Awesome Audiophile Snake Oil

http://shop.mapleshadestore.com/Mapleshade-Static-Draining-Brush/productinfo/SDBRUSH/

MAYBE this thing makes sense for vinyl, but for CDs??

I think they would have more fun spending money on drugs and listening to music than buying a brush.

Utter bullshit, a static charge is unable to affect how light reflects from an optical discs's binary pits. Even for LPs the issue with static is attracting dust, not some magical effect on the needle in the groove.

*disc's - sigh

This Stooges box set with 9 different takes on "Dirt" sounds so exquisite on this black tar heroin in this old 90s boombox after I sold my McIntosh poweramp to Big Al up in Stuebensville. While not as definitively high fi, the boombox's aurual distortion along with the nodding out pulls out a true extension of the artist intentions.

getting closer to the pure source

Awesome audiophile hash oil I have known and loved

My audiophile work colleague has just had his oven replaced and has now got an induction hob. Not only is it great for cooking he swears that his hi-fi sounds better, he thinks the old cooker was tainting the power supply.

yeah that sounds legit, def won’t lead to him tearing down the walls of his home in the middle of the night in search of the problematic electrons which are causing some weird trebly flutters on his copy of kind of blue

the cracks, whistles, hums, and whooshes had crisper mids supported by a thicker, more robust low end
https://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS00060832/

hahaha

thank you SG for these laughs

Serious question here:
I visited a record dealer once, and he had what looked to be quite a high-end turntable.
Rather than being mounted on a conventional plinth, it seemed like the turntable was sitting on top of some bizarre miniature waterbed or something, free to sway from side to side ever so slightly.
I don't think I'd call it snake oil, though, as the turntable did sound really amazing.
Anybody have any idea what this actually is? I don't recall the brand name.

I've heard of some turntables suspended on a thin later of an oil or gel type substance but that shit is generally some super high end stuff

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/reddit-audiophiles-test-homepod-say-it-sounds-better-than-1000-speaker/

In-depth test says $350 speaker has a "near-perfectly flat frequency response."

kind of makes me want to try these myself

I'd love to get a HomePod, but it works only with Apple Music or songs you bought from iTunes. It won't play songs you've burned from CDs.

uh what

I guess for voice control maybe, but you can stream to it from any of your devices, and I believe it works fine with iTunes Match. That's kind of a racket in that it's $15/year but hey, you're streaming

lol audiophile snake oil + apple fanboy delusions what a combo

it's apple, i guarantee there are already like a dozen speakers like that half as much and just as good

this is like when they "invented" wireless earbuds

the earbuds are really good though

I think the apple superfan claim is generally that apple didn't necessarily invent anything, just that whatever the thing is, it was no good until Apple did it

I've been working with Apple guys for years, I'm glad you like them, for $159 I certainly hope you do.

It's a religion at this point there's no point in arguing.

i actually had a chance to use the earbuds

they sound very nice and has a weirdly good bass response

have*

but i also just use my german maestro gmp 8.5d's most of the time

I guess for voice control maybe, but you can stream to it from any of your devices
Well, what I've been reading says otherwise. "If you add music to your home iTunes library that was not acquired through a purchase, HomePod will not be able to access it." (Link below.) That means about 99 percent of the music in my library can't be played through this speaker. I tried Apple Music for about a month, but it screwed up my existing library so I dumped it.
https://9to5mac.com/2018/01/23/homepod-can-play-purchased-itunes-music-podcasts-and-stream-beats-1-without-apple-music-subscription/

hard to believe that two play:1s (or ones?) as a stereo pair wouldn't be preferable for the price of one homepod

it acts as a normal airplay speaker
AirPlaying content to HomePod is obviously unrestricted.
the article isn’t clear but they’re talking about what works via siri

you can run spotify or whatever on a phone, or even have it act as an apple tv speaker and play stuff there

I think they’re trying to frame it in terms of the amazon/google devices that can link to multiple music services natively (“alexa, play X artist on spotify”) as opposed to using it as a speaker you just stream things to

I've seen this confusion a lot in the media, which is understandable - the set of what you can tell the speaker to do is smaller than what the speaker can actually do. I guess Siri, being a cloud agent, has no idea what mp3s you have on your machine, but only knows about the files associated with your iCloud account

If I didn't already have a killer speaker that does things the homepod can't do - be wireless, have an input jack - I'd be all over this thing, I don't care how lobotomized the 'home speaker' aspect is, since I hate that stuff and never use it

Er, 'wireless' = 'battery-powered'

the real time and automatic spectral flattening is interesting (and not new, I don't think). But I wonder if there's a more advanced analysis that accounts for the fact that the microphone is located at the speaker and not actually where you are listening. I enjoy thinking about the room correction problem, but I generally don't care about it when listening. It would probably drive me crazy imagining that my speaker might be messing with its spectral response as I'm listening at any given moment. maybe you can turn it off.

xpost OK, maybe I'm not understanding. So I can play anything in my iTunes library on a HomePod, just like I do now through AppleTV (using AirPlay)?

yup

it’s an airplay speaker with siri built in and some other “smart” audio correction

room correction for spectral flatness might be good for removing extreme notches or peaks, but I don't think a mastering engineer assumes you'll be listening on a speaker that is spectrally flat. he/she is already making compromises to accommodate various listening environments. so you are better off using measurements to prove snake oil, i.e. if a thing doesn't change the measurement it doesn't actually do anything. but you should use your own ears, music, and listening environment to decide if speakers actually sound good to you. you have your own filter curve the speaker can't know, anyhow.

I'm sure that you can train an EQ AI in some piece of software to try and account for your internal filter curve, though

yup
it’s an airplay speaker with siri built in and some other “smart” audio correction
Thanks. I need to look into iTunes Match, which may be the way to go for me since most of my digitalized music was burned from CDs.

I joined Apple Music a couple of months ago and had no problem with it doing the matching with my juuuuust-under 100 000 songs (that's the limit for matching). it uploaded a bunch of stuff but lots of that is stuff they have but it didn't recognize my metadata. I'm hoping that I will get over caring about metadata with this thing because I have wasted a lot of time on that over the years.

not gonna get a homepad though

have*

but i also just use my german maestro gmp 8.5d's most of the time

― papa poutine (∞), Tuesday, February 13, 2018 11:50 AM (forty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

how are these??? they are on massdrop now and i'm intruiged...

iTunes Match can be a pretty neat way to clean up your library if you have an assortment of things that were ripped at varying quality and are ok with AAC audio format (which pretty much everything plays). Sync your whole library, make a playlist of only matched songs, and then delete anything matched that's in low quality -- old rips at 160kbps or whatever, one-offs that have metadata good enough to match but are otherwise a little messy. Then you can redownload those songs at iTunes store quality, all tagged up and everything, without DRM. You have to be a little careful to make sure it didn't misidentify but it's generally fine.

Sufjan, the EQ stuff reminds me the most of stuff a lot of home receivers have like Audyssey or similar branded features. Instead of moving a little mic around your room as your receiver plays test tones, it does it automatically. It's not for everyone, but I've had it work pretty well.

do not let itunes match anywhere near your library without making a backup

that, too

xxxp

i mean you gotta test them for yrself obviously but they have a very flat frequency response, i use them for monitoring, it has barely any bass response, and almost every sound sounds very crisp and clear

speaker should be called apple crisp obv

the nuraphones seem to run with the idea of each person being a unique filter. I suppose room correction would still be needed to do this sort of thing in a loudspeaker. not saying it isn't snake oil, though.

you don't need to be an audiophile to see that the main selling point of a standalone speaker is never going to be sound quality

it's kinda like suggesting the big mac is the best burger ever (or even the best in its price range)

it’s that you just want.. one speaker, man

(There are actually many tweeters, a subwoofer, etc)

A bunch of style brands have speakers on that principle but it’s halfway between those and a smart device with passable sound like an echo

I’ve kind of lusted after this thing but I have lots of hoarded things and can’t justify buying more: https://teenageengineering.com/products/od-11

There is also that harman kardon all-in-one speaker that looks like the sub from the old soundsticks, those transparent ones that were always in pictures next to macs in the early 00s. Those sounded nice, for computer speakers

xp yes, I agree. and you are always going to get the somewhat off-feeling directional bass that reminds you of your college computer speakers. can you not do stereo pairing with the homepod? I agree that adding stereo separation or a sub offers more improvement over simply buying a better standalone speaker with the same size and separation issues compensated with arrays of drivers and dsp.

that OD-11 looks cool. I wonder what directional orthogonality gets you when the two orthogonal drivers already appear to be frequency orthogonal, though. I'm sure that swedish sound genius knew.

https://www.bang-olufsen.com/recreate/setup/

that's cool!