Posted on 08/29/2015 1:06:53 AM PDT by WhiskeyX
JOHN DANKOSKY, HOST:
Up next: how to tell your CD from your MP3, from your AAC. But first, let's start with the LP. When I was a kid, music took up a lot of room - not in your hard drive, but in your life. Being an audiophile meant devoting shelves and shelves and shelves and shelves to your album collection. And when you moved out of your parents' house, out of your first apartment, you hauled milk crates filled with your music collection onto your next life. And these days, most of us probably get our music in the form of downloads - no heavy boxes, but no fancy cover art, either.
Lots of audiophiles say that when it comes to sound quality, nothing beats vinyl. These purists wonder if digital files can really give you that analog sound of our youth. For the rest of this hour, we'll be talking about the science of audio, what all those bit rates and sample frequency terms mean, and we'll find out how your perceptions could affect what you hear.
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
Which is roughly 7K - 8K hz for the average person with average hearing loss... (Everyone suffers from SOME hearing loss) Compression is only a byproduct of the volume wars. Loudness is the problem. If I compress drum overheads I can make you hear a ride bell ping over a Dimebag solo. Conversly, if I put a bus compressor on a master track without sidechaining bass frequencies, you’ll never hear anything worth hearing.
The perceived quality boost from audiophile equipment is merely “in your eardrums(head)”... It also helps if the producers and engineers mixing and mastering the music know how to mix music.
It was just a joke about being old.
:)
Why not just use the audio portion of a DVD to pump up the sound? Most people who have home theaters would have a ready-made player capable of playing an album. More than enough room for 45-80 minutes of music on a DVD without video (other than album cover/lyrics sheet).
ping
The loud home hi-fi system has mostly gone the way of the dodo. Adults will sit and watch a sophisticated program for an hour. I’m not sure a significant % will ever go back to doing that with music. Seems to me now, most adults look at music as something they listen to while they are also doing something else, driving, jogging, making supper. It’s just background noise, acceptable to be experienced through computer speakers while surfing the internet or earbuds or whatever you call them. So they produce and mix the songs with that in mind, a lot of it is made to have all the levels as high as possible. It’s why they sound really bad on good systems, in my opinion.
Freegards
We kept an old rotary dial phone on the wall until the late 90s just to have fun with our kids' friends. They didn't have a clue how to phone Mom. It was priceless.
I always wondered how Sgt. Oddball was able to play music through his tank's loudspeaker in the era before magnetic tape recording. That tank had to have been rough on his record player. I was amazed it never skipped.
Dude, That original system gives me wood...er..is exciting!
I must be the luckiest guy on earth.
My wife loves football, racing, and understands the need for AV equipment like that. She gives me more grief about my tools because I’m not a mechanic. I tell her it’s like her kitchen stuff. She’s not a world class chef, but you never know when you’ll need that 6” milled stainless saute pan.
As far as the audio equipment, she grew up on a farm in eastern KY. They had 1 TV station. Her exposure to music had been mostly small transistor radios.
After she heard the music she liked on my system, she was hooked. Her music tastes branched out (went from country only to Loving the Metallica S&M DVD) and went to her first concert at 32 years old.
She also doesn’t understand other women’s desire to either hide the equipment, or make their husband get rid of it.
She’s proud of the fact that we don’t go to the theater.
We cook a nice fat steak on the grill, have a few adult beverages, pop a big bowl of popcorn, and watch a movie with sound and picture better than any theater, with no talking idiots, cell phones, screaming kids, and not missing anything if nature calls.
Vinyl is best.......nostalgia.......wheeling you back to yesteryear.
The Nakamichi Dragon was an autoreverse cassette deck, but rather than just reversing the direction of the tape, it had a mechanism to automatically eject the tape, flip it, then load it back up and start playing the other side.
Very cool to watch (back then.)
Mark
There is more HiFi in even a home studio than you think... Not more than mine. Start talking professional studios that use Genelec for tracking monitors then move to a full tuned system in an acoustically treated room, just to mix. Mastering? To the nth degree. With some graybeard who lives in a quiet room just to keep his ears good.
Kinda off base about quality control. Otherwise songwriter albums wouldn’t cost $10K or more just in studio expenses.
That’s the problem with audiophiles, their ears are better than everyone else’s, LOL
No one ever recorded music with audiophiles in mind because the market isn’t big enough to justify 92k HD audio. The only gains are in the ambience anyway. Enter Lexicon, exit audio snobs... I’d challenge you to tell me the difference between a Slingerland and a Fibes regardless of the cost of your vacuum tubes or not.
Well it all depends on whether one plugs a $5000 gold wired power cable into the equipment or not because clearly the last 5 feet of cable makes a phenomenal difference. The lows are sublime, the mids become haunting and the highs instantly clarify without becoming glassy,,,, ;)
Personally I can’t wait until they start doing M/S post processing and re-summing through an SSL just to have more expensive hardware to penis measure over.Vintage King has a used 80 channel SSL 9KJ for sale right now that would be the perfect audiophile accessory for a small listening room ;)
An album is a collection of something. It could be a collection of songs, a collection of pictures, etc. The media on which the collection is stored is irrelevant. If I have Sticky Fingers on vinyl, cassette and CD I have three albums, one of which is a vinyl album.
I remember when CDs first were introduced. Most folks thought that properly cared for, they would last forever. Sadly, they proved to be susceptible to scratching if not handled with care, and if severely mishandled this scratching could cause it to fail to read.
I still have the very first CD I ever purchased, (Dark Side of the Moon) and it plays fine. In fact, I just ripped it using cdparanoia, and it didn't show any errors at all. From my own experience, later CDs were more susceptible to environmental factors. Seems they originally started making the darn things too well and people weren't having to re-buy their albums. The evil bastards in the music industry hate that kind of performance with a passion.
Do it with a Manley for much cheaper. Do it with a freeware Modern VST for free though. Mojo is in the fingers. Not the equipment. And not your ears. Gold? It hardly even belongs in Neumann gear.
Sure but doesn’t that fly in the face of what ‘audiophile’ means today?
Today it’s all about talking on the internet about how expensive your toys are, selling acoustic rocks and differences in cable construction/materials so fractionally insignificant as to be meaningless to actual sound reproduction. In other words, it’s a fashion statement.
As impressive as Manley gear is (and it is DEFINITELY impressive), you need a lot of it to take up the physical space, visual impact and rgo stroke of owning a full blown and restored vintage Neve/SSL recording console. Now granted, you could argue how 80 channels of Manley gear is impressive, and it would be BEYOND impressive. But a Vari-mu and a Massive Passive just don’t have the same argumentative impact online as saying “I sum through an SSL desk which is what X was originally built on to begin with.”
Besides, with the SSL, you need to build a machine room for the power/HVAC, which also tells the world how devoted you are to chasing the perfect sound ;)
Call the local police and put an APB out for your </s>
I told a local analogue purist once that the only difference between audiophiles and pedophiles is, well... I’m not gonna say that in a public forum.
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