Do you have prejudices that you can't get rid of? (Lets stick to audio)

[Newman]

Let alone switching amplifiers! Those are surely even worse with their dreaded digitalness.

What if I told you that "switching amplifiers" are analog? Would your prejudice unfold?

 

[Rednaxela]

Schiit. I believe I am prejudiced against Schiit products. There is this irrational feeling that it must be less than great gear. Which as far as I know is mostly incorrect.

 

[Ropeburn]

Schiit. I believe I am prejudiced against Schiit products. There is this irrational feeling that it must be less than great gear. Which as far as I know is mostly incorrect.

I hate their whole schtick and how they're dragging the gods of my ancestors through literal shit.

"Schiit is a proud German name..." no it's not, you sillies. You're making this whole Schiit up.

 

[mhardy6647]

I, too, have a bad reaction to Schiit's frat boy antics.
Nonetheless I swallowed my pride and prejudice and bought a Schiit Mani headphone amp.
For our church livestream setup.
It was perfect for the application. I can't imagine that, dollar for dollar, I could have done any better.





This being said: There's probably a special place reserved in hell (or at the least, in purgatory) for people who put Schiit in church.

 

[Ropeburn]

I, too, have a bad reaction to Schiit's frat boy antics.
Nonetheless I swallowed my pride and prejudice and bought a Schiit Mani headphone amp.
For our church livestream setup.
It was perfect for the application. I can't imagine that, dollar for dollar, I could have done any better.




This being said: There's probably a special place reserved in hell (or at the least, in purgatory) for people who put Schiit in church.

Let alone one named after a heathen god. You're going to hell twice!

Schiit is also the German word for Shiite, a member of the second largest islamic faith. So much for their German precision... Lol

 

[Keith_W]

I, too, have a bad reaction to Schiit's frat boy antics.
Nonetheless I swallowed my pride and prejudice and bought a Schiit Mani headphone amp.
For our church livestream setup.

You brought a line of products named after Pagan Gods into your church?

 

[mhardy6647]

It's New England.

 

[007Shorty]

The church on the monitor immediately looked familiar to me:

Google Maps

Find local businesses, view maps and get driving directions in Google Maps.

www.google.de

 

[manisandher]

The church on the monitor immediately looked familiar to me:

I'm a visiting "professor" at the IEDC School, and go to Bled a few times a year. Absolutely beautiful!

 

[Cogito]

Biased against:

stamped speaker baskets
horn loaded drivers
tube gear
vinyl
plastic driver cones
vinyl veneers
SMPS

 

[Waxx]

I also got something against veneer, i want real (ply)wood actually. Idem with plastic speaker cabinets and speaker cabinets from metal, that looks like metal. I don't mind the Genelec way of using metal, where it's coated to look different altough (even if i'm subjectivly not fan of those speakers on sound).

Amps and electronics in plastic cases is also something i don't like. An electronic device should be in a metal case, that should look like metal, even if it's painted. And it should be more or less the size of a 19" rackmount device, no small metal boxes (even if i own a lot of them, because they are good on sound).

 

[WillBrink]

I still can't get with class D amps, still assume all horn speakers will sound like garbage, still think new "high tech" driver materials will be better than paper cuz they look cool.

 

[MattHooper]

Long ago, I used to have a mild bias against metal drivers and tweeters. I never truly went in for the claim they inevitably sounded metallic, but… some experience versus paper drivers seemed to slightly support the idea.
And the whole “ metal tweeters always sound metallic and bright” thing.

Then I encountered some well-designed speakers using metal drivers, and that prejudiced essentially went away.
I’ve had plenty of speakers with metal drivers that sound smooth and gorgeous.

Though I don’t think I’ve shaken it absolutely completely. I still have a sense that many modern speakers using metal drivers have a sense of clarity and purity that almost seems a signature compared to speakers with paper drivers. Sort of like speakers with paper drivers, especially older ones , have a very slight “ fizz” to the sound that is absent with modern speakers and metal drivers.

There’s a number of variables that would need to be untangled in such impressions, and so I think at this point it’s still a form of bias or prejudice.

 

[Waxx]

Long ago, I used to have a mild bias against metal drivers and tweeters. I never truly went in for the claim they inevitably sounded metallic, but… some experience versus paper drivers seemed to slightly support the idea.
And the whole “ metal tweeters always sound metallic and bright” thing.

Then I encountered some well-designed speakers using metal drivers, and that prejudiced essentially went away.
I’ve had plenty of speakers with metal drivers that sound smooth and gorgeous.

Though I don’t think I’ve shaken it absolutely completely. I still have a sense that many modern speakers using metal drivers have a sense of clarity and purity that almost seems a signature compared to speakers with paper drivers. Sort of like speakers with paper drivers, especially older ones , have a very slight “ fizz” to the sound that is absent with modern speakers and metal drivers.

There’s a number of variables that would need to be untangled in such impressions, and so I think at this point it’s still a form of bias or prejudice.

There is a difference, but not one you can't deal with in the design process. Soft material like paper (breakup) resonate less in amplitude, but earlier in the frequency band, hard material like metal resonates more in amplitude, but higher in the frequency band. These are rough generalisations of course, there are all kind of ways to damp and minimise resonations that may have be used and so. But this is the same for any kind of driver, from subwoofer to tweeter and for all types (cone, dome, ribbon, amt, ...)

 

[Keith_W]

I forgot about this one until a friend came over last night to play some music.

I HATE artificial anything in music! Autotune, artificial reverb, and digital pianos. Whenever I hear these things, I think of the uncanny valley. Not artificial enough to be accepted as artificial (example: electronic music), and not real enough to sound like a live performance. It is somewhere in between, and I find the fakeness to be grating.

How to hear autotune: a real singer is unable to hold pitch steady, and sometimes unable to reach the correct pitch immediately, especially high notes. A good singer is able to do both more accurately. But an autotuned singer immediately hits the correct pitch and stays there with no variation in pitch. It is the unnatural perfection of autotune that makes singers sound like singing robots.

Real reverb seems to add space to the recording. But artificial reverb does not - it still sounds like a small acoustic space, but the singer's voice is smeared out in time. Use too much of this, and it adds to the "singing robot" impression.

Digital pianos: these go "plink plonk" and there is a sameness to every note. There is a richness to a real piano, probably because each frequency does not have the same resonance, and some notes might vibrate other strings in resonance.

All the fakeness makes most pop music unlistenable to me. They sound like robotic performing monkeys. I attribute their success to most people not listening on proper systems, because if they did, they would realise how fake it sounds. And they might not mind the fakeness, because they are surrounded by it.

 

[MattHooper]

I forgot about this one until a friend came over last night to play some music.

I HATE artificial anything in music! Autotune, artificial reverb, and digital pianos. Whenever I hear these things, I think of the uncanny valley. Not artificial enough to be accepted as artificial (example: electronic music), and not real enough to sound like a live performance. It is somewhere in between, and I find the fakeness to be grating.

How to hear autotune: a real singer is unable to hold pitch steady, and sometimes unable to reach the correct pitch immediately, especially high notes. A good singer is able to do both more accurately. But an autotuned singer immediately hits the correct pitch and stays there with no variation in pitch. It is the unnatural perfection of autotune that makes singers sound like singing robots.

Real reverb seems to add space to the recording. But artificial reverb does not - it still sounds like a small acoustic space, but the singer's voice is smeared out in time. Use too much of this, and it adds to the "singing robot" impression.

Digital pianos: these go "plink plonk" and there is a sameness to every note. There is a richness to a real piano, probably because each frequency does not have the same resonance, and some notes might vibrate other strings in resonance.

All the fakeness makes most pop music unlistenable to me. They sound like robotic performing monkeys. I attribute their success to most people not listening on proper systems, because if they did, they would realise how fake it sounds. And they might not mind the fakeness, because they are surrounded by it.

I don’t have an allergy to artificial sounds per se since I really love electronic music.

But I truly dislike samples that are supposed to mimic real sounds - strings horns, etc.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m into a genre of music known as library music, which is pre-recorded music of all sorts of genres and moods, which is sold to production houses for movies TV commercials, industrial films, etc. So I’ve got a big library of the stuff from the 60s 70s and into the 80s.

In the 60s and 70s it was all real musicians, so big dynamic band stuff would have full horns sections, drums, percussion, etc., symphonic style music with real symphony instruments, much of it terrifically recorded.

And then the dreaded 80s hit and the keyboard revolution. And then much of the music switched over to being played on keyboards with samples.

The drop in sonic quality can sometimes be monumental. The string and horn and piano, etc. patches are so thin, so harmonically bland, so undynamic, it’s hilarious. But this kind of sound was also accepted in the 80s.

 

[DavidMcRoy]

I am prejudiced "toward" dipole planar or open baffle speakers, even though they are a giant pain in the ass to implement.

I also like just the right kind and amount of tube-like distortion...and it doesn't have to come from an actual tube: a suitable FET circuit or a plug-in will do. No, it doesn't sound more "real," it just sounds more "entertaining."

There. I said it.

 

[Mart68]

I forgot about this one until a friend came over last night to play some music.

I HATE artificial anything in music! Autotune, artificial reverb, and digital pianos. Whenever I hear these things, I think of the uncanny valley. Not artificial enough to be accepted as artificial (example: electronic music), and not real enough to sound like a live performance. It is somewhere in between, and I find the fakeness to be grating.

How to hear autotune: a real singer is unable to hold pitch steady, and sometimes unable to reach the correct pitch immediately, especially high notes. A good singer is able to do both more accurately. But an autotuned singer immediately hits the correct pitch and stays there with no variation in pitch. It is the unnatural perfection of autotune that makes singers sound like singing robots.

Real reverb seems to add space to the recording. But artificial reverb does not - it still sounds like a small acoustic space, but the singer's voice is smeared out in time. Use too much of this, and it adds to the "singing robot" impression.

Digital pianos: these go "plink plonk" and there is a sameness to every note. There is a richness to a real piano, probably because each frequency does not have the same resonance, and some notes might vibrate other strings in resonance.

All the fakeness makes most pop music unlistenable to me. They sound like robotic performing monkeys. I attribute their success to most people not listening on proper systems, because if they did, they would realise how fake it sounds. And they might not mind the fakeness, because they are surrounded by it.

I know where you're coming from but I don't have a problem with it. I just regard it as integral to the art. I can listen to 'processed' pop music (had Kylie and Gwen Stefani on recently) and enjoy it. I think my system is fairly 'proper'. The mixes on those albums are absolute works of art, truly an exempler of the recording engineer's craft.

 

[Chr1]

I would go so far as to suggest that the modern pop music producers and engineers have to be even more skilled than those required for producing the likes of jazz and classical music. For classical music it is just a case of getting a good recording of the instruments played. Modern pop music production and engineering can be very difficult to produce and record. Way more varied and complex equipment involved IMHO.
(I enjoy all of the genres above btw.)

 

[Waxx]

I would go so far as to suggest that the modern pop music producers and engineers have to be even more skilled than those required for producing the likes of jazz and classical music. For classical music it is just a case of getting a good recording of the instruments played. Modern pop music production and engineering can be very difficult to produce and record. Way more varied and complex equipment involved IMHO.
(I enjoy all of the genres above btw.)

That's because you don't know how classical is recorded, mic placement there is an art, as most crucial are the room mics that make the majority of the sound. Pop music is almost all closem miced in an relative neutral sounding room, classical is mostly recorded in concert halls and from a distance, where acoustics are a big part of the sound. The skills are different, not less complex, because you can't fix things in the mix mostly. It need to be recorded right from first take or it's useless and it will cost a lot more to re-record it.