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High-end electronics vs high-end audio

Blumlein 88

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Here it comes from 90 degree to the left.

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.
Yes Q sound is based upon how we hear directional cues. And can quite effectively place objects all around you. Not quite as solidly or consistently as true multi-channel, but it can do a good job of it. I've a couple of CDs done in Q sound. Roger Water's Amused to Death is probably the other one most widely known for using Qsound.

Phillips DVD players used to have a proprietary variation that did the same thing. It too could place sounds around and behind you with only stereo source signals.
 
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JustPoo

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That's something I've never experienced myself, although I've never heard The Soul Cages or Amused to Death. But I'll certainly give it go, I'd like to see how effective it is. I think I may have to reposition my speakers into a more standard setup because of my space restrictions, but I might stick it on before and see what it sounds like. It'll have to wait until I'm back to my main rig though, I don't think Ms Poo's little friend Dot is gonna do the trick. I'd like to experience it anyhow and I agree that stereo can produce a remarkable effect, though I'm still of the opinion that in order for musical reproduction to progress to the point where it produces a consistently believable soundstage, equally from all sides, we need more speakers. Surround sound exists for a reason, although I sometimes suspect it's to sell more bloody speakers!. If we could get to the state where the "barbershop" binaural recording is as convincing with speakers as it is with headphones I'd be a very happy camper. It will take some processing - probably hugely more complicated successors to Q-Sound and its variants - maybe head and body tracking etc, but I'm sure we can get there. If that's possible with 2.1 rather than 200.1 then all the better, I barely have room for the speakers I have :)

I saw a video about some very interesting technology today; a holographic display that requires no glasses and has a 50° range of viewing angles - as you move your head you see the image as it would look from that viewpoint and it works for multiple people at once. In some ways it's similar to VR. It's a remarkable product, it was impressive enough just to see it demonstrated on my television but I'd love to see the effect for myself. It's a wee bit pricey at the mo though. It's in its infancy, even at 4k and 8k the video or image isn't as sharp as a standard display due to the way the technology works, but if that's a sign of things to come then I can only do a little wee in anticipation of what cinema and home cinema might look and sound like in the future.

On reading the talk of poorly mastered music I realised that a person of my age has likely never had a truly great CD of any of their favourite music made in their teen-adult lifetime. Fuck that's depressing. You do get exceptions, but you have to look. Against all expectation, when my niece introduced me to Billy Eilish I really liked her music. Don't you judge me. I have her CD rips and have also listened to the Tidal and Amazon Music versions. The sound quality seems to differ from track to track, I think it might just be the nature of the music in some cases. I was interested to see that she also released a cassette of her latest album and might grab it to see how well it's been done. I had a decent collection of tape albums from my early years and after having ripped them to FLAC I must admit I prefer some of them to the CD version. Not least because some of them weren't released on CD at all!.

Ah the upgrade cycle. How I miss it so. Actually it's kinda true, having the latest toys is nice. But damn it'll cost ya. I'm glad I jumped off that train. I haven't upgraded my AVR for ten years and until a few days ago, before it indicating its impending death, I wasn't planning on it. It did the job perfectly. I still might not, eBay here I come. As Matt mentioned, high-end bullshit did and still does infect the home cinema market too.

The cable pushers probably remain the worst offenders across both markets. I've happened across some frighteningly expensive HDMI cables on Amazon from AudioQuest (who else?). And customer reviews swearing tellies or projectors are now popping with ungodly contrast, and audio systems are positively ablaze with extra electrons. There's often a loose formula to the reviews - they start off defending their choice, telling you they were a skeptic, or outright telling you to stop reading if you're a non-believer. I read one that gave permission to copy and paste his review to heretic forums. I hope someone has taken him up on his kind offer, it was a doozy. They'll mention what marvels the cable has done, then go right back to defending their choice and conclude by pleading with the reader to ignore the skeptics and try one. Why so defensive? I guess it's a good thing that they think to preempt an inevitable sea of critics. It gives me hope :)

The high-end of the home cinema market isn't so divorced from high-end audio as other categories I guess, with audio being such a large component of the experience and cables that carry both video and audio. You still have the same companies preying on insecurity and ignorance, and it's not such a mental leap with the components being so similar. I follow a YouTube channel called Audioholics, I'm sure some of you are familiar with it. They seem to have pretty thorough objective testing methodologies when it comes to home cinema audio gear. They're certainly no fans of snake oil or inflated claims anyway.

I've written too much already. I can feel a rant brewing. Ah screw it. Digicidal brought up the internet and social media as vectors for the spread of the high-end along with its associated ideas, and it's a very good point. So blame him. There really aren't nearly enough popular YouTube channels with that sort of approach. Objectivist audiophiles appear to have a PR problem now that information is so readily available on the net. You'd hope now the gatekeepers of knowledge - the magazines, elders and dealers (not all bad of course) - are now hugely outnumbered, that the public would be closer to the truth through the wisdom of crowds. Well, Beats are the best selling headphones. Audiophiles may be more numerous than they were, but while their gear might be fancier, is the truth more sought after than sensationalism and opinion?.

Viewpoints abound, they're parroted, they become received wisdom. Youtube is hugely influential. Look at McGowan, Darko, even Guttenberg to a point. They're amiable, even charming, they speak with authority and provide easily understood nuggets that'll cost you. Hey, Paul, I don't care about your book, your diet, or your book about your diet, I care that you disseminate specious advice to a wide audience that takes you seriously. There's Ethan who knows more than those three combined. However, he's not a "personality YouTuber" and his more thorough explanations aren't so readily understood by your average viewer with the attention span of a gnat. Even if perfectly clear to a toddler they're still not delivered with that smooth sales patter so common now. He's not a bullshitter in a bullish bullshit market. So people return to subjective entertainment delivered by salesmen of one stripe or another. That entertainment is more popular shouldn't be a surprise, but if more objectivity could be injected into entertainment we'd be on to something. I'm as entertaining as shingles, so I'll leave that up to you fine folks :)

The potential audience for high-end audio is now bigger than it ever was and it's never been easier to buy into, in all senses. With so many companies and people claiming its technical and aural superiority, plus the accepted wisdom of consumer electronics that the more you pay the more you get, it's unsurprising you find more and more people falling for it. And once you're invested in it, the more difficult it is to extricate yourself.

An aside before I get back to the internet, I have yet more ranting to do on that. The high-end wouldn't be the high end if it weren't expensive. That's bloody obvious, that's its definition, but have you ever seen or heard something to the effect of "high-end sound without the high-end price tag"?. High-end sound isn't a thing. High quality sound is a thing. High-end sound is just a presumption of quality, and with that comes pricing bias. To reduce their prices would cheapen brands, their perceived value, and undermine the assumption or their claims of high performance. The opposite is also true, raise your prices and people take the gear more seriously. And it works, I'm sick of consumers strictly price bracketing performance. Some companies offer affordable options - but they make it clear you're buying in at the low end of their range of increasingly expensive - and therefore better - products. Some brands don't have sales or special offers. Others even invent new brands to compete in lower price bands in order to preserve their high-end company's prestige. So which came first, the performance or the price? And how well are they linked? Well we know the answer to that at least.

The insidious thing about high-end audio is that you don't have to be rich. If you have a job, or a credit card, you can grab yourself a taste of that pie. No it won't be the cost of a car or even a house, but it'll still be far more than you need to spend and maybe not a one-off purchase. In the same way that someone can buy a £100 Versace t-shirt or a Vuitton keyring, they can have a touch of that high end. Sell tens of thousands and gain some repeat customers into the bargain and you're quids in, as with the purest grade snake oil. You can buy an AudioQuest "entry-level" cable for £30. Customer and seller alike have their foot in the door.

Okay, now it's officially a rant. Speaking of "buying in", back in the day I bought a pair of fancy RCA cables - sorry - interconnects. I'd never given them much thought, but they had five stars in WhatHiFi. They know what they're talking about, right? People say they're the bees knees, they can't all be wrong. Is wire just wire? I guess I'll find out for myself. They were many times the cost of my existing cables, but within reach, they were entry level. And cheaper than new speakers. They arrived and ooh, they did look nice. Shiny. I A/B'd them with my boring old cables. Sighted. Hmm, they do sound better, yup, I'm sure they're clearer. Yup. I wondered what their higher end cables might sound like. If these had offered such an obvious upgrade then what could spending triple do?!. A few weeks later I then proudly demonstrated the difference to my sister. She couldn't hear a thing. Ah, maybe it's the music. I tried again. Nothing but an indulgent and amused look. Maybe she just isn't as attuned to these thing as me, I probably thought, puffing my chest out. I double checked the connections to the amp just in case. I had them reversed in my head, the cables I thought were better were my old ones. Deflated, my sister did the switching, blind. Shit. There's that look again. Oh great, now she's laughing. If that hadn't happened, then who knows? Would I still be swearing there's a difference despite the wealth of easily available information to the contrary? I hope not, I'd like to think I'm more rational than that, but that's how it starts.

Still here? Wow. Back to the internet then. Maybe the best/worst thing about it is that it allows people with similar and dissimilar interests and beliefs to find each other. You'd hope that being exposed to differing views would open our minds - and indeed it can - but it also creates bubbles and echo chambers. The algorithms will show you more and more of whatever it is you search for, view and click on, which is even dangerous in some cases. People may end up more and more ideologically insulated. Even with something as relatively mundane as audio.

So they join a forum of people who share certain opinions, not merely a forum that caters to a specific interest. Forums where dissenting views are stamped on by anonymous mobs and mods. And those places grow and grow, until dissent becomes unmanageable, lines are drawn, there's a schism and yet another new forum is born. Sometimes marginally different, sometimes radically so. And then those forums malign and argue with each other, defying the point of the split in the first place, but further strengthening their own dogmas.

It happened to a vaping forum I was an active member of. A bloody vaping forum. "But why?" you definitely asked. There was a fierce divide that made the forum intolerable because... well first you need to know what a mechanical mod is to understand the awesome stupidity of the acrimony. A mech mod is a metal tube that houses a battery and has a mechanical switch. It resembles a torch body modified to power an atomiser, which is exactly what the first home-brew turned commercial example was and why they're called mods. The more you know. Anyhow, there were those who thought £200+ for a mechanical mod was obscene when you could buy an identical one for less than a tenner, and those who said they were worth every penny, that they could tell the difference, and that the real innovation came from the high-end. Which also happened to sponsor the newly minted forum and be personal friends with the admins. Even then, the new forum still made occasional incursions to stir things up. Meanwhile, Chinese equipment quickly outperformed and evolved far past anything the high-end produced, and at a fraction of the cost. It exposed the high-end fans for what they were. Tube polishing elitists interested in posting pictures of collections of increasingly inferior equipment, whilst somehow living with the intense cognitive dissonance that continuing to claim its superiority brings. Hmm, rings a bell.

"Fake news" - it's OK, I punched myself in the dick for saying it - saturates all social media, which is optimised for engagement, not truth. It's almost custom built to create drama. We're quite capable of creating that with no help at all, as people seek the sensational and easy to understand over the thoroughly researched and dryly argued. It feels good to know that you bought the best. It feels good to be part of an elite club. Golden Ears™ are birthed, nurtured and exploited by the high-end market. That's one reason why we're outnumbered. They're selling a dream. We just have plain old reality to offer. Blue pill or the red pill?

And while I'm at it - oh god, he's still talking - I've seen some pretty fancy wordplay and cherry picked or outright fabricated customer testimonials. I'm sure that high-end audio companies craft their copy very carefully. There are still companies out there making misleading scientific claims. The pseudoscience on some manufacturers' websites is genuinely of a calibre that I couldn't make it up. Most, if not all, has been handily debunked - at least in reference to audible improvements in sound. We know double blind testing is not kind to those claims, nor are measuring instruments. I don't think it's unreasonable for scientific claims or implications made by manufacturers to be backed by publicly available bench tests, sound and relevant scientific theory, and regulated by the law. Independent standardised blind testing would be the icing on an easily digestible cake. I care when, for instance, a company suggests audible improvements are because they've solved an issue that is indeed a concern in some fields - giving the veneer of scientific authority - but shouldn't be applied to audio because it's completely inaudible and in many cases has no measurable effect to the audible spectrum at all. There has to be a way of regulating that. It wouldn't surprise me if a framework is already in place and it just needs a well placed nudge.

There are parallels to be drawn with homeopathic medicine. Look, you came this far, we're on the home stretch now, I really do need a little wee now. It arose around the same time as vaccination theory was first being developed. As I understand it some aspects involved introducing the body to a small amount of a virus in a weakened state, provoking the body into an autoimmune response and gaining adaptive immunity. The inventor of homeopathy took a sound idea and turned it to 11. What he didn't know was A: it wouldn't work and B: there is a limit to dilution and after a while there's not one molecule of the substance left in the solution. This has since been well established, yet homeopaths have now rationalised that the water somehow retains a memory of the original added substance (whilst ignoring all of the other "memories" that water should also have!).It's literally metaphysics. Homeopathic medicine is now all but eradicated from the NHS, they've declared it a placebo with no basis in science - and potentially dangerous if it discourages people from seeking medical help. The Advertising Standards Authority ruled it was engaging in false advertising. Homeopaths can't make medical/scientific claims for their products any more. They must include a disclaimer. An industry based loosely on valid science, misrepresenting its applications, with its claims proven false. Yet it's still believed in, defended, and financially supported by millions. Does that sound familiar to you?!.

So we went from an acceptance of alternative medicine by the authorities to them disowning it, denouncing it, and in effect making it illegal for professionals to claim they're anything but quacks. It might be a pipe dream, but I don't see it as inconceivable that advertising laws around other spurious claims might be tightened considerably. I know that medical claims potentially harm people's health, but still, taking money under false pretences is a form of harm. Manufacturers have been manipulating figures and misrepresenting the abilities of their products for too long as it is. Then there's companies that rely completely on pseudoscience. Actually it's an insult to pseudoscience to use it to describe some of the products. Let's just call them paranormal entities. It's those I think might be in the most legally dubious position should it come down to defending their claims and advertising. They might be the low hanging fruit needed to begin the process of legal reform.

Consumers should have the right to know exactly what they're buying so they can make informed decisions. They also have the right to choose poorly. But it's time companies were dragged into the light, out of the shade that the term high-end affords them, and a large magnifying glass taken to their products and practices. If it's sunny enough, well, maybe we could hope for a little combustion? :)

My kingdom for an advert that ends with:

*Any improvements to the performance of your audio system resulting from proper usage of this product are entirely imaginary. The company¹, its employees, and its products are unable to bend the laws of physics and possess no magical quantum powers.

¹Magical Quantum Power Cables™ site is for entertainment and promotional purposes only. It is not intended to reflect or act as a substitute for information, science and reality. Any resemblance to the truth is entirely coincidental. Always seek the permission of a rational adult before purchasing.

That's me done. They do say everyone has a novel in them. I'm gonna have that wee and watch The Witcher. Against all odds I still hold hope it's good. If you've read the entirety of this remarkably therapeutic (read: gratuitously long) rant, I can only apologise. I promise I won't speak for at least another week. Merry Christmas if you celebrate it, best wishes if you don't* :)


*Woah that sentence could sound dark!
 
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audio2design

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EGO. Pure and simple EGO.

2 channel audio is horribly flawed even if the electronics is not. It is always about trade offs so there is no absolute measure. As there is no absolute measure, EGO drives the decision making process and then EGO justifies the outcome.
 

escksu

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You need to think about economy of scale and mass production. It goes for all items too, not just audio. For cars, you get mass produced cars and sports/luxury cars that cost close to a million. Even for TV/projectors, you too get TV that cost way way more (way more than 5x).

For audio, you can find equipment that cost hundreds to hundred thousand. Eg. $200 pair speakers to those over 100K. DAC too has less than a hundred to 20-30K or more.
 
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