of the high end can be had without spending megabucks). I still miss those speakers. But I digress from the OP. Accessories cause such contention in audiophileland. You dollars are better spent on components, and your time better spent setting up the speakers so that they project a nice soundstage. The last straw for me accessory-wise was the wooden hockey pucks called mpingo disks. Placing them on a speaker or component was supposed to improve the sound. Let the millionaire audiophile worry about this stuff. But let me say this - don’t let this accessory nonsense (and there may be some good accessories out there) convince you that the high end is full of baloney. Listen to an entry level system at a high end store. Bring your own music and an open mind.

20

Not exactly on topic, but I generally agree with King Rat. I have a fairly low middle end system (Rotel integrated amp, B&W speakers). For a long time I was using a Denon CD player, which was fine, and I never noticed any problems with it. One day a friend who’s a real audio nut brought over his Linn CD player (Linn makes a CD player, that plays one CD only, that they market for $20,000 - my friend got a lower level player used for about $1500). The difference between his Linn and my Denon was astonishing. I heard things on my CDs I’d never heard before (like Glenn Gould humming while playing the piano on the Goldberg Variations, like Stevie Ray Vaughn’s amplifier buzzing on Little Wing), and the overall clarity was just much, much greater. I have since bought a DVD player that I use to play CDs, and I think it’s close to the Linn in CD reproduction (DVD players generally have much better digital to analog conversion chips than straight CD players). Power conditioners, woven silver speaker cables, etc., might not make a difference, but the CD player sure does.