Ridicule Audiophiles - Find the cat shit's resonant frequency

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Inspect Your Gadgets > Ridicule Audiophiles - Find the cat shit's resonant frequency

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

KillHour posted:

In addition to the other answers in the thread, the optics for high speed fiber (10gbps+) are ridiculously expensive. Like "A pair costs more than the rest of your AV setup combined" expensive.

http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/Cisco-SFP-transceiver-module-10GBase-SR/1651560.aspx

Obviously, they don't cost nearly that much to make, but that's where the market is right now.

No one seems to get worked up over video over copper, but since 192kHz/24bit is ~ 4 Mbps you could comfortably run (digital) audio over Cat5e cables and have room for hundreds of channels.

The issue is that audiophiles think DACs are magic. HDBase-T would solve everyone's problems but no one would be able to sell snake oil cables.

# ¿ Sep 13, 2013 01:29

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# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 17:58

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

120dB of dynamic range is enough to distinguish a mosquito in front of a jet taking off

# ¿ Apr 1, 2016 23:44

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

KozmoNaut posted:

A lot of audiophile speakers have very pronounced treble, to make them "clearer" sounding, especially to dudes in their 50s and 60s with high frequency hearing loss, money to spend, and an irrational fear of tone controls and EQ.

Hopefully your amp will sound like nothing at all, if a solid state amp does anything other than linearly amplify the input stall with no coloring, it's defective by definition.

And man, I have never understood the fascination with McIntosh gear. It's hideous, way too busy looking IMO.

Yeah I don't get why people want amps to sound like something they are literally just a way to increase volume and any coloration added is a defect

# ¿ Jul 13, 2016 07:16

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

I got a $600 amp free because Amazon couldn't label their stock correctly

Asus makes good amps and DACs as you'd expect from a motherboard maker, they have to deal with far tougher signals regularly

# ¿ Jul 13, 2016 13:04

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

evilcat posted:

What about for those who find their audio gear is limited by the power supply and seek the manually adjustable DC rectifier power supply that will cause everything connected to it to deliver "the ultimate in sound quality" that has "never been equaled" by everything from mercury rectifiers through selenium and up to bridge rectifiers, active bridge rectifiers and so on?
Why, it's coupling an old wire wound variable resistor to tungar bulbs, a NOS analog voltmeter (because a new one would be unreasonable) and a dial so the user can adjust the DC voltage themselves!
I suppose the next step is a vibrating rectifier and then maybe a motor-generator spinning away to power some amplifiers.

Luckily, for those into horn speakers they have an ultimate horn speaker with special conical horns. Their whole thing is that conical horns are the absolute best over every other horn type, how most audio cable is snake oil, but then they drop a "but this $800/4ft and up cable is very good and worth it" and apparently their speakers are 60% efficient compared to the .1% that other speakers are. there is just the slight issue that conical horns actually seem to have issues with wavefronts being disturbed and various higher order mode issues even at frequencies lower than what would load it.

That said if I had a box of parts and scrap wood I'd build a tungar bulb powered tube amplifier with conical horns because I have very bad taste and like some aspects of the look of their gear despite the very real performance and part availability issues those will have.

On a related possibly audiophile tangent, how is Arkhipov's Laboratory? The only stuff I can find on their gear is a head-fi article praising them and the website of the maker with some product photos and mostly Russian descriptions, so I'm very unsure if they fall into audiophoolery or are just fairly ordinary tube amplifiers with some marketing added in the form of audiophile grade components but are decent enough as far as tubes go.

the one problem i have with the free $800 amp/dac combo amazon's incompetence got me is that the power supply is this ancient toroidal linear power supply design that makes it a space heater

it's nice in the winter, not so good in the summer

# ¿ Aug 9, 2016 23:17

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

BobHoward posted:

Just as it is totally unrelated that DSD, instead of being a natural follow up to 16/44.1 PCM like 20/88.2 or whatever, uses 1-bit samples at several MHz. This requires serious additional tech to make it work somewhat well (DSP based noise shaping etc) that would be totally superfluous in a more conventional system design, but is novel and therefore much more defensible in patent courts. I am sure however that Sony's engineers were pursuing the best possible technical solution, they couldn't have had any other reason for designing DSD that way

They used it in dvd-a

# ¿ Apr 25, 2017 03:57

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

qirex posted:

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"]

hmm i need my AC triple enhanced

# ¿ Jul 2, 2017 22:03

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

Its the audio equivalent of putting an instagram filter

Fidelity is lost but the effect is sometimes neat

# ¿ Jul 9, 2017 20:28

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

Ieee1588 you numbnuts

# ¿ Oct 19, 2017 22:28

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

14kW wtf kind of home has 3 phase power coming in

# ¿ Oct 22, 2017 21:19

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

Bowers and Wilkins is expensive but actually fine

This is not audiophile trash but that carpet is

# ¿ Dec 17, 2017 22:56

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

Spent $0 on my dac and amp since Amazon hosed up

Thanks for a $700 combo unit that measures insanely good Jeff!

Of course I end up using airpods 90% of the time.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2018 15:08

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

The ideal amp is a wire with gain so any amp that sounds like anything at all is just distortion

DACs are also basically commodity components these days. It also shouldn't sound like anything.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2018 06:19

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

Yeah I have a 500$ dac amp that has a noise floor of -105dB and guess what, since I live in nyc it's entirely pointless since the ambient noise is well above that

I also got it for free so you can easily hit transparency at like $100 or so.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2018 20:30

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

Bad amps sound different

Good amps all sound the same

# ¿ Nov 11, 2018 22:40

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

Lmao then they have to deal with room effects

# ¿ Dec 21, 2018 03:36

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

Lol they are trying to claim i2s as proprietary

# ¿ Feb 26, 2019 14:54

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

Twisted pair and star quad are genuinely better for noise rejection but you could equally remove the iPhone charger from your cable

# ¿ Oct 14, 2019 00:09

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

strtj posted:

So the sort of noise that was being rejected was primarily noise from active close-contact sources? That makes total sense to me, I just want to confirm. And it would have made much more sense in a dormitory environment than it does in the real world.

You can measure significant reductions in noise coupled into your cables if they are twisted pair and even less for star quad since it also rejects magnetic fields more effectively

But it basically doesn�t matter unless you have a noise source nearby (smps like chargers are common) or your signals are sensitive like microphones

If you have a ton of cat5 sitting around sure knock yourself out

# ¿ Oct 15, 2019 18:22

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

Guttenberg is the ur-woo anti digital idiot. Also he's old and demonstrably age fucks your high frequency hearing response. So he's gonna be inaccurate tbh

# ¿ Jan 15, 2020 23:43

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

Lol that's more than the electrostatic shure iems which are insanely good

# ¿ Jan 16, 2020 20:09

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

qirex posted:

Spotify premium is 320 which is pretty much inaudibly different from CD quality.

Weirdly they use vorbis instead of something better yet 320kbps vorbis is transparent

# ¿ Feb 19, 2020 05:43

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

EL BROMANCE posted:

funny thing is the ''tightness'' of the weave can affect the sound - i tried this on some home-made cables.......a looser weave gave a more relaxed sound

post your frequency response curves bithc

# ¿ May 23, 2020 00:18

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

namlosh posted:

Lol, if you�re not soldering your power cord directly to your house mains

Lmao if you're not like that Japanese guy who got his power company to install a fully separate drop from the grid

# ¿ Jun 3, 2020 17:34

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

Combat Pretzel posted:

How long can this thing keep running until the caps are discharged?

And what are those donut components, anyway? Since they say what I presume is Volt-Ampere?

Toroidal transformers for linear power supplies

# ¿ Jul 15, 2020 01:45

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

qirex posted:

That FPGA and stupid case design is Chord's whole thing. At least they can claim to be doing some secret sauce processing unlike most other companies who just sell a $3 ESS or AKM in a $100 housing for $5000.

basically they decided to implement a colossal fir reconstruction filter for absolutely no audible improvement but it likely costs $100s in fpga.

it's not even better than the SMSL d1 balanced dac/amp which is half the price, and is only 4db better than the khadas tone board which is $100 compared to $1900

# ¿ Aug 22, 2020 17:48

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

KozmoNaut posted:

No.

strictly speaking most iems have low input impedance requiring a really good amp at very low output impedance. Most cannot get the sub 1 Ohm required.

# ¿ Aug 22, 2020 17:49

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

KozmoNaut posted:

Not really, most are 32 ohm or 16 ohm, same as a lot of full-size headphones. As long as you have a ~1:8 ratio or better it's fine.

I've seen 8ohm ones where it gets dicey but you are right, my cutoff is 1:10 so it's a bit more stringent

Of course it doesn't matter when you aren't in an anechoic chamber.....

# ¿ Aug 22, 2020 18:35

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

Foxtrot_13 posted:

Well yes you can get just as good for much less but it doesn't look like a prop from a sci-fi film. As long as you know you are paying over the odds on the technical side of things then that is fine. A Rolex isn't any better at keeping time than a �60 Chinese mechanical watch but it looks a drat sight better.

If I won the lottery Chord would be the stuff I would buy because gently caress it, the different between �100 and �1000 doesn't matter if I like the look of it.

If you're gonna go full scifi at least mcintosh goes balls out

# ¿ Aug 22, 2020 18:35

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# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 17:58

Malcolm XML: Aug 8, 2009; I always knew it would end like ｔｈｉｓ．

everything different about vinyl can be reduced to �we had to master it differently to accommodate the lovely format�

# ¿ Nov 2, 2020 18:29

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