They didn't make me mad. 😄
Two questions to make you mad.
#1 Why is it that the worlds most sophisticated and accurate machine the (ASML) TWINSCAN NXE:3600D doesn’t use special AC or signal cables to make 3nm semiconductors. Audiophiles need special cables for accuracy?
#2 Why is it that you can always tell when a piano is playing live, or even an electric guitar is playing live 2 houses away directly into an amp through walls and windows?
In the 1960s Electro Voice announced that their speakers could reproduce exactly accurate sounds, many believed them.
We are fooling ourselves, our hobby is full of lies and we can’t even face facts.
80 responses Add your response
@hilde45 agree. bigger things going on in this crazy world. | |
i concur with this short answer... Anyway mine would have been too long and boring to read ... 😊
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Good questions. And I’m hardly even fuming… ;-) 1. We need good cables because they make a difference. Anyone that is skeptical of this should try and small number of different cables and see which they prefer. Viola, you’ll know there’s difference whether you can explain it empirically or not. So pick the ones that sound best to you. 2. I don’t expect my 2 channel system to play as if it were live music because that’s just not possible. It is not live. It will never be. Although it may sound very, very good and provide a lot of enjoyment to the listeners. A painting of pipe is not a pipe.
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"We need good cable because they make a difference" @jpan There are two types of cables, good ones and bad ones. It is extremely easy to make good ones from cable and parts you can get online. Adding a fancy casing and jacking the price only make a difference in your head. Is absolutely right. Audiophiles suffer from two distinct diseases, the Mark Levinson disease and the Dan D'Agostino disease. In Mark Levinson the price is increased to make it sound better. In the Dan D'Agostino disease if it looks better it sounds better. Affliction with either causes severe economic and psychosocial disruption. These people are extremely easy to take advantage of so you see companies like Synergistic Research that exist purely to take advantage of this population when in reality their products are garbage, totally non functional. | |
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Audiophiles, subjectivists as objectivists suffer from only one disease : psycho-acoustic basics knowledge ignorance and then gear and/or tools fetichism... The gear fetichism of the subjectivists cannot be explained if we do not point to their acoustic and psycho-acoustic ignorance... This ignorance is a well shared ignorance in general anyway among objectivist as well as among subjectivist audiophiles... This why there exist so much threads as this one attacking one group or the other...Ignorance... | |
Those are direct instruments , in guitars or amps I have used better capacitors, wiring and tubes and better cabling connectors to enhance the fidelity of the Amps , guitar and this to for sure applies to loudspeakers the Xover is a very important component , these speakers extra voice fine as a direct monitor but not even close to a full range Loudspeaker ,it has its place in a specific area . | |
The main lie by omission in audio is that we ( the industry and consumers) for OUR convenience forgot to say even to ourselves that the acoustic and psycho-acoustic knowledge value exceed the gear pricing.... Then going after cables or pointing to the difference between live event versus recording one , is missing the main point ...And this mislead people putting them in two groups : subjectivist and objectivist, the two groups focussing on the gear / measuring tools components instead of the psycho-acoustic event which need to be controlled ... Anyway all these old quarrels in audio will soon disapear in a psycho-acoustic revolution which is already here...
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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. | |
1) The quantifiable issues associated with wiring and cabling have been accounted for in the design of the Twinscan machine have been accounted for in the design. 2) The dynamics of a live instrument, in acoustical, volume, frequency, and temporal domains are only at best approximated in playback. This does not mean the results are unpleasant, on the contrary, they can be extraordinary. Just not live. | |
1) The quantifiable issues associated with wiring and cabling have been accounted for in the design of the Twinscan machine have been accounted for in the design. 2) The dynamics of a live instrument, in acoustical, volume, frequency, and temporal domains are only at best approximated in playback. This does not mean the results are unpleasant, on the contrary, they can be extraordinary. Just not live. | |
I think A.I. will take the cake...😁 Commercially for money reason A. I. will be used to create music and process it... We have a soul... But we will bargain it for money... It is all already written in any S.F. litterature...😁 I am not a luddite by the way but A.I. will be under criminal corporation control for a while as it is already ... After that it will become A. C. or artificial consciousness...Here it will be more like a "Blade Runner" movie ... The difference between neural network mathematic or A. I. and the new mathematic of A. C. is that it is self learning in the real world as a human or animal body do it is not a language model ... This new mathematics is already written in an astounding book by an Indian not so well known genius because it superseed ALL any other models paradigm of the brain on neuron basis ... There is the same quantitative complexities in one neuron inside with his grid of microtubules as the overall sum of all neuron network of all the brain... ... One of the best book i read in the last decades or more....It change everything... Totally new concepts nowhere else to be read... Better than any thriller but hard science... It is like "fractal geometry" the book that had changed our geometric intuition ...I read it in his first edition in french in 1976... here is a book that change our intuition about everything or almost... And this scientist has proven 15 years ago the quantum properties in microtubules...He just discovered how to read them few months ago... | |
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.
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....this and those questions made me So Mad I could almost fall aslee..... @donavabdear , you ought to bore your guitar buddy about the Deads' "Wall of Sound", and what it consisted of.... Not that it'll change his blind or rock his whirl'd, but at least he can be intelligently clueless about the things he can play with....😏 Btw, a monied dilettante has cretined a reduced version of the WoS.....appeared to be 'bout 10' tall x 20 odd ft. wide.....😍 Just in time for the holidays | |
@mahgister | |
There's a basic lack of understanding here about guitar amps, and I'm too lazy to address it. However, I generally plug my TWINSCAN NXE:3600D into a wall socket and let it rip...it still doesn't sound very good but...meh...I understand psycho acoustics as the sound reflected off of a shower stall as recorded by Alfred Hitchcock. | |
I can stand on the streets of Savannah and listen to live musicians and imagine that I am in front of my stereo. I can sit in front of my stereo and imagine that I am at a live concert. I think it is all due to my special cables- or I’m too old and decrepit to no longer know the difference... Thomas Edison started marketing his new phonograph in 1916 by having a live singer stand next to his phonograph on stage. He would task the audience with guessing if the singing was live or the recording. (No mention if he used special cables.) Over a hundred years later and we are still trying to find that magic. | |
I am of the same opinion as you... But there is also a price to pay for A.I. domination as tool becoming more than a tool... We will see soon ...
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@mahgister @donavabdear With my limited understanding in many fields, I think what we perceive as sound is the result of the change in pressure (vibration) created by the speaker and bouncing through our ear canals and ear drums (simplified explanation of our complex ears). So unless you are physically changing the function of our ears, or possibly creating a hearing aid like device to improve our ears, I don't see how AI will impact how we hear music? Maybe I'm just showing off my ignorance but.......... | |
@bigtwin Your not ignorant at all, your note reminds me of the old saying, "your most important sexual organ is your brain". 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. | |
To perceive a sound as meaningful the brain must interpret it , A.I. will be designed mathematically to interpret it as our brain does, not in the same manner and ways but designed to give results that will fool us... Music is a meaningful sound which is way more than just linear Fourier acoustic maps because the brain dont work linearly and work in his own time domain but A. I. will emulate it... The problem is human creativity is expressive in an esthetical and spiritual sense , this will be trade for the easier indifferent and neutral creativity of the machine and humans will lose something... Then we will used by conditioning to gave ourself to the machine...Nothing absolutely bad with that , but we will lose something and we will be in the obligation to compensate for this lost part of the soul in education .. If not A. I. will cause as in medieval times an immuration of the soul....
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@mahgister ....It...'They'....whatever....might mess with the lyrics in some fashion, for one.... "...'scuse me, while I eat this fly..." Classical fiascos....Rap Country...Alt Choral....the mind would reel, the ears burn.... | |
I think we need a new terms in our hobby for three different goals. "Audiophile" is not a good word. Once upon a time, maybe we could say it was someone who appreciates music reproduction enough to sit and listen, and the hobby that represents. Not sure we are still there. Kind of like the early computer days. "Hacker" was someone who dug into the OS and figured how it worked, made it better and learned. I was a proud hacker in disassembling the BIOS and changing the CAS/RAS timing to run a Z80B in my Kaypro. I wrote a Greek character PROM to match a Diablo daisy wheel. That was hacking. Then it became a bad word for people doing bad things to other peoples computers. The term "cracker" never took off. We do have a problem with words being stolen. Female dog, Person in a happy mood, etc. Context seems to not matter, just the word. One term would be for the pure measurement objective only who thinks traditional static measurements are perfect and everyone else is wrong. All DACs are the same. All amps the same as they are below the "scientific .1% level. Their pursuit is for some level of perfection if it passes by our limited set of measurements, it must be right. And yes, ALL cables, analog and digital, are the same. The opposite far end are the ones with unlimited funds and who believe in magic if it costs enough. To them, any system not costing as much as a house is "not resolving enough" and science is wrong. Somehow a power plug can unmask spatial details that were not recorded in the first place and believe only their hearing is 100% objective and if they hear it it must be real as they are immune to the placebo effect. Then the rest who just want the best musical experience we can afford. Objective measures are only one data point as we understand they are limited. We also use our hearing. It is not objective, but it is what we think and our experience is what matters. Price is a matter of if it is worth it, some having a higher threshold than others, not what our friends think or a justification for being right because you paid more. It's about if the music is enjoyable to us. Even if we fall for placebo effects. Three different goals.
Computer Science comment: AI is based on data sets making an average assumption based on history training. Then newest technologies are "learning systems" in that good and bad guesses continually get logged to improve the data set. By the current technology, it may mimic a population, but not an individual. I prefer Turner to Rembrandt, Picasso to Warhol. What would some AI engine think? AI is a bad phrase. The earlier pre-press coined to be dramatic for headlines catch phrase" is "Expert System" and that is a far more accurate term. If anyone thinks AI is super advanced, they should look into the effort Kodak did to determine which way was up in a digital photograph. Hilarious actually. | |
It's a fine word. Audiophiles apparently make you uncomfortable, and so the word makes you uncomfortable, too.
Logical fallacy, straw man argument. It's odd that you work so hard to portray yourself as a person of science and reason, but then resort to such lazy and and sloppy arguments. | |
Excellent post... But i differ a bit about these three "goals"... Using measurements specs of a single component even verified to determined if the sound experience will be good, is an "objectivist" beliefs which some want to impose on all audiophiles, this tactic is from some kind of misplaced attitude in electrical design which cannot replace anyway psycho-acoustic goals and methods ... The last revolution in listening come from psycho-acoustics not from electronic design of components even if a new DSP will come from this knowledge ( See Edgar Choueiri BACCH ) "Subjectivists" use their "tasting" ears only to define with most of the time highly costlier components as upgrades and imposing this through marketing and forums as true audiophile experience some branded names, this is a marketing tactic not psycho-acoustic goals and methods ...They forgot that hearing must be trained in acoustics not by listening amplifier or dac tasting... Measures must includes acoustics and psycho-acoustics measures , not mere specs of each component; and ears must be trained by acoustic concepts and experiments including music basics...These are the ONLY goal....And we dont need new word, the basis of audiophile experience is determined by psycho-acoustics... The word psycho-acoustics exist already and the science connected to it... Audiophiles then love sound and experiment and use psycho-acoustics basic to determine for themselves a good sound experience... they are neither subjectivist nor objectivist... The subject cannot be separated once for all from the object in psycho-acoustics save for specific controlled experiments ... I will add my personal experience with mechanical, electrical and acoustical system embeddings controls which matter as much as mere specs of separate component if synergy is there to begin with, then measured specs are insufficient, and embeddings controls matter more than costlier upgrades which are often unnecessary anyway...
For A. I. we have a long road to go, and i concur with tvrgeek , but this long road will be travel in a shorter time than we think.... I absolutely reject all transhumanists thinking ideology not because they are delusional about artificial intelligence, they are, but not as much and not in the way most people think... And anyway the beginning of Artificial consciousness with a mathematic way over the statistical tool used in neural network is already here... i pointed out by whom and which maths in a post above... Transhumanism is way more erroneous and delusional and dangerous, and actually in dominance everywhere, it is for sure a more lethal ideology than audiophiles sectarism and ignorance of psycho-acoustics which is hilarious...😁 I dont think though that A.I. is hilarious now.... because it is a spiritual battle... ( i am not religious at all here)
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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 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. | |
When Beethoven wrote his last quartets completely deaf, i doubt that he would have been convinced by this sentence :
Sound waves need an ears/brain to be interpreted or created as meaningful sound by the listener... Sound must be LEARNED... But meaning is suprasensible phenomenon given to a consciousness or created by it , meaning while often perceived through material arrangement is not reducible to material arrangement in any way ... For example the drawing of an undulated line can be interpreted as a "wave" by a sailor, a vibration by a physicist, or the curve indicating to the Sculptor Michel-Angelo the way to sculpt his Madona folding robe, or it can be a passing cloud in the dream of a poet... It can be anything because it is a symbolic form also not a mere material arrangement in analog or digital form and it is a symbolic form offered to our interpretation as any natural phenomena are ... Meanings are not only mere facts, nor sensible manifested forms, they are FELT modification of our consciousness... Then Beethoven wrote with his soul a music which was written by a deaf man to be understood as a soul event , a meaning, and not only heard by the ears in playback or live... Then our soul was ignited in fire way before Edison... Technology does not ignite our soul , meanings did... We mastered our tools till yesterday... Never before our tools has been proposed to became our masters before A. I. and our corporate powers domination ... Technology is useful , nothing more; our freedom and meanings are completely out of the technology domain... It is our creativity and search for meanings and our freedom who stole the fire not A.I. ...
By the way on a pure scientific standpoint, music is not only magic as meanings but may stay magic as a sensible phenomenon for long ; because not only is it a transcendant meaning over and through the sensible wold, but we have not understood yet the psycho-acoustics behind hearing musical and speech sound... We have yet many hearing competing theories in science ...This science as other science investigate an open field not a closed garden yet... The cosmos is a mystery, not yet mere things waiting to be sold or patented as the corporate technocratic power wanted it to be...
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