maybe some blue stickers, er I mean tuning devices

http://www.machinadynamica.com/machina47.htm

or some stones, sorry resonance control devices

http://www.machinadynamica.com/machina17.htm

Philips TDA1541 based CD players

But that’s just a list of CDPs that use the Philips DAC (probs at the time the best, and even now well respected) and transport, a bit like a list of those that use Burr-Brown.

It isn’t just the DAC – its the overall design and the other components in the analog stage that will determine overall sound quality.

So I’d say no it’s not just a Philips

i.e. If you can’t hear the difference you’re a moron.
That’s not strictly true – all of those things can be measured fairly accurately, using, in some cases, a number of scales. That said – it’s a real faff to measure them, and the differences between the measurements are difficult to actually assess unless you have some kind of reference – as with many audio things, they mean little to nothing in a vacuum.

I stand by original point. There is no absolute measure of sound quality, e.g. this system is 84/100 on the “Absolute Sound Quality” scale. There are two sides to it, the electrical/mechanical/acoustic response of the equipment and then there is the psycho-acoustic response of the human listening to it. No metric in hi-fi/pro audio brings these two things together. As you stated, there are a lot of audio metrics but they’re all measurements of just the hi-fi system. Nothing uses psycho-acoustics, something which is quite well understood.

However, metrics that combine the system response and the human response are in use elsewhere in audio, for example, mobile phone audio quality.

I was at a lecture by John Watkinson (Art of Digital Audio) last year, run by AES, where he challenged the use of the current metrics to measure loudspeakers, was quite interesting.

Isn’t that more about “we’re throwing away a huge amount of info – lets test which bits of the human voice people prefer to keep”?

Evolution gave us ears, and we all know about the results of double blind trials when it comes to audio cables…

Except it’s not.

There are some really vast areas where there are gaps, and we can talk in terms of ranges of possibility (like frequency response changes in response to loudness changes) but there are some aspects (like the transition between the use of ITD and IID in localisation) which are poorly understood, and seemingly inconsistent.

We can do a lot with what we know about psycho-acoustics – just look at how effective MP3’s are at compressing audio down and retaining most of the information (particularly compared with other methodologies.) There is however, and insufficient amount of knowledge to use this to create a useful measurement of quality.

If we start to try and look at audio quality as a whole in any kind of detail, then Heisenberg pops up his head and says no – because we’re dealing with interacting variables, once we get any detail in terms of, for example, frequency, then we automatically lose detail in terms of timing and indeed phase.

bellerophon listening to some banging beats on his B&O earlier.

Totally agree, although I tend to buy decent quality interconnects simply as they are more physically robust. By decent quality I mean a tenner, not £100!

LOL, I can’t see the image (work is blocking it) but going by the image name 😆

Anyway, I seem to be matching perfectly the hi fi and the music, both being from the same era 😉

yeah, know what you mean with everyone buying Sonos – not me though Ha ha

🙂
It’s ok – I don’t have any Sonos either. But I used to sell it and still recommend it to friends.

I have no need for multi-room therefore I have one nice hi-fi. If I need to hear music in another room, I turn it up!

Now don’t have a cd. It’s all on NAS or vinyl.

100!

“In a blind test I would wager that most could not tell you which is the £1000 and which is the £10,000.”

Horse poo. Sorry, but if you design two systems to be as close as possible in terms of tonal presentation to try and maintain a similar ‘sound’ a £10k system will be far superior; soundstage, dynamics, imaging, pretty much anything than can be used to analyse performance would be improved. Whether the listener can or would justify the extra expense is a different question and highly subjective though.

Needless to say most of my favorite systems cost a lot less than £10k.

Cables?

Cables can very easily change the tonal character of a system and the cable manufacturers capitalise on this, you can’t measure it so it’s very easy to say “hey look, it’s better isn’t it?”. The thing with cables is that we all like to ‘believe’ we’ve made the right decision(s) to justify expense; in Hi-Fi it’s cabling and with bikes it’s weight; I mean do we really believe we’ll ride faster with an XTR rather than XT cassette? Deep down we know not but when spending £5k on a bike you want to ‘believe’ this is the right choice. Not trying to start a new discussion here but you get my point. Cable manufacturers, websites and high street retailers all take advantage of this to add margin to a sale.

News flash : businesses are out to make money and not every sales tactic is entrenched in scientific theory. Yes, I bought XTR! but I never spent more than £100 on all my cables for a system. ❓

I moved from high street to contract sales nearly ten years ago and I still giggle at the things I believed and the tactics I used. Yes most CD players had very similar internal components but you’d be amazed how differently they sounded, sometimes very slight but everyone likes choice. £20k on a CD player though, nope! £20k on speakers? Quite possibly.

I spend most of my time now focusing on user interface. When you install £500k+ Multi-room systems high quality is a given, it’s more about how easy it is to use as no amount of quality will fix a system that’s difficult. What do I use for music? Sonos. I don’t care how much money a client has Sonos offers the best user experience and is easily good enough for pretty much everyone.

Yeah but don’t tell anyone.

And if they do find out, give them one of these to measure it with:

Horse poo. Sorry, but if you design two systems to be as close as possible in terms of tonal presentation to try and maintain a similar ‘sound’ a £10k system will be far superior; soundstage, dynamics, imaging, pretty much anything than can be used to analyse performance would be improved

BLAH BLAH BLAh

user experience and is easily good enough for pretty much everyone.

This is classic meaningless diversionary twaddle.

Come up with some measurable effects that those cables produce and you will have us, otherwise it’s just marketing bollocks.

Gizmodo featured an interesting article where the double blind tested audiophiles to see if they could tell the difference between speaker cables.

THe two ‘cables’ on test were high end Monster cabing and…. soldered wire coat hangers. The reviews rated both as ‘excellent’, but were unable to tell the difference, or to assess which they reckoned sounded ‘better’.

IMO a lot of this is down to teh placebo effect – you *think* you’re listening to high quality, therefore you perceive it as such.

Ears are pretty rubbish microphones compared to good mics. However the brain is the best audio post-processor ever made – and if you tell the brain it’s going to hear better sound then it’ll work harder at deciphering the data coming from the ears. The placebo effect is HUGE in audio.

Gobuchul, as someone who designs fancy loudspeakers for a living I can tell you that it’s very hard to make two accurate loudspeakers for £1000. It is a hideously difficult job to get electrical energy to turn into pressure changes in a air in a manner which is truly representative of the source signal. However I’ve also noticed that I prefer listening to 6music through a little digital radio most of the time because I can hear the music without it taking over my life!

This site is makes good reading on the subject:

http://www.linkwitzlab.com/

You’ll notice that little on that site concurs with the silliness you can read in hi-fi magazines…

they seem to manage it with reference monitors

how much??, you must be mad 😉

that being the reason why there are such recording outfits as Linn Records…

my reckoning makes it 8/147.9 betterer. Not sure that’s enough to make me switch from my current setup, but you can’t argue with maths.

OK I was generalising quite a bit in a very short answer and I guess there is a bit of interpretation in the word accurate. I’d certainly agree with you saying monitors are designed to show every element of the recording/sound they are reproducing, without flattering the audio to sound ‘nice’ at all, but that is what I personally would call an accurate reproduction of the sound, whereas the hifi sound I would say is designed to flatter the sound, and sound as pleasing as possible, rather than show up every bit of sibillance, 400hz mud, aliasing, etc etc that is present in the actual recording and audio signal being turned into sound. As you say the point of the monitors is so you can hear everything that is there in the audio signal, and that is what I would call being accurate.

I’d argue that a pair of modern Adam, Mackie or JBL monitors are very accurate, brutally honest and non flattering in terms of reproducing all the frequencies and amplitudes of sound in the recording compared to hifi speakers. In terms of things like NS10s, I’ve never experienced them but you always read if you can make your mix sound good on them then it will sound good on anything, but I see them as a different thing from modern reference monitors.