High-end electronics vs high-end audio

[Wombat]

Gaffer

 

[restorer-john]

In Oz, duct tape is a satin-silver coloured super grippy smooth vinyl substrate tape that sticks like shit. It is used for joining aluminium concertinaed ducting.
Gaffer tape has threads in the vinyl backing for strength and although it sticks tenaciously can be readily 'undone'. Mostly used by Gaffers and Roadies for temporary dismantlable stage accessory fastening.

 

[Gedeon]

I have always associated possessions listed in a forum signature with:

View attachment 42586


Or the abbreviated form:

View attachment 42587

That's a lossless or lossy compression ?

 

[Kal Rubinson]

You guys are mangling the words. It's 200 mph tape.

How much is that in IPS?

 

[JP]

3,520.

 

[Kal Rubinson]

3,520.

Thanks, neighbor. (I should have included a smiley.)

 

[murraycamp]

Nobody who bought a super expensive TV would tell you it needed synergy with their games console, that you don't have the eyesight/hearing to appreciate it, or that they're still burning their remote in.

Preach

 

[murraycamp]

I think another factor is everything other than transducers and maybe some power amps is or usually can be audibly transparent. It has reached the point of effective perfection for human hearing. That is very difficult for people to accept as true. So you either create stories to convince people other factors matter or you actually degrade the resulting signal in a way that one might find attractive or at least not annoying and proclaim the difference an improvement.

+1

 

[LTig]

No sure about all this.
A high end TV with 10 bit comes no way near the real live contrast of at least 16 bit that every body can experience an sunset (and most have a low cost 6bit Panel). The TVs color space and handling is no way close to real live. Almost every stores displays them in a special „Sales” mode with the color temperature set to 10k as it looks so sharp. Sure, go ahead and get a calibrated screen to adjust your photos in LR or PS to be perfect - only that 99% of all viewers will have 8000Kelvin screen with blown out colors. This is like audio engineers would create recordings for an audience consisting 99% of Bluetooth boom boxes.

This actually happens: audio engineers which create brick wall recordings. They may sound good on boom boxes but horribly on better gear.

 

[JP]

Thanks, neighbor. (I should have included a smiley.)

I'm not that far on the spectrum that I didn't know you were joking.

 

[Dimitri]

This actually happens: audio engineers which create brick wall recordings. They may sound good on boom boxes but horribly on better gear.

Not engineers. Hungry scum.

 

[Pluto]

Makes you wonder what they call gaffers at the BBC... "lighting tech" or something I'd guess

The "lighting gaffer" is the chargehand (foreman) electrician. The term derives from the use of a "gaff", essentially a pulley operated by the use of a long pole. It was, traditionally, the gaffer's task to interpret the lighting designer's plan and supervise the rigging of the stage accordingly.

The electricians team, in general, are referred to as "sparks" and the gaffer, colloquially, as the "chargehand sparks". It's one of those odd terms where singular and plural appear not to matter. One electrician is a sparks, as are an entire team of them.

 

[Dimitri]

This actually happens: audio engineers which create brick wall recordings. They may sound good on boom boxes but horribly on better gear.

This is somethign I always keep in mind when people discuss equipment ...I wonder what kind of mastering they are listening to. And to keep the lid of the other can of worms half open, as "limited" as vinyl is, it's harder to be mastered for by scum.

 

[Putter]

This is something I always keep in mind when people discuss equipment ...I wonder what kind of mastering they are listening to. And to keep the lid of the other can of worms half open, as "limited" as vinyl is, it's harder to be mastered for by scum.

As long as we're on a rant, it bugs me that almost all popular music produced in the last 20 years is either brickwalled or significantly compressed unless you buy the technically inferior, but more expensive vinyl record. Even worse, recordings issued from before that are remastered. Any audible improvements from that process are then compromised by added compression vs. the initial CD release apparently because everyone listens to music on earbuds in noisy environs, i.e. the gym, subway, bus etc.

 

[MattHooper]

It's interesting to consider why audio seems particularly susceptible to the level of B.S. we see. The direct analogy to things like watches or other blingy purchases doesn't really capture what is going on in high end audio. In audio there are outrageous and often psuedo-scientific claims made, and those claims are evaluated as "true" because people buying the expensive gear think they can actually "hear" the effects. So an audiophile spending $20,000 on a CD player isn't just buying for the aesthetics (even though they likely influence perception) but for the promise of better sound, and they believe they are hearing better sound.

This kind of thing seems less the case in, as the OP points out, things like TVs which are generally appealing to our visual sense. Seems at least on face value that with hearing there is a lot more "fudge space" for perception to wander. If you and I are both listening to a system and I say "listen to that lovely burnished tone on the trumpets this new CDP is depicting" you may not hear what I say I hear. But...in the normal environment of listening (e.g. not blind testing) how do you dispute it? It seems all you can say is "Well, I don't hear it." That leaves the option available to the other listener of just presuming his perception is true, but the other guy's hearing isn't perceptive enough to pick up on it. (I go through this all the time on the subjectivist forums, as I have again lately. If the debate concerns whether a certain tweak produces audible results, and I'm questioning both the claimed basis for the tweak and the purely subjective method of vetting the claim, if I point out I try the tweak and hear no difference, the subjectivist-tweaker will always just default to "then clearly you don't have refined enough gear/ears to hear the difference." It's never, ever, that the subjectivist could be fooling himself. But since the subjectivist won't put his own perception to the test under controlled conditions, he always has this "Golden Eared" card to play, at least to himself).

Whereas if we are sitting in front of two computer displays, or TVs, one being higher res than the other, and I say "look at the added detail on the higher res screen"...yes, bias can still influence...but there seems a much better chance that (vision being ok with both viewers) we could agree by literally pointing to details seen on one - e.g. letters becoming legible - and not seen on the other. A sort of "point right at the effect" which is available visually, but not so much in subjective audio listening.

That said, there certainly has been a bunch of B.S. with home theater displays. Especially in the days before HDMI and when home theater was really breaking out in the 90's to early 2000's, there were plenty of subjective reviews of analog video cables extolling the "deeper contrast, more brilliant color, more 3 dimensional image" of one set of cables over another. And it was often discussed this way among videophiles. (The amount of fretting over the picture quality differences in DVD players filled tomes, in AV forums).

I certainly exprienced sighted bias this way when I was testing video cables at the time. But when I put it to a blind test both for myself and others, the differences I thought I was identifying went away.

 

[Pluto]

It's interesting to consider why audio seems particularly susceptible to the level of B.S. we see

I don't think that's an especially difficult question to answer.

We are now in a place where a couple of k-bucks will get you from any kind of digital signal you can think of, to sufficient analogue power to satisfy most needs. And all the foregoing is achieved with a quality that is, in most respects, far ahead of the capability of the human ear. Ergo, anything more than this is unnecessary and, therefore, requires BS, of a greater or lesser degree, to sell it.

After that, you can spend all you want on speakers but that, in my view, is a different story.

 

[anmpr1]

It's interesting to consider why audio seems particularly susceptible to the level of B.S. we see. The direct analogy to things like watches or other blingy purchases doesn't really capture what is going on in high end audio.

Exactly. No one buys a high end Swiss mechanical watch and says, "Wow. The pace and timing of this Rolex blows my Timex out of the water." No one thinks that the higher the price of the watch, the better it tells time. In fact, everyone knows it's probably just the opposite.

It's just willfull imagination. I've told the story before: I was at a high end salon I used to deal with. Three of us and the salesman were auditioning three preamps. An FET Acoustat, and two tube models (Counterpoint SA-5 and Conrad Johnson whose model I don't recall). We all thought the Acoustat sounded 'dry and sterile' (it could have conceivably sounded different given its non-tube topology) whereas the the tube units had all the 'warmth and delicacy' you expected with tubes (note the expectation from the get-go).

The Counterpoint had the old Mark Levinson preamp form-factor, necessitating that the tubes be mounted horizontally to fit the half rack space. As we were listening no one complained about the sound, but one guy theorized that tubes were 'meant' to be mounted vertically, up and down. He then theorized that the horizontal mounting would introduce an unexpected 'time smear' into the electron flow, causing some audible smearing of the sound. After a short while, we all started to notice this esoteric, but definitely present, form of time-smear distortion.

My only excuse for that bit of idiocy was that most everyone who went into a 'high end' store back in the day was an idiot. It was sort of an 'idiot's club' where you could hang-out, swap stories, and have a good time. As long as you bought something every now and then. Plus, the store would take your old idiot gear bought last year, in trade for this year's new idiot gear. Lather, rinse, repeat...

 

[majingotan]

Exactly. No one buys a high end Swiss mechanical watch and says, "Wow. The pace and timing of this Rolex blows my Timex out of the water." No one thinks that the higher the price of the watch, the better it tells time. In fact, everyone knows it's probably just the opposite.

That's why the word Audiophool exists. The difference in marketing watches and high end DACs makes a huge impact as well: high end Swiss watch talks about complications but I don't see them saying that they're the most accurate in time keeping whereas high end DACs boast all the complications in the promise of most accurate timing, best soundstage, most analog sound, and other glorious unicorn improvements. The phools are not well informed of the objective facts in the equipment while the customers in the high end swiss watch market are aware of the limitations so they have other reasons to buy them which are purely subjective

 

[jsrtheta]

Yup, Wombat, high-end audio is a category so far removed from other branches of electronics and technology I still can't get my head around it.

I've confused the hell out of my friends and family with binaural recordings too, tks. "But it's just one on each ear, how is coming from behind me?!". Nothing quite as elaborate as that though!.

I'm not so sure about two channel being enough. We're stuffing more and more speakers around us for home cinema in order to get the directionality needed, using all sorts of DSP, and it's still not there. I can fool someone outside the room that someone is knocking at the door - accidentally, it's just a film - or even that I'm having a conversation. But stereos don't create anything but a passingly convincing 3D effect on front of you, and you have to buy into it. I've never thought an audience member was clapping behind me or whispering in my ear. Perhaps there's a way to virtually divide the room down the middle to approach the effect of headphones, I did see a review of a speaker that played with phase in order to create an odd stereo separation effect. I'm dubious, but you never know. It'd certainly be convenient. I still don't think it'll be the old guard high-end audio companies who achieve it however its done though, it'll be modern tech companies.

Home cinema with all these speakers can occasionally produce extremely convincing effects. So there's already people with setups that most would deem impractical, just to have those experiences. That's the lightning in a bottle we chase. It's not inconceivable that as homes get "smarter", sound engineers focus more heavily on it, and money is poured into R&D that we could bridge that uncanny valley in audio and have truly immersive experiences, outside the lab. And in time it could become commonplace. That's the dream anyhow. Bring back Tomorrow's World!

Then explain why, at the end of Sting's The Soul Cages, Sting's final word, "Goodnight", comes from behind the listener? Granted, the room and the system have to be just so, but it made me jump the first time I heard the effect. No DSP, no crosstalk cancellation tricks, just simple 2.1 stereo playing through an analog two-channel preamp and an analog two channel amp.

As I said, the system and the room have to work together. It doesn't work in the wrong room. But psychoacoustics are powerful enough, done correctly, to create a lot of special effects.

 

[LTig]

Then explain why, at the end of Sting's The Soul Cages, Sting's final word, "Goodnight", comes from behind the listener?

Here it comes from 90 degree to the left.

Granted, the room and the system have to be just so, but it made me jump the first time I heard the effect. No DSP, no crosstalk cancellation tricks, just simple 2.1 stereo playing through an analog two-channel preamp and an analog two channel amp.

As I said, the system and the room have to work together. It doesn't work in the wrong room. But psychoacoustics are powerful enough, done correctly, to create a lot of special effects.

It was created by Q-sound. I've no idea what kind of electronics was used to create this effect but chances are high that it's done in the digital domain.