What annoys me today in marketing and media that too often today then talking on hi-fi, science is replaced by bizarre belief structures and marketing fluff, leading to a decades-long stagnation of the audiophile domain. Science makes progress, pseudo-science doesn’t. Hi-fi world is filled by pseudoscience, dogma and fruitloopery to the extent that it resembles a fundamentalist religion. Loudspeaker performance hasn’t tangibly improved in forty years and vast sums are spent addressing the wrong problems.
Business for Engineers: Marketers Lie article points tout that marketing tells lies — falsehoods — things that serve to convey a false impression. Marketing’s purpose is to determining how the product will be branded, positioned, and sold. It seems that there too many snake oil rubbish products marketed in the name of hifi. It is irritating to watch the stupid people in the world be fooled.
In EEVblog #29 – Audiophile Audiophoolery video David L. Jones (from EEVBlog) cuts loose on the Golden Ear Audiophiles and all their Audiophoolery snake oil rubbish. The information presented in Dave’s unique non-scripted overly enthusiastic style! He’s an enthusiastic chap, but couldn’t agree more with many of the opinions he expressed: Directional cables, thousand dollar IEC power cables, and all that rubbish. Monster Cable gets mostered. Note what he says right at the end: “If you pay ridiculous money for these cable you will hear a difference, but don’t expect your friends to”. If you want to believe, you will.
My points on hifi-nonsense:
One of the tenets of audiophile systems is that they are assembled from components, allegedly so that the user can “choose” the best combination. This is pretty largely a myth. The main advantage of component systems is that the dealer can sell ridiculously expensive cables, hand-knitted by Peruvian virgins and soaked in snake oil, to connect it all up. Say goodbye to the noughties: Yesterday’s hi-fi biz is BUSTED, bro article asks are the days of floorstanders and separates numbered? If traditional two-channel audio does have a future, then it could be as the preserve of high resolution audio. Sony has taken the industry lead in High-Res Audio.
HIFI Cable Humbug and Snake oil etc. blog posting rightly points out that there is too much emphasis placed on spending huge sums of money on HIFI cables. Most of what is written about this subject is complete tripe. HIFI magazines promote myths about the benefits of all sorts of equipment. I am as amazed as the writer that that so called audiophiles and HIFI journalists can be fooled into thinking that very expensive speaker cables etc. improve performance. I generally agree – most of this expensive interconnect cable stuff is just plain overpriced.
I can agree that in analogue interconnect cables there are few cases where better cables can really result in cleaner sound, but usually getting any noticeable difference needs that the one you compare with was very bad yo start with (clearly too thin speaker wires with resistance, interconnect that picks interference etc..) or the equipment in the systems are so that they are overly-sensitive to cable characteristics (generally bad equipment designs can make for example cable capacitance affect 100 times or more than it should). Definitely too much snake oil. Good solid engineering is all that is required (like keep LCR low, Teflon or other good insulation, shielding if required, proper gauge for application and the distance traveled). Geometry is a factor but not in the same sense these yahoos preach and deceive.
In digital interconnect cables story is different than on those analogue interconnect cables. Generally in digital interconnect cables the communication either works, does not work or sometimes work unreliably. The digital cable either gets the bits to the other end or not, it does not magically alter the sound that goes through the cable. You need to have active electronics like digital signal processor to change the tone of the audio signal traveling on the digital cable, cable will just not do that.
But this digital interconnect cables characteristics has not stopped hifi marketers to make very expensive cable products that are marketed with unbelievable claims. Ethernet has come to audio world, so there are hifi Ethernet cables. How about 500 dollar Ethernet cable? That’s ridiculous. And it’s only 1.5 meters. Then how about $10,000 audiophile ethernet cable? Bias your dielectrics with the Dielectric-Bias ethernet cable from AudioQuest: “When insulation is unbiased, it slows down parts of the signal differently, a big problem for very time-sensitive multi-octave audio.” I see this as complete marketing crap speak. It seems that they’re made for gullible idiots. No professional would EVER waste money on those cables. Audioquest even produces iPhone sync cables in similar price ranges.
HIFI Cable insulators/supports (expensive blocks that keep cables few centimeters off the floor) are a product category I don’t get. They typically claim to offer incredible performance as well as appealing appearance. Conventional cable isolation theory holds that optimal cable performance can be achieved by elevating cables from the floor in an attempt to control vibrations and manage static fields. Typical cable elevators are made from electrically insulating materials such as wood, glass, plastic or ceramics. Most of these products claim superior performance based upon the materials or methods of elevation. I don’t get those claims.
Along with green magic markers on CDs and audio bricks is another item called the wire conditioner. The claim is that unused wires do not sound the same as wires that have been used for a period of time. I don’t get this product category. And I don’t believe claims in the line like “Natural Quartz crystals along with proprietary materials cause a molecular restructuring of the media, which reduces stress, and significantly improves its mechanical, acoustic, electric, and optical characteristics.” All sounds like just pure marketing with no real benefits.
CD no evil, hear no evil. But the key thing about the CD was that it represented an obvious leap from earlier recording media that simply weren’t good enough for delivery of post-produced material to the consumer to one that was. Once you have made that leap, there is no requirement to go further. The 16 bits of CD were effectively extended to 18 bits by the development of noise shaping, which allows over 100dB signal to noise ratio. That falls a bit short of the 140dB maximum range of human hearing, but that has never been a real goal. If you improve the digital media, the sound quality limiting problem became the transducers; the headphones and the speakers.
We need to talk about SPEAKERS: Soz, ‘audiophiles’, only IT will break the sound barrier article says that today’s loudspeakers are nowhere near as good as they could be, due in no small measure to the presence of “traditional” audiophile products. that today’s loudspeakers are nowhere near as good as they could be, due in no small measure to the presence of “traditional” audiophile products. I can agree with this. Loudspeaker performance hasn’t tangibly improved in forty years and vast sums are spent addressing the wrong problems.
We need to talk about SPEAKERS: Soz, ‘audiophiles’, only IT will break the sound barrier article makes good points on design, DSPs and the debunking of traditional hi-fi. Science makes progress, pseudo-science doesn’t. Legacy loudspeakers are omni-directional at low frequencies, but as frequency rises, the radiation becomes more directional until at the highest frequencies the sound only emerges directly forwards. Thus to enjoy the full frequency range, the listener has to sit in the so-called sweet spot. As a result legacy loudspeakers with sweet spots need extensive room treatment to soak up the deficient off-axis sound. New tools that can change speaker system designs in the future are omni-directional speakers and DSP-based room correction. It’s a scenario ripe for “disruption”.
Computers have become an integrated part of many audio setups. Back in the day integrated audio solutions in PCs had trouble earning respect. Ode To Sound Blaster: Are Discrete Audio Cards Still Worth the Investment? posting tells that it’s been 25 years since the first Sound Blaster card was introduced (a pretty remarkable feat considering the diminished reliance on discrete audio in PCs) and many enthusiasts still consider a sound card an essential piece to the PC building puzzle. It seems that in general onboard sound is finally “Good Enough”, and has been “Good Enough” for a long time now. For most users it is hard to justify the high price of special sound card on PC anymore. There are still some PCs with bad sound hardware on motherboard and buttload of cheap USB adapters with very poor performance. However, what if you want the best sound possible, the lowest noise possible, and don’t really game or use the various audio enhancements? You just want a plain-vanilla sound card, but with the highest quality audio (products typically made for music makers). You can find some really good USB solutions that will blow on-board audio out of the water for about $100 or so.
Although solid-state technology overwhelmingly dominates today’s world of electronics, vacuum tubes are holding out in two small but vibrant areas. Some people like the sound of tubes. The Cool Sound of Tubes article says that a commercially viable number of people find that they prefer the sound produced by tubed equipment in three areas: musical-instrument (MI) amplifiers (mainly guitar amps), some processing devices used in recording studios, and a small but growing percentage of high-fidelity equipment at the high end of the audiophile market. Keep those filaments lit, Design your own Vacuum Tube Audio Equipment article claims that vacuum tubes do sound better than transistors (before you hate in the comments check out this scholarly article on the topic). The difficulty is cost; tube gear is very expensive because it uses lots of copper, iron, often point-to-point wired by hand, and requires a heavy metal chassis to support all of these parts. With this high cost and relative simplicity of circuitry (compared to modern electronics) comes good justification for building your own gear. Maybe this is one of the last frontiers of do-it-yourself that is actually worth doing.
1,744 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://headbangerzclub.net/news/elon-musk-says-implant-will-stream-music-directly-into-the-brain
Tomi Engdahl says:
“It’s Not Snake Oil” — High-End Cable Founder Says Physics Proves His Expensive Cables Enhance Audio Quality
https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/02/cable-founder-physics-expensive-cables-audio-quality/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Subtle differences are impossible with digital, data gets corrupted if there a problem and corruption causes obvious problems, glitches and dropouts etc. Enjoy the music just spout absolute BS constantly, no science or real facts to be seen anywhere. More truth in fairytale books.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.crutchfield.com/S-k3fwalbOuo1/learn/learningcenter/car/equalizers_glossary.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.headphonesty.com/2024/04/top-chifi-brands/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/01/memes-hit-every-audiophile-right-hurts/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.enjoythemusic.com/hificritic/vol5_no3/listening_to_storage.htm?fbclid=IwY2xjawJA8jZleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHTvquRXImu7VMyeKNEjK8akSYOa2C1QKfH020EdIO_j7Q7aRh_Uc6u84-Q_aem_MY7UcEB8txnbihlL35W7yA
Tomi Engdahl says:
If you recognize even one of these signs, congratulations—you’re an audiophile!
Full story: https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/03/signs-audiophile-than-music-lover/
Tomi Engdahl says:
If you recognize even one of these signs, it’s already too late.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.headphonesty.com/2024/10/inventor-mp3-no-sound-benefit-vinyl-digital/
Tomi Engdahl says:
10 influential people you’d never guess are audiophiles: https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/02/influential-people-audiophiles/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Oh but it’s the “Geometry and the Capacitance and Inductance “ I know those new words ‘cause I watch me a fancy YouTube !
Tomi Engdahl says:
our balanced speaker cables would be optimized to be used with balanced power amplifiers and bridged amplifiers
hear the subjective difference that objective persons don’t get
Tomi Engdahl says:
Biwiring is BS invented by cable dealers to sell twice as many cables. All it acts as is a particularly long, especially expensive jumper between the binding posts. Even then, it may not do anything as there were quite a few “biwire compatible only, no biamp” audiophool speakers that came out in the ’90s that had the binding posts internally jumpered.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/03/confessions-fake-audiophile-buy-vinyl-mostly-aesthetic/
Tomi Engdahl says:
A record that is pristine played on a good turntable with a great cartridge will sound as good as a CD. However once you play that record a few times, it will start getting damaged. A CD, will sound the same no matter how many times you play it.
Especially when the original recording and subsequent processing is all done in the digital domain.
That way one also gets to combine the perceived issues of digital with the real degradation of analog in records.
Robert Patterson It won’t even sound as accurate on the first play if the CD were mastered properly and played back on adequate equipment.
(I avoided the word “good” because it’s a weasel word.)
Robert Patterson One of those things is bit perfect and the other has enough variance you can sometimes hear the difference between two brand new pressings.
I’ll let you figure out which is which.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Matt Hubley One of those is mastered with extreme skill and care to preserve every aspect of the original master within the constraints of the technology.
The other can, and so often is, butchered with over compression and EQ in mastering because “louder is better, innit!
I’ll let you figure out which is which.
Iain Churches You’re no longer comparing media: now you’re comparing aesthetic decisions, and you’re assuming that the better decisions will always be made for the inferior medium.
John Davison The criteria, methods and objectives for mastering say modern pop compared with say classical, jazz and some other minority genres are very different indeed in any medium.
The skillset required to meet the objectives in cutting a lacquer master is considerable.
In contrast, young “engineers” often barely literate claim expertise in digital mastering.
A studio with which I am associated recently received a
message from a young hopeful in the UK, a “top mastering engineer” who, only three months ago had been looking for (free) mentoring and was asking for chains and presets to make money, wrote “Bleeve me bro ime the man loud”
Both clients’ instructions and listeners’ expectations are different too.
That is why the “inferior medium” (which I presume you mean is vinyl) is often perceived by the listener as better, although as most of us know, it’s technical parameters, electrical and electromechanical are quite severely restricted.
Iain Churches overcompressed crap was around in the sixties, aka Phil Spector’s ‘wall of sound’.
Tomi Engdahl says:
15 Most Hated Audio Equipment & Features, According to Audiophiles
https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/03/most-hated-audio-gear-time-according-audiophiles/
Tomi Engdahl says:
God. I’m looking at the website of Atlas Cables. Those are far from the most ridiculous XLR cables. See, for example: https://atlascables.us/collections/analogue-interconnects/products/asimi-luxe-xlr-interconnect
Tomi Engdahl says:
Here’s why audiophiles won’t let go of vintage gear: https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/03/audiophiles-swear-vintage-gear-modern-hi-fi/
Tomi Engdahl says:
These songs reveal issues that most DAC and amp reviews don’t talk about.
Full list: https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/03/songs-instantly-expose-bad-dac-amp/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ah yes, the infamous ‘powdery’ Chinese crap cables!
Yes. The same happens when smaller cables are involved. Much of the cable installation for internet connection in the UK is aluminium and this corrodes away and doesn’t get replaced because the system is being replaced with later tech.
In both cases, the coating of aluminium with copper is bad news due to the relative positions of these metals on the electromotive series. This places them apart by about 2V leading to electrolytic action – the true definition of corrosion. Surely this was realised.
It brings to mind the situation where ships were falling apart due to corrosion between steel plates and copper rivets holding them in place. Seemed like a good idea at the time.
I have recently scrapped some old lengths of 7/8″ coaxial cable which has the same type of construction consisting of a roughly 3/8″ diameter aluminum inner conductor which has copper plating on it. I have yet to see any lengths of that type of construction that was corroded. Maybe it is because it is fabricated differently or maybe it is not exposed to moisture in normal use.
Kevin Roland Smith I would disagree with your assertion that ‘much’ of the UK phone cables are aluminium. Post Office Telecommunications installed aluminium in the 1970s when copper was scare and prices escalated. By BT’s time (1980) it had reverted to copper.
Kevin Roland Smith not sure about internet but it was common in RF cables, because of skin effect. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_effect
Why on earth would anyone use copper coated aluminum wiring? it’s literally one of the worst things you could make electrical wiring out of.
Even a cursory websearch would show that. Pic for evidence.
Rob Kirschenbaumbecause it looks like copper at first glance and in photos. It’s just fake copper. Like gold plated jewelry.
Adrian Thoroughgood smart business people would want repeat customers. Swindling others isn’t good for the long term. Just ask noted copper merchant Ea-Nasir. He’s still notorious for shoddy copper and he’s been dead for 3000 years.
Rob Kirschenbaum Because china is cheap. They wouldn’t put any wire inside at all if they could get away with it.
Rob Kirschenbaum because it’s cheap, the automotive industry has gone to great lengths to hide cca.
The cost of high current DC copper cables is no joke, something like a full copper 0awg is $100/metre in a roll, much more if you need it properly cut and crimp terminated. Meanwhile aluminium ones are 10% of that, sometimes less. I don’t blame the manufacturers, I blame the ignorant consumers…
$200 for decent quality 12V car jumper cables? “Hell no”…
$20 “300A cables” that are made of 80% PVC sheath and 10% copper strands thinner than your hair in the bargain bin section of your local dollar store? “Hell yeah I’ll take 3 of those”
And that’s how the free market determined what became the most available.
You are so right though, its come to a point where you can sometimes tell by the grittiness when you roll the wire between your fingers its going to be junk…I often but not always replace the wires on this stuff..If i have the thing open and the iron out, i almost definitely will run new wires.
I just shudder to think what it would be like if we couldn’t even order good hookup wire..imagine this is all we could find
Well-known china junk. They make the cable look like it is of large gauge, but when you strip the plastic back it has tiny wires inside made of CCA.
“Booster” cables are made the same way. They claim they will handle 400 amps but you try putting that much energy through them. They turn incandescent and catch on fire.
I really despise china for the cheap shitty products they make like this.
Heh better than steel cables lol
David Hsieh steel would have lasted longer than that aluminum copper clad. But I’m with you this crap is getting bad. (Side note) we have a lot of heaters in my plant that use stainless wire so it doesn’t ablate and melt so easily for the temps we run.
if copper coated aluminum is wrong, I don’t wanna be right – No one
Scott Choroba
Right?
One of those things that might look good in theory but total garbage in the real world.
Aluminum wires in this day and age?! These things were starting house fires in the 60s and 70s in America and they stopped using them. I was watching a video about it the other day.
Arty Salt Arty Salt aluminum wires and copper clad is still used in houses
The issue was never with the wires, it was mixing copper and aluminum in wire nuts or any termination. They expand differently.
Damon Richter There were a few different issues. Thermal expansion of the aluminum in fixtures not rated for it was the biggest cause for loose connections at receptacles.
Damon Richter and corrode giving high resistance joints. Most standard connectors are brass screw terminals – nearly copper.
Daniel Bujold galvanic corrosion make hot connection and start fire this is why sell wire connector with anticorrosion compound inside
Arty Salt No, they did not stop using them. What happened is that they switched to AA8000 series aluminum alloys which unlike the AA1350 series alloys used previously, are much more suitable for use as building wire. AA1350 is an alloy used for power distribution and transmission lines, where it works admirably but does not work well for building wire. In 1987 the NEC mandated the use of AA8000 alloys but the industry had largely switched long before then (1972 is when UL started requiring it). What also happened is that they switched to only using aluminum in sizes 6 AWG and larger, where it works very well.
Damon Richter The AA8000 alloys, from what I read, don’t expand and contract as much with temperature change compared to the AA1350 alloys. The AA8000 alloys are closer to copper in terms of the expansion/contraction due to temperature change.
Arty Salt Current Nissan vehicles have CCA, and you cannot install copper wire circuit breakers, otherwise you could set the car on fire due to galvanic corrosion.
Arty Salt There was this big restaurant or hotel fire (Kentucky?) in the 70s that killed a lot of people. They blamed it on aluminum wiring being used to supply electricity.
Allen Schroeter and to this day lineman still use aluminum (of the same size is your copper) to feed your service entrance. Messed up how the code is different for you and the power company.
Arty Salt power company uses it to this day. They are bound by a different code. The aluminum they they send to my house is the exact same size as the copper in required to run
Arty Salt a strand of cca the same size doesn’t have the same resistance and amperage load.
I saw a guy’s video where he bought some clip test leads from “China”. He started using them without bothering to prove them… cause why? He found all kinds of off readings and found they had allot of resistance… They stuck right to a magnet… Steel wire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15sMogK3vTI
A lot of the Chinese electric cars use CCA wires ‘for saving weight’
Properly made CCA is not bad but cheaply made crap like this probably made from poor quality aluminum of a questionable alloy, and then it’s not really properly clad, just poorly plated and they probably leave remnants of the electrolytes or acids used in the plating preperation on the wire leaving the perfect storm for something like this to occur.
I was looking for a set of jumper cables yesterday, really need to read the fine print. Many were copper coated aluminum. Finally found an American company who makes copper jumper cables.
What crap copper coated wire is, one size up compared to copper is beginning to be an understatement. I myself refuse to use aluminum and copper clad, no luck with it and corrosion is terrible. My thoughts about this.
I bought 3 packs of those alligator jumper leads and they were causing me lots of problems working on PWM circuits, then I discovered they were iron leads, weren’t soldered to the clips because solder doesn’t stick to the wires. I had to remove all the wires and replace all of them with copper.
CCA sounds like a terrible idea from a galvanic standpoint. But they don’t care, they just want it to sell for cheap and make it even cheaper.
Justin McCright and consumers just want cheap shit. And at purchase time you can’t tell between quality and fake, so the only differentiator is price. So you buy low and get low quality. And no one buys high, so they stop selling high. And thus you have the market for lemons.
Cheap ass shit that pisses me off all the money you pay for copper cable just to be scammed for alum
I bought a used inverter welder and one of the welding cables had turned into powder right at the connector. White dust. CCA wire is garbage. Usually just the weight of the wire will give you a clue. CCA feels a lot lighter than real copper wire. Almost every car jumper cable is now made with CCA wire.
Always buy full copper cables from quality sources or these for home Installation or welding machines – They should be full copper, have low resistance and shouldn’t do that – The big problem are these complete cable packs for car-hifi they’re nearly always that cheaper CCA shi*.
This isn’t exactly electronics related but just an observation.
There is no length that Chinese manufacturing won’t go to to save money, even to the point where it seems more trouble than it’s worth.
The point always seems to be, to save on expensive materials, like copper and good carbon steel or quality stainless steel etc.
Recently i removed some dome headed nuts from a outside light I was installing, when the domes of the nuts just fell off.
It must be cheaper to glue a little dome on a normal nut than to mill a thread into a solid nut.
It’s just a small thing, but it doesn’t surprise me anymore uncovering the lack of quality in almost everything made nowdays.
Yeah. There’s a company trying to bring back copper clad romex. They make the #8 AWG sheath orange and the #10 AWG sheath yellow. Not sure if I’d trust it
John Emig
A company named Copper weld makes CCA, and it’s code. It is in the standard colors, but since allowable ampacity is lower, the colors correspond to wire two AWG sizes larger wire.
The ampacity tables are in 310.16.
It can NOT be exposed to moisture.
It is marketed as a theft deterrent, as it has no value at the scrapyard.
I suppose if you’ve had enough installations stripped out in the dead of night you might install it.
I wouldn’t use the stuff.
“Cheap Chinese inverter” says it all. Temu and Ali are notorious for these cheapos. Proving you get what you pay for.
I never Understood the use of aluminum in cabling.
Larry Maloney conductivity , weight, probably cost, corrosion is minimal in suitably designed transmission systems (as in others not mixing metals and baring in mind materials mechanical properties in the design is a good start)
Current Nissan vehicles have CCA, and you cannot install copper wire circuit breakers, otherwise you could set the car on fire due to galvanic corrosion.
I had some jumper cables made of that.. one tiny crack (because they can’t even make good plastic) and they disintegrated
Aluminium still isn’t the worst Chinese could use for conductors stating 99.99% copper. They could even use lead, yes lead, especially the thick conductors like the pins of type G plugs my birthplace and now still using all the time.
Lots of type G plugs they make the pins turn dark rather than red, brown or green. Somebody got his factory in China told me the pins are actually lead inside but covered by thin copper outside. And they state that’s 99.99% pure copper, and you probably think so. The dark color is the lead.
Thanks for the post; I hate cheap ass wires. Copper for the win!
We are seeing copper coated aluminium wires and copper coated iron wires in twisted pair cables US made!
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1Xstdjf8LR/
Picked up this cheap Chinese inverter at the scrap yard with hugely over stated output of 1200W in something about the size of a 200w one.
Inverter works ok, issue is with the cable, which is awful copper coated aluminium. The slightest bit of moisture present in the cable and it corrodes and turns to powder.
Watch out for this crap, known as CCA, it powders, it fractures, it’s awful. It’s either CCA or steel wire these days, you rarely get real copper.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.headphonesty.com/2024/12/hilarious-audio-gear-knockoffs/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/03/signs-audiophile-than-music-lover/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hifihalloffame.com/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Masters for vinyl cannot have too much low and high frequencies. Too much stereo (especially in the low frequencies) is also a problem. Then there is the noise floor. When mixed, mastered and cut well, beautiful results can be achieved with vinyl. With CD: no limitations at all. Whether this gives you a better sound depends entirely on your preferences and how “cuttable” the music you want on vinyl is. In general, the chance that vinyl sounds too bright is very small.
Tomi Engdahl says:
I saw a test where they recorded the vinyl sound to a computer and burned a cd of the content. Afterwards they playd both the cdr and vinyl at the same time and had a switch to a/b them. They concluded that a cd could easily sound like a vinyl record.
Tomi Engdahl says:
As i always say: CD has the potential to sound better that vinyl. They usually don’t, though. Mainly because instead of utilising the higher dynamic range, engineers rather utilise not needing to have any dynamic headroom. Thus outside some early examples, CDs have less dynamic range.
Tomi Engdahl says:
This is one of those things that people get wrong a lot.
Vinyl does sound better than CD for reasons having to do with how harmonic overtones are introduced as well as bit rate. That’s not a matter of opinion; it’s just physics of high fidelity sound reproduction.
The part that people don’t realize is that, to take advantage of that superior sound quality, you basically need a $10,000 audio setup.
Whether CDs or vinyl sound better, your $150 Amazon record and/or CD player and speakers that you have set up on a milk crate are not going to deliver that superior audio.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Depending on the mastering quality. I had a cd which sounded mediocre when compared to the same album released in cassette format. I know it’s strange and hard to believe.
Tomi Engdahl says:
It depends on how the recording was mastered. Theoretically, CD outperforms vinyl in every way. And “better” is a subjective term. Due to the compromises involved in making vinyl records, a CD will be closer to the studio master if done correctly.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Calum Powrie What compromises are those? And what are the metrics that are being used to measure the audio quality?
Red Heaven this is a long article, but it explains it all in great detail.
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/the-truth-about-vinyl-records.36398/
Tomi Engdahl says:
CD used to sound bad as the DACs back in the day was not very good but today DACs sound so much better, however vinyl is not about the sound its about the procedure to play the records, cleaning them, turning them over, rinse and repeat
Tomi Engdahl says:
Can be – vinyl is highly dependent on factors like quality of turntable and cartridge. Also consider dust, quality of printing and other physical damage. Last but not least is – some of the music does not even deserve to be on vinyl.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.headphonesty.com/2024/03/spending-thousands-vinyl-cd-sound-quality/
Audiophile Admits $5 CDs Sound Better After Spending Thousands on Vinyl Records
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.headphonesty.com/2024/04/why-audiophiles-hate-beats/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Harald Horn proper audiophile systems use binding posts (with or without spades) or banana plugs. Sounds better.
Tomi Engdahl says:
PLOT TWIST: Science proves that 320 kbps MP3s can actually sound better than hi-res audio files: https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/02/320kbps-mp3s-sound-better-hi-res-files/
Tomi Engdahl says:
25 songs that instantly expose a bad DAC or amp: https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/03/songs-instantly-expose-bad-dac-amp/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.theverge.com/news/638455/jvc-kenwood-bluetooth-speaker-wood
Tomi Engdahl says:
Back in the old days when 16-bit DACs had 12-bit linearity yeah things were obvious. Now even cheapo DACs have 24-bit resolution with 20-bit linearity you can’t really discern the difference. Sigma-Delta really changed the game as it was no longer necessary to laser trim the R2 ladders in SAR DACs to get to a few LSBs of linearity. Even newer SAR architecture DACs are trimmed with fusible links which is faster and cheaper than lasers. It’s not the ‘70s anymore.
Hugh Baldwin Yes, you are. it’s just special words to discuss the specifics. There are two major things going on.
Digital audio means representing a continuous value (a voltage or pressure or wiggle in an LP groove) as numbers. A 16-bit DAC (digital-to-analog converter) can represent 2^16 or 65000 values. A 24-bit DAC can represent 2^24 or 4 million values. Remember when computers that had only 1 bit, or 4 bits, or 8 bits of color? It looked kind of junky. Nowadays we have 24-bit color and it looks as good as we can see. The same thing is going on in audio.
To convert bits to volts you have to have a network of very precise resistors. I have an oscilloscope calibrator with a very similar network, but only half a dozen resistors for that many voltage steps (1mv, 10mv, 100mv, 1v, 10v, 100v). 1% variance in the resistor values is fine. But the network for a DAC has a lot more intermediate values to encode so it must be exscreamly precise. During the manufacturing process they have to shave the resistors to get them to the right values. That’s tedious.
Delta-Sigma and SAR are math algorithms for calculating the digitized values. LSB is the Least Significant Bit, there resolution is the most difficult to get right. This stuff gets complicated.
Daniel Williams A quality 16 bit 44.1 KHz DAC will always sound better than 24 bit 192 KHz cheap DAC. However the ESS Sabre DAC is next level clarity. But I really enjoy Cirrus Logic and Wolfsom DACs as well. AKM sounds a bit muddled and lacks the high end transients.
On the other hand, I don’t care how good an 8-bit 8kHz DAC is; it will sound like crap There are minimums for acceptable sample rate and level resolution.
Michael Roeder one thing that has bugged me is the low voltage architecture of the integrated A/D D/A chips. A lot of the converters were aimed at low power, low voltage applications and a lot of these converters found their way into high end equipment.
Michael Roeder for most modern mainstream music albums, 8 bits will be way more than adequate!
16 bit 44.1KHz is the minimum for a DAC to be able to have good clarity.
Daniel Williams I have a still-working Philips/Magnavox CD player from 1983. It uses the TDA1542 ladder-type chips. It sounds fine!
Brother just because there are a lot of audiophool snake oil salesmen doesn’t mean there is absolutely zero point to quality hifi components.
Don’t be needlessly contrarian.
Except that’s literally the same mechanism psychologically behind all of those things. Absolute insane confirmation bias.
Naturally the pic in the top right of the Beatles proves who the target demographic is. 100% the other songs they suggest are by Dire Straits and Steely Dan
..and Norah Jones
Are you saying you can’t generally tell the difference between delta-sigma and R2R DACs? Or between op-amp and valve-based output stages? Let’s not forget that what we casually refer to as a “DAC” is actually a complex digital-to-analog chain. Some designs include oversampling, others don’t; some use aggressive (sometimes even user-configurable) digital filters that introduce ringing artifacts and subtle phase shifts into the reconstructed analog signal — while others take a much more minimalist approach or avoid digital filters entirely.
And after all that, to reach line-level output, you still need an analog amplification stage. That final step alone can vary tremendously, with different implementations — each imparting its own sonic character. So to say that all DACs sound the same is a bit absurd. They all distort differently, in their own way.
(And yes, while THD, IMD, J-Test and other measurements are helpful, they only capture part of the story when it comes to evaluating a DAC’s real-world performance.)
IMHO, After working in the pro audio industry for some time and asking people here and there in the industry about audiophile stuff most of them can’t belive we can hear the difference for modern DACs the way we hear audio is purely biological and psicological, the latter one playing a really BIG role making the way we hear subjective, and in a world where a niche of people claim to have golden ears beyond 20yo should be a really really small group, and yet there is A LOT of them claiming they can hear a difference, then, or nobody is and snake oil is prevalent or then all psicoacoustic research is wrong and we have been fooled into how the human earing processing functions, yes, computers can tell a difference, but that does not mean we can or should care past a point.
Yeah, that guy is right you know…
Modern DACs are so good with very, very low Distortion and Jitter nowadays that even the $80 SMSL SU-1 is acousticaly completely transparent.
Dacs have made a huge difference for me, from my computers built in Dac to a cheap old Yamaha interface was an amazing difference, and then from the Yamaha interface to an SMSL C200 Dac was also huge!
You actually don’t need exceptional hearing to recognize some differences in how some DACs handle samples. But in the majority of cases you wouldn’t know what to listen for and most DAC/Amps nowadays are very very low distortion. Most differences you may or may not here could come from cutting sample rate, the output stage not being a great impedance match for a low impedance headphone/speaker ooor just the good ol clipping.
I’m sure you can make a better case for exposing a bad amp than a bad DAC. I mean, there are bad DACs out there (which by today’s standard would mean ‘not as good as others’), but I wouldn’t expect any song to Instantly Expose It.
Funny, but is level of concern about DAC differences really important when listening to pop music? There are guitars, drums, vocals etc and it’s often noisy. Does that justify the concern?
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1C8MKVDCPW/
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Scammiest Audiophile Company
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ccc7qcO5ySw&pp=0gcJCdgAo7VqN5tD
Tomi Engdahl says:
A $300 vintage turntable just beat models that cost sixteen times more in these tests!
Full story: https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/04/vinyl-fans-smartphone-apps-shame-turntables/