Just ask an audiophile what they think about blind tests. If they argue against them you’ve found a snake oil salesman.
But what’s the point of having your newly-purchased $3000 wooden volume knob and polyatomic copper ring bus lift yet another veil from the soundstage if you’re blindfolded?
HEY! I got my $3000 wooden volume knob because it’s pretty and I can’t take a blind test if it’s worth it. I need my eyes to see it!
All I want to know is just how many veils has that soundstage got‽ Here I am, just having a soundstage like a sucker, and they’ve got veils they can lift!
3k is obviously an exaggeration but goddamn why is woodwork so expensive?! I needed wooden set of some things that are normally made of plastic for about $100, the wood was $465 and literally only one guy on earth makes it. Fuck me!
Now if they’re deaf tests on the other hand…
Most people can’t tell the difference between a 320kbps mp3 and lossless, but hey if folks really want to waste their money on snake oil like gold-plated cables then I say let ‘em.
The funny thing is that the people who can afford all that overpriced garbage are usually so old, they can’t hear all that well anymore.
I found I can detect VBR but yeah at that bitrate I really can’t tell the difference between 320 and flac, always thought it was just my ears!
Yep, and an especially fun fact is that people with high-end equipment prefer MP3 over lossless.
Reminds me of the lengths people go with their peripheral purchases to save 1-2ms of input latency for playing games with like a 20 TPS tick rate on a wifi connection
I downloaded the same track from soundcloud at 320kbps mp3 and bandcamp FLAC and played them at the same time in the VDJ changing from one song to the other and couldn’t feel any difference (the graphic Soundwave was also exactly the same). I had not tried it in actual club environment, but when the mp3 is really compressed it shows visually on the Soundwave
Hell, I can’t even tell the difference between 128kbps and flac. Realizing that saved me a whole lot of hard drive space :D
My hearing isn’t extraordinarily acute, bit I can hear the difference, especially in transient-rich sounds like cymbals.
I noticed something similar with video. Like, if I am paying attention, the difference between the highest quality encoding and the next level is usually visible.
However, I have a harder time telling the difference if I don’t do a side by side comparison.
And even when I can easily tell the difference, once I’m watching the thing, I get into the story and I don’t care anyways.
Obviously a slightly different criteria compared to music, but people do make a big deal out of stuff that even they don’t actually care about.
I recently switched from 320kbps to lossless, and there are very few moments where I can tell a difference. The biggest one is in the cover of “Tom’s Diner” by AnnenMayKantereit. There’s a section of the song at 320kbps where it goes almost silent, other than faint whispers of the band counting out the silence, but in lossless you can hear them actually singing the song quietly
To be fair, the signal is only going through these suboptimal conductors for a very short distance.
Try wiring up your stereo with 50 feet of bananas, and you might start having problems.
There’s always music in the banana chain… or something like that
This just shows that bananas and mud are materials for excellent audio equipment. I am looking forward to my gold-plated banana.
I’m jealous of people who can’t tell the difference and have no need to buy audiophile grade SSDs
That’s got to be a joke, right ?
Right?
depends on who you ask
Coming soon to a retailer near you, this exact same price on a regular SSD.
Everybody say “Thank you AI!”
I love seeing this story… it reminds me of 30 years ago when I worked in the telephone industry. Heard about telephone copmanies rolling out service in very very rural areas - running signals over barbed-wire fences because it was too expensive to run dedicated cables. That did degrade the signal, but it worked.
I know it’s a completely different thing entirely, but it just gave me nostalgia remembering hearing about that.
I know I has nothing to do with your story. But I just spent the weekend removing barbed wire fencing. And I just want to say, fuck barbed wire. Whoever thought it was a good idea to put that shit up should be wrapped in it and pushed down a steep slope.
And by whoever I mean my great grandfather. But also everyone else involved. All the way to the factory making it.
I’ve put barbed wire up, I’ve taken it down. It ain’t that hard. Just cut it into lengths you can easily coil by hand if you don’t have a winding machine.
Personally I think woven wire fencing is a bigger pain in the ass. All that grass and weeds growing through it and then rolling it back up.
I did use a winding contraption. I don’t hate it because it’s annoying to remove. I hate it because it’s terrible for the animals that get injured by it.
I mean yeah, audiophile cables are 100% a rip-off every time. You can spend thousands on a cable without it having any real benefits.
It makes more sense to just buy decent speakers and a decent amp, along with a good audio source (any CD player).
Yeah, but if they don’t buy the gold and platinum plated cables, washed in the blood of young rams, and studded with diamonds- how can they be sure they are experiencing the music as it was intended to be experienced?
Everyone knows that the quartz cones with gold flakes is what actually makes a difference.
Bunch of amateurs!
Or wet mud
Does dry mud exist? I’m pretty sure we just call that dirt xD
I worked at an online shop for high end audio equipment. It was always both amusing and painful when customers asked about the sound characteristics of various power cables in the price range between $100 and $10,000 that we carried, or the same with USB and optical digital cables. Some came with the firm belief that they needed better power cables to enhance the bass of their setup. They even bought gold plated “audiophile fuses”.
I mean, electrically all of those things will just attenuate amplitude, not really effect signal oscillations, which is actually what sound is …
All they’re doing is effectively adding a small resistance to the signal which will just lower the volume in effect. Adding any amplifier will fix that
This is quite surprising, especially as we often don’t think of bananas, or even wet mud, as great conductors. However, the tester surmised that introducing the materials into the circuit is just like adding a resistor in series, and they’re unlikely to distort the audio too much, except by lowering the signal level.
I see you also read the article
it could distort the signal or add noise
The article isn’t clear on one thing : was it an analog or digital signal ?
The results are entirely unsurprising if the signal was digital. Also, I’d like to see a similar test in an environment with more electrical interference, I think the unshielded materials would fare less well there.
This is a really old test. There are forum posts of the same concept and some news articles with the test that are so old that they 404 now. An unshielded coat hanger is the most common. And yes, this is done frequently with analog signals. No, you can’t tell the difference.
It’s a little confusing to me how it could be physically possible that there’d be no difference.
I’m not saying I think I could tell which is which, but surely they can’t sound the same ? Or if they do, why do we even use copper, instead of just making cables out of the cheapest random conductive substance available ? Is copper just that substance ?
Audiophiles get a lot of friction, but this kind of person exists in almost any hobby. People fascinated by equipment and ascetics who loose the plot about what their hobby is all about.
The eye opening moments for me were
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Listening to $35 Porta Pro headphones and realizing you don’t need a lot of money for great sound
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ABX testing and realizing I couldn’t tell the difference AT ALL and certainly couldn’t remember the last sound bite well enough to make a real comparison anyway.
Were they comfortable though?
I did get aftermarket pads for them but they are not made for long term listening. But that is beside the point - they show you don’t need to spend $1000 to get great sound and they are only one example of that.
Did they have good noise blocking? Good battery? Good delay? Microphone? Good warranty? Reparaibility? There’s so many reasons to spend a buck extra
TBF if they’re uncomfortable you don’t use them, so that’s a breaking feature.
Returned them after they kept grabbing hairs
True! I love the retro look but the hair thing isn’t ideal
Similar with mp3 bitrate. While I do think I noticed a difference going from 128kbps to 192kbps, anything beyond that I can’t hear a difference for.
Which clearly means I need to dump 15k into my sound setup because it maxes out somewhere between 128kbps and 192kbps!
Edit: dumb -> dump
aound -> sound
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The way audiophiles tell sound quality is 99.99% subjectivity and 0.01% objectivity.
will be converting to bananas tonight, thanks op
