10 Wonderful things and 10 bad things about the audiophile world.

@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.

@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. 

@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.

@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.