What could a phonograph do to be worth $12000?

In My Humble Opinion
61

A few years ago I got to see Neil Young at a tech conference pushing his new Pono system.

First, he ranted about how Apple and iTunes were destroying music; it sounded like a bitter personal vendetta. He talked about his new product that stored digital files with something like 8 times the data of an MP3. Then he pulled out his Pono player - about the size of a beer can, but triangular - not something you could slip comfortably into your pocket.

I was skeptical, and with good reason as it turned out. In blind testing, most listeners couldn’t tell the difference between Pono and MP3’s. The price was high and storage capacity low, and content was overpriced. The company failed.

This to me is an example of how the evils of digital compression are usually overstated by audiophiles. A telling quote from the linked article states, “Several commentators suggested that the key to improved sound lay largely in music engineering and mastering practices, rather than in file formats and players.”

62

Sometimes these things get mixed together. For example, there’s the famous loudness war with CDs that degraded their effective dynamic range. This wasn’t a problem with the medium, but the medium allowed it. When records started making a comeback, they didn’t have this problem–partly because they were just being mastered by different engineers with different motivations, and partly because you would physically wreck a player if you somehow mastered it to the same loudness. So despite being an inferior medium technically, those same limitations made it so any given album might sound better on vinyl.

63

Even if it was a top of the line turntable, friction would cause immediate and continuous sound degradation. I remember when I was little and my dad would play his old Beetles records. Thee was some crackling and hissing that I remember. He must have played them a lot when he bought them.

64

That’s part of the experience.

65

A question: do actual professionals, like sound technicians or DJs, also use this ultra-expensive sound equipment, or is it just the aficionados? Because I’d much rather trust the judgement of experts - by which I mean people who get paid to do stuff - than that of amateurs, no matter how knowledgeable.

66

Just the aficionados.

There is a class of audio equipment called pro audio that is used by DJs and recording engineers. They’re designed for reliability, not aesthetics, and are reasonably priced.

67

Experts have different needs. Michael Bay isn’t editing his movie on a 30 foot tall screen. I’m not going to take my stereo and pack it into a van 150 times a year like some DJ.

My brother and one of my friends were into audiophile stuff, and I got to tag along, and listen to their gear. There were two experiences that stand out as examples of how people get into this stuff.

One was a trip to a store, they setup some music for me to listen to while showing my friend some stuff and I can say without exaggeration that I’ve never heard anything like this system before or since. Not like the Memorex guy with the speakers blowing his hair back, but a level of detail that I didn’t even know existed. It was like the entire band was in front of me spread across the room, I could pick out each musician, exactly where that person was standing, spread over like a 30 foot space, as crisp and clean as if they were really there. The system had a turntable, tube pre-amp, and tube amp all products people would say are inherently inferior sloppy distortion ridden designs. But I’ve never heard music sound better.

The other was a lot less impressive, but surprised the hell out of me. My friend and one of his buddies are playing music, fiddling with the system and I’m 20 feet away reading a magazine, not really paying attention. They play the same song a few times, and one time my head just snapped up from the magazine. “What did you guys just do?” I asked, because it sounded completely different, like a ton more bass or something like that. “We changed a cable.” was the reply.

I never got into it beyond getting a nice set of headphones and a dedicated headphone amplifier for my bedroom, but I appreciate the appeal, and how people get sucked into it. I am very glad I never got into it because there’s a pursuit of perfection to the hobby and folks never really seem happy and satisfied with their systems.

68

Dang.

At what point does it make better sense financially to just coax the Trashmen out of retirement to play Surfin’ Bird live?

69

Handbags can cost $50?

I thought they were about ten bucks.

70

I want to buy a gramophone.

71

I know someone who used to work for Nordost, a manufacturer of high-end speaker cables mentioned above. Many of them are ribbon cables, similar to what was found inside the average tower PC in the olden days. In a moment of candor (read: she was drunk) she admitted that they buy the ribbon cable in bulk. The ends of the cables are also off-the-shelf items. All they do is put them together in a pretty package.

72

I have worked in fields that have very difficult electrical requirements. High speed signals that dwarf the requirements of audio, in environments full of radio noise, where absolute fidelity is a must. I have never seen these types of systems wired with anything more than good quality belkin cables or the like.

Audiophiles glom on to lots of theory and then misapply it to justify their golden ears and need to spend huge gobs of money. For example, you’ll hear lots of talk about ‘skin effect’ and how you need fancy cables to avoid it. Skin effect is negligible at audio frequencies.

You will also notice that audiophiles can get absolutely enraged if you ask them to take an A/B test, or show them results of an A/B test. They also get enraged if you try to show them that there is absolutely no measurable difference between their crazy expensive stuff and much cheaper hardware.

That’s why you often hear audiophiles make claims about ‘stereo imaging’, or ‘presence’, or ‘sound stage’, or ‘airiness’, or ‘tightness’, or other characteristics that are absolutely unmeasurable.

I remember someone freaking out at me once when they claimed that they had laboriously measured the exact distance of their speaker cables and then added extra to one side to make sure the signal went through exactly the same length of cable on each channel, to avoid ‘timing distortion and soundstage breakdown’. I pointed out that the speed of sound in air was a tiny fraction of that in the cable, and if he moved his head by a millimeter it would have more effect on when sound hit each ear than adding a mile of cable to one channel. I just got snarked at for my trouble.

My favorite AB test was one in which the researchers told participants they were listening to one high-end speaker cable in one channel, and a different high-end speaker cable on the other, and asked them to tell them which one was best.

The subjects either heard no difference, or if they did their choice for the ‘best’ cable was distributed randomly. The researchers then revealed that one speaker was indeed connected with a high end speaker wire, but the other was connected with a rusty coat hanger. (-:

One of the big reasons why vinyl came into favor again was because modern consumer CD’s are mastered horribly. They get tweaked through compression to raise abslute loudness, they get EQ’d to sound bright, yada yada. When people went back to vinyl they started hearing nuances in volume and a more natural EQ, and some decided it was because of the characteristics of vinyl, instead of the fact that they are listening to music properly mastered.

73

Nevermind “pro audio” gear for the techs and DJs. You want to see crazy, look at the average musician’s home system. There’s a whole lot of Sony rack systems, Garrard changers and Technics speakers out there.

74

Another crazy thing about audiophiles - most of them are older men, and older men have terrible hearing. And yet, I NEVER hear this mentioned. My hearing starts to roll off now at 8700 hz. One ear is worse than the other. So clearly my own hearing is the biggest limitation to hearing the ‘true’ sound.

I would have thought there would be a massive industry around measuring people’s ears, getting the correct audio profile then providing EQ in headphones or speakers to help compensate for the natural deficits we all have as we age. But I’ve never seen such a thing in the audiophile world. I do, however, see lots of people who probably can’t hear a damned thing above 12K or so getting into heated arguments over whether 44.1K or 48K sampling sounds better. Or people talking about the nuances of soundstaging when one ear has a huge 3db difference in rolloff over the other.

Here’s a cool site that has audio recordings at different frequencies so you can test your hearing. I’m 56, and I can hear the 12K test tone with my volume up all the way. The 15K one sounds totally silent to me. I’d be curious what other people’s results are.

Also interesting, NPR has an ABx testing page where they randomly give you the same music sample in three different formats, and you have to pick which one sounds best. Give it a try:

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I’m 42, and I can hear all of them easily. 12k is outright painful to listen to. 15k is quieter but would still be annoying in the background. 17.4k was a little odd because on my setup (cheap gaming headphones and motherboard audio) there is a foreground hum that gives away the difference. However, in the background I can still clearly hear a high frequency sound. So I’m pretty sure I’m hearing it, with the caveat that my audio is doing some weird things.

76

I really struggled with this test despite having done tolerably well on similar tests in the past, then I read an interesting caveat that I didn’t see until after I took the test multiple times. Bluetooth headphones by nature of the protocols they use recompress the stream for transmission. So in essence, when I was frustrated by the fact that all the samples sounded identical to me, it was because my relatively inexpensive office headset uses a lower bandwith codec in exchange for more range.

77

If the volume at 15k was lower, that means your ears are starting to roll off somewhere below that. That’s normal for your age.

So for older ears, the mix completely changes. The higher frequency sounds roll off more than lower ones, and each frequency is different. These effects absolutely swamp the tiny differences in frequency response between mid-grade and audiophile equipment.

If you are in your 40’s or older, and yiu are listening to something mixed by someone in their 20’s or 30’s, you are not hearing what they wanted you to hear. As I get older, this becomes more pronounced. I find music tends to sound muddier and more muffled than it used to, unless I crank up the highs with an eq. To younger people, it would probably sound too bright or harsh.

78

I wonder what a calibrated test would show, though. I don’t think it’s necessarily the case that even very young listeners would hear 12k and 15k at the same volume. The test tones are probably at the same amplitude but that doesn’t mean that they would be perceived at the same volume by people with no degradation. Everyone has some non-flat frequency response (as an aside, I also don’t know about the frequency response of my equipment).

I went to high school when CRT TVs were the norm. Their flyback transformers emitted sound at 15.734 kHz. I remember that not all of my friends could hear that sound. Maybe they had damaged their hearing already with loud music.

79

The human ear is not even remotely linear, even at low and mid frequencies. And the frequency response will depend on individual ear shape, head angle, whether hair covers your ear, wax buildup in the ear, etc.

You’d think audiophiles would spend as much time cleaning out ear wax buildup as they do cleaning needles and such. But I never hear about that.

Add to that the influence of the brain, which can radically change how you interpret a sound. I can’t find it now, but there is a great illusion where a person stares at the camera and says, “Thought… Thought…Thought”. It’s very clear, and there’s no doubt what he’s saying. Then he says “Fought…Fought…Fought”. Again, you csn very clearly hear the word ‘fought’. No doubt, It’s not subtle.

Then you find out that the same audio clip is used for both words. But because your eyes clearly see the person making an ‘f’ sound, Your brain adjusts the audio to match. Even after you know it’s an illusion it’s hard not to hear ‘fought’ even when you know he’s saying ‘thought’. The decision as to how to perceive the word is done by your ‘system 1’ processing before it gets to your conscious mind.

All you have to do is close your eyes, and the illusion immediately vanishes. You hear ‘thought’ both times.

So if your brain can be fooled in such extreme ways, imagine how hard it is to objectively hear very tiny, nearly unmeasurable differences between say, a $500 receiver and a $20,000 amp/preamp.

I would love to see an experiment where someone puts the guts of a $500 receiver in a $10,000 high end receiver chassis, and vice versa, then display them prominently and ask people which one sounds better after you visibly switch. For good measure, put a light over the one selected so people absolutely know which one is selected. I’m willing to bet that many people will pick the one they think is most expensive, and really believe it. If they are expecting to hear better sound, their brains will arrange it.
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Most people under 20 can hear up to 18k or so. ‘normal’ hearing is 20hz - 20khz. By 20 it’s degraded a bit, and it continues to decljne with age.

Some malls used to use ‘teen control’ audio, a loud annoying screech above 18k. Teens are annoyed by it, non-teens can’t hear it at all