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I've had the QC2's before. They're alright, but the build quality is poo poo (cheapest plastic headband you can imagine), and they sound like they cost $80, not $300. The noise cancelling was alright, I guess, but I rarely used it since it would give me headaches after awhile.
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Mar 10, 2014 20:05
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It doesn't help our cause when standards bodies that should know better post poo poo like this.quote:Up to 1536kHz audio sample frequency for the highest audio fidelity http://www.hdmi.org/manufacturer/hdmi_2_0/ 
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Mar 26, 2014 23:44
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New game: Take  from video games / movies and turn them into audiophile products.quote:Ionic polymeric gel myofibrils are woven into the wire strands, increasing the speed at which signals propagate through the medium. Points are awarded for correctly guessing the game / movie the reference came from. You automatically win if you manage to sell a product based on that description for >$50. KillHour fucked around with this message at 14:24 on Apr 21, 2014 |
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Apr 21, 2014 14:15
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quote:When clamped to the frame of most amplifiers, a harmonic balancer dampens the vertical motion produced by current oscillations, resulting in increased tonal accuracy. Each upgrade improves the base accuracy by 10%.
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Apr 21, 2014 14:42
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BANME.sh posted:I am a member of a local group of audio gear enthusiasts. The conversation is pretty boring but it sometimes gives me access to good deals on used equipment before it hits local classifieds. Anyway, quite a few members are typical audiophiles. One of them just posted this article about how double blind tests don't work for audio. The problem is not that his article is wrong; it's that it completely misses the point. Yes, it's impossible to get two people to agree on something as subjective as "Does A or B sound better?", but that's not what double blind testing is supposed to do. Double blind testing is supposed to help decide which system an individual prefers, and whether that individual can even tell the difference without needing to worry about any bias from brand, price, or other external factors.
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Apr 24, 2014 22:29
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qirex posted:I don't see why there would be, both brands are considered mass market junk by audiophiles. Apple should buy McIntosh.
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May 9, 2014 21:49
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Install Windows posted:Real power conditioners do exist of course, but they will do absolutely nothing on functioning electrical systems by design. Something like this would definitely filter noise out of your electrical system: http://powerquality.eaton.com/Products-services/Power-Conditioning/PowerSuppress100.asp And I could potentially see using something like this if you (for some retarded reason) had an extremely large amplifier without APFC on the same circuit as other PF sensitive electronic equipment: http://www.eaton.com/Eaton/ProductsServices/Electrical/ProductsandServices/PowerQualityandMonitoring/PowerFactorCorrection/LV-AutoVAR300/ That being said, I can't think of a situation where using one of these made any sense for home audio use unless you lived in an area that had terrible power delivery and billed based on apparent power. Edit: Both of these are <$1000 units, and are designed for industrial and enterprise use. Idiots spend 5 figures on power conditioner snake oil. KillHour fucked around with this message at 05:57 on May 24, 2014 |
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May 24, 2014 05:55
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Combat Pretzel posted:Talking about Eaton, is their stuff worth anything? I'm looking into an UPS of theirs. They're as well known as APC or Tripplite. Never used one, but I've heard good things.
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May 24, 2014 22:40
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Theris posted:Because cables are like wine: You don't buy the cheapest, you buy the second cheapest. Monoprice is the second cheapest. http://www.dx.com/c/consumer-electronics-199/audio-video-cables-123
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May 29, 2014 16:50
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  Edit: I did everything for Golden Ears except the one where you had to guess what frequency changed. gently caress that one. And then it didn't save my progress. 
KillHour fucked around with this message at 16:41 on May 31, 2014 |
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May 31, 2014 03:30
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TheMadMilkman posted:Eh, the software has a feature set that works for me. The fact that it averages the response curve for a full couch (I don't sit in the same place often), easily adjustable response curves, and the impulse adjustment appeals to me. And not having pro gear in the living room. I'm willing to pay more to maintain a look. You would have to be on crack to pay $800 for EQ software. If you care about looks, get this. http://www.minidsp.com/products/minidsp-in-a-box/minidsp-2x4
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Jul 1, 2014 15:54
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I hate to break it to you, Mr. "I want to spend $Texas on good sound, but it has to look good." You're not really going to solve bass issues with a DSP, software or otherwise. You can make it sound good in *one specific spot*, but anywhere else is actually going to sound worse. Also, if you room has a null in bass response, there's nothing a DSP can do, period. Options: Multiple subwoofers. Preferably not in the corners - having them at odd fractions (1/3, 2/5, etc.) across the room will result in the best overall response. Sound traps. Need to be placed in specific places around the room to stop the bass from reflecting off walls (and your ceiling) and interfering with itself. Look like this:  What speakers do you have? This might sound insultingly obvious, but you do have a subwoofer, right? KillHour fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Jul 2, 2014 |
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Jul 2, 2014 03:43
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What amp are you using? Those speakers basically have 10" subwoofers built in, so you shouldn't need subs unless you want to go <20hz. I still don't think that software will give you anything a MiniDSP can't for 1/4 the price. And you're right, DSP is used AFTER room treatments. I didn't say it did nothing, I said it can't fix your room issues. It's that last little bit you add after you've done everything else to try to compensate for any remaining imperfections in the setup (phase alignment, channel delay, correcting for harmonics, etc.). KillHour fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Jul 2, 2014 |
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Jul 2, 2014 20:45
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To expand on what KozmoNaut was saying, your problem isn't high damping factor - a high damping factor is good. I think a bigger problem is that those are 16 ohm speakers, so they're going to be hard to drive and you'll get half the rated power out of it (25W per channel instead of 50). They do claim to be very efficient, though (100 dB-SPL 1W, 1m), so it may balance out. KillHour fucked around with this message at 21:45 on Jul 2, 2014 |
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Jul 2, 2014 21:31
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Zu Audio is exactly the kind of company we've been making fun of.quote:complete with ZuB3 silver alloy internal cabling... Don't listen to any advice from these monkeys.
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Jul 2, 2014 21:45
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KozmoNaut posted:IIRC the C320BEE should be able to handle a set of 16 ohm speakers just fine. It's a beefy little bugger. I honestly don't think a new amp is going to help much, if at all. If an amp can power the speakers at required levels without clipping, it's not going to affect bass response. Unless the amp is coloring the sound (like a tube amp). If your speakers are sounding anemic on the low end, it usually either means you have poor room acoustics or you need a dedicated sub. I honestly think a 12" subwoofer is going to be more effective and cheaper than anything else you can come up with.
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Jul 2, 2014 23:33
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TheMadMilkman posted:That might be the case. Fortunately, I can borrow the amp I'm interested in and keep it long enough to evaluate it properly, by which I mean long enough to get past the "this is new and possibly slightly different, it must be better!" stage that seems to drive many audiophile purchases. Just remember that tube amps are going to color the sound. And those amps are ungodly expensive for what they are - $40 or less in parts plus some overpriced tubes. Edit: If you're going to spend insane amounts of money on a tube amp, at least go all the way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlrdvF3CQSs The tubes light up green. How can you not love that? KillHour fucked around with this message at 01:00 on Jul 3, 2014 |
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Jul 3, 2014 00:15
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So I was sitting listening to music in my office when I got the itch to fiddle again. I was thinking about how flabby the bass was with my PSW10, and on a lark I tried stuffing a t-shirt in the port. And... it worked! Mostly. I had to turn the volume on the sub up from 1/4 to 1/2, but there's definitely an improvement in the smallish room. I probably lost everything below ~35hz and it's still a little boomy, but it's a good tradeoff until I can afford to upgrade. Edit: I also got a few foam blocks and put them under the sub. That helped reduce some of the rattle. I can still hear my door rattle when I crank it, though. Double Edit: While looking around for different kinds of music to test out my changes, I found this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuZLtMrCOoU He is amazing, and I want to pay him to come play bass while I fall asleep. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYgflEpPDWQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuZLtMrCOoU KillHour fucked around with this message at 02:13 on Jul 3, 2014 |
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Jul 3, 2014 01:54
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It's 8, "Necropolis". Lots between 20 and 40hz. But mostly, I'm just a big fan of slap bass. Any other good artists I should look into?
KillHour fucked around with this message at 03:47 on Jul 4, 2014 |
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Jul 4, 2014 03:39
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Combat Pretzel posted:Hggggnnnnn! The best part is the implication that there is no microphone in existence sensitive enough to pick up all the intricacies and nuance of music recorded with microphones.
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Jul 10, 2014 23:56
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And thus was born a new class of audiophile: "If you don't pay bands to come play for you live whenever you want to listen to music, you're not a real audiophile. Plebes.  "
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Jul 12, 2014 06:43
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Combat Pretzel posted:Creates some sort of EM field, or whatever that big PCB antenna is good for. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say it's good for "Breaking FCC regulations." Was I close? Edit: That antenna isn't nearly long enough to generate a 7.83Hz wave. Some back-of-the-napkin math is giving me a wavelength of ~38,000 KM. Double Edit: I reported them to the FCC. 
KillHour fucked around with this message at 15:30 on Jul 21, 2014 |
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Jul 21, 2014 14:51
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Flipperwaldt posted:I've found that too much
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Jul 21, 2014 19:13
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88h88 posted:Which one of you started this? Someone go out and chart reviews with one axis being price (normalized per product type), and one axis being positive or negative reception in audiophile reviews. Edit: Bonus round - find a cable that costs >$1000 with a majority of negative reviews. Someone has to make a lovely cable, and if it's so easy to hear, it should be easy to find out who. Right, guys? KillHour fucked around with this message at 13:25 on Sep 18, 2014 |
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Sep 18, 2014 13:20
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I'm here to breathe back a little hope for humanity in this thread. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyrGkx76QjA This guy is awesome, and I want to play with all of his cool equipment. Edit: I would totally do this, if I wasn't terrified I'd electrocute myself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gAUuLkc1ik
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Sep 22, 2014 20:14
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rear end Catchcum posted:Haha I can't tell if this is the right place to ask but... Things you will notice from using an external DAC/amp:
Things you will notice from using FLAC:
If you could really DBX FLAC vs. 320kbps MP3 or the noise floor difference from using an external DAC, you would have told us what headphones you were using since pairing the amplifier to match those is going to have a far greater impact. Edit: Also, you would know that ALAC works natively on iOS and performs just as well as FLAC. KillHour fucked around with this message at 20:00 on Oct 10, 2014 |
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Oct 10, 2014 19:53
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Oh, in that case, buy one of these: http://www.amazon.com/Cypher-Labs-T...ords=iphone+dac And don't forget your cable! http://www.custom-cable.co.uk/wireworld-platinum-starlight-usb-cable.html
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Oct 10, 2014 20:05
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Combat Pretzel posted:ABX tests are bullshit in relation to general consumptions. At least these days with decently tuned encoders. Which is why ABX tests are important - they reveal which flaws are the encoding, which are in the actual recording and most importantly, which are all in your head.
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Oct 11, 2014 02:55
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Combat Pretzel posted:These days, MP3 encoders do pretty well, and AAC encoders even more. It's very unlikely that any encodings will contain really messy artifacts, unless you force it with silly settings during encoding. The files may as well just be the truth to you and me, if they're what you're going to listen to. Agreed. I'm just saying ABX tests prove this, which is why "audiophiles" hate them. They can't stand people telling them they're wrong.
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Oct 12, 2014 01:17
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phongn posted:You can use ALAC, which outputs bit-for-bit identical data as the original AIFF PCM file. iTunes sync works normally and the files will play in the normal music player with no third party apps required. This implies that you are likely to hear artifacts or noise introduced by most external DACs, which is not true. It may very well be possible that an iPhone's DAC is better constructed or has a higher SNR than many other DACs on the market (I do not know either way), but I can guarantee you wouldn't be able to ABX them. Long story short: Unless you are hearing very obvious artifacts such as noise or hissing, your DAC is good enough. A $2K "Audiophile" DAC isn't going to magically make the snare drums more impactful or whatever. KillHour fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Oct 15, 2014 |
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Oct 15, 2014 00:03
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rear end Catchcum posted:I'm not trying to be a dink but I have AIFF files I've bought from HDTracks.com that iTunes accepts but when I try to sync with my iPhone the phone won't accept them. Yes. They are both lossless formats; you'll lose no quality in the same way that a .PNG is identical in quality to a .BMP. It is a verifiable mathematical fact, as fundamental as 1+1=2. Anyone who argues that they can hear a difference is objectively wrong. It may sound like I'm beating a dead horse, but I don't want to sound like I'm speaking figuratively or simplifying for the sake of the argument. The resulting waveforms are 100% identical. Edit: For proof, I took a .WAV file and used iTunes to import it as ALAC. I then imported both into Audacity and inverted the .WAV file (so the waveforms would cancel each other out). The only thing left is the differences between the tracks. When you play back the result, it's dead silent. The waveforms cancel each other out perfectly. You can see in this screenshot that the cursor is in a particularly loud section of the song, but nothing shows up on the VU meter. 
KillHour fucked around with this message at 01:50 on Oct 15, 2014 |
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Oct 15, 2014 01:24
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rear end Catchcum posted:Thanks man. Test it yourself. Audacity's free, and it can open both ALAC and AIFF with FFMpeg. I'd upload a file of the difference, but it's literally a 9 minute track of dead silence.
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Oct 15, 2014 02:15
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BANME.sh posted:Another way to prove this would be to do a checksum on both files. If even a single bit was changed during the conversion, the hashes would be different. However you'll notice each format will produce exactly the same value. The checksums will come out different because they are two different encoding schemes. Just like how a zip and a rar will have different checksums, even with the same contents. Edit: Unless you mean convert both to a WAV file and do a checksum. That should come out the same.
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Oct 15, 2014 03:50
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rear end Catchcum posted:No I mean I believe you I'm just pissed that "expert" misinformed me when I asked him a direct question about media I paid for. Never believe someone on the internet without doing the research yourself. That's what drives someone to believe self-proclaimed "experts" that don't know jack poo poo.  While we're on the subject of challenging your preconceptions, I strongly recommend you give this a try: http://lifehacker.com/5903625/mp3-or-lossless-see-if-you-can-hear-the-difference-with-this-test Since you have a bunch of lossless files already, you can get your comparison tracks easily by converting to AAC or MP3 in iTunes or whatever program you prefer. If you do MP3, use V0. Pick songs you know like the back of your hand. Ones you are sure you could ABX from memory with a head cold at 3 in the morning. Do each song at least 10 times to make sure you're not just getting lucky. I think you'll be surprised just how hard it is to tell them apart. Maybe you can (I sure as hell can't, and my setup is no slouch), but it will take all your concentration - far more than you would ever use actually listening to music. You have to know what weaknesses the specific format has, and you have to look for them. This is not to say that lossless formats aren't useful; they're extremely important for archiving (and if you're ripping a CD collection, you should be using a lossless format if you can spare the HDD space). But they were never intended for listening to directly.
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Oct 15, 2014 04:16
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EL BROMANCE posted:HDTracks are well known for selling stuff from crap masters too. They're about as trustworthy as a Russian MP3 site and everything they tell you with a grain of salt. They exist to separate people from their money and nothing more. Since I've never gone there, I decided to check their FAQ to see how long it took to set off red flags. Their first answer is how to use the files they sell, so that doesn't count. Their second answer has a typo and their third answer has blatantly misleading information. Their fourth answer makes a comparison that isn't even close to accurate. Edit: Just for fun, let's pick this apart. quote:For comparison, our 88.1kHz/24-bit FLAC files gives you profoundly more musical information, twice the amount found on a CD. Think of the CD playing music vs.88.1kHz/24-bit FLAC files as similar to the difference between watching a VHS video tape vs. watching a DVD on your HDTV. Both VHS and DVD video are lossy compressed formats. All consumer video formats are lossy. VHS is an analog NTSC format, while DVD is a digital format. Both have the same vertical resolution (480), but VHS is interlaced (each frame shows only even or odd horizontal lines) while DVD is progressive (all lines in all frames). Also, DVD has a much higher horizontal resolution. Comparing any of that to audio is a load of crock. quote:For another comparison, 176.4kHz/24-bit FLAC files would be comparable to watching Blu-Ray video on your HDTV The DVD on an HDTV is going to look a lot better than a VHS tape, and a Blu-Ray is going to look even better! The ONLY difference between 88.1kHz and 176.4kHz audio files is the maximum frequency that can be reproduced. 88.1 kHz can perfectly reproduce audio up to 44kHz (max human hearing range is ~20kHz). 176.4kHz can reproduce audio up to 88kHz. Dogs can only hear up to about 60kHz, so I guess if you want an audio file that can record dog whistles in all their glory, this is what you want. Also, remember Blu-Rays still use a lossy compression format - H.264. Here's an example. Say you have a 1080p Blu-Ray (1920x1080 resolution). Do you know what the resolution of the chroma (color information) is? 960x540. Seriously. They throw out 75% of the color information in a frame, and you probably never noticed. Double Edit: Uncompressed 8 bit per channel 1080p video at 29.97 FPS (NTSC standard) would take up over 11GB per minute. There's a reason you never hear about people using lossless encoding for video. KillHour fucked around with this message at 19:15 on Oct 15, 2014 |
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Oct 15, 2014 18:51
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I'm going to show up with a pair of Beats headphones but act just like everybody else and talk about how those B&W Nautilus speakers really widen the soundstage or whatever.
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Oct 21, 2014 23:36
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RoadCrewWorker posted:How does the 320kb lossy codecs hold up if you decide to load the file up in an editor and run it through 26 filters? I heard the more aggressive "optimized for human hearing" stuff falls apart pretty quickly if it gets transposed or multiplied. Or scenarios like "re-encode in a new future codec"? This is the reason lossless codecs exist. They're not pointless, they're just not meant for listening to.
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Oct 28, 2014 21:26
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Because not all of us have "reasonable" amounts of music. Also, I've moved to Spotify and it's saved me thousands in song purchases. TomR posted:There really isn't a good place to post this, but I'd like to make some speakers that look like this: http://brokenliquid.com/52503/3525132/gallery/rough-waters This is made of dozens of pieces of glass sandwiched together, and is completely awesome. Speakers would ruin it.
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Oct 28, 2014 22:04
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It goes from "This could be a legitimate post" to "What the gently caress" to  in like 30 seconds.
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Oct 29, 2014 02:16
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The Modern Leper posted:http://tidalhifi.com/us Or you could just get Spotify for half that and stream in 'extreme' quality. And here, let me free you from your iTunes hell: https://support.spotify.com/us/problems/#!/article/Convert-Playlists-to-Spotify Spotify has last.fm integration, if you want to keep track of your playcounts. It can also play music stored locally on your computer if you have iTunes albums not available through the streaming service. You really have no excuse. KillHour fucked around with this message at 04:00 on Oct 29, 2014 |
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Oct 29, 2014 03:55
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