Don't be so sure about Audiophonics' ethical foundation (or lack thereof) without dealing with them first. I just did business with them for the first time a few weeks ago. They were great at offering advice, even convinced me to spend less than I was planning to (a rare behavior these days!). I do get the feeling they care about the product they sell. My guess is that they will try to steer people towards the right product/sound signature whenever they get the opportunity. Just my 2 cents based on actual experience. Hope this helps.
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Review and Measurements of Audio-GD R8
- Thread starter WolfX-700
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Don't be so sure about Audiophonics' ethical foundation (or lack thereof) without dealing with them first. I just did business with them for the first time a few weeks ago. They were great at offering advice, even convinced me to spend less than I was planning to (a rare behavior these days!). I do get the feeling they care about the product they sell. My guess is that they will try to steer people towards the right product/sound signature whenever they get the opportunity. Just my 2 cents based on actual experience. Hope this helps.
Decades at least. Or else there would be a big market for boxes that just generate distortion and noise!
If you have a pain in your chest, do you demand your doctor to have the same to diagnose you?
Only if you only care about the gear, and not using it to enjoy music!
That is why we are here. We provide 100% reliable data on how the box is engineered and performs.
Correct. Another word for it is relying on stuff you imagine, rather than the sound coming out of the box. Instrumentation doesn't do that and hence the reason you have a conflict with it.
Learn to properly listen to equipment and you will find no use for products that don't measure well yet sell for a lot of money.
Don't get me wrong, I'm reading this forum because it's always enriching to hear multiple opinions.
But I find many reviews obsessed with only one side of the equation: the rational, number-obsessed side. All I'm saying is that measurement numbers don't take into account pleasure. That's where psychoacoustics science comes into play. One uses gear with no understanding of emotions, to make a recommendation on music, which is purely emotional.
Any professional musician will tell you that the best players use both their technique and their heart to play. And their interpretation of the music sheets will be a mix of the two. In other words, the one who will trigger the most emotional response from the audience will not necessarily be the best technician of them all. That's why it's called art. I see the same thing in electronics. Great designers will sometimes acknowledge that certain choices might hurt measurement to benefit your ears.
We are obsessed with audio science. Measurements are one facet of that. Theory of operation and design is another. Psychoacoustics analysis of measurement data completes the picture. If needed, we also perform controlled listening tests. I have done a lot of these.
In contrast, audiophile feelings and imagined perception of sound is shown numerous times to have zero value and only help to mislead. Audiophiles are terrible at perceiving what they think they are good at: good sound reproduction anyway. They are never testing themselves to know if they can really detect differences in gear. When tested formally, they do very poorly. I know, because my team and I tested them. They fail to tell the differences between MP3 and CD let alone two amplifiers.
So it is against this background that we conduct ourselves the way we do. No different than a doctor following the science he is taught. A lawyer using the teachings and practices of his profession. Only in audio it seems people throw out the book on audio science and make up their own rules.
And no, sound reproduction is not the same as creating music. Equipment has no emotion. Cares not if you tell it to produce a beautiful note or a screeching sound.
And the psychoacoustic literature is clear on the distortionary results of sighted bias. See Zielinski and Rumsey, section on "Sighted Listening Tests". Comprehensive literature review of the issue, even then.
Also, sound is moving air. These graphs represent the equipment's output, to be translated into the moving air. It is the emotional content encoded into a certain configuration of moving air that is constitutive of music, not the conduit through which the moving air is ultimately reproduced. To think otherwise, that a piece of equipment can interact favourably with some arbitrary subset of musical content played through it - even when lower than known best-case hearing thresholds - under sighted conditions is wishful and disingenuous thinking.
That doctor analogy is way off track so I won't even go there as it would be silly to disagree!
As for a market for boxes that generate big distortion... It's just making a caricature of my point. Car is a good example of what I'm trying to say: sometimes, measurement goes against pleasure. The amount of vibration one feels at the wheel might be something a machine would measure to strive for vibration reduction. However, x amount of driving pleasure can come from such vibration (it can make you feel more connected to the road, to the engine, make you feel more alive, etc.)
Point being that we all look for a different mix of stimuli that make us appreciate what we love. In hi-fi, we don't have yet a perfect understanding of what makes some people tick, that emotional response. Thinking that low THD or another metric is all there is to enjoy the music is a mistake IMHO. That's why I would think it's useful to confront the numbers to one's impression because that compare and contrast makes us understand the human factor better. Hope it makes sense to a certain extent!
Of course we do. It is called the look and feel of the gear. Make the equipment attractive to the eye, tell some technical story about its design that appeals to lay intuition and cannot be disproven by an audiophile, and folks buy your gear and feel good about it too! Notice that "sound" did not enter this picture.
The above stimulates audiophiles into thinking they are getting better sound. They are not of course as those factors don't relate to sound. Because of that, the first impression is fleeting and disappears soon. Once there, the audiophile chases the next upgrade. Sell and buy other gear. Put in this or that cable. Or this other tweaks. Each is a "hit" that causes the brain to imagine better sound until reality hits that there was no difference and cycle continues.
For many above becomes life rather than enjoying music. They are constantly tweaking their systems with useless means. We are here to get you out of that insanity. We strive to find equipment that is so well engineered that it is totally transparent to the content you buy. That way the artist and talent are in charge of art. As it should be.
Which just means you want to buy a pretty box that makes you feel good and don't care about performance. If you just want shiny things this is not the forum for you. I just want something that I know performs well and has the connections I need, preferably in a box which design I like. Then I don't have to mess around doing double blind tests to buy my electronics.
Thanks for this thoughtful response.
Lots to discuss here. But glad to hear that listening is also part of the deal! A few responses to some reviews here could have fooled me!
Equipment cares not about playing beautifully (agreed!) but a good music-loving engineer should (and let's assume here that he or she does) and would therefore strive for this emotional delivery while making his piece of gear. My point here is that I would applaud him if some of his decisions would strive for what sounds best to him (like a sound signature from brand x or y) rather than what delivers the most beautiful measurement output. Because measurement techniques only focus on what we know how to measure and interpret as best. But we know very little yet about what triggers emotions. And it's different for every one of us, which is a scary thought. My bet is that in the not so distant future, all gears will tweak sounds on a per individual basis, like an individual-based DSP kinda system because our hearing and brains differ. The target outcome will be what sounds best at individual level. And I'm not even sure I like this idea. There are pros and cons for anything and everything!
Lots of truth to it. Not necessarily all that bad (it's human to strive for more and better, for good and bad). Still think we don't fully understand how bad measurement numbers can sometimes deliver more enjoyment for some. That's the fascinating piece. Part of it is because no one hears the same way.
The process here does not isolate the moving air that is sound. Acoustic claims should be backed up by acoustic evidence - not anecdotes tainted by sight and ergonomics.
solderdude
Grand Contributor
The reasons for that is personal taste and the hearing not being as 'accurate' and 'superior' as most people think it is when reproducing music.
Psychoacoustics is the fascinating part, the brain and how easily it is fooled and accepts (or rejects) various input as ears rarely work alone in creating the 'sensation' music brings.
Just enjoy music. If you can do this by selecting gear by ear or based on measurements in the end is moot. It is the end result (happy owner) that counts.
For some it is the journey, for others only the outcome.
digicidal
Major Contributor
You are correct, in saying "no one hears the same way" because our brains are involved more than our ears. The real question is whether you believe sound itself is different? No matter what we attribute to it, it's just waves of different frequency and amplitude traveling through the air to our ears. I think we do fully understand how bad measurements can "deliver more enjoyment for some" as you put it... the problem lies in that being yet another quality that many want to separate from science and hand off to emotions.
To carry forward your car analogy... there are many reasons people will pay six figures for a bone-stock, barely driven, classic car - but none of them involve the best skid-pad performance or lap times. The desirability of an object carries significant weight for many... and is often perceived as a major component of satisfaction once acquired. The rarity and sentimentality play the commanding roles - and often outweigh deficiencies in engineering and construction for said device (think Edsel, DeLorean, etc). This is also a very gender-biased phenomenon... though that's so non-PC of me to even suggest - and of course there are exceptions to every rule.
There's a good reason that "audiophile-culture" is predominantly (overwhelmingly?) male-dominated. Take a look at your average symphony orchestra, top 10 singles artists, concert audience, or just music purchaser demographics... and suddenly you find where all the women went. The love of music is not so divided (I'd even guess it skews more towards women than away). That's because they're less susceptible to the expensive, shiny boxes with tons of wires, tweaks, racks, etc. - they connect with the music, not the gear (for the most part). They have other shiny, expensive things that perform that role for them - not audio gear.
There's nothing at all wrong with wanting a rack full of beautiful, expensive gear that you spent your youth wishing you had the resources to acquire and dreaming of the time you would rectify that "deficit" in your life. However, it is also important to be able to differentiate between a company that is leveraging that irrational value to sell you a product which is less capable of "reproducing sound exactly as recorded".
It's hard to remember sometimes, but all the music we love was recorded with boring, utilitarian, pro-audio gear which lacked precious-metal casings, esoteric promises, etc. Although no one is immune (engineers fall for it as well), for the most part "highest audio fidelity" is the goal for a source recording - yet it seemingly has a much, much lower importance in playback. Far less surprising is that many profit-driven producers of audio gear care less about fidelity than appearance - because you can always say something that sounds the same (or worse) is still worth more money due to brand identity, materials, exclusivity, etc. Luckily for us as consumers, ASR and the measurements provided, show objectively whether this is true or not. For the most part, it's not... but there are cases where it also provides justification for possibly paying more in order to also get more. Whether that "more" is audible to anyone is still debatable of course, but at least there is a quantifiable difference beyond looks, brand name, and "trust".
If your starting premise is that everyone has their own preference, why would you want some engineer to impose his on you? Wouldn't you rather start with knowing you have a signal chain that is accurately delivering the original recording as signed off on by the artist and engineer? As in, delivering the original with as High a degree of Fidelity as possible.
If I start expecting my audio equipment to not be transporters of digital/electrical information, to the limits of engineering capability, but to be instruments of coloration, it simply moves me further from my goal.
Give me the original, without adding in the DAC engineer's taste, the amp engineer's taste, etc. (what if they are different...the permutations and combinations get out of hand quickly...)
I can now add tone or contour controls as I choose, throw in an effects box to emulate tube distortion or whatever and go from there.
If you start thinking of these boxes as engineered devices that only need competence to disappear into your system, rather than instruments of art, it gets a lot less stressful, a lot cheaper, and honestly a lot easier.
digicidal
Major Contributor
Some things you just gotta own...
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1000x this. Gear should convey the artist's emotion, not impart its own. I think it's natural to want, appreciate, even covet nice things - whether for craftsmanship, design, or aesthetics - but marketing/purchasing an amp or DAC because *its* sound has "soul" reflects, to me, a kind of misplaced arrogance as to the actual role of the component. You don't buy a Patek for its absolute timekeeping prowess, nor would you pretend to.
It's not about how it sounds,it's about price and getting ripped off,as a matter of fact you or your kid could order parts from radio shack and probably build something better yourself.
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