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Catcher10 View Drop Down
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Points: 17845 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 12 2011 at 14:23
It has been proven here, scientifically, mathematically, electronically...others (insert)ally......That the "add-ons" to a sound system, like thicker speaker cable, special cable connects with gold plated stuff, separate power sources......and other stuff mentioned (I have forgotten most, this thread is so long), do not make the sound of the source any better. And what I am referring to is a technical/specification point of view....$50 per foot cable does not sound better than $5 per foot cable...and so on.
 
In my 30 yrs of sound systems, it is very evident that the main selling feature of audio equipment is "the more expensive it is the better it sounds.." Ummm Hogwash!!
For sure there is a price point where quality and sound is very evident to anyones ears....but once you get passed that $1000.00 price tag for a set of speakers, I have yet to hear an appreciable difference that will make me pay $5000.00 or more. Also in my 35+ yrs of listening to music, I never find myself needing to listen at such levels for long periods of time that require speakers that will "move walls". My experience has always been if I listen at lower to moderate levels I hear all that I need to hear, sonically, I do not believe I am missing any details.
 
Now I have always spent most of my available funds when shopping for equipment on speakers. I recently auditioned Epos, Quad and B&W bookshelf speakers, priced from US$600-US$1200/pair. The B&W CM1 had the best bass response....but in general they all sounded the same. And actually my initial response was "my system sounds better". But I think this has more to do with what my mind knows as the norm...we are creatures of habit when it comes to music, we like and prefer what we have been listening to for the past xx years. Speakers are easy.....
 
Where we get hype thrown at us is in the components, the stuff we can't actually hear make music, so we only use the specs to buy from and determine if its krapp or good. So many audio sellers have been telling me "you don't need tone controls anymore in your amp, its not needed if you want to hear true music" I'm like what?? Number one I like tone controls, adding or taking away low or high is sometimes a good thing. And not all music sounds good with a flat playback response.....at least to my ears.
 
Anyhow, I think it has been said enough on this thread. If you wanna spend big bucks on your hifi system then go ahead, if you wanna buy the $50 per foot speaker cable and all the other add on stuff then go ahead.
But I also think it has been proven scientifically that some of these add on pcs do not improve the sound any better or at all, compared to the standard issue add ons.
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Points: 6308 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 12 2011 at 14:33
There's huge minsunderstanding due to the fact that none of you are experienced. People love my system because it's NEUTRAL and it's transparent, everything but coloured, wide range (by using solidstate and valve at their best through bi amp), dynamic and extremely precise.

I must precise that some "bad" tube amps sound coloured (but some solid state do as well), i'm only interested in neutral sounding elements anyway. A coloured device may be pleasant but will "eat" some music.

You can stay in your cave one century and eleborate very complex theories, i just hope that some day you'll get out of it to discover that it's about exactly the contrary that what you'd expect.

My system sounds WAY better for everybody, everybody can hear how much more transparent it is compared to everything else they heard in their life. It's not due to Holy spirit.

Some examples: thanks to tube and the whole synergy, you hear ring bells, songbirds, you'll get a clearly articulated bass line...a huge soundstage that you've never heard on this record you now very well. EXACTLY the contrary of a coloured, muffled tube sound.

Again, the difference between experience and theory.

It happens that bitter narrow minded scientists feel secretly jealous of these "non engineers" people who have fun with hifi.


Edited by oliverstoned - September 12 2011 at 14:35
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Points: 6308 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 12 2011 at 14:38
Originally posted by Catcher10 Catcher10 wrote:

It has been proven here, scientifically, mathematically, electronically...others (insert)ally......That the "add-ons" to a sound system, like thicker speaker cable, special cable connects with gold plated stuff, separate power sources......and other stuff mentioned (I have forgotten most, this thread is so long), do not make the sound of the source any better. And what I am referring to is a technical/specification point of view....$50 per foot cable does not sound better than $5 per foot cable...and so on.

In my 30 yrs of sound systems, it is very evident that the main selling feature of audio equipment is "the more expensive it is the better it sounds.." Ummm Hogwash!!

For sure there is a price point where quality and sound is very evident to anyones ears....but once you get passed that $1000.00 price tag for a set of speakers, I have yet to hear an appreciable difference that will make me pay $5000.00 or more. Also in my 35+ yrs of listening to music, I never find myself needing to listen at such levels for long periods of time that require speakers that will "move walls". My experience has always been if I listen at lower to moderate levels I hear all that I need to hear, sonically, I do not believe I am missing any details.


Now I have always spent most of my available funds when shopping for equipment on speakers. I recently auditioned Epos, Quad and B&W bookshelf speakers, priced from US$600-US$1200/pair. The B&W CM1 had the best bass response....but in general they all sounded the same. And actually my initial response was "my system sounds better". But I think this has more to do with what my mind knows as the norm...we are creatures of habit when it comes to music, we like and prefer what we have been listening to for the past xx years. Speakers are easy.....


Where we get hype thrown at us is in the components, the stuff we can't actually hear make music, so we only use the specs to buy from and determine if its krapp or good. So many audio sellers have been telling me "you don't need tone controls anymore in your amp, its not needed if you want to hear true music" I'm like what?? Number one I like tone controls, adding or taking away low or high is sometimes a good thing. And not all music sounds good with a flat playback response.....at least to my ears.


Anyhow, I think it has been said enough on this thread. If you wanna spend big bucks on your hifi system then go ahead, if you wanna buy the $50 per foot speaker cable and all the other add on stuff then go ahead.

But I also think it has been proven scientifically that some of these add on pcs do not improve the sound any better or at all, compared to the standard issue add ons.


Because we don't measure the good criterias...science is not all

Price means nothing, there are good and bad things at all prices...like for everything else. I'm very tired of repeating that for years.

But i admit that a system cannot be really good without valve (or at least hybrid) in the highs. And the cheapest amp to my knowledge is around 600 euros. You'll find (very) high end solidstate amps who try to sound as well in the highs but eventually fail to compare and cost as least three times more!





Edited by oliverstoned - September 12 2011 at 14:56
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Points: 5208 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 12 2011 at 14:44
"My system sounds WAY better for everybody, everybody can hear how much more transparent it is compared to everything else they heard in their life."
 
Transparent systems don't necessarily sound good to everyone. That's the point.
 
 
You are quite a fine person, and I am very fond of you. But you are only quite a little fellow, in a wide world, after all.
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Points: 6308 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 12 2011 at 15:04
My system sounds transparent AND musical.

There are billion dollars ultra high end systems based on digital source and solidstate amplification only, using the best loudspeakers, which are extremely transparent and precise but unlisteneable because not musical: too cold, electronic, which is the contrary of a natural, lifelike sound.


The kind of system you'll stand five minutes because there's no pleasure whereas i can listen my system whole days without fatigue.





Edited by oliverstoned - September 12 2011 at 15:08
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Points: 6308 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 12 2011 at 15:12
Originally posted by Catcher10 Catcher10 wrote:

$50 per foot cable does not sound better than $5 per foot cable...and so on.


even more, a well choosed 5 dollar one may sound better than a coloured
50 dollars one. There are over expensive power, speakers or modulation cables which sound very bad in a way or another and downgrade the sound...i'm only interested in the ones that enhance my sound.
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Points: 17845 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 12 2011 at 15:13

So if in my system I hear ring bells and songbirds......its as good as what you have? I'll go with that.......but if you tell me I have to have a US$5000.00 tube amplifier to hear the ring bells and songbirds accurately, then I have disagree with you.

I guess what you believe is that even though scientifically, electronically it is proven that the solidstate NAD amp (for example) sounds as good or better than a Jolida tube amp......you don't buy that? To your ears a tube amp sounds better period?
I mean somewhere in all this talk you have to have a clear black and white belief in your mind.
 
Does this make sense?
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Points: 17845 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 12 2011 at 15:18
Originally posted by oliverstoned oliverstoned wrote:

Originally posted by Catcher10 Catcher10 wrote:

$50 per foot cable does not sound better than $5 per foot cable...and so on.


even more, a well choosed 5 dollar one may sound better than a coloured
50 dollars one. There are over expensive power, speakers or modulation cables which sound very bad in a way or another and downgrade the sound...i'm only interested in the ones that enhance my sound.
 
But that's my point........I think Dean has proven that "lamp cord" used for speaker wire carries the electronic signal just the same as some of these hyped up copper, gold, hyper-allergenic, non-oxidizing, wire..blah, blah, blah....ones that cost 10x what lamp cord costs.
Do you believe that or agree with Dean's assesment?
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Points: 5208 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 12 2011 at 15:29
Originally posted by oliverstoned oliverstoned wrote:

My system sounds transparent AND musical.

There are billion dollars ultra high end systems based on digital source and solidstate amplification only, using the best loudspeakers, which are extremely transparent and precise but unlisteneable because not musical: too cold, electronic, which is the contrary of a natural, lifelike sound.


The kind of system you'll stand five minutes because there's no pleasure whereas i can listen my system whole days without fatigue.



 
Transparent = nothing changed from input signal to output signal (or as little as possible)
 
You cannot have two transparent systems with one "cold, unlistenable" and another "natural, lifelike"
 
 
Perhaps you're confusing this with separation, where you can hear individual instruments well. While a good set up of your stereo will make a difference for this, the mixing of the source will make a MUCH bigger difference. If the recording is in mono and had no EQ on the mixing end, it's going to be narrower and more muddled and your  system is only going to be able to do so much.
You are quite a fine person, and I am very fond of you. But you are only quite a little fellow, in a wide world, after all.
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Points: 37575 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 12 2011 at 19:01
Originally posted by oliverstoned oliverstoned wrote:

There's huge minsunderstanding due to the fact that none of you are experienced. People love my system because it's NEUTRAL and it's transparent, everything but coloured, wide range (by using solidstate and valve at their best through bi amp), dynamic and extremely precise.

I must precise that some "bad" tube amps sound coloured (but some solid state do as well), i'm only interested in neutral sounding elements anyway. A coloured device may be pleasant but will "eat" some music.

You can stay in your cave one century and eleborate very complex theories, i just hope that some day you'll get out of it to discover that it's about exactly the contrary that what you'd expect.

My system sounds WAY better for everybody, everybody can hear how much more transparent it is compared to everything else they heard in their life. It's not due to Holy spirit.

Some examples: thanks to tube and the whole synergy, you hear ring bells, songbirds, you'll get a clearly articulated bass line...a huge soundstage that you've never heard on this record you now very well. EXACTLY the contrary of a coloured, muffled tube sound.

Again, the difference between experience and theory.

It happens that bitter narrow minded scientists feel secretly jealous of these "non engineers" people who have fun with hifi.
There is a huge misunderstanding/misconception (and failure to read) concerning the distortion added into a system by valves and their matching transformers. This is partially due to the word "distortion" which gives the impression that it is "a bad thing" ... and this is partly true because in most cases distortion is "a bad thing". However, when the distortion is harmonic, and predominately even-harmonic, it can be "a good thing" - it can make things sound "nicer", and "warmer" and altogether "better". Take the sound of a bell for instance - this can be harsh and unpleasant (I know this for a fact - I used to be a campanologist in my youth¹) but with some even harmonic distortion this can sound sweet and pleasant which it can make it appear to have more clarity - this is something guitarists know and love about valve amplifiers - it's not just the smooth overdrive they like, it's the warmth and clarity of the clean high notes that can be achieved when using a valve amp that is not in overdrive. This is also something that any musician knows (albeit instinctively) - the difference between one make of instrument and the next is all down to the degree of harmonic distortion that the instrument body adds to the sound of the overal sound at specific frequencies across the audio spectrum - this (along with a spectral property called 'formant') is what distinguishes a Les Paul from a Stratocaster guitar, a Stradivarius from Yamaha violin and a Bösendorfer from a Steinway piano.
 
This added distortion is not muffled or muddied - that's a different problem completely and nothing to do with valves or matching transformers. This colouration in valves cannot be removed or eliminated, it is a fundamental property of the valve/tube and of the matching transformer - it is physically impossible to design and construct a valve power amplifier that does not have this characteristic just as it is physically impossible to design and construct a violin that sounds like a piano.
 
One comment I would add about "soundstage" is that you cannot change a soundstage once it has been recorded - as Jay has said - it is not possible to make it any more "huge" than it was when the mixing engineer created it, if the image was muddled and busy in the final mix nothing will ever make it better than that. However, by the same argument, it is also not possible to make it any worse.
 
Speaker positioning is important when reproducing a recorded soundstage in a listening environment, but straight through (ie separate and not cross-coupled) stereo amplifiers and cables cannot affect this "image" - even the most powerful and complex audio analysis and processing cannot reposition a musical instrument in a recorded soundstage, so a single length of wire has no chance. Also human beings are only able to locate sounds to an accuracy of around 8 degrees which tends to limit how much separation it is possible to detect in a soundstage (of course the mixing engineer is able to pan an instrument with absolute precision, but if he were to place two separate instruments 5 degrees apart you would not be able to tell which was one was to the left and which was to the right). Now this is a bit of a simplification and I did say "separate and not cross-coupled" - the overall stereo image width can be altered by cross-coupling, the simplest and most noticeable form of this is the "mono" button which adds all the left channel to the right and vice-versa, and so collapses the stereo image to a mono one - here the sound stage is the narrowest it can ever be. You can do this to a lesser degree and make the overall stereo image just a little narrower, this can be very effective when listening on headphones and some headphone amplifiers have this as a feature, you can also do it over selective bands of frequencies to make the effect less dramatic, you can also widen the image by adding a phase-shifted portion of each channel into the opposite channel. All of these things require extra circuitry to make happen and they cannot happen "accidentally", they also only affect the apparent width of the overall soundstage, they do not (and cannot) reposition or move individual instruments and sounds within that soundstage separately and they cannot "blur" the instruments within that image.
 
Now, you can chose to believe all that or ignore it as you see fit, I honestly don't care. Like Jay, I spend time and effort in creating a soundstage when I produce a recording and I put a lot of thought into how to set up instruments in that stereo image² - if my playback equipment could not reproduce that soundstage I would be wasting my time.
 
¹ before you ask: there are lots of things I have yet to do in my life, but (church) bell ringing isn't one of them.
² for one album I even had a long debate with the band being recorded on whether we should position the individual drums from the drummer's perspective (ie snare to the left and toms to the right) or from the audience's perspective (snare on the right)... and to be frank, I doubt anyone noticed what we did in the end.
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Points: 13298 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 12 2011 at 19:07
It's the end of the decade, and CDs aren't leaving anytime soon, even if you have a really nice sound system that plays vinyl better.

/thread.
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Points: 37575 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 12 2011 at 19:17
OMG! the decade ends in 2011! Run for the hills!!!!!
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Points: 13298 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 12 2011 at 19:25
Start of a new decade, end of another, whatever Tongue
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Points: 29630 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 12 2011 at 19:29
Actually, try the end of the record store:
http://www.ajc.com/business/criminal-records-owner-plans-1160071.html

Criminal Records owner plans November close

"There are more than 700 independent record stores nationwide. Many have closed their doors saying they can’t compete with Amazon, iTunes and big box retailers such as Best Buy or Target that sell new releases at deep discounts. If Criminal closes, that will leave the metro Atlanta area with a half-dozen independent stores that sell new or used CDs or vinyl records. Levin rattled off nearly 10 independent music stores in Atlanta or Decatur that have shuttered in recent years."

""There is something uniquely human about having a physical location and a physical record selection to look through," Malek said. "And it's not really fun to wait for things to show up in the mail.""
Yes and also a big no for the last bit. 

The last couple of b&m stores I visited online had no section where you could browse their stock and buy things, which I find very dumb, unless for some reason you can't mingle online and in store sales.  This is the computer age for crying out loud.  Not everyone can physically travel to your stores.  Or guess at what they might want to order.  One can support the other.  Enough rant.


Edited by Slartibartfast - September 12 2011 at 19:52
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Points: 17845 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 12 2011 at 19:35
^ Atlanta clearly is not a vinyl town with only 10 stores........Seattle has probably double that, with 4-5 in just the Tacoma area with a population of 3million.
Maybe the owners here will buy their inventory....more for me Yaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Points: 29630 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 12 2011 at 19:51
^  What's your collection up to now anyway? 


Edited by Slartibartfast - September 12 2011 at 19:51
Released date are often when it it impacted you but recorded dates are when it really happened...
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Points: 8667 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 12 2011 at 20:16
Originally posted by Catcher10 Catcher10 wrote:

^ Atlanta clearly is not a vinyl town with only 10 stores........Seattle has probably double that, with 4-5 in just the Tacoma area with a population of 3million.
Maybe the owners here will buy their inventory....more for me Yaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Wow, by those numbers I live in a music haven, 6+ record stores I'm aware of,
with a population of just over one million in this city.
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Points: 29630 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 12 2011 at 20:50
Originally posted by TheGazzardian TheGazzardian wrote:

Originally posted by Catcher10 Catcher10 wrote:

^ Atlanta clearly is not a vinyl town with only 10 stores........Seattle has probably double that, with 4-5 in just the Tacoma area with a population of 3million.
Maybe the owners here will buy their inventory....more for me Yaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Wow, by those numbers I live in a music haven, 6+ record stores I'm aware of,
with a population of just over one million in this city.

Of course even take a chain store I've bought a lot of stuff from: Best Buy has decimated their CD section.  The last thing I bought there was Bryan Ferry's Olympia and I snagged the last or possibly only copy.  I mean come on, just one or two of that as a new release? LOL

I do think it may be a vinyl enthusiast's market in some respects. 
Released date are often when it it impacted you but recorded dates are when it really happened...
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Points: 17845 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 12 2011 at 21:19
Originally posted by Slartibartfast Slartibartfast wrote:

^ 

What's your collection up to now anyway? 

Not enough

I look for stuff to replace my older stuff generally. And most of what I find is very good reissue and 180 gram weight.
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Points: 37575 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 13 2011 at 02:34
Originally posted by Slartibartfast Slartibartfast wrote:

Originally posted by TheGazzardian TheGazzardian wrote:

Originally posted by Catcher10 Catcher10 wrote:

^ Atlanta clearly is not a vinyl town with only 10 stores........Seattle has probably double that, with 4-5 in just the Tacoma area with a population of 3million.
Maybe the owners here will buy their inventory....more for me Yaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Wow, by those numbers I live in a music haven, 6+ record stores I'm aware of,
with a population of just over one million in this city.

Of course even take a chain store I've bought a lot of stuff from: Best Buy has decimated their CD section.  The last thing I bought there was Bryan Ferry's Olympia and I snagged the last or possibly only copy.  I mean come on, just one or two of that as a new release? LOL

I do think it may be a vinyl enthusiast's market in some respects. 
I was in HMV in Shrewsbury at the weekend - I would say that less than ¼ of the floor-space was given over to CDs, the rest was DVD, T-shirts, books, games and mp3 players - and the selection of CD was pretty poor. However the used vinyl stall in the market was full of great stuff - unfortunately the guy knew what he had and what it was worth (Eloy picture discs for £15 each - nice, but no thanks)
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