Why do people associate High End audio with snake-oil?

[SIY]

Yes. It was not my cup of tea, but it was very evident why people like that kind of thing. It was my first experience with Lowthers, which sounded highly colored to me, what I described as a "crispy" sound, but it was, for lack of a better term, fun. The bass on the Pipe-Os was very smooth and natural.

The best Lowther setup I've heard since was much smaller scale, a demo at Axpona 2 or 3 years ago. Fine with small scale acoustic music, but not great with complex source material. But on some of my singer-songwriter recordings, wow, that sound was beguiling!

 

[FrantzM]

Hi

I have been long enough in this hobby to have witnessed a few things: In my parental house we went from mono to stereo , dabbled a bit with quadraphonic .. went back to stereo (2 channels) .. My personal journey has been mostly stereo. i stll like surround for movies but don;t care for it much in music...
I have heard many of this do-one-thing-well devices or contraptions. The full-range drivers are one of those audiophile-affectations that do not have much to do with the concept of Hi-Fi. SETs are another... Lowther and other full range (aside from some full range ESl panels that do rather well within a very small window/aka sweetspot,) can do a good mid range to lower treble with limited dynamics... Please don't ask these to do Hi-Fi they are producing sweet sounds not reproducing faithfully (as opposed to HiFi). Most often those audiophiles play one kind of music at a low volume and ask you to focus on the midrange .... Since that is all that can be reproduced .. one cannot hear anyhting else but this midrange. Full range drivers + SET seems to just do only midrange and not much else.
Confronted to those High priced but low fidelity systems people uninitiated to High End Audio nervosa are (rightfully) underwhelmed... they do not, in any way, recognize the music they hear on their cheap iPhone buds. Rush's Tom Sawyer on one of these .. a (normal, non-audiophile) person insisted on playing it on a SET + Full Range driver expensive contraption ..Boy!! was that anti-climatic!!! No wonder after such an audition and having learned of the (whiplashing) price tags, this young person's eyes will not stop rolling once a person talk about Audiophilia ...

Audiophiles like to bash some brands.. Bang and Olufsen comes to mind.. Mea Culpa I was one of those biased audiophiles.. a few years ago I came with an encounter with an audiophile in Miami who had ditched his Watts-Puppy + whatever anyone drives their Watt-Puppys with (i-e a shrine with high priced, high powered ss amps, preamps, cables, cable elevators and perhaps grounding blocks) in a favor of .. gasp!! a pair of Beolab 5 of speakers ... I have never been a Wilson Audio fan but I came to the audition with my full bags of prejudices .. then the Beolab began to play in the room .... fed by a Beo CD player ...The proverbial jaw on the floor!!! To this day I believe the Beolab 5 to be a seriously good audio system as opposed to mere active speakers ... Sight unseen and unheard, I can posit that a properly set pair of Beolab 90 will crush most any audiophile systems you would dare present to it ...

 

[Fitzcaraldo215]

Yes. It was not my cup of tea, but it was very evident why people like that kind of thing. It was my first experience with Lowthers, which sounded highly colored to me, what I described as a "crispy" sound, but it was, for lack of a better term, fun. The bass on the Pipe-Os was very smooth and natural.

The best Lowther setup I've heard since was much smaller scale, a demo at Axpona 2 or 3 years ago. Fine with small scale acoustic music, but not great with complex source material. But on some of my singer-songwriter recordings, wow, that sound was beguiling!

OMG, Lowthers! Take it from me, the legend, which for some reason will not die, is one of the most overstated pieces of mythical nonsense in audio. Have you ever seen their measurements? Atrocious. But, many like that nice peaky, zippy quality the paper whizzer cone provides before the highs go down the toilet. But, hey, no passive crossover. And, of course that nice, tiny, pure paper woofer, the only actual driver, is fantastic in the bass with a nice big, macho horn.

Yes, beguiling they were, especially with 50's tubes in mono using vinyl. I think we can do a little better today.

 

[tomelex]

Nor should anyone be, if they like music. I even listen in my car, heaven forbid.

Dude, surrender your audiophile card! ahahahahha yeah, on any sort of non work commute (news for work commutes) I enjoy music in the car played from my digital recorder. Not much else to do....

 

[Rod]

Dude, surrender your audiophile card! ahahahahha yeah, on any sort of non work commute (news for work commutes) I enjoy music in the car played from my digital recorder. Not much else to do....

I have to admit to something, I listen in my car with my phone's bluetooth. But I put on my sunglasses first.

 

[cjfrbw]

Is this my imagination, or does this Beolab 90 look like a big chicken head with a speaker hat?

 

[Rod]

Is this my imagination, or does this Beolab 90 look like a big chicken head with a speaker hat?View attachment 14636

Kinda reminds me of a evil chicken head Shriner.

 

[restorer-john]

What about tubes in the car?

 

[Wombat]

What about tubes in the car?

View attachment 14637

View attachment 14638

Tuned to B-flat, I see.

 

[vert]

I'm a recent member here, with no expertise in audio, but with an interest in it and a taste for good music and good sound. Browsing through ASR has been endlessly fascinating to me in the past weeks.
About the subject at hand, I remember reading a very positive review a few years ago of the HRT Stage system
http://www.hirestech.com/product/?pid=1207
by a very serious audiophile and wondering, as the reviewer seemed to think the Stage was just as good as "high-end" products costing 10x more, how would it fare compared to products worth 50x or 100x more? What could the differences reasonably be between a 1k, a 10k and a 100k system? Either I would be missing out on something very special in this lifetime (as it is very unlikely I'll ever be able to afford high-end audio), or things were maybe not quite right in audiophilandia. Back to today, ASR has only confirmed those suspicions. For instance, I'm very thankful that I did not buy a Schitt DAC. If you're an average, Head-Fi reading Joe getting into audio or updating their gear, the pull can be very strong. You really are doing a public service.

Now the HRT Stage has been discounted where I live time and again to the equivalent of $700 and I considered buying it, but with young children I thought it best at the time to make it do with what I already had and work my way up from there. In the first years of my mariage my stereo system was relegated to a spare room and never used, with all music restricted to my commute, from my phone + a portable DAC and some in-ears. Then at home for a couple of years I was able to sneak in an AVR some friends gave us, my wife was very against it but eventually gave in. She began to recognize it as a plus, after all the children watch a lot of TV, and we also like to watch a movie now and then. But that AVR seemed to have electrical problems and emit popping sounds and cause the TV to short sometimes, maybe because of bad ventilation. It was also very massive and ugly, as many AVRs are. I started by removing the center speaker, and liked the sound better and decided I had no use for anything more than a 2.1 system after all. Finally I dusted off my old Teac amp to replace it, which I combined with a DAC I got from Audiophonics, and everybody's now happier (the TV signal is fiber optics and routed to the DAC before the amp). The Teac is tiny, silvery and pretty. Everything sounds great. It has no sub out though and I'm waiting delivery of a new sub with high level inputs, one made by Phonar out of northern Germany. I'm sure that modest system will sound great and be all I need for a few years to come. Even the modest JBL Control 1 speakers I'm currently using sound great in that configuration - the DAC made a big difference. It was my intention initially to upgrade the JBLs but I'm not sure I will anytime soon. So here it is, an average Joe's journey into hifi in 2018.

One thing I'm a little proud of is I managed to convince my wife that better audio was a real thing and worth the effort. The cost has been reasonable. I've also managed to sneak a hi fi system back into the living room (I can hook my PC or phone to the DAC for music listening) that can be enjoyed most of the time by the whole family (TV watching). I've never heard a Sonos product but haven't been impressed by other soundbars I've listened too, so I'm not sure it would beat my little system in versatility. The friend who gave me the AVR upgraded to a monstrous amp with a set of huge Klipsch speakers. I haven't told him but I think it's too large for his room. To me, many AVR systems are just too massive.

 

[Wombat]

I think audio enthusiasts need pre-nups., me included(in the past).

Enjoy your system.

 

[SIY]

What about tubes in the car?

My old Chevy had tubes in the sound system.

As far as stuff with actual pretensions of quality, some of David Berning's class B amps were adapted for auto and sold under the Milbert brand, maybe 15-20 years ago. Interesting designs: switching supplies, screen drive, and nested feedback loops.

 

[Frank Dernie]

After writing the above I noticed that Goldmund.com is no more ..are they dead? sometimes the truth hurts too much

Goldmund still about today afaik.
Also, unlike a lot of other "high end" kit, they are designed to achieve the best measurements they can. The "luxury" is, I believe, because more expensive sells better, and their prices have certainly gone daft compared to 20 years ago.
They went digital well before most others of the expensive makers, though they did resurrect the turntable at a ludicrous price to satisfy demand, but it has an ADC to digitise the cartridge output and RIAA is digital, to give the best performance.
Now they mainly propose DSP active speakers which are expensive but hardly the sort of thing boutique manufacturers are making these days.

 

[DonH56]

https://www.goldmund.com/ worked for me...

 

[Sal1950]

My old Chevy had tubes in the sound system.

I had a few cars with tubes in the radio. When you first turned them on you could hear the buzzing of the vibrator till the tubes warmed up and the sound began. Many times when the radio was dead it was the vibrator, they were always the first to fail.

 

[SIY]

Damn, dude, you old.

 

[FrantzM]

https://www.goldmund.com/ worked for me...

Works now for me ... DNS hiccups?

 

[DonH56]

I worked on my dad's tubed CB radio that lived in his car. Like Sal, most of the time it died, the vibrator was the culprit. I debated long and hard about grabbing that old CB from his house after he passed away but decided it would just end up being something my kids would have to throw away later so left it. Still miss it though, lots of fond memories, and reminds me of the short time I actually drove a big rig with a friend across KS (lived in Salina for a piece, got my CDL a few years later and, like the Harry Chapin song, spent a week there one afternoon on the KC-Goodland route).

 

[Dismayed]

What’s the point of removing the marker?

So you don't look like a dork.

 

[JJB70]

I can only speak for myself but I have nothing against high end audio per se. There are purveyors of high end audio who truly deserve the tag "high end" and if you want the best in any field then it is seldom cheap.

What I do object to is some of the quackery around certain aspects of the high end part of the hobby, including (but not limited to) ridiculously priced cables, power chords, furniture etc sold on the basis of improving performance. If this stuff was sold on the basis of providing really expensive audio jewellery to impress people with how much money you've got then I'd say fair enough but all the subjective nonsense claims around performance (usually supported by assurances that measurement is irrelevant and dismissal of "objectivist trolls") that I really object to. I bought an Omega Speedmaster Professional Moon watch, it is less accurate and less bomb proof than my cheap Casio G Shock which is actually a much better watch but I've never regretted buying the Omega. The difference is I've never made any pretence of why I bought it (I just wanted it and felt it was super cool to have a watch which had been selected for the astronaut program regardless of whether it made any sense to spend that much on a watch).

There is also a real issue that many high end products are high in price, but not design, build quality or performance. I have zero issue with companies like Benchmark, RME, Lake People/Violectric, Bryston etc as whether their equipment is worth the money for most it is genuinely superb (I'm aware that the real high enders would dismiss these brands as low rent lower mid range anyway.....) but I've seen very expensive items that were basically just hideously over priced tat and shockingly shoddily manufactured given the price (sometimes made by the darlings of certain magazines).

My real issue isn't really with manufacturers or even dealers as if people are happy to buy some of this stuff I can't really blame manufacturers for making hay while the sun shines as we say. My real issue is with magazine reviewers who embrace all the snake oil, spin and quackery and use their position to persuade readers that they really need to spend $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$'s on something that may actually be worse than affordable mass market Asian equipment, who dismiss measurement and who value their incestuous relationship with a small coterie of other like minded persons rather than the interests of their readers. How much they actually believe their own spin and how much is just being at best disingenuous is debateable.

The law of diminishing returns kicks in an awful lot sooner than audiophiles will ever admit and you start paying a lot of money for marginal gains remarkably low down the hifi food chain. Bizarrely also a lot of the low - mid range gear made by companies like Sony, Yamaha, TEAC, Marantz etc is manufactured to far higher standards than high end exotica in my experience.

BUT, for all that people have a right to spend their own money as they like and if people want to spend a lot on high end gear then that is entirely their right and if they enjoy it then who am I to criticise.