Are you an "audiophile"? (1 Viewer)

[William Goodspeed]

True.

 

[Steve_AS]

Stereophile has rather infamously praised gear that tested rather badly on its own bench. That's what can happen when the wild and wooly 'subjective' reviews (in a sighted comparison "the soundstage opened up and I was hearing details I never heard before" -- I've seen this so often I have to wonder just how far a soundstage can continue to open up, and how many details one recording can contain) is juxtaposed to objective measures of performance, wihtout the reviewer seeing the bench test results (Stereophile's bench tests tend to be quite thorough). John Atkinson's explanations for such disjunction are always a, um, *delight* to read.h

 

[Steve_AS]

You know, BOSE is hardly the only purveyor of audio gear to employ the 'made cheap, sold expensive' strategy. You'd be surprised at the cost of the stuff inside some of those brushed-aluminum front panels at your local boutique audio salon. And don't even start me on cables....

 

[Seth=L]

Oh, I know all to well. Bose is probably the best marketed bull s#!t ever closely followed by Monster. Virtually all companies will do their darndest two save one penny on ever model they ship.

Seth=L

 

[JeremyErwin]

How in the hell did Bose end up in a discussion about audiophiles?

Perhaps this definition.
An audiophile is a tweaker. Some know how to do it, having studied acoustics, while others flail about, allocating the bulk of their budget to buying things that either don't make a dimes worth of difference, or are masked by a more serious flaw elsewhere.

 

[Kevin C Brown]

Steve- That's one reason why I much prefer Stereophile to The Absolute Sound. The measurements section. But sometimes, John does actually call a spade a spade, and says things like, "while the overall design is impressive enough in and of itself, based on the distortion (or whatever) characteristics of the component, we simply cannot recommend it."

One I remember is the universal player by McCormack. McCormack makes excellent amplifiers. But their universal is based on the Pio 45a, which is quite a long in the tooth design, and doesn't have very good video anyway. I remember him saying that the s/n or distortion or dynamic range (or something) of SACD and DVD-A was no better than CD on that machine.

 

[Steve_AS]

...which is to say, it was probably entirely adequate, in terms of audible distortion and dynamic range. I bet he left that part out though. ;>

 

[JeremyErwin]

can you imagine the hassles associated with reviewing equipment based on sound pschcoaccoustical principles, with stars corresponding to various levels of confidence?

 

[Kevin C Brown]

Yup. And sometimes as you stated, it's fun seeing Atkinson try to "bridge the gap" between the measurements and the subjective.

... Perfectly adequate for the $500 Pio, but not for the $3500 McCormack. For $3500, I'd expect better measurements for SACD and DVD-A ... even if I couldn't hear the difference.

 

[JeremyErwin]

Side Bar 3Measurements

 

[Steve_AS]

It's funny that Atkinson couldn't come up with the obvious explanation --that the intrinsic resolution of Redbook CD is *quite good enough* for a delivery format,and that any sonic qualities Kal Rubinson projected onto the device beyond that were imaginary.

 

[Kevin C Brown]

See the Legacy speaker review in the latest Stereophile? For the price, crap freq response measurements, but yet the text gushed over it. Exactly why I'm going to let my free subscriptiont to TAS lapse. No measurements to "balance" the subjective.

 

[Lee Scoggins]

I'm going to dissent here for two reasons:

1. Some writers get things so right that you build trust with their subjective analysis.

2. I simply don't place much faith in metrics when it comes to audio. They simply are inadequate to describing the whole audio event. I will wait until science gets further along and has more meaningful measurements.

 

[Rachael B]

No, I'm worse! I'm an audio-vidiot. I have a jones for video equipment too. I'm hoplessly strung out.

It's not that I have all the very best equipment, sometimes that is the case, but it's always way, way above the average that sane people have. I'm atleast a little bit obcessive, well, alot.... I thank my lucky stars that I don't have a penchant for tube amps. I listen to all kinds of strange and obscure music that hardly anybody else listens to anymore. Soy muy, muy loca! El disco es cultura....atleast I think so.

 

[Steve_AS]

as Hemingway wrote, 'Isn't it pretty to think so?'

 

[Kevin C Brown]

It's much easier for me to believe that I will get good sound quality from a component that measures well, than from one that measures poorly. For me, it's really as simple as that.

 

[Manus]

Im reminded of an old Mark Levinson quote from Einstein :

" Not everything that can be counted , counts,
And not everything that counts can be counted "


Mind you , Einstein was probably listening in Mono at the time

~M~

 

[JeremyErwin]

To appeal to both sides. Perhaps annual articles can be made out of such discrepancies. I don't know how rigorous the result would be, though. Valve amplifiers have their partisans, eager to explain how "tube clipping" is less of a concern than transistorized clipping, or why certain types of distortion are less pleasurable than others. Fodder for psycho-accoustical investigation, I suppose.

 

[Seth=L]

On the subject of what makes an audiophile, I think an audiophile makes sacrifices in many respects to obtain the best sound that they can have. Sacrifices could include a smaller house, a economy car (cheap not hybrid), listening to a spouse that constantly rides you about your obsession and how ugly it looks in the living room, or even shifting away from technology to quality to obtain that sound you want.

An example of putting technology aside for quality was my upgrade or degrade depending on how you look at it, from my Onkyo TX-DS787 receiver used as a processor to a older Rotel pro-logic processor designed for stereo operation as it's best function. While the Onkyo was more engaging with movies with the newer surround decoding, the Rotel has a better sound, of course an opinion, but who is going to debate that, than the Onkyo with music.

With this in mind, I believe I have the right to call myself an audiophile.

Seth=L

 

[Seth=L]

If your neck hurts from listening to music, you might be an audiophile.

Seth=L