An interesting article on audio gear from wired

[beeface]

This article quickly went from reasonable (in-room acoustics are important, overpriced cables aren't) to basically just endorsing the same products that Darko endorses.

 

[krabapple]

Good speakers sound good in any room, treated or no.

LOL, no. Terrible room acoustics can defeat even 'good speakers'.

 

[BrEpBrEpBrEpBrEp]

Why, 60s, why? And why is her neck broken???

Edit:

 

[jsrtheta]

You should see some of the vintage articles I have about stereo systems from the 1960s - you'd think the only reason was to impress women. And they only got more superficial from that. Exhibit "A"

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I don't know whether to laugh or puke.

Life was so much simpler then.

 

[Blumlein 88]

LOL, no. Terrible room acoustics can defeat even 'good speakers'.

Having tried to make it work in an 11x11x11 ft cube of metal I can confirm terrible rooms can defeat any speaker.

 

[pozz]

@Somafunk @krabapple

"The quality of the sound you hear in your room will only ever be as good as the room itself. In other words, a pair of $250 speakers will sound better in a room that's been treated to dampen reverberations than a pair of $10,000 speakers will sound in an empty room with bare floors and walls."

1. It's a mistake to approach speakers or any audio gear with price in mind first, apart from determining budget. Price and performance are not correlated.
2. Speaker designers can't know what rooms their products will inhabit or where they will be placed.
3. Listener circumstances often change. You buy specific gear for specific purposes, realize something's missing, add things on, rearrange furniture, move house, etc. A bookshelf setup in the living room is moved to a bedroom after making an investment in bigger speakers for the former.
4. Speaker placement is often very constrained, and bad speakers are more sensitive to placement than good ones.
5. Room treatment is not always feasible to install. Modern open concept dwellings in particular, besides being small, have no dividing lines between traditional separate spaces like the kitchen, living room and bedroom, and moreover tend to include a lot of glass and concrete and feature unusual floorplans with skewed walls and the like. Not everyone lives in a house or has a dedicated room even if they do.
6. Room treatment is often insufficient. A few panels is nowhere close to a fully designed studio. Effective bass treatment is expensive, hard to come by and takes up space, and so in most nonprofessional cases can be counted nonexistent. Commercially available room treatment options often oversell treatment capabilities and can easily create more problems.
7. If a speaker is bad, room treatment will more likely reveal its flaws than not. Recognizing those flaws as such depends on the listener's experience.

So the goal is find a general purpose speaker that will sound good despite being in unknown, highly varying conditions. Controlled radiation, bass capability and minimal compression and distortion fit that bill. Also, good ≠ optimal. The latter is a higher goal and requires defining results as well as specific combinations of gear that take the circumstances of the room into account.

Contrived "terrible" listening circumstances that require an equally contrived speaker to sound good have nothing to do with the above.

 

[rdenney]

https://www.wired.com/story/audiophile-gear-guide/

"The quality of the sound you hear in your room will only ever be as good as the room itself. In other words, a pair of $250 speakers will sound better in a room that's been treated to dampen reverberations than a pair of $10,000 speakers will sound in an empty room with bare floors and walls. "

TBH I know absolutely nothing about speakers but this seems like an extreme claim. Maybe if you are listening to them in your garage or something but in a regular room I don't think it would be that bad.

"f you prefer over-ear headphones, I really like the latest models from the French company Focal. The recent Celestee closed-back headphones ($990) are as gorgeous to listen to as they are to look at. They produce one of the widest soundstages I've ever heard. (In headphone lingo, the soundstage is the imaginary three-dimensional space you find yourself in when you shut your eyes and listen.)"

I haven't listened to the celestee but this is the exact opposite of what everyone said about them.

Sigh.

Unless he runs a garden hose into his listening room, or wets his pants, he isn't going to dampen anything. That's the first tell that he's just a guy like the rest of us dilettantes and not actually an expert on the topic.

And he is repeating what he has read on the Internet, not what he personally knows to be true based on education and testing.

Finally, I wonder why the best live performance venues have a relatively long decay time, and dead spaces are abhorred by acoustic musicians. To the notion that studios are dead on purpose, I note that stuff recorded in dead studios has a lot of processing added to them, especially including reverb. I don't want to live in an anechoic chamber. There are certainly specific problems we might address, such as asymmetric first reflections, but making it like a recording studio is not the objective, I hope. And just because a little targeted treatment might solve a problem, too much creates other problems. That's what makes the article superficial--it talks about strategies and tactics without understanding goals and objectives.

Really finally, if I spent a kilobuck on headphones, they damn well better make me...dampen my listening room.

Rick "decay without echo is usually a good thing" Denney

 

[audio2design]

What happens at recording is art, what happens at playback is science, at least if you want to recreate the art. A studio or a live performance hall is not your living room, and good thing too. Can you imagine the wicked double echos from the hall and your living room. If goes without saying of course that long decay times in live performance venues is because they are large (not exclusively of course).

Most of us are adding a bit of art to our playback, but not too much or the original performance and the information contained in the recording is lost, so we add a bit of acoustic reverb but we are probably going to end up with an RT60 close to a small studio.

 

[Midwest Blade]

I suspect a lot of people have spent a lot of $'s on room treatments without even knowing what they were trying to accomplish.
As we have seen in ASR's and other's objective data, good performing loudspeakers with a decent response are available at a variety of price points.

 

[MakeMineVinyl]

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Why, 60s, why? And why is her neck broken???

Edit:
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I remember those stupid polka dot shirts and vests like the guy in the foreground is wearing. Some things should not be allowed to exist.

 

[Martin]

Interesting article with some good, some OK and some questionable recommendations. Best advice in the entire article:

"Accessories are where the vast majority of audio snake oil shows up. The worst offender? Cables. The first thing to know is that unless you're running speaker cables for hundreds of feet, you just don't need to worry too much about cable quality. People will try to sell you crazy-expensive cables. Laugh at them and buy standard cabling—which isn't as cheap as it used to be, due to material costs of copper alone.​

​

You're essentially shopping for looks and durability, not fidelity; cheaper speaker cables are more susceptible to fraying or breaking, but they still carry audio signals just as well. Just buy modern wire and you'll be fine. Anyone who tells you otherwise doesn't understand physics."​

​

Martin

 

[Frgirard]

i doesn't understand physics because i had never fray or break an ultra cheap speaker cable.