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SentinelXS posted:Have the $1,000 power cable buying morons ruined the hobby enough that anybody talking about audio sounds crazy? I personally haven't listened to Klipsch speakers, but I've always heard that the horn tweeters have a unique "brighter" sound to them. Stop sounding like a pretentious poo poo fag. People get really butt hurt if you talk about things that they haven't heard of before.
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May 27, 2012 23:54
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WanderingKid posted:For example, the last reference track I used was Under the Influence (Chemical Brothers) which has enormous bass. I love that track, the initial frequency sweep as it starts is AMAZE and then the bassline just throbs wonderfully. One of the best they've ever done IMO.
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May 28, 2012 08:58
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I was tweaking the sound on a pair of computer speakers I just bought and came across a thread on head-fi where people were saying these speakers were particularly susceptible to sounding bad if the polarity from the power source is reversed (i.e. plugged into the power socket backwards). I know nothing about electricity, but can I safely assume this is complete horseshit?
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May 30, 2012 08:18
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I can't believe the states still don't have hard wired earth pins, or at least one way keyed plugs 
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May 30, 2012 08:56
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Ron Burgundy posted:I can't believe the states still don't have hard wired earth pins, or at least one way keyed plugs We do. On polarized non-grounded devices one pin is larger than the other. Obviously devices with a ground pin can only go in one way. The only time you see non-polarized plugs is on lamps or electronics that will fix the polarity on their own.
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May 30, 2012 12:50
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I'm not quite sure if you guys are serious.
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May 30, 2012 13:30
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Tacier posted:I was tweaking the sound on a pair of computer speakers I just bought and came across a thread on head-fi where people were saying these speakers were particularly susceptible to sounding bad if the polarity from the power source is reversed (i.e. plugged into the power socket backwards). I know nothing about electricity, but can I safely assume this is complete horseshit?
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May 30, 2012 15:24
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How the gently caress does single phase AC polarity matter at all?! --edit: Actually "polarity" since there's no actual polarity. --edit: vvvv Must be some voodoo rectifier then. Combat Pretzel fucked around with this message at 15:52 on May 30, 2012 |
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May 30, 2012 15:33
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The only American equipment I use down here is antique motion picture projection equipment, which involves DC rectification, which is apparently polarity sensitive. When I plug it into the step-down transformer the wrong way, none of the DC components work.
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May 30, 2012 15:46
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Ron Burgundy posted:I can't believe the states still don't have hard wired earth pins, or at least one way keyed plugs Aussies have no right to criticise other nation's plug design after approving this easily bent madness: 
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May 30, 2012 19:58
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Combat Pretzel posted:How the gently caress does single phase AC polarity matter at all?! --edit: Actually "polarity" since there's no actual polarity. One side is tied to ground at the breaker box, the other isn't. Often the metal chassis of a device is attached to the neutral lead. If you had two devices with metal cases, where one of them was attached to one side of the AC source and one was tied to the other side, what happens when you touch both of them? Devices which draw more than a certain amount of current have a separate ground lead, because if they tied the case to the neutral lead, it would end up a few volts above ground due to the voltage drop of the supply wire.
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May 30, 2012 21:54
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You don't ground a metal chassis to the neutral lead. If you need grounding, you design your appliance around the assumption that there's a dedicated ground lead. If you don't, you make sure your circuitry is insulated from the chassis. Also, there are quite a few countries in the world that transport current in triple phase AC to homes (one phase acts as L1 and one as N, you connect the phases as you like to balance the load), and they're not third world countries. This is reason alone why this is insane design, because you're in constant danger of shorting two phases, or grounding one of these with your feet. Either way, this is a safety issue, and not really the point to begin with. Single phase AC doesn't have any sort of polarity in the sense of direction of constant flow, like DC current. Actual AC devices are designed with that in mind (essentially just electric motors). Virtually any other appliance works with DC, and a rectifier doesn't care where the main and neutral leads are. The diodes in the circuitry make sure of that. (And then again, there's that triple phase AC to one's home.) Combat Pretzel fucked around with this message at 22:23 on May 30, 2012 |
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May 30, 2012 22:18
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Why do polarized, non-grounded plugs exist then? (I can count at least half a dozen devices in the room with me that have one of these)
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May 30, 2012 22:26
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I don't know. I have them, too, and they're useless, because I have three phase AC to my house.
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May 30, 2012 22:28
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I've chatted with a few people on this topic and it seems like, in the US at least, a lot of stuff has a polarized two-prong plug when it should really have a three prong plug. Best example would be metal desk lamps.
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May 30, 2012 22:34
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Okay...I think I'm going crazy, BUT: Should MP3s played on my PC sound better than MP3s played on my iPod? Same file, same speakers. My iPod seems to make the speakers distort at a high volume, whereas listening to the SAME FILE on my PC doesn't seem to do it. Am I crazy? Please tell me if I am.
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Jun 1, 2012 16:43
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Hammer Floyd posted:Okay...I think I'm going crazy, BUT: You're probably not crazy. There's a lot of hardware you're switching out between the PC and the iPod, and a lot of it's analog. You're just driving the speakers straight out of the mini stereo jack on your PC/iPod? The DACs and amps are going to be different. The PC is going to have more power available to drive the speakers, and the iPod amp is geared for driving headphones, which is generally a lot easier than driving speakers. So, not inconceivable to get worse sound out of your iPod. Honestly, though, I'd expect the iPod to do a better job most of the time. Most integrated motherboard amps sound like poo poo because of interference and general crappiness. To get the thread back on track: listening to digital audio directly from the on-board DAC of your iPod is an abominable travesty, and you're a horrible person unless you listen to your iPod through one of these.
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Jun 1, 2012 16:58
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pgroce posted:To get the thread back on track: listening to digital audio directly from the on-board DAC of your iPod is an abominable travesty, and you're a horrible person unless you listen to your iPod through one of these. Real audiophiles make their ipod worthless as a portable device. http://redwineaudio.com/imod
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Jun 4, 2012 15:58
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Pudgygiant posted:Real audiophiles make their ipod worthless as a portable device. Red Wine Audio first became(in)famous for modding $30 T-Amps and selling them for $500.
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Jun 5, 2012 02:10
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I had a bunch of iPods (regular and touch) in the past. Their output is noisy as gently caress due to cramped circuitry, Wolfson DAC or not.
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Jun 5, 2012 04:28
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They sound better using a line-out cable rather than the headphones jack. I've used a couple of iPods and now an iPhone that way with my car stereo and never noticed any distortion. Anyway, properly beveled CDs are clearly a superior audiophile listening experience. Using this CD beveler you can stop those pesky laser beams from bouncing around and degrading the transparent clarity of your sound. Get rid of that "acoustic smog"! Edit: Oops that CD beveler was already posted way back. It's still great though. SentinelXS fucked around with this message at 06:19 on Jun 5, 2012 |
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Jun 5, 2012 06:05
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Red Wine Audio posted:A larger more 3-dimentional soundstage Indeed. Combat Pretzel posted:I had a bunch of iPods (regular and touch) in the past. Their output is noisy as gently caress due to cramped circuitry, Wolfson DAC or not. It doesn't simply use Wolfson DACs, it leverages them.
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Jun 5, 2012 13:47
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I just picked up a pair of "Coby" headphones at Marshall's for $6. They had a gold plated plug.
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Jun 14, 2012 20:33
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As I stated a few pages back, every piece of Sorny, Panaphonics and Magnetbox equipment comes with gold plating now.
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Jun 15, 2012 02:09
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Chitin posted:I just picked up a pair of "Coby" headphones at Marshall's for $6. They had a gold plated plug. My audio-technica headphones had gold plating on the end but it wore off pretty fast.
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Jun 15, 2012 05:29
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A lot of the Sutsuma-brand stuff advertises gold-plated plugs on the box but the metal doesn't actually look anything much like gold. (Not that I'm an expert on gold.)
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Jun 15, 2012 09:46
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My new career is going to be snipping off all the gold plated connectors I see and sending them to Cash4Gold.
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Jun 15, 2012 14:48
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Are Beats fans the anti-audiophile?
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Jun 19, 2012 09:18
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Gromit posted:I wouldn't talk to them about it. I could think of few things that would make me sound like a pretentious twat than telling my friends about the frequency response of my drivers. To be fair, I think your job makes your perceptions of how many people look at CP a tad skewed. (Also, I almost typed "skewed" as "SKU'd", so that says something about my job.  )
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Jun 24, 2012 05:08
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Does this link work for you lot? http://www.amazon.co.uk/forum/mp3/ref=cm_cd_pg_pg1?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx28IXQIV6LBRU4&cdPage=1&cdThread=Tx3E8GXR2DFFR51 It's basically customer discussions going back to 2009 on the mp3 side of the site saying that mp3s are an awful format to be selling music in (conveniently ignoring the fact Amazon also sells CDs). It's all full of people spouting complete bollocks... quote:Hair, a well ripped CD to flac should really sound better than the CD, not inferior. The flac contains the same information as the CD but doesn't suffer any loss in quality in the process of reading a spinning CD with a laser. Since changing from a Pink Triangle Numeral CD to a Linn Majik DS as my source, the increase in sound quality has been very significant. Jesus. loving. Christ. Olympic Mathlete fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Jun 25, 2012 |
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Jun 25, 2012 23:09
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I bet there's a whole new realm of sales for audiophile CD mechanisms. Like using a magnetic levitation system to isolate drive vibrations using ferrofluid to "capture" the interference from wifi. Sell it as a cheaper alternative to a faraday cage that also has proven homeopathic health benefits.
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Jun 25, 2012 23:52
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Seems like whenever so-called audiophiles use the word "significant", it actually means "imaginary". Since hearing happens in the brain, if they imagine something sounds better then it in fact does, for them. And possibly other crazy people as well.
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Jun 26, 2012 04:26
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Someone needs to create a device/program that "increases the bitrate" of your CDs/MP3s while they play. Just a few buttons that say "2X, 4X, 8X and LP Quality" That way that crappy little 128bit rip of dark side of the moon you got on limewire will come alive! "Before using the Vinylizer app, my iTunes collection was dull, tinny and flat. Now that I've been using Vinylizer there is a significant fullness, richness, and realness to my collection. Despite 1/2 of my songs being mp3's ripped from youtube, I can now close my eyes and pinpoint to the exact inch where each of the instruments are located in the 3D setting my music is painting. This is well worth the $2500! Thanks Vinylizer." Wait! This already exists. . . . doesn't it?
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Jun 26, 2012 14:30
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Well, I had a vinylizer-type plugin back when I used Winamp, but all it did was add scratches, wow, dust and narrowed the frequency band a bit. It was never proclaimed to be an audiophile plugin, just a bit of fun to play around with and fiddle with the settings. But I am dead certain there are people out there who would pay money to have their sound quality degraded like that. KozmoNaut fucked around with this message at 15:44 on Jun 26, 2012 |
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Jun 26, 2012 15:42
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Pioneer amps have some compressed music retrieve thing, apparently supposed to "restore lost information in compressed sound". Ive tried it on and off, just seems to increase the mids and low end of the bass a bit. I like listening to stuff as close to reference as possible so I turned it off.
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Jun 26, 2012 18:24
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Apparently the Audigy series of sound cards had a dynamic range expander built in as one of the main features. Assuming it was set properly that might help a lot of modern recordings, I've used that to get more life out of concert recordings that were effectively compressed by the microphone overloading. Still wouldn't trust an automatic system to not mess things up though.
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Jun 26, 2012 23:19
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longview posted:Apparently the Audigy series of sound cards had a dynamic range expander built in as one of the main features. I always go with the philosophy that you can't get something from nothing. Especially with digital.
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Jun 27, 2012 00:21
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Regardless of whether its digital or not, you cannot restore something that was never present to begin with. So if you really are overloading a mic then the only way to fix that properly is to do the recording again. Probably with a less sensitive mic or with -10dB pad. Similarly you cannot restore dynamic range to a song that is brickwalled in the mix. Theres nothing there to restore since it was destructively edited to be the way it is, deliberately or otherwise. If brickwalling it wasn't your intention then the cold hard truth is you need to redo the mix. Lastly, an increase in dynamic range is one possible byproduct of using an expander. It is basically a noise gate with an envelope. So you use it to de-emphasize low level noise in a recording. But there are limits to what you can do with it and it is not a fix for a bad recording. If you have low level noise in your recording and you want to get rid of it, then the proper way to address the problem is to go back to the recording and eliminate the noise at the source. So if you are recording your voice in your room and your computer fan can be heard whirring away in the background then the best thing to do is not record so close to your computer. When people point out flaws in professionally recorded and produced music, it is sometimes the case that some people do not regard them as flaws. For better or worse, these things just are what they are. The imperfections and the mistakes are part of what makes it unique and part of what makes it human.
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Jun 27, 2012 00:58
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WanderingKid posted:The imperfections and the mistakes are part of what makes it unique and part of what makes it human. Regarding recorded music, there are some records where one needs to turn up the <gasp> loudness knob just to hear all the instruments being played at sensible volumes. If you don't, you'll end up asking the band "hey when did you get a horn section?" after the first live gig you attend and the answer is: "We've always had them". These are almost always self-produced, of course.
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Jun 27, 2012 01:04
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I was just speaking from my own experience where I sometimes have bootleg recordings with really dull audio, or times when I've recorded sets for fun with whatever equipment I had at hand (i.e. not pro grade gear, but not entirely poo poo either). It may just be the live mixing is that way in the first place sometimes, but a combination of eq (based on the sound and the known characteristic of the microphone used) and dynamics processing made a big difference in making it sound less flat. That's a whole different topic I think than adding questionable signal processing to the playback chain, the only thing I use is the eq built into the sound card to compensate for my speaker/headset characteristics, and sometimes DRC at night.
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Jun 27, 2012 12:43
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