Ridicule Audiophiles - Find the cat shit's resonant frequency

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Inspect Your Gadgets > Ridicule Audiophiles - Find the cat shit's resonant frequency

Lazlo Nibble: Jan 9, 2004; It was Weasleby, by God! At last I had the miserable blighter precisely where I wanted him!

Sunesis posted:

I love reading audiophile stuff. I cant believe that people buy this crap, and think it makes a difference. If you want to listen to it "how its sposed to sound" then get a setup the same as the studio that recorded and mastered the CD.

Ah, but what if the CD was pressed at the wrong pressing plant? As many audiophiles are well aware, it's possible for CDs with the exact same bits on them to sound different from each other on the same player depending on where they were pressed. So even if you play it back in the studio where it was mastered, you might not be hearing what the mastering engineer heard.

(Because, you know, we still haven't figured out how to get data off a CD and into an A/D converter reliably...)

# ¿ Jul 11, 2009 17:55

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 18:00

Lazlo Nibble: Jan 9, 2004; It was Weasleby, by God! At last I had the miserable blighter precisely where I wanted him!

stizu posted:

With the amount of effort these guys put into their audiophillia, you would think that they would have figured out how to make a competitive sport of it.

Competition requires objective measurements, which audiophiles take to like vampires take to holy water.

# ¿ Jul 16, 2009 08:03

Lazlo Nibble: Jan 9, 2004; It was Weasleby, by God! At last I had the miserable blighter precisely where I wanted him!

qirex posted:

38 persons participated on this test
14 chose the "A" system as the best sounding one
10 chose the "B" system as the best sounding one
14 were not able to hear differences or didn't choose any as the best.

Clearly the benefits of the better-quality equipment were negated by the use of a consumer-class power strip. :colbert:

And I don't see any mention of the grounding used. If the earth lead isn't capacitively-coupled you get resonance, which dulls the mids. The effect is particularly pronounced in locations north of 40� latitude (the tests were done in Guadalajara, Spain, which is at around 40� 38' N).

Also, radon.

Lazlo Nibble fucked around with this message at 07:53 on Jul 25, 2009

# ¿ Jul 25, 2009 07:45

Lazlo Nibble: Jan 9, 2004; It was Weasleby, by God! At last I had the miserable blighter precisely where I wanted him!

RexSS345 posted:

You're all fairly rational individuals re: the audiophile stuff. What do you think the rational ceiling is for the cost of a private, one-chair listening room?

In other words, at what price point are you just wasting money/be unable to tell a difference double-blind?

You just answered your own question. IMO if someone claims they're looking for the best sounding equipment, they haven't wasted their money as long as they can actually tell which equipment they think is actually better sounding in a double-blind test. The point at which this happens is going to vary from person to person -- there's no objective ceiling to it.

Where audiophiles veer from rationality isn't in what gear they buy or how much money they spend, it's in claiming "X is different from Y" but refusing to validate that claim under controlled conditions. If you do a double-blind test of $10,000 speaker cables vs. $250 speaker cables and consistently choose the expensive cables as the better-sounding ones, by all means, spend the $10k if the difference is really worth that much to you.

# ¿ Jul 26, 2009 20:42

Lazlo Nibble: Jan 9, 2004; It was Weasleby, by God! At last I had the miserable blighter precisely where I wanted him!

Audiot posted:

The sickness finally has a name: audiophilia. The timing is just too good and feels almost like some reverse troll.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,824654,00.html

The phenomenon definitely dates back a while (1958 in this case; 1991 is just the CD reissue).

# ¿ Aug 8, 2009 03:30

Lazlo Nibble: Jan 9, 2004; It was Weasleby, by God! At last I had the miserable blighter precisely where I wanted him!

something_clever posted:

For that price they really should be pre-burned in for at least 1000 hours?

If they got burned in with the wrong music it could make your Peter Green Fleetwood Mac records sound like Buckingham/Nicks Fleetwood Mac records. :colbert:

# ¿ May 1, 2013 01:28

Lazlo Nibble: Jan 9, 2004; It was Weasleby, by God! At last I had the miserable blighter precisely where I wanted him!

Sagacity posted:

$8800 seems like a reasonable price point for a networked media player.

http://www.ayonaudio.com/products/cd-player-dac/network-player/ayon-s-3.html

Hey, they had to look through a lot of old Radio Shack catalogs to find the CB radio that inspired its design!

# ¿ May 29, 2013 04:50

Lazlo Nibble: Jan 9, 2004; It was Weasleby, by God! At last I had the miserable blighter precisely where I wanted him!

Jerry Cotton posted:

When a person says they listen to rock they generally don't mean they listen to Yello

Yello's Flag was the go-to "rock" demo disc at my local shop in the late '80s/early '90s. It's tailor-made for the job, with a super-clean sound, insane dynamics that are obvious from the start of the first track, and instrumentation that covers all the obvious "rock" territory, so it showed off a $50,000 system like nobody's business. It also had the advantage (for the sales people at least) of being material most people weren't really familiar with, so it was harder for customers to pick out anything that sounded "off" to them.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2014 16:14

Lazlo Nibble: Jan 9, 2004; It was Weasleby, by God! At last I had the miserable blighter precisely where I wanted him!

Jerry Cotton posted:

Yeah just no.

It's got guitar, bass, drums, keyboards/synths and vocals, so I'm not sure what typical "rock" instrumentation it's missing unless you think a sweet sweet Clarence Clemons tenor sax solo is mandatory.

# ¿ Jun 27, 2014 00:45

Lazlo Nibble: Jan 9, 2004; It was Weasleby, by God! At last I had the miserable blighter precisely where I wanted him!

EAC (or any other AccurateRip-enabled software), rip in burst mode or the equivalent, and if the rip fails the AccurateRip check try to fix it with CUEtools before you bring out the big guns. I have a directory of bad rips that I throw CUEtools at every month or two and it's gradually been able to fix more and more of them as the database grows. It's kind of amazing.

# ¿ Aug 28, 2014 06:16

Lazlo Nibble: Jan 9, 2004; It was Weasleby, by God! At last I had the miserable blighter precisely where I wanted him!

Flipperwaldt posted:

He also quotes the Spotify data saying streamers skip around 50% of the songs that come up to support his conclusion that people have gotten short attention spans,

He would probably be astounded to learn that ever since they were introduced in�when? The late '50s?�the preset buttons on car radios were used for the exact same thing. Something comes on you don't want to listen to, you dive for the controls and start flipping around to find something else.

Put that mechanism in a USB controller and you'd make a mint.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2015 17:24

Lazlo Nibble: Jan 9, 2004; It was Weasleby, by God! At last I had the miserable blighter precisely where I wanted him!

Woolie Wool posted:

Why don't they just call it a "disc drive"?

"Transport" is audio/video engineering jargon for the part of a media player/recorder that's responsible for getting the signal off of/onto the medium (not just optical media, things like tapes too). It's not just audiophile bullshit�calling the CD transport a "disc drive" would be legitimately odd in this context.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2015 04:36

Lazlo Nibble: Jan 9, 2004; It was Weasleby, by God! At last I had the miserable blighter precisely where I wanted him!

Been there, done that.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2018 03:26

Lazlo Nibble: Jan 9, 2004; It was Weasleby, by God! At last I had the miserable blighter precisely where I wanted him!

but I have a chart!

# ¿ Aug 7, 2018 23:21

Lazlo Nibble: Jan 9, 2004; It was Weasleby, by God! At last I had the miserable blighter precisely where I wanted him!

You cannot get proper results with a common Sharpie. It has to be a #255 Eberhard Faber Design Art Marker.

# ¿ Nov 23, 2018 16:44

Lazlo Nibble: Jan 9, 2004; It was Weasleby, by God! At last I had the miserable blighter precisely where I wanted him!

Christ almighty, and I thought all my rotting PDO Blackburn discs were bad. :aaaaa:

# ¿ Dec 4, 2018 17:01

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 18:00

Lazlo Nibble: Jan 9, 2004; It was Weasleby, by God! At last I had the miserable blighter precisely where I wanted him!

Any $10 no-name optical drive from the bottom shelf at Fry�s can reliably produce bit-perfect digital output. It�s been a solved problem since the 1980s.

# ¿ Dec 18, 2018 23:45

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