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GWBBQ posted:Even at 320, I could probably tell you the difference between mp3 and lossless or mp3 and AAC almost every time. I've re-ripped CDs in AAC for my iPod and found that even on the earbuds that came with it (I'm pretty sure I got one of the better production runs,) music sounds a lot clearer and not muffled. I had a friend who claimed that there was no audible difference between 320 mp3 and lossless. His rationale was that some computer magazine had sent out CDs with music in different bit rates and had readers compare them, and based on the results they declared that there were no audible differences. So to spite him, I had him set up a blind test for me that I aced with ease. I'm apparently very sensitive to the information that the mp3 codec strips out. I also agree that AAC is a far superior codec and, at least with earbuds or computer speakers, doesn't bother me at all. proudfoot posted:This is basically what I meant, after around the 5k mark, you can't really do anything but room treatment. 5k per component, or 5k for the entire system?
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# ? Sep 6, 2009 09:53 |
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# ? May 11, 2024 09:57 |
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TheMadMilkman posted:I had a friend who claimed that there was no audible difference between 320 mp3 and lossless. His rationale was that some computer magazine had sent out CDs with music in different bit rates and had readers compare them, and based on the results they declared that there were no audible differences. So to spite him, I had him set up a blind test for me that I aced with ease. I'm apparently very sensitive to the information that the mp3 codec strips out. I also agree that AAC is a far superior codec and, at least with earbuds or computer speakers, doesn't bother me at all. How dare he tell you what he can and can't hear the difference between.
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# ? Sep 6, 2009 20:48 |
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900ftjesus posted:How dare he tell you what he can and can't hear the difference between. If that's what he had said, I wouldn't have cared. But since he claimed that no one could, I had to respond.
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# ? Sep 6, 2009 21:50 |
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TheMadMilkman posted:5k per component, or 5k for the entire system? I'm of the opinion that $5k per component is a ridiculous sum to spend, and the law of diminishing returns kills you way before this price point.
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# ? Sep 7, 2009 04:44 |
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Gromit posted:I'm of the opinion that $5k per component is a ridiculous sum to spend, and the law of diminishing returns kills you way before this price point. Time to clarify this; it's $5k per cable.
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# ? Sep 7, 2009 04:48 |
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Is that including cable elevators?
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# ? Sep 7, 2009 05:51 |
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Xaranx posted:Is that including cable elevators? I hate to say this, but I really want a set of those. Not because they do anything, but because of how they look. It's so neat and tidy. Devian666 posted:Time to clarify this; it's $5k per cable. I wandered around CES with an electrical engineer/audiophile once. It was very entertaining. He would look at the opened components on display and show me the actual audio path through the component. Then he'd point to other parts of the design, like a large bank of capacitors, and explain how they were a waste and could have no effect on the sound. We even visited a few cable manufacturers. He'd just shake his head and walk back out. Gromit posted:I'm of the opinion that $5k per component is a ridiculous sum to spend, and the law of diminishing returns kills you way before this price point. I guess this is what I'm really asking. I'm sure that my tipping point for the law of diminishing returns is higher than most people here. The system I currently dream of owning (but will never be able to afford) would put me back about $35,000, and that's only for 2-channel digital. That's way beyond the tipping point, though, which I would peg at probably about $2000 per electronic component, and about $5000 for speakers.
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# ? Sep 7, 2009 09:16 |
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I'm fortunate enough to have a room all to myself for my stereo, it's main purpose in life is a stereo setup, Boston VR speakers, good amp and a good SACD/DVD-A cd player. There are surrounds and the like with a display, but it's main use is 2 channel listening. Not audiophile level stuff, but prosumer easily. The shop I used for this stuff tried so hard to get me into 1000+ dollar interconnects and hugely expensive isolation systems, even let me demo the things. What I ended up doing that was buying ~200 bucks worth of flame resistant acoustic foam rolls and making the room acoustic friendly. Did way more than exotic interconnects and artificial sine wave inducing power supplies and other such things. Good room to nap in as well, real quiet. Also for 45 bucks I got enough black fabric to pleat and make the side walls look like the big heavy curtains in a theatre, looks cool and eliminates reflected light from painted walls. I'm all about cheap mods that garner results.
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# ? Sep 9, 2009 18:10 |
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http://www.electronichouse.com/article/print/diyer_spends_1_million_on_audio/ That is a lot of money to spend to watch movies.
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# ? Sep 15, 2009 16:34 |
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Deathlove posted:That is a lot of money to spend to watch movies. On a regular flat screen, no less. $1 million and no front/rear projection? That's insane. I wonder how hot it gets in that room.
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# ? Sep 15, 2009 17:09 |
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TheMadMilkman posted:On a regular flat screen, no less. $1 million and no front/rear projection? That's insane. According to the site, Sony VPH-G90U Projector Stewart Filmscreen 120-inch Screen So he has multiple ways of watching movies
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# ? Sep 15, 2009 19:27 |
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bacon! posted:According to the site, My mistake for not reading the equipment list a little more carefully. At least he has good tastes, the G90 was easily the best CRT projector ever produced.
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# ? Sep 15, 2009 21:45 |
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Doc Spratley posted:You may also try digital room eq'ing. Did you prefer the sound like this? It goes quite strongly against the measured average response curve of the human ear, and every time I’ve EQ’d a system perfectly flat it’s sounded far too bright in the midrange and like there’s nowhere near enough bass. http://www.silcom.com/~aludwig/EARS.htm
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# ? Sep 27, 2009 14:08 |
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I'm confused. Are we supposed to ridicule you for that stuff? It looks a bit logical.
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# ? Sep 28, 2009 07:22 |
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Somehow we have moved away from snake oil onto real things that will actually effect sound quality! Thats not what this thread is about! I have decided to rotate my entire listening room by 90 deg, so my listening area and cables run at right angles to the Earths magnetic poles. I believe this will cause less bend in my signal as it travels across the room. Musical notes will stay more sharp and more curved as they travel through the air, and not get "flattened out" as they would if affected by a magnetic field.
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# ? Sep 28, 2009 15:56 |
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Neurophonic posted:Did you prefer the sound like this? It goes quite strongly against the measured average response curve of the human ear, and every time I’ve EQ’d a system perfectly flat it’s sounded far too bright in the midrange and like there’s nowhere near enough bass. self quoting from earlier this thread. "Granted, you can't always get ruler flat response everywhere in your environment, and in fact it might sound kinda dead, many clubs and live venues might dial in a 'house curve' to sweeten the sound a bit."
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# ? Oct 1, 2009 04:34 |
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Neurophonic posted:Did you prefer the sound like this? It goes quite strongly against the measured average response curve of the human ear, and every time I’ve EQ’d a system perfectly flat it’s sounded far too bright in the midrange and like there’s nowhere near enough bass. What you're saying doesn't make sense to me. If you want an accurate reproduction of an instrument, the response curve of the microphone used to record said instrument should be flat and the response curve of the speakers you are listening to should also be flat. Why would you try to have the speakers emulate the response curve of your ear? That's irrelevant.
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# ? Oct 4, 2009 06:24 |
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Pibborando San posted:What you're saying doesn't make sense to me. If you want an accurate reproduction of an instrument, the response curve of the microphone used to record said instrument should be flat and the response curve of the speakers you are listening to should also be flat. Why would you try to have the speakers emulate the response curve of your ear? That's irrelevant. No, that's not what he's saying. The digital calibration shown was used to create a perfectly flat response at the listening position. Even a perfectly flat speaker response will not create a perfectly flat in-room response, thanks to boundary reinforcement, beaming, room modes, and other things. While digital calibration of bass frequencies to correct in-room response makes sense to some degree (and we could argue for days about how far it should be taken), doing so for the entire spectrum can create an incredibly harsh and unnatural sound. The graph is just to show that a perfectly flat in-room response won't sound flat or natural.
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# ? Oct 4, 2009 06:47 |
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I had a real winner on the line a few months ago on diyaudio.com, he claimed that the same CD ripped using EAC would result in different sounding wave files depending on if it was ripped with any old drive and a fancy blu ray burner. This INCLUDED him showing md5 hashes of the two files clearly showing they were identical down to the last bit. He claimed the two .wav files clearly sounded different. Must have been the hard drive storing the jitter! Except even then he claimed he could copy the files around (burn them to a data disc, etc...) and still hear it. I try to stay away from the tweakers, but I've enjoyed the semi-audiophile Do-It-Yourself community for many years. Most of the guys are pretty level headed, it's an incredibly fun hobby, and even if you do want to try something crazy, it's not costing nearly as much when you're building it yourself.
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# ? Oct 4, 2009 20:38 |
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I build my own gear, and currently have a 2x600w (into 4 ohms) power amp waiting to get some attention. But I just like loud sound with good bass and lots of power behind it. I typically use PA speakers to listen to music though, so its perhaps not the best possible reproduction of the sound! Jitter implies that the bits that are being read are either falling before or after the clock, or that the ones and zeroes are slightly longer or slightly shorter than they should be. If he has ripped a CD and got the same hashes, then clearly the jitter was the same? I don't get how these guys think the laws of physics don't apply to them. Threads on DIYaudio where they compare opamps. Low amounts of distortion mean what goes in, comes out! How can changing one opamp, which mind you, probably share the same basic layout internally as most opamps, make such a difference?
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# ? Oct 5, 2009 04:25 |
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Rescue Toaster posted:I had a real winner on the line a few months ago on diyaudio.com, he claimed that the same CD ripped using EAC would result in different sounding wave files depending on if it was ripped with any old drive and a fancy blu ray burner. qirex fucked around with this message at 18:09 on Oct 5, 2009 |
# ? Oct 5, 2009 05:28 |
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qirex posted:I'm pretty sure this guy ended up getting different MD5s because the filenamees were different. I hope you're joking here.
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# ? Oct 5, 2009 12:44 |
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Gromit posted:I hope you're joking here. I know for a fact I read about something like that once it might have been on the Slim Devices "Audiophiles" forum. The dude was all "why are the file sizes 6 bytes different if they're EXACTLY the same, huh smart guys?" and someone finally noticed the 6 more letters in one of the file names. qirex fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Oct 5, 2009 |
# ? Oct 5, 2009 18:11 |
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qirex posted:I know for a fact I read about something like that once it might have been on the Slim Devices "Audiophiles" forum. The dude was all "why are the file sizes 6 bytes different if they're EXACTLY the same, huh smart guys?" and someone finally noticed the 6 more letters in one of the file names. That's not how md5 hashes work. The file name does not affect the computation of the hash edit: code:
vanilla slimfast fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Oct 5, 2009 |
# ? Oct 5, 2009 18:32 |
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Yeah my point was he ADMITTED that the md5 of the files, and thus every single bit of data was the same. But he insisted that they consistently sounded different. The one credit I will give him is he actually didn't try to come up with some bullshit reason for it. He just said "This is what I hear, I don't know why." And at least that I can respect. It's still crazy, but whatever floats his boat I guess. It's the people that make insane claims about how things work, like the existence of 'optical jitter' in CD players, that drive me insane. Shut up. If you think one thing sounds better, just say it. People will either try it or ignore you, so be it.
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# ? Oct 6, 2009 04:08 |
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I am not big on large speakers; I prefer headphones. I want the full experience when listening to my cans, so I've been pioneering a head dampening system, with some pretty impressive results! I have pierced my ears, and wear earrings made of carbon nano tubes under my headphones. Easily 47.3% performance increase over undamped heads.
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# ? Oct 6, 2009 20:26 |
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thataaronguy posted:I am not big on large speakers; I prefer headphones. For a smoother listening experience slowly leak a noble gas (argon for instance, radon for the hardcore audiophile) under the cups. The consistency of the gas will ensure a proper soundstage and being an ideal gas the results of any tests will be very repeatable.
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# ? Oct 8, 2009 16:28 |
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Perform all non-double-blind testing inside a pure helium environment for the best sound if you want to die
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# ? Oct 9, 2009 01:20 |
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Rescue Toaster posted:he claimed that the same CD ripped using EAC would result in different sounding wave files depending on if it was ripped with any old drive and a fancy blu ray burner.... You will see offset compensation settings if you look hard enough in EAC's drive settings, and though you may wonder what the point is, it can matter on a mixed CD if you rip some tracks on one drive and some on another (you may end up with a click between tracks). Your friend's an idiot though, even if the files had a diffent checksum (that they didn't surprises me) it will just be the offset and the files won't sound any different on their own though unless you are ripping a badly scratched CD and one drive copes better than the other (I have an old Teac 32 speed CDROM drive which is excellent for this, can take hours to rip though. I also recently built a PC for a mate with an IDE LG DVD burner which I found was excellent for EAC CD ripping - EAC reported it doesn't internally cache but does report C2 error info - this is the best case scenario for EAC, and it ripped even fairly scratched CD's fast).
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# ? Oct 9, 2009 02:11 |
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Has anyone tried suggesting that they listen to their devices under water? (Like in their bathtub)
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# ? Oct 9, 2009 04:50 |
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CrazyLittle posted:Has anyone tried suggesting that they listen to their devices under water? (Like in their bathtub) You should try and convince as many audiophiles as you can to do this. Either they'll get electrocuted or possibly damage their hearing beyond reapair! Win/win.
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# ? Oct 9, 2009 20:23 |
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CrazyLittle posted:Has anyone tried suggesting that they listen to their devices under water? (Like in their bathtub) Use mineral oil instead of water to make it more plausible (it won't short the electronics) and expensive. edit: Hell, create (read:label) a special 'Audio Grade' mineral oil specifically for this purpose and mark it up by 1000%.
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# ? Oct 9, 2009 23:52 |
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TheMadMilkman posted:
Here, a super awesome looking DIY speaker cables that will cost you under $100 for the set: http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/showthread.php?t=94203 They perform no better then $20 radio shack speaker wire, but look 1000x better, and I'll gladly pay the money for that.
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# ? Oct 10, 2009 02:52 |
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Promoted Pawn posted:Use mineral oil instead of water to make it more plausible (it won't short the electronics) and expensive. Now you're talking. But to make it plausible to audiophiles you would have to put it in an inverted glass pyramid shape, mounted on a sound dampening pedestal made of teak and canary beaks. Claim it broadens the auravisual potency of the pathways of the bits that aren't played from any CD or DVD (get the videophiles too). edit: don't forget the expensive (but super cheap compared to the selling price of the item) box to store it in when not in use mr. nobody fucked around with this message at 02:56 on Oct 10, 2009 |
# ? Oct 10, 2009 02:53 |
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Boiled Water posted:You should try and convince as many audiophiles as you can to do this. Either they'll get electrocuted or possibly damage their hearing beyond reapair! Win/win. There are two episodes of Metalocalypse that will help with convincing them. One where they record underwater and another where they record their entire album into a jar of water (for a more analogue sound).
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# ? Oct 14, 2009 00:09 |
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Man, reading this thread makes me grateful that I have bad ears or something. I'm pleased as punch with 128k MP3s off my iPod with cheap-rear end $10 Skull Candy earbuds.
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# ? Oct 14, 2009 21:22 |
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Tsaven Nava posted:Man, reading this thread makes me grateful that I have bad ears or something. I'm pleased as punch with 128k MP3s off my iPod with cheap-rear end $10 Skull Candy earbuds. If you're happy with them, my recommendation is to never try anything more expensive/better. It's a terrible downward spiral from there
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# ? Oct 15, 2009 05:25 |
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Back when I was a TA, I had a student who spent about $2500 putting a sound system into his $300 car. Before reading this thread, I thought he was the dumbest A/V related person ever. I was so sheltered. About the guy with the million dollar theater/sound install; Do you think he realizes that for less, he could have built an actual theater with 100+ seats with state of the art projection and sound? I was also trying to figure out why he would just keep buying more amps. What would he think he was gaining?
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# ? Oct 15, 2009 20:34 |
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Acinonyx posted:About the guy with the million dollar theater/sound install; Do you think he realizes that for less, he could have built an actual theater with 100+ seats with state of the art projection and sound? I was also trying to figure out why he would just keep buying more amps. What would he think he was gaining? Why would he want a 100-seat theater? Part of the allure is probably the expense. He has money and wants to turn that money into nice things. He gains the ability to show it off as well. Just like other rich guys collect fine art I suppose.
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# ? Oct 16, 2009 00:10 |
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# ? May 11, 2024 09:57 |
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I just wonder how much of that $1 mil is markup. $600k? $700?
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# ? Oct 16, 2009 15:45 |