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Hacker News Hacker NewsA few things I learned that may save someone time:
(1) Sound quality is in the medium, not the build. Speakers almost always sound better than a pair of cans (headphones), headphones almost always sound better than IEMs, IEMs almost always sound better than over the ears.
(2) The difference in sound quality between something that is a few hundred dollars, and something that is a few thousand is so small that "diminishing returns" as a phrase doesn't do it justice.
(3) The stack of DACs, EQs, preamps, and neatly managed RCA/XLR cables looks cool on your desk - but they take up a lot of space and cost a lot of money for something that sounds maybe 10% better than a pair of AirPods Max (provided you remember to turn on lossless in apple music, which I forgot to!)
Around COVID lockdown #1 I did a lot more walking outside, pushing a pram and listening to music on headphones.
For years I'd been using cheap wired headphones from exhibition swag and things.
I put a pair through the washing machine. Top tip: this is really not good for them.
I looked online and found I could buy a brand new pair of my preferred Sony in-ear ones for $NotALot.
I bought the absolutely top of the line most expensive bass-boost in-ear buds.
They cost the equivalent of $20 (about £15) and the sound is amazing.
The point being here: because all the fashion-victims want Bluetooth, wired headphones have got really cheap and top quality premium grade ones cost less than a modest meal, or alternatively perhaps, less than I could easily drink in beer while listening to 1 CD or album.
Shun wireless. Go back to wired. Get an adaptor if your phone doesn't have a socket. You can get really good earphones for very little money now, they never need charging, never go flat, never need pairing, are compatible with every OS able to play sound, and they come with a handy tool to stop them falling out and you losing them, called "a cable".
Also: the microphone is great as well. I've recorded podcasts with them. The quality is way better than my £300 over-ear sound-cancelling premium Bluetooth headset, which I now only use while onboard aeroplanes.
It’s the least important part of any system and indeed my Quad amp and CA R50s are wired with twisted, braided, brown lamp cable as a nice aesthetic homage.
on a more serious note.. doesn't seem like the "good" audio was good? there is a huge difference between noise free audio and garbage integrated audio / speakers with hizz imbalance and peaking... if the "good" audio is bad then there obviously won't be a difference between any of them.
which makes me think... banana and mud are noise filters... hmm...
Audio equipment is produced by engineers and they create elegant solutions to physical constraints. There is a huge difference in quality when hearing a pair of Allison One speakers, or AKG K1000 headphones over an airpod.
Some engineers believe in speaker wire improvements, most don't. Some even openly acknowledge they don't believe but use premium wires to satisfy customers' demands. Most audio forums outright ban the discussion of speaker wire because it's so contentious.
Dismissing the industry that supports audio engineering is dismissing the disciplines of circuit, materials, and sound engineering.
Sure, there are extremes and charlatans out there like the guys who sell magic rocks, but wtf, some of you pay for skins to play in a mmog.
- Run the amplifier output through a banana or mud. Even if this somehow works and you can hear the sound, you’ll probably smell it as you cook and/or electrolyze your conductor :) (The banana likely works because the load impedance is very high in the experiment they did. The load impedance with an actual speaker is typically in the ballpark of 8 ohms. I admit I haven’t stuck a pair of multimeter probes in a banana lately, let alone done a proper I-V or AC impedance measurement.)
- Use really long cables. It’s not especially rare to be able to hear and even understand AM radio that gets accidentally picked up on a long cable and converted to baseband by some accidental nonlinearity in the amplifier.
- Use the actual outdoor mud on a rainy day as your conductor. I bet you can get some very loud mains hum like that.
Even audiophiles can probably identify these effects!
My preferred equipment today is a MiniDSP 2x4HD, a pair of 8" studio monitors on floor stands, a 12" subwoofer and a tape measure. The whole setup cost maybe $1200 and is nearly indistinguishable from my prior setup which cost easily 10x as much.
If you've got a bunch of money to spend on audio gear, the best thing you can probably buy right now is some rockwool and the time of a construction crew.
The chosen propagation media (wire substitute) wouldn't have significant frequency responses differences for those lengths for that level of power in the audio frequency range.
You'd need to have transmission-line effects kick-in which would occur at higher frequencies and/or if a cross-section of the signal propagation paths would have a significant difference in impedance. All three of the chosen medium act like simple power-sink resistors in this scenario--attenuating the signal consistently across the power frequency spectra.
Seriously, just do a frequency sweep and plot the log of the output responses! But no, that would be far too straightforward an experiment.
What really matters is the signal source, any amplified distortion in the signal, final sonic transducer (speaker), transmission medium (air density), transducer orientation (for higher frequencies), and the individual listener's ear.
So yeah, audiophiles are in over their heads and tend to attribute near-mystical properties to individual electronic components, but the only tool they can rely on is trial and error. So if you can afford it, and if some of it seemingly sounds better... have fun? You're going to make mistakes, but that's not the end of the world.
I am not an audiophile by any means, but the thing is cables are more than just resistance. Cables radiate energy, cables absorb ambient energy, cables are both capacitors and inductors (both of which will exhibit a frequency-dependent response). Perfect shield, I can't imagine it mattering. Imperfect shield--I can easily see it mattering, although not to the extent they claim.
Don't test against a banana and mud, test against quality wire vs a heap of wire. Test a straight wire with a coil of wire. Test kinked wire. (I'm sure many of us have had bad experiences with network wires that get kinked.)
Can today's audio systems do that? How much money do I have to spend to get there?
I would guess that this experiment is under powered and no conclusions can be drawn from it.
Just look at the boxes for half this stuff, quoting peak power for speakers instead of RMS, which is the equivalent of saying "This LED hits 50 watts for .00001 seconds during startup! Wow so amazing! (but don't look at the average 1 watt of output past that)"
The speakers, the cables, the AMPs, even digital source cables nearly all have 90% marketing budgets which drive up the price of many products without increasing quality at all.