Hacking tips from an audio geek (Score 1)

I have a composing/recording studio that I've been building up for over a decade. I suppose that puts me outside the center of the bell curve in terms of who this poll was meant for. But I've learned some valuable tricks over the years. Most consumer audio gear is absolutely garbage--i.e. designed to be as cheap as possible while sounding just barely good enough not to be noticeably horrible. BUT it doesn't take much money to come up with a world-class system, either. With a few tricks and an investment of your time to gain an understanding of the real issues, you can rival the most expensive systems available.

- The single most important component is the speakers. Speakers have the hard job of transducing an electronic signal into vibrations in the air, and they're subject to all sorts of physical limitations as a result. Speakers are always by definition the weakest link in the chain. If you must upgrade one thing, upgrade the speakers. To get an idea of the best speaker designs out there, look at what mastering engineers use in their studios. Mastering engineers make their living on their ability to hear sound accurately. Mastering engineers are your best point of reference. What you'll find in their studios is generally conservative speaker designs; i.e. a rectangular box with several speaker drivers lined up on the front. Fancy-looking designs might look nice and even sound good, but only at a higher cost. If in doubt, go with a conservative design.

- I prefer aluminum drivers because the aluminum is good at moving the air without flexing. Carbon fiber should also work, but it is costly. The paper/plastic woofers in common speakers flex and bend as they interact with the air, reducing sound accuracy and wasting valuable amp energy.

Beyond the speakers, however...

- The electronic components matter. With a bit of knowledge of basic audio circuits and soldering ability, you can vastly improve audio systems. Don't look at your system as a collection of audio components--amp, speakers, CD player, etc.--look at it as one big electronic circuit, comprising multiple smaller circuits, themselves comprising individual electronic components of varying quality. When you start seeing things this way, you start to notice where the weak links really are, and you become capable of systematically replacing them with better parts/circuits. Great speakers can have poor crossovers. Great crossovers could have fantastic inductors but terrible capacitors. Almost everything, even professional gear, uses 35-year-old op-amps when newer designs are widely available and significantly more accurate in audio signal reproduction. I have modified almost everything in my own studio by replacing electronic parts with higher quality parts. I have also modified circuits to accommodate newer op-amps in some cases, increasing their bandwidth, reducing audible phasing, etc. Friends and clients don't believe me when I talk about what an improvement it has made...until they come over and listen to it, at which point their jaws drop.

- For digital gear, pay attention to the DAC stage. If any piece of gear advertises what a great DAC chip it has, then what this really means is "we're talking about the great DAC chip to distract you from the terrible analog stage that follows it". You can then replace this analog stage with your own parts, vastly improving the quality of your D/A conversion at minimal cost.

- Cables do matter, but not in the way most people think. The main problem in audio cables today is high capacitance. High capacitance can create a situation where the high frequencies get rolled off, due to a lowpass RC filter forming between the cable's capacitance and the combined impedances of the equipments' input and output stages. The ideal audio interconnect cable has perfect conductivity and zero capacitance between the conductors, perfectly preserving the signal. Therefore, the ideal cable is no cable at all, i.e. an infinitely short cable or simply connecting the input and output together at the same physical point. Cables should be as short as possible, as this both increases conductivity and reduces capacitance. It also lowers the chances of picking up EMI/hum/noise. Any 1-foot cable performs better than any 10-foot, $10,000 cable almost by definition. I use silver-plated teflon-coated surplus cable for aircraft, as it is cheap ($0.19 per foot last I checked), low-capacitance, and it preserves the signal absolutely perfectly to my ears.

I'll stop here before I end up writing a book. The short version: Don't believe the audiophile claims, believe the science you know to be observably true. Audio isn't magic, audio is just reality.