Awesome Audiophile Snake Oil

Thought about this thread earlier when I was reading about Sonys new $1200 Walkman

I was just about to post that.

http://gizmodo.com/sony-walkman-reborn-again-as-a-1200-hi-res-audio-han-1677643981

The market for a $1200 portable music player can't be very big.

especially one whose only reason for existence is the rights to the name "Walkman" - a brand name that has little to no connection with audiophile sound.

I was kinda looking at this as a potential replacement for my iPod classic when that eventually dies, but at $1000 they can fuck right off.

can it play PONO files?

I was kinda looking at this as a potential replacement for my iPod classic

For $200 you can get a Fiio X1 with a 128gb micro SD card - plays FLAC, too. Fuck a Walkman.

(I just had to replace my iPod classic with a Fiio and am pretty happy with it, although the operating system's really basic compared to the iPod.)

saw what you want about pono but the neil remasters sound amazing

Per that Gizmodo piece, "Your ears can only ear so much."

that was an interesting read

but yeah as i've said upthread a few times the thing that bums me out about this is that all this snakeoil crap convinces ppl that no one can really tell the difference between a good quality playback system and shitty skullcandy heaphones or a bose sound dock, and it's like man you are literally spoiled for choice today with more cheap options for great sound, analog or digital, than ever

xposts isn't there a fiio which can take two micro SDs at once? 2 x 128 GB = my beautiful dream

although this morning i just experienced a micro sd failure for the first time when one of my 128 GB cards fried itself while docked in my macbook slot, got super hot and now is dead to the world. But I've been pretty happy with the "assortment of micro SD cards in a Sansa Clip" approach in the 9 months I've been doing it.

taking mental notes on this "Filo" for when my Cowon O2 eventually dies

oh it really is "Fiio", sorry

Still love my shitty skull candy Titan earbuds with their not flat frequency response and indestructibility thank you.

yeah but could get get monoprice ones that are better for peanuts

Agreed, there are a lot of great choices for a wide variety of price points. At some point there is a diminishing return per dollar, but there is slightly improved potential performance for those who are willing to pay more for certain things. I'm just relieved that I really don't need to replace/upgrade my 8,000 albums of 16/44.1 FLAC files that took me 25 years to accumulate.

Considering how great gadgets like Fiio sound, I have spent more than I really need to on a Meier Corda headphone amp/DAC set and various headphones, but am happy with the results.

hey m@tt can you tell me what kind of hard drives are the best for video game genres? I am thinking samsung for first-person shooters as I have heard they have a smoother feel, but perhaps a western digital for MMOs

Magnetically opaque hard-drive cables will make a bigger difference than drive brands. Other than the enclosures, which you obviously have to take off to maximize kinetic expansion.

otm

Mh I prefer that vintage warmth of 5" floppies, you only have to change disks a hundred and fifty times but worth it imo

cool, can't wait to trade account info so we can play that Borderlands Pre Sequel together, I assume you won't mind if it takes me a little while to join the game :)

y'all are making sure to make the 0.8 mm diameter trepanation hole just behind each ear right? Otherwise I don't know how you can even claim to have heard what brothers in arms sounds like

proper attenuation of your skull as it relates to your tympanic membrane is so key! I prefer a 0.7 with a slight left/right offset to compensate for ocular drift (my right eye is a little lower than the left)

"I prefer a 0.7 with a slight left/right offset"

Yes - "standard" symmetry and diameter (and depth) will not always provide even halfway tolerable sound quality.

Getting it right inevitably involves a lot of trial and errorrrxoentogwspgpg

[sorry, I rally must clean this keyboard sometime]

http://xiph.org/%7Exiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

this was great. thank you.

^ v interesting thx

Misinformation and superstition only serve charlatans.

this guy will never be in audiophile magazines

I think the only things the article doesn't address are:
- People doing home mixing of recorded music, whether it's for DJing or remixing, where the extra headroom of 24 bit would be useful as it is in pro mixing
- Bass on recordings that is inaudible by the ear but intentionally in the recording

excellent article

Also, there are (and always will be) reasons to use more than 16 bits in recording and production.

I think that addresses yr 1st one mh

- People doing home mixing of recorded music, whether it's for DJing or remixing, where the extra headroom of 24 bit would be useful as it is in pro mixing

he acknowledges this, essentially, but moves on as he's writing about audio playback, not recording.

xpost kismet

true, but the source you're going to get for such things is mostly going to be whatever is commonly available and ehhh you're right

- Bass on recordings that is inaudible by the ear but intentionally in the recording

I'm probably wrong here but I got the impression that it's only the upper limit that's extended on 192kHz vs 44, and the lower limit remains the same?

I have no idea because I'm an idiot and it wasn't implicitly addressed

yes, the increased sampling rate should only extend the upper frequency limit (though, as he points out, this could in theory then make the low frequency response worse by introducing IMD at the differences of signal frequencies, which would show up in the lower frequency response). I'd guess that the lower limit of a setup is still set by the capacitive coupling of the audio signal to various circuits in a given setup. So buy some of these.

(and pray that nothing ever shorts them when fully charged)

that will do well for me when I finish my rotary subwoofer

omg I've never read about these

yeah I was joking because there is no way you could build your own without a loooot of expertise but they are basically the most awesome thing

the other deep bass thing I ran across in the last few years was an installation where they drilled motors into the concrete floor of a building and used their frequency to create bass vibrations in the whole structure

another interesting article, more about the science of hearing than audiophile stuff

http://reverb.com/blog/psychoacoustics-a-practical-guide-to-how-our-mind-distorts-sound?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=rn010915&_aid=newsletter

i get the sense that recording something at a greater bitrate than can be appreciated by the human ear makes sense for largely the same reasons that e.g. david fincher likes to shoot in 6K even though his films will never be screened in more than 4K ... because doing so allows you to preserve everything when mixing down and mastering. there's much less possibly of losing audible information via generation loss.

but actually buying /recordings/ at 24 bits, esp. at a premium cost, makes about as much sense as, i dunno, buying a 50" 8k TV. or so it seems to me.

the McGherkin effect: you perceive sounds differently with sweet baby gherkins stuffed in your ears

...hey, has anyone seen those crazybaby ads on youtube?
it's a levitating bluetooth speaker thing!
...i suspect the real audiophiles will sneer, but... the freaking thing levitates! even if it only sounds as good as other $200 bluetooth speakers, that is pretty cool.....

man when your speaker levitates you gotta ask yourself, "how good would this sound if all of that levitation money was put into the crossover!"

plus bluetooth signals sound richer in the lower mids when you hang a (WRINKLY NOT PRISTINE) sheet of 0.08mm robin's egg blue cellophane between the signal source and speaker

obv

goes without saying

Since this seems to be the place where ILM audiophiles hang out, I thought I'd ask this question here:

I bough myself a Fiio E07K DAC/headphone amplifier, and I wonder if anyone's had problems with getting the sound to it from the computer via USB? It's supposed to plug-n-play, i.e. once you plug it to the USB port, it will automatically work as DAC, and it works exactly like that on my work laptop, everything was fine with that. But with my tabletop computer, I can't get the signal to travel to it via the USB cable, so I have to plug the analog cable to the headphones plug in the computer.

I can't figure out what's wrong: the E07K shows normally on the device list, the driver software is up to date, everything seems to be correct. But when I go to the Windows sound mixer settings and try to change the sound device from the internal speakers to the E07K, I get an error message, even though the mixer shows E07K on the list of devices I can choose from. Also, while the E07K shows on the list of available audio devices, I can't change it to the default device; the option to make it the default device is there, but even if click, the it internal speakers still remain the default. I've tried everything, updating drivers, disabling the speakers so the E07K is the only sound device that's abled, but nothing helps. The laptop has Windows 7 and the tabletop has Windows 8.1, so I wonder if this problem is somehow related to 8.1?