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I can see how they end up down that rabbit hole. When I’ve made things myself, be it small furniture or other craft projects, I end up in this iterative refinement kick, where I want to keep improving it and I’m dealing with smaller and smaller details/improvements each time. And I imagine audiophiles deal with that once they get their overpriced components in place, then it’s a matter of incrementally improving everything else in the chain. And that’s how you end up with a $3,000 power cord.
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Oct 2, 2018 21:32
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Iron Crowned posted:Cables can be bent, but most people don't realize that they're still made of copper, which can be broken. In engineering there's a "minimum bend radius," this is literally the smallest radius you can bend these cables before they're damaged. The MBR is dictated by the diameter of the cable, the bigger the cable, the bigger the MBR. Haha, so they're trying to avoid breakage there? I meant that in terms of the additional attenuation(?) you could introduce by having a longer conductor. In my  retro gamer circles, they say shorter wires are better.
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Oct 2, 2018 21:34
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Vanagoon posted:The latest Technology Connections has the guy poking around in an old full deck CD player with the leads to an oscilloscope trying to reverse engineer it, it's great. This is the only CD player oscilloscope video I need: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCL_BZBmvD8 I love Paul D Millar
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Oct 2, 2018 21:43
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azurite posted:Haha, so they're trying to avoid breakage there? I meant that in terms of the additional attenuation(?) you could introduce by having a longer conductor. In my Audiophiles are absolute masters at coming up with bullshit excuses for what they do.
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Oct 2, 2018 22:02
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barbecue at the folks posted:poo poo, most men of a certain age have weird and often expensive hobbies, be it miniature trains, woodworking, motorcycles or modular synths. The thing about audiophiles is the sheer uselessness and insanity of it all. Many of these people have gone through divorce because of their obsession with imaginary sound waves and didn't even think twice about choosing the $100/ft cables over their family. Wow, did you interview my dad about his $700 silver-plated RCA cables + complaint that he had no money from the child support he wasn't paying
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Oct 2, 2018 23:11
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I have a friend who was what I would call a "sane audiophile"; dude loved expensive fine-sounding equipment, but had a pretty great bullshit detector about it. He's the one who told me about that article where "audiophiles" could not tell the difference between monster cables and an old coat hanger
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Oct 3, 2018 00:06
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Jerry Cotton posted:Audiophiles only listen to Phil Collins and the worst Dave Brubeck recordings they can find. Dark Side of the Moon is one of the standards for them as well, but yeah, it's crazy how audiophiles make almost no mention of the music they're actually listening to, just the equipment
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Oct 3, 2018 00:47
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I wonder what the crossover is between audiophiles, gun dress up enthusiasts, and the EDC crowd.
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Oct 3, 2018 00:59
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Rev. Bleech_ posted:I have a friend who was what I would call a "sane audiophile"
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Oct 3, 2018 01:17
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Flash Gordon Ramsay posted:I used to go into a high end audio store with my buddy who was into that stuff. It was always weird what albums they'd use to demo the equipment. I don't think I ever saw them playing anything recorded after 1980. Rage Against the Machine's self titled is the modern benchmark for these people
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Oct 3, 2018 01:33
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I see pictures like that and then wonder what they would do if you cracked open their amplifier and showed them all the standard gauge wires used internally.
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Oct 3, 2018 01:35
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I'm just thinking of the mechanical strain those huge, heavy cables must cause.
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Oct 3, 2018 01:43
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McCracAttack posted:I see pictures like that and then wonder what they would do if you cracked open their amplifier and showed them all the standard gauge wires used internally. Or if you cracked open one of those cables and showed them it's the thinnest possible copper inside five layers of garden hose. e: By you I mean your cat 
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Oct 3, 2018 01:44
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BRB, selling “silver” cables that are actually aluminum.
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Oct 3, 2018 01:56
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big crush on Chad OMG posted:See also: boats, bicycles, power tools but these are all fun things
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Oct 3, 2018 03:46
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If you obsess over model trains, you still have some cool trains. If you obsess over six inch thick audio cables, you're just a moron.
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Oct 3, 2018 03:53
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Cojawfee posted:If you obsess over model trains, you still have some cool trains. If you obsess over six inch thick audio cables, you're just a moron. edit: can’t seem to attach a RAW image so just duckduckgo “external voltage interference soundstage depth loss cabling solutions” and thank me later SLOSifl has a new favorite as of 05:17 on Oct 3, 2018 |
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Oct 3, 2018 05:14
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SLOSifl posted:Ah poo poo, from what I caught over this lossy wireless connection, sounds like you are having interference problem from a train? The high voltage lines will pull some of the deeper tones from your signal - maybe you can send me a toshiba dvd with the flac file of your post? I can send back a chrome tape which you can listen to on either an AIWA mark 2 or an original ZX80 tape drive, otherwise nevermind I don’t think you’ll appreciate my investment anyway.  drat, that's p obsolete
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Oct 3, 2018 05:44
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Grand Prize Winner posted:
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Oct 3, 2018 05:54
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In which LGR builds a high end Windows XP gaming rig using parts that would've equalled almost 4 thousand dollars if purchased new, 10 years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XTnL4Mang0
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Oct 6, 2018 00:33
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Gonz posted:In which LGR builds a high end Windows XP gaming rig using parts that would've equalled almost 4 thousand dollars if purchased new, 10 years ago. Haha I just started watching that.
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Oct 6, 2018 02:45
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Jerry Cotton posted:Audiophiles only listen to Phil Collins and the worst Dave Brubeck recordings they can find. Steely Dan is the ultimate audiophile music.
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Oct 6, 2018 03:14
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Gonz posted:In which LGR builds a high end Windows XP gaming rig using parts that would've equalled almost 4 thousand dollars if purchased new, 10 years ago. Oh man, that takes me back. I built a PC around the same time. Athlon X2 4400+ on an ECS KN3-SLI2 motherboard, 1 gb Corsair XMS2 DDR2-800, PNY GeForce 7600. The 7600 turned out to be a bum card and I replaced in short order with an ATI HD3870 I bought at Circuit City. Stuffed in two more 1gb sticks of XMS2 for 3gb total, a poo poo-ton more hard drive space, etc. The motherboard was quirky and janky as gently caress - I bought it specifically because it still had two ATA133 connectors because I was reusing my old drives - 60gb, 200gb, DVD-R - and didn't have anything in SATA yet. It only died two years ago of capacitor plague. Creaky and old and jankier and gone from quirky to straight out bizarre in its behavior, but still steady and reliable until the end. I've gone through three much newer computers since - much better performing but unreliable as poo poo.
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Oct 6, 2018 06:33
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I have an nforce4 socket 939 board that still runs great, which is funny because nforce4 was hot garbage. (The chipset had a knack for frying itself if you plugged a sound card in)
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Oct 6, 2018 13:37
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Huh, I didn’t know that; I still have my old A8N32-SLI Deluxe around running an A64-4400. It spent it’s whole life with a Soundblaster Audigy hanging off a PCI slot. I was always a bit miffed that AMD shitcanned Socket 939 about a month after I bought my first really good, expensive motherboard. C’est la vie, I guess.
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Oct 6, 2018 13:52
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rndmnmbr posted:Oh man, that takes me back. I built a PC around the same time. Athlon X2 4400+ on an ECS KN3-SLI2 motherboard, 1 gb Corsair XMS2 DDR2-800, PNY GeForce 7600. The 7600 turned out to be a bum card and I replaced in short order with an ATI HD3870 I bought at Circuit City. Stuffed in two more 1gb sticks of XMS2 for 3gb total, a poo poo-ton more hard drive space, etc. The motherboard was quirky and janky as gently caress - I bought it specifically because it still had two ATA133 connectors because I was reusing my old drives - 60gb, 200gb, DVD-R - and didn't have anything in SATA yet. Some idiot convinced me to do SLI 7600s. That was when I learned that two midrange cards is never as good as one high end card. I went from that to an 8800GTX, and hoo boy that was a good year or so for me. That was the only time I ever had a top of the line card and it was fuckin awesome.
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Oct 6, 2018 14:10
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empty baggie posted:Steely Dan is the ultimate audiophile music. So loving true. I had a friend who went big for DVD audio just so he could hear an 'absolutely pristine' copy of Gaucho.
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Oct 6, 2018 17:03
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Arms_Akimbo posted:I have an nforce4 socket 939 board that still runs great, which is funny because nforce4 was hot garbage. (The chipset had a knack for frying itself if you plugged a sound card in) I had an nforce4 board that had screwy compatibility issues with ATI graphics cards. Games would crash so hard that it hardlocked the entire system all the loving time. Sometimes just browsing the internet would kill it. The tiny chipset fan would run up to about 900rpm or so for no reason every now and then, making it impossible to hear anything without a headset. The fuckers at the computer shop didn't believe me and claimed they couldn't reproduce the problems, so they wouldn't let me just exchange the hardware. I eventually swapped the board out for a different one because it was cheaper than replacing the Radeon. It worked flawlessly after the change, though the Radeon finally died in 2010 just shy of five years later.
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Oct 6, 2018 17:08
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rndmnmbr posted:Oh man, that takes me back. I built a PC around the same time. Athlon X2 4400+ on an ECS KN3-SLI2 motherboard, 1 gb Corsair XMS2 DDR2-800, PNY GeForce 7600. The 7600 turned out to be a bum card and I replaced in short order with an ATI HD3870 I bought at Circuit City. Stuffed in two more 1gb sticks of XMS2 for 3gb total, a poo poo-ton more hard drive space, etc. The motherboard was quirky and janky as gently caress - I bought it specifically because it still had two ATA133 connectors because I was reusing my old drives - 60gb, 200gb, DVD-R - and didn't have anything in SATA yet. Yeah, this isn't even old enough to be nostalgic for me yet. AMD, scythe cooler, 2GB corsair ram, corsair 560w psu, lian li tower, cheap upgrade from a 6xxx nvidia to an ati 4770 gpu, samsung spinny hdds, later on upgrade to a 64gb ssd for OS and games... I'm not going from memory here, most of those parts are still in use with the only retirement being the 4400+ because the motherboard died (all my s939 boards and skt a boards died and I had some other cpus like 4200+, 3200+, 2600+ etc), but I'm still using an ancient replacement 1090t and AM3 motherboard. Fo3 has a new favorite as of 17:18 on Oct 6, 2018 |
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Oct 6, 2018 17:14
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I had an nForce board that was somehow incompatible with the brand new SSD I was so excited to have. God what a pile of poo poo.
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Oct 6, 2018 17:16
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It's kind of tempting to build an XP computer today. The mid-2000s were kind of a frustrating time because our family desktops were far from enthusiast rigs and I couldn't always play the best stuff on them. I had to mess with the settings on Half Life 2: Episode I a bunch to make it work decently. I was also in high school so building something awesome was kind of out of the question. If I did build one it would kind of hard to dial in the right ratio of awesome to garish looking.
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Oct 6, 2018 17:36
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The early to mid 2000s was defined by me being a moron and buying an Alienware. The worst part was that I got a 5 series nvidia card where they didn't even bother to implement all of Direct X 9. That pissed me off so much.
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Oct 6, 2018 19:09
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I remember my first video card. As a poor college student, I bought myself and my partner whatever Nvidia was barely adequate for Team Fortress 2. Then got into L4D when it came out. Years later, I played L4D on a newish computer, and couldn't see poo poo. Apparently that first card could run the game itself, but not the smoke/fog/general lighting effects. No wonder we did so well in L4D when it was new, our half of the team was basically cheating by having a lovely video card and being able to see everything without using the flashlight.
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Oct 6, 2018 20:14
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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My first graphics card was some model of ATI Rage. 3d acceleration baby!
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Oct 6, 2018 21:07
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 Intel Slot 1. I had a couple systems with these, pulled from the loading dock at my school. It's kind of a neat concept, I always hated the risk of bending pins on your processor. Did they abandon them for price reasons, or did higher clockrates and higher pin counts just make it unsuitable?
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Oct 6, 2018 21:20
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nVidia Riva 128 still the best video card ever
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Oct 6, 2018 21:27
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We got a GForce 32GB (the og) as part of my dad's new pc (which he trusted me to spec out and I read Maximum PC). Sadly we got cheated and they installed the one with sdram instead of the DDR that we paid for. Company went out of business the next year. Still it was awesome for stuff like Unreal Tournament and MDK2.
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Oct 6, 2018 21:43
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Pham Nuwen posted:Did they abandon them for price reasons, or did higher clockrates and higher pin counts just make it unsuitable?
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Oct 6, 2018 21:45
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Chillbro Baggins posted:I remember my first video card. As a poor college student, I bought myself and my partner whatever Nvidia was barely adequate for Team Fortress 2. Then got into L4D when it came out. My first computer was some lovely emachines computer. My parents said they bought it "for games" but it had integrated graphics. I used to play the UT2K3 demo all the time. It had one level that was just a big floating island with two towers on each side. I eventually got a new computer (the alienware mentioned before) and got the UT2K3 demo again as well as UT2K4. I barely recognized that level because it had dirt, and a bunch of grass. My emachines was so lovely that it couldn't even load the texture of the ground of that level. I thought it was a snow level.
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Oct 6, 2018 21:53
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When I bought my first Windows machine with student loan money, I made sure I picked one with AGP so I could upgrade the video card later on when I had more money. Of course the thing didn't have an AGP connector. It had an AGP bus and a lovely video chip soldered right into it. So the best I could do a few years later was a really expensive Voodoo 3 3000 PCI card. I guess it still ran pretty much whatever 3-D games would've run on the thing anyway 
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Oct 6, 2018 22:04
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