Comment Re:The sordid life of the audiophile (Score 1) 1239
I wouldn't call myself an audiophile by the definitions put forth in this post, but I do love to listen to music, and I do pay more money for a decent system. I would never pay $6000 for a pair of analog cables, but I have spent $30 to upgrade from the crappy cables that come with ANY receiver. As the ladies say, never mind the length, feel the WIDTH :)
First, let me just say that there is definitely a difference between a $100 receiver and a $1000 receiver. I have never heard a $10,000 receiver, so I have no idea what it would sound like. So what is different between the $100 receiver and the $1000 receiver? Lots of things. Any modern receiver is made up of hundreds of components, from resisters and transistors to specialized chips like D/A converters and video scaling. For an audiophile, the real money is in the D/A converter. Many people think that the recording on a CD is perfect. It isn't. It's just like the squeeze theorem in Calculus. If you take a sine wave, and you want to approximate the volume underneath, you can draw rectangles that start from the y axis at 0 and go up or down until they touch the sine wave. They you pick an arbitrary width and draw the rectangle underneath the curve. There is a little triangular gap between the rectangle and the curve, but as you make the width of the rectangles smaller, you have less and less of a gap. That's what an A/D converter does: it maps a true sound wave to an approximate equivalent using little slices. For CD that would be around 22000 slices per second, which is very close to the limit of the human ear's capability to resolve. So we have a nearly perfect recording on CD, how about turning those bits back into a wave that can be passed through analog equipment, like speakers? For that we need a digital to analog (D/A) converter. A D/A converter is usually measured by things like noise and dynamics. So if the CD recorded a dynamic peak that was +12db, the analog version should be +12db. Some of the converters used in cheaper stereo equipment uses D/A converters that produce enough noise, and not enough dynamics, that the music starts to sound like AM radio. But mostly they do a good job. Some equipment uses really nice D/A converters that make the music sound more like a vinyl record, not from the noise perspective, but from the "hey that actually sounds like a woman's voice" perspective. For those who don't think their is a difference, head out to a Tweeter and listen to the different products. If you can't tell a difference between them, I would be surprised. Make sure to use a decent pair of speakers that can actually handle some power, and turn it way up. Listen to the distortion that some products produce on the upper end, and whether the bass is muddy or crisp. Turn on a subwoofer and then turn it off. It all makes a difference. The real question is, how much is that difference worth to you? To me, there is no point in listening to music through a crappy system, because the music loses some of its beauty. It's like the difference between watching a movie on your flip phone and watching it in an iMax theater.
I find it really amusing that Slashdot readers, many of whom obsess over the smallest difference in their computer components, and who will spend $100 on fans and $300 on a fancy case, feel the need to make fun of the exact equivalent in the audio category. Perhaps we all don't spend $6000 on USB cables, but I have definitely seen people spent $400 on a whacked-out power supply. We all have our little quirks, so who cares if someone obsesses over the sound of their music collection? Let's get rid of the snake oil salesmen like the Anjou stuff, but remember that for a lot of people sound quality is a reality, and they can spend their money however they feel fit. I tend to spend a lot of money on BOTH ;)
First, let me just say that there is definitely a difference between a $100 receiver and a $1000 receiver. I have never heard a $10,000 receiver, so I have no idea what it would sound like. So what is different between the $100 receiver and the $1000 receiver? Lots of things. Any modern receiver is made up of hundreds of components, from resisters and transistors to specialized chips like D/A converters and video scaling. For an audiophile, the real money is in the D/A converter. Many people think that the recording on a CD is perfect. It isn't. It's just like the squeeze theorem in Calculus. If you take a sine wave, and you want to approximate the volume underneath, you can draw rectangles that start from the y axis at 0 and go up or down until they touch the sine wave. They you pick an arbitrary width and draw the rectangle underneath the curve. There is a little triangular gap between the rectangle and the curve, but as you make the width of the rectangles smaller, you have less and less of a gap. That's what an A/D converter does: it maps a true sound wave to an approximate equivalent using little slices. For CD that would be around 22000 slices per second, which is very close to the limit of the human ear's capability to resolve. So we have a nearly perfect recording on CD, how about turning those bits back into a wave that can be passed through analog equipment, like speakers? For that we need a digital to analog (D/A) converter. A D/A converter is usually measured by things like noise and dynamics. So if the CD recorded a dynamic peak that was +12db, the analog version should be +12db. Some of the converters used in cheaper stereo equipment uses D/A converters that produce enough noise, and not enough dynamics, that the music starts to sound like AM radio. But mostly they do a good job. Some equipment uses really nice D/A converters that make the music sound more like a vinyl record, not from the noise perspective, but from the "hey that actually sounds like a woman's voice" perspective. For those who don't think their is a difference, head out to a Tweeter and listen to the different products. If you can't tell a difference between them, I would be surprised. Make sure to use a decent pair of speakers that can actually handle some power, and turn it way up. Listen to the distortion that some products produce on the upper end, and whether the bass is muddy or crisp. Turn on a subwoofer and then turn it off. It all makes a difference. The real question is, how much is that difference worth to you? To me, there is no point in listening to music through a crappy system, because the music loses some of its beauty. It's like the difference between watching a movie on your flip phone and watching it in an iMax theater.
I find it really amusing that Slashdot readers, many of whom obsess over the smallest difference in their computer components, and who will spend $100 on fans and $300 on a fancy case, feel the need to make fun of the exact equivalent in the audio category. Perhaps we all don't spend $6000 on USB cables, but I have definitely seen people spent $400 on a whacked-out power supply. We all have our little quirks, so who cares if someone obsesses over the sound of their music collection? Let's get rid of the snake oil salesmen like the Anjou stuff, but remember that for a lot of people sound quality is a reality, and they can spend their money however they feel fit. I tend to spend a lot of money on BOTH
