More audio foolery

[ebastler]

They have Latvian flag in their logo, WTF!

No, I think in that particular context, the red/white/red is meant to depict a slice of bacon. 
Wonder who came up with the company name?

[james_s]

This is not a reasonable equivocation in my opinion. These cables are not being marketed on their form or function but rather BS claims.

To put this in painting terms, the painting is claimed to have been painted using magical mystical crystals dipped in magical paint by a psychic claiming to be in-touch and guided by a famous long dead painter.

Well there are various degrees of audiophoolery, some stuff just gives you a very questionable cost per real benefit ratio, other stuff is clearly bogus. There's the old saying though "A fool and his money are soon parted." Some people are just determined to spend their money, which I can't say really bothers me. If they don't waste it on one thing they'll waste it on something else, nobody forces anyone to buy into the mystical voodoo crap and anyone who does, I have a hard time feeling sorry for them.

[PlainName]

nobody forces anyone to buy into the mystical voodoo crap and anyone who does, I have a hard time feeling sorry for them

When you buy, let's say, replacement tyres for you car, how do you determine which are the best ones? Me, I go for lowest price and expect to drift a lot but if I were wanting to be really safe, how would I be able to evaluate the claims from the rival manufacturers?

People in this forum are generally au fait with the subject covered by these audio claims, so we can figure it our by ourselves. However, Joe Public wouldn't likely have any deep knowledge at all - they would hopefully know that power flows from positive to negative, but many of these claims require knowledge that goes deeper than that.

Further, they may even try the stuff out and find that it really does make a difference and they really can tell that scam product A has the expected result. It could happen to you in some other field. Maybe it would be nicer not to start with the victim-blaming.

[unitedatoms]

The tyres replacement is a mystery for me. I only know that I need winter tyres even if it is summer time, and that the cost very high, and that makes me to remember the fact that I even did anything with tyres (the fact of high cost). when expected cost is combined with cost of brake replacements it makes everything so complicated and beyond analysis, so I give up and trade the car for newer everything, with new tyres and brakes and windwasher liquid. So it gives me false hope that I solved all the maintenance problems.

[PlainName]

so I give up and trade the car for newer everything

I think the TEA thread is that way --->

 

[james_s]

nobody forces anyone to buy into the mystical voodoo crap and anyone who does, I have a hard time feeling sorry for them

When you buy, let's say, replacement tyres for you car, how do you determine which are the best ones? Me, I go for lowest price and expect to drift a lot but if I were wanting to be really safe, how would I be able to evaluate the claims from the rival manufacturers?

People in this forum are generally au fait with the subject covered by these audio claims, so we can figure it our by ourselves. However, Joe Public wouldn't likely have any deep knowledge at all - they would hopefully know that power flows from positive to negative, but many of these claims require knowledge that goes deeper than that.

Further, they may even try the stuff out and find that it really does make a difference and they really can tell that scam product A has the expected result. It could happen to you in some other field. Maybe it would be nicer not to start with the victim-blaming.

I read reviews from people who sound knowledgeable, it's usually not too hard to tell when someone knows what they're talking about. To some degree I also trust specifications because I buy tires made by reputable companies from reputable suppliers. Prior to the modern internet I used to look at tests done by Consumer Reports, they used to occasionally test things like tires and I always found their ratings to be pretty reliable.

Lacking any such resources I would ignore the very cheapest options and the absurdly expensive options and explore the middle range using whatever information I could find.

Tires are important and often overlooked. Crappy tires can put your car in a ditch, leave you stranded or worse. Trying to cut corners there is a false economy.

[PlainName]

I read reviews from people who sound knowledgeable, it's usually not too hard to tell when someone knows what they're talking about.

That there is basically saying that a scammer with the gift of the gab is going to rake it in. Which they do. The victim shouldn't be blamed for not being a polymath or a living lie detector.

[james_s]

I read reviews from people who sound knowledgeable, it's usually not too hard to tell when someone knows what they're talking about.

That there is basically saying that a scammer with the gift of the gab is going to rake it in. Which they do. The victim shouldn't be blamed for not being a polymath or a living lie detector.

It's going to take a whole lot more than one scammer. reviews are effective when you have a significant sample size to choose from, typically I focus most on the middle of the usually roughly bell curve of reviews, people who mention the good and the bad. Excessively positive reviews listing nothing negative are more likely to be fake or not based on a thorough test, excessively negative reviews tend to be people who bought the wrong product or do not understand how to use it, some complaining about the speed of shipping, the packaging, etc, those are easily ignored.

Also like I said, I'm going to pretty much categorically ignore products that are hugely more expensive than comparable options unless I personally understand what justifies the high cost and know that I can benefit from it. I'm not even going to consider a $5000 set of tires for my car nor will I consider $1,000 audiophile speaker cables. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all that.

Often the victim absolutely deserves some of the blame for getting scammed. We all know scammers exist, learning to identify scams is an important life skill and I feel that falling for an obvious scam is a bit like stepping through the ice on a frozen lake or touching a downed powerline and getting electrocuted. Dangers are everywhere and to some degree we are all responsible for our own wellbeing. Some people on the other hand will always look for someone else to blame, they're the ones who will complain that there wasn't a sign or a railing or something to stop them from doing something stupid.

[unknownparticle]

Having been an audio enthusiast for many years, and also, importantly, a music lover, I can suggets one way to shut audiophool nonsense up, the blind listening test!
I have a friend who is fortunate enough to be VERY rich, to the extent that spending £250K and more on audio is not an issue.  I have always taken the piss out of him for this, saying that for an otherwise intelligent person he demonstrates all the intellectual ability of a single cell life form
when it comes to audio.
So, some years ago, I challenged him to the blind listening test, which, with some bullying from me he eventually agreed to, the phool!
His UK home made the ideal location, as it had vast space and, a dedicated listening room.  I rigged up my system, all bought used and costing a paltry £2k max, along with his collossus of a system, both behind screens!  With 3 other friends as witnesses we  went through a 10 track play list and all filled in comment forms indicating preferences and which system we thought was in play etc. The guy charged with playing the tracks stayed behind the screens and was to keep a record of what played on what when.
The results were embarassing for my friend!  Not once did he choose his own system as his preference, and actually made some insulting comments about it!  The overall preference was for my system!
This was a technique we used in a Hi-Fi shop I worked in at one time, when customers could not choose between items of equipment they were considering to buy. With the bias of make and model taken out of the equation, the choice was made easy, and often saved them alot of money!

[GregDunn]

A friend and I set up a blind listening test back in the 80s to compare a very highly respected and expensive preamp to my homemade IC-based unit.  We found that even a small difference in volume was perceived as a difference in sound quality; and further, that neither of us could remember the essential qualities of a sound if more than a few seconds passed before comparing it to another.  Once we got the levels matched, there was no difference.  This same type of test has been repeated by many other people and it's very humbling when you realize your ears just aren't that good as measuring instruments; and being able to see which choice you're listening to totally botches your ability to discriminate accurately.

I've done a huge number of comparisons between lossless and lossy audio encoding over the last few years, all automated by double-blind testing.  Once a certain level of bit rate has been achieved using a quality encoder, it's essentially impossible for me to discriminate between them.  And this is a situation where 80% to 90% of the audio has been discarded by the encoding process!  I'm very critical of people who say they can easily hear differences between encoders as well as electronics - and generally, they won't submit to a fair listening test to prove their beliefs, so they get no slack from me.

It's OK if people just want to buy audio jewelry and admit it to themselves; I'm just highly skeptical of any claims that one well-designed piece of audio gear is dramatically better than another.  Except speakers, of course - there are so many variables between designs and room placement that we're still not even close to achieving transparency through the speakers in a typical room.  Not even with DSP augmentation.

[james_s]

I can certainly hear the difference between a CD and a 128kbs MP3 but there are definitely diminishing returns as you crank up the bitrate. Some types of music suffer much more from compression than others but again at some point I really can't hear the difference.

I'm not going to claim that nobody can though, provided there's an actual difference that can be measured. I mean I can see flicker in lighting that some claim is impossible and apparently cannot see but it's flicker that I can easily measure and demonstrate with test gear, not super high frequency. Again there are diminishing returns, beyond several hundred Hz I can't detect the flicker anymore. Point is, some people's ears work better than mine, mine worked better when I was 17 than they do now. I used to be able to hear the horizontal whine of a 15kHz CRT from across the room and it was ear splitting in some. Now I can just barely perceive it if I put my ear right up to the housing.

[NiHaoMike]

I've done a huge number of comparisons between lossless and lossy audio encoding over the last few years, all automated by double-blind testing.  Once a certain level of bit rate has been achieved using a quality encoder, it's essentially impossible for me to discriminate between them.  And this is a situation where 80% to 90% of the audio has been discarded by the encoding process!  I'm very critical of people who say they can easily hear differences between encoders as well as electronics - and generally, they won't submit to a fair listening test to prove their beliefs, so they get no slack from me.

In my experience, 192kbps seems to be the point where MP3 sounds "basically lossless", but it's highly content dependent. Some sound good with less and a few need more to not show audible flaws. (It depends on the "entropy" of the content - it obviously takes more bits to describe if it's complex.) I would say to go straight for 320kbps since storage is so cheap nowadays.

BTW, I once bought a HDMI cable that claimed to make things look better. With my GTX 970 as the source, it worked no better than the "plain" cable I was using, but with a Raspberry Pi as the source, it actually did kind of work. That said, I don't think it's worth anywhere near the $120 list price - put that towards a better GPU instead. For the $15 or so I paid for it, it's at least worth the novelty factor.

[james_s]

The quality of HDMI cables matters when you're pushing the limits, length, speed (resolution), interference, marginal quality source, sink or termination, etc. If you're using an average setup where all the equipment is reasonably compliant, the connectors are in good shape and cable lengths sensible you're not gonna see any difference. If all the bits are arriving intact that's as good as it's gonna get. When something is on the ragged edge a lower quality cable can push it over the edge.

Quality is not tied directly to price though. Very cheap cables are likely to be crappy but very expensive cables are probably not much better than modestly priced decent stuff.

[BravoV]

One thing for sure to really piss off these goons, but they just swallow the insults or mockings, they knew it but unable to counter as its their native lingo, is to introduce new jargon words, but funny & definitely insulting ones.

Rather using these goons favorite terms for example "brighter sound" , "lively" and etc , try start using words like "farty base" .. "wet fart smell nice middle" ... "spicy yet yucky treble" ... "shitty brown warm choco feel" ... etc, just let loose your imagination & creativity. 

It works every time. 

[GregDunn]

In my experience, 192kbps seems to be the point where MP3 sounds "basically lossless", but it's highly content dependent. Some sound good with less and a few need more to not show audible flaws. (It depends on the "entropy" of the content - it obviously takes more bits to describe if it's complex.) I would say to go straight for 320kbps since storage is so cheap nowadays.

That's the case for me too.  Some things are almost transparent at 128k, while others seem to need more bandwidth.  The consensus seems to be that certain instruments like harpsichord and Latin percussion are the hardest to encode, while (ironically) much symphonic music is far less demanding.  I picked the killer samples from my library and tested them at 256k, which is my default now.  YMMV.

It's not so much about the complexity as it is the ability of the encoder to select frequency bins and block size when capturing high frequency information; even a solo instrument with highly correlated harmonics can be tough to encode.  E.g., the SiriusXM codec does OK on fairly busy rock music, but solo piano sounds horrible.  It's dependent on how much masking is present in the ensemble of sounds, which can be leveraged to improve the perceived fidelity.

[dzseki]

I found that listening through headphones makes compression artifacts more noticeable.

I have some really old mp3s like carrying them for like more than 20 years through generations of PCs, and it looks like along the way there were errors in the transfer so those mp3s suffering from more artifacts compared to newer ones of the same bitrate. Obviously less encoded or better yet, less dense formats are more bulletproof to errors IMO.

[schmitt trigger]

As PT Barnum would say, a sucker is born every minute.

I am also in agreement with the basic premise here, that once you reach a certain equipment quality level, any further cost increase will yield negligible to non existent improvements.
Heck, in some instances it may make the sound worse!

Having said this, to each its own.
I happen to love vacuum tube audio, but I recognize it is pure nostalgia. And I don’t try to push my views to anyone.

But the warm glow of tubes in a darkened room puts me in a mood that allows me to enjoy better certain types of music.

So.......Everything is on your head!

[NiHaoMike]

The quality of HDMI cables matters when you're pushing the limits, length, speed (resolution), interference, marginal quality source, sink or termination, etc. If you're using an average setup where all the equipment is reasonably compliant, the connectors are in good shape and cable lengths sensible you're not gonna see any difference. If all the bits are arriving intact that's as good as it's gonna get. When something is on the ragged edge a lower quality cable can push it over the edge.

Quality is not tied directly to price though. Very cheap cables are likely to be crappy but very expensive cables are probably not much better than modestly priced decent stuff.

The cable I'm referring to has "active trickery" built in.
https://www.marseilleinc.com/gaming-edition/

[ebastler]

it looks like along the way there were errors in the transfer so those mp3s suffering from more artifacts compared to newer ones of the same bitrate.

That seems very unlikely in my opinion. If you had transfer errors in these tightly compressed/encoded files, you would probably hear massive artefacts -- loud cracks, dropouts or such.

If the more recently generated files just "sound better" than the 20-year-old ones, the more likely reason would be that the MP3 encoder you use today has an improved algorithm. So it can generate more faithful reproductions of the music with the same bitrate, compared to the old encoder.

[dzseki]

it looks like along the way there were errors in the transfer so those mp3s suffering from more artifacts compared to newer ones of the same bitrate.

That seems very unlikely in my opinion. If you had transfer errors in these tightly compressed/encoded files, you would probably hear massive artefacts -- loud cracks, dropouts or such.

If the more recently generated files just "sound better" than the 20-year-old ones, the more likely reason would be that the MP3 encoder you use today has an improved algorithm. So it can generate more faithful reproductions of the music with the same bitrate, compared to the old encoder.

I definitely have pops in those mp3s and they were not there before...

[TomS_]

It makes me wonder how some of them manage to tie their shoelaces in the morning.[/color][/b]

They can tie them just fine, but they would have to be laces that cost 100x normal laces and be directional...

[ZaphodBeeblebrox]

It makes me wonder how some of them manage to tie their shoelaces in the morning.[/color][/b]

They can tie them just fine, but they would have to be laces that cost 100x normal laces and be directional...

However, it becomes exceedingly difficult after those laces have been burnt in 

[Musclor]

He also reviewed a 1,000 dollar ethernet cable giving it a glowing review. He's obvioulsy a paid shill for these scam companies, or he's mentally ill (i don't use these words lightly).

[borjam]

I "discovered" that website after I saw a mention of "audiophile grade Ethernet" on Mikrotik's forum-

So I did a search and I found a really insane world. I saw somewhere photos of an el-cheapo switch modified with an OCXO and an impressive signal integrity cabling!

https://audiobacon.net/2018/09/28/the-linear-solution-ocxo-audiophile-switch-reference-ethernet-cable-the-missing-pieces-of-digital-audio/

So these guys don't understand the difference between packet transmission with store and forward switches and sample based digital audio transmission systems such as AES/EBU or S/PDIF. Clock jitter and Ethernet! 

[Haenk]

Trying to find some words, but I fail.
There honestly can't be people falling to this nonsense. What's next? "Audio grade room heating"? "Audio grade ambient lightning"?