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What Matters and What is Nonsense

I’ve been an audiophile for approximately 50 years. In my college days, I used to hang around the factory of a very well regarded speaker manufacturer where I learned a lot from the owners. When I started with audio it was a technical hobby. You were expected to know something about electronics and acoustics. Listening was important, but understanding why something sounded good or not so good was just as important. No one in 1968 would have known what you were talking about if you said you had tweaked your system and it sounded so much better. But if you talked about constant power output with frequency, or pleasing second-order harmonic distortion versus jarring odd-order harmonics in amplification, you were part of the tribe.

Starting in the 1980s, a lot of pseudo scientific nonsense started appearing. Power cords were important. One meter interconnects made a big difference. Using a green magic marker on the edge of a CD was amazing. Putting isolation dampers under a CD transport lifted the veil on the music. Ugh. This stuff still make my eyes roll, even after all these years.

So I have decided to impart years and years of hard won knowledge to today’s hobbists who might be interested in reality. This is my list of the steps in the audio reproduction chain, and the relative importance of each step. My ranking of relative importance includes a big dose of cost/benefit ratio. At this point in the evolution of audio, I am assuming digital recording and reproduction.

Item / Importance to the sound on a scale of 1-10 / Cost benefit ratio

  • The room the recording was made in / 8 / Nothing you can do about it
  • The microphones and setup used in the recording / 8 / nothing you can do about it.
  • The equalization and mixing of the recording / 10 / Nothing you can do about it
  • The technology used for the recording (analog, digital, sample rate, etc.) / 5 / nothing you can do about it.
  • The format of the consumer recording (vinyl, CD, DSD, etc.) 44.1 - 16 really is good enough / 3 / moderate CB ratio
  • The playback device i.e. cartridge or DAC / 5 / can be a horribe CB ratio - do this almost last
  • The electronics - preamp and amp / 4 / the amount of money wasted on $5,000 preamps and amps is amazing.
  • Low leve interconnects / 2 / save your money, folks
  • Speaker cables / 3 / another place to save your money
  • Speakers / 10 / very very high cost to benefit ratio. Spend your money here.
  • Listening room / 9 / an excellent place to put your money. DSPs have revolutionized audio reproduction
In summary, buy the best speakers you can afford, and invest in something like Dirac Live or learn how to use REW and buy a MiniDSP HD to implement the filters. Almost everything else is a gross waste of money.
128x128phomchick

Showing 1 response by noble100

noble100's avatar
noble100
2,419 posts
 

I agree with many others on this thread that the quality level of recordings is very important. Even if your reproduction system is excellent, it will only be able to faithfully reproduce what was captured on the recording when it was originally made. In other words, the quality of the recordings played is a limiting factor in the overall sound quality of any home music or ht system.
Excellent recordings will sound that way on an excellent system. However, the quality of all recordings will also be more easily apparent the better the quality of your system becomes. Poor recordings will sound that way, even on an excellent system.
I use a laptop running JRiver that sends ripped CDs and 24bit/96Khz hi-res files on a Synology NAS to an Oppo 105 serving as a DAC and player. Amplification is a pair of high powered class D monoblocks driving Magnepan 2.7 speakers. Bass below 40 Hz is reproduced by a separate 4 sub distributed bass array system powered by a 1K watt class AB amp. I believe most members, including myself, would classify my system as good but not excellent.
The main point I want to make is that, even played through just a moderately good system, the quality of the recording largely dictates the quality of the overall sound produced on my system. I’m able to clearly discern the superiority in general of my hi-res FLAC and WAV files in comparison to my ripped CD files.
I primarily perceive the hi-res files as having lower background noise levels, greater dynamics and higher levels of details that seems to result in a more realistic sound stage illusion as well as a better sense of the recording venue.
Some of these characteristics may actually be mostly attributable to the higher resolution level of the hi-res direct to digital recording format but I’m considering this just another contributing factor in the more general recording quality assessment.
I think the variances between recording formats and recording quality would likely only become more easily noticed the better one’s system becomes.
Of course, nobody’s going to completely agree with phomchick’ s list of relative importance of relevant factors in system building since it’s so subjective and there are too many permutations with assigning a relative importance ranking..
I tend to agree on some of his thoughts:
The high importance of buying the best speakers you can afford and a good listening room.
The relatively high importance assigned to elements of the overall recording quality such as the recording room, the mics used, the room and mic setup as well as the equalization and mixing of the recording.
But I tend to disagree on some of his other thoughts:
His relatively high importance assigned to room correction and DSP.
His claims that there’s nothing we music consumers can do about the format and quality of recordings.
     We are all constantly voting with our dollars. If we consistently vote by purchasing the better formats and recordings, the content providers will continue to supply and even increase and improve the quantity and quality of those recordings.

Tim
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