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Pibborando San posted:Haha are you serious? A $30,000 set-up that includes room acoustic treatment and CHEAP rear end cables will sound worlds better than a $300 set-up to pretty much anyone who isn't deaf. I think we'd need you to define "sounds worlds better" before we can argue this. A $300 setup is not going to be a static-ridden low volume adventure ride through a sawmill, and a $30k setup is not going to make me think angels have sprayed hot loads of musical ejaculate into my brain.
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Sep 2, 2009 03:49
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proudfoot posted:It really depends, certain things actually can have a noticeable effect on audio quality, or at the very least allow you to increase the volume. Room treatment to isolate noise is probably one of the few expensive things that actually do make a noticeable improvement. Well, what do you mean by "effect on audio quality"? I can turn my hifi up pretty drat loud in my untreated house, and it all sounds fine to me. True, I spent $7k on the audio components, but that's a far cry from $30k. "Sounds worlds better", to me, would be like going from AM radio to CD. Not making my subwoofer produce 2dB less inaudible resonance on my antique bottle collection.
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Sep 2, 2009 07:25
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TheMadMilkman posted:5k per component, or 5k for the entire system? I'm of the opinion that $5k per component is a ridiculous sum to spend, and the law of diminishing returns kills you way before this price point.
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Sep 7, 2009 04:44
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qirex posted:I'm pretty sure this guy ended up getting different MD5s because the filenamees were different. I hope you're joking here.
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Oct 5, 2009 12:44
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TheMadMilkman posted:...Richard Vandersteen, in which he discusses his new $45,000 pair of speakers. Richard is well-known for his adherence to a cost plus system for pricing his speakers, simply meaning that the retail price directly reflects the cost of building the speaker... Maybe it says it in the links you posted and I missed it, but what exactly is it in his speakers that cost so much money if his mark-up is so low? The cones are made out of carbon-fibre and balsa wood, with neodymium magnets. The boxes are HDF and carbon-fibre, and painted with car paint. After those hundreds of dollars worth of materials you end up with something that looks like it came straight out of 1980s Doctor Who?
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Oct 26, 2009 10:30
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TheMadMilkman posted:That's not even for the full driver, just the cone. Place a 40% profit margin on that for the manufacturer and you come out at about $3300. Place a 40% margin on that for the dealer and you're up to about $5500 just for the midrange cones. Well, the cone is the main part of the driver, surely? After that you have a big magnet, and they are cheap. I find it hard to believe it really costs someone $2000 to make a cone out of balsa and CF, too. I'll admit I really don't know anything about it, but those speakers contain a few hundred dollars worth of materials, surely? Balsa, HDF, automative paint - all bought from a hardware store. Carbon-fibre is a few bucks a pound. I guess lamination could be tricky, but who knows. I guess I'm just not getting that these things are worth $45k if the guy has really low mark-up. Looks more like $42k of mark-up if I'm being *really* generous. Hard to put a dollar figure on his R&D costs, I guess, but this will always be the case if he's keeping all that to himself. Anyway, I'm not expecting any sort of discussion as we don't know his costs. I think it fair, though, to suggest that buyers of these are after the bragging rights rather than the output?
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Oct 27, 2009 02:09
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TheMadMilkman posted:First, who are you going to brag to? People on the internet? Other audiophiles? I would have said yes to both of these, but then I'm not this sort of nutter.
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Oct 28, 2009 05:06
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Elentor posted:Audiophile-Grade RAM memory: These low-latency RAM are optimized to load music files. As a matter of fact, they'll only load audio files. No more will other files delay the execution of your sweet music again. On a slightly serious note, wouldn't freaks buy ECC RAM so that the audio data is "how god intended it"? I would market the poo poo out of that to audiophiles, especially given that it is already such a pricey item, and they seem to like that.
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Dec 24, 2009 00:25
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Sunesis posted:Again, because of the way digital audio works, missing even one bit from the stream would create something akin to static noise, or a thump. It would be very noticeable, because its just not that sample that gets affected, its the samples around that broken sample, because the samples make up a waveform, and that waveform just got mangled. The only way this wouldn't matter would be for the LSB, but if its happening randomly to the LSB, it will be happening to the other bits too. So you're saying yes, they should be wasting their money on ECC RAM?
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Dec 27, 2009 03:19
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Sunesis posted:What i am saying is it either works, or doesn't work. Little 1% improvements don't work for Digital Audio, unless you are in a dealing with lots of different clocks from different devices, or lots of digital gear hooked up after each other. Yeah, you're not getting my meaning. I'm not suggesting it makes any sense, I'm suggesting it's a perfect product to aim at the audiophile market.
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Dec 31, 2009 03:09
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Hogscraper posted:I've auditioned a lot of speakers and I can honestly say that there's a huge difference between $500.00 speakers and $10,000.00 speakers. There is, however, a point of diminishing returns on your money. You could also say there's a huge difference between $50 speakers and $1,000,000 speakers, and be equally uninformative. What we need to know is where the law of diminishing returns starts to really kick in. I'd hazard a guess at closer to the $500 end than the $10,000 end.
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Jul 15, 2010 04:55
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You mean you don't have your own Hyperion Nuclear Battery or Toshiba 4-S reactor in the shed generating power for your house?
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Apr 2, 2011 23:39
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Jerry Cotton posted:If I ever hear myself talking about 'detailed brights' with a straight face, I'm going to slap myself. Haha, you took the words right out of my mouth. My level of hifi tinkering went as far as angling my speakers a little to point towards my couch and using the microphone gadget that came with my amp to set up the speaker delays and whatever else voodoo magic it did.
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May 16, 2012 01:26
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Keep in mind there is a big difference between liking how your speakers sound and telling your friends "oh my god, the detailed brights!" I mean, maybe all my friends are neanderthals but the phrase "detailed brights" would be code for "punch me".
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May 19, 2012 23:50
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Waldo P Barnstormer posted:Gromit, how do we talk to our friends about frequency response? If I tell you that my system has a higher response in the 4khz - 8kHz range will you go to sleep instead of punching me? I wouldn't talk to them about it. I could think of few things that would make me sound like a pretentious twat than telling my friends about the frequency response of my drivers. This all changes if your friends are audio nuts, of course. But almost no-one is one of those. Statistically you'd probably be better off talking about child porn.
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May 21, 2012 12:02
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No, what I'm saying is my circle of friends would think less of me for having a conversation that featured the phrase "detailed brights" or any talk about the frequency response of my speakers. That's it. I have no idea if your friends dig that sort of thing or not. I'm telling you I would sound like a wanker saying these things within my group of peers. And judging by other posts in this thread, I'm not alone in this. Also, this specific thread is for ridiculing audiophiles. I can't think of a more apt target than someone for who "detailed brights" is a reasonable phrase. Who else would use that term?
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May 21, 2012 23:49
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jonathan posted:You can try to ridicule me for using a very common term used for a very common speaker brand, but you're just coming off as someone who wants to make fun of audiophiles without knowing very basic things about the hobby. Nope, you still sound like an audiophile wanker for using the phrase "detailed brights". I just did a straw poll around the office and the vote was unanimous.
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May 25, 2012 03:19
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I can certainly agree that using this terminology is nothing like buying sound-enhancing hifi stones, but to normal people it really does sound pretentious, which is where I was going with this to begin with. Ah, I'm sure we can move on from this now anyway. There's got to be another wooden volume knob being sold for 3 figures somewhere.
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May 25, 2012 06:04
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KillHour posted:To be fair, I think your job makes your perceptions of how many people look at CP a tad skewed. (Also, I almost typed "skewed" as "SKU'd", so that says something about my job. Well, if you believe that the percentage of the population that have pedophillic tendencies is somewhere between 3% and 9% (as per cited doco listed on wikipedia) then that sounds like a greater proportion than there are audiophiles. But I'll not harp on, as this would be a derail from which no good can arise. My Yamaha amp has a setting for playback of MP3s and the like called "compressed music enhancer mode". The manual says: "Enhances your listening experience by regenerating the missing harmonics in a compression artifact. As a result, flattened complexity due to the loss of high-frequency fidelity as well as lack of bass due to the loss of low-frequency bass is compensated, providing improved performance of the overall sound system." Presumably that's some sort of EQ tweak rather than magic, but I don't know a thing about the subject.
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Jun 29, 2012 23:32
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jonathan posted:The problem is, with a high quality lossless FLAC file, it still makes it sound more bassy and more mids. If it worked properly, it wouldn't do anything to uncompressed music. I think its a gimmick. Well, it's one of the modes I can turn on or off, just like "cinema" or "concert" or whatever else of the preset effects it has are. Given that, it will affect absolutely any audio that is put through it while the mode is on. It's not smart and able to detect that the stream is MP3 compressed audio. I never use any of the audio tweaks this amp has, to be honest. It sits on one setting and that's it. It would be amusing, perhaps, if the cinema mode randomly put the sounds of people coughing and rustling candy wrappers over the audio, but how would it kick the back of my sofa?
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Jul 4, 2012 06:10
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Sagacity posted:Subwoofer. Whilst my sub does a fair job of shaking the seat, I hate to think how beefy it would need to be to really put the boot in like a drunken loon.
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Jul 5, 2012 14:48
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I'm not clever enough to build my own, but my HT runs Monitor speakers, with the sub being an RSW12. Does a good enough job for me.
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Jul 6, 2012 10:22
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Opus125 posted:You should ditch your circle of friends because they sound like douchebags. edit: You know what - who cares anymore, let's move on. If we're posting in this thread we're probably all douchbags anyway. Gromit fucked around with this message at 05:45 on Jul 18, 2012 |
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Jul 18, 2012 03:29
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Page of idiocy posted:Absolute minimum dielectric (insulation) losses due to a loose-fitting, thin dielectric sleeve, composed of polymer compounds selected by ear. Are the compounds selected by ear, or the final product? I'm picturing them holding a beaker of molten plastic to their ear and listening to it. "No mate, this stuff is too bubbly. Do you have anything wider, or perhaps oakey?"
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May 31, 2013 00:56
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something_clever posted:Including a very nice Espresso maker/time machine?: When I saw the earlier shot where you could see two of these things in the middle ground, I actually said out loud "what the gently caress are those? Time machines?"
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Jul 17, 2013 11:17
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Nintendo Kid posted:Showing works for it, auditioning could technically work but wouldn't really be appropriate to use here. I like "demoing".
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Jun 2, 2014 06:13
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BigFactory posted:Especially for students, there's something to be learned by developing and printing your own negatives, or splicing film/tape/you name it, that digital just can never offer. And it might have nothing at all to do with composition, but it's valuable. Same line of thinking where driving a piece of poo poo car teaches you how to keep a car running. Surely learning how to develop your own negatives or splice film is like flint knapping? A skill that may be interesting if you are into history, but of no use whatsoever? You might as well read about it and leave it at that.
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Apr 6, 2015 00:09
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BigFactory posted:I don't think that's true at all. I'm not trying to be a dick, I'm honestly unfamiliar with how those skills could be useful these days. I'm not in the film industry, so I'd like to hear more about it if there's actually a use for it. I just can't imagine that any reasonable percentage of the film-making population would need to know how that sort of thing is done. I used to splice video tape about 20 years ago when I had a video store, but have never done it since and don't see using that skill ever again.
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Apr 6, 2015 02:26
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BigFactory posted:Discipline and patience. Nobody or at least very few people need the actual skills any more but the discipline of working your craft without an undo button has value. Feel free to disagree. Exactly like my flint knapping example then. Good to see we agree on something.
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Apr 7, 2015 03:21
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BANME.sh posted:SSDs die too and often catastrophically with no warning signs I love SSDs for the speed but if they fail your data is gone. If a HDD fails, you have a lot of recovery options. Mind you, any data you care about should exist in more than one place anyway.
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Dec 23, 2015 02:43
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EL BROMANCE posted:Yeah, I'm not aware of any $100k tripods (probably exist to some degree), but a $100 tripod will literally be garbage that doesn't hold your camera still. You're talking pro-use though. For the general consumer I don't see any issues with sub-$100 tripods. Unless I've been very lucky with my $30 purchases that have all held my cheap camera perfectly still?
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Feb 28, 2016 00:01
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EL BROMANCE posted:How long are the exposures? I'm far from a pro and my next tripod is $600~. If you're shooting at 1/500 then sure, but if the weather is windy and you're doing multi minute exposures then you need something sturdy, or if you need to repeat the same shot over and over (time lapse etc). I have an old cheap one here that I've had to use and even indoors it drives me mad, and my little gorilla pod is fun but one broke on me (so it's used as a tiny flash stand now) so I'm cautious about putting expensive gear on it for too long. I could see it moving in the breeze the other day too on a 100 second exposure. No super-long exposures, but it's been fine for stop motion animation use with remote shutter release. I have a 15-hour long time lapse of a scene taken with a dirt-cheap tiny tripod that exhibits no drift whatsoever.
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Feb 28, 2016 06:14
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KillHour posted:I hate all of you for ruining my analogy. I was just amused that a $100 tripod is "literal garbage" whereas $1000 is money well spent. You know, given the nature of this thread topic. But as people have said, at least a tripod has physical stuff on it you can easily quantify.
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Feb 29, 2016 01:26
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Phanatic posted:If it really does that, it's a miracle. But I suspect that even just the act of tightening it up moves your camera and requires you to readjust it. I have never once thought I needed a better tripod, but I'm not a pro user. I'm not doubting I could buy better units, but they aren't better in a way I need.
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Mar 1, 2016 03:54
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GnarlyCharlie4u posted:eh... it's more of a "this is really hard to hide, and if the boss sees it, questions will be asked" sort of deal. You should go as big as possible, so they don't even register to him as speakers. Get something in beige and mount some horizontal plastic bars on it and he'll just see some filing cabinets.
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Apr 14, 2017 01:17
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Left Eye and Right Eye?
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Oct 20, 2017 12:48
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Panty Saluter posted:speaking of well-timed speakers I wish they didn't look like they were made from the cheapest of molded plastic. That silver finish just screams junk to me.
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Jul 5, 2018 00:50
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shortspecialbus posted:The idea of any marker - much less a sharpie specifically - affecting CDs is still stupid. I wonder if Sharpie had any marketing behind it. Business idea: Create esoteric marker only sold in one location. Convince idiots that it improves picture quality on UHD discs. Sell on ebay for ridiculous profit. I did a course many years ago on data recovery for optical media. The guy there said that some marker pens were made with chemicals that could eat the label and so your CD-RW could be killed, and recommended pens made specifically for CDs. This means nothing for pressed CDs, and also has nothing to do with making the disc read better. Purely a chemical reaction - maybe the bad inks are mildly acidic (I don't remember if that was clarified, but I have certainly found older RWs where the writing on them has become a hollow outline.)
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Nov 26, 2018 00:06
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shortspecialbus posted:Sorry - I should have clarified that I meant the idea of using a marker on the edge of a cd (or anywhere) actually *improving* the sound of it is ludicrous. I wasn't thinking along the lines of writing on CD-Rs or anything like that. It would certainly be possible to use a marker to wreck a CD, I would say, but you're never going to make it sound better with one. No, you were very clear and I was just adding to the topic. I wrote "has nothing to do with making the disc read better" to say it wasn't related to your exact post. On the same subject, here's a photo I took of one of my old gold CDs that has no protective coating. The photo is dated from 2004 and you can see corrosion in the shape of various fingerprints on the disc, as well as the edge of the SA forums from back then on my CRT. That disc is packed away in my shed somewhere so for all I know it's now just a piece of clear plastic with black writing on it. e: not a great film, but one or two stellar tracks on that album.
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Dec 4, 2018 08:25
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You just said that and now I'm thinking of trying ChatGPT to see if it can write some great audiophile nonsense. Not understanding anything about the topic probably makes it perfect for the task.
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Aug 6, 2023 02:20
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