audio thread-anybody here consider themselves an audiophile?

Post Reply New Topic

http://hifipig.com/3-square-audio-trans ... dspeakers/
something like that but older

those look pretty good

Am involved in audio production, and in deejaying, and am a music lover . But am not exactly an "audiophile".

A friend in college showed off his system once. Pointed to to various points in the "sound picture" in the room while a record was playing, and could say "here is the flute, here is the lead guitar, here is etc...". That as opposed to the two speakers being "just two boxes making noise". I got what he meant and was quite impressed with both his system and with his conneiseurmanship. But that was the first, last, and really only, time I really thought about the quality of a sound system in that way.

I hope you don't mind the question, but did you take even a smidgen of sensual [non-sexual] pleasure in how his system translated music into his listening room? that is half the reason I love high-quality audio.

Hardly.

It was a very academic exercise. Like a professor pointing out stuff that I hadn't thought of before. Mind bending, and informative, but not not much of a below the neck experience (gut, much less genitals. Lol).

But your question reminds me of a conversation Mom had with a lady friend of her own bobby sox big band generation about hearing drummers like Charlie Rich, and Gene Krupa. One lady said "to me drumming is a very sexual thing" to which the reply was "Oh yeah!".

to me it is just the sound of strings swirling all around, the smooth silkiness of it, punctuated by jabbing blatting brasses and sharp pointy percussions slams and crashes and booms, and tremulating organ chords and such, and each in their own places in the aural canvas, like paintings of sound.

Nothing beats live music. And the closer you can get to that the better.

now you're got what I've been talking about, the better home audio systems get you "closer" to the live experience!

Id consider my self audiophilic only in the sense of a deep appreciation of temporal and tiberal nuance. Whether i can pick sound apart to a definition of clarity that audiofiles commonly adhere to, like recognising what frequency a certain sound registers at for instance, i just don't have the technical recollection for.

I do however have a profound synesthesia experience for music and sound. I can picture sound in motion, the mechanics of it, the orbits of repetition and i can hear sounds in nature and instantly mentally reconstruct it into new rhythmic contexts. I'm fascinated in programming a musical sequencer and synthesis system that can reconstruct the way i mentally visualise music.

I adore really sonically abstract music like Autechre, Aphex Twin, Phillip Glass, Richard Divine, anything that gives me that gives me vivid images of quantum like interactions, really does it for me. Im definitely more into less lyrically defined music, give me some trippy industrial techno any day, but really theres so much music out there i love and its always these sonic concepts that stick in my memory, no matter the genre. Hell...that song by Britney Spears, toxic i think its called? Something about the sound design in that definitely sticks in my skull (whether i want it there or not haha).

Does any of this make me an audiophile? Well, it doesn't make me intolerable at parties so maybe not .

I would consider you an audiophile if you enjoy sound that is well-reproduced, and prefer it over sound that is not well reproduced.

I have often thought of doing that...I really should!

One thing that bothers me is how to separate the marketing from the facts. Is a $5000 set of speakers ACTUALLY demonstrably superior to a $2000 set?

OR is it such a MINOR difference that only the experts would notice?

There is a great deal of psychological influence in the subjectivity of what "sounds" better, it seems to me, as an ignorant outsider. Makes me not know what to believe.

This insider broaches the issue...........
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqABlCRbH8w

I useta sell audio and can tell you there is a boatload of BS that goes along with the field. what you want in speakers is something catholic that reproduces all audio equally, not favoring one genre over the other, NEUTRALITY, not adding or subtracting anything from the audio recordings played through them. that is the FIRST test of speaker quality. price is NOT in lock-step with quality, that is 90% true in my opinion. noted audio engineer/critic J. Gordon Holt dismissed a set of Duntech speakers [that cost as much as a car] as "the world's largest headphones." IOW they failed the 2nd test of a speaker, in that it couldn't distribute sound [more or less] uniformly around the room. in comparison, speakers that cost a lot but still a lot less than those Duntechs did [like between $2k-$5k] such as the Ohm Walsh or [used] Mirage [they don't make 'em anymore, for the most part, you can find 'em on ebay and elsewhere] pass the uniform dispersion test easily. you want something with a decently wide and airy "sweet spot" that multiple listeners, not just those smack dab in the middle, can hear the stereo effect with clearly. the Canadian-made speakers, designed under the auspices of Canada's National Research Council [gov't-sponsored audio engineering think tank] to many test panel listeners, are among the most neutral and musical loudspeakers for the price. having heard Ohm Walsh speakers, I can say the same thing about them, they pass the 3rd important musical test, that of having low long-term listener fatigue. speakers with "shriek and boom" [accentuated trebles and bass] stand out in the show room but when you take them home you find you can't comfortably listen to any but the most well-recorded CDs, the more common music recordings of mediocre technical quality become unlistenable through such speakers, tiresome and headache-inducing, after a short while, one turns them down or off.


I would be glad to offer some pointers at least. resist the urge to just bring your musical faves, bring stuff instead that will test the speakers absence or presence of listener fatigue, bass quality and extension, transparency [hearing all the way into the back of a dense mix] in the all-important midrange, non-tizzy trebles. it first has to get the midrange right first. then it has to be able to throw a decent stereo image resulting in sound spread across an invisible curtain between and around the speakers, if the sound clumps around each speaker box [hence the term "boxy-sounding speakers"] it fails. if you close your eyes you should be able to 1] point out positions of musicians across the soundstage, and 2]fail mostly to be able to tell where the speaker boxes actually are in terms of sound identifiably coming from them. 3, it should make bass sound real and not boomy, bass lines [especially in a dense mix] should be clear, distinct [not fuzzy or blurred] and room-filling and uniform from top to bottom of the bass range. oh, and one last bit of advice, AVOID the company's showrooms whose name rhymes with HOSE.

Installing a new Bluetooth/Auxiliary/USB kit in my car tomorrow. If only I could afford new drivers.

https://youtu.be/DvswW6M7bMo

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bewar ... the-green/
above link shows that green-inking the edges of CDs does NOTHING to their sound quality.