Welcome, SPFC! You seem to have a mind which is both critical and open - an excellent combination, also in audio 
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Introductions anyone?
- Thread starter Phelonious Ponk
- Start date
Another welcome for a kindred soul here, myself with no real tech background just reading and learning from those that have.
Pull that Monitor Audio rig out of storage and fire it up with a modern digital source, you might be surprised at how good it can sound. It's really the music that counts and why we're here.
Cent' Anni, Sal
Hello from London UK, wet here this morning.
Hi, new here so I thought I’d introduce myself, been lurking for a few weeks, this is more of a ramble than I intended.
Hi-Fi has been an annoyance for me for a long time, I have a simple aim, for my stereo to just work, without messing things up. It seems that this is much harder than you would think and I’ve been down many a dead end before relatively recently getting the best performing system I’ve ever had.
I put the blame for why it’s been so hard to get good sound at home in two camps. The recording and mastering of lots of music I like is very variable, and for so long the people who sound like experts really are not.
For the first part I only have myself to blame, if I was a good little audiophile I would stick to ‘nice’ well recorded jazz, and not the mess of different genres I listen to whose only unifying feature seems to be to favour the low recording quality. I realised a long time ago that if all my music was as well recorded as the best sounding records in my collection I wouldn’t have a ‘proper’ hi fi, as good recording sound so good on quite limited systems. One of the main aims I have for a stereo is to do so little wrong that it does not dictate in any way what music I listen to.
For the second part, so called experts, magazines, forum gurus etc. I’m mystified how a technical pursuit (accurate reproduction) has gone so far away from an engineering / science based approach. I haven’t been immune to this, the FUD spread seeps into you if you read enough, fretting about expensive foo, how do you know it’s nonsense if I don’t buy it. Fortunately for me all my early experiments in such things as cables always resulted in me preferring the ‘free’ in the box cable rather than the life changing veil removing expensive trinket. Note, I did prefer one over the other, not didn’t hear a difference, it’s only much later I understand that I was just following expectation bias. Because my system was classic Naim at the time, and they always stated their cables were part of the design, and all others were wrong, that’s what I heard. The flip side of this is there is a massive amount of real knowledge about sound and sound reproduction out there, but it seems to have been hidden from people, I used to buy the hi fi comics regularly, and over a decade I don’t recall seeing any articles addressing this stuff.
For me the major change was when I did my first blind test. Quite a while ago I started experimenting with ripping all my CDs to FLAC, and then lashing together a mess of software, long cables, IR controller etc, to send the sound from my PC in another room to my preamp. I did this mainly to play with the software, and with the intention of using it for background music sometimes, always using the proper CD player for real listening. After it had been up and running for a few weeks I found I was using it more than I thought, but had a creeping impression that the music sounded slow. I was playing the music from aac files (the flac files were on an external backup disk, I was using the motherboard soundcard, and a 10m phono cable. So although I assumed it was the motherboard, or the long cable, I got curious to do a test of the flac vs the aac using foobar’s comparator. This was the most illuminating thing I ever did with audio. At first I could not hear the difference, but I persisted, tried to quiet my mind and just listen, and then there it was, each time I clicked on the aac it did sound slow. I was using the Nero AAC encoder as it was what came with dbpoweramps batch converter. I tried mp3 vs flac, mp3 was ‘messy’. I should point out I wasn’t guessing with these tests, I could tell the difference statistically, and after I had tuned in I knew I wasn’t guessing. I then tried using the apple AAC encoder in iTunes+ mode, hmm, now I was guessing. I remain confident that I could have passed this with more work, but the key for me was I had found a lossy codec that worked for me, and the difference if it existed was very small, and the double blind part totally re-calibrated how I assessed all future comparisons of kit, the question “how confident am I that I could ab these blind?” is the key question I ask myself, and the answer is usually not very.
Anyway my current system is as follows.
Rega P9 TT, Devialet 440 amps, Sonus Faber Guarneri evolution speakers.
I also have a umk1 mic, and a very limited knowledge of how to use REW, very illuminating, more work required.
Most of the time I use digital into the amp, I have very little to criticise about the sound, but the minor things I’d like to improve I’ll leave to other threads.
Anyway, it's not just hi fi geeks that believe in nonsense as this more than demonstrates.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/23/nasa_goop_sticker_denial/, but you don't have to go too far into the comments before predictable parallels are drawn.
Here’s a picture of my system...
Note 30 - 10K only.
Hi-Fi has been an annoyance for me for a long time, I have a simple aim, for my stereo to just work, without messing things up. It seems that this is much harder than you would think and I’ve been down many a dead end before relatively recently getting the best performing system I’ve ever had.
I put the blame for why it’s been so hard to get good sound at home in two camps. The recording and mastering of lots of music I like is very variable, and for so long the people who sound like experts really are not.
For the first part I only have myself to blame, if I was a good little audiophile I would stick to ‘nice’ well recorded jazz, and not the mess of different genres I listen to whose only unifying feature seems to be to favour the low recording quality. I realised a long time ago that if all my music was as well recorded as the best sounding records in my collection I wouldn’t have a ‘proper’ hi fi, as good recording sound so good on quite limited systems. One of the main aims I have for a stereo is to do so little wrong that it does not dictate in any way what music I listen to.
For the second part, so called experts, magazines, forum gurus etc. I’m mystified how a technical pursuit (accurate reproduction) has gone so far away from an engineering / science based approach. I haven’t been immune to this, the FUD spread seeps into you if you read enough, fretting about expensive foo, how do you know it’s nonsense if I don’t buy it. Fortunately for me all my early experiments in such things as cables always resulted in me preferring the ‘free’ in the box cable rather than the life changing veil removing expensive trinket. Note, I did prefer one over the other, not didn’t hear a difference, it’s only much later I understand that I was just following expectation bias. Because my system was classic Naim at the time, and they always stated their cables were part of the design, and all others were wrong, that’s what I heard. The flip side of this is there is a massive amount of real knowledge about sound and sound reproduction out there, but it seems to have been hidden from people, I used to buy the hi fi comics regularly, and over a decade I don’t recall seeing any articles addressing this stuff.
For me the major change was when I did my first blind test. Quite a while ago I started experimenting with ripping all my CDs to FLAC, and then lashing together a mess of software, long cables, IR controller etc, to send the sound from my PC in another room to my preamp. I did this mainly to play with the software, and with the intention of using it for background music sometimes, always using the proper CD player for real listening. After it had been up and running for a few weeks I found I was using it more than I thought, but had a creeping impression that the music sounded slow. I was playing the music from aac files (the flac files were on an external backup disk, I was using the motherboard soundcard, and a 10m phono cable. So although I assumed it was the motherboard, or the long cable, I got curious to do a test of the flac vs the aac using foobar’s comparator. This was the most illuminating thing I ever did with audio. At first I could not hear the difference, but I persisted, tried to quiet my mind and just listen, and then there it was, each time I clicked on the aac it did sound slow. I was using the Nero AAC encoder as it was what came with dbpoweramps batch converter. I tried mp3 vs flac, mp3 was ‘messy’. I should point out I wasn’t guessing with these tests, I could tell the difference statistically, and after I had tuned in I knew I wasn’t guessing. I then tried using the apple AAC encoder in iTunes+ mode, hmm, now I was guessing. I remain confident that I could have passed this with more work, but the key for me was I had found a lossy codec that worked for me, and the difference if it existed was very small, and the double blind part totally re-calibrated how I assessed all future comparisons of kit, the question “how confident am I that I could ab these blind?” is the key question I ask myself, and the answer is usually not very.
Anyway my current system is as follows.
Rega P9 TT, Devialet 440 amps, Sonus Faber Guarneri evolution speakers.
I also have a umk1 mic, and a very limited knowledge of how to use REW, very illuminating, more work required.
Most of the time I use digital into the amp, I have very little to criticise about the sound, but the minor things I’d like to improve I’ll leave to other threads.
Anyway, it's not just hi fi geeks that believe in nonsense as this more than demonstrates.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/23/nasa_goop_sticker_denial/, but you don't have to go too far into the comments before predictable parallels are drawn.
Here’s a picture of my system...
Note 30 - 10K only.
Attachments
Hi Soniclife. Thanks for the write-up. Good to see you using REW and measurement.
Welcome Soni, A how do I post MDAT files from REW?
BW Keith
BW Keith
I've no idea, only managed a screen shot so far. Might be easiest to put it in drop box or similar and share a link to it.
P.S. Very interested in the stuff you have to share.
Hi Soni, great first post. I enjoyed reading it very much and following your path in listening tests.
Hope to hear lots more from you.
Sal
I can modify the forum software allow uploads of .mdat files. There is some concern regarding security of such files but if there is enough demand, I can make the change.
Welcome
Hummm, we do have our enemies, some of them pretty smart too?
I don't mean audiophiles but true hackers. Believe it or not for the longest time and even today, there are things you can stick in JPEG files that mere viewing them will cause your computer to crash, be hijacked, etc. A lot of them have been found and fixed. But .mdat files are not common so no such search for problems has been made and hence my concern. Then again so few things know what to do with it that the risk is very low.
Yep, that's what I was referring to. A number of guys out there are pretty good coders or know people who are.
I'm sure you've had some of the same experience with your websites as I did. Maybe we did have a more coding savvy group in out Linux community than the audio one, but we experienced some of the strangest attacks over the years. Lost a whole server data base once and the main admin didn't have it backed up properly. About 3 years of forum traffic lost. OUCH.
Never underestimate your enemies.
Just some food for thought
Hello were are you in the UK ?
Surry, I work in London.
Welcome, enjoyed your post. Your experience has much in common with my own.
So did I.
Welcome!!
NWCgrad
Member
- Joined
- Aug 14, 2017
- Messages
- 17
- Likes
- 7
I recently joined the forum, after lurching for quite awhile. I am a scientist by training (molecular microbiology) and profession. I failed miserably in college as an electrical engineering student, luckily I found a science I could understand.
I have spent the last few years assembling a rather nice home theater, but nothing audiophile approved (dbx DSP, Crown amplification, and 250 lb main speakers built with JBL Pro drivers. Now I am re-gaining interest in two channel systems (but will not ever consider using non-active speakers).
Love the tone of this site, I follow many different sites but am finding myself drawn to this site due to the people and ports.
I am an objectivist in work, hypothesis driven research is second nature 20+ yrs I to my career. With audio I like to turn off the critical mind and relax to music. It's all about the music!!!!
I have spent the last few years assembling a rather nice home theater, but nothing audiophile approved (dbx DSP, Crown amplification, and 250 lb main speakers built with JBL Pro drivers. Now I am re-gaining interest in two channel systems (but will not ever consider using non-active speakers).
Love the tone of this site, I follow many different sites but am finding myself drawn to this site due to the people and ports.
I am an objectivist in work, hypothesis driven research is second nature 20+ yrs I to my career. With audio I like to turn off the critical mind and relax to music. It's all about the music!!!!
Welcome aboard NWCgrad!
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