Two questions to make you mad.

@mahgister 

I’d love to hear your view on where AI (Artificial Intelligence) will lead recording and playback in music and movies.

@mijostyn 

love your views, if your ever in Idaho look me up.

I’ve had a fun and way to long argument with a friend of mine that works in a vintage guitar store in LA, he knows practically every guitar player and their set up tout there. I would always tell him why do you sell all these beautiful guitars and then have them run through a Vox, Martin, or some other amp with full range speakers why don’t you get a high quality audiophile amp and a Hifi speaker to bring fidelity to the outrageously expensive guitar you sold them, he always says because that’s not rock n roll. 

I honestly don’t know why you can tell a live guitar a mile away playing through any old amp. I have a Steinway and Sons Spirio/r piano that plays back exactly the way the original player played it, this is the only Hifi playback I have ever heard in 40 years of recording.

Of course the reason I mentioned the ASML machine that sells for 300M$ that makes 3nm chips is because it is the most accurate machine mankind has ever made (not including the LHC), The LHC uses super conductive cables so they are in a different class. The ASML machine uses cables that many of us would not accept for our audio playback systems on the grounds that the fancy cables we buy are more accurate than regular cables without 10 kinds of shrink-wrap and cool little wooden emblems on them. If the ASML machine doesn't need fancy cables then why do we? Audio works at very slow and very long wavelengths, cables are easy at our wavelengths. If your stereo costs 300M$ would you demand 80k$/Meter cables you would probably say yes but you would have no reason other than people saying it sounds better. The limit of engineering now is 3nm accuracy and that machine doesn't include 80k$ cables. The ASML machine is literally the definition of accuracy and somehow we demand more accurate signal cables than it does, one of the groups is wrong the audiophiles or the semiconductor industry. 

@mahgister 
Thanks for your note, I had a feeling you'd have some interesting thoughts. I think A I will change everything in sound one of the interesting things that will change soon will be the meaningless ideas that we pay so much for today that will be totally missing from future systems. A I won't understand fluff or aesthetics or marketing hype. A I may finally give the end user a standard for acoustics then after that we can modify the sound to suit our taste. A I will need quantum computers to really change things but that is just around the corner as well.

@bigtwin Your not ignorant at all, your note reminds me of the old saying, "your most important sexual organ is your brain". 

@wolf_garcia I have miked and gone direct, put guitar amps in caskets, put them on stage behind the vocals, put them on the side of stage as the string section, and mixed them with every mic ever made (good old SM 57 works great). But I don't know why there is such a difference between the sound of an amp and the sound of an amp on a recording.

A friend of mine went to an electronics store with Eddie Van Hallen he bought an expensive amp and literally took it apart in the parking lot and threw everything away except for a single tube he wanted.

@tvrgeek 

outstanding post.

I feel like I'm always putting down audiophiles but I'm really trying to stick up for them because I have a long background in all kinds of sound reproduction. It is clear to me that audiophiles really have a hugely inflated view of the production of recording and live sound it is very far from even being close to perfect. 

I just bought a more expensive preamp and it really sounds so much better, the difference was between tube 8k$ and a 28k$ SS the tube sounded really buttery and wonderful but noisy and the SS sounded more sterile accurate and quiet. The SS (Boulder) won even though it doesn't sound as wonderful as the tube preamp. 

@tomic601 

I think your note is more profound than you may think. I think in a way it can, given this fancy printer makes semiconductors which make our music it does in a way set our souls on fire. Music is not magic it's talented people making nice pressure waves in the the air and electronically stored in 1s and 0s or waves and magnetic fields. It's sorta like saying Edisons invention made it possible to ignite our soul on fire, I think that's true. 

@mahgister 

i understand and appreciate your thought. Using consciousness as an unattainable format doesn't help it's not magic whatever it is we know it's not magic because it is  within everyone. I'm being very literal here and I understand that just because the thousands of dollars I've spent on my signal cables in my playback system don't mean that just because those cables measure sometimes worse than regular cables the difference is magic. Take out the waves in sound and you don't have music Beethoven remembered his experience when he could hear and he did use his hands to feel the waves of the music, even if he wouldn't have he still used a mechanical instrument to achieve his goal not a magical one the harpsichord or his experience .

@tomic601 

The day you make your breakthrough and quantum computing for the masses comes in will be the day we do understand acoustics and do develop a format that can hold music properly and someday understand consciousness when we can define it at least. AI needs quantum computing to be effective the big printer is getting down to the size of a molecule and won't be able to jump that hurdle very soon. It's not magic it's a matter of stuffing 10 pounds of information into a 2 pound bag as we try to do now.

I think it’s interesting that no one has tackled the reason why the 300M$ ASML machine that demands nearly perfect accuracy uses info cables that are not as expensive as most used in our audio systems. Everyone knows that it is incorrect to compare cables carrying higher frequency info to cables using audio frequencies, but still AC is relatively all the same and that nagging fact that very expensive test equipment don’t use audiophile AC cables to test audio equipment. 

@mahgister 

I do understand what you are saying, I’m definitely not a materialist I’m a Christian that thinks God has designed logic into all of his creation from the galaxies to the orbits of atoms. I disagree about your mystical view of math and logic in general. 
once in college someone asked our math professor what his doctoral thesis was on, he said you wouldn’t understand. We were taken back here we were big shots taking to highest calculus class the university offered many students pressed on and got our professor to explain so he put one of his thesis problems on the board we didn’t even know that language sure it kinda looked like math but no one had a clue, he said I told you so. 
 

Seems to me you are using the gaps in knowledge to justify the parts we don’t understand prime numbers are not magical in fact they are the very opposite of magic they are logic. If you listen to music that moves your emotions there is an explanation it may be very personal but it’s not magic. To be blunt you seem like a mathophile that delights in linking things like the logic of math and physics to other categories like emotions by way of popular jargon with slightly mystical bridges. 

Acoustics and fluid dynamics are really hard subjects there is no room for anything but hardcore logic. Back in college I took some quantum math from a professor that was a bit famous in the field I thought it would be very interesting it wasn’t it was like statistics not physics no fun at all.

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This is why audiophiles are so subject to snake oil and 700$ fuses 80k$ speaker cables they are smart and choose to live between the technical and emotional boundaries of knowledge. Some of the more experienced people on this forum just say -enjoy the music- and don’t bother.

@mijostyn 

One of the reasons I'm not a big cable guy is because good equipment should have a good power supply, and audio equipment uses DC at low voltages so I've never understood pre transformer and pre voltage regulation in the last 6 feet before the AC connection. I've got about 32k$ in power components alone not counting AC cables so I believe in clean power. I started in live sound and there are often power problems even in bigger venues, to fix power problems you need to fix or isolate the main transformers which is always expensive. I worked at a church that put in a big sound system and really did it right they spent money on isolated power transformers for the sound system, it was an analog system with about 200 channels for the orchestra. It was easy to mix but there was always more to do on every mix meaning it was so quiet that you could obsess about EQing the 2nd viola or French horn section and not ever get the mix you wanted. It's just like when we went to HD video in a the film industry when we stoped using film all of a sudden the makeup people were really extra worried about tiny little makeup details on the actors that were never seen on film cameras in the past. A blacker background is not always a good idea, makeup is a filter used in Hollywood to make homely people into beautiful movie stars. 

@texbychoice 

Nearly all electronics (not electrical) changes AC to DC. After the power is changed to DC the AC part is done, yes the transformer, rectifier and down powering circuits are important but any audiophile grade AC to DC conversion is easily done the the filtering is applied to the DC circuit. 
 

the ASML doesn’t work on raw AC it works on DC and those engineers don’t feel that it’s important to use very expensive boutique AC cables with things like insulation bias and other such nonsense. If these AC cables did make the usable signal more accurate don’t you think they would use them? Im using this example because this is the most expensive and accurate machine in the world that is manufactured. If there were invisible advantages to audiophile AC power cables don’t you think they would be tested and used when the need for accurate is so important. Intel couldn’t make 5nm chips a few years ago and it nearly bankrupt the company, money is not in the equation of chip making only accuracy and the engineering to make it happen is and they don’t use special AC cables. Hope my argument is clear.

@texbychoice 
Ok you win fancy AC cables have nothing to do with accuracy in an electronic signal. 
 

@texbychoice 
When you have a logic problem you extrapolate and extend the terms, you do this in math and physics all the time to see if your idea is valid logically. I'll take the extended criteria down a little. The standard piece of test equipment in the audio industry is the -Audio Precision Analyzer- it comes with a regular AC cable. If you get higher accuracy in the playback of audio equipment why doesn't a 30k $ audio tester use a fancy expensive AC cable like we use as audiophiles. Hope this is clear.

BTW I've spend about 30k $ in my listening system alone on power and power cables I feel I paid enough to have an opinion.

@texbychoice Thanks for the thoughtful post and the reference. To your question I bought a Boulder Preamp and that made a huge difference, and I just added 2x power filters (old Firman AC conditioners) for my Subs that are always noisy, I've been fighting with them for 4 years I love their sound and I really should know how to get rid of the hum but I have had only bits of luck here and there. Moving speakers around made a huge difference lately but honestly I don't think any of my cables really have made much difference I haven't spent a lot on cables probably just under 10k $, probably a much lower % of my system price than most here. But I do have about 18 of my speakers that are powered (the future), those speakers are  super precise and have the best imaging I've ever heard (Genelec "The Ones"). Good cables are important but AC doesn't work on the audio side of quality equipment it's all run on the DC side so as you said the transformation to DC is the important part.