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
I think the attitude exhibited by the author of the opening post is arrogant and condescending and close-minded. But he is very well aware of that.

I would have expected that 50 years of time in this hobby would have produced more questions and circumspection, and less dogma and certainty. But this opening post proves once again that age is not highly correlated with wisdom.

He certainly is entitled to his subjective, personal opinion, as are we all. I respect his personal opinion. At the highest level of audio reproduction he likely has experienced I might also have arrived at those incorrect conclusions. (Though I certainly would not proffer them as immutable facts.)

His utter dismissal of analog recording and reproduction, and his “assumption” of digital recording and reproduction, informs me that whatever audio hobby he thinks he is engaged in, he in not engaged in the hobby of high-end audio. His opinions evidence a lack of experience with the best the hobby of high-end audio can produce.





@ronres





+1

The OP has certainly some very strong opinions...and those he is entitled to. OTOH, Ron is 100% correct IMHO ( notice how I use the IMHO --in my humble opinion, something that the OP would do well to sprinkle around in his post....again IMHO, LOL)




Great topic.
44.1 is enough, I use it daily. The AD converter matters far more, as does the engineering. It's not about sample rate.
What matters to us reflects where we are on the hearing scale vs. where we are in the room.  Our listening evolves, and our needs change.  We only need what we need when we hear that we need it.  Mental lists are not the way forward.  Just live with your room and let it talk to you.

Playback acoustics are undervalued most IMO.
Interesting side note on pre amp expenses:  I just tried the BAT vk-43se (good) and the Boulder 1010 (not good), and yet neither was as good as the Crane Song Avocet, that was $1900 15 years ago.
Inspirational!

i was so moved by the anti tweak commentary, I spent three hours taking my system back to factory default (as much as I could, wasn’t going to pull the mods out of the phono pre). RadioShack ic’s and zipcord went in though.  .rega back to all factory set up etc. 
results:  cheap ic’s Suck. Zip cord even worse.  TT mods make a world of difference.  Isolation and anti vibration measures are essential. Soundstage had collapsed, timbre went out the window. 
Vocal Presence...fuggeddaboudit

so it begs the question what is a tweak?  What is a upgrade?
and why do we doubt our ears?  Psycho-acoustics is the measure. Hearing is unavoidably subjective. So what you think you hear...you hear.  Do enjoy you system however you want, but don’t tell me what I do and do not get results from. 
Because you don’t have any way of knowing. 
Inspirational!

i was so moved by the anti tweak commentary, I spent three hours taking my system back to factory default (as much as I could, wasn’t going to pull the mods out of the phono pre). RadioShack ic’s and zipcord went in though.  .rega back to all factory set up etc. 
results:  cheap ic’s Suck. Zip cord even worse.  TT mods make a world of difference.  Isolation and anti vibration measures are essential. Soundstage had collapsed, timbre went out the window. 
Vocal Presence...fuggeddaboudit

so it begs the question what is a tweak?  What is a upgrade?
and why do we doubt our ears?  Psycho-acoustics is the measure. Hearing is unavoidably subjective. So what you think you hear...you hear.  Do enjoy you system however you want, but don’t tell me what I do and do not get results from. 
Because you don’t have any way of knowing.