I always find hi-fi threads on this forum so very amusing. I mean my word you guys tie yourselves up in knots, desperately trying to prove that everything you’ve never experienced and don’t want to believe in this the product of someone else’s furtive imagination. And Lorde don’t the derogatory remarks about individual character just spring forth like music from a speaker. Why is that do you think why are you so at pains to desperately claim somebody else’s experience and knowledge as wrong?

There is a difference between subjective vs objective, ie subjective personal listening is wholly dependant on trusting what you hear which is extremely variable as has been proven in genuine double blind studies whereas objectivists rely on a repeatable and quantifiable measurement.

Why is that do you think why are you so at pains to desperately claim somebody else’s experience and knowledge as wrong?

It’s not so much claiming that your experience is wrong, your experience is your experience alone whereas I cannot begin to experience what perception bias is at play, I take issue with flowery word salad claims and non-scientific voodoo that cannot be backed up by a quantifiable measurement – the scientific method.

TLDR : show me the evidence.

Did you do loads of double blind tests when configuring your system? I remember when I had a set of speakers which I loved, but were notoriously bass light. Got a sub in, but found that I spent an awful lot of time tweaking instead of enjoying music. Eventually I just got a bigger set of speakers 🙂

Did you do loads of double blind tests when configuring your system?

Nope, not a single one. I selected speakers/sub based on measurements/freq response/crossover/drive units, db rating etc and network streamer based on balance xlr outputs, sinad response and features that I wanted (it helped that ive been around studios and have a decent knowledge on what works and why). I then employed a mate who’s an acoustician/ foley sound engineer to set my room up/take measurements/select speaker/sub position and decide how to get the most out of everything using parametric eq to control room modes (within reason, nothing is perfect but its as good as can be for what I had to spend).

Saying that I’d throw it all out for a pair of Kii Three’s and matching BXT extension drive unitsbut I don’t have a spare £30,000+ lying around like my mate (working studio)

I always find hi-fi threads on this forum so very amusing. I mean my word you guys tie yourselves up in knots, desperately trying to prove that everything you’ve never experienced and don’t want to believe in this the product of someone else’s furtive imagination. And Lorde don’t the derogatory remarks about individual character just spring forth like music from a speaker. Why is that do you think why are you so at pains to desperately claim somebody else’s experience and knowledge as wrong?

And what value does this add to the thread, exactly?

Artist formerly known as, would you notice the difference? You definitely could if listening for it. Would you care though? Maybe not, depends if you heart something you really like and some people do.

I remember almost 30 years ago going to my bosses house to listen to his turntable. I am off the CD generation and we’d talked ment times and I’d stated a decent cd player should sound as good as a turntable, or better. Well after a few hours listening where I could have sworn Joan armatrading was singing to me from behind the sofa, I left realising my ears need to be trusted, it’s about enjoying the music, not always clear from the maths.

I have a Sony mnwhd5 player which uses their atrac lossless system which is great. However, Sony seem to drop support for their products (sonicstage, clie )too easily so probably wouldn’t buy another sony product that I would like to keep for any length of time

It seems there is a market for them if you seriously into your music hi-fidelity sound quality perception you’re a gullible halfwit.

😉

how much discernable difference would the average person be able to hear over, say my phone streaming Tidal HQ tracks to Sony WHXM3’s?

Depends – are they being used wirelessly, or wired?
If the former, then no difference, because BT doesn’t have the bandwidth to transmit anything more than about 256Kb/sec, IIRC, certainly nothing classed as Lossless. Streaming sucks anyway, especially Spotify, which has a business model built on paying artists effectively nothing – all the royalties are paid in a lump sum to the record companies, who then parcel it out on a pro rata basis. Also, unless there’s a full strength 4G signal available, streaming just doesn’t work worth a damn; there are plenty of places I go where there’s a barely usable 3G signal available, for Christ’s sake!

I download from Apple Music, and listen via IEM’s connected to my iPhone 11Pro Max with a custom MMCX to Lightning cable, so I can take advantage of Lossless downloads, but there are albums I’ve added to my phone library but forgot to download, and I know straight away that it’s streaming, because after a minute or two, the track starts to play intermittently then stops completely, and that’s in the centre of town, not way out in the middle of nowhere.

Currently, I’ve got over 50,000 tracks in my Apple Music Library – thankfully my next phone upgrade will have 1Tb of storage.

Regarding iPod Classics, there are mods available that come with a new battery and internals that take SDXC cards, up to 2Tb, I believe.

there are mods available that come with a new battery and internals that take SDXC cards, up to 2Tb, I believe

Indeed there are. I breathed fresh life into my 2-Gen iPod with a new battery but kept the original 20GB HDD. I replaced the battery in an iPod Photo (4-Gen iPod) and replaced the 60GB (dead) HDD with an adapter and 256GB SD card. Both are still pretty good. Wondering whether to replace the battery in my iPod Touch (1-Gen). It still works well but not for long enough and ‘cover flow’ is still a really nice feature.

So how will this be any different to a smart phone apart from having less functionality?

Depends – are they being used wirelessly, or wired?

If the former, then no difference, because BT doesn’t have the bandwidth to transmit anything more than about 256Kb/sec

The Sony’s have LDAC – up to 990Kb/s

So how will this be any different to a smart phone apart from having less functionality?

At a guess:

It’ll have a proper, dedicated headphone amp circuit.
It’ll have much more capable DSP and dedicated DAC and clock circuitry.
Circuit design in general will have been biased to audio performance.
It won’t have a GSM antenna built in, which I’d assume isn’t helpful to a low noise environment.

So how will this be any different to a smart phone apart from having less functionality?

It’s substantially more expensive than any regular smartphone I’ve seen for the top end model. And it features all sorts of Hi-Fi marketing buzz words: it must be better?

My iPods have slightly less funtionality than my phone, doesn’t stop me using them. They’re just different.

I saw a bloke in his 20’s at Charing Cross the other day listening to an old tape Walkman with the front held on with an elastic band

tape making a comeback!

It’ll have a proper, dedicated headphone amp circuit.
It’ll have much more capable DSP and dedicated DAC and clock circuitry.
Circuit design in general will have been biased to audio performance.
It won’t have a GSM antenna built in, which I’d assume isn’t helpful to a low noise environment.

Maybe, maybe not. Without proper testing you wouldn’t know.

The processing power in a modern iPhone will be orders of magnitude more than any CD player you can buy, so the second point it complete nonsense.

It won’t have a GSM antenna built in, which I’d assume isn’t helpful to a low noise environment.

As a radio engineer this is quite an ironic post! The noise requirements for GSM are orders of magnitude lower than for human audio – so the actual design challenge is the other way around, it’s meeting the spec for GSM sensitivity whilst having a built in MP3 player sat next to it. Anything low noise in the Hifi world is several orders of magnitude more noisy than ‘low noise’ in terms of radio receiver design where you’re dealing with signals a few dBs above thermal noise (thermal noise is the random movement of electrons in conductors which occurs at temperatures above absolute zero).

Doesn’t really matter at all about the limited functionality, the sound quality, the electrons, storage capacity etc etc – some people just like gadgets and some people have a lot of spare cash to chuck at them.

I always find hi-fi threads on this forum so very amusing.

Me too, but for different reasons 🙂

I saw a bloke in his 20’s at Charing Cross the other day listening to an old tape Walkman with the front held on with an elastic band

tape making a comeback!

After looking up my old Aiwa walkman on this thread, I found a working one on Ebay, tempted to buy it as I still have a load of mix tapes in a cupboard somewere I can’t play anymore…..

Although I suspect it might be a profound dissapointment….

The processing power in a modern iPhone will be orders of magnitude more than any CD player you can buy, so the second point it complete nonsense.

Fair enough, maybe it is nonsense. But I have worked around engineers in the pro audio and hi-fi world for 30 years. So I’ve seen different iterative approaches depending on BOM target costs. And they always seem to involve spending more of the available costs in those areas. So you’d have mono DAC’s rather than stereo or integrated, higher quality independently regulated power supplies to segregated areas, more accurate clock circuitry etc.

As a radio engineer this is quite an ironic post! The noise requirements for GSM are orders of magnitude lower than for human audio – so the actual design challenge is the other way around, it’s meeting the spec for GSM sensitivity whilst having a built in MP3 player sat next to it. Anything low noise in the Hifi world is several orders of magnitude more noisy than ‘low noise’ in terms of radio receiver design where you’re dealing with signals a few dBs above thermal noise (thermal noise is the random movement of electrons in conductors which occurs at temperatures above absolute zero).

Fair point, that one was a bit of a stretch! But you raise another point, in that there are significant elements of a mobile phone design that are required for it to work as a phone, which are not rewquired for a device like this.

Thanks footflaps, I’d not heard of thermal noise before, everyday is a school day etc 🙂

‘auto reverse’ was a big deal for me. I remember hankering after a Walkman* with autoreverse but never had the money

*Never actually had a Sony Walkman, but deffo had an Aiwa ‘portable tape player’

Yeah, auto reverse was the dogs bollox

‘auto reverse’ was a big deal for me. I remember hankering after a Walkman* with autoreverse but never had the money

Was amazing but over time the parts would wear and the head alignment would deteriorate which reduced signal quality.

But you raise another point, in that there are significant elements of a mobile phone design that are required for it to work as a phone, which are not rewquired for a device like this.

There are but that doesn’t mean it still can’t have excellent audio reproduction esp as you’re only driving headphones / bluetooth which is all very low power (less power than needed for the RF PA). Having a mobile phone drive a set of 100W speakers would be more of a challenge.

Mobile handsets are incredible designs which are strictly tested for comformance (unlike Hifi) – have a power supply which dips on current surges, will pull your phased locked loops off frequency and you’ll fail conformance. Build an expensive Stereo with a power supply that can’t cope with surges and no one notices because it says ‘New Class A’ or whatever on the case and has gold plated contacts and cost £2000 so must be ‘high quality’.

Buy the cheapest possible GSM phone for a few $ and it performs exactly to the GSM standard, which is no mean feat. All down to standards and conformance testing.

@footflaps all great in theory but…

At this point I should point out I’m a firm hi-fi non-believer. After a certain point it’s all marginal gains and all about the speakers and room acoustics. Nothing else. Directional cables, little pylons for cables, £100000 USB cables, £2000 kettle leads and the like are all the very worst of consumerism.

That all said my phone is utterly awful to use as an audio player. The storage gets swamped with other stuff, there isn’t a decent program, it doesn’t support the files I use (yes, I went down the .ogg path many moons ago and still can’t face re-ripping everything) and the control interface is useless as it’s all touch based. It doesn’t have optical input or output, open source firmware or a very simple USB interface for flinging stuff on and off of it. I can attach it to any hi-fi system and drive it natively through the 3.5mm or optical jack or use it as a caddy via the USB.

Now some of that can be fixed but other stuff is just completely superfluous for probably 99% of the potential users so for sound reasons just isn’t an option. And I’m fine with that, I like being able to just leave my phone behind and use my player for days between charges. Different target audience.

£xxxx is rather extreme though when you can buy an old iRiver/iPod and customise it to your hearts content almost 20 years after they came out.

There are but that doesn’t mean it still can’t have excellent audio reproduction esp as you’re only driving headphones / bluetooth which is all very low power (less power than needed for the RF PA). Having a mobile phone drive a set of 100W speakers would be more of a challenge.

Maybe, maybe not – I guess that’s part of the skill in engineering. But if a decent chunk of your BOM cost is dedicated to the GSM side, not having it there does give you more budget and PCB real estate to help improve your audio performance.

Mobile handsets are incredible designs which are strictly tested for comformance (unlike Hifi) – have a power supply which dips on current surges, will pull your phased locked loops off frequency and you’ll fail conformance. Build an expensive Stereo with a power supply that can’t cope with surges and no one notices because it says ‘New Class A’ or whatever on the case and has gold plated contacts and cost £2000 so must be ‘high quality’.

There is compliance testing for Hi-fi products, or you wouldn’t be allowed to sell it. Anything, like this device, with bluetooth, wifi etc will also need to pass conformance to those standards as well. Apple and Google have their own standards which you need to meet in order to make products using their licenced connectivity.
I’d agree, it’s possible to design and release, say, a power amp, with a woefully inadequate PSU and actually launch it. Where I’d guess I get a bit defensive is that it shouldn’t mean all engineers in audio are not capable of understanding how to design an adequate PSU.

there are albums I’ve added to my phone library but forgot to download, and I know straight away that it’s streaming, because after a minute or two, the track starts to play intermittently

Hang on. That’s not ‘straight away’, straight away would be a noticeable drop in quality. Yet you’re seemingly oblivious to this until it starts cutting out.

Maybe, maybe not. Without proper testing you wouldn’t know.

But surely that’s the whole point? If you wouldn’t know then it doesn’t matter. It may well be important to an audio engineer but as a consumer it’s an irrelevance, I listen to music using ears not an oscilloscope.

But surely that’s the whole point? If you wouldn’t know then it doesn’t matter. It may well be important to an audio engineer but as a consumer it’s an irrelevance, I listen to music using ears not an oscilloscope.

I would expect the things mentioned to have measurable differences, which could translate to being audible and are just based on good engineering principles. I’d also expect the engineer to be doing listening tests through the design process.

Also technically, you listen to music with your brain. That’s why even Coldplay can appear acceptable musically if you befuddle your senses with enough booze.

Also technically, you listen to music with your brain. That’s why even Coldplay can appear acceptable musically if you befuddle your senses with enough booze

This is true! I was out of it in a club on a ski trip once – DJ played Blue’s “All Rise” and I was like “WHAT’S THIS!?!” – so embarrassed when I got home to discover the sober reality 😆

I’ve been thinking of a dap for a while, £3-400 maybe, plenue d3, fiio something, ibasso, shanking, cayin, a pre owned astell and Kern sr15…. Anyone got any experience of daps in this price range?

Also technically, you listen to music with your brain. That’s why even Coldplay can appear acceptable musically if you befuddle your senses with enough booze.

That’s pretty much moot since the quantities necessary would have rendered Lemmy comatose.

It’s a bit like ‘beatz’ headphones.. Basically a Panasonic design, and guess what, the Panasonic is less than half the price.

I take issue with flowery word salad claims and non-scientific voodoo that cannot be backed up by a quantifiable measurement – the scientific method.

To do what you ask would be as pointless and flawed as trying to offer you empirical evidence for why a Monet is better than a Madrigal. There is no scientific method for measuring it.

Two Hi-Fi systems built with entirely different circuit topologies and design parameters will sound different because they are different. I think we can both agree in that right? If one sounds better to you then why that is might be something that can try to explain from an engineering perspective, class A SET vs class AB solid state for example, but there is no way to measure the nuanced experience and any attempt to do is largely redundant.

And what value does this add to the thread, exactly?

About as much as your own comment does I guess.

I’m sure Apple are watching keenly. A reissued iPod with SSD and WiFi would get my money. Son1 lost my classic when I leant it to him. Do you prefer a multitool or a ball ended Allen key when you work on your bike? Sometimes having just the right tool for the job is the right answer.

And bitd I so wanted that Walkman Professional (was £299 if I recall?). Up there with a Nakamichi for hifi use, but could be carried around. Was the standard tool for radio recording.

https://www.stereonet.com/uk/features/past-masters-sony-wm-d6c

To do what you ask would be as pointless and flawed as trying to offer you empirical evidence for why a Monet is better than a Madrigal. There is no scientific method for measuring it.

There is. Double blind testing.

But nobody wants to do that for some reason.

You’re still totally missing the point and labouring under the impression that people who call themselves audiophiles are trying to prove empirically that A is better than B. That’s not what most of us care about.

We care about whether we prefer A over B and for that there is no test needed other than listening and (subjective) opinion.

We can at least agree that it’s entirely possible for system A to sound different to system B right? I mean let’s establish what your actual premise is here since it just seems like you’re saying that ‘all hifi equipment sounds exactly the same’.

That said blind testing happens all the time But it’s really of little value because it assumes that what a piece of kit looks like has a material effect on what you hear. Maybe that’s true with very very high end pieces of equipment that look very expensive but I’ve listened to plenty of systems like that not like them because they sound to clinical.

Now listening without knowing the price is a much more useful exercise but the most useful exercise of all is just listening. Some people are better at that then others.

All bits of kit sound different, even at the same price point.

Amps are a great example – play some music through an older Arcam (say an Alpha 7), a Mission Cyrus 2 and a Marantz PM66 and it’s obvious they were designed to do the same thing in different ways.
They all sound very, very different.

The specs give you a clue, especially with speakers – look at the frequency response curve.
But a metal tweeter will not sound like a fabric dome or a horn, even if the frequency response is similar.

If you haven’t experienced this, then probably best not to comment.
It just makes you look a bit daft.

An objective test:

Do you have a copy of ‘Permission To Land’ on CD?
Have a listen and tell me what’s wrong with the production.
It’s pretty obvious and can’t be unheard once you’ve noticed it.

Another:
Can you hear the swearing on ‘Hey Jude’? 🙂

There’s loads more, but those are both good examples of how accurately your system resolves source info.

It might have been posted on a previous thread, but have we done the audiophile SSD drive yet? 😉

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvme-ssd-for-audiophiles

There’s loads more, but those are both good examples of how accurately your system resolves source info.

Once you have a half decent sound system (and I’m not talking about £1000+ systems) you can actually hear the difference in production quality on various CD’s.
Michael Jacksons ‘bad’ album for example is superbly produced, as opposed to some compilation albums that sound flat and canned with no sound stage.

I think once you are at that point, spending more is snake oil, or at best very diminished returns for the extra money spent on hardware.