Awesome Audiophile Snake Oil

Not quite the same thing, but the last time I visited my audiophile pal in Hertfordshire, I made sure to play some filthy electronic nonsense and it sounded wonderful.
Pan Sonic, holy moly.

But then he's got some sort of monster kilowatt solid-state Bryston into Wilson Benesch arrangement, not the tubes-breathing-delicately-into-horns end of things.

yeah, as might be obvious i'm on the audiophile side of the spectrum, have heard/read about the SET tube amps into horns, but have never really been that interested because it seemed like the range of music you could actually play on them was so limiting.

back when i was still actively trying out gear i got a new DAC that did DSM decoding and somehow waded into the middle of a big PCM vs DSD fight. sort of related to the mofi debacle, although in that instance i think the analog end-to-end guys were poo-pooing on dsd, even though it turns out none of them could hear the difference. anyway, the DSD guys all say how DSD is vastly superior to PCM (which i understand is what the vast majority of music is recorded in), you simply have to try it out, etc. being curious, i downloaded a DSD sampler. hoo boy, i turned it off after 10 seconds. i can't comment on the classical music stuff, but the "pop/rock" tracks? imagine building one of these systems and only being able to listen to the 80 albums ever recorded in proper end to end DSD. classic case of tail wagging the dog, exactly what SFJ means when he says "He also clearly loves music (oddly not a prerequisite in this cohort)", i think, but if any of those guys are reading this, no disrespect, don't mean to yuck your yum, you do you!

(oh and i think i was able to a/b the pcm and dsd version of these tracks, couldn't tell any difference with these tin ears, natch)

I would think that horn speakers would work great with modern music. Horns are designed to really project music - the knock on them (at least from the anti-horn crowd) is that they project music in an unnatural way. PA systems often use horns or at least did at one time, so if you are going to a concert or a club, you might be hearing horns. The legendary system at Paradise Garage were based on Klipschorns:

To procure quality sound for their 5,000 square foot dance floor, and after many experiments and tinkering, the finalized setup is something to behold:

Four Waldorf bass speakers, the high ends consisting of the largest available JBL horn lens, which electronically crossed over at 800 hz. The speakers featured a custom sub-bass horn called the “Levan Horn,” which consisted of two parts: a main cabinet, with a large “W” type hyperbolic folded horn, fueled by two 500 watt custom-built 18” drivers — and an extension which bolted onto the mouth of the “W” horn. The extension alone was 8 feet wide and 3 1/2 ft. high. That 28 square feet of mouth could apparently overwhelm a quartet of scaled-up Klipschorns all playing together at once (!!!!!!!!!).

Oops, cut out the previous paragraph:

The garage commissioned master carpenter and sound designer Richard Long and Al Fierstein, who built wooden speaker boxes by hand. They drew from the design of Klipsch cabinets, and remained in constant communication during the Garage’s operation for tuning and retuning. Justin Berkmann, founder of Ministry of Sound in London best explained it: “Rather than EQing the system, they EQ’d the room. So they took the whole concept of a sound system and turned it on its head by fitting the room around the sounds rather than the other way.”

best sounding setup I ever had was a Sun Audio 2A3 amp (2 1/2 watts) into Lowther drivers in back-loaded horns. listened to everything on that and it was glorious, so it wasn't limiting for me (though the low end wasn't the best). worst thing was the tiny sweet spot, real head-in-a-vise listening position.

those speakers developed issues, and I'm solid state into Eggleston speakers these days. my audiophilia is pretty basic: best speakers I can do, setup to the best I/the room can do (no extraordinary measures, though I am tempted to try an inexpensive DAC with DSP for EQ).

A mate of mine was looking for a new phono preamp and we went to the local hifi store. They had set up a few for him to test with $30k speakers. He played an old LP copy of PiL's "Flowers Of Romance" and it sounded INCREDIBLE, it made sense in a way it never had before. Then we went to the next room and listened to The The's "Mind Bomb" on $250k speakers. You know the picture of the guy in the Maxell ad? That was me, no kidding. But these are also acoustically perfect rooms, something I'll never have (let alone insanely expensive speakers). But it was fun and I can see why it's aspirational for some folks.

xp Yeah, tiny sweet spot is one of the issues I was referring to. Horn speakers project music like a hose, so if you step outside that stream, the sound supposedly decays. Non-horn drivers also have sweet spots, but they supposedly aren't as limited because they aren't projecting the music in the same way.

Properly set up PAs often get around this issue with arrays of horns so the sound is not projecting from a single source.

i want to get back to cast iron skillets, i know the aesthetic from the outside looking in can be worryingly akin to a beardman artisanal thing but they're very useful if taken care of properly. just my 2 cents.

they're also not that hard to take care of, you can use dish soap to clean them no sweat, the 'no soap' thing is from back when soap had lye in it and could actually strip the seasoning.

probably the only thing you don't want to do in a cast iron is to reduce a can of tomatoes to sauce in it, the acidity will strip the seasoning.

no citrus either! I love our cast iron

just added "go to a kissa" to my life goals

great for pancakes, in my experience!

The analog pancakes experience!

Stephen ushered me into his kitchen and removed a soft, lint-free cloth from a bowl to reveal a perfectly mixed, pleasingly yellow batter. "The turmeric gives it its hue," he said, ladling batter with a handcrafted wooden spoon into a lightly heated cast iron pan.

i have recently realized that, after building/tweaking my system for a long time, it's over - this is the system i'll have until some component dies. i love how it sounds and i got some good deals on clearance/used along the way. but at this point, i think anything further would be getting into mania.

setup:
cambridge audio cx60 integrated amp

rega p1 turntable (about 15ish years old)

audio technica VM540ML Microline MM Cartridge (best cartridge i've ever owned including the popular ortofon 2m blue)

hsu research subwoofer

dali zensor 1 bookshelf speakers

rotel cd11 cd player

google chromecast audio > schitt modi DAC

nice

Mine is maybe more silly in terms of complexity, but more basic gear. When I finally put in the Kenwood VR-705 after 3-4 unsatisfying "main" amps, and added the subwoofer, everything clicked

Kenwood AR-404 as the main channel-changing amp, fed by a GLI MX99 Pro mixer. Channels on the mixer are a Technics 1700, an Onkyo tape deck, and the laptop out w/Dragonfly. Another input on this Kenwood is for the dedicated "fancy turntable" MMF-5 with Cambridge Audio preamp that I use for ripping vinyl. I can also use the radio receiver on this.

That Kenwood runs the living room speakers, and then there is a separate out from that Kenwood to another Kenwood VR-705 that runs the listening room speakers exclusively. I have a remote that adjusts the volume on both amps at once, a handy feature.

oh and the speakers are Paradigms, smaller bookshelf ones for the living room and Studio 20 V.3 for the listening room

What’s the snake oil percentage tho

Stephen ushered me into his kitchen and removed a soft, lint-free cloth from a bowl to reveal a perfectly mixed, pleasingly yellow batter. "The turmeric gives it its hue," he said, ladling batter with a handcrafted wooden spoon into a lightly heated cast iron pan.

― omar little, Thursday, November 17, 2022 5:25 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

lmao

yeah that was good

definitely settled on a sub + high quality bookshelf speakers being better in most cases, unless you have the room for truly big floorstanders

speaking of doja cat, pop music etc, it's pretty insane some of the deep bass on modern hip hop and pop records most people never hear

silby my snake oil component is a Furman M-8x2 power conditioner that feeds all the power strips! sorry I forgot that important topical thread content

lather, rinse, repeat

ums that is a perfect little system

I've a similar digital solution, a Bluesound Powernode with a pair of Dali Mentor Menuet - if you ever find the Menuets at a bargain, I can't recommend them enough (but retail price is a bit high)

From the mid-'90s to the early-'10s I had what might be described as upper mid-fi (I'm not going to say "high-end" in the same thread as six-figure horn speakers :) ). I've been boring about it in here before.

Final incarnation was Copland/Michell/NVA/Audiolab/Heybrook. (With Nak/NAD/Sony bits). Weak link was certainly the speakers. Snake oil aspect was the connections. I remember having a long and eventually quite tetchy email correspondence with an audio accessories company in Cheshire in the summer of '97, as I borrowed and returned various bits of cabling exotica. I eventually convinced myself to spend the cash, as much to get out of that conversation as anything I thought I could hear. I even got the wiring loom inside a Rega tonearm replaced around then. Bit difficult to A:B something when you send the "before" off in the post and get the "after" back two weeks later. Oh well. I didn't have much of a social life then. ("Or now" - Ed.)

Anyway, it all had to go eventually. And, yet, in 2017 I still found myself walking out of Richer Sounds with an expensive hosepipe of speaker cable when I'd planned to spend about a tenner online reconnecting the system in the new house. Never learn.

These days, it's Marantz CD-DAB-streamer-amp driving Q-Acoustics bookshelf speakers, with a Pro-ject vinyl source. It's pretty good, I think, but the days when I can spend hours just listening to stuff playing in a room are rare now.

I've never really had the itch with this stuff. I have some great speakers - Elac Debut 2.0 5.2s - kind of the high end of the low end - a 25-year-old Yamaha AV amp, Technics, and a Pioneer mixer. For digital stuff I'm using an Airport Express into a miniplug which I'm sure is laughable but I don't need multiroom I just need a reliable way of casting my phone to the stereo which this... well, it's not reliable. I would like something more rock solid. This, for instance, though I do wonder if it's slight overkill:

https://www.andoveraudio.com/products/songbird-hr-high-resolution-internet-wifi-music-streamer

By the way, I ended up getting a centre channel Elac Debut to go under the TV - my living room happens to be set up so that the TV is between the stereo speakers - and the ancient Yamaha receiver does Dolby Prologic, so the sound coming out of the TV into those speakers via optical is actually.. amazing. Would recommend.

Ok, I'll admit to being more susceptible to audiophilia than most here. I was neighbors and friends with H@rry Pe@rson, founder of the Absolute Sound magazine mentioned in the SFJ article kicking off this discussion, so I've heard systems costing probably $1M.

I have a Rega P2 (gifted) with an Elys cartridge through a 30 year old Audio Research SP-9 hybrid pre-amp (inherited from my uncle), into a 100W VAC Phi-200 tube power amp (used), into Nola Contender 3 floorstanders. I stream off my Macbook into a Centrance DACmini. My Denon CD player broke and I haven't replaced it. At least I never bought into cables and tweeks - my speaker wire is cheapo 12 gauge cable from Amazon.

I am 50 with a good job and no kids so I'm lucky to treat this as a hobby a bit. Discovering Audio Science Review has helped. Also, my wife is indulgent but probably a healthy brake on my worst impulses.

I was super into this stuff 1996-2000 or so. I think it was reading Usenet groups and digging a bit more into the tech side which started to make me sour on a lot of it. The biggest audiophile I know is a physics PhD who has designed systems that are infinitely more sensitive than any home audio gear, and must know that a lot of what he spends his money on is technically unsupportable; I used to think "how deluded", and now I think "go for it, invite me round" :)

I honestly don't think I can tell the difference between 320k MP3 and 16/44.1k PCM (maybe I could train myself to do, but sod that), so hi-res digital is wasted on me. My hearing is probably slightly better than average for 54, but I have terrible high-freq hyperacusis in one ear, so loud stuff is no fun. Good speakers in a nice room with lots of LF extension are a treat though. It's the listening *time* I miss. The time, and no distractions.

You have to be pretty deluded not to realize there are extra-musical/audio factors in all this (mystique, confirmation bias, etc.).

Sometimes I think the best audio enhancement is getting better grass.

I could see myself at some point reaching some point in my career/income where I would put a few hundred bucks each into receiver, speaker and maybe turntable upgrades. I'm definitely enough of a putterer and homebody that having a 'listening room' (doubling as a 'study' and 'room for tinkering on hopeless projects') would be a really nice quality of life thing.

But beyond that, further into audiophile territory, I'm with Michael Jones - get me a friend who's doing it, and I'll very gladly come around to listen. I'll bring drinks and baked treats, even!

We need this guy to break it down:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edIi6hYpUoQ

The dude agreed to fix up my deck but is so backlogged he can't do it until February. I've waited this long, so...

I've got a Stanton STR8.150 M2 deck, which is like a slab of concrete with a stylus, plugged into a Cambridge Audio integrated amp. My pride and joy are my Kef Concord floorstanders, but I think these are on the way out. I've avoided the cables & connector bug.

Like others here, my issue is time, and the fact that I'm a distracted fool and never spend enough time just monkishly listening.

Absolutely not an audiophile - not much above 13khz at 48, no good listening space (it's all in the kitchen/living area) and I don't have an especially high bar for 'good enough'. Still, my plan is to put in a few hundred here and there in upgrades in the fat years, and planning & research is fun (inc. reading forums where people get toxic about cables)

Biggest push was last year - cheap digital overhaul (pi for streaming, £30 dvd player for CDs, Schiit dac) but put money and effort into turntable and speakers - technics sl-l500c (which is basically all I'll need forever, I reckon) and a pair of Monitor Silver 100s (ordered and auditioned 4 pairs of £300-£500 speakers, and they comfortably won - not surprising given they were discounted £700 speakers. Returned the others - big shout out to the EU distance selling directive).

The mission was really to bring my vinyl back to life. Complete success, so much so that it seemed best value to push on with that so this year's just been a new cartridge and the ultrasonic record cleaner.

i've dabbled in this stuff more than i'd like to admit, so far the way i've come out on this stuff is: the bigger the speakers, the better. sort of similar to car guys - there's no replacement for displacement.

Smaller speakers can outperform larger ones with vocals if that's your primary focus, but otherwise larger is definitely better.

The big floorstanders from 90s basic package systems, not so much. I used my family's for a long time and was impressed how much better a nice bookshelf can be (head to head).

i have a tiny living room. it’s really not an issue for me.

Sometimes I think the best audio enhancement is getting better grass.

― The Bankruptcy of the Planet of the Apes (PBKR)

lol, truth bomb

haha yes very very otm

this is not exactly snake oil but i have an appt to check out some very clean looking klipsch kg4s i spotted
on craigslist!

That Ginza music bar looks an awful lot like the vinyl hifi bar I visited in Mexico City this last summer.

BTW I definitely fall in the category of "pragmatic audiophile" if that exists. I get cheap cables, decent measuring gear (DAC/amps/streamers) for relatively affordable prices, but when it comes to speakers, headphones or a turntable, I'm willing to splurge once I've heard it and could compare to what I had previously. Hell, just getting a nicer stylus/cart actually fixed all of my records that skipped, the needle point was so fine as to no longer jump the groove, and that alone was worth the price.

But holy hell the kind of salesman BS you have to deal with walking into most audio shops is crazy. We went to go wine tasting this summer and found one of the dudes running the tasting was a former audio shop salesman, and I thought to myself "Yeah this makes sense... selling subjectivity and a luxury brand requires a skillset that transfers very easily from audio to things like wine". Good lord.

I have some recent thoughts, but I really need to get my friend to crank up his system. He has Altec 605A speakers in solid cabinets, I guess they were Abbey Road studios and a lot of others across the board back in the day. I’ve mostly heard them just sitting around and chilling, and they’re always warm and clean (lol audiophile magic!) at lower volume

There is absolutely an overlap between audiophile reviews and their descriptions and the world of wine or whiskey tasting notes.

Altec's were originally old movie theater speakers and are one of the super desirable vintage horn speaker manufacturers.

i've only met one guy irl who was super into audiophilia (total ass btw) and his other interests included very fancy coffee and coffee equipment ($10k+ espresso machines) and leica cameras.

lol what a prick

Cars are another big one for audiophiles. Boys and their toys.

I mean I think we are kind of making this about audiophiles when it's more rich guys buy all kinds of expensive stuff

^^^^

I will never have the money to be within 1000ft of this convo