10 Problems with the audiophile world.

#11  Some take this hobby way to seriously.

Pa-Rump-Pum-Pum Pum.

DeKay

#1  Speakers and amps need to be made synergistically.

Why "made"? Why not just matched?

#3. High End audio companies rarely show scientific measurements. Why not?
 
Would they guide people? Why? My sense is that most do not know what to do with them, and those who think they do often overestimate single data points.
 
#4  Audiophiles have very little knowledge of music production.

Why is this relevant? I don't know much about food production, either, but I'm capable of tasting, grading, discriminating what I eat. 

#6  Snake oil is not loathed but treated as an amusing possibility for better sound.

I've never seen an adequate definition of snake oil. Do you have one?

#7  Expensive equipment, confirmation bias, ego, no standards, will eat people who don’t like expensive cables.

Why is this bad?

#10 Audiophiles make subjective decisions claiming to be scientifically objective.

Isn't it a scientific fact that they subjectively preferred X over Y? Not sure what you're getting at.

#9  Audiophiles are always moving toward a goal.

Is a circle a goal?

Hilde45 +1 😊

#8 Very little blind listening tests.

I made many simple blind tests in my few years of mechanical, electrical and acoustical incremental process of optimization for my system ...

Then you means by blind test : double blind test protocol ... guess why it is generally useless for me and any other audiophile optimizing his system ?😁

Only objectivist fanatic promote double blind test as the only "proof" of a small change ...

For small change i dont need public validated proof because all ears, all designs and all gear pieces and all acoustic rooms or all headphones etc are not equals ...

For big change i dont need double blind test public validated proof either ... A company may need it to sell it , not me designing my own system with gear pieces i use my ears.. ...

#10 Audiophiles make subjective decisions claiming to be scientifically objective.

You means here without doubt without saying it explicitly :  subjectivist audiophiles ...

But the reverse is true for objectivist audiophiles ...Then i will add this to your tenth point :

They appeal to an objective limited set of electrical measurement called specs as the only ground for ANY subjective perception ...

Psycho-acoustics research rules audio, not mere electrical specs, well measured or not ...

Then :

#2 Room acoustics are so much more important than they realize.

This is true subjectivist audiophiles underestimated the impact of room acoustic on their beautiful loved gear pieces ...😊

But objectivists audiophiles, enamoured by electrical measurements tools and double blind test, ignore also that electrical specs of the gear matter way less than the room/speakers/ears settings and psycho-acoustics principles ...

#9 Audiophiles are always moving toward a goal.

Here you means deluded consumers obsessed by upgrades collection or you means objectivist fanatic in a crusade to debunk audiophiles no ?😁

As a non-subjectivist and a non-objectivist audiophile myself , my goal is never moving when i walk because my goal is inside me : learning acoustics and loving music ...

« A single set of measures cannot say all the story to tell , because all possible measures, known and unknown, are not equals » -- Anonymus acoustician

«Do we need a new theory as much, if not much more than a new fact ? »-- Anonymus hearing aids designer

 I must thanks the OP here for his ten wonderful things ... I only add my grain of salt about one of the 10 points ... 😊

my deepest respect to him ...

I think you meant Harmon @donavabdear, and I disagree with most of the rest of what you said.

I did not commented about point 6 and 7 because hilde45 did it better than i could 😁...

#6  Snake oil is not loathed but treated as an amusing possibility for better sound.

#7  Expensive equipment, confirmation bias, ego, no standards, will eat people who don’t like expensive cables.

More proof that most posts should start with IMHO.  IMHO

@bigtwin  +1

I don’t know about you guys, but I stopped eating people years ago.😁

I only see two problems:

#1. Too gullible

#2. Way too much faith

The entire core beliefs and foundation of the audiophile world is built and based on BS, voodoo and downright nonsense.   But, they are harmless, and after all, it is their money.

The problem is, the offerings chase the deep pockets, thereby limiting the choices available to the guys who just like music.  It's sort of like planet earth, in that  99% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct.  Same can be said of audio companies.

Cheers

I think this whole thread is a bit silly, but hey, it sucked me in, so whadoeyeno?

Regardless, I have two peripherally related comments:

i) The more one understands about psychoascoustics -- about how the brain perceives audio -- the more obvious it becomes that double-blind tests are not a gold standard for evaluating audio equipment. Hearing is not vision -- one integrates anomalies, the other differentiates; and if youplay the same passage multiple times you can hear different details with eacy playing, regardless of the signal chain. There’s a reason why professional listeners -- guys like the Stereophile & TAS reviewers -- generally use a different methodology.

ii) "Snake Oil" actually had real health benefits. It was a good source of Omega-3 fatty acids, possibly the earliest effective (if inadvertent) prophylactic targeting cardiovascular disease. The term only became pejorative when the market began to be flooded with "fake" snake oil, that pretended to be the real thing. Badaboom. Now you know. Charaterizing something as "true" snake oil should be a compliment.

Great post! thanks and welcome...

I appreciate especially this sentence  because i feel less alone:

The more one understands about psychoascoustics -- about how the brain perceives audio -- the more obvious it becomes that double-blind tests are not a gold standard for evaluating audio equipment.

That’s way too complicated. Just do it!

@mahgister Hey brother I'm cheering you on every time I se you sticking up for acoustics and psychoacoustics. There is a famous story about a recording studio in LA that was very popular they had a box called the "funk box" sitting between the monitors it had only an on/ off switch on it and an input and output. The box had nothing in it but producers and musicians came to this studio for the sound of that funk box, when things needed a little extra something in the mix the engineer would  carefully turn it on and watch the producers reaction to the great new sound. 

Great story....

A story with two sides, if someone understand a bit about psycho-acoustics ...

A side about the easy way we can deceive ourself, and walk in what the objectivist crowd accuse not without reasons the subjectivist crowd of : victims of deceptive placebo ...

The other side is very different and as true as the first side is true in his own way : sound quality is created by a complex set of electrical,mechanical and acoustical parameters, but it is also created by human biases , creativity , and motivation and conditioned be the moving and sound producing and perceiving body ...We contribute actively in the perceptive evaluation and interpretation with not only our brain but our heart ... It is why wise mothers and empathic doctors use positively the placebo effect to help and catalyse the body self healing process...Only drug company want to suppress it for statistical methodological reason in the testing of drugs we dont need most of the times ...

Myself being not a subjectivist nor an objectivist, but being interested by the true core of the sound process , psycho-acoustics, i push myself into ectasy by staying creative , even at the risk or i prefer to say with the profit of the placebo effect, which work by the way in the neural path of the body and in some organs the same way some drug work... It is verifiable with modern technology if we scan the body in real time ...

Also sound memory is not stored in a singular place in the brain, as books on a shelves but in all the gesturing body mapped in mutiple layers and in many zones of the brain associated with emotion which is the trigger of musical memory...

Viva placebo! If it makes musicians happier and participating they play better and they sound better and even the engineer will profit from it ...

Thank you for your kind words ...my deepest respect ...

@mahgister Hey brother I’m cheering you on every time I se you sticking up for acoustics and psychoacoustics. There is a famous story about a recording studio in LA that was very popular they had a box called the "funk box" sitting between the monitors it had only an on/ off switch on it and an input and output. The box had nothing in it but producers and musicians came to this studio for the sound of that funk box, when things needed a little extra something in the mix the engineer would carefully turn it on and watch the producers reaction to the great new sound.

@hilde45 

#1  Speakers and amps need to be made synergistically.

Why "made"? Why not just matched?

I know being an audiophile is really pretty tame and doesn't hurt anyone but I really don't like to see smart people believing in not so true ideas. To get the most out of a speaker the driver needs to be designed with a particular amp. There are many reasons for this if there is one amp and 2 drivers putting out different frequencies you are compromising the potential performance of the speaker. A high end speaker engineer selling a speaker without a designed amp is like selling a Ferrari body body being sold without without a suspension and saying just add or match a suspension until you get it right, no one would put up with that. It is understood that expensive cars need to be designed expensive stereos also need to be designed not mixed and matched.

My Doctor told me to eat less human, and more leafy greens.

@donavabdear 

To get the most out of a speaker the driver needs to be designed with a particular amp. There are many reasons for this if there is one amp and 2 drivers putting out different frequencies you are compromising the potential performance of the speaker. A high end speaker engineer selling a speaker without a designed amp is like selling a Ferrari body body being sold without without a suspension and saying just add or match a suspension until you get it right, no one would put up with that. It is understood that expensive cars need to be designed expensive stereos also need to be designed not mixed and matched.

This is really stunning news to me. After reading for years now about the ability to find good and synergistic matches between different speakers with different amps -- so many people are wrong about this. Audiophiles are incredibly misinformed and uneducated about this critical fact that you are pointing out. That is, if it's true.

https://www.themasterswitch.com/how-to-match-speakers-and-amps

@hilde45 
Here's a little cut and past of my studio speakers on some of the benefits of being powered in just the crossovers. A small part of the design.

The active crossover design offers multiple benefits:

• The frequency response becomes independent of any dynamic changes in the driver’s electrical characteristics or the drive level.
• There is an increased flexibility and precision to adjust and fine tune each output frequency response for the specific drivers used.
• Each driver has its own signal processing and power amplifier. This isolates each driver from the drive signals handled by the other drivers, reducing inter-modulation distortion and overdriving problems.
• The ability to compensate for sensitivity variations between drivers.
• The possibility to compensate for the frequency and phase response anomalies associated with a driver’s characteristics within the intended pass-band.
• The flat frequency response of a high-quality active loudspeaker is a result of the combined effect of the crossover filter response, power amplifier responses and driver responses in a loudspeaker enclosure.

There are so many reasons why powered and active speakers are the future the sports car analogy is one most audiophile understand. Everyone knows powered speakers are the future in every category of playback, I started a thread about how audiophiles were confused about powered speakers, 65k views later people still didn't have a clue. Yes you can put a "A"  or "AB" or whatever kind of amp you want in a speakers you just need big heat sinks (Pass did it).

Look at it from this point of view, today speaker cables cables are becoming some of the largest costs in a system, assuming that this is a proper use of audio money then why not bypass the cables completely. If there is merit in the idea that cables create such a huge deeper, wider, higher, lower, more accurate, tighter bass, blacker backgrounds, more musicality which is caused by hyper priced 1 meter speaker cables then why not do without cables all together just think of the musicality then wow. For that reason alone (if it is valid) designed powered speakers make sense. 

In life or in audio, there is always many roads to the summit of the mountain...

 Thanks hilde45 for the video ...

And for sure my little self powered speakers are impossible to beat for the S.Q. /price ratio scale ...

But there is no one solution for all in my book ...

@mahgister 
Here is a story about perception that I've never forgot. 
I was doing the production sound (recording the actors on stage) on the TV show "Bones" about 5 years ago. I was using an excellent sound package with all the very best analog recording equipment then making a long story short I switched sound package and used one with the very best digital recording equipment using the same microphones with my usual headphones recording the actors who's voices I knew perfectly in the acoustic environment that I knew exactly using the same boom operator who I had worked with for many years. I switched systems (which never happen to me before in almost 40 years of production sound). The first 3 seconds of hearing the actors voice made me a believer in digital. In production sound you have to be hyper critical and exceptionally careful about every aspect of the actors voice the digital signal was so much better. It was like looking down the grocery store aisle and seeing a beautiful girl then realizing that that girl is your wife, the reaction was honest.

Very informative story and i believe you ...

I never enter in this debate analog-digital...The brain work analog-digital-analog -digital in translation ...

But my audio system is dac based and i own only lossless files ...

Also there is more about sound than clarity and details so ....But in speech perception clarity and details win the race ...We must clearly hear what is spoken ...And for sure in music without clarity and details there is a problem ...

Tacet a polish musical company record all their albums with analog tube process and their sound is audiophile grade and rich in harmonic not agressive and i love it more than almost any other recordings ( save the one mic recording by Sound Liaison ) ... Even if i listen from a dac Tacet albums they distinguish themselves by their refined sound ...

The truth is our brain work in a digital-analog- analog-digital translation chain... Choosing one over the other is misleading save for special audio purpose ...

I must admit though that you have experience in audio which i had not at all ... I am only a not completely uninformed music listener ...Then i believe and trust your opinion  for sure ...This must be said ...

😊

@mahgister Here is a story about perception that I’ve never forgot. I was doing the production sound (recording the actors on stage) on the TV show "Bones" about 5 years ago. I was using an excellent sound package with all the very best analog recording equipment then making a long story short I switched sound package and used one with the very best digital recording equipment using the same microphones with my usual headphones recording the actors who’s voices I knew perfectly in the acoustic environment that I knew exactly using the same boom operator who I had worked with for many years. I switched systems (which never happen to me before in almost 40 years of production sound). The first 3 seconds of hearing the actors voice made me a believer in digital. In production sound you have to be hyper critical and exceptionally careful about every aspect of the actors voice the digital signal was so much better. It was like looking down the grocery store aisle and seeing a beautiful girl then realizing that that girl is your wife, the reaction was honest.

 

 

 

I should have recorded it, so i shall have to paraphrase his comment from yesterday: “ The Grateful Dead taught me achieving great audio quality was about more than great specifications “ John Curl at LA / Orange County Audio Society gala where he was one of those honored with an award.

@mahgister There are lots of ways to make records sound good and volume level is probably the best but then you get the industry corrupting volume wars of the 80s it was horrible. Tubes make things sound better you would have to be slightly dead not to know that. What is the goal, I would say it’s recording more accurately and putting music together in ways that can expand creativity. In my Pro Tools system you can put in literally hundreds of digital apps that were impossible to get even a few years ago there are not limits to the things you can do with sound today.

I personally told an executive at Apple that he really hurt the future of music I said he made music so easy that now quality is secondary. He seems surprised like he had never heard this before, I said todays young adults can’t tell the difference between mp3 and 192k in fact many prefer it, you at Apple need to do Hi Fi on iTunes, I’m sure that it was just a coincidence that about a year later they did.

In my opinion the creative part of recording music shouldn’t infringe of the technical side of playing it back, if playback is a creative process they the recording and mixing is impugned not meaningless but it would be like looking at a picture in a museum through rose colored classes, if the artist wanted the picture to be rose colored he would have painted it like that.

i concur with your post opinion for sure ...