AudioPhiles are full of shit

[Saddam Hussain Obama]

Yes. Audiophiles are full of shit. Not even reading the thread because I agree.

barry buckbreaking audiophiles

 

[TheBigZee]

Go to an audio store and ask to listen to a pair of studio monitors, you'll understand

They won't sound right until your used to listening to them. The sound reproduction on $15 to $25 earbuds is stellar these days, worlds above 90s and 00s jvcs and Sony's at the same price point. That "whoa" factor won't be the same

Oh, there absolutely are videophiles spending $1000+ more than they need to for new OLED TVs for a marginally better picture over an LCD TV a fraction of the price.

It's still perceivable though.

 

[The King-In-Chains]

In all seriousness, there is something to be said about using HiFi gear upon playback and with recording.

The preamps that come on an Apogee interface are going sound "besser" than some rinky-dink Tascam interface.

Unfortunately, there are too many factors with sound and perception of sound that I don't think it really matters in the scheme of things if you're not working in the biz:

• Using Adam Monitors that have 3 Tweeters and a dedicated sub bass vs some pre-sonus stock monitors. No shit it'll sound different.
• Headphone coloration. You see this shit all the time with Basshead-type headphones fo' dem beeeetz yo. Ideally just try to find reference standard headphones if you don't want a tonne of coloration.
• The Mixer/Masterer decided to make some songs in mono while other songs have stereo panning but didn't put that in the liner notes? Sometimes on "flatter'' systems it'll sound great or like dogshit.
• Bit quality. Ok, this is actually interesting because with 16 bit and 24 bit your top end can get completely obliterated with clipping upon input, however with 32 bit recording you can actually recover and also percieve said data that would've been lost.
• Room coloration, and Cable quality. If your listening space is in a celldwellers hovel theres gonna be some coloration, same with relying on chinesium cables.

Finally, how often do you go to shows without ear protection, or how old are you? No matter what we are always losing our perception of hearing, and based on our conditions ultimately the perception of how sound "sounds" is unique to the individual. (Not to get into the whole gay "Your blue is not my blue" thought trap...)

As others have stated, being a sperg about audio quality is totally fucking gay and you'd be better off listening to your own enjoyment and not getting ripped off by Deutschers who have Chinese Wagies make the product.

 

[Lemmingwiser]

People try to get unearned elitism from anything.

But thinking that good audio equipment doesn't exist at all is dumb too.

---

The audio world is built on monetizing people coming together and listening/dancing, one of the most fundamental and ancient human experiences. A lot of it is built on mysticism and mystique so it makes sense that there is a lot of bullshit in there too.

 

[tuanea ocea ecala]

all you need is flac

 

[Bonesjones]

Audiophiles are usually old guys with hearing loss trying to replace their bad hearing with thousands of dollars worth of equipment instead of getting hearing aids.

 

[Historical Strelkov]

You can literally hear the lower fidelity waveforms, and the lack of data if you listen to FLAC/ALAC/AIFF/WAV files vs MP3 or M4A lossy filetypes. You lose atmosphere, very high end stuff, the full breadth of sound.
Listening to MP3's is like looking at thumbnails of a .jpg instead of looking at a RAW (.DNG) image file.
Have you ever listened to a DSD/.DSF/SACD version of a song?
Have you sat at a mixing console before?
What is truly funny to me about statements like this, is that the mentality can be applied to any discipline or niche.
"Carfags are full of shit...I can just buy a Honda Civic, there's no difference between that and an Acura NSX"
"Why the hell would I spend 500 dollars on a blender?"
"Why should I buy this grand piano, i can get a keyboard for 50 bucks off amazon?"

Audiophiles are usually old guys with hearing loss trying to replace their bad hearing with thousands of dollars worth of equipment instead of getting hearing aids.

cheap "pro audio" solutions for poorfags, and live mixing faggots who turn up the gain for the headliner is how i got my tinnitus.
Rewind a decade or so and I'd turn all that shit down. Nothing changes tho, same story I keep hearing from the old heads. We all have ear damage.

 

[Bonesjones]

You can literally hear the lower fidelity waveforms, and the lack of data if you listen to FLAC/ALAC/AIFF/WAV files vs MP3 or M4A lossy filetypes. You lose atmosphere, very high end stuff, the full breadth of sound.
Listening to MP3's is like looking at thumbnails of a .jpg instead of looking at a RAW (.DNG) image file.
Have you ever listened to a DSD/.DSF/SACD version of a song?
Have you sat at a mixing console before?
What is truly funny to me about statements like this, is that the mentality can be applied to any discipline or niche.
"Carfags are full of shit...I can just buy a Honda Civic, there's no difference between that and an Acura NSX"
"Why the hell would I spend 500 dollars on a blender?"
"Why should I buy this grand piano, i can get a keyboard for 50 bucks off amazon?"

cheap "pro audio" solutions for poorfags, and live mixing faggots who turn up the gain for the headliner is how i got my tinnitus.
Rewind a decade or so and I'd turn all that shit down. Nothing changes tho, same story I keep hearing from the old heads. We all have ear damage.

You can literally disprove all of that with an oscilloscope, you old fucking retard.

 

[Historical Strelkov]

You can literally disprove all of that with an oscilloscope, you old fucking retard.

I don't even know what you're trying to say.
A digital audio signal's quality is contingent on bit rate, sample rate, and depending on if its PCM or PDM also its bit depth.

 

[Bonesjones]

I don't even know what you're trying to say.
A digital audio signal's quality is contingent on bit rate, sample rate, and depending on if its PCM or PDM also its bit depth.

You can use a scientific device to measure the actual waveform produced to mathematically prove there is zero noticeable difference between things.

 

[Historical Strelkov]

You can use a scientific device to measure the actual waveform produced to mathematically prove there is zero noticeable difference between things.

Ok but if we're talking about digital audio, then bit rate/sample rate and bit-depth can change the accuracy of waveform reproduction.
There's a difference between low bitrate audio like youtube and lossless audio. its not placebo, you can hear it and see it if you look through the scopes.

 

[Falcos_Commisar]

1080, 1440, and 4K are extremely noticeable visual upgrades unless you're watching low-res media that's been run through a shitty upscaling filter. 4K TVs are bullshit because cable TV and streaming services almost exclusively serve up 720 or 1080 garbage even if you're paying for the 4K package and the TV just upscales it. sometimes it's even upscaled on the back-end, and then sold as native 4K media, because all media providers are unscrupulous shitheads and assume you're retarded.



this is Spiritual Truth.

Yep. Also under certain sizes you can't really tell the difference between 4k and 1080p unless it's text and even than you almost have to side by size the content

Does that make you a videophile though? I think that just makes you a normie whose REDY FER SUM FOOTBALL

Gonna be honest though I think OLED is much better

A 1080p TV at or under 50 inches is gold enough for most people.

I don't even follow the audio/videophool community, and I've seen some outrageous bullshit.

• Hand-carved bamboo volume knobs (because somehow that "enhances tone and clarity") for $200
• Oxygen-free copper cables
• Hand-blown glass (sometimes ceramic) "cable lifters" at $300 a pop
• A fucking ETHERNET CABLE for $1,000....for a 5' cable. Oh but it had "direction marks to indicate correct direction for connecting the cable".... an arrow pointing both ways. Oh yeah, it's also "designed to thoroughly eliminate adverse effects from vibration and helps stabilize the digital transmission from occurrences of jitter and ripple."
• Obscenely overpriced HDMI cables for "optimum picture clarity"..... it's digital. It fucking works or it doesn't....

And that's just off the top of my head.

"Normal people listen to music. Audiophiles listen to stereos."

As for resolution, most of that is bullshit as well. Unless you have like a 70"+ TV, human visual acuity just isn't going to pick out the difference between 1080p and 4K, even with proper content. Where 4K does come in handy is on the production side. If you're producing for 1080p, but shooting at 4K, that gives you a nice chunk of wiggle-room if you need to re-frame a shot in editing.

Holy shit yes. I'm happy with Stereo sound that's no murdered by compression.

My Pixel Buds pro and Spotify "high quality " sound, my Anker SoundCore Motion + and my Camry's 6 speaker stock system are fine by me (although I might upgrade 2/4 of its speakers)

They won't sound right until your used to listening to them. The sound reproduction on $15 to $25 earbuds is stellar these days, worlds above 90s and 00s jvcs and Sony's at the same price point. That "whoa" factor won't be the same


It's still perceivable though.

With HDR content yeah. All else will be 99% the same.

Even then I'm waiting till next year for Mini or Micro LED TVs to get really cost competitive as OLED displays eventually get burn in and ghosting issues.

 

[Standardized Profile]

FLAC/ALAC/AIFF/WAV files vs MP3 or M4A lossy filetypes. You lose atmosphere, very high end stuff, the full breadth of sound.
Listening to MP3's is like looking at thumbnails of a .jpg instead of looking at a RAW (.DNG) image file.

It's extremely difficult to ABX even moderate bitrate MP3s from source files unless you have trained yourself to identify artifacts and/or you are encoding files that tend to generate artifacts. Modern codecs are more transparent, at lower bitrates.

 

[oldTireWater]

It's looking like this thread was bait to draw the audiophiles out.

True audiophiles build and endlessly modify their own systems. They never even listen to music, just 10 second clips over and over to A/B their changes. I grew up with one. It was a random assault of tones and weird noises at full volume with no warning.

 

[Flavius Claudius Julianus]

I really don't understand these people. I mean obviously, there's a difference in quality between a dogshit pair of 'No Fear' discount headphones, and even fairly entry level Sennheiser wired headphones. Assuming you're listening to 'modern' music, that difference is worth paying for, and you don't have to spend much.

But the difference between a £300 pair and a £500 pair is... what? What measurable benefit are you getting at that stage? This of course doesn't take into account the individual's capacity to hear, how WELL they can hear certain levels, and if they even clean their fucking ears (which has a much greater effect on the capacity to hear than ANY pair of headphones you can buy.)

I have everything from a 1920s gramophone for my classical and opera, to a more modern record player, tape player, and numerous devices to play 'electronic' music from. In the case of the gramophone, the sound crackles, pops, and has a certain ghostly, ethereal tone to it - and that's part of the charm.

With classical music at least, I find overmastered and overproduced recordings have no soul. Listen to Rolando Villazon's album-esque recording of Questa o' quella, and then play a vintage one by Jussi Bjorling, Tito Schipa, or Gigli. The latter sound infinitely better, despite the 'quality' being inferior.

I don't listen to shitty pop or nigger jive, so I couldn't give a fuck about garbage can bass or artificial sounds. That ain't music.

 

[The Connected Nose]

But the difference between a £300 pair and a £500 pair is... what? What measurable benefit are you getting at that stage?

Reminds me of a similar thing Tim Henson was talking about in a Q&A he did (yes, he's got an extremely punchable face, but he's one hell of a guitarist).

Someone had asked him about how much someone needed to spend on a guitar. His answer boiled down to yes, there's a huge difference between a $100 Amazon special and a $500 guitar from an actual music store. But after that you start getting into diminishing returns and the higher price is just getting things like better pickups, electronics, etc. IIRC he said that once you get to the $1500 or $2000 range (or even before then), an electric guitar is "as good as it's going to get" and there's no real reason to pay anything beyond that.

 

[Bonesjones]

Reminds me of a similar thing Tim Henson was talking about in a Q&A he did (yes, he's got an extremely punchable face, but he's one hell of a guitarist).

Someone had asked him about how much someone needed to spend on a guitar. His answer boiled down to yes, there's a huge difference between a $100 Amazon special and a $500 guitar from an actual music store. But after that you start getting into diminishing returns and the higher price is just getting things like better pickups, electronics, etc. IIRC he said that once you get to the $1500 or $2000 range (or even before then), an electric guitar is "as good as it's going to get" and there's no real reason to pay anything beyond that.

An electric guitar is just metal strings, pickups, and the hardware to mount it. Everything else is entirely optional. Now we have CNC machines pumping out perfect copies of the best body and necks you can find. The music industry has spent the past 100 years building bullshit mystique about tonewood and whatever else to sell idiots 5000 dollar guitars when it's all smoke and mirrors. You can make whatever tone you want with an EQ pedal. A properly setup 100 guitar will play just as well as a 10k custom blowcaster. The Klon is just a simple overdrive circuit with diode clipping stolen from modular synthesizers.

 

[Ashkenazi Porn Actress]

What measurable benefit are you getting at that stage?

It's conspicous consumption, so the benefit is purely psychological. It's about feeling better than the plebeians who can't spend the equivalent of a mid-size car on home entertainment. Same reason why every single photography forum is filled with fat, balding, middle-aged faggots who insist that shouldn't start photographing things unless you drop 30k USD/EUR on equipment.

 

[teriyakiburns]

I feel there might be a lack of definition of terms here. Spending money in a decent sound system doesn't make someone an audiophile. Being able to hear the difference between digitally compressed and uncompressed audio doesn't make you an audiophile.

Audiophiles are the people who spend thousands on special cables, the packaging for which mentions gold at least three times, and then use their ultra-expensive audio equipment to listen to music that has been mastered into a muddy, compressed wall of noise because more louder = better.

 

[Still Exceptional]

So long as it doesn't sound like my music is coming through a tin can on a wire or from down a hallway I'm good. Granted I do like the sound to be crisp and clear so I can hear every goddamn instrument, but I can easily get that from a $50 set of old-school wired studio headphones. I'm the sort who's adverse to paying more than I have to, but I know that cheap shit is cheap for a reason.