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Ron Burgundy posted:This is 100% a lovely club DJ thing. No, lovely non-club DJs also do it.
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Nov 26, 2012 08:58
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Haha now we have to decide whether it is the club that is poo poo or the DJ!  Regardless it is someone who certainly has little regard for their (or others) equipment.
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Nov 26, 2012 09:04
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The old ortofon headshells were so poorly designed that they would actually bend the contacts in your tonearm so that other headshells wouldn't make good enough contact anymore.
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Nov 26, 2012 14:28
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Socket Ryanist posted:The old ortofon headshells were so poorly designed that they would actually bend the contacts in your tonearm so that other headshells wouldn't make good enough contact anymore. You call it poor design, I call it technical marketing.
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Nov 26, 2012 14:50
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No audiofool thread is complete without a mention of Peter Belt. http://www.belt.demon.co.uk/ Passing mention has been made of his "Rainbow Foils" ITT. His website and the newsletters and articles linked therein constitute one of the richest veins of pure crazy to be found outside of Scientology. Highlights include: Rainbow Foils, Electret Creams, the "Quantum Clip" (a common or garden alligator clip with a couple of inches of wire hanging off it; £500), a special £100 felt tip pen with which you can improve your stereo system by writing "x 26 x" and "my stereo is awesome > O.K." on your gear, audiofool-quality USB keys, special coloured cable ties costing a tenner each, and schemes to improve your audio by taping a picture of a dog and an aspirin to your speakers and putting photographs of yourself in the fridge, and the guy who improved the acoustics of the O2 Arena by applying Creams and Foils to his seat when he went to a concert. Dude has a crazy wife who comes up with elaborate explanations for all this crazy involving morphic resonance. I enjoy dipping into his website whenever I feel the need for a hearty dose of what the absolute gently caress. But hey, I wish I could sell alligator clips for £500 each.
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Nov 26, 2012 21:36
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timb posted:Why do you need four tone arms? For playing quadraphonic albums.
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Nov 26, 2012 23:43
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I believe you mean quadraphonic acoustic test vinyl. Audiophiles don't listen to music.
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Nov 27, 2012 00:07
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Maybe if you want to listen to Zaireeka but you have no friends?
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Nov 27, 2012 01:28
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CaptainRightful posted:Maybe if you want to listen to Zaireeka but you have no friends? When you have a $64,000 turntable, you don't friends.
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Nov 27, 2012 04:07
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Fanelien posted:I changed the locks on an audiophile's house recently, he spent half the time complaining about the girl that left him and the other half explaining how much his audio set up cost and how awesome it was. I got bored about half way through and just noted the brands. Most of the setup was Gryphon, with this turntable I sometimes wonder how someone so spergy could manage to have a job that allows him to afford such a device without pissing off everyone to the point where he no longer has that job.
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Nov 27, 2012 08:02
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Blistex posted:I sometimes wonder how someone so spergy could manage to have a job that allows him to afford such a device without pissing off everyone to the point where he no longer has that job. One word: engineering.
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Nov 27, 2012 08:24
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Korendian Leader posted:
You made my morning, thank you.
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Nov 27, 2012 15:46
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"http://www.head-fi.org/t/617026/usb-cable-and-sound-quality/90 posted:Hi Guys... just my experiences and $0.02. I've been doing electronics since I was 10, have an EE degree, have been making a living in electronics for 30 years and have been an Audiophile for about 35 years. The brain suggests that bits are bits and the USB cable shouldn't matter. Real world experiences and my ears tell me just the opposite, and it's not subtle, at least with my system and my ears. It's difficult to explain the reason as to why this is so from an electronics/physics standpoint. My guess is that it's mainly an issue with timing/jitter and perhaps isolation of the power lines from the data lines. The jitter issue is a difficult-to-explain and complex relationship of micro-vibration, dilectrics, conductor type and geometry. To this day, my brain says this doesn't really make any logical sense. My ears tell me the exact opposite. In the end, my ears won the debate hands down.Going back to a standard USB cable robs my system of the that magic make makes you forget that you're listening to just another good stereo. It all started with a Locus Design Polestar and then I upgraded to a Locus Design Axis, using Audirvana Plus, a Mac Mini and a Wyrd4Sound DAC2. I miss Lee Weiland... he was a cable genius, a gentleman and an awesome guy. Whatever the secrets of USB cables really are, I think he knew most them. All of this being said, if you can't hear the difference, that's OK. Then USB cables are a non-issue for you. It really boils down to what you do or don't hear. If you try a good USB cable and you can't hear the difference, then that's that. On the other hand, if you do hear it, then it becomes of case of, "Is it worth it or not". Pretty simple really. If you haven't tried it in a nicely controlled experiment, then your opinion is nothing more, nothing less than a best guess. It doesn't take DBT. If it's that subtle, then it's not worth it to me. I've demonstrated the difference to four friends. They all heard the difference, and had a bewildered look, in about 30 seconds of listening. In my system at least, the difference is anything but subtle. You millage may vary and probably will. Again, this is just my $0.02... the last thing I'm looking for is a fight. I'm just trying to share my experience with you guys in the hopes that the music you love can become (even more) alive. Happy listening and happy experimenting everyone! High-end audio is awesome! This is why I love reading head-fi, there's so many just completely normal posts about headphones then every once in a while BAM someone crazy starts talking.
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Nov 28, 2012 03:31
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Doc Spratley posted:Just wanted to pop in and say that Bob Crites is an awesome guy to deal with, replies to emails within minutes and really knows his stuff. He won't steer you wrong. Very reasonable prices as well. I love LOVE Klipsch Heritage stuff. Got pictures ?
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Nov 29, 2012 01:28
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jonathan posted:I love LOVE Klipsch Heritage stuff. Got pictures ? I'm not a huge Klipsch fan but the pair of Cornerhorns I listened to in the right room (huge) with the right front end equipment (Levinson) sounded loving fantastic. You really wouldn't want to put them in a room much smaller than, say, a school gymnasium though. 
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Nov 29, 2012 01:54
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Found this when looking up that electrosomething creme mentioned a few posts uphttp://www.enjoythemusic.com/magazine/viewpoint/0712/aa_chapter_152.htm posted:So was there any effect, how great or significant was it, was it worth the effort and expense, is it based on science, religion or magic, and was the effect actual or some psychologically induced phantom of my imagination? Yes, there was an effect on the sound when applied to electronics, a tightening of transients but a softening of the total soundscape making it more natural. The change was not huge, but definitely there. Unhappily I know of no way of completely removing the cream so there is no way of reversing the process or being able to do a double blind evaluation. I like how their "huge 8 channel system" is apparently so "harsh" that anything done to 'correct' this is immediately apparent on walking in to the room. Money well spent, champ. He's not married. Also they're all loving insane.
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Nov 29, 2012 03:58
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quote:Let's say FLAC is 3% better then MP3:320.. Maybe you can't hear the 3%. Sure it will vary per song. Sure it depend on hardware. But will you be OK with 97% of the possible quality? I also don't remember where I saw it so I can't quote it but I also saw someone say how FLAC sounded better than ALAC, I really want to know what these people think happens when they play music because it just baffles me.
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Nov 29, 2012 08:52
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piratepilates posted:Sure I'm saying I can't tell the difference and it's not worth it, but don't you want an improvement you won't even notice?!??! I rip to FLAC for archival purposes. No matter how good MP3 at 320kbps is, it's still lossy. FLAC lets me recreate my CDs 1:1, should I ever lose them. Regarding the FLAC vs. ALAC thing, those are the same people who think using a different USB cable on their external hard drives will make an audible difference, and the people who think digitally stored music degrades when you play it.
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Nov 29, 2012 09:08
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Khablam posted:Found this when looking up that electrosomething creme mentioned a few posts up --edit: As far as lossy versus non-lossy goes, at certain bitrates and codec efficiency, it's a moot argument. If you'd do a delta of a FLAC and a 320kbit AAC file, you'd end up mostly with low-level white noise. Any other results in the delta happen due to frame size selection and alignment in the encoding process. The white noise would be masked away in the psychoacoustics, and the frame alignment issues are in the millisecond range the ear can't discern in, anyway. Unless you intend to re-encode ALL your music every time a portable playback device comes with a newer generation audio codec, there's zero use in lossless archiving. Actually, if you're listening to the compressed versions all the time, it may just be the actual version to you, anyway, with no need to keep an archival version. And considering how hosed up the masters are when they hit the markets (loudness wars), I think bit-perfect archiving is silly to begin with. Combat Pretzel fucked around with this message at 13:25 on Nov 29, 2012 |
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Nov 29, 2012 13:19
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Jerry Cotton posted:One word: engineering. The truly scary thing is an engineer being this way. I wouldn't want an engineer working for me who didn't believe in double-blind A/B testing.
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Nov 29, 2012 13:42
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Radbot posted:The truly scary thing is an engineer being this way. I wouldn't want an engineer working for me who didn't believe in double-blind A/B testing. I'm not a crazy audiophile-ologist so maybe I'm wrong but a lot of the craziest audiophiles on internet forums seem to be fairly successful, often retired, (electrical) engineers. EDIT: At least they claim to be whenever someone questions their expertise on any matter.
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Nov 29, 2012 13:46
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Dubfire, the reason why sound engineers are asking about the cables is because they look different, not because they sound better. http://youtu.be/c6VA28Y2wNA quote:About the product planning for the d+ RCA series, we contemplated the best combination of important materials and factors such as its structure, conductor, insulator, shielding, outer sheath, and contact of plug.As a matter of course, for not only a data compressed file but also WAV, AIFF, and CD, it contributes to dissolve the stiffness and shallowness of digital sounds. In addition, its hi-definition playback property helps for making a good quality file recording for vinyl sound capturing. http://www.neo-w.com/catalog/2010/06/d-usb_en.html
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Nov 29, 2012 14:14
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I like how they call Polyethylene "Polyolefin", just so it doesn't sound like the insulation is some cheap poo poo.
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Nov 29, 2012 14:29
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This comes up every now and then, but it's always fun to read about studio engineers when questioned about the cables used in recording studios to connect equipment disclose that it's usually the cheapest crap possible. Makes a nice antithesis to 101% oxygen free speaker wire that is raised off the floor with even more expensive cable holders.
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Nov 29, 2012 14:40
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Combat Pretzel posted:Unless you intend to re-encode ALL your music every time a portable playback device comes with a newer generation audio codec, there's zero use in lossless archiving. That's precisely the point of lossless archiving, it's a perfect copy of the original, it's my backup if anything should happen to my CDs. Backups should be perfect copies of the original, warts and all due to questionable mastering. Anything else is missing the point of a backup. Storage space and CPU power is cheap, so I rip my music once to FLAC and transcode it on the fly if needed. My PC music player handles it seamlessly for me. Even if it didn't, my portable players all happen to play FLAC and have plenty of space. Keeping my music in a lossless format allows me to use whichever lossy codec I want, with no cumulative loss in quality.
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Nov 29, 2012 17:19
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We had a discussion about lossless playback somewhere In this thread or another, and a couple of us theorised that a lossy format could strip away a lot of high frequency phsychoacoustics that would actually make a track sound cleaner and less fatiguing than a "full range" track with very high frequency info. Were talking inaudible but still subconsciously perceptible stuff such as cymbal crash. This stuff is scientifically proven to have an effect on people and its usually in a negative way. The same can be said for below 20hz content. So a lossy mp3 that knows what to cut out and what to keep could very well be more pleasing to the normal human brain. Also interesting is how many of these flakes love to use tube amps and players that sound "warm". Basically "warm" means strong mid frequencies. So they use tube amps which have been documented as rolling off the high frequencies. Yeah it sounds warm, its missing 30% of the audible range ! But with these kooks its not what you can measure, its the aura you get from your soundstage or whatever. Audiophiles sweat the details to get playback as close as possible to the studio recording as it was mixed. These aren't audiophiles, they're hobbyists who try to come up with ways to improve their equipment outside of the realms of documented science, in order to feel line they're above the rest of their peers who "keep it simple".
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Nov 29, 2012 23:00
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I often listen to a 50s tube amp that rolls off around 12k and completely distorts the low bass, it sounds awesome but with a THD rating of 4% I would never call it "hi-fi". I even added inputs via the high-gain microphone inputs that are tuned to overload the inputs during normal loud play, since I like tube fuzz for old rock records. I like tube amplifiers, and I'd even consider building one, but if you're looking for high fidelity you don't need tubes, you need measurements, room characteristics, system-characteristics (it's trivial to set up a high quality playback chain up to the speakers so this isn't very expensive or difficult). I honestly know very little about how rooms affect acoustics except theory, but if I wanted proper hi-fi I'd look in to room treatments instead of buying a tube kit.
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Nov 29, 2012 23:36
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jonathan posted:We had a discussion about lossless playback somewhere In this thread or another, and a couple of us theorised that a lossy format could strip away a lot of high frequency phsychoacoustics that would actually make a track sound cleaner and less fatiguing than a "full range" track with very high frequency info. Were talking inaudible but still subconsciously perceptible stuff such as cymbal crash. This stuff is scientifically proven to have an effect on people and its usually in a negative way. The same can be said for below 20hz content. But anyway, if the encodings are transparent, there's economically nothing gained by keeping bit-perfect FLACs. Because it's sure as hell a pain in the rear end, whenever I have to do a full backup of my poo poo, and it's only around 35GB of compressed music. It'd be 3-4x that in FLAC. Transcoding into every new codec of the month is also silly. If the current contemporary codec did well/transparent enough, you can keep the file in that format. Says already enough that MP3 is still prevalent, even after AAC been made mainstream years ago thanks to Apple. Don't even begin hoping that CELT goes anywhere, IETF RFC or not. Vorbis didn't manage, either.
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Nov 29, 2012 23:48
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longview posted:I often listen to a 50s tube amp that rolls off around 12k and completely distorts the low bass, it sounds awesome but with a THD rating of 4% I would never call it "hi-fi". I really like distortion, but I don't like my own equipment causing it. Its really fun to play source material on my setup that is recorded using distorted guitar etc. I like the band Type O Negative, and their recordings themselves are produced well, but the guitar and bass are filtered and distorted. Same with that new Zz Top single "Gotta Get Paid", when I first heard it, I loved the dirty guitar work.
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Nov 29, 2012 23:59
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longview posted:I often listen to a 50s tube amp that rolls off around 12k and completely distorts the low bass, it sounds awesome but with a THD rating of 4% I would never call it "hi-fi". I listen to my pre-1960's records with a tonearm that tracks at 5 grams with a crystal cartridge. What sounds "good" is totally subjective.
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Nov 30, 2012 00:13
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Blistex posted:I sometimes wonder how someone so spergy could manage to have a job that allows him to afford such a device without pissing off everyone to the point where he no longer has that job. He owned his own business, a couple of the people working under him who I have met subsequently doing jobs at his showroom and factory seem to think he's bat poo poo crazy as well. But he's actually a decent bloke and apparently pays his staff well.
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Nov 30, 2012 01:31
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Combat Pretzel posted:If that's true, it's a plus. If it's a pain in the rear end to back up 35GB of data, you're doing backups wrong. I don't keep FLACs, but only because when I digitized my CD collection I didn't have the hard drive space for it. I wish I had, but I didn't, and that's that. But my music collection is on the order of just under a terabyte of MP3s. If I could have backed up my collection in FLAC for only 200GB? I absolutely would have gone for it.
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Nov 30, 2012 05:07
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Combat Pretzel posted:If that's true, it's a plus. I think my collection is only 80GB or so in FLAC. I have an external 500GB NAS that does nightly backups to my ISPs servers. Even if you do your own local backups, 2TB external drives are cheap as hell these days. And I still have all my CDs stashed away, so while my FLAC files are backups of my CDs, my CDs are backups of my FLAC files, in a way  I am fully aware that LAME V2 MP3 is transparent, at least I can't hear any difference. I'm also the guy who transcodes any 24bit/96kHz music I come across (mostly vinyl rips of stuff not on CD) to 16bit/44.1kHz because dammit, noone can hear the difference anyway. But I like having the best possible backup of my own CD collection, for peace of mind.
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Nov 30, 2012 08:31
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KozmoNaut posted:Regarding the FLAC vs. ALAC thing, those are the same people who think using a different USB cable on their external hard drives will make an audible difference, and the people who think digitally stored music degrades when you play it. Remember, these are the same people who drag diamonds across their vinyl bumps.
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Nov 30, 2012 23:52
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Blistex posted:Remember, these are the same people who drag diamonds across their vinyl bumps. What's wrong with playing vinyl records, don't knock it 
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Dec 1, 2012 00:08
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piratepilates posted:What's wrong with playing vinyl records, don't knock it Nothing wrong with it, but the people he was talking about think there is loss in digital data they are storing/playing, while their listening mode of choice involves friction against soft plastic, physically changing the record. Also vinyl rocks, I recently restored a Dual 510 turntable and love it.
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Dec 1, 2012 02:18
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piratepilates posted:What's wrong with playing vinyl records, don't knock it As mentioned before, you're dragging a needle made of one of the hardest materials over plastic, degenerating and as such changing the record every play. And then, the way the groove is read varies with the flex of the cantilever and the amount of counterbalance. And lets not even go into preamps and the different ways the RIAA equalization curve is implemented. Or rather approximated, since different electrical implementations of an equalizer behave differently. In short, it's a loving awful lovely medium.
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Dec 1, 2012 02:30
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Records are a seriously cheap way to access a boatload of music you otherwise can't find anywhere. But as we've already discussed countless times, audiophiles don't actually care about the music.
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Dec 1, 2012 03:55
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Combat Pretzel posted:The fact that enough audiophiles hail vinyls as the be-all end-all audio carrier is loving hilarious. I've always said that if you want to argue for the superiority of analog you need to talk about 30 IPS tape. Most audiophiles would probably find it too sterile and clinical though.
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Dec 1, 2012 04:19
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Detroit Q. Spider posted:I've always said that if you want to argue for the superiority of analog you need to talk about 30 IPS tape. Most audiophiles would probably find it too sterile and clinical though.
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Dec 1, 2012 13:38
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