Posted on 10/04/2007 9:32:58 AM PDT by Notary Sojac
For all I know, James Randi believes in global warming. It doesn’t make what he has done any less valuable in my opinion. If we can’t agree to disagree, let’s cut short the discussion.
Nope. Virtually everything "lost" during MP3 encoding if from the part of the audio spectrum humans can't hear. Further, I have never noticed any quality gain when bypassing the soundcard or even when recording straight from the sound card analog outputs. (ie. running a cable right from the card outputs back into the same card's input to bypass DRM.) Without a doubt the most relevant sound factor for MP3s is using care and good software in the encoding process. VBR works well as does standard 360 bitrate encoding. (360 is overkill but hard drive space is so cheap why not.) Failure to use care here will result in "bloops" and other ugly sound artifacts.
A home system pushing 100W/channel (which would be pretty loud in a living room) would be pumping 1.5A, and 20 ga wire would be fine. 100 feet of 20 ga would have a resistance of .1 Ohm. 18 ga would be better for slightly lower resistance (0.06 Ohms, but I doubt anyone could tell the difference between 22, 18, 12, or welding cable by ear in a home situation (which is Randi’s point).
yes you do. your stereo has an internal amp to produce any noticable volume. and internal amps tend to be lower grade-
especially on stock stereos. you’ll notice a huge difference if you compared, for example, a delco stock stereo to even a low end sony or kenwood head unit, with a halfway decent external amp and speakers.
step up to a high end alpine or eclipse set up and you’ll really notice.
Every component except speakers can easily be plugged into an A/B switch, have levels matched ( the ear has a tendency to prefer the slightly louder of two identical signals so you need to make sure the test samples are at the same volume) and if the test is done double blind you can get reliable repeatable results.
You find that once you get past the cheapest components the differences are very difficult to detect. You will also find people can detect differences but those differences are not necessarily better or worse sound, just different.
Speakers are a special case. Location of speakers relative to walls, sound absorbency of walls, position of listener, volume of music, style of music, mix of high and low frequency, how much very low frequency(bass) all are factors. Double blind tests of speakers are more difficult but certainly not impossible.
Decades ago when it became clear that double blind tests directly contradicted the claims of the high end audiophile industry and it enablers; those people then came up with
a series of transparently false and in many cases absurd objections to double blind testing. For a period of time people with a scientific bent tried to meet those objections and eventually gave up.
What now exists is a form of pseudoscience which makes Phrenology look logical in comparison. You also have Emperors Clothes” arguments where if you question their perceptions they simply claim your hearing is not sensitive or educated enough.
As someone stated earlier there are clearly genuine audible detectable improvements in sound quality as you go up in price but as they noted you very quickly encounter the law of diminishing returns and very soon after that the graph becomes parallel to the one axis.
I was in the market last week for s-video cables. Radio Shack had “Monster Cables” and a cheaper set. Even the cheap set was 20+ bucks, stupidly high. I found a completely adequate cable at Ace hardware for 8 bucks or so.
That’s what I was gonna say — welding cable is cheaper and handles plenty of amps. Plus it is a theft deterrent if you weld it at both ends.
LOL, nice! Yeah, I’m still struggling along with dual 6SN7s in my old mouse.
I'm surprised that these scam artists haven't sold the gullible on the latter option.
Whatever you do, don’t try to use hydrogen hydroxide to clean the screen.
iTunes does offer enhanced bitrate files for many songs; EMI’s catalog and many indie artists have this option, for an extra 30 cents per song.
You mean.....oh, crap!
You do know that those Bose head phones are actually USAF rejects right?
They were developed for pilots to reduce hearing issues from long flights, problem was that they sucked.
And by the way, Bose is all marketing, not quality, the final perfect proof of that is that none of their speakers are THX certified, they’ve submitted them for certification, but they never pass.
Obviously I don’t what kind of speaker setup you have on your computer vs in your car, but it’s not hard to imagine that the spatial array of front + rear speakers at head level in a car vs a smallish set of (just) left-right spkrs usually affiliated with a PC will reveal plenty of “nuance”, shall we say. Even if the car speakers are just midrange quality.
Me, despite knowing a lot of tehcnical info about this stuff and having been a musician for 35 years, I’m happiest when I can walk into my home a push a button. I just can’t get myself to care much about infinite-fetish technical detail.
A salesman with character. There’s still hope!
What is the max length for a HDMI cable?
No real “max”, it depends on the cable quality, I have seen that in 30 foot runs that the more expensive cables actually do a better job at signal loss than less expensive alternatives, but in the end the average person isn’t making runs that long from source to end point.
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