A few things I learned that may save someone time:
(1) Sound quality is in the medium, not the build. Speakers almost always sound better than a pair of cans (headphones), headphones almost always sound better than IEMs, IEMs almost always sound better than over the ears.
(2) The difference in sound quality between something that is a few hundred dollars, and something that is a few thousand is so small that "diminishing returns" as a phrase doesn't do it justice.
(3) The stack of DACs, EQs, preamps, and neatly managed RCA/XLR cables looks cool on your desk - but they take up a lot of space and cost a lot of money for something that sounds maybe 10% better than a pair of AirPods Max (provided you remember to turn on lossless in apple music, which I forgot to!)
I bought some custom IEMs and had the opportunity to test ~10 of the super high-end options from several different brands. I found that there was no correlation whatsoever between price or even brand and how good they sounded to me. The technician I was working with said he observed the same thing all the time in the professionals he worked with. He'd have musicians on the same instruments in the same roles in the same group come in and all walk put with completely different products.
IEMs are the most personal but even headphones have the problem.
Because of this, my recommendation is that you make purchasing decisions in one of two ways:
- Learn how to EQ to get a sound you like. Purchase based on objective measurements like frequency response curves to find products that require minimal EQ to match your preference.
- Only buy after listening, or buy, listen and return if that's an option for you.
I recommend avoiding purchases based on reviews that make subjective judgements about the sound.
If you want to learn more, I like the videos/articles/forums of Headphones.com and Crinacle.
For (2), again it depends. Some companies build amazing things for cheap, some companies build crapshoot for tons of money. The trick is to find the sound you like for the cheapest price.
For (3), the simplest chain is the best(est) chain. I used to have a high-end 2x10 band eq which sat between pre and power stages. I removed it, and I'm happier. Unless I'm listening vinyl, I bypass loudness and tone circuits even.
There's a funny thing in audio. When you increase the resolution too much, the problems in old/remastered sources become apparent, and you can't enjoy that material anymore. A good Hi-Fi system is meant to create enjoyment, not motivation to spend more money on more equipment or sources.
Lastly, for casual listening, even the basic airpods provide plenty of resolution and detail.
It doesn’t need to even be that old. I’ve got stuff from small musicians and they don’t have the equipment to make perfect recordings. You can’t tell with good headphones, but you put it through an amazing pair of speakers and it gets fuzzy.
My information might be outdated, but aren’t those the kind that sort of sit loosely at the outside of your ear canal (like the original iPod headphones)? If so, those are the one kind of headphones that I find basically worthless. I’m not an audiophile by any stretch of the imagination, but in the iPod era I could never understand how people tolerated those when you can get vastly better sound for a few bucks. I figured the distinctive apple-brand headphones were kind of a status symbol.
AirPod pro sounds fine, though.
3rd generation Airpods, while don't isolate, sound pretty epic for what they are. When sitting at home, I can listen to some music and genuinely enjoy it, and I like their non-isolating nature because it helps me to hear traffic around while walking with them. The only problem is, talking on the phone with them might get a little noisy for the other party, but I believe phone hardware filters some of it.
When compared to their rivals, they really have higher resolution, and enjoyable sound balance. Also, iPhone scans your ears with FaceID camera to profile them, so they are also tuned for your ears from get go. This makes positional audio really shine, too.
The original iPod buds were pretty flat and tinny. I used to use a pair Sennheisers (I don't remember the model but they were pretty high end) to be able to enjoy what iPods had to offer, back in the day.
2) Absolutely and it's constantly getting better.
But they do interact with the environment. Having walls which reflect the sound can mess with the sound. Changing speakers won't help. Changing headphones can help.
Yup. Got plaster walls, vinyl flooring, narrow room, different sizes of rattling single-pane windows…
Neighbors with leaf blowers…
I really like my noise canceling headphones. :)
+1 though for the thought that the medium makes the biggest part of the sound quality.
Also read positive things about the moondrop old fashioned, to mention an alternative to the porta pro in a very close form factor, not the strange ear clips that are the KSC 75.
I'd argue that the additional space should give the form factor an advantage, though sure, being closer to the ear might also be one. And no doubt, given the huge popularity of IEMs the technology must have seen a lot of progress, so I might be wrong.
We had 2 "living room" setups for a while, upstairs and down. We eventually realized how dumb that was, and condensed to 1.
Doing that, we stopped using some really expensive speakers and started using some that were 1/5 the price because we couldn't tell the difference.
Then, one day, I brought those expensive speakers down and set them up. Wow. There was a definite difference after all. I'm not an audiophile and can't tell you what that difference was, just that both of us could immediately tell the expensive speakers were better, and we were not going back to the cheaper ones. Nothing else in the setup changed.
Also, I eventually upgraded the receiver to something that could better drive those speakers. An upgrade from $600 to about $900. And there was a definite difference there, too. The older box should have been enough, but it just wasn't.
Do I recommend that someone on a budget spend $4000 instead of $1500? Nope. It's not enough difference. But for stuff we already had, or for someone that really cares, it's definitely better.
Also... 'good' is something you first need to agree on when talking with people. Some people like to have 'distorted' playback (compared to the original), because they "like" that better. That is the moment retailers can sell objectively worse but overpriced stuff.
Genelecs for instance are very detailed, neutral etc (there is a reason you see them everywhere in professional settings), but consumers don't necessarily have an appetite for 'objectivity'.
It’s the least important part of any system and indeed my Quad amp and CA R50s are wired with twisted, braided, brown lamp cable as a nice aesthetic homage.
About the only things you could do wrong would be using wire that's too small to carry the load, is frayed/broken/severely corroded, or is coiled in a way that inductance becomes a real issue. Running parallel and near electrical or signal wires is problematic, and largely different run lengths can make a difference.
Today, I'd still use "mains wire" if I can find it in a 100% copper form with the correct cross section. The reason I used "speaker wire" in my set is because the recommended cable was thicker than the standard stuff, and I didn't believe that I'd be able to get 100% copper wire easily.
And the UL-listed stuff is fantastic, because UL cares about the insulation and jacket. There is plenty of “speaker” wire with crappy insulation that degrades after a few years, but I’ve never seen an actual CL2 or CM or CL3 (or their R or P variants) or THWN(2), TC(-ER) etc, cable, from the last 30 years, with any such issues.
16AWG CL2 cable is fantastic speaker wire, and it’s cheap and you can buy it at any store that sells electrical supplies. TC-ER is great if you need something bigger than 16AWG (the longer the run, the thicker the cable you need to keep resistance below 1 ohm or so), but it’s a bit harder to find.
The thing that can be genuinely hard to find is nice twisted-pair or shielded twisted-pair cable in any format other than category (Ethernet) cable, and that tends to max out at 22-23AWG and may have the wrong number of conductors for whatever you’re doing with it. For making up an RCA cable, this is completely unnecessary — use RG59 or RG6 cable if you need particularly good shielding. But for long runs of balanced audio cable, you want actual twisted pairs, 23 AWG is plenty, but you may need those pairs shielded from each other to minimize crosstalk. So you end up with commercial snake cables, and those are not cheap. Some people use digital stage boxes these days, because an effectively transparent ADC and all the electronics needed to make it work can be cheaper than the fancy cables.
Somewhere far w.r.t. US. :)
> 16AWG CL2 cable is fantastic speaker wire,
Yet, it's way thinner than the manufacturer of my speakers recommend, which start at 13, and only go up. In my case I need 12 or 11. I don't remember honestly.
The good thing is, I managed to get a roll of the correct cable made by Acoustic Research. While the cable is not "fancy", it's copper, has the correct thickness and it's jacket still feels like day 1, and that thing is 10+ years old at this point.
For RCA cables I still use the factory default set came with my amplifier. Japan made, with very flexible jackets and gold plated connectors. That provides more than enough clarity for me.
> Please always use a good quality loudspeaker connection cable from an audio dealer. To prevent impairment of sound quality, we recommend cables with cross-sections of at least 2.5 mm² for lengths up to 3 m and at least 4 mm² for lengths above 3 m.
Interestingly, the table present in the printed manual is not present in the one on the internet. IIRC, recommendation for 100W up to 3m was 3mm² or 4mm² at minimum.
From what I looked at, 14AWG is ~2mm² and 16AWG is 1.3mm². Way too skinny for what the manufacturer says.
Unless you're running speaker cables parallel to some power cables, shielding is not a requirement from my experience. The cable I use is at [0]. I have a roll like this. Mine is thicker than 2.5mm² though.
[0]: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71Jr0vhSTsL._AC_UF1000,1...
This is just a unit issue. See:
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/wire-gauges-d_419.html
Those numbers are also ridiculous. They’re recommending 13AWG or higher for a 3m run. That’s about 20 feet round trip, which is about 0.04 ohms. The speaker should be 8 ohms nominal, but let’s call it 1 ohm at some very audible frequency to be conservative. So you might lose 2% of your power or maybe 0.1dB. Keep in mind that you cannot hear frequency-independent attention at all (the volume knob fixes it), so you’ll only hear the frequency-dependent part, which will be smaller, and your speaker plus room already has frequency dependence far in excess of 0.1dB. Note that the speaker power doesn’t even factor in to the calculation — as you supply more power, you’re increasing the current and voltage accordingly, and the effects cancel out.
At very high power you may care about heating. That recommended cable has an NEC ampacity of 15A or more, and 15A^2 * 8ohms = 1800W. Derate a bit because you’re at higher frequencies than 60Hz and you are just fine — in fact, the voltage will become a safety problem at silly power long before the resistive heating matters.
I will admit that there is a good reason to use at least 18AWG cable or so: speaker cable terminations are utter crap, and the crappiness seems to get worse as the fanciness goes up. A thicker wire is more likely to survive being terminated, within limits.
Buy some 16AWG two-conductor CL2 or CL2R or CL2P cable at your home improvement store and be done with it.
> Unless you're running speaker cables parallel to some power cables, shielding is not a requirement from my experience.
I have never heard mains hum coupled from a passive speaker cable. That’s not really a thing — there just isn’t enough power to make it audible under normal conditions.
on a more serious note.. doesn't seem like the "good" audio was good? there is a huge difference between noise free audio and garbage integrated audio / speakers with hizz imbalance and peaking... if the "good" audio is bad then there obviously won't be a difference between any of them.
which makes me think... banana and mud are noise filters... hmm...
So yes, the “good” audio is good.
- Run the amplifier output through a banana or mud. Even if this somehow works and you can hear the sound, you’ll probably smell it as you cook and/or electrolyze your conductor :) (The banana likely works because the load impedance is very high in the experiment they did. The load impedance with an actual speaker is typically in the ballpark of 8 ohms. I admit I haven’t stuck a pair of multimeter probes in a banana lately, let alone done a proper I-V or AC impedance measurement.)
- Use really long cables. It’s not especially rare to be able to hear and even understand AM radio that gets accidentally picked up on a long cable and converted to baseband by some accidental nonlinearity in the amplifier.
- Use the actual outdoor mud on a rainy day as your conductor. I bet you can get some very loud mains hum like that.
Even audiophiles can probably identify these effects!
Therein, audio from a microphone is sent through progressively-longer cables until the length reaches ~6 miles. It gets pretty muffled-sounding... eventually.
(The longest pair of wires I've sent analog audio through was in the realm of 37 miles, stretching across the countryside. AMA, I guess.)
In general, with low-level analog audio and non-ridiculous lengths, additive noise effects are likely to become audible long before attenuation or especially frequency-dependent attenuation. As a decent heuristic, as long as the DC resistance is small compared to load impedance, the cable impedance is unlikely to be a problem. For the connection from the amplifier to the speaker, additive noise is unlikely to be a problem, so the DC resistance is even a decent heuristic: keep the round-trip resistance below half an ohm or so and you should be fine with most speakers.
That was almost certainly the result of illegal transmitters, but it was annoying. One time I heard a man shouting through the stereo and the signal was hot enough in RF land that it made my X10-controlled lights flash on and off.
Later, I got DirecTV and it became differently-annoying: The noise of the satellite receiver switching bias voltage to select between different LNB polarities was sufficient to make a loud pop through the speakers (again, unaffected by the volume control). This made channel surfing very noisy. I was able to reduce it rather substantially with some very deliberate choices in audio cabling construction.
But with better gear (and with the differential[1] signalling that every avenue of pro audio seeks to use by default), this kind of stuff is usually a complete non-issue.
[1]: We popularly call this kind of connection "balanced," but we're wrong about that since there's usually hardly any concern about impedance matching. But it's definitely consistently differential, so I find this less-popular nomenclature to have the right amount of specificity to ~fit reality.
37 miles?!? Why??
Our sales guy had sold a remote node for a voter system to improve receive coverage for a central dispatch system. (Signal-to-noise voters are pretty neat: They can continuously compare two or more related audio signals and [ideally!] pick the one that is best for use while discarding the others.)
That node wasn't all that far away as the crow flies, but it was a very long way out in telephone cabling miles. It spread across two different telco LATAs.
So we rented this very long series of bits of wire held together by scotchloks and punch blocks and whatever else in telephone world to use, and we used it. It was not a conditioned circuit: Just wire.
The specific endpoints of that wire were kind of neat, too: There was some basic EQ that could be used to help compensate, and (IIRC) some impedance adjustment to dial in the circuit itself.
And there was a continuous pilot tone used to set gain: Apparently, when wire gets really long like that, atmospheric conditions can dynamically change its attenuation.
Putting a pilot tone near the middle of the voice range (to be notched it out later) and using its level to set gain helps to improve consistency.
That wireline stuff all worked pretty well.
(The remote node was ultimately a bust. The sales guy also tried to cram too much shit into one feedline and antenna, and the gear to combine and separate all of those signals ate too much energy to make any of it an improvement over doing nothing at all.
Which is... well, that's exactly what the engineering told him would happen, but he did it anyway.
No part of this was inexpensive.)
Outside of the hyper-crazies, no one is really stating that a 6-12 inches of conductor is going to make a giant difference in audio quality. Yes, I'm aware of the super-premium-gold-plated-platinum-encrusted 12" audio patch cords available. But almost no one really makes serious arguments those do anything.
I don't think running a 50ft banana is going to have similar performance to a 50ft properly-sized copper conductor though.
Where you get into the "debate" is the difference between buying a spool of 12ga stranded copper wiring from Home Depot, or buying the same thing only with de-oxygenated or whatever silliness some audiophile brand is selling for 10x the cost.
There are levels to things. I imagine copper speaker wire to be essentially fungible. Just size it to your length of run and max power needs. Calculate the total resistance for your wire run and done/done. All professional level sound installations for venues and what-have-you do this already.
This sort of test just seems to prove nothing in either direction other than provide bait for folks to point and laugh (or defend) in comment sections. Consider me baited, I suppose!
You need source, digital to analog conversion, pre-amp, amp, speakers to have low distortion too, and you need the room to be appropriately treated too. I didn’t look at whether they did all that but I seriously doubt they did.
https://www.audiotherapyuk.com/product/oephi-reference-inter...
Up to a point, there's an easily distinguishable sound and detail difference between cheaper and more expensive gear, given that you don't cheat (i.e. put cheaper gear in expensive enclosure), but that difference indistinguishable well before these "true audiophile" level stuff.
For example: I run a pair of Heco Celan GT302s. They are not something exotic. 100W per channel, adequately detailed speakers with great soundstage. The manual gives you a table: Wattage -> Recommended wire gauge. I got a high quality, 100% copper cable (from Acoustic Research, so nothing fancy) at the recommended gauge, and connected them. You can't convince me to get a better cable. It's pointless.
Do I enjoy the sound I get, hell yeah. Do I need to listen to my system instead of listening to the music, hell no. I feed the amplifier with a good turntable (which is 40 years old, shocker!) and a good CD player (which is pretty entry level for what's out there), and that's it.
That set will nail any person who likes to listen to the music to its chair. That's the aim of a good system. Same for personal DAPs and DACs. If you enjoy what you have, who cares!
I don't understand how that is cheating. Isn't it a better controlled experiment if the equipment looks the same?
If you want a good controlled experiment, create a literal black box, without any distinguishing features, or lose the box completely and give them an output (speakers or headphones) only.
Another bad thing is, sound is so subjective and experience changes between brands a lot. For example: headphone "burn in" is considered an hallucination, it mostly is. However I have bought a set of RHA MA750i earphones which changed from "This is not what it says on the box" to "am I sure that these are the RHAs I hated" in a month, because it's sound character changed so immensely. No other headphone I had in my life did that.
So, everything is so muddy, subjective and unreproducible. When a room's organization or floor carpet density can change its frequency response, you can't control anything. Moreover, every human's ear profile is different, so you can't be sure that their ear is hearing that the same (e.g. one of my ears have a notch in its hearing curve around mid frequencies. we don't know why it happened).
If anybody wants to learn some of the tricks which can be done to get better sound, please watch Mend it Mark's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RJbpFSFziI
While the £25.000 price tag on that preamp is literal snake-oil level and the builder has the audacity to erase the model numbers of the ICs (and OpAmps) he uses, some of the methods he uses are legit and Mark explains them exceptionally well.
I mean, I like Mikrotik products just fine. I happen to have a Mikrotik Hex S on my desk in front of me as I write this.
But scroll down and zoom in on the money shot here: https://hifi.nl/artikel/32753/Review-Synergistic-Research-Ne...
And then, for comparison: https://openwrt.org/_media/media/mikrotik/rb760igs/pcb_top.j...
The difference in price between the Mikrotik box and the Synergistic box with the board is north of $2,500.
Also, this explains why I hear some birds chirping and bees buzzing in the beginning of the Pink Floyd's High Hopes (from Pulse). It's possible that the sounds from outside imprint on my wireless signal while streaming it.
Maybe I should buy this Micro^H^H^H^H Synergistic box and connect via it while listening to music. Of course I'll need Cat8 shielded cables, but it'll clear the sound, probably, I hope. /s
We all know that the aim of a good system is to blow your clothes off ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNZ-nEGHDKk
In other words, they got fooled.
What’s happened in electronics is that there’s a cutoff, above which the audio quality doesn’t get any better, but that cutoff is much lower than anybody can believe. So the psychological cutoff is higher than the physical one, and a role of marketing is to raise that cutoff even further.
I feel the same way about wine. At a certain point, it's not really about objective improvements, it's about vibes and lore.
That said, think there is value in putting out facts that let people make informed decisions and not spend tons of money on things that don't actually work.
(And yet: They still make inexpensive cables in factories every day.)
So yeah, audiophiles are in over their heads and tend to attribute near-mystical properties to individual electronic components, but the only tool they can rely on is trial and error. So if you can afford it, and if some of it seemingly sounds better... have fun? You're going to make mistakes, but that's not the end of the world.
Erin over at Erin's Audio Corner did a really nice video[1] recently which focuses on room treatment, but dives into some of these variables which gives a good insight in why something that works well for you might be horrible in my living room.
But it’s much more fun to spend crazy money on magic rocks and snake oil that make your rich audiophile friends want their own magic rocks.
You realize that the pitch for this is basically the same as the pitch for magic pebbles? It's a cure-all box you put on the wire to make things sound better, for a low price of $1,500 or something like that.
I know enough about signal processing to know that magic pebbles probably work worse, but I can think of many reasons why it might not produce the audio you subjectively like better. I suspect it can't really even correct for many of the real-world issues you might have, because equalization doesn't fix echoes, resonance, etc.
In any case, it's a bit of a strawman, because most audiophiles are not buying pebbles in the first place. They're trying vacuum tubes instead of ICs, or are trying out different op-amps, or stuff like that.
They aren't. They aren't even seeing statistical noise. There is nothing an "oxygen-free" cable can do to your sound, regardless of your unique particulars. They will still insist it sounds better.
Can today's audio systems do that? How much money do I have to spend to get there?
Usually you only get some specially-crafted demo files that are capable of fooling you.
My experience is I hanged out with one band in a garage where they were practicing and I attended couple live music shows in pubs.
Main upside of those live music shows is that they are not "perfect" like playing a record and each one of the gigs will be off here or there, tempo somewhere will be off or a tune will be off - or you are just having enough beers you don't care pick your way :)
That's a very different metric. How good the sound is vs. what the sound is.
I would guess that this experiment is under powered and no conclusions can be drawn from it.
Just look at the boxes for half this stuff, quoting peak power for speakers instead of RMS, which is the equivalent of saying "This LED hits 50 watts for .00001 seconds during startup! Wow so amazing! (but don't look at the average 1 watt of output past that)"
The speakers, the cables, the AMPs, even digital source cables nearly all have 90% marketing budgets which drive up the price of many products without increasing quality at all.
I thought my fathers old setup always sounded amazing when I was younger. Coming back to it 20 years later though, it sounds stupidly scooped to my ears. Same speakers but what has changed is the music I was playing on them and what my ears expect to hear. 20 years ago I was more into guitar/bass/drum/vocal music that these speakers were made for.
There is really no such thing as "sound quality". There is just different EQ, frequency range, etc.
