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Waldo P Barnstormer posted:Also, what's going on here? Is that a car's torque converter under the platen? The base is made from two electric motor endbells. And he's using a 60Hz sine wave from an iPod to control the motor speed. It's one hell of a Rube Goldberg machine.
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# ? Dec 21, 2015 00:56 |
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# ? Apr 24, 2024 15:41 |
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Woolie Wool posted:Am I weird for liking tube amps specifically for the things that make them less accurate than solid state amps? For me the fact that a tube amp is not "natural" or "live" but colored and a little bit distorted is the whole point. It's like film grain--technically it's a defect but people like it. KozmoNaut posted:The base is made from two electric motor endbells. And he's using a 60Hz sine wave from an iPod to control the motor speed. Combat Pretzel fucked around with this message at 01:12 on Dec 21, 2015 |
# ? Dec 21, 2015 01:05 |
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Combat Pretzel posted:What makes them less accurate? A couple of days ago, while clicking my way through random Youtube videos, I eventually ended up on tube amps, and the more serious reviewers all say that unless you're driving the amp near its limit, tube and solid state should sound pretty much the same. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_sound#Audible_differences http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/audiovideo/the-cool-sound-of-tubes Different sources seem a bit conflicted, and I'm not an engineer, but from what I've gathered, without delving into subjective audiophile-speak: * They have more THD (often much more--the Schiit Valhalla, which I use, has a stated THD almost 70 times higher than the solid-state Magni 2) and their distortion happens mostly along consonant harmonics, while harmonic distortion from solid-state tends to be dissonant. Their distortion is biased overwhelmingly towards harmonic distortion over IM distortion. * Their frequency response isn't quite even, with attenuation of the highest treble frequencies and emphasis on midrange. People tend to call this "warm" and contrast with solid state being "bright" (ruler-flat) * Their output transformers make them slightly slower to respond in fast transients than solid-state, which makes the bass and midrange "bloom" a bit in ways some people find pleasing All I know is that they sound different, like traditional film looks different from high definition digital video. Traditional film isn't as accurate or as detailed as good digital video, but people are accustomed to it to the point where movie studios add fake film artifacts to movies shot digitally because otherwise they look "wrong" or "like TV" to many audience members. You can put a tube preamp before a solid-state power amp or powered monitors to inject "tubeyness" into the sound. You can have tube systems with more or less tube sound, and even too much of it--when my father replaced his tube phono preamp with a solid-state one, I found the change to be an improvement because the sound going through three sets of tubes (phono stage, preamp, power amp) was just too much to the point of being kind of muddy. WatHiFi posted:“Hundreds of factors determine what a vintage record will sound like, from the chain of ownership and whether it’s been properly stored to the purity of the vinyl stock and the quality of the equipment that produced it. One factor many serious record collectors fixate on is the quality of the stampers, the grooved metal plates used to press a lump of hot vinyl into a record album. Like any metal die, these molds have a finite lifespan. The accumulation of scratches, flaws, and other damage resulting from the tremendous mechanical stress a stamper is subjected to—100 tons of pressure during a production run—leads to a gradual loss of audio fidelity in the finished records.” E: Oh my god this hobby is literally gambling, God help me. E2: WatHiFi posted:“ Woolie Wool fucked around with this message at 03:04 on Dec 21, 2015 |
# ? Dec 21, 2015 01:34 |
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Woolie Wool posted:This won't make your music sound better but it might just make it sound worse by introducing active powered equipment where it doesn't belong and violating the KISS principle. But what if he's not going to listen to KISS on it.
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# ? Dec 21, 2015 04:42 |
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KillHour posted:But what if he's not going to listen to KISS on it. KISS = Keep It Simple, Stupid. A very versatile principle with many applications.
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# ? Dec 21, 2015 04:44 |
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I just had a play around with this vst: http://www.silverspike.com/?Products:RubyTube When the effect was little, I couldn't really tell it was on and when it was noticeable it just made everything sound a little shittier (they call it sparkle). Mind you, I haven't heard real tube gear in my life so I don't really know. Edit: I guess if I had an underpowered amp (like they were 50 years ago) and was wanting to listen loudly I'd appreciate a tube's softer overdrive sound. Transistor clipping sounds awful, but power is so cheap today that I never go near clipping. A Lone Girl Flier fucked around with this message at 05:23 on Dec 21, 2015 |
# ? Dec 21, 2015 05:18 |
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Woolie Wool posted:KISS = Keep It Simple, Stupid. A very versatile principle with many applications.
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# ? Dec 21, 2015 05:24 |
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So basically tubes are part of the pantheon of DSP sound modes at this point
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# ? Dec 21, 2015 05:25 |
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Waldo P Barnstormer posted:I just had a play around with this vst: http://www.silverspike.com/?Products:RubyTube I would not put much faith in a freeware VST plugin. But then I pretty much avoid all software DSP and EQ (well, any kind of EQ whatsoever) like the plague. I suppose if you're feeling adventurous you could try to take advantage of Schiit's 15-day return policy, borrow a Vali 2 and rig up some way to run both it and your favorite solid state headphone amp into a switching box you plug your headphones into. I'm sure such a gadget exists for cheap. Either that or use the Vali 2 as a preamp and use some sort of switchable bypass. As I said, it's like film grain. If you didn't grow up with it, it will probably just sound worse to you. I'm sure all the fake film effects and 24 fps limit in movies will be gone in a few decades once the older viewers die off. EDIT: I actually have some vinyl rips that went through a tube preamp. It's a shame I can't share them because but they might have some of the "tube sound" embedded in them by the preamp if you could hear them and find the CD versions to compare them to. Also I wonder how many "bits" some of these rips are equivalent to because my rip of Heir Apparent's One Small Voice in particular has an obnoxiously high noise floor. For actual listening, the ones done through a solid-state phono stage are much better Woolie Wool fucked around with this message at 07:31 on Dec 21, 2015 |
# ? Dec 21, 2015 05:35 |
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I can tell you that Leipai amp he's using is a piece of crap that doesn't come near its' rated wattage. I have one bolted to the top of a home made boombox and it is... sufficient. 30 bucks!
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# ? Dec 21, 2015 05:35 |
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It's funny that this is being discussed now. I was listening to Master of Reality last night and everything is so remarkably soft and "analog" sounding that it doesn't seem right to listen to it on a computer or even a CD. I'm no vinyl fanatic but it just seems like it really belongs to that format...
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# ? Dec 21, 2015 05:42 |
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Woolie Wool posted:As I said, it's like film grain. If you didn't grow up with it, it will probably just sound worse to you. I'm sure all the fake film effects and 24 fps limit in movies will be gone in a few decades once the older viewers die off. I don't think audio or visual distortion will ever leave us, it's been an artistic choice forever. Here's a laugh at my expense: when I first heard this song, I thought there was something wrong with my stereo, then thought the producers put intentional distortion in the soundcloud version to make me buy the final record. But no, the effect is only on the synth, and it's probably the most intentionally analogue, most warm sounding thing I'll hear all year. Everything but the vocals is CG too. https://soundcloud.com/rufussounds/innerbloom Wouldn't feel right warming up the tubes and hitting cue on the record player though. I guess that's one of the main reasons I like to laugh at audiophiles. That song would sound warm even on a $5 waterproof shower radio. The insistence on measuring and talking about audio in an exclusively subjective way, when there's so much objective stuff to do is comical to me. A Lone Girl Flier fucked around with this message at 09:04 on Dec 21, 2015 |
# ? Dec 21, 2015 09:00 |
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I had a thought while browsing the Hydrogenaudio forums and one of their boring debates about tube amps: what's the loving point of this hobby anymore? On the one hand, you've got rich people competing to see how much capital they can destroy and turning music into a vehicle to display their consumption, and on the other hand you've got insufferable sperglords who calibrate their EQs to within 0.001dB to make sure they fall within the parameters of correct sound representation. The best you can hope for in that realm is not mind-blowing, it's not a revelation, it's not even exciting, it's just conforming to The One True Path of perfect digital audio. gently caress, modern musical recordings aren't even recordings, they're abstract sound creations born from a DAW. Forget the "live sound", you're just getting the sound that went into Rick Rubin's ears as he hosed around in Pro Tools. These studio Frankensteins mostly sound terrible regardless of how they're played back. Where's the fun in that? Being an audio enthusiast must have been so much more exciting in 1955 when nobody knew anything and people were building competitive systems in tiny boutique shops under the principle of "sounds good to me! ". Wanting is better than having, and a problem is better than a solution. No wonder kids these days all listen to earbuds and Beats--you can get into audio and interact with elitist rich pricks and neckbeards with customized Linux installations, or you can buy the thing with the pretty logo and celebrity name that sounds "better" than the stock earbuds on your phone. Stereophile's retired founder J. Gordon Holt wrote some stuff several years ago where he basically took a huge steaming poo poo on the audio industry, audiophiles, and Stereophile itself that expresses similar sentiments: http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/1107awsi/ And I think Michael Fremer was half right when he heard the CD demonstrated in the early '80s and thought "we're hosed". We were hosed, because the CD, as a way of reproducing stereo sound, is perfect. Digital, when you have everything set up just right, is the termination of stereo sound. The best you can ever hope for in terms of sound reproduction is exactly what the nerds tell you to do. And the whole explosion of audiophile silliness is a denial, a Luddistic attempt to escape from the end of history, the awful reality of Perfect Sound Forever. Woolie Wool fucked around with this message at 09:20 on Dec 21, 2015 |
# ? Dec 21, 2015 09:04 |
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Nah, psychoacoustics is where it's at. The second best thing I can do to my stereo is invest time, effort and money into it. Doesn't matter how it measures or what my friends think, it will sound better to me because my monkey brain tells me it does. The best thing you can do to make your stereo sound better is turn it up. Which is why I modded my audio player to do the following: A Lone Girl Flier fucked around with this message at 09:48 on Dec 21, 2015 |
# ? Dec 21, 2015 09:46 |
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I agree with the hypothesis that most hardcore audiophiles are simply in denial. They refuse to believe that the days of meaningful analog tweaks are gone forever, and that a $30 DVD/bluray player can produce sound that is absolutely 100% identical to that produced by a $3000 CD transport connected to a $3000 DAC. The move to digital PCM sound is the greatest thing that has ever happened to audio recording and reproduction. It made everything so drat easy (for the end users), and it made a lot of analog "purists" very mad indeed, because it destroyed the foundation of their exclusive little elitist tweaker clubs by bringing high-quality sound to the masses with little or no effort needed. Woolie Wool posted:I pretty much avoid all software DSP and EQ (well, any kind of EQ whatsoever) like the plague. I have some pretty gnarly room modes at ~45Hz and ~70Hz that I use my DSP/crossover/EQ box o' tricks to tame (-6dB for both of them with a ~10-15Hz bandwidth). Everything sounds much better now that the bass response has been smoothed out a bit. Almost everyone who uses one or more subwoofers in a normal room will have the ~70Hz room mode at the very least. It's just inevitable when you place it near a wall in a room with a ~2.5m ceiling height. It occurs with normal speakers too, to a somewhat lesser degree. EQ can be a powerful tool, and as with any powerful tool, you have to restrain yourself a bit. E: And the forums just keep on giving! quote:Let's start with your experience. I was met with this when I wrote that even $30 DVD/bluray players produce output that is every bit as good as an expensive CD transport+DAC setup. And then he got all huffy, picked up his toys and left when I told him to stop being childish, and stick to the topic (whether the 2x55W Sonos Amp can reasonably power a set of floorstanding speakers). I guess he didn't feel like debating after all. KozmoNaut fucked around with this message at 12:44 on Dec 21, 2015 |
# ? Dec 21, 2015 10:18 |
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Waldo P Barnstormer posted:Nah, psychoacoustics is where it's at. The second best thing I can do to my stereo is invest time, effort and money into it. Doesn't matter how it measures or what my friends think, it will sound better to me because my monkey brain tells me it does. That's a good idea. I was just looking at reel to reel players and I realized that I would never use one if I had it, but they look so cool. Then I thought I should build a mock one with big VU meters and reels that spin whenever I play music from my computer.
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# ? Dec 21, 2015 14:11 |
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Did you do that just so you can say it goes to 11?
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# ? Dec 21, 2015 14:13 |
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Tweaks are hardly dead either, just moving your speakers slightly will change how the sound is presented a lot. You can always play with acoustic treatments (whether a multi-thousand dollar foam brick kit or just putting up decent curtains). Hell, I have old Paradigm Titans that only came with a single tiny fiberglass batt for internal damping. Replacing that with some decent polyfill helped reduce their "woofiness" considerably. I used to be a "no EQ" guy myself. As KozmoNaut said, it really is a great tool but it must be applied very sparingly or it winds up sounding very, well...equalized. I have 125 and 250 Hz nipped down just ever so slightly and it's a big help keeping the bass in line. Still, what J. Gordon Holt said was on the money as well. Why else would we all be posting in a thread mocking audiophiles when, in the strictest sense of the word, that is what we all are? Most of us just realized (or never bought into) the futility of hi-end audio. He's absolutely right about live sound too - so many audiophiles hate live recordings, even when they're done really well. The raw sound just isn't what they're looking for. I think there's room for both though - I mean, how can you not appreciate the masterfully crafted fiction of A Night at the Opera or Dark Side of the Moon? (I'm sure there are much more recent examples, I'm just old and can't think of any ) It's pointless to bemoan ProTools as the death of audio. Sure, there is a sea of mediocre or even plain bad recordings out there because of it. That's hardly a new development - there were plenty of bad records being made in years past and that's why no one remembers them today. Just find what you like and don't worry about the rest.
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# ? Dec 21, 2015 16:20 |
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Woolie Wool posted:I had a thought while browsing the Hydrogenaudio forums and one of their boring debates about tube amps: what's the loving point of this hobby anymore? I always thought it was about listening to music, but this thread has proved me wrong on multiple occasions.
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# ? Dec 21, 2015 17:19 |
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Well I also wonder how much time many of the people on Hydrogenaudio spend actually listening to music instead of about people being Wrong On The Internet (and not in a funny way like this thread, but in a dreary, relentlessly serious way) and how much money they spend on equipment compared to instruments to measure the equipment. I mean at least their claims have some basis in reality but way to be a loving buzzkill pedant about something that's supposed to be entertaining. Hydrogenaudio goonlord posted:The error here is the implication that there is some general point to tube amps. There isn't any. They are museum pieces that should never be used on the grounds that they consume rare irreplaceable artifacts (tubes) if run for any amount of time. Turning on a tube amp is like using the Mona Lisa for a doormat. It is like playing vinyl for any reason other than transcription to a more useful format. They still make tubes of almost every variety imaginable. You name it, there's a factory in Russia churning them out in adequate quality. People still make records, and even an old records will last hundreds of plays before significant degradation if you take care of them and set your turntable up correctly (don't be that dipshit earlier in the thread who replaced his cantilever and stylus with a nail please). The amps themselves last basically forever. A guy playing records through a tube amp harms nothing except perhaps his own wallet. Meanwhile the hard drive that contains all your mp3s is an incredibly fragile device that will break after only a few years, and possibly when you least expect it. Unlike tubes, I suspect very few people will miss platters when the price per gigabyte of SSDs gets within shouting distance of HDDs. I certainly don't like the fact that my data is sitting inside a time bomb. Woolie Wool fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Dec 22, 2015 |
# ? Dec 22, 2015 01:49 |
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I'm not saying these people are insane, I'm just saying that when I start to place audio crystals on my stuff in an effort to make it sound better you should do the humane thing and put me down. I can't even start to comprehend what sort of person would tape a bag of rocks onto his cables and start listening to differences in sound. The act alone is lunacy, much less the belief that yes, it really does sound much better now.
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# ? Dec 22, 2015 02:02 |
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Oh, no one's disputing that, except the guy with the bag of magic rocks.
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# ? Dec 22, 2015 02:03 |
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It's always worth mentioning that a lot of audiophiles are hooking $50,000 of equipment up to listen to a beat up record from the 1950s, or some well-played cassette tape, or a poorly mastered 80s CD.
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# ? Dec 22, 2015 02:04 |
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Yes, but it's very important to hear all the details in your system. That's why you need the best cable available.
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# ? Dec 22, 2015 02:12 |
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I wonder, what effect would the Kim regime falling have on tube prices? I'm certain there are millions of North Korean tubes and massive production capacity, dumping it all into the global audio market would be...interesting.another Hydrogenaudio goonlord posted:They are not common enough to require that, but if the audiophile companies were sufficiently successful in their disinformation campaigns that sound and video reproduction systems began to switch back to tube amplification, I would strongly support it (government regulation, that is). Significant waste due to pseudoscience claims should be addressed. Woolie Wool fucked around with this message at 02:20 on Dec 22, 2015 |
# ? Dec 22, 2015 02:16 |
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Woolie Wool posted:
This is great, thank you
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# ? Dec 22, 2015 02:26 |
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Woolie Wool posted:I wonder, what effect would the Kim regime falling have on tube prices? I'm certain there are millions of North Korean tubes and massive production capacity, dumping it all into the global audio market would be...interesting. I really doubt it. Pretty sure when their tube equipment breaks it just stays broken rather than them running a factory to churn out replacement parts.
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# ? Dec 22, 2015 02:35 |
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Woolie Wool posted:Meanwhile the hard drive that contains all your mp3s is an incredibly fragile device that will break after only a few years, and possibly when you least expect it.
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# ? Dec 22, 2015 02:45 |
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That's still only six years. Where the gently caress can I get one of those
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# ? Dec 22, 2015 02:49 |
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Combat Pretzel posted:Tell that to my drives with 52000 hours of runtime. Pfffft I have a 250 gb seagate pushing 80,000 hours and still going.
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# ? Dec 22, 2015 02:49 |
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I come bearing gifts! A new and lovely product from our favourites at LessLoss http://www.lessloss.com/firewall-module-p-216.html I highly enjoy their suggestions: Don't buy just one! Layer them together in series AND parallel runs! Some are only 400 bucks a pop - a steal for UNLIMITED QUALITY. Just install them EVERYWHERE you have a wire! All your problems will be solved forever. Filter all of your precious clean power from evil city-grid noise! ------------------------------------------------------------------ And now with untainted customer testimony, too! This is my favourite gem among the many: Kenreau LessLoss_fan • 6 months ago Did you see any visible improvements to the picture quality? Lessloss_fan Kenreau • 6 months ago The picture quality on the TV has improved. At first I was admittedly somewhat anxious about being disappointed, thinking that it would probably be impossible to get even better picture results, but after installing the modules I did indeed see a difference! The picture became "cleaner," more natural. I even walked right up to the TV for a close look, I was enchanted by it. My general impression was very good: natural, rich, real-looking colors, a very dark black (one of the most important aspects), a fantastic depiction of detail without high frequency interference or hash (which usually shows up in loss of fine image details on screen when the power is "dirty". In a word, those little black boxes really do miracles. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Of all of LessLoss 's magical product line, my favourite is still their Picture of Dorian Gray cabling system ( http://www.lessloss.com/tunnelbridge-distortionless-interconnect-system-p-204.html ) - but they tend to deliver treats every few months! DarkDobe fucked around with this message at 08:39 on Dec 22, 2015 |
# ? Dec 22, 2015 02:50 |
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DarkDobe posted:I come bearing gifts! I love that one of foot notes for the cabling is: quote:This pertains to the telegraph equations from the 1880s.
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# ? Dec 22, 2015 03:10 |
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DarkDobe posted:I come bearing gifts! Oooh, awesome! Thanks for this, just bought a pair. Will provide a trip report. Just kidding.
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# ? Dec 22, 2015 03:14 |
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DarkDobe posted:I come bearing gifts! For $200 you'd think they could get a better finish on the wood.
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# ? Dec 22, 2015 03:24 |
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Woolie Wool posted:I had a thought while browsing the Hydrogenaudio forums and one of their boring debates about tube amps: what's the loving point of this hobby anymore? On the one hand, you've got rich people competing to see how much capital they can destroy and turning music into a vehicle to display their consumption, and on the other hand you've got insufferable sperglords who calibrate their EQs to within 0.001dB to make sure they fall within the parameters of correct sound representation. The best you can hope for in that realm is not mind-blowing, it's not a revelation, it's not even exciting, it's just conforming to The One True Path of perfect digital audio. gently caress, modern musical recordings aren't even recordings, they're abstract sound creations born from a DAW. Forget the "live sound", you're just getting the sound that went into Rick Rubin's ears as he hosed around in Pro Tools. These studio Frankensteins mostly sound terrible regardless of how they're played back. Where's the fun in that? the audiophile stupidity is coming from inside the thread No but seriously man it's not hard to resolve this dilemma. Leave it up to the Jimi Hendrixes of the world to decide what kind of distortion they want on their guitar. Record the resulting signal, distribute, play it back as perfect as possible, enjoy. poo poo on the recording studio "engineers" (scarequotes 'cause they're really technicians) if they gently caress up the mastering process on the version you got and compress the signal into clipping so you're not listening to Jimi's artistic choices anymore. (this is literally the worst problem that exists in audio today, btw, all your gear choices pale before it) Yes much of the high end audio hobby has no loving point because distribution media technology was a solved problem 30 years ago and internet distribution became a solved problem ~10 years ago (well-encoded 256K mp3/aac is just as good as anything else) and power amplification is easily solved at relatively low cost. So what? Get over it. Focus your hobbyin' on what matters: speakers, room treatments. Learn enough about the science and engineering of these things to do it right. Conquer your supernatural fear of EQ, because it sure isn't based on anything rational. (I'll put it this way: if you resolve to let no EQ touch your signals you are actually signing up to let your speakers and room do uncontrolled EQ for you.) quote:Being an audio enthusiast must have been so much more exciting in 1955 when nobody knew anything and people were building competitive systems in tiny boutique shops under the principle of "sounds good to me! ". Wanting is better than having, and a problem is better than a solution. No wonder kids these days all listen to earbuds and Beats--you can get into audio and interact with elitist rich pricks and neckbeards with customized Linux installations, or you can buy the thing with the pretty logo and celebrity name that sounds "better" than the stock earbuds on your phone. People knew all kinds of poo poo in 1955. Claude Shannon published his sampling theory (aka the math which makes digital audio possible) in 1949. Generally speaking I think you're over-idealizing the distant past because you want audio reproduction to be more romantic than it is. quote:Stereophile's retired founder J. Gordon Holt wrote some stuff several years ago where he basically took a huge steaming poo poo on the audio industry, audiophiles, and Stereophile itself that expresses similar sentiments: http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/1107awsi/ An entertaining link, but it's extra precious if you know that John Atkinson (the editor interviewing the cranky emeritus founder/editor Holt) is a giant turd who is happy to promote audio snake oil, hates science, and has been selling Stereophile's integrity to the highest bidder for decades.
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# ? Dec 22, 2015 06:52 |
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DarkDobe posted:I highly enjoy their suggestions: Don't buy just one! Layer them together in series AND parallel runs! I think the thing I hate the most about these is the production videos on the site and how much wood they waste due to really lazy layout of patterns on the main sheet material... Though I suppose for $400 a go on what is essentially a mains extension cable, you can afford to be wasteful.
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# ? Dec 22, 2015 09:41 |
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TomR posted:That's a good idea. I was just looking at reel to reel players and I realized that I would never use one if I had it, but they look so cool. Then I thought I should build a mock one with big VU meters and reels that spin whenever I play music from my computer. Get one of these: BEWARE! FULL SCALE TEST TONES IN THIS VIDEO! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwFNs8WDc0M Your post inspired me though, now I want to build one of these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg_uwcybUQs
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# ? Dec 22, 2015 10:13 |
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Woolie Wool posted:For $200 you'd think they could get a better finish on the wood. If you polish the wood too much it reduces the effectiveness of the device.
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# ? Dec 22, 2015 13:48 |
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Woolie Wool posted:Meanwhile the hard drive that contains all your mp3s is an incredibly fragile device that will break after only a few years, and possibly when you least expect it. Unlike tubes, I suspect very few people will miss platters when the price per gigabyte of SSDs gets within shouting distance of HDDs. I certainly don't like the fact that my data is sitting inside a time bomb. That's why you set up backups and forget about that nonsense.
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# ? Dec 22, 2015 15:24 |
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# ? Apr 24, 2024 15:41 |
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SSDs die too and often catastrophically with no warning signs
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# ? Dec 22, 2015 15:29 |