I have said that same thing about albums. Some people seem to collect records, I collect music. I don’t care if that vinyl/CD/cassette is rare or not. I just want to hear music that I enjoy. That’s why I don’t want to pay high prices from it.
This hurts because it’s kinda true… chasing perfect sound instead of just enjoying the music 😅
You can make any audiophile claim your system now sounds better by futzing around behind it for a while and claiming that you installed a “polarity aligned non-hertzian oscilation dampener” or whatever but in reality make no alterations other than turning the volume up one notch.
This is a well documented phenomenon, and reproducible with almost 100% accuracy. It turns out that humans are, objectively speaking, tin-eared gits. This expressly includes audiophiles.
Sell more cables to those people.
I actually think thats fine.
the problem starts when they thkink everyone else is doing it wrong.
That’s what drives me crazy. There’s usually more than one way to do/enjoy things and there’s people who actually can’t comprehend they don’t actually know the optimal way for everything-ever.
Or when they help phone manufacturers enshittifying phones. They’re the reason, why the “integrated DACs are too noisy” argument exists, and then they’re telling you that unless you’re willing to spend $500 on an audiophile DAC, $1000 on an external headphone amplifier, and $8000 on an audiophile-grade headphone, you’ll be fine with cheap airpods.
Ugh yeah i just bought a dac just to do something that i was doing back in 2005 (plugin my headset into m’y phone)
I at least hope the sound is better
It’s just an opportunity for opportunists to sell even cheaper DACs, while the ones who wanted better DACs could have still plugged a USB into their phone or used bluetooth.
Whenever anyone asks for a quick get rich scheme I always tell them either Psychic stuff or Audio. 😂
Anyone ever try combining both to make a gold-plated amethyst fiber toslink cable for $25000 that wards off 5G interference?
Yes.
There was the 5g protection ointment people were selling at the start of covid lol
I like listening to my equipment with https://soffmimuhod.bandcamp.com/
Audiophiles get a lot of shit outside their little online dens and it’s always the same cable memes everywhere (that’s not even the gear most people sell their kidneys for, afaik), but if you’re one and you have a shred of self-awareness, this kinda makes ya laugh out loud.
When I was in high school, late 90s, I dated a chick whose mom worked in a bakery. She started work at like 2AM and for some reason I don’t remember, my gf had to go there and she asked me to go with her…sure fuck it (we pretty much ran free back then, different time) and we went down there. About a half dozen middle-aged women making batter and dough and whatever they did and their boss, the bakery’s owner.
He was in his early 40s, and was like the love child of David Lee Roth and Otto the bus driver from The Simpsons. Cargo shorts, dirty sneakers, Motley Crue tshirt with a blond curly mullet and an earring in one ear. For being 2 in the morning he was wide eyed and he practically exploded as soon as I walked in the door “HEY MAN HOWS IT GOING?! WELCOME TO MY BAKERY!! YOU LIKE MUSIC?! WHAT KIND OF MUSIC DO YOU LIKE?! WANT TO SEE SOMETHING?!” I was honestly on the edge of fight or flight for a moment but despite the coke or just how fuckin excited he was to have a visitor, he seemed safe, so I was like “Yeah sure, what’s up?”
Leads me back to the far corner of the bakery to his office. There are speakers fucking everywhere. In his office he has racks and racks of high end stereo equipment, and he immediately launches into all this technical detail about the setup that I’m just nodding through…“SO THE SIGNAL COMES DOWN HERE THROUGH THIS SPECIAL CABLES…100 BUCKS A FOOT BUT ITS SO WORTH IT…THIS TAKES THE SIGNAL AND MUXES IT WITH THE AMPLIFIER THAN PIPES IT TO THE FLUX CAPACITOR THEN…” and eventually he wraps up and says “CHECK THIS OUT!!!”
Pulls out one of those gold, high bitrate CDs, Peter Gabriel’s So, slots it into a CD player that by itself was bigger and more complicated looking than my whole stereo at home with so many knobs and shit, and cranks it to what he called about 30%. Lights blinking, animated EQs, level meters at the ready…
Red Rain kicks in and literally takes my breath away, not just in awe, but I mean the goddamn bass was so heavy and so crystal clear that it disrupted the airflow in the entire bakery. The volume was beyond screaming over, it was like you were standing on fucking stage in an arena next to the amps, but not only was it ear-shatteringly loud, it was crystal clear. Like the level of detail and fidelity in the recording broadcasted all these little human moments in the playing that I never had heard before and my mom pretty much blasted that record all the time for most of the tail end of the 80s. After a minute of Red Rain he skips to track two, Sledgehammer and holy shit, that bass riff on that system…felt like when you’re standing waist deep in the ocean and a wave comes up with enough force to rock you on your feet before you recover.
And through all this, these women in the bakery just doing their thing, not a care in the world. Clearly a common occurrence there, 2 oclock in the morning, deep in an industrial area with nobody for miles around, this dude and his like $100,000+ stereo and him just running around like a madman making whatever the hell they were making.
Anyways, definitely nothing I would ever spend that kind of money on, but man, it was hard as hell to go back home to my shitty $20 headphones and my discman after hearing what $100k worth of high end stereo equipment sounds like lol
Man, I love these kinds of stories, and I just love hearing about that feeling of wonder in those moments where the music you thought you knew just clicks like it’s the first time you’re hearing it. That’s what it’s all about. Made me want to play that Peter Gabriel album, too, after reading your tale!
That’s how they get you down the rabbit hole, though, when you come back home to your modest setup and you miss the stuff you didn’t know was there to begin with.
Dudes living the dream with a $100K stereo, a kilo of cocaine, and all the pastries he can eat. Not a bad life, I gotta say.
The moral of the story is cocaine
or capitalism. People toiling at 0200 in the morning while some guy has a 100,000 dollar toy.
Not to disagree with the capitalism part but 2AM is a pretty common time to start work in a bakery. They have to allow time for the dough to proof and obviously need to have enough stuff coming out the oven early enough to get it packaged and delivered wherever its going.
My wife worked in a bakery for a time and she always started work at 3am so that the donuts and muffins and shit would be ready by 630am when people started showing up in droves to buy them.
I was a greenskeeper for a 36 hole golf course and we similarly had to start at like 2am because we had to be done all our mowing and cup moving and trap raking on the front 9s before dawn…the golfers would be fucking irate if we weren’t lol.
I was a greenkeeper for a while as well, luckily we just started at 6.00 to finish at 11.00ish. Some people would show up early but because we were starting at hole 9 and 18 and going backwards it was no big deal.
Yeah our golfers were like the epitome of entitled, if they so much as saw us working on holes they weren’t even playing on they would go nuclear. We had to be sure we were at least on the 10th or 11th hole by dawn because they would roll up with the sun ready to get their 18 holes in before heading back to the clubhouse for brunch and a half dozen martinis before getting into their Porsche and god help you if they so much as heard the sound of an internal combustion engine coming from literally anywhere.
Not nice people…but luckily I wasnt forced to deal with them much, and was usually farting around in the maintenance shed with the other kids waiting to punch out by the time we got too busy lol
I don’t think anyone with self awareness or love for sound or music would call themselves an audiophile tbf.
They might not self-identify as an audiophile, but they’re definitely on the gradient. At high (and even medium) levels of the game, musicians, producers, and mix/mastering engineers are often using >$5K headphones and >$30K speaker setups, and that’s not to mention the cost of building & treating the studio.
These are people with deep love for music, and many of these same people have high-end listening systems at home as well. I’ve had the joy of listening to some really nice setups, and it’s definitely hard going back to my home stereo afterwards.
Where I think it veers off into pseudoscience is once you get into the stratosphere of >$100K setups. At that point it’s marginal (often indiscernible) gains that are exclusively marketed to people with money to burn. People who just want to know they’re getting the absolute best of the best, regardless of whether they can tell the difference. There’s a lot more marketing than reality at that level.
Yea i bought a hifi amplifier for 50 bucks at the pawnshop and a pair of speaker from the fleamarket. It works great
15-20 year old hifi is the sweet spot for me, $100-200 for what would’ve been a couple thousand in today’s dollars at MSRP. At that point, room/placement and source matter way more than going up a tier
Yeah that’s what i spent for the whole thing. Plus 200 for a home cinema subwoofer that my neighbors just love
I haven’t fact-checked whether this quote is legit attributable to Alan Parsons but considering his production mastering pedigree it’s believable. My dad used to sell audiophile equipment in the 80’s and he would play Dark Side of the Moon and Alan Parsons Project to show off their hi-fi equipment. He said customers would put on their lower-quality records and it wouldn’t sound as good (obviously), making their gear a harder sell.
EDIT: Parsons didn’t say this, a web commenter did on an article about an interview with Parsons:
https://boingboing.net/2012/02/10/alan-parsons-on-audiophiles.html
Alan Parsons was the sound engineer on Dark Side of the Moon, AND Abbey Road.
I think we can trust Alan Parsons. The dude put a frickin laser on the moon!
Whatever
He didn’t manage to get one on a frickin’ shark’s head though did he!
Ahh yes. The Alan Parsons’ Project.
I mean they’re the same thing. Does the music come from the violin or the violoniste?
I have a hifi chain, a subwoofer, and I ordered myself some musical grade in ear. For the last one, i mostly bought it for the sound isolation coz city noise is literally driving me crazy. That shit is designed for rockstars. Can’t wait for the silence.
Also i’m making music and mixing myself si that shit’s sorta necessary. That being said if you’re just a consumer and own those expensive luxury stuff without knowing what to hear you’ve been scammed
The music comes from the horse
Good answer. T’as gagné un bon point
plz vite ma dopamiiiiiiine
Well; he’s right.
Buy good enough hardware and play some old music and it sounds old.
On plateau tier stuff, you just hear whatever it is. Including if the mastering was crap.
(Spoiler: I can’t tell)
Man, tinnitus is such a money saver
it’s true. you can’t listen to music with an audiophile in the room without having to listen to them go on and on about the production and “the bass is too loud” this or “too much compression on the vocals” that-- like bro…listen to the song or GTFO
I mean i have that as a musician. Knowing how music’s made takes away part of the magic i’m afraid.
On the other hand the more i know about music the less i care about genre and the more i hear the artists intention / authenticity (or lack thereof).
Me and my dad can’t watch a movie or a sports broadcast without going on about the cameras and the lenses and the angles and the framerate and the exposure etc… and it drives my mom nuts. So hi mom.
I am an audio engineer for those events, I can’t watch one with out calling out bad Camera and Audio…I’m well aware of all my mistakes too.
He was a radio engineer for CBC, so that makes sense.
That’s a cool ass job ngl.
I mean the whole dub music genre that influenced half of modern music came from bbc studios in jamaica
Do you watch F1 via Sky Sports by any chance? I’ve been wondering for two years what the hell is going on with Bernie Collins’ audio all the time. Feels like she’s been consistently sabotaged by the audio guys.
Well could you describe it or link me an example? I don’t personally work with that broadcast but I can probably figure it out if I hear it
Nah, nevermind. Her audio seems to have become better this season, but I’m planning on deploying some snarky memes if it’s wonky again, in hopes that Sky do something about it.
Your mom says, “Hi!”
Can you tell her we say we love her and to make sure to put on a sweater tonight? It’s going to be chilly.
Be honest, how many audiophiles do you actually know? I work in pro AV and have been surrounded by audiophiles for 20+ years and this applies to exactly 1 person I’ve ever known and it was freshman year of college
Sounds like this person you’re describing is just a douchebag who wants to sound smart. We’d love to tell you all about our systems but we’re not gonna complain about your Walmart soundbar unprompted
i spent years working both in a recording studio and in live sound, and in permanent audio installs (sound systems for venues). so yes, i’ve worked around more audiophiles than the average person. i concede that the annoying can’t-just-shut-up-and-listen variety is relatively rare, but i’ve known more than a few
My belief is most people who describe themselves as audiophiles are in the 2nd group but think they’re in the 1st group
I don’t know if I qualify as an audiophile or not… I like expensive headphones and high resolution audio but I’m not one of those idiots that pays $10,000 for an HDMI cable.
I listen to music to enjoy it. The only thing that really stops me enjoying it is if it sounds like shit, which 99% of the time is because it’s some badly encoded lossy stream being played through a shitty Bluetooth speaker on SBC codec. That is not what music is supposed to sound like.
Give me some basic appointment that correctly reproduces what the artist created, and I’ll be happy. That doesn’t have to cost a fortune, you just need a lossless stream with a half decent DAC/amp into decent headphones, and you’ll be blown away. Spend like $300 on a pair of non-wireless analog headphones, $50-$75 on a USB DAC, and by a subscription to Tidal or Qobuz. It’ll change how you think about music. But it doesn’t turn you into an asshole.
My friend is a different sort of audiophile. He finds every setup and location to be a new opportunity to hear the music he loves in a way that he’s never heard it before.
That’s really cool!! I’ve never thought about doing that but it reminds me of this:
Does he have any samples of where he’s experimented at?
Samples? No. He just listens and enjoys. And pulls out some measuring equipment, lol
Your friend is one of us. A normal audiophile!
I always struggle with that for equalizers. I think, I understand the concept, but no matter how much I fuck up the sliders on the equalizer, I always find it interesting more than anything else. It sounds different, sure enough, but is it better or worse? No idea.
Oooh oooh oooh! Now’s my chance to say a snobby thing! “They’re called faders, not sliders.”
I learned this from also calling them sliders.
Also, when I get to run a camera for work, I like fucking with the AV guys by asking them to “turn down the sound dimmer, I can hear myself too loud on the headset.” (The comms mixer has knobs to control this at my end.)
I cannot listen to Rihanna with my good DAC/amp/headphone combo. The mixing is poop. The compression is poop. It’s all i notice. I bought hi-res .flac files for Good Girl Gone Bad, and it didn’t help. It was just produced poorly. So, I have to listen to her in the car with the average people stereo to enjoy it.
It’s like anything else people obsess over–food, wine, cars, health, exercise, drugs, guns, etc.
The problem isn’t the obsession–you do you, glad you have a hobby–the problem is they won’t shut the fuck up about it, and the air of superiority. Go geek out at your audiophile conventions, which I assume is a thing. Control yourself around we normies. Or don’t, I guess, and be annoying.
It’s about the money. I enjoy having a good hifi chain. It costed me a day of wage, it’s second hand. Then you have those shops selling stuff that are like a month wage, a few thousands dollars. You buy those to show you have more money than others
You do you and I’ll do me and we won’t do each other … Probably.
But what you describe is still listening to music. The things they pick on is still part of the audio track, not part of the audio equipment.
Yeah it’s just stuff someone thinks about when they’ve refined their taste over “bass goes boom”. It can still be annoying when they try to force their opinions down on you when you haven’t even asked.
Yeah, that would be when they tell you that your speaker cables are not danceable.
Well, but it’s not about the music itself (like what it means to you, how it makes you feel etc.) - it’s like talking about a picture and focusing on what kind of brushes were used. Valid and interesting to a degree, but not what art is about. It’s impossible without techne (practical stuff) but transcends it.
Or whatever.
I hate the word. I’m an audio enjoyer. I can critique every aspect of a song and recording. But why? The song is what matters.
Ive been saying for years and I say it to clients. Motown had a damn dirt basement that flooded every year. And look how fucking good they sounded. Because they had talent and soul (well, and amazing transformers…)
Gear is fun, it doesn’t matter AT ALL if there’s talent.
That said, a good mix can elevate a track immensely.
Flat response gang checking in. A flat response speaker/monitor is the superior system. What Parsons said is true though. That’s why I listen on flat response monitors, because that is exactly how the music was meant to be recorded and heard.
I think it’s like any other piece of art. It’s up to the person listening / watching / viewing to decide how it appeals to them.
I love bass, I play bass (badly), I like hearing the bass in songs. Sometimes I’ll listen so that I can really hear and appreciate the bass. I’ve even been known to isolated Bass stems of songs not to learn them, just because I love the bass part. Other times I’ll listen so that the bass blends in to the overall sound and appreciate the entire thing.
I love this comment. It’s origins are from the 60’s and was bandied about by rich white guys. The reason they said flat is best, is because that’s all there was back then Mono was king.
As for that’s how the music was meant to be recorded and heard. Ask a hip hop producer about that…
Audiophile: “The aluminum cones on these tweeters were precision engineered to give an unbiased audio signal at up to 30,000hz.”
Musician: “Some asshole barfed into my amp and now it has this buzz and catches on fire if I leave it plugged in for too long, but I still like how it sounds so we recorded the whole album on it.”
Reminds me of Phil Collins’ In The Air Tonight. In addition to the hi-fi recording lines, there was basically a phone line designed to allow the sound engineer in the booth and the musician(s) to talk 2-way. Collins liked the effect it gave so they rigged up a way to pipe that audio into the desk. It gives his vocal performance a distant, numb feeling that reinforces the theme of antipathy. Because the equipment was worse.
I’ll tell another one: The first time I ever heard The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, it was an mp3 my father downloaded. He managed to find a version that sounded like it was taped off of the radio and then the tape played into the PC capturing at a low bitrate. It’s my definitive version of the track; the result sounds foggy and mysterious like it’s being played from somewhere in the fog across the lake, it bolsters the legend of the piece.
Can you share that MP3?
Lo-Fi certainly certainly has an appeal all its own.
The reason why GBV’s Vampire on Titus sounds the way it does is precisely because they treated sound quality as an afterthought. Makes it unlistenable to some, a diamond in the rough to others. To me, it’s the greatest underground album of the '90s. As Jason Hernandez once so brilliantly put it: “[The album] conjures up mazes of crushed basement beer cans. […] What keeps us coming back are all the solid tunes beneath the grime. This is great, unsettling cartoon-land psychedelic pop from front to back. […] Several classics lurk in this murk.”
Well you still need a decent pair of cans to properly hear the barf on the recording
My headphone’s app has a DSP effect for puke and a slider to adjust the chunkiness.
exactly how the music was meant to be recorded and heard.
Is it? Every producer is different, every studio has different equipment and most importantly, everyone’s ears are different. You can’t possibly know what they intended.
The truth is that the correct way to listen to music is however you like it to hear it!
It absolutely is not. Albums aren’t mixed to be listened to on studio monitors, they are mixed to sound good on consumer grade speakers because that’s where people listen to music. Nowadays if you’re listening on air pods that’s probably the way it was meant to be listened to.
Yeah, not to mention the loudness war changing how things were mixed.
And like with most art, the artist doesn’t get a say in how you appreciate it
Fuck the loudness war
WHAT DID YOU SAY??? SPEAK LOUDER
No, the reason why it sounds good on consumer grade equipment is exactly because it was mixed on flat response studio monitors. Flat response means little to no bias across the frequency spectrum and no enhancements. This is so you can make sure it sounds good regardless of the quality of equipment the listener is using.
Yes, I am aware that studio monitors (other than NS10Ms, lol) have a flat response and that albums are mixed primarily on studio monitors. But the people mixing those albums aren’t mixing them to be listened to on studio monitors. There using their extensive knowledge to make that album sound its best how most people will be listening to it. Taking into account people listening in their car, on their phones, on their laptop speakers, headphones, air pods, home stereos, fucking TVs, etc.
No engineer worth their salt will be mixing an album to be listened to on studio monitors because that’s not how normal people listen to music.
Edited to add: However, the point I kind of lost is people should listen however they want. I used to listen to albums that I knew very well on my monitors to get to know the speakers.
For sure. My original comment was meant as a half-joke that my flat response monitors and headphones are superior than an expensive audiophile setup. Your points are valid of course.
every studio has different equipment
That’s why flat monitors and sound dampening are important.
A lot of money is spent to try and make a neutral room.
From my limited understanding (and what I just read up right now), if you send audio through non-flat-response speakers multiple times (so stick a mic in front of the speaker to re-record it, and play it back through the speakers again) then each time your highs and lows would become more silent and the mids would become louder.
They’re designed as the last piece in the chain, to then give some artistic coloring to the music.Flat response is designed to not do that, so that what comes out sounds as much as possible like what you’ve put in.
In my personal experience as a very hobbyist musician, yes, of course I will also try to listen to my shit on phone speakers and try to make it not sound entirely terrible there. But you go from one consumer-grade speaker to the next and entirely different frequency ranges are fucked up.
Having some headphones that don’t fuck with the sound (whether intentional or just crappy) is really helpful, because they give me a middleground that’s likely to sound reasonable on multiple systems.
Much better than composing on a system that fucks it up in a specific way and then playing back on another system that fucks it up in a different way. That’s pretty much guaranteed to sound terrible.Yes, the point of mixing on flat monitors is so you eliminate as much bias as possible, and to make sure it will sound good regardless if you’re listening in the car or in an audiophile listening room. When you listen to music on flat response speakers as the consumer, you are listening to it with the least bias possible, meaning no enhancements of any kind. So you listen to it the way the artist/band, producer, and sound engineer mixed/mastered it.
It’s meant to be heard on shopping mall speakers 30 years later. That’s when most of the royalties come in.
It’s nice to know the estates of all our beloved 90s icons are so well off today
All hail flat response! But alas, a lot of (and even most of, likely) the music is mastered to sound good on cheap stuff with bloated bass - as that is how it is listened by the paying majority. So when you (and me, love my Adam Audio stuff!) turn that on, we hear sad tunes… So getting a well mastered copy is equally important.
Sennheiser HD-280 PRO
Flat response? Check
Nerdy-ass thick-as-hell telephone cord? Check
Flat doesnt really have useful meaning with headphones due to everyone having a unique HRTF, even between each of their ears. So each set will sound different to each person, often dramatically so over 1 or 2khz.
But from the squigs, those 280 pros dont seem flat (if flat means diffuse field target), theyve got a big ol subbass boost
Mix on flat response. Enjoy and listen on good lively speakers like magnepans.
Mixing and listening enjoyment are totally different. My hs7s are not enjoyable.
This is my preference too. I’m no audiophile, but I do like decent sound. Still a big fan of my 'ol ~2003 Beyer DT880s (the flat aluminum cup version) which are rather flat. For IEMs, Ety ER4S fits the bill as well, without spending a fortune.
I also recently picked up my first pair of ANC BT headphones. I’d not call them flat, but I’m quite impressed for the price. Earfun Wave Pros for ~$50.
I use your music to avoid going to therapy
