I should also add that it’s interesting – and telling – that neither the turntable nor the cartridge description at that site provides any detailed technical specifications, just glowing poetic commentary. You have to write to them to get specs. I suspect one reason for this is that if you actually compared the specs to those of similar components that you could buy at any decent audio store for realistic prices, they would be substantially the same in any meaningful, detectable way.
I used to date an audiophile [it ended because he wanted to move to LA and I didn’t, not because of the joke] and he and his roomie moved from an apartment to a condo, and he left his stereo for us to move in the van instead of to the professional movers. I had a couple spare all in one cheapie stereos in the back room for an art project, so we disassembled to components and dumped them into the original box for the Nakamichi Dragon … and let him open it like it was holding a holy relic and waited for the screaming to start =) [we had the Dragon in the bedroom stored carefully on the dresser =) ]
It was epic.
Once the screaming stopped, and we gave him his Dragon back, he calmed down. In the end, he actually agreed it was a pretty good joke.
Ah, here we go! 
Once you have the above-mentioned $27,000 turntable + cartridge, not including. as I said, the cost of the cable to connect it to a pre-amp, which itself will probably cost much as a yacht, then you get to the pre-amp itself: merely $36,000.
Please note that this is a pre-amp, not an amplifier. It’s needed because of the extremely low output level of any sort of magnetic phono cartridge. The thing is, though, that any standard amplifier also has a built-in pre-amp for the phono inputs (and some modern turntables have built-in pre-amps as well). But of course this will not do for the true audiophile once he has taken leave of his senses and become a full-fledged lunatic.
So now we have a total of $63,000 for what is essentially a turntable, ready to plug in to the amplifier and the rest of the sound system, not counting the cost of the cables. So realistically, if we keep up the “quality”, we’ll need at least $10K for cabling, so maybe a total of around $73,000 for the turntable and the ability to plug it in to the rest of your audio system. I wonder how much such an aficionado would have spent on the entirety of the rest of the system and its cabling?
My amps and speakers would cry in agony if they were fed with that POS. Personally, I won’t settle for anything less than the Audio Note M10 Signature Preamp. Yea, the $137K price tag may have depleted our children’s college fund, but the silver input and output transformers made it all worthwhile. I mean, just listen!
The US Distributor listed in the article is a house in Palo Alto, Ca. Less that 100 yards(straight line) from the house I grew up in.
From their website.
We currently live in the San Francisco Bay Area (Palo Alto, Silicon Valley) in the U.S. and run our store out of our home, usually with at least one million dollar system for our customers to enjoy.
doesn’t even begin to describe my reaction.
Thank you. I was going to order the $36,000 pre-amp today but, like the turntable cited in the OP, it is obviously cheap junk. I will get the proper one for $137,000 instead.
Just as a side note, years ago I thought it would be fun to set up a direct-to-home satellite system even though I already had cable. One major part of the system consists of the satellite dish, which really has a major job to do compared with an audio pre-amp. The parabolic dish itself, once properly aimed, gathers and focuses the extremely weak satellite signal from around 25,000 miles away onto a tiny microwave receiving antenna at its focal point, which antenna is directly coupled to a low-noise pre-amp right at the dish, because the signal level is so low that there would be major losses along any length of cable.
The antenna plus pre-amp combo is called an LNB (low-noise amplifier and block downconverter). It has the dual function of greatly amplifying the weak satellite signal and also converting the microwave frequencies to lower ones suitable for transmission through a coax cable. The LNB connects to an IRD (integrated receiver-decoder) inside the house, which also supplies power to the LNB through the same cable.
This is pretty sophisticated stuff, and provides high-definition TV with theatrical quality sound. The cost of this amazing low-noise satellite pre-amp, dish included? Around $60. The cost of the IRD? Don’t really remember, but somewhere in the ballpark of $100.
To be fair, all this stuff just generates the raw signal, so the quality of the TV and the home theater audio system and all its components and speakers are all important. But I just find it hilarious that someone can justify $137,000 for an audio pre-amp when a highly sensitive low-noise high-bandwidth pre-amp on a satellite dish for both HD video and multi-channel audio is $60.
I had a hunch, so I did some searching and it turns out that no true audiophile would plug directly into a municipal power grid. You’ve got to condition the power first.. It’s listed as unavailable on their website but I found it elsewhere for a mere 5k.
A review from the site:
“It’s not surprising that such a dejected-looking sinewave could suck the joy out of music. I knew it was possible that fixing my power would make my music cleaner and more accurate. What I didn’t anticipate was that it would make the music so much more engaging. Maybe more accurate is more engaging—an appealing thought. Anyway, the PerfectWave P10 Power Plant may be an essential accessory for any audiophile who lives in a neighborhood like mine. A power conditioner—sorry, regenerator—may not be a sexy purchase, but I’m going to have a hard time sending this thing back.”
Well, if you can’t be bothered to pay for one of these…
Then I don’t think you’re really dedicated to you home system.
< sniffs > My first power cord cost more than that. </ sniffs >
Actually, I did say earlier that in some cases a power conditioner or a good UPS might make sense (if, say, you’re out in the sticks with flaky or unreliable power, or get occasional voltage drops, or whatever). But even so, $5K is stupid for a device that isn’t even a UPS, but mainly just looks fancy. It probably does provide clean power, but FFS, I get far more value from one of these.
It delivers constant-voltage clean power, normally without having to switch to battery except in a power failure or extreme low voltage, and when on battery, provides true sine wave power, not a sine wave approximation which doesn’t play nice with some power supplies (particularly power factor correction (PFC) designs).
That said, I use it with my main desktop computer, not my audio system, which just has a surge protector. I don’t know how often, during a thunderstorm or whatever may have been the cause of a power interruption, I thanked what gods there are for having this thing, because Murphy’s Law says that if you’re going to have a power outage, it’s going to be in the middle of doing something important on the computer.
Nor did I pay USD $589 for it. I got it during one of the times that Dell Canada was periodically offering it on sale for CDN $199 with free delivery. One of their best deals at the time which, sadly, are not being offered any more.
For my money, the funniest audiophile ripoff has to be Brilliant Pebbles.
Now on one hand, they’re a real steal compared to some of the stuff here at a mere $99 each, though outfitting an entire setup with them would get expensive. On the other hand, they’re selling small bags of rocks that you tape to the cables. Or perhaps place on top of, or nearby your equipment.
The value in that thing is the bragging rights the audiophile purchaser has with other audiophiles - especially since he’ll convince them that his golden ears require such a machine to deliver the nuances only he can hear.
And he’ll acrually believe it, or he’d have to admit that he blew 12 grand on old technology that can’t hope to match the fidelity of a $50 digital audio player that can handle uncompressed audio streams.
Audiophiles love turntables, because like other hobbyists they want to play with the hardware. With a turntable you have to carefully clean the needle, choose cartridges, clean your albums, isolate the turntable, yada yada. You can spend enjoyable hours pouring over catalogs for record brushes and cleaners, isolators, cartridges, vinyl albums, etc. To normal people, this is a pain in the ass. To a true hobbyist, it’s part of the fun and ritual.
When CD’s came out, audiophiles were lost. Back in the day there were plenty of things to tune and tweak. Now you plop in the CD or start the digital player and you’re done. So of course audiophiles invented special techniques for drawing on your CD to make it sound better, and they started buying into all sorts of craziness like $1000 ‘isolators’ that woild elevate speaker cables 6" off the ground, or $400 ‘tice clocks’ to align the digital bits, or whatever.
But now they have their beloved turntables back. $12,000 doesn’t have to make sense - it just has to make the turntable exclusive and the purchaser feel special. That’s the value. It’s what economists call a ‘Veblenesque good’ - one that derives its value from its high price, like Gucci handbags or diamonds. If a Gucci handbag cost $50, the rich wouldn’t want fhem.
You’re right! While the prices here are not in the astronomical range of some of the other devices mentioned, I have to admit that $99 for a bag of rocks to improve the quality of your sound system deserves some kind of marketing award – I dunno, “Snake Oil of the Year, or something”.
The guy could use some of those rocks around his server. It appears that most of his image links are broken. Or maybe he isn’t using the proper $50,000 cables for those image links.
From a purist perspective there is no such thing as “uncompressed” digital audio, since all digital audio is a compromise between sampling rate, sample size, and storage and processing requirements, in addition to the fact that it may be further degraded by lossy compression. There is certainly “lossless” compression like FLAC, and the Redbook PCM encoding standard for CDs technically has no compression, but that hardly means that it represents audio perfection. Far from it – it’s limited by its sampling rate and 16-bit sample size. A higher sampling rate and other alleged benefits is one of the reasons that SACD was developed. The fact that a recording is digital and lossless (or “uncompressed”, if you like) does not in any way mean that it’s perfect. Far from it. It means that it’s different, and in many practical ways superior to the analog equivalent consumer product, but in some ways not.
Vinyl is of course pure analog with entirely different characteristics and limitations than digital media. Modern recordings will likely originate from digital studio masters, but older recordings will probably come from analog master tapes. And the result will not be the same as a CD or SACD from either of those original studio sources.
It’s a lot like the conundrum with speakers, their placement, and the acoustics of the room. None of it will ever be “perfect”, which is really kind of an amorphous and subjective concept anyway. At a basic level we strive for high quality and realism and we intuitively know it when we hear it, but in the final analysis you pick and choose the qualities that you find most pleasing for what you like to listen to.
This conversation has opened a window into a world I hardly knew existed. I now see that the $12K phono at Best Buy is a piece of junk. Running Coach has led me to this $38,000-55,000 turntable. Nothing else will reproduce the hiss and pops of my Pretty In Pink soundtrack album. (Honestly, PiP is the only vinyl record I’ve ever bought new. As a teen, cassette was the format of choice for me. I did buy a used copy of The Doors’ LA Woman as a gift for my wife years ago.)
Seriously, just what is the serious audiophile trying to accomplish? Let’s suppose that a guy singing and playing a guitar live in your living room is as “real” as music can be. So, any music lover simply wants the music to sound like the guy with the guitar is right there in my living room. I don’t see how I need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get there. Now, if I’m trying to recreate a superior musical experience for every person in a stadium, I can see needing to spend some money. But, just for me in my house? Please.
Wolfpup mentions the LNB he uses for satellite TV service at his house. I have a fairly inexpensive 4K TV and connected to my Dish Genie device via a wireless Joey. The picture, to me, is pretty much immaculate. I can, however, tell the difference between what I have at home and the high-end monitors on display at Best Buy.
In my car, I have SiriusXM. I listen to music on it quite a lot. However, I assume that the signal is heavily compressed. When I listen to music from my iPhone (even when the source of the music is the internet), the frequency response seems to be much wider than when I’m on satellite. Even then, at best, I’m listening to compressed mp3 recordings.
Maybe I’m just not the target for this stuff. I sure don’t have the bank account for it.
I remember that James Randi offered his prize (back when it was still a thing and when HDMI was fairly new) to any audiophile who could reliably tell a standard set of high-end HDMI cables from a ten thousand dollar version. I don’t think anybody ever took him up on it.
But really, these guys are no different than oenophiles with ‘supernatural’ palates who spend thousands of dollars on bottles. At least an audiophile can enjoy their purchases and still try to sell the equipment later if they tire of the hobby.
Being part of a community of peers is part of the draw of any hobby. Bring part of an EXCLUSIVE community is important to some folks. Some exclusive communities are gated by experience or intelligence or skill. Others are simply gated by cost.
Yes, but only if by “purist” you mean someone who ignores the range of human hearing. You have the Nyquist-Shannon frequency theorum, which is a physical property of sound that says that all frequencies below half the sample rate will be reproduced perfectly. So when we talk stuff like 48khz, that means sound under 24khz is reproduced perfectly, and normal human hearing goes up to 20khz.
The only limitation is the quantization of the amplitude, aka the volume levels. With 16-bit, you get over 65,000 different levels. With 24-bit, you get over 16 million different volume levels. It’s hard enough to tell the difference for the first, let alone the second.
So, as long as there is no further lossy compression, a 48khz 24bit sampled song is going to be outside the human perception to notice the difference. The fact you’re trying to reproduce that sound with limited range speakers (even if you have the best possible ones) is going to matter long before then.
The only reason for higher formats is that the quality can degrade when you manipulate it with effects or even just increasing the volume. Well, that and playing to audiophiles who swear they can hear the difference, despite A/B testing showing otherwise, same as with their overpriced equipment.
Indeed. I know someone [NB this has nothing to do with the rich bloke I mentioned before with the $$$$$ Nagra amplifiers] who can distinguish and describe undesirable artifacts in CD-quality PCM music versus professional studio reel-to-reel analog tape. Needless to say, that sort of equipment is not marketed to “audiophiles” (who would have nothing to do with it anyway), and I have no idea how much it costs, maybe hundreds of thousands. The same person does also use various digital formats; they have many digital studio formats, some of which are not PCM at all.
I presume the ideal goal is to have the played-back recording sound exactly the same as the original. To the extent the audiophile is just a consumer, though, he or she is completely reliant on all the work done by the recording and sound engineers. The music will have been manipulated in all sorts of ways just to produce a master recording.
Sampling rate/frequency is not the only issue. Jitter and quantization and nonlinearity can affect the stereo image, for example. You might not be able to tell if you were not familiar with the original, though, unless it were really bad.
They do use “higher formats” in the studio, but there is no reason anyone buying the music would have access to them. So I guess you have to hope the people editing and mastering the music did a good job.
ETA without claiming anything about the importance of the fact, under certain circumstances people absolutely can tell the difference between digital and analogue formats and among different digital formats. For instance,
…a 2014 study conducted at the Tokyo University of the Arts found that listeners could distinguish PCM (192 kHz/24 bits) from either DSD (2.8 MHz) or DSD (5.6 MHz) (but not between the two DSD samplings), preferring the sound of DSD over PCM: “For example, Drums stimulus of DSD (5.6 MHz) has p = 0.001 when compared against PCM (192 kHz/24 bit) in overall preference. This suggests that DSD version was statistically significantly preferred over the PCM version.”
Yes, someone can do a bad job digitizing or mastering the content. It’s not an inherent problem with the format, though, which is what was being stated in the post I was responding to.
I was talking about PCM, since that is the format most audio is in these days. I don’t know much about DSD, but if it sounds different than PCM, then, based on what I know, I would expect that it was the one that was less accurate, even if it was actually preferred by the listeners.
The same would be my presumption for any discrepancy between an analog recording and PCM–that it was the analog recording that had artifacts. Most analog media has them. And they even change over time.
My friend’s specific complaint was of distorsions in the stereophonic field in consumer-quality digital PCM (think: CDs) versus a good analog recording.
He definitely did not say anything along the lines that analogue tapes cannot have artifacts, or that 192 kHz/24 bit PCM, or DXD or DSD should be avoided.
ETA don’t forget to hock your car for a microphone, like the Blues Brothers