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I haven't heard the Andrew Jones Pioneer speakers myself but they're stupid ugly, huge, and have a 4" driver. If you must spend only $129.99 on a pair of speakers I bet they're a good choice but there's a reason I said $300 is a good place to start, you're just in a different product category once you get out of the bargain basement. My bare minimum would probably be like the Wavecrest HVL-1, Aperion Intimus 5B, Q Acoustics 2020i or Ascend CBM-170. You just get a better value from direct sellers IMO unless something is on sale. qirex fucked around with this message at 18:47 on May 25, 2017 |
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May 25, 2017 18:45
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I got the Pioneer ~Andrew Jones~ designed wifi speaker A4 or whatever it's called (now discontinued). The bass is way too loving loud and boomy and sounds like poo poo. I had to stuff a towel in the rear bass port to make it tolerable, but the mids and highs are also really muddy and bad. I have no idea who this loving andrew jones clown is but he can't design speakers for poo poo. Never heard any of his passive speakers from pioneer though.
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May 25, 2017 20:21
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Craigslist is great for getting cheap speakers. There's always someone sellllong some cheap. I got a pair of KEF K120 for like $150 in manhattan and a pair of arcam musos for $125 here in Chicago. If you know what you're looking for you can get bargains JFairfax fucked around with this message at 21:07 on May 25, 2017 |
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May 25, 2017 21:04
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JFairfax posted:Craigslist is great for getting cheap speakers. Yeah, especially for tower speakers it can be great. There's also Audiogon which is where I'll probably go when I decide it's finally time for KEF LS50s. A lot of these dudes [let's face it, 99% of them are male] are constantly turning over their equipment.
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May 25, 2017 21:23
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and the good thing with speakers is that it's really easy to see whether or not they're in good condition, whereas with electronics it's not always obvious if there's a problem
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May 25, 2017 21:33
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metallicaeg posted:If you wanted to up your budget then you can be like me and get big gently caress off 12" Cerwin Vega towers with the matching center and bookshelves. Back in high school in the 90's I managed to score a set of brand new Cerwin Vega Re-series speakers (I forget the exact model, but they had 12" woofers - Re-30 maybe?) from Best Buy for 1/4 price because they were open box and one of the grilles had the tiniest flaw in it. Those speakers were enormous and served me very well through college. I only got rid of them because they really didn't work well for surround sound setups because they were so much louder than everything else, 6-ohm, and I didn't want to try to track down matching surrounds for them. Plus with subwoofers being a thing I didn't really need such enormous speakers as my tastes went from listening to loud music to watching loud movies.
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May 26, 2017 02:17
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I have a Yamaha RX-V1000 receiver for my vinyl/tape/cd, with Yamaha NS-6390 speakers. However I acquired a Vector Research VR-7000 receiver. Wondering if it would be worthwhile to swap them. Asking here first, because its going to be over a half hour of work moving poo poo around to do that. I don't need the modern features like sound modeling, or modern connections that the Yamaha has, so its purely for sound quality. Amount of power isnt so much a factor either since I live in an apartment and cant crank it too loud anyways.
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May 28, 2017 00:18
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shortspecialbus posted:Back in high school in the 90's I managed to score a set of brand new Cerwin Vega Re-series speakers (I forget the exact model, but they had 12" woofers - Re-30 maybe?) from Best Buy for 1/4 price because they were open box and one of the grilles had the tiniest flaw in it. Those speakers were enormous and served me very well through college. I only got rid of them because they really didn't work well for surround sound setups because they were so much louder than everything else, 6-ohm, and I didn't want to try to track down matching surrounds for them. Plus with subwoofers being a thing I didn't really need such enormous speakers as my tastes went from listening to loud music to watching loud movies. Got mine open box as well. I was selling electronics at Sears when I was in high school. Bought the towers and center channel that they used as their floor display/background noise speakers. Grabbed the bookshelves off eBay. Pretty sure mine are 8 Ohm though, I think they're V or VE series or something. They sat, unused, in my parents basement until I bought a house, as my parents didn't want them being used, and my girl's apartment was hilariously tiny. Have the set paired with an 8-inch Aiwa sub that was from a crazy rear end sound system that I bought when I was like 14 with newspaper route money. I too watch loud movies, but even being a small sub it's more than adequate for living in a duplex.
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May 28, 2017 01:25
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I have a pair of the Jones BS22 pioneer speakers and they sound fine. Certainly better than any other $120 pair I've heard and better than a sound bar of the same price. Suits my needs.
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May 28, 2017 03:50
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ChocNitty posted:I have a Yamaha RX-V1000 receiver for my vinyl/tape/cd, with Yamaha NS-6390 speakers. Try the quick audio questions megathread: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2389259 If your question was about hi-end components, at least it would fit in this thread, but we'd just make fun of you.
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May 29, 2017 10:31
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I remember buying a pair of B&W DM302 speakers for ~$250 and them sounding crazy good, but that was probably 20 years ago.
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May 29, 2017 15:49
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RobotDogPolice posted:What's considered "reasonable person quality"? The most important is working out your own usage profile first. Do you actually sit down and listen to music or do you keep the radio on to keep you company? Do you watch movies with surround audio more than other uses combined? As a generalist solution I'd send the person asking to a hi-fi shop. I'm partial to B&W, so a pair of 685/683/CM6/CM9 speakers with a Denon receiver would be decent enough starting point for me. Add a center channel or subwoofer next. Chromecast, turntable and phono amp, other stuff like that as needed. Maybe a good pair of headphones. Then again, my mom has a Denon entry level amp with a pair of Argon speakers bought for €40. She keeps it on FM radio to keep her company during the day. Sounds good enough for that purpose. One size doesn't fit all.
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May 29, 2017 16:27
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synthetik posted:I remember buying a pair of B&W DM302 speakers for ~$250 and them sounding crazy good, but that was probably 20 years ago. Funny thing about physics... it hasn't changed much in the last billion years or so. Those speakers probably still sound really good.
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May 30, 2017 16:08
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GnarlyCharlie4u posted:Funny thing about physics... it hasn't changed much in the last billion years or so. Materials, construction methods, branding, and quality controls do change much more quickly, though. That isn't to imply that they don't sound good or not, but they may have changed any of those factors, which would affect the sound.
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May 31, 2017 01:03
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Most don't really care about audio quality, and speakers as amazingly good as the LSR305 can be made dirt cheap in some sweatshop in China.
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May 31, 2017 05:20
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GnarlyCharlie4u posted:Funny thing about physics... it hasn't changed much in the last billion years or so. I was more thinking that they probably don't make that exact model anymore, since it was their 1997 line of speakers.
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May 31, 2017 17:17
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quote:Just like 48kHz, the range of a 96kHz or 192kHz audio signal is still 24kHz. You're not gaining higher frequencies. What you're gaining is a higher resolution in the time domain. Uhh quote:Remember that frequencies aren't just numbers, they represent analog signals. Toward the upper end of the range they aren't even recognizable anymore because you're getting only a couple of sampling points of the wave rather than a proper trace. Uhhhhh quote:Well I wasn't going to throw my credentials around, but since you didn't know when to quit, I'm an electrical engineer you dumb cock. 
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Jun 28, 2017 06:48
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...Yeah because this little thing called Nyquist's Sampling Theorem was just a suggestion that evaded any sort of scrutiny for only about 90 years until self-proclaimed EEs figured out how wrong it was by 2017.
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Jun 28, 2017 13:37
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KozmoNaut posted:Uhh i am engineer therefore i never wrong sounds about right
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Jun 28, 2017 21:02
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sound doesn't exist above 24kHz dummy. source: i won the spelling bee in 3rd grade.
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Jun 28, 2017 22:47
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On a Norwegian HiFi forum I check very infrequently, a discussion about CDs vs streaming devolved into a discussion about the sound quality difference in spinning harddrives vs SSD drives. I'm getting actual chest pains.
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Jun 29, 2017 07:49
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Obviously spinning hard drives have better sound because they're closer in function to The Best Sounding Format Ever, The Vinyl LP. SSDs are weird purely digital things with no moving parts, they make all your music sound like it was wrangled through a vocoder.
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Jun 29, 2017 08:45
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evobatman posted:On a Norwegian HiFi forum I check very infrequently, a discussion about CDs vs streaming devolved into a discussion about the sound quality difference in spinning harddrives vs SSD drives. Some dude was trying to prove that lossless wasn't lossless so he took a WAV, converted it to FLAC and back to WAV and lo and behold the checksums were different! This proves the fallibility of 'lossless' compression! the checksum difference was because of differing file names
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Jun 29, 2017 15:52
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qirex posted:Some dude was trying to prove that lossless wasn't lossless so he took a WAV, converted it to FLAC and back to WAV and lo and behold the checksums were different! This proves the fallibility of 'lossless' compression! I'm not saying he's correct about the file becoming lossy, but a filename change shouldn't affect a checksum. There could be some metadata injected into the file header by whatever conversion software he was using.
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Jun 29, 2017 16:14
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GutBomb posted:I'm not saying he's correct about the file becoming lossy, but a filename change shouldn't affect a checksum. There could be some metadata injected into the file header by whatever conversion software he was using. WAV is also a container type vs the audio inside. Of course the data should be exactly the same if the both encoders outputted to LPCM. However, there are a number of settings on how a wav file is output that will lead to different md5sums even if both encodings were using LPCM. What I would not expect is for the data lined end to end with padding removed from each block to be different from the original.
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Jun 29, 2017 17:10
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There's a reason I stay the gently caress away from audiophile forums, it's mainly because I can't stand the loving idiocy. This thread is as close as I'll get and the various postings about your dealings with idiot audiophiles legit makes my eyes roll back in my head. I avoid poo poo forums for my sanity.
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Jun 29, 2017 18:07
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Olympic Mathlete posted:There's a reason I stay the gently caress away from audiophile forums, it's mainly because I can't stand the loving idiocy. This thread is as close as I'll get and the various postings about your dealings with idiot audiophiles legit makes my eyes roll back in my head. On the subject of forums, the true believer meccas with placebophiles, Star Shitizen JPGers and buttcoin overlords make Intel/AMD/NV PC fanboyism and flashlight/knife hoarders seem harmless.
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Jun 30, 2017 17:41
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The thing I find funny about the audiophile media and communities is they'll put up with the most insane tweako garbage because those are the exact companies that advertise in the magazine or on their site. I mean look at 6moons: Of course they're going to bias conversation towards this crap, it's how they make all their money. [Side note I think I used to eat a brand of ramen called "Bakoon"]
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Jun 30, 2017 18:17
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Somebody should start shilling white van speakers on a bunch of audiophile sites just to see what happens.
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Jul 1, 2017 02:35
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I had a roommate once who bought white van speakers. It was a 5.1 system with the receiver in the subwoofer box, similar to what you would see on a set of computer surround speakers. He came home from the bank really excited that he'd found an awesome deal. These dudes stopped him on his way back to the car after doing some business at a bank. They said "we just got finished doing an install at a house in this neighborhood and there was some extra equipment on the order. Our boss is just going to take these for himself when we get back to the shop, so how about we sell 'em to you real cheap?" My roommate asks how much and they throw out $700. They had a copy of Home Theater Buyers Guide magazine and flipped to a page that had an ad for this exact speaker system and the text "MSRP: $2400." He's convinced he's getting a good deal. He talks them down to $500. They even throw in the magazine. He gets home and he's like "help me hook up this new system!!!" And tells me the story all excited. Immediately I jump on the internet to look at some reviews and can only find one page about these speakers anywhere. It's an ebay auction with a Buy it Now of $50 with more than 100 units available. I showed it to him and he cried. He also sold Herbalife for a while, gave his social security number to a cold-calling credit counselor telemarketer who also charged him $450 to fix his credit. What he actually got was a book with credit card company addresses that you're supposed to write to and ask for debt negotiation. Oh and his identity stolen by the seller. Now he sells magnetic pain relieving bracelets at metaphysical fairs and poo poo. Also he's a dirty pedophile. After I showed him that the speakers were poo poo they just stayed in the box for months. I ended up using them in my bedroom because they weren't horrible. The outer casing of the speakers were plastic made to look like metal but the bottoms were actually pretty thick metal, presumably so they would have some weight to them and feel premium. Unfortunately after a couple days of hanging on my wall the glue holding one of the metal weights on the bottom of the left rear speaker gave up in the middle of the night, the metal weight hitting me in the head and waking me up. I guess what I'm saying here is don't buy white van speakers.
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Jul 1, 2017 13:56
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A pretty good indicator of white van stuff besides all of the obvious parking lot red flags is that the box won't have any official logos for HDMI, Dolby, etc. It will just say some bullshit like "HD Surround Sound". I see them still in box at thrift stores from time to time, and the staff is usually unaware of the real value themselves and will price them at $100-200 because they don't know better.
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Jul 1, 2017 15:46
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I actually saw a couple of guys trying to sell speakers out of the back of a minivan a couple days ago in the parking lot of my local grocery store. I came out of the store after doing grocery shopping and they were boxed in by a couple of police cars. I should note that this particular grocery store was a block away from a police station. Dumbasses. Funny dumbasses to be sure, but dumbasses.
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Jul 1, 2017 21:12
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GutBomb posted:Also he's a dirty pedophile. are you looking for a different thread, or perhaps a federal form field?
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Jul 1, 2017 22:41
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Might just post it here to get it ripped apart... So about that Soundblaster AE-5 card, it's boasting an ostensibly super high quality ESS Sabre DAC and separate amps for left and right headphone channels, which to very first tests apparently results in zero stereo crosstalk. Is crosstalk at levels of -80dB even noticeable? Also why does that card have almost no caps, whereas the previous high-end model is littered with them? I guess I shouldn't be surprised though, given the performance of the iPhone 7 audio dongle.
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Jul 2, 2017 13:22
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Combat Pretzel posted:Is crosstalk at levels of -80dB even noticeable? If you're have super well isolated headphones and everything is hard panned to one side you'd hear a little signal in the other side. But in normal listening, no way.
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Jul 2, 2017 13:35
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I'll take Creative's claims with a big grain of salt. They most likely just parroted the chip specs done in perfect lab conditions done by ESS when the rest of their own circuit performs nowhere as good.
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Jul 2, 2017 16:23
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Hmm. I might get one.
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Jul 2, 2017 17:00
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An optical output to an external DAC/receiver/amp is probably the cleanest PC output you will get. USB is probably similar, assuming you don't have a common mode noise problem 
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Jul 2, 2017 17:34
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Palladium posted:I'll take Creative's claims with a big grain of salt. They most likely just parroted the chip specs done in perfect lab conditions done by ESS when the rest of their own circuit performs nowhere as good.
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Jul 2, 2017 18:13
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LOVE LOVE SKELETON posted:are you looking for a different thread, or perhaps a federal form field? It's just good to have some background to round out a character.
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Jul 2, 2017 19:15
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