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.
1,598 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.headphonesty.com/2024/05/audiophile-icon-calls-mafia-tactics-luxury-audio/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Never have I seen and heard something so over rated as Naim gear and their weirdo cult user base. From memory some of the early amps lacked an output zobel network so you had to use their speaker cable otherwise the amp could self oscillate, they were designed to use only the speaker cables inductance for this hahaha
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/WWvNz3jBUTu5Dcgm/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.sitime.com/support/resource-library/application-notes/an10073-how-setup-real-time-oscilloscope-measure-jitter
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://kimmosaunisto.net/Software/Software.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.residentialsystems.com/technology/audio/audioquest-introduces-mythical-horses-zero-tech-analog-interconnects
https://www.audioquest.com/products/pegasus-rca-interconnect-cable
Tomi Engdahl says:
http://archimago.blogspot.com/2020/02/measurements-do-power-cables-make.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Measuring audio / hifi cabling
https://www.alpha-audio.net/academy/measuring-audio-hifi-cabling/
Cables are a highly controversial topic within the hi-fi hobby. And that is partly understandable… it’s rather intangible and difficult to prove that it does anything.
We made an attempt with a mass test of speaker cables. We listened to them blind and measured everything. Including practical measurements on a loudspeaker. These turned out to be the most interesting. But it is also interesting to combine the cable properties with these measurements to see if there is a relationship.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Multitest plug in filters – ten plug in filters – measurements and blind test
https://www.alpha-audio.net/review/multitest-plug-in-filters-ten-plug-in-filters-measurements-and-blind-test/
Tomi Engdahl says:
http://archimago.blogspot.com/2013/05/measurements-power-cables-for-low-power.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
More Fun With PS Audio:
We can’t trust measurements because “they don’t tell us which one will sound great and which will suck”
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/GFr72jdryCznvrDB/
There seems to be some confusion amongst audiophiles. Accuracy Vs what sounds pleasant to your ears. If accuracy was important they’d all listen in anechoic chambers through very linear systems. How the room affects the sound, the EQ that the manufacturers engineer into their products for their “signature sound” and whatever pleasant distortion has been added by whatever electromechanical means of playback they enjoy. That’s where any enjoyment lies. Accuracy sounds very flat indeed.
Jim Walker
Saturation can be a very pleasing sonic tool. But it can also be measured. The notion that measurements and statistics can’t be trusted is how cults operate
John Shaughnessy I’m not saying that measurements don’t matter, I’m saying that it’s not accuracy that people get pleasure from. For reference 20+ years in AV and a jaded perspective
I think the other thing that people get pleasure from is “authenticity”. Whether it’s vinyl, wax cylinders, classic cars or visiting wonders of the world. They all want to tap into something authentic. Humans are weird.
Jim Walker
I understand. That’s not what they are saying though. PS Audio is famous for phoolery. They’re saying that measurements don’t matter, and that you should use your ears. I’m sure you know that using the wrong spec’d product for the job will cause all sorts of problems, That even quantum crystals can’t fix
Paul McGowan is pure, classic confidence man. Takes a little fact, blends in his brand of BS and tries to sell it with his “awe shucks, I’m just like you” put on character to sell the rubes on what he’s selling. These videos should be a lesson in what to watch out for and to stay away from, yet they keep getting shared as “helpful” by the clueless. No wonder he’s managed to convince people of his nonsense that he clearly doesn’t believe in himself beyond the fact it makes him money.
Even if $10,000 fuses, $30,000 speaker cables, $40,000 circuit breakers, $50,000 RCA interconnects not to mention exotic wood blocks to keep your cables off the floor, do make a minuscule difference to the sound (something I would mostly dispute but…) how fantastically expensive does your system have to be for that tiny difference to be audible?
Tomi Engdahl says:
So…coloring is cool now? I thought the whole point of audiophile sound was to NOT color the sound
Tomi Engdahl says:
Here Paul…
Read a book…
Hopefully you will understand why you think you can hear the things that you think you can hear…
https://www.amazon.com/Hearing-Physiological-Acoustics-Neural-Psychoacoustics/dp/0195043073/ref=mp_s_a_1_8?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.pMgGmYPqERDVK7qwwJpjf1Cy4N0CPPfp0-mPFBH7lk-i7_KlU-s__IzxINCjbo72vussMZuk6JBNQNbZOSWYHnkT9wB5AfuX3F0SrZkSsnHnHMn99JsCe9LhPXOfp6zHW3X9vSU1hpMvF-D8tqgfF6J1jLsL2Uwi_rZnPt33PxOgtT6AAJVboOk8mWOoEmjO-8PG7Z41Ix0th5DWGlAbFQ.Al7lI77H0pOe0gVddPhwo_Vy0xU4NLCvBz4NfonWFEY&dib_tag=se&qid=1717339637&refinements=p_28%3AAcoustics+and+Psychoacoustics&s=books&sr=1-8
Tomi Engdahl says:
Audiophiles; IC’s ARE THE DEVIL, DISCRETE CIRCUITS OR U DIE, WE LISTEN WITH OUR EYES NOT EARS
Meanwhile the albums they listen to were recorded on some crap like a Mackie 8 Bus or EVEN worse a old Yamaha 02R which is DIGITAL lol
Tomi Engdahl says:
Instrumentation engineer here. Low noise balance and unbalanced best practice is to have the shield only connected at the amplifier end, not the sensor (guitar) end. Unbalanced should be 2 wire plus shield. Unbalanced return connected to the shield on both ends forms a loop antenna which will pick up magnetic fields. Not so big a deal on guitars that have a large output voltage but can be a real problem on thermocouple, RTDs, etc.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Pro guitarist here. Aluminium is THE WORST conductor you can use for guitar cables, mechanically it cannot take all the flexing and movement and starts to break up and “rustle” when moved. Also it only has about 60% of the conductivity of copper, which when you are working with tiny guitar signals (around 100-300mV over 20 feet) makes a difference. Good quality stranded copper (Sommer, Van Damme etc) and Neutrik plugs are the industry standard, and cost about 1.00 per foot. Anything more than that is snake oil, though there was a trend for “vintage” cloth covered cables a while back that some people seem to think makes your $200 Squier sound like a 1954 Strat… But those people are rare.
Pete Dee Nothign wrong with cloth covered cables. They can just be nicer feel ‘in the hand’, and, there’s nothing wrong with paying for cosmetics if thats what you like. Loads of guitar shit is about the looks anyway, and that’s fine. If you think they DO something different well that IS different (its like cloth covered wire inside tube amps… which I will use to ‘look right’ but god save me from the guys who think its an audible choice). I did have a Fender brand cloth covered guitar cable some years back that I’d have intermittent problems with, and well then over time the cloth started to just totally disintegrate like UV was breaking down the plastic fibers, and what was revealed underneath was super garbage cable. Total ripoff by Fender hiding cheap cable under a fancy cover.
John Cunningham you’ve missed my point, there is nothing wrong with cloth cables, only the people who think they “improve their tone”. Kinda the same principle this here page is founded on, right?
We guitar players are known for spending extra $ on cables that look cool. But fortunately not audiophile $ as we have recording engineers who make fun of any witchcraft voodoo metaphysical bs we may believe.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/479C2UEvEY25oXaA/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?si=rxK0e4fsIMBfN7jf&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR3psDvYa-INtH5MwRLxA2DcQYQzrdBu99Xut1ZHYF-fyU0GI5hzoFyCk8c_aem_AVKIi0NYdok46dMTqfuO61BkbamXX5ryaUPGZvp4MUXLAh3LJekeZHm0HXA11KE8UciqCtfStThuFd8PJke2oH-m&v=Th8Y3j9Mgw0&feature=youtu.be
Audioquest Robin Hood Zero hifi speaker cables vs Clarus Cables.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Audioquest one is sufficient just crazily overpriced, Clarus is audiophilia nervuosa bullshit regardless of the price.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Snake oil shop
https://quantum-science-audio.com/ac-power-jitter?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR36CYfWHe00Aa9vuv0xkLIIzmj3L4PZOp6lQBWzpUq22RA19Hu4XJ9uE7A_aem_AVKvsdTqVTZCflSZsSmDWcsqPBvVDMOOsQ52wprCHDc2r763h52vtuyRgOe5wubY6wP2jMfyNqwrMtleTMvi26SY
Tomi Engdahl says:
The real phool ads didn’t make it here. Half the people here buy overpriced crap that’s maybe .01% better than standard but they only pay 10x standard so it’s okay. 100x retail is all that gets posted.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Non shielded cables can act as antennas which would pick up interference in the audio signal. But even cheap audio cables are shielded so it’s definitely an exaggeration on their behalf.
Tomi Engdahl says:
yes the screening inherently creates a capacitance but it actually reduces inductance in the cable. Cable science is in fact pretty complex but, at audio frequency for short runs (3m-4m), the capacitances and inductance have no effect.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Air as a dielectric is a valid application in HF transmission cables, it doesn’t do jack for low frequency applications though.
Look at this example, 16cm in diameter, now that’s a cable
https://www.rfsworld.com/pim/product/html/HCA618-50J
And the chinesium version
https://zjjwdz.en.made-in-china.com/product/nZitlBedfwrR/China-5-Inch-Air-Dielectric-Coaxial-Cable-5-Inch-Air-Coaxial-Cable-Hca495-50j.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
They’ve stolen the mooring ropes from an ocean liner
Im new here. Has anyone made this association yet? Seems like its a psychological indication of exclucivity. These things look just like velvet ropes. Signifying eleitism and gatekeeping.
Can audiophiles hear dog whistles??
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?si=rxK0e4fsIMBfN7jf&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1PW7TdAVRq8BhYWwroksqZOEMmE6OD9O_J57m8UHMYFDBcAPo-ioICbvs_aem_AU1EDmZcoggW9FT9qs8hoBsQ-md4eN__F96z7PPfht0kTDKE-xjIzTexZEAm-LlXOl2Yaq1NxnQe6MjL52jIfZ0n&v=Th8Y3j9Mgw0&feature=youtu.be
Tomi Engdahl says:
(From the cable group) “But just remember, “YRMV”
(your results may vary) Don’t tell the next guy that cables don’t make difference just because you didn’t notice any.” Hmm…
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jackson Taylorall streams and digital sources are buffered by many of orders of magnitude so this is not a factor. As soon as the ecc fails you hear it as a drop out out, not as as a lack of majestic cymbals crashing against the shore….
Lee Dumbarton yes… I have actually read audiophile reviews of expensive digital cables (HDMI, SPDIF, etc,) where they talk about subtleties of audio that are revealed by the cable. It’s an astounding ignorance of the underlying technologies.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Richard Stacey yes… the fact that audiophiles will “listen” to a digital cable in the way that they listen to a speaker cable (also silly, but at least grounded in some plausibility in the analog realm,) reflects the fact that they just don’t understand digital audio.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jackson Taylor Unrecovered signal dropouts on a digital line do not lead to analogue audio distortion. Cuts or dropouts in the signal is the usual result of a poorly data stream. There will be no change in the sonic quality, only drop outs. If it’s working, its working….
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jackson Taylor digital is like a honey badger. It don’t give a shit.
As long as you can tell high from low logic level you can have as much noise on the signal as you want, it won’t affect the 1/0 threshold. You have to seriously screw up impedances to get enough ringing to corrupt a bitstream.
Things can get a bit trickier when you have multilevel encodings like QAM but for digital audio interconnects that isn’t relevant.
Tomi Engdahl says:
I am a complete slob for the cool aid most of the time, but cables I just can’t get onboard with. The cable either works or it doesn’t. Some of the absolutely huge cables I’ve seen may actually be doing something inductance/capacitance wise. I’m not sure if it’s helpful though. I’ve always been taught that we want to account for resistance, capacitance, and inductance in any design. Can’t imagine audio frequency mattering at all. Nobody has proved that we lose anything over interconnects in the same way we do with higher frequency signals
Alessandro Tommei Naim Audio amps rely on the inductance of their speaker wires. Have to be a certain length and thickness.
Poor design
It can become apparent quickly with high impedance sources like guitars running into a 50 foot cable but for stereo equipment it should be unnoticeable if everything is designed properly and runs are short
I always like to find out how much they spend on room treatment, just to see how serious they are about listening to music.
In a studio environment, accepted wisdom has been to spend as much on room treatment as you do on your monitors.
Colin Jones
The thing is, you can accomplish as much with bookcases, rugs and a bag of Safe n sound as you can with expensive diffusers.
They first need to do a few obvious things that will make a HUGE difference: bass traps in corners, break up parallel walls, put some absorbent material and/or diffusers on reflective surfaces.
Flatten all out the EQ, put on a record you know, and listen for weird humps or drop outs. That’s pretty much it.
If they REALLY want to get wacky, buy a test mic and some software for like $200 and sh00t the room to look for issues. But that’s way past the average phool.
I’m also shocked they never call someone like Jeff Hedbeck to design a room especially for them. For all the tens of thousands they spend on nonsense, this would actually work.
Tomi Engdahl says:
I always thought cables – long before the digital era – were the litmus test. Not esoteric stuff like 50-foot runs, just your typical wiring used to hook up a stereo – the only deviations from “fully functional” I have ever heard were both “wrong” and “high end”. And one of the wrongs was hideously so.
(Pretty is fine. Nothing wrong with jewelry. But it doesn’t sound better.)
And for me the sanity cutoff always seemed to be right around there. And from there it just got weirder and weirder, the psychological and rhetorical convolutions ever more deviant from our friend the Bishop of Limited Entities…
…and from that era on the hallmark has always been made-up physics. It seems to *always* be involved, one way or another. I guess the digital cable part is even more refined: made-up mathematics.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Also, if someone cares about an ANALOG interconnect, they would put the money in devices that have balanced inputs and outputs (instead of trying to achieve something with unbalanaced RCA interconnects using supposed alchemy magic).
Oleksandr Dzyubenko a brief session round the back of any professional audio installation will teach them much. For example the balanced audio leaving the BBC lime grove studios went out over a couple of crocodile clips whilst we waited for a replacement patch panel. No disernable difference perceived either by the local golden ears (we had them, excellent audio engineers who could detect a/b comparisons 99 times out of 100) or any of the thousands of pounds worth of Hewlett Packard calibrated kit we routinely used to measure.
Tomi Engdahl says:
It’s pretty simple: with digital, the data is there or it’s not. If it’s not there, for whatever reason, you get dropouts. Error correction can only go so far, and if there’s too much missing you guessed it: dropouts. I don’t care what cable you run it through, if it ain’t there it ain’t there! Short of a magical unicorn picking out the missing bits out of the ether and putting them back in the right spot, you’ll get dropouts!
Switching between different types of connections is another story, but again whether we’re talking spdif, hdmi, optical, etc. a good cable (i.e.: one that’s not damaged) with good connectors, even if it’s inexpensive, will yield the same results as those ridiculously expensive ones!
Tomi Engdahl says:
The one thing I sorta agree with is speaker cable conductivity. Adding additional resistance via skimpy speaker cables does affect the “Q” of the LC load, which causes slight distortion. The finely tuned ear may notice this. So, for a normal sized room I recommend 12 gauge copper stranded. Minimum. No gold or silver needed.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Class D amplifiers are now the center of arguments as contentious as the ones voiced back when CD audio was in the 1990s. So it was natural for the audifools to buy gadgets and geegaws to “improve” that bad ol’ digital stream of shit.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ryan Lambert OS1 and OS2 are standard single-mode optical fiber used with wavelengths 1310 nm and 1550 nm (size 9/125 μm) with a maximum attenuation of 1 dB/km (OS1) and 0.4 dB/km (OS2). A typical single-mode optical fiber has a core diameter between 8 and 10.5 μm[7] and a cladding diameter of 125 μm.
This is not what audiophools use.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-mode_optical_fiber
Plastic optical fiber (POF) or polymer optical fiber is an optical fiber that is made out of polymer. Similar to glass optical fiber, POF transmits light (for illumination or data) through the core of the fiber. Its chief advantage over the glass product, other aspect being equal, is its robustness under bending and stretching.
Attenuation loss is about 1 dB/m @ 650 nm. Bandwidth is ~5 MHz-km @ 650 nm.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_optical_fiber
Tomi Engdahl says:
In my opinion if a $1000 speaker driver should run for x hours before it’s ready then the company should do it as part of the price.
From a technical standpoint, decent drivers shouldn’t change from being played. I guess some really bad ones might have stiff surrounds that you need to “break in”. Do headphones even have surrounds?
Stu Hebb, there’s another Facebook group where they design and build DIY loudspeakers. The head guru on there says he’s fully tested loads of bass units and running them in has negligible effect. With regards to headphones the cone/diaphragm material has folds around the edge that allow it to move. My experience of sou d quality of headphones has little to do with cost.
Burn-in is a process done to eliminate weak components that will cause early failures. What audiphools practice is pure fantasy. Especially cables. They either work or they don’t.
The only thing that needs burning is your ears
It can be needed even in electronics. But the issue is how some people create drama around it like their ears would bleed if they listen to eat before the break in takes place.
In my trade burn in means, we aging for x hours electroblnics in a thermostat. Any electronics need some wear and tear, mostly but not only to regain or loose some of the property of the components, like capacitors, there are sevaral, which change chemically a bit when laying on shelf for a ling time. For speakers mostly the moisture is the enemy. The absorbing moving parts need to adjust to the local enviorement. But nothing crazy mumbo-jambo.
It more probable the audiophile’s burn-out.
Speakers need a break-in period as every mechamical part, because membrane Is a mechamical part.
( More woofers than tweeters and it also depends on materials )
From
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/JEzYhaT3WyPcQWaV/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cable risers
https://community.naimaudio.com/t/cable-risers-can-improve-sq/22949
https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/can-anyone-explain-cable-risers
https://audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/a-physicist-explains-why-we-need-cable-lifters.40913/
https://forum.psaudio.com/t/the-science-of-cable-elevators/17780
https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/453-cable-risers-snake-oil-or-they-do-improve-the-sq/
https://www.reddit.com/r/audiophile/comments/sghjp5/finally_got_my_cable_lifters_set_up_again_wow/
https://darklantern.proboards.com/thread/1558/cable-lifters
https://www.hifivision.com/threads/diy-speaker-cable-risers.94044/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Do Audiophile Cables Matter? Here’s PROOF!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DC0s6KqQz3g
All this test has done is prove how good or bad those cables work when used as an antenna. How they work as speaker cables with both ends terminated and voltage driving the speaker is an entirely different thing. You need blind testing under controlled conditions to see if people can actually hear a difference, and that’s where things usually fall apart for cables making a difference.
I didn’t get very far into this experiment before I had to ask, “Why don’t you just test for cable effects by identical signals nulled at the ends of a sample? We engineers do this all the time when looking for very small signal differences due to inequality. The resulting difference is the contribution of the sample cable. Big difference = not so good cable. The standard used could be an agreed essentially lossless bit of conductor.
Also, for the cognoscenti, we don’t care a wit about what the sample can conduct; we care a lot about what it changes.
Null testing is a thing.
yep. Audiophiles and recording engineers don´t have a lot of overlap in knowledge
demistify the vodoo
Thanks for this. Nulling out slightly different signals has been a regarded and peer reviewed technique in electrical engineering for over 80 years. Yet, it is not well known among cookbook and shade tree designers. And analysing the test results must be done with discipline and rigor. No offense intended to anyone.
I’d say audiophiles & engineers have rarely been on the same page. But whenever that’s true, then I say both of them have a good head on their shoulders.
Kind of a catch 22 situation, because we need schister engineers eager to find gullible audiophiles, and there’s surely a large supply of each. Whenever we have a good sensible honest engineer working in tandem with an audiophile who does not think he needs pixie dust added to get everything out of his system, then things are good and back to normal. All too often, the engineer is thinking … “I’m gonna get you, sucker!” And with a bit of practice, he most assuredly will. Pseudo science and gullibility make for a most glorious combination. Don’t deny it. – - Find a sucker. Mix with nonsense. Bake 30 minutes. Fudge Shit Brownies for dessert. One million dollar$ each. BURP.
There, I’ve just now demystified everything.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Finally! DIY Audiophile Speaker Cable Kits!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfjQJxeTANE
Tomi Engdahl says:
Balanced vs Unbalanced Audio | Do Balanced Cables Sound Better?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgfZb1pEIrU
0:00 – Introduction
0:22 – Why Use A Balanced Audio Connection?
1:00 – Balanced vs Unbalanced Audio: Cable Construction
1:38 – What Is A Balanced Circuit?
2:21 – Balanced Audio Explained
3:56 – A Common Myth About Balanced Audio
4:33 – Demonstration – Balanced vs Unbalanced Sound Quality
5:24 – Subscribe To Audio University!
Tomi Engdahl says:
Geometrically pleasing, our cable risers are designed to do one thing well–keep your expensive power and speaker cables off the floor and static-charged rugs. Never has something so beautiful been so controversial.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
From my extensive experience in designing & building tube amps I noticed that amplifiers with regulated high voltage power supplies sound different, especially single-ended ones, where the power supply is indeed in the signal path. It is the tubes or transistors used in the regulator that determine the sonics more than the output tube! And “different” to me invariably means inferior!
Likewise, DC heating of directly heated triodes such as 300B, 2A3, etc. sounds inferior to AC heating, but the AC heating results in higher noise levels … there’s no free lunch in electronics or audio …
I’ve heard guitar amp people mention that a tube rectified vacuum tube amp sounds more “musical” because of the B+ sag during loud playing … some crazy shit
The reason? People are idiots. What happens is an amplifier with an insufficiently stout and regulated power supply will suffer from non-linear response when pushed, compress, clip and distort heavily. In short, it’ll make a solid state amp behave as badly as a good tube amp.
Sometimes, this can have a role in the production of music. I’ve seen some mosfet based amps with undersized power supplies used specifically for the kind of distortion for use with guitars and the like as a poor man’s tube amp. For reproduction where fidelity is desirable? It’s a terrible idea. Anyone who suggests it to you should be promptly ignored. Same with any that recommend amps without negative feedback for similar reasons (the amplifier will behave with higher distortion and non-linearity into a reactive load aka speaker).
So I’ve got a question that I’ve wondered for a long time. I’ve had many tell me you don’t want a regulated power supply in a power amplifier because it makes it sound worse, or dead, flat etc. Why would that be? How can the power rails bouncing all over the place make anything better? Back in 2008 I made two mono amplifiers that were 200W rms (220ish at clipping) and each had 500VA toroids and 66,000uf worth of capacitance and the supplies still sagged some under load. Are the claims about regulated supplies sounding worse true, or simply an excuse?
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/vpq9LF6h3h5DuCQX/
Source:
Tomi Engdahl says:
The major component that most people miss is that a power amplifier has negative feedback. If it has a gain of 100, and you feed it 1v volt it will spit out 100volts. If the rail is 110 volts, or 140 volts or 130 volts with a ripple of 10 volts on it, it will STILL output 100 volts.
The gain of an amp (unless its horribly designed) has nothing to do with the rails. Its not like an amp goes “i will amplify this signal according to the ratio of my supply rails and the input voltage”
It only really comes into play when the amp is badly designed and doesn’t really have the ability to deal with differential power rails. Thats when during the AC cycle, one rail will go up, the other will go down, and then it will switch. This is USUALLY resolved by having the VAS stage isolated from the rails with a resistor capacitor filter, and the feedback signal being filtered correctly. (this IS why feedback resistors in opamp and gain stages do matter)
The other issue is that negative feedback of course has a bandwidth limit due to closed loop phase delay thats impossible to get rid of.. physics being physics and all (im sure someones wooden volume knob would fix this lol).
Intermodulation can and does occur during heavy bass beats either reinforcing or opposing any AC related changes on the DC rails. And it all goes to hell when you have a say a positive bass beat while the positive rail is at its lowest, which causes massive current spikes, which have resistive losses, as well as gain changes inside any active device (especially normal transistors, mosfets are basically immune to this). Good negative feedback does negate this however. “GOOD”.
The only fixes for those current surges are massive amounts of caps, or capacitive multipliers.
The real rub occurs when you treat active power supplies as amplifiers as well! Which they technically are. They will take a reference voltage, multiply it, and “amplify” it, so its basically an amp with a low cut off frequency of 0hz.
But. if they ARE amplifiers, they ALSO suffer from the same issues that other amplifiers suffer from. That is closed loop feedback phase changing.
Basically that means that if you suddenly draw a huge spike of current, it takes a finite time for an active power supply to go “oh shit, i better fix that” THis is why you will rarely rarely ever find an active switch mode supply in a power amp. They take time to respond, and during that time, your audio is taking a dive of a cliff.
In the long run, as most people are aware of. Huge banks of filtering caps do the best, other then feeding your amplifiers from a large battery.
As long as you filter out diode noise, mains bourne RFI, and keep a pretty solid headroom for the worst of worst current demands, a well designed amp with good negative feedback stage will just…. ignore what the rails are doing. This also means that a range of caps on the main rails will do a better job of sourcing/sinking current then just one type. My gainclone modules have 4x 3300uf filter caps, 2x 100uf, and 2x .1uf caps. Bigger capacitors have larger inductance, and they like to not respond instantly to a sudden spike in current, but the 100uf will. So you have to have res caps, filter caps, and decoupling caps on your DC rails. (low ESR caps also do help)
The main amp will take care of the rest. As long as the main positive, negative and earth rails to your power supply caps are short and thick, the amp will be happy.
So basically, if you are putting out a fire, and your water goes from “we need it all now” down to “just keep that area cool” down to “turn it off” Your pump and water tank need to be able to go “no worries” to all of those scenarios. A nice fat toroid transformer, and a bank of large, medium and small caps will take care of all of that.
Oh and buy my 77000 dollar speaker cables.
EDIT: There are active power supplies in car amps for example, but you will find they are often unregulated or “just kinda regulated” to solve the issue of closed loop response time causing instability of the power rails. They also have huge banks of caps too, simply because they work.
The only other place regulated main amp power rails are useful are things like class A amps.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The reason? People are idiots. What happens is an amplifier with an insufficiently stout and regulated power supply will suffer from non-linear response when pushed, compress, clip and distort heavily. In short, it’ll make a solid state amp behave as badly as a good tube amp.
Sometimes, this can have a role in the production of music. I’ve seen some mosfet based amps with undersized power supplies used specifically for the kind of distortion for use with guitars and the like as a poor man’s tube amp. For reproduction where fidelity is desirable? It’s a terrible idea. Anyone who suggests it to you should be promptly ignored. Same with any that recommend amps without negative feedback for similar reasons (the amplifier will behave with higher distortion and non-linearity into a reactive load aka speaker).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Like many things, real answers are never black and white.Audiophools have a kind of OCD that demands certainty and black and white categorization. A rock solid power supply is a good thing. But techniques like a bootstrapping intentionally make the power rail into kind of a signal anyway at least during large audio transients that would otherwise cause sag in the rails. But that makes a pretty Wiggly power rail doesn’t it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The regulator circuit can only remove power, not add it. It’s redundant if the amplifier is well designed and has consistent gain regardless of rail voltage. Spend the money on filter capacitors instead
Tomi Engdahl says:
Most people wouldn’t want to clutter their living rooms with dampers and absorbers. The route to go is DSP. But of course it requires quality equipment for a start. Not BS overpriced stuff, but devices with proven, measurable merit. Then Dirac, RoomPerfect or Roon convolutions based on REW or other good software.
Tore Neset dsp does NOT remove room acoustic problems. It can reduce and mitigate some of their bad effects but only physical remedies resolve physical problems.
Paul Smith there’s an old surgeon saying: “nothing can heal like cold hard steel”
Tore Neset quite often they build a monstrous tech altar in their living room. those people shouldn´t tell anybody that they are striving for “sound quality”.
Tore Neset DSP really doesn’t help that much, it can’t. It generates an EQ filter to mitigate a general average of the irregularities in frequency response measured across a particular room but it doesn’t really fix the problem.
Philip Quinton and it only works for a single sweet spot unless the room is huge.
Philip Quinton If this had been 1994, you would be right. But computing power has increased vastly since then. There are now systems that to some extent take care of phase and reflections as well as basic EQ. It still cannot cope with every kind of physical problem, but we are fairly close with some of the most advanced systems.
Paul Smith There are systems (RP for one, is quite good at itwith its Focus and Global modes) that calculate both room average and sweet spot. You can choose between sweet spot mode and “family mode” or use an average.
Tore Neset but good acoustic treatment will solve the problem without wasting amplifier and speaker power filling in holes in the rooms modalities. Treating reflective surfaces cannot be done electronically, only with physical solutions.
the trinnov systems deal with speaker phase, frequency alignment – and it’s actually quite incredible. it’s one of 3 systems in my studio now that are desert island boxes. It’ll take a bad room and make it significsntly better, but the magic is taking a good room and squeezing the last percentages out of it
Tore Neset you can’t resolve a null mode with a +48 dB notch filter. You fix the physical problems *first* then use DSP/EQ/tone controls to finish the job.
Tore Neset All the DSP in the world can’t help what the room does. DSP can only change the input into the room. It cannot alter the changes made by the room and the rooms output.
As for esthetics of room treatments, if they’re clutter, then that’s a design issue. I can assure you no one has ever considered the acoustic treatments in my living room or theater as ‘clutter’.
The Trinnov is indeed amazing, but also quite expensive. Getting some Artnovion bass traps and diffusers will in many cases work equally well (at least) and still look good. But of course, you need to measure (!) the room and read up on the basics of acoustics. Overspending on pointless bling is perhaps easier.
Lots of people waste lots of money on hobbies that don’t matter to other people. I guarantee you spend money on things that others feel is a waste. That’s the beauty of a hobby. It’s for personal enjoyment.
Peter Kay it’s an expensive obsession that is exploited by salesmen but it’s still healthier and less self destructive than a drug habit.
Philip Quinton not much less self-destructive. Yes, less, certainly on the physical health front. But this is a “hobby” that depends on massive levels of self-delusion *and* a never-ending, neurotic quest for an ill-defined impossibility.
Huw Powell and a scientifically unprovable nirvana…
Huw Powell yeah it’s the delusion that’s hard to beat. I’d like to take an audiophile into a professional mastering suite and invite them to tell the educated, experienced professional engineer what’s wrong with their sound and/or setup.
Or to blindfold the audiophile and ask him to identify just by listening to his own system which single useless component has been removed from the setup before revealing that they had just hooked his speakers up to an old hi-fi amp with 2 metres of unshielded bell wire.
It wouldn’t change anything of course.
Fred Swain yup you’re correct. I’m sure my audio equipment has no value to some people. Difference is my RCA cords have a value of about a dollar because spending $50 or more on one makes no audible difference. Sure I spend money on things other people think are worthless but I want value for my money and don’t respect when someone tries to swindle me in exchange for nothing of value.
What I find amusing is that perception of sound it totally subjective. Just eating a full meal affects hearing. You can spend all you want, you still can’t get a flat response out of a meatbag. The bose reference made me chuckle.
Jon Willett yeah the brain plays a big part in filtering out stuff that we don’t want to hear. You can walk down a busy high street having a conversation with your friend and not even notice how much you’re struggling to hear each others words above the din of the traffic. It’s a different kettle of fish when I go out onto the same street with a directional boom mic and try to record the dialogue of two actors. Without the brain acting as intermediary and filling in the bits that you don’t hear the unfiltered recording is swamped by noise. it does the same for our deficiencies in hearing. I’m 50 years old now and doubtless there are frequencies that I can’t hear now which I used to be able to hear when I was 20, but the mixes that I did in my twenties mostly sucked whereas now I would say that I’m at the top of my game and the improvements in my work are obvious. Of course it could also be that I’ve got much better tech now but the point is that the brain unconsciously compensates for the fluctuations that you describe which is probably why audiophiles don’t worry about acoustics and technically sonic perfection.
Jon Willett the perception is of a shared objective reality, though. 10% distortion at 2 kHz or static louder than the cymbals is not subjective, it’s real and there.
“Sounding good” is, of course, subjective. But the audiophool goal is allegedly accurate reproduction of a real world phenomenon, not “sounding good”. Despite their ludicrous “my ears are the best measuring tool” approach, they claim what they hear is universal, is not dependent on their own state of delusion.
There’s a lot of marketing and memory-driven obsession with vagueness like “warmth” right now, but that’s just nostalgia and distortion working together. To separate the partially deaf from their cash…
Huw Powell shimmering highs and earthquake lows. Same old bs.
But whose ears are right? The Recording engineers? Mastering engineers? Pressing engineer? In all honesty it’s all subjective. So audiophilia is moot. It is totally pointless as there is no absolute reference. They’d be better off just plugging a pure tone generator into their system and listening to that.
Simon Rafferty I would say that the finished master of any audio production is its own absolute reference and any system’s playback of that master material can be measured by calibration mics and spectral imaging and any deviations from the source can be compared to measurements from other systems. My assumption based on everything I’d read on the topic has been that audiophiles are looking to get as close to flawless, uncoloured reproduction as possible. Of course the system hasn’t been created which can perfectly achieve identical reproduction but I think it’s reasonable to say that a high end mastering suite is going to come closer to that metric than the listening room of an average audiophile.
But I was wrong. To the audiophile the master recording is still incomplete, a work in progress that is finished by them through their choice of format and the equipment that they have assembled. Like someone who would turn their nose up at an original digital studio master recording claiming that they can hear the aliasing of a 24-bit recording at 192k but salivate when that same recording gets filtered and stamped into a plastic groove.
Philip Quinton it’s interesting as I have 2 friends one a recording engineer and one a mastering engineer. The recording engineer is also a speaker and amplifier designer. Their preferred is, ears are flawed, neural audio processing is flawed. Listen to what makes you happy. Everything else is one man’s opinion.
Simon Raffertythe artist who signed off on the final mix and masters thats whose ears are correct. it is their art, and we should be endeavoring to enjoy it the way they intended us to. injecting our own tastes into other peoples art as consumers is the hight of audiophile stupidity.
Errol West what they hear in a studio using reference monitors and commercial grade amplifiers is normally a million miles from what the consumer will ever hear. Again the point is moot.
The point is that playback should NOT sound like what the mixer hears. Studio monitoring is neutral and ‘cold’ so that the mixer can hear every element of the mix with clarity, while mixing. When those same people listen to music at home they normally choose systems that sound ‘warmer’.
Ben McPherson Not always. I always mixed with a profile on the EQ and sensible global compression settings. Most recording studios don’t actually have flat response control rooms either, artists don’t want to hear flat lifeless mixes. The mastering engineer rooms maybe closer to what you’ve described, but even then it’s for a reason and not perhaps what you might think…
Peter Kay If a mix is lifeless, then it’s a poor mix. A poor production. The playback should be flat so you can hear what the recording actually consists of.
Having worked with both classical and rock, I found that if monitoring sounded good on classical, relatively untouched material, then it would work well with rock. If it sounded good on rock, then it didn’t always sound OK on classical stuff. For me classical music is the real test, as all rock recordings are artificially created with close mics, direct lines and loads of eq. compression and many tricks to make the mix stand out. If peeps want it to sound “warm” let them, just don’t impose their view of what’s best on others. Hifi = neutrality for me.
Ben McPherson there are 2 schools of thought when it comes to Audiophile systems, “critical listening” and “leisure”. A critical listening system would be tuned as flat an neutral as possible to hear exactly what the mixing and mastering engineers heard in the studio, a leisure system focuses more on the sound of the individual components and speakers and how they work together, it’s not always as flat as possible
Daniel Milligan what about “what the instruments sounded like in the room”? I think you forgot that one. Now, of course, many ‘phools forget that, too. But it is basically the stated, memorized, repeated mantra.
So critical is for tuning and corrections and comparing choices, leisure is for listening to the symphony at home.
In theory.
Ben McPherson “warmth” is a chosen distortion.
But yes, the mixing engineer is usually listening to a setup that no one would listen to for the purpose of enjoying the music. And in a way that does not lead to enjoyment, but to analysis.
Huw Powell Yes, absolutely. But audiophiles have been sold the notion that they must either recreate something that never existed, or reproduce with great fidelity something most people would never want to listen to and which doesn’t sound good.
I agree w the acoustic treatment but you also have to realise you don’t want to hear exactly what the mastering engineer hears. You don’t want something so forward as end consumer
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Tomi Engdahl says:
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Tomi Engdahl says:
HIGH END Discussion round: “Has vinyl playback technology gone about as far as it can go?
https://youtu.be/BkcoPObkwWI?si=UVFdslR1AbppTAwZ