Awesome Audiophile Snake Oil

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

?

the klipsch speakers i am talking about are like $300-$500. that’s not like, crazy money for a speaker, is it?

altec 605s on the other hand …

and that’s for the pair of speakers, btw

lots of ranges being represented. i will probably be able to do upper low end at some point. the bookshelf speakers that sfj eventually gets would be doable for me. spread out upgrades on that level over a few years and voila. it's just not a priority for me atm though.

what i really wonder is where are the women audiophiles?

every audiophile article or discussion i see feels like going back 70 years not just in terms of speaker technology but also in terms of women seemingly not existing

so true. every discussion of size / appearance inevitably veers into discussion of whether it is “wife friendly” etc. hi fi forums are actually super toxic in general (maybe because it’e a lot of ppl acting out their anxieties about buying the best equipment so that they can listen to the worst music) but that aspect always jumps out at me

my guess is that it has roots in how hi fi culture was linked to postwar “bachelor pad” culture. i think we forget that a lot of these things (nice stereos and record collections) were out of reach of many consumers (at least until the early 60s) so would have been heavily marketed toward ppl with disposable income (bachelors with professional jobs)

at least i forget that. maybe blame it on how we’ve romanticized the image of “midcentury living”

when my brother-in-law was in grad school he worked closely with two professors - one had an incredibly complex and expensive audiophile system and the other had insane amounts of expensive wine in his custom wine cellar.

He said they would argue with each other all the time because each thought the other's hobby was an elitist, pointless waste of time and thought the other arrogant or foolish to claim that they could hear or taste the subtitles and nuances they claimed to be able to detect. They were basically the exact same person with slightly different hobbies.

lol

the Hoffman forums is like an all-male prison planet, Beatles playing constantly on shockingly good speakers throughout the penitentiaries. One post I saw awhile back was someone bemoaning how his wife didn’t always want to listen to the music he wanted to play, and glumly concluding he wished he lived alone.

Not that ilm has the best track record wrt female posters either tbh

re affordability, nobody is going to write an article about my system but it is good enough for me (ie i am actively pleased with how my music sounds and don’t crave upgrades) - the basics (tt/amp/speakers) cost me about $100 total - at one point the most expensive item in the setup was a pair of 2 inch pre-post jumper cables made by QED lol

i spent heaps of time researching and learning about brands/models so i would know a bargain when i saw it - setting up classified alerts, haunting thrift stores and flea markets (i do this anyway) - so there is a definite labour component

to me the pursuit of good sound is actually pretty beautiful but the dick-swinging consumption aspect mentioned above is deeply yuk - one other thing is how all audiophiles are super-finicky about cosmetic condition, keeping original boxes etc. i know one guy who wraps his remote controls in clingfilm! so if you’re happy to go with beat-up vintage gear then it is a real advantage in this space - kind of like buying a NM record with a G cover - if you’re in it for the music then it’s fine

anyway my friends/peers always say how much they enjoy listening on the setup when they’re around, and it almost certainly cost less than the bluetooth speaker they make do with at home - maybe there is an element of “hey i am a good shopper!!” in this post but i would also say if yr audio-curious it definitely worth the effort to take yr listening up a couple of notches

audiophiles are always selling the new thing they bought 3 months later to buy the newer shinier thing they want to buy, so yeah if you have your eye on a piece of gear and are patient you can score good deals. hifishark is a good collator of listings and you can set up alerts too.

if i were to do it on a budget, a thrift store receiver + $50 bookshelves from a good brand off of craigslist + usb dac for your computer (assuming that's your source) would be the way i'd go. home depot cut-by-the-foot power cable for speaker wire. then killfile any thread that mentions 'audiophile', listen to your music in blissful peace.

i know one guy who wraps his remote controls in clingfilm!

was he from the middle east? because tbf my parents and all their peers would keep a new couch wrapped like that for a year or two. at that point you could unwrap the new tv remote but you had to put it in a ziploc bag (true story)

and yeah keeping the original boxes + clingfilm is because they know they are just going to put it up in the classifieds section of head-fi in a few months.

My most expensive component is my Cambridge Audio amp, think it was on sale for $800. I got lucky because my house got struck by lightning and burned out a bunch of electronics and the adjuster overvalued a lot of stuff.

Which is hilarious cuz I can't imagine anything sounding better but even a grand is peanuts in the scheme of things.

I think I have those same speakers, tlg, I just meant all the expensive Magic Alex stuff. That listening_room instagram account is frightening. Rooms filled with ugly electronics on one side and the other side of the room looks like a haunted 1 star motel room

oh yeah? do you like them? i’ve always had this mythical view of klipsch cause of mancuso + the loft, was thinking about getting some new speakers and was surprised how affordable these are, especially compared to many of the other “historic” speakers like jbl century, klipsch heresy, altecs etc

actually it’s the kp3.5 that I have, they sound really good to me but I’ve never done any a/b-ing or anything. also haven’t really been able to really crank them cuz neighbors. I like the looks of those kp4s.

kg

Y’all are talking too much about gear that a halfway normal person might buy and not $92,000 hand-magnetized hard drives

Does this guy think he has a first gen Beatles master tape in his collection?

I can't figure it out. At best, this would be a production master copped from a pressing plant, perhaps a 1/4 reel copy of an original half-inch (or 1/4 inch) mix-master. But he's acting like it's the holy grail of sound quality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLWHPy9zdGs

“It sounds like Paul McCartney is singing right next to you!” No, it sounds like someone is talking over the music.

And anyway, wasn’t it the professional industry standard that 1/4” master tapes play at 15 ips (inches per second)? Because it looks like its playing a lot slower than that.

30 ips is generally better sound quality but you really eat through tape, 15 ips can be great too, but it's a little grittier, I guess it's more of a flavor thing. I'd imagine lower than 15 ips and it would get even more effected.

in the opening seconds he says "this is the original Let It Be master recording" while holding a 7" acetate, so his definition of 'master' seems to be pretty fluid. I LOLd at his stupid chart where he explains how blu ray only has a fraction the sound quality of LPs, because they are more generations removed from the master tape - as if people are dubbing music onto each new format from the previous format. guy seems like a complete idiot.

Lol that is the dumbest theory I've ever heard.

XP - Yeah, 7.5ips can be pretty grungy on 1/4 inch by comparison, better if mono though, using the entire width of the tape.

I'm wondering if a lot is being lost in translation here