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evobatman posted:Audiophiles do not listen to music, they listen to equipment. Music is just a necessary evil. Now let me play Yello - The Race for you so you can really experience the openness in the soundstage these unobtanium wood coasters I have placed under my CD player create. Is there a law that states the only "pop" records hi-fi shops can have in store for demonstration purposes are by Queen, Yello, and Sting?
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Dec 9, 2014 15:00
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baka kaba posted:But how is it on a stereo system??
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Dec 9, 2014 17:12
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shortspecialbus posted:Network Jacks? Pfft. I use RFC1149 for airier highs and more dynamic drops. I knew this was going to be pigeon protocol before I even clicked. Love it.
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Dec 9, 2014 21:10
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AlexDeGruven posted:I knew this was going to be pigeon protocol before I even clicked. Love it. The embarrassing thing is I don't even have to look up the number because I reference it so often  Edit: VVV I'm glad someone got it. 
ssb fucked around with this message at 04:26 on Dec 12, 2014 |
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Dec 10, 2014 19:15
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The best analogy I've heard discrediting the benefits of super-high sample rates is to imagine the same thing for visuals. Imagine if Samsung started putting out flatscreens touting infrared and ultraviolet capabilities. More info = better quality amirite? This article talks about sampling/bit rates, sites lots of references and makes sense to me, so at least the odds are reduced that it's crazy bullshit. It's interesting to me that people are so ready to accept the bounds of their perception visually but not aurally, I think it speaks to how much influence our brains can have over the data our senses feed us. Check out the McGurk Effect and watch your ears literally lie to you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0 shortspecialbus posted:Network Jacks? Pfft. I use RFC1149 for airier highs and more dynamic drops. I just got the joke, airier highs and dynamic drops  edit: Speaking of bass drops, I was just reminded of one of my favorite quick youtube speaker vids. This man is clearly a true musical connoisseur who transcends the feeble goals of most audiophiles... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9bk_QLvc_c Takes No Damage fucked around with this message at 01:35 on Dec 12, 2014 |
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Dec 11, 2014 23:50
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"This is how I stir my cookies."
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Dec 12, 2014 09:49
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Does anyone have some more good bass song recommendations? Not those dumb bass CDs they sell at car shops but actual music? I recently messed around with the EQ in Windows and turned the bass way up for fun, actually still sounds pretty nice for most things. For years now I've been using this old Foobar EQ preset called Punch & Sparkle as a base for any EQ adjustments and it seems like a decent place to start most of the time. So far from earlier in the thread I got: Mario Paint BGM3 (holy poo poo this is sick, the left side of my spectrum visualization in Foobar just holds different patterns throughout the whole song). Jamiroquai - Butterfly Trentemoller - Evil Dub + another song I have written down at home Oh and I went and ripped the OST off my old Quake CD, now I should have some nice clean FLACs to mess about with stupid low frequency stuff.
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Dec 16, 2014 01:37
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My favorite for bass testing is Gorillaz vs. Spacemonkeyz "Laika Come Home" - any of the tracks ought to do the trick.
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Dec 16, 2014 01:47
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Takes No Damage posted:Does anyone have some more good bass song recommendations? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVNrIchvH50
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Dec 16, 2014 01:51
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Takes No Damage posted:Does anyone have some more good bass song recommendations? Béla Fleck and the Flecktones has a lot of good stuff. Try Flight of the Cosmic Hippo. From classical side of things I prefer Pomp and Circumstance. I suppose most would listen to 1812 Overture instead, especially the beginning of finale. You should be able to hear a low, quiet drumming underneath other instruments. I would love to use Finlandia Op. 26 as my test tone, but every time I try I end up listening to the whole piece.
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Dec 16, 2014 14:55
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All this makes me feel better that all the silly poo poo I have done is getting family's old mcintosh 2105 amp, the preamp and two ML-1C's restored. I was only spending $950 to get everything that needs it recapped, refoamed, and serviced and checked over as all of it has been in storage for 15 years.
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Dec 16, 2014 17:10
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For the tightest pace and drive, make sure you store your music on a RAID 0 array. SSDs are to be avoided, unless you place a premium on your music's blackness: Idiots posted:Drive three (a solid state type) gave a far from subtle shift in tone and soundstaging. I thought that here this Kingston SSD spread the stage wider, could really pull apart the multi-track layers, and certainly led in blackness too, sounding agreeably quieter than it had any right to. Yet there was also a dull flatness to its presentation, even a graying of timbre.
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Dec 31, 2014 08:09
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quote:As it turned out, it was possibly the best sounding source yet. It could sustain pace and drive, and gave body and richness to music where the Kingston SSD, for example, had been heard as limpid and lightweight. Maybe higher frequencies still weren't as insightful as direct CD playback at its best, but the sound had a relaxed quality that this listener has found quite enticing enough to plan a migration of all music onto it — pending a test of other NAS combinations!  If it wasn't that many people saying such stupid poo poo, accompanied with pictures of their gear and listening rooms, I'd say this is one big and elaborate prank. What mental gymnastics have there to be to claim that transports that delivers user data 100% perfect, yet fucks up sound? At this point, I'm surprised that there isn't a community of digital photographers claiming similar poo poo, that devices besides the camera and display, like storage and cables, take influence on their digital data.
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Dec 31, 2014 11:42
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Combat Pretzel posted:At this point, I'm surprised that there isn't a community of digital photographers claiming similar poo poo, that devices besides the camera and display, like storage and cables, take influence on their digital data. There probably is. People are insane.
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Dec 31, 2014 12:18
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The spinning of my hard drive really brings out the brightness of the 1s and 0s of my FLAC collection.
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Dec 31, 2014 15:29
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Combat Pretzel posted:At this point, I'm surprised that there isn't a community of digital photographers claiming similar poo poo, that devices besides the camera and display, like storage and cables, take influence on their digital data. This mostly comes down to the fact that we are able to reproduce audio drat-near perfectly, while we are barely able to scratch the capabilities of our visual system. There are so many real, significant improvements that can be made in visual quality by throwing money at the problem (and many more coming in the near future) that you don't need to drop $20K on magic rocks to one-up your peers. You can just buy a $20K 4K projector, instead. Of course, there are still people that believe expensive HDMI cables are needed to get the best image quality out of their new uncalibrated, curved TV with an 8200K white point.
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Dec 31, 2014 17:15
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Combat Pretzel posted:
The ONLY way there may be even a smidge of truth to what this moron is saying is if they have some sort of interference going on inside the computer. The headphone jack on my Mac Pro at work does weird things when drives are spinning and the sound gets hosed with extremely noticeably. He may have some sort of similar thing where an analog output is getting screwed with a bit, and changing drives MAY (but probably not) have an effect on that. If he's sending it out digital via SPDIF or something though, that's horseshit beyond horseshit.
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Dec 31, 2014 18:47
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Modern computers are really shittily designed and built and usually the sound is all sorts of hosed up because no-one cares about sound anyway as long as it's loud. Anything may affect anything  (For example I get all sorts of buzzes and warbles through my laptop speakers that are clearly audible when there's no sound playing if I plug in a USB mouse but nothing like that when I use a wireless mouse. Go figure.)
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Dec 31, 2014 18:50
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shortspecialbus posted:The ONLY way there may be even a smidge of truth to what this moron is saying is if they have some sort of interference going on inside the computer. The headphone jack on my Mac Pro at work does weird things when drives are spinning and the sound gets hosed with extremely noticeably. He may have some sort of similar thing where an analog output is getting screwed with a bit, and changing drives MAY (but probably not) have an effect on that. If he's sending it out digital via SPDIF or something though, that's horseshit beyond horseshit.
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Dec 31, 2014 19:23
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Endless Mike posted:He's using a NAS. It's just sending data over his network. Then he's an idiot.
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Jan 2, 2015 19:26
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I have a wireless network at home. I've found that a slight addition of Argon to the atmosphere results in sweeter highs and faster bass.
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Jan 2, 2015 23:34
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Right now I am rocking some old-school Audioengine A2 speaks with an Audioengine D1 DAC with 192k being outputted via SPDIF from my computer (Computer sound hardware on separate . I'd like to do the a couple things soon to make both my wife and I lives easier: 1) Move my D1 DAC over to my wife's computer, give her the A2s. 2) While keeping the same audio fidelity I have now: make my new computer a hub for media files and install a wireless system that connects to different pairs of speakers in 3 separate rooms. I was thinking of popping for a pair of Audioengine A5+ speakers and getting an Audioengine D2 Wireless DAC to make this happen, but the add-ons seem totally overpriced for what I need. Here are the questions I have, pardon how retarded they may be: 1) Will this setup at least help me get equal sound playing in multiple rooms of my house without added expense? 2) Transmitting the sound via Wi-Fi, how much loss can I anticipate from a hard 192k SPDIF connection into the DAC? 3) When using pairs of speakers that are both hard-wired and receiving signal via analog and wi-fi, I assume that latencies are going to be different, how much of an issue is this? 4) Do I have any better options than the selections I've laid out so far? I'd like to keep everything compatible with each other. Price is a factor and sound fidelity is a big deal to me: I'd prefer albums to be as high quality as possible, I'd prefer a wireless system, I'd prefer to have the latency to be as similar as possible, and I'd prefer to have all my speakers receiving an analog signal in the end with a pre or DAC. I know, I'm totally too picky, but  .
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Jan 3, 2015 00:40
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hellfaucet posted:Here are the questions I have, pardon how retarded they may be: 1) Yes. 2) According to the manufacturer: 44.1kHz, 48kHz, 188.2kHz, 192kHz - re-sampled to 96kHz for playback. So effectively, none, unless the resampling is just some ridiculous 1998 spec resampling algorithm. 3) ~20 ms, again from the spec sheet, so not noticeable from a "I changed the track," standpoint but completely noticeable if you try to use it for dual-stereo output. 4) No input.
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Jan 3, 2015 00:50
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Why are you outputting 192KHz?
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Jan 3, 2015 01:19
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Combat Pretzel posted:Why are you outputting 192KHz? Because he wants to provide thread content.
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Jan 3, 2015 01:41
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If you spend $400 on a wireless audio transmitter, I'm going to laugh at you. https://www.outlawaudio.com/products/OAW3.html Combat Pretzel posted:Why are you outputting 192KHz? Because he has exactly zero idea what he's talking about. 
KillHour fucked around with this message at 02:35 on Jan 3, 2015 |
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Jan 3, 2015 02:03
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KillHour posted:If you spend $400 on a wireless audio transmitter, I'm going to laugh at you. I WANT SICK SOUNDING poo poo TRANSMITTING VIA WI-FI IN MY loving HOUSE, BRO. Give me solutions instead of being a dick. I'm here because you know more than me.
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Jan 3, 2015 05:41
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hellfaucet posted:I WANT SICK SOUNDING poo poo TRANSMITTING VIA WI-FI IN MY loving HOUSE, BRO. He loving did you ignoramus.
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Jan 3, 2015 06:06
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hellfaucet posted:I WANT SICK SOUNDING poo poo TRANSMITTING VIA WI-FI IN MY loving HOUSE, BRO. Try clicking on the link you quoted
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Jan 3, 2015 07:37
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hellfaucet posted:I WANT SICK SOUNDING poo poo TRANSMITTING VIA WI-FI IN MY loving HOUSE, BRO. I can't comment to the WiFi audio thing of it, but I can at least tell you why you shouldn't be running 192KHz output. Imagine that we took a live performance, hooked it up to a mic, and had two devices recording the signal: one at oversampled 44.1KHz, one at 192KHz. You then hook up these devices and play it back on a typical home theater. (For sake of argument, let's assume that these devices are perfect, and output the exact same voltages that the microphone produced, and that there's no R/C/L interference from having both digitizers hooked up simultaneously.) Which of the two recordings will sound more realistic? The answer is that the 44.1KHz will measurably sound better, and here's why. The bandwidth of 192KHz extends up into the ultrasonic. Your speakers -- even if they're very good ones -- are simple devices: a coil and a magnet and a bit of paper or plastic. They're precisely designed and optimized to reproduce sound accurately in the ranges that humans can hear and/or feel -- i.e. somewhere between 2Hz and ~22KHz. In comparison, for ultrasonic content, you'd really want a piezo transducer, a little chunk of vibrating quartz. What happens when you send ultrasonic content to a cone-and-coil speaker? What happens is that the poor speaker, bless its heart, will try its best to reproduce that ultrasonic content, and it's not going to be very good at it. Specifically, it's going to have a fuckton of intermodulation distortion -- you're going to get audible noise, and even phantom tones, that didn't exist in the original performance. The 44.1KHz recording, despite having "less" data, will sound closer to the original performance. In order to actually benefit from the extra bandwidth that 192KHz provides, you'd need a speaker system beyond what's available today. (e: Except that you wouldn't really benefit, since you can't hear ultrasonics. That's why said speaker systems don't exist.) The best case scenario, honestly, is that your receiver (or amplifier) will have a low pass filter to remove the ultrasonic content, which means the 192KHz is wasted. Now, 192KHz recordings are still useful -- that extra data pays off for studios at the mixing/editing stages of music production. However, once they're actually done mixing and finishing a song, they're going to digitally filter it to remove the ultrasonics, then antialias to produce a 44.1KHz or 48KHz version that's a perfect reproduction of the remaining data. But 192KHz playback is pointless. Even if your soundcard supports it, playing back content at 192KHz is measurably, provably pointless. ullerrm fucked around with this message at 10:26 on Jan 3, 2015 |
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Jan 3, 2015 10:16
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Even if he finds a magical way of pushing that frequency out of his amp, it will probably sound the same, because every half-decent speaker will have more than one loudspeaker driver and the crossover unit will only push frequencies to the relevant speaker it can play - low end to the sub, highs at the tweeter, etc. Some will possibly just push all high frequencies to the tweeter with no low-pass, but it's extremely unlikely you'll hear the difference between a tweeter working well, and one with slightly diminished fidelity.
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Jan 3, 2015 12:02
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ullerrm posted:In order to actually benefit from the extra bandwidth that 192KHz provides, you'd need a speaker system beyond what's available today. (e: Except that you wouldn't really benefit, since you can't hear ultrasonics. That's why said speaker systems don't exist.) There are actually a number of speakers with extended high-frequency capability, I have a pair sitting on my desk right now. They're Adam A5X studio monitors with a claimed -3dB range of 50hz-50kHz, but it's just a number in the spec sheet with no audiophile claims. According to Adam Audio, their tweeter just extends that high naturally and that helps to make it more linear in the audible frequency range. Considering the fact that they're made for professionals, I greatly assume that audible frequencies are a lot more important to them than ultrasonics. (And I'm feeding them through a 48kHz sample rate digital crossover, so extended frequency range is a moot point anyway) There are also quite a lot of audiophile-targeted speaker systems that claim to extend to 50kHz and beyond, with all kinds of lofty claims. The only slightly non-bullshit claim I've heard about something like this is from Audiovector, who specifically say that the extended frequency range of their Avantgarde Arreté tweeter "makes sure that everything going on in the human hearing range is reproduced to perfection". Funnily enough, that tweeter also happens to look exceedingly similar to the Adam-designed tweeter in my A5Xs. Of course you'll have the pleasure of paying 10 times the cost a set of A5Xs just for that upgrade. So it's a ripoff, but at least they seem to be using known-good components. And then they throw it all away by also offering a "molecular realignment" of all the speaker wiring. It's also very very expensive.
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Jan 3, 2015 12:35
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The human ear only ears up to 20KHz, maybe a little more, and that only if it hasn't started to wear out, which means that'd have worked in your early teens only. Or if you were stuck in an anechoic chamber all your life. Go with 16-17KHz in your early 30ies. May get worse if you still keep going to loud parties/clubs/concerts. Also, virtually all music content these days is 44.1KHz. Unless your music player uses a more esoteric FFT-based samplerate conversion algorithm, say SSRC or PPHS in foobar2k, or heavyhanded VSTs like Izotope, you're pretty much linear interpolating the signal and robbing the DAC from the possibility to properly reconstruct the bandwidth limited signal in its dedicated 44.1KHz mode. Essentially worsening the high frequency content and introducing artifacts (which you may hear or not, depending on how good your hearing still is), contrary to what you believe you may doing by setting the output to 192KHz. Because if you simply set Windows' userland mixer to 192KHz to achieve your goal, you're dealing with a lovely SRC. Sure, tweeters rated for higher frequencies will probably guarantee more accurate reconstruction of a high frequency signal in a 44.1KHz track, but anything beyond for instance the aforementioned 50KHz is bullshit and useless. That said, anything using multiple speaker units and frequency crossovers is already a compromised speaker, anyway. The ideal speaker would be a single cone capable of reproducing the whole frequency band. Of course, that one exists merely in headphone form (and even then), because elasticity and inertia makes it very impractical in large speaker cones. Combat Pretzel fucked around with this message at 12:57 on Jan 3, 2015 |
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Jan 3, 2015 12:52
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Thanks for explaining this to me, ya'll. I was just pushing it as far as I could because "if it's the highest it can be, it must be better, right?" OK, so If I don't need to push beyond 44.1KHz, if I can truly do this cheaply with the Outlaw OAW3, what would you guys recommend for my DAC?
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Jan 3, 2015 15:08
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Combat Pretzel posted:Sure, tweeters rated for higher frequencies will probably guarantee more accurate reconstruction of a high frequency signal in a 44.1KHz track, but anything beyond for instance the aforementioned 50KHz is bullshit and useless. That said, anything using multiple speaker units and frequency crossovers is already a compromised speaker, anyway. The ideal speaker would be a single cone capable of reproducing the whole frequency band. Of course, that one exists merely in headphone form (and even then), because elasticity and inertia makes it very impractical in large speaker cones. The ideal speaker would actually be a pulsating sphere suspended in midair and capable of instantly going from infinitely small to enormous size. Obviously, this would require the invention of levitation, infinitely-expandable yet infinitely stiff materials and of course infinite amounts of energy. It is impossible by definition, of course. The best compromise comes in the form of active speakers. They discard the complicated and inherently flawed passive crossovers for active (sometimes digital) crossovers and contain multiple amplifiers, usually one per speaker cone. Some even come with built-in DSPs. The downside is cost, because each speaker also needs to contain a power supply, an active crossover and two or more amplifiers. hellfaucet posted:Thanks for explaining this to me, ya'll. I was just pushing it as far as I could because "if it's the highest it can be, it must be better, right?" OK, so If I don't need to push beyond 44.1KHz, if I can truly do this cheaply with the Outlaw OAW3, what would you guys recommend for my DAC? If you have TOSLINK or SPDIF output from your PC, the FiiO D3 is highly recommended and very affordable: http://www.amazon.com/D3-Digital-Converter-Optical-Toslink/dp/B005K2TXMO. I've been using one for a couple of years and it does everything you need in a stereo DAC. If you only have USB available, the Behringer UA202 is a good choice: http://www.amazon.com/Behringer-UCA202-Audio-Interface/dp/B000KW2YEI. It's also quite inexpensive, but does exactly what it says on the box.
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Jan 3, 2015 15:23
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KozmoNaut posted:If you have TOSLINK or SPDIF output from your PC, the FiiO D3 is highly recommended and very affordable: http://www.amazon.com/D3-Digital-Converter-Optical-Toslink/dp/B005K2TXMO. I've been using one for a couple of years and it does everything you need in a stereo DAC. I also like my Scarlett 2i2 at my desk because it has a big honkin' volume knob, and balanced outputs, which are a whole other  You can also get the Focusrite Scarlett Solo if you like the knob but don't care about balanced out (you shouldn't). I totally forgot I have a Schiit Modi first gen USB DAC which is awesome, I just don't have a need for it. I'll sell it for $50. Wasabi the J fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Jan 3, 2015 |
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Jan 3, 2015 16:11
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It's also significantly more expensive  But if price is no object, the Benchmark DAC2 HGC is the best DAC in existence, and it's also a complete preamp with digital/analog inputs and a headphone amplifier. It'll cost you $2K, but it is also measurably and verifiably the very best DAC money can buy, and it's actually significantly cheaper than a number of inferior 'audiophile' DACs. Of course, no one can actually hear the different between a 123dB signal/noise ratio and a 92dB signal/noise ratio, and all of your other equipment would have to meet those high standards as well, but numbers geeks will surely appreciate it. And it could theoretically make a difference when producing music, which is the market Benchmark generally targets. If it wasn't so expensive, I wouldn't mind replacing my DAC and preamp with one, simply because it's a nice compact package that does exactly what I need (DAC, input switching, volume control and headphone output). It costs more than my entire current system put together, though. E: Regarding balanced outputs/inputs, there really is no , balanced is literally always better than unbalanced. XLR connectors are so much better than RCA in every way apart from physical size, and the noise cancellation due to running balanced is far superior to just shielding the cables and hoping that works (it doesn't).There a only really one drawback to balanced XLR cables, and that's cost. The connectors are more expensive, the additional electronics to handle the balanced signals add cost, and the cables require an additional conductor. Cost and market penetration are the only reasons why RCA connectors persist on even very expensive consumer gear, which just makes it even more ridiculous when manufacturers start harping on about their "high-quality interconnects" with RCA plugs on them. Is there an audible difference outside of situations with rather long cable runs and/or significant amounts of electronic noise in the environment? No, absolutely not. But on all technical points, XLR and balanced signal cables are superior to RCA and unbalanced signal cables. I'm using balanced cables from my crossover to my speakers, but that's only because their native connections are balanced XLR, and I figure using as few adapters as possible is probably best. KozmoNaut fucked around with this message at 16:41 on Jan 3, 2015 |
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Jan 3, 2015 16:26
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Yeah, but I threw $50 option at the end which normally sells for $75 used. I'm literally trying to get rid of this thing, along with my Schiit Asgard. I'm the former audiophile. Ridicule me.
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Jan 3, 2015 16:36
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hellfaucet posted:Thanks for explaining this to me, ya'll. I was just pushing it as far as I could because "if it's the highest it can be, it must be better, right?" Take this graphic I stole and tweaked from xiph.org. The dots are the samples taken of a 20KHz sine wave at 44.1KHz. A DAC running in 44.1KHz mode would reconstruct the red wave form (or at least be *very* close), whereas a lovely linear interpolator would pretty much recreate the blue line (except at a higher sampling rate). That's why people laughed at the 192KHz thing. There's computationally expensive resampling algorithms using FFTs and/or other mathematical magic to make sure it gets as close to the red line as possible, but don't expect that built into windows or your common music players. There's a reason why modular players like foobar2000 are popular with people that care about audio quality, because there's plugins with high quality resampling (altho it was mostly just needed and used during that Soundblaster Live/Audigy sample rate debacle). 
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Jan 3, 2015 16:45
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Wasabi the J posted:Yeah, but I threw $50 option at the end which normally sells for $75 used. I'll buy your modi for $50. Sent you a PM.
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Jan 3, 2015 20:35
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