Is There any Consensus at all amongst Audiophiles?

The differing opinions and differing priorities are part of what makes audiophilia so much fun and what earns the sport so much derision.  What variety of angels should we count when we gaze at the head of a pin?  Imaging angels?  Angels that have slam?  Why do we have to count those angels anyway?  Isn't it good enough for the music to just have a beat we can dance to? 

Is There any Consensus at all amongst Audiophiles?

Is there any way to herd cats?

A consensus among audiophiles is only motivated by relative comparison in a unique particular room, in a very peculiar electrical grid in some building....Therefore the consensus is only motivated by our own ears and history of listening sessions and experience and experiments...Being an audiophile is a journey in listening and an education of our hearing potential...Absolutely not a science...Consensus is temporary and very relative to our own journey and education...

And "no way to herd cats" indeed... My best to all...


P.S. For sure there is some rules, for example in placing speakers, in matching gear, in room treatment etc

And also some evident fact: an amplifier costing 10,000 is probably better than my vintage very good Sansui...

They all want: "good" sound. "Good" is subjective. So there you go.

I wouldn’t waste to much time pining over the fact everyone has their own perception of what is "good" when it comes to sound. It’s largely a matter of opinion and preference.

Probably easier to get agreement on really bad ie very distorted sound than on what sounds best.

Just like most would agree dog doo flavor ice cream is bad but which flavor is best?

I think we can find a level of consensus in that we enjoy music. Different types for sure, but music nonetheless. 

Sometimes even old forgotten theories eg Flat Earth, can attempt a comeback!

That's a hypothesis. A theory is correct until proven otherwise.

I believe in science and engineering.



I believe in measurements.


I also believe in the buyer's listening pleasure being the most important thing in choosing equipment.


Oscilloscopes don't put up with bosses, angry customers and snow bound commutes to afford a pair of  speakers, people do, and those who shell out the money, in the end, should decide what brings them joy that is worth the exchange.


It is a great deal of fun to talk tech, and to learn and to share what new ideas are coming down the pipeline, but ultimately I believe that to your own ears you must be true.

If I had realized this was a bloviation contest I would have posted sooner. If memory serves there has NEVER been audiophile consensus on ANYTHING. Don’t believe Me? Check out cables, power cords, fuses, solid state vs tubes, tube brands, speaker designs, direct drive vs belt drive, contact enhancers, CD treatments, CD vs Vinyl, CD vs streaming, cassette vs CD, coloring CDs, demagnetizing CDs and cables, tweaks that are nit in the audio signal anywhere in the system, and others no doubt.

I believe we can all agree that kenjit is a troublemaker.

Sorry, pal. Wrong thread. 

I disagree.....

How about a little poll to test the waters?

Ginger?
Mary Ann?
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart?

Pick one.

DeKay

"Indeed there have been no major upheavals in scientific thought for almost one hundred years."

I think you need to pay more attention to what is happening in biology (That is, if you’re interested). :)

Read Malcom Gladwell’s "Blink", which if I have the right tile of the several good books he has written, is about "thin slicing", in brief, the decisions that are made split second, and come from intuition and experience.

Applied to audio: People make quick decisions based on intuition and experience, and draw firm conclusions that are not easily dislodged. Different ears, different systems, different musical media.

No formal consensus on the myriad of expressions of HiFi. And that’s ok, because it’s a hobby (and, yes, an industry for some), not a lab study. There is a concerted effort on the part of industry members to be different, so obviously if consensus is not important among the industry members in terms of setting a universal standard, then it will hardly develop among enthusiasts of those companies. :)

douglas_schroeder

I am happily with you on this post.... My best... 

We had the CD laser. We had Intelligent Chip. We had the Quantum Clip. We had New Dark Matter. We had the Schumann frequency generator, We even had Graphene fuses. What the hell else do you want?

Who are Ginger and Mary Ann?

They were the Gilligan's Island's version of a Hobbesian choice.

IMO this comes back to understand design and what impacts sound in what ways.  To me that was the learning experience on how to improve sound and in what ways sound could be improved.  To me this is why there are so many opinions and no consensus or at least some of the why.

I disagree and agree with some opinions but overall don't think most people understand the how and the why sound can be improved.

Happy Listening.

+1 I’d add people generally don’t know where their system stacks up on the overall curve of sound quality or how to get to the next level. Consequently, they aim too low. Most audiophiles are at least two paradigm shifts behind the power curve, I’d opine.

I think we can all agree that U2 only had one good song. 

No way!

Indeed there have been no major upheavals in scientific thought for almost one hundred years.

Yeah. Right. Plate tectonics. Look it up.

@nonoise Am I missing a reference to John Hobbes, or do you mean Hobson's choice?

Yes, maybe and no.

@noromance ,
I struggled between the two choices and settled on Hobbes. He believed the common man couldn’t properly choose and was powerless to reach any outcome, or something like that, without guidance from a sovereign (Leviathan).

The Hobson’s choice was something like a take it or leave it situation. I had to look them up to make sure (it’s been so long). 

All the best,
Nonoise

The only thing I can think of is that YOUR ROOM is the most important element of any sound system.

Other than that, everyone likes what they like, so that is GOOD!

Cheers!

@nonoise , are we human or are we cats?

@maghister, "And also some evident fact: an amplifier costing 10,000 is probably better than my vintage very good Sansui..."

I agree with what you say about individual experience. Your comment above ('probably better') shows just how difficult it is to establish any definites. 

@boxer12, agreed. Surely we all like music?

@erik_squires , totally agree.

@flatbackground, not sure about that. I think his arguments do have merit. I just wish he'd pull his punches a bit more.

@douglas_schroeder , I have read Blink and don't see what it adds to the work of Freud. Sure Siggy's writings go in and out of fashion but the acid test of his analysis of the workings of the unconscious mind is currently moving along almost hand in hand with the ongoing development of fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scanning technology. Whew!

@andrewkelly, do you mean "AlI Want is You"?

@bpoletti , you're probably right. Perspective matters.

@richopp, in extreme cases yes.
A dead room can almost kill the life/energy out of any sound. But on the other hand too much life (echo) has its own issues.

So yes, the room matters.

I remember once reading somewhere that theories in science don't necessarily disprove and succeed each other - merely that when proponents of less popular theories die they often take their theory with them.

So even in science there is no absolute right or wrong, merely an accepted consensus which can change from day to day. Much like the butter or margarine debate which has seen both sides on top at one time or another. Sometimes even old forgotten theories eg Flat Earth, can attempt a comeback!

However this lack of consensus only applies to cutting edge science. It does not mean that the vast amount of accumulated scientific knowledge is held in contention. Indeed there have been no major upheavals in scientific thought for almost one hundred years.

This is just uninformed scientific nihilism.  In the last 25 years humans have confirmed the existence of exoplanets, discovered the universe is expanded at an increasing rate of speed, measured gravity waves from colliding neutron stars (which also confirmed the genesis of many heavy elements) and discovered that super massive black holes are at the center of nearly all galaxies.  And that's just a few of the scientific discoveries from astronomy.

There's more happening between human beings than figuring out what power cord to use.

As several others have noted, you seem to have sabotaged the main point of your post by including the statement that there have been no major upheavals in scientific thought for almost one hundred years. To a scientist such as myself, this is just a frightfully ignorant statement. Here are a few of the more important ideas: Big Bang Theory and accelerating expansion of the universe, the Cosmic Microwave Background, the age of the universe, missing mass and energy (dark matter and dark energy), exoplanets, plate tectonics, Quantum mechanics and the structure of atoms, quarks, Superconductivity, DNA (which conclusively proves evolution), and vaccines (which have saved millions of lives). 

You remember some of this statement, but the devil is in the details.


The statement was more along the lines of scientific advancement does not always happen because a new theory is so obviously better, but that those who hold on, often viciously, to "old" theories, eventually die.

It was not a statement about whether the old theory was right or wrong, the statement accepted that the new one was correct, it was that old ideas often literally have to die, because the proponents who hold old to them, their life's work, often respected scientists, refuse to accept they were wrong (and what that would mean).

Flat Earth is not a theory, and barely a hypothesis, but perhaps a good example. The Greeks showed the earth was round in about 2,000 BC. Look how long it took some powerful organizations to accept that it really was round, and even longer to accept it was not the center of the universe, even though the evidence was clear to those that understood it.

I remember once reading somewhere that theories in science don't necessarily disprove and succeed each other - merely that when proponents of less popular theories die they often take their theory with them.

So even in science there is no absolute right or wrong, merely an accepted consensus which can change from day to day. Much like the butter or margarine debate which has seen both sides on top at one time or another. Sometimes even old forgotten theories eg Flat Earth, can attempt a comeback!

Thank you for the clarification berner99!

Can we at least agree that one objective we all strive for is to reproduce the source material without alterations? Regardless of source type, don’t we all want to build a system that won’t add or subtract anything?  Leave the issue of source quality or accuracy out of this equation. 

vinylfan62,

Probably not. We are already listening in an artificial environment to music that is almost exclusively not representative of a single listener ... so why stop there.

A little extra 3rd harmonic distortion, a little aliased high frequencies, a little compression .... are all things that some people in this community prefer, and perhaps listening condition dependent, many will.

I think a better statement would be the potential for reproduction without alteration. Then let the user decide what they want to hear.

Atdavid, I think we are saying the same thing- no unintended alteration from input to output. That’s my goal. I had assumed it was everyone’s goal. 

@nonoise 
There is one way to herd cats....
Starve them.
Have food.
Run faster than they can.

Yes, I know; not specifically 'herding' but one achieves the same goal.
*shrug*  Vaguely applicable in our instance as well, no? *L*

@atdavid,

"I think a better statement would be the potential for reproduction without alteration. Then let the user decide what they want to hear. "

I can agree with that. *S*  The only addendum would be "...to the best of one's budget, site, and tastes."

A 'baseline' we all might agree on...at least, in theory...;)

BTW...Happy Saturday.

@berner99, thanks for the clarification. I couldn’t recall where I read it but that it did bother me then that science often progresses in such haphazard ways.

Anyway the point that I wanted to make was that there is a large consensus in science that has not seen major turbulence since quantum physics, Einstein, Freud, Pasteur, Darwin etc who all changed the way we see the world. Even politically there has been nothing new since Marx - just the usual constantly ongoing development.

Hence a broad consensus, upon which the world is built and continues to function, is in effect.

I think it should be possible to set up a consensus amongst audiophiles for the good reason to prevent the constant (financially driven?) muddying of the waters that seems to go on incessantly.

Surely it’s beyond disputing that

1 loudspeakers which are easier to drive permit a wider range of amplifiers to be considered?

2 amplifiers with greater power are more desirable than similar ones with less?

3 the room matters

4 mastering of source material matters

5 loudspeakers vary the most in terms of quality in regards to domestic playback equipment.

Of course there must be many more but perhaps there’s no need to go on further.

Perhaps we already have an existing template and just need to make it more readily available before it’s airbrushed out of history.

Instead of the bewildering complexity facing all enthusiasts and perhaps we can look back to find an existing template to use as a broad consensus to work with.

Perhaps we could re-read and enjoy the final article from the pen of the late Peter Aczel as printed here below.



1. Audio is a mature technology. Its origins go back to Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Alva Edison in the 1870s. By the early 1930s, at the legendary Bell Laboratories, they had thought of just about everything, including multichannel stereo. The implementation keeps improving to this day, but conceptually there is very little, perhaps nothing, really new. I have been through all phases of implementation—shellac records via crystal pickups, LPs via magnetic and moving-coil pickups, CDs, SACDs, Blu-rays, downloads, full-range and two/three/four-way mono /stereo /multichannel speakers, dynamics, electrostatics, ribbons (shall I go on?)—and heard incremental improvements most of the time, but at no point did the heavens open up and the seraphim blow their trumpets. That I could experience only in the concert hall and not very often at that.

Wide-eyed reviewers who are over and over again thunderstruck by the sound of the latest magic cable or circuit tweak are delusional.

2. The principal determinants of sound quality in a recording produced in the last 60 years or so are the recording venue and the microphones, not the downstream technology. The size and acoustics of the hall, the number and placement of the microphones, the quality and level setting of the microphones will have a much greater influence on the perceived quality of the recording than how the signal was captured—whether on analog tape, digital tape, hard drive, or even direct-to-disk cutter; whether through vacuum-tube or solid-state electronics; whether with 44.1-kHz/16-bit or much higher resolution.

The proof of this can be found in some of the classic recordings from the 1950s and 1960s that sound better, more real, more musical, than today’s average super-HD jobs. Lewis Layton, Richard Mohr, Wilma Cozart, Bob Fine, John Culshaw, where are you now that we need you?

3. The principal determinants of sound quality in your listening room, given the limitations of a particular recording, are the loudspeakers—not the electronics, not the cables, not anything else. This is so fundamental that I still can’t understand why it hasn’t filtered down to the lowest levels of the audio community.

The melancholy truth is that a new amplifier will not change your audio life. It may, or may not, effect a very small improvement (usually not unless your old amplifier was badly designed), but the basic sound of your system will remain the same. Only a better loudspeaker can change that. My best guess as to why the loudspeaker-comes-first principle has not prevailed in the audiophile world is that a new pair of loudspeakers tends to present a problem in interior decoration. Swapping amplifiers is so much simpler, not to mention spouse-friendlier, and the initial level of anticipation is just as high, before the eventual letdown (or denial thereof).

4. Cables—that’s one subject I can’t discuss calmly. Even after all these years, I still fly into a rage when I read “$900 per foot” or “$5200 the pair.” That’s an obscenity, a despicable extortion exploiting the inability of moneyed audiophiles to deal with the laws of physics. The transmission of electrical signals through a wire is governed by resistance, inductance, and capacitance (R, L, and C). That’s all, folks! (At least that’s all at audio frequencies. At radio frequencies the geometry of the cable begins to have certain effects.) An audio signal has no idea whether it is passing through expensive or inexpensive RLC. It retains its purity or impurity regardless. There may be some expensive cables that sound “different” because they have crazy RLC characteristics that cause significant changes in frequency response. That’s what you hear, not the $900 per foot. And what about the wiring inside your loudspeakers, inside your amplifiers, inside your other components? What you don’t see doesn’t count, doesn’t have to be upgraded for megabucks? What about the miles of AC wiring from the power station to your house and inside your walls? Only the six-foot length of the thousand-dollar power cord counts?

The lack of common sense in the high-end audio market drives me to despair.

5. Loudspeakers are a different story. No two of them sound exactly alike, nor will they ever. All, or at least nearly all, of the conflicting claims have some validity. The trouble is that most designers have an obsessive agenda about one particular design requirement, which they then inflate above all others, marginalizing the latter. Very few designers focus on the forest rather than the trees. The best designer is inevitably the one who has no agenda, meaning that he does not care which engineering approach works best as long as it really does. And the design process does not stop with the anechoic optimization of the speaker. Imagine a theoretically perfect loudspeaker that has an anechoic response like a point source, producing exactly the same spherical wave front at equal levels at all frequencies. If a pair of such speakers were brought into a normally reverberant room with four walls, a floor, and a ceiling, they wouldn’t sound good! They would only be a good start, requiring further engineering. It’s complicated.

Loudspeakers are the only sector of audio where significant improvements are still possible and can be expected. I suspect that (1) further refinements of radiation pattern will result in the largest sonic benefits and (2) powered loudspeakers with electronic crossovers will end up being preferred to passive-crossover designs.

In any case, one thing I am fairly sure of: No breakthrough in sound quality will be heard from “monkey coffins” (1970s trade lingo), i.e. rectangular boxes with forward-firing drivers. I’ll go even further: Even if the box is not rectangular but some incredibly fancy shape, even if it’s huge, even if it costs more than a luxury car, if it’s sealed or vented and the drivers are all in front, it’s a monkey coffin and will sound like a monkey coffin—boxy and, to varying degrees, not quite open and transparent.

6. Amplifiers have been quite excellent for more than a few decades, offering few opportunities for engineering breakthroughs. There are significant differences in topology, measured specifications, physical design, and cosmetics, not to mention price, but the sound of all properly designed units is basically the same. The biggest diversity is in power supplies, ranging from barely adequate to ridiculously overdesigned. That may or may not affect the sound quality, depending on the impedance characteristics and efficiency of the loudspeaker.

The point is that, unless the amplifier has serious design errors or is totally mismatched to a particular speaker, the sound you will hear is the sound of the speaker, not the amplifier.

As for the future, I think it belongs to highly refined class D amplifiers, such as Bang & Olufsen’s ICEpower modules and Bruno Putzeys’s modular Hypex designs, compact and efficient enough to be incorporated in powered loudspeakers. The free-standing power amplifier will slowly become history, except perhaps as an audiophile affectation. What about vacuum-tube designs? If you like second-harmonic distortion, output transformers, and low damping factors, be my guest. (Can you imagine a four-way powered loudspeaker driven by vacuum-tube modules?)

7. We should all be grateful to the founding fathers of CD at Sony and Philips for their fight some 35 years ago on behalf of 16-bit, instead of 14-bit, word depth on CDs and 44.1 kHz sampling rate. Losing that fight would have retarded digital media by several decades. As it turned out, the 16-bit/44.1-kHz standard has stood the test of time; after all these years it still sounds subjectively equal to today’s HD techniques—if executed with the utmost precision. I am not saying that 24-bit/192-kHz technology is not a good thing, since it provides considerably more options, flexibility, and ease; I am saying that a SNR of 98.08 dB and a frequency response up to 22.05 kHz, if both are actually achieved, will be audibly equal to 146.24 dB and 96 kHz, which in the real world are never achieved, in any case. The same goes for 1-bit/2.8224 MHz DSD.

If your ear is so sensitive, so fine, that you can hear the difference, go ahead and prove it with an ABX test, don’t just say it.

8. The gullibility of audiophiles is what astonishes me the most, even after all these years. How is it possible, how did it ever happen, that they trust fairy-tale purveyors and mystic gurus more than reliable sources of scientific information? It wasn’t always so. Between the birth of “high fidelity,” circa 1947, and the early 1970s, what the engineers said was accepted by that generation of hi-fi enthusiasts as the truth. Then, as the ’70s decade grew older, the self-appointed experts without any scientific credentials started to crawl out of the woodwork.

For a while they did not overpower the educated technologists but by the early ’80s they did, with the subjective “golden-ear” audio magazines as their chief line of communication.

I remember pleading with some of the most brilliant academic and industrial brains in audio to fight against all the nonsense, to speak up loudly and brutally before the untutored drivel gets out of control, but they just laughed, dismissing the “flat-earthers” and “cultists” with a wave of the hand. Now look at them!

Talk to the know-it-all young salesman in the high-end audio salon, read the catalogs of Audio Advisor, Music Direct, or any other high-end merchant, read any of the golden-ear audio magazines, check out the subjective audio websites—and weep.

The witch doctors have taken over.

Even so, all is not lost. You can still read Floyd Toole and Siegfried Linkwitz on loudspeakers, Douglas Self and Bob Cordell on amplifiers, David Rich (hometheaterhifi.com) on miscellaneous audio subjects, and a few others in that very sparsely populated club. (I am not including The Audio Critic, now that it has become almost silent.) Once you have breathed that atmosphere, you will have a pretty good idea what advice to ignore.

9. When I go to Verizon Hall in the Kimmel Center in Philadephia and sit in my favorite seat to listen to the Philadelphia Orchestra, I realize that 137 years after the original Edison phonograph audio technology still hasn’t quite caught up with unamplified live music in a good acoustic venue. To be sure, my state-of-the-art stereo system renders a startlingly faithful imitation of a grand piano, a string quartet, or a jazz trio, but a symphony orchestra or a large chorus? Close but no cigar.

10. My greatest disappointment after six decades as an audio journalist is about today’s teenagers and twentysomethings. Most of them have never had a musical experience! I mean of any kind, not just good music. Whether they are listening to trash or Bach, they have no idea what the music sounds like in real life. The iPods, iPads, iPhones, and earbuds they use are of such low audio quality that what they hear bears no relationship to live music. And if they think that going to an arena “concert” to hop around in one square foot of space with their arms raised is a live-music experience, they are sadly deluded. It’s the most egregiously canned music of all. (To think that I used to question the fidelity of those small dormitory-room stereos of the 1960s!)

Please, kids, listen to unamplified live music just once!


https://www.metal-fi.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=162

11. More emphasis on the room and acoustic treatment.

@atdavid, you're right.

That looks like an important omission - despite the fact that it's never ever been popular amongst enthusiasts.

Most of us I guess, unless we experience obvious bass resonance issues, tend to regard room treatment as a final fine-tuning touch.

Unfortunately as it's all too easy to get obsessed about future equipment upgrades, we might rarely get to this 'final' stage.

Even in 2019 room treatment remains a greatly neglected area in comparison to equipment upgrades.

Just not sexy enough?

Nope, not sexy enough. Hard to brag on a forum about your room treatment when no-one cares. Most would rather wax eloquent about a $70,000 cable that has never been put through blind testing, versus room treatment where the impact is never questioned.  There is a large component of narcissism and it is not stroked by room treatment.

Also, some of are not willing (or allowed) to turn our living rooms into recording studios which some treatment schemes can seem to do. Good to see that some companies are offering more aesthetically pleasing decor-friendly options these days

Oh, geez, here we go again with the $70,000 cable Strawman. The $70,000 cable that noone has. It’s only for show. Hel-loo! Think of it like a 4 Million dollar Lambo. I bet you’re not even a little upset by $35,000 speaker wiring upgrade kits or $850,000 speakers. 

spinaker01
But some of are not willing (or allowed) to turn our living rooms into recording studios which some treatment schemes can seem to do. Good to see that some companies are offering more aesthetically pleasing decor-friendly options these days.

>>>>I’m afraid that ship sailed long time ago, about the time you decided to take up half the living room with 6’ tall speakers and and racks of electronics and a big old couch. And once you put your first Tube Trap in the room you can forget about it.

As we wuz sayin', right on cue.

Easy does it room treatment ideas for audiophiles - courtesy of the Audiophillac himself - Steve Guttenberg.

https://youtu.be/yP5qxFiVZHY

Geoffkait, you are always good for a giggle or two. My gear is not nearly as large as you think but I do get what you are saying. HOWEVER, I was not necessarily speaking of myself. I have been happily single for the past 19 years so I get to do what I want. Even so, I wish I had a better room and equipment layout that minimized the tech-footprint in my living space. Some people are seeking to create gear temples with their systems, I’m not actively trying to do that and am actually downsizing a bit as I retreat from home theatre and separates. 

That’s what she said. 

We agree to disagree.