Follow-up from my 10 year old posting on "Truth, Lies and Fraud in the Audiophile World"

[skikirkwood]

This is my first posting on ASR, and I was unaware of the forum rules requiring a summary paragraph instead of just posting a link, so let me try again.

For many years, I believed what I read in audio magazines and forums. Why wouldn't I? I've always loved music, and 25 years ago upgraded my system - Bryston electronics and B&W speakers. Ten years ago, I pre-purchased a Pono unit, but after doing so, I got a promotional email from them describing the improved audio quality of hi-res music. Something didn't seem right, and I started researching the topic of digital audio. Note that I am a computer scientist and led the digital media software group at SGI 30 years ago.

I eventually concluded that the high-end audiophile world was lying to me. And they were doing this out of necessity. As audio magazines went online, their revenue model shifted to advertising. And who were their advertisers? Companies like Synergistic Research and Shunyata Research sell $1000+ cables and all kinds of crazy stuff. Ironically, I checked the brand of my own cables, and the audio dealer had sold me Transparent cables, which I'm sure were extremely expensive when I purchased them 25 years ago.

So, based upon all of that, I published an article on Medium titled "Truth, Lies and Fraud in the Audiophile World". It's been ten years, and yesterday I published a follow-up article, where I described how 10 years ago I saw that the kind of thinking in high-end audio could spill over to U.S. politics - in a bad way. And it has. Here's the post, and hopefully I'm compliant with forum rules this time.

https://medium.com/@skikirkwood/truth-lies-and-fraud-in-the-audiophile-world-ten-years-later-f6105fc7b8f6

 

[skikirkwood]

Since I posted an article on what I thought was rampant fraud in the audiophile world 10 years ago on Medium, I decided to do a follow-up article today:

https://medium.com/@skikirkwood/truth-lies-and-fraud-in-the-audiophile-world-ten-years-later-f6105fc7b8f6

I shared this on Audiophilestyle.com and the owner deleted it 5 minutes later. So I guess there's no better validation of the article's major premise than this!

 

[Arindal]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. To me, observing this scene from the stance of objectivism and evidence-based thinking, it is a bit amusing and frustrating to see how little has changed not only in the last 10 years, but rather 30 years since high end phenomena are discussed publicly. Some thoughts:

The audiophile media ecosystem, at its corrupt core, was training people to distrust measurement and trust authority.

I seriously doubt that. In my understanding, it was not esoteric audiophile publications destroying trust in science and authority of measurements, specs and audio objectivism. It was audio objectivism itself, or the way it was handled some 30, 40 or 50 years ago by both publications, dealerships and manufacturers. What was declared to be best-measuring gear and meaningful technical specs, was not matching people´s experience with what sounded good. Loudspeakers with the flattest graphs were sounding horrible, specs like SNR became meaningless in the CD era. On top, an absurd tech-spec marketing war was raging, ´My loudspeakers reach as low as 22 Hz!´ - ´Your amp has only 278 Watts, I have 724!´. The packaging for my first cheap desktop speakers which I bought being a school boy, was boasting ´10.000 Watts PMPO!´ while offering maybe 2Watts RMS. From the very beginning, it taught everyone of my generation and those to follow, to mistrust measurements.

People relying solely on subjectivism, eventually ending up with esoteric nitpicking trying to hear differences between power chords and USB cables, rather looked like a countermovement to this spec/measurement absurdity of the 1970s and 1980s.

No one needed to train people to distrust measurements. A single listening session with an admittingly flawed LS3/5a sounding surprisingly natural compared to all the tech-spec monsters, would do. And this attitude is surprisingly persistent and wide-spread even among those who have come late to the party (like my generation).

1. There is a truth that experts can access, but instruments cannot fully measure.

The most science-based, grounded and objectivist experts in pro audio and recording will tell you: there are aspects of sound quality assessment, which you cannot predict or evaluate solely based on measurements. Not because they are deriving from magic or have no ground in physics (they all do), but because the soundfield in a room and mechanism of human perception including the HRTF, are too complicated to build a prediction model.

I am talking about aspects like phantom source localization, reverb tonality, depth-of-field, spatial perception, ambience, proximity, as well as others like bass impulse precision and midrange transparency. Anyone who has experienced either differences between loudspeakers or rooms which should sound the same solely judging from measurements and facts, or has experienced a situation in which something that measured worse, sounds actually more natural or more according to own´s expectations, will doubt the almight of audio objectivism from that moment on.

The more audio objectivists talk about limitations of what measurements can predict, the more they take people´s personal experience seriously (even if it will turn out to be non-existent differences) and discuss the relevance of subjective preference of sound character, the more credibility measurements will get, IMHO.

That does not mean accepting every single delusion or objectively irrelevant phenomena. If you want people to understand that digital cables don´t matter, teach them how to do own blind tests! It is much more effective than publicly insulting everyone as ´corrupt´ or every expensive product as ´snake oil´.

The objectivists didn’t save the audiophile industry. The legacy publications still exist, still publish glowing reviews of six-figure components, still don’t run measurements, still don’t have comments. But they are smaller, less influential, and increasingly irrelevant to anyone who discovered ASR or Reddit.

I fully support the mission, but i doubt it is having the impact you are hoping for. Yes, the ultra high end scene being open for absurd products, looks like it is in decline. But that could also be the outcome of its typical members growing older, losing interest in flipping gear and simply walking away.

If you just publish measurements and judge gear based on it, without explaining why which aspect matters, leaving room for subjective experience and personal taste, I don´t really see the idea of audio objectivism growing among hi-fi people and audiophiles to come. Yes, traffic of the site may grow, and lots of people who have bought inexpensive digital gear, might feel confirmation that this is the right thing to do.

But these are not the majority of future hi-fi buyers and listeners. The generation who is about to discover audio, in the sense of buying their first gear costing more than a few bucks, between age 15 and 35, seemingly does not overly care for technical aspects and measurements. They typically buy true wireless earbuds, portable bluetooth speakers, bigger party speakers and smart home components, which oftentimes are tuned to achieve a maximum of ´party fun sound´, measuring ridiculous and in the majority deviating from the ideal of linear reproduction gear. In many cases, they do not even care for stereo reproduction, and have never experienced plausible loudspeaker reproduction in a room. I don´t see examples of typical gear being promoted by ASR and other objectivists, becoming really popular *because* of superior measurements.

If they would not be taught basic objective principles of how audio reproduction, loudspeakers and stereo works and how to personally experience sound quality beyond cheap standard gear and earphones, they will be the next generation lost for audio objectivism.

 

[Yasuo]

Thank you for doing this!

 

[RexrothPigeon]

The generation who is about to discover audio, in the sense of buying their first gear costing more than a few bucks, between age 15 and 35, seemingly does not overly care for technical aspects and measurements.

I'm a bit older, but my social scenes are heavily in this age range, and everyone I know who has taken the step to improve their audio experience disdains "audiophile" culture and focuses instead on good-measuring gear (mostly desktop setups, IEMs/amps/streamers, but not exclusively). In fact, it's they who first exposed me to ASR and told me about Klippel NFS.

 

[tineared]

I shared this on Audiophilestyle.com and the owner deleted it 5 minutes later. So I guess there's no better validation of the article's major premise than this!

Thank you for sharing your cogent and thought provoking observations of the evolution of the contemporary audio environment and how the same observations also apply to other areas of human concern. Excellent contribution to the community!

 

[skikirkwood]

Thank you for sharing your cogent and thought provoking observations of the evolution of the contemporary audio environment and how the same observations also apply to other areas of human concern. Excellent contribution to the community!

Thank you!

 

[JSmith]

I eventually concluded that the high-end audiophile world was lying to me. And they were doing this out of necessity. As audio magazines went online, their revenue model shifted to advertising. And who were their advertisers? Companies like Synergistic Research and Shunyata Research sell $1000+ cables and all kinds of crazy stuff.

JSmith

 

[Chris A]

One thing that will likely change...as Gen-X begins to age out, the "audiophile crowd" (behind the boomers) will simply start to disappear, too. It seems that Millennial listeners can't afford hi-fi sound systems after they renovate their homes. Gen-Z has yet to find the disposable income to buy a home, much less hi-fi audio.

The second issue that you've tied to (fairly successfully I think in context of the first) will likely not be going away any time soon. That kind of thing persists--essentially forever. It doesn't hit the pocket book quite like the first subject so it can stick around even if there is no disposable income.

To the OP: you're a brave man. I applaud your bravery to swim against such a strong current that exists right now--one that doesn't care about truth or reason. I was beginning to think that everyone had cowered down. "Go along...and continue to ignore the elephant in the room."

Chris

 

[Haskil]

Thank You ! It' so true... and the story begin with Monster Cable during the 70's... and after with the gang of analogic against CD and digital...

 

[HalSF]

I read this 10-year follow-up essay and have extremely mixed feelings about it.

I too have evolved past a lot of audiophile assumptions into a deep skepticism toward “high end” conceptions about sound quality and how to understand it, but a framework that elevates a harsh, moralistic, Manichean vocabulary of fraud, lies, conspiracy, and deception in a battle of audio “shills” and evil charlatans vs. noble, honest truth-tellers is not the way forward in my opinion. And equating dubious subjective thinking about music playback to deranged toxic politics seems like a pretentious leap and a risky path to poisoning the conversation. This whole approach needs to take it down a very large notch.

Years ago I read an essay on literary theory that offered a contrast between two styles of reading, paranoid and reparative.

“Paranoia places its faith in exposure,” the essay argues. But it also contends that “paranoia knows some things well and others poorly.” One thing it knows poorly is how to avoid getting stuck on the cynical naïveté that we’re all being played for suckers in a zero-sum game.

I have a strong preference for sweet reason, calm persuasion, and an emphasis on mutual pleasure and love for musical beauty in our endless, hopefully reparative conversations about hi-fi truth and excellence.

Versus thousands of pages of acrid bickering about MQA bunk and expensive cables and the neo-fascism of subjective audio in denunciations that make the rubble bounce.

 

[voodooless]

I have a strong preference for sweet reason, calm persuasion, and an emphasis on mutual pleasure and love for musical beauty in our endless, hopefully reparative conversations about hi-fi truth and excellence.

Versus thousands of pages of acrid bickering about MQA bunk and expensive cables and the neo-fascism of subjective audio in denunciations that make the rubble bounce.

Both can be true at the same time. They are not mutually exclusive.

 

[RickS]

Removed a few posts as thread was reported a few times for off-topic politics.

Please stay on topic. Thanks!

 

[Arindal]

It seems that Millennial listeners can't afford hi-fi sound systems after they renovate their homes.

Some can, some cannot, don´t think this is much different from Gen X. What I noticed is lots of Millenials, or ´Gen MP3´/ `Gen iPhone´, how I call them, tending more towards compact gear and convenient usability. Explaining them the sense of having a vast CD collection, or the beauty of chunky mono amplifiers or big tower speakers, seems almost impossible. Members of Gen Z at least find this exotic, and for Gen X this is what their fathers used to have.

I applaud your bravery to swim against such a strong current that exists right now--one that doesn't care about truth or reason.

We should not forget that some 40 years ago, this ultra-objectivistic thinking was mainstream in hi-fi and common belief. Funnily, those who discovered first that measurements are not everything and good-measuring gear can sound terrible, were back then the ones lauded ´brave men´, getting applause for swimming against the mainstream. It is still a mystery to me why this pendulum has swung back to the opposite direction of extreme subjectivism and esoteric beliefs so decisively, and never really came back.

 

[Chris A]

We should not forget that some 40 years ago, this ultra-objectivistic thinking was mainstream in hi-fi and common belief.

The comment you originally quoted concerned the "second issue" mentioned in the article. Strong desire based on personal beliefs replace measurement and honest reasoning. Hi-fi is but one casualty.

Funnily, those who discovered first that measurements are not everything and good-measuring gear can sound terrible, were back then the ones lauded ´brave men´, getting applause for swimming against the mainstream.

Measurements can effectively identify good sound nowadays, but the data necessary is typically not taken...and is summarily dismissed when it is.

Chris