Honestly, it was OK. We did not have a lot growing up and so I had scrounged this and that often building things custom to take advantage of the room and passive acoustics to get good sound.

I, and friends and family, listened to a lot of music on it.

Then I did something one day that would turn out to be special!

Just for kicks, I wondered whether recording using the same speakers that would play the recording back would sound good.

Turns out yes! It was a little like a hologram. If you played those recordings in my room, you would hear the house! Mom cooking in the kitchen, living room TV, complete with CRT wine, in the living room, people talking...

It was all there! And one could place the sounds as if they were really happening. Listening in, say the middle of the night, was dramatic. With eyes closed, it was like midday. Hard to tell otherwise.

And those recordings only worked on that system, in that room.

Today, I bet software would tease out what I did on a wider range of listening scenarios. But back then, some considered it magic, and only in that room.

So when I left home, I left it all and some tapes and encouraged anyone wanting to hear family life from some years ago to go and listen before it all gets torn apart.

My mom sold the house and that was the end of an era. Sadly, the tapes have been lost too.

All I know is you can use a capable preamp to record through your speakers and when that recording is played on that system, it will be magic!

I am not sure I used the big drivers at all for recording. Hard to remember.

Or, if you're made of money, there are purpose-built dummy heads like this: https://www.neumann.com/en-en/products/microphones/ku-100/

Binaural recordings already have very realistic playback on headphones. So I'd imagine using multiple speakers would be a trip for everyone in the room.

I assumed you flipped the speakers around to record?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IUDTlvagjJA

(Use headphones and close your eyes.)

Check this out: (this is where I got the idea of recording through speakers)

In 8th grade, I took apart a dynamic microphone I had picked up from radio shack. It was essentially a tiny speaker! Naturally, I went ahead and connected it to the headphone jack of a portable cassette recorder and...

Heard some of the BEST sound I had ever heard out of small electronics! It was not loud, but it was detailed and full so long as one held the mic right against the ear.

I bought another one and mounted both of them inside some hearing protection type ear covers, essentially turning them into a sort of weird headphone.

Later on, a friend showed me a Walkman type radio / cassette player and the little open air type speakers it came with looked a whole lot like the dynamic mic "speakers" did and had a similar sound too.

I had come close to producing open air type listening gear on my own. My first attempt at stereo listening failed because I just did not have a great head mount. Went with the ear protection gear because that fit well and did make the most of the great, but somewhat quiet sound the little plastic cones in the cheapo dynamic mic could deliver.

Had I been able to come up with a suitable mount, it was extremely likely I would have ended up with two small speakers resting right on my ears Walkman style.

In any case, that is when I realized speakers can be microphones and that lead up to the point of discussion here now.

I have had my share too. Good stuff.

Another fun example: solar panels are LEDs and LEDs are solar panels. You can detect light with an LED (and in theory power something from it, but you'd need a lot of light and not need much power) and you can emit light with a solar panel. Most solar panels will only emit light in the infrared, though. I have seen a triple-junction solar panel being back-driven by others in parallel with it, and it glowed a deep red, which is pretty cool.

As in capable of amplifying the low signal from the speakers reasonably without too much noise. There is likely a proper term I do not know.

That trombone part: well, it worked out well for them. There is one quiet part where we can hear the horn pretty well and I have to say the response of the speaker rolled off a lot of the subtlety of the instrument.

Normally, that would be bad, but for the overall production style of the tune, it just works! Feels a whole lot like a sample ripped from a cassette, or lo-fi vinyl setup.

Playback on another one sounded good, even better than mine, but the illusion I described was not there.

Those are what places everything. Well, most everything. Frequency response changes do it too.

Front/Back for example. Frequency response curves are very different.

If the overall EQ is close, it all seems to work. But moving stuff has a tighter tolerance from what I remember.

I am not sure many of us find ourselves having done that.

His stereo sounded great and he was super smug about it, including taking the super expensive audiophile cables back and telling the shop they weren't as good as plain thick copper wire.

[1] This kind of thing https://images.homedepot-static.com/productImages/97a91edb-a...

https://www.soundguys.com/cable-myths-reviving-the-coathange...

Spoiler: the difference between the coathanger and the premium cable is probably inaudible, and the difference between anything better than a coathanger (ie, literally any sort of copper wire) and the premium cable is certainly inaudible.

Well, I was dead wrong. Cheap cables hiss and hum like crazy when there's no signal.

Turns what you're paying for with expensive cables is better shielding around the copper. Unless you have perfectly air gapped cables that don't touch anything electrically conductive, they'll pick up some static charge and interference over a long enough run, and it's very audible.

So yeah, get half decent shielded cables for long unbalanced runs to passive speakers. Or just use balanced cables with active speakers.

Its like vodka. There's certainly bad vodka, but there's not such thing as good vodka, only neutral tasteless vodka.

What matters more is the rest of the ingredients mixed with vodka to make the cocktail (which is the connectors, insulation, and shielding of the cable). If those are good, they'll easily mask the common issues with cables. If those are bad, it doesn't matter how good your vodka/cable metal is.

I'm not saying wires don't matter and I'm not saying wires do matter, I'm saying inasmuch as they make a difference, there are plenty of ways to undermine what you are doing. Might be a better idea to send shielded high impedance signals around the room and put power amplifiers at the speakers.

It is an example I ripped off of an old SV founder.

Previously:

“Vodka” is neutral spirits so distilled, or so treated after distillation with charcoal or other materials, as to be without distinctive character, aroma, taste, or color.

Now:

Vodka: Neutral spirits which may be treated with up to two grams per liter of sugar and up to one gram per liter of citric acid. Products to be labeled as vodka may not be aged or stored in wood barrels at any time except when stored in paraffin-lined wood barrels and labeled as bottled in bond pursuant to § 5.88. Vodka treated and filtered with not less than one ounce of activated carbon or activated charcoal per 100 wine gallons of spirits may be labeled as “charcoal filtered.” Addition of any other flavoring or blending materials changes the classification to flavored vodka or to a distilled spirits specialty product, as appropriate. Vodka must be designated on the label as “neutral spirits,” “alcohol,” or “vodka”.

They've ruined vodka and a great example.

There's a threshold where any shielding improvement is inaudible, and that threshold is far below what most people would consider "expensive cables".

Shielding is definitely important on the "line" side and somewhat on the PSU side.

But yes on very important for the line side. Connected a long cheap RCA cable to powered speakers, and the moment I pulled it across carpet the speakers started crackling. Then I understood exactly what my buddy meant by "these are garbage" when he gave them to me, so not too sure what the intended purpose of such a long poorly insulated RCA cable was.

Ah yes, that is basically just an impromptu air-core transformer between mains and your speakers.

For lengths longer than that, balanced cables (or digital signals over Ethernet) are used and the speaker has more local amplification.

As far as I know, that post is where the coathanger wire test idea originated.

Another thing I really love about it when viewed in context is, right after he destroys the entire idea of expensive cables in one post, the immediate follow-up post is "Is your speaker system time coherent?" Some people will never be convinced.

If you are doing long speaker cable runs and are using 12 gauge wire anyway… At some point it occurs to you, why not just use Romex ?

And, in fact, it’s a very good choice. 12/3 romex - typically used in three Way lighting circuits - gives you two speaker pair in one nice package.

Two downsides:

First, it can be confusing for future electricians, etc., who do not expect romex in the wall to be used for low voltage.

Second, stereo terminal connectors are not typically designed for solid copper and that can get a little frustrating and complicated.

… but then you think about it a little more and it occurs to you:

why not just build terminal blocks and make connections with WAGO lever nuts ?

What you get from vanilla integrated speakers today is something that would have cost tens of thousands in the 90s and would not have been available in the 70s: dedicated amplifiers for each speaker element, with electronic crossovers and, if you want it, room correction.

As a silly and dramatic experiment, touch a wire connected to a passive speaker (without power applied — don’t zap yourself!). You won’t hear anything. Now touch the center pin of an RCA wire leading to a powered-on speaker with appreciable low frequency response, e.g. a subwoofer. Bzzzzzzzzz!

My stereo is the usual rat's nest of various cables and connectors. I also have a tub full of various plugs, adapters, etc. Wouldn't it be nice to have a receiver that just had an ethernet connector on the back? Run it to an ethernet switch, and plug your turntable, TV, cassette player, into the switch?

One cool consequence is your components could be anywhere in the house, as any component could play over any powered speaker in the house.

If you’re building a new pro audio setup today, be it studio or even live sound, that’s likely how you’re doing it.

Even 20 years ago we had digital audio routers that worked pretty decently (not great, but well enough). This was a recording studio of course, not a home audio setting.

The reason we don’t have this in consumer audio is almost certainly cost. Now you need to add a ADC, Ethernet, and a small chip to run it all. Meanwhile nobody wants to run cables anymore and WiFi is everywhere. But of course putting WiFi in everything drives cost too.

It should be noted that the wifi version of this is sold by Sonos though I don't think they do surround sound for movie watching, but are focused on multi-room audio.

Or you're using a protocol that does retransmission/buffering, which introduces noticeable latency with the video or even between speakers.

For good audio, you want known, controlled latency, preferably with quite precise timing. For live audio, or for a fully convenient replacement for analog cable, you want that known latency to be very short.

And you either need no drops or you need an entire drop + retransmit cycle to fit within your latency. (Hmm, FEC could be used, I suppose — encode packets such that an entire lost packet could be recovered from the preceding packets plus the next couple packets.)

https://www.wisatechnologies.com/speakers

The same thing happens with my Roku remote when I plug headphones into it.

No thanks.

We have gotten pretty good at sending low voltage signals over wires with little to no noise so it seems like we can apply similar principles to audio gear?

This right here is part of the reason the "coathanger versus cable test" annoys me so much. All these wonderful graphs "proving" that cables don't matter never take environmental noise into account, which is frustrating because in reality that's exactly what you're testing.

The fact that you could pick up AM radio inside a sound studio means that, for experimental purposes, that environment is simply not good enough.

Are expensive cables mostly bullshit? sure. Do better cables still make a difference? My personal experience tells me absolutely yes, just usually not enough to matter to 95%+ of people.

SPDIF input to every speaker with custom DSP to do digital crossover tuned to the cabinet and particular cones.

Arent studio monitors this?

But be careful with NM-B cable. I didn’t find an exact reference in the NEC, but I bet that Article 200 and friends would not approve of the reuse of the bare conductor for anything other than ground and might also disapprove of using the white conductor for anything other than neutral. (If you’re not installing the cable in the wall, maybe it’s not subject to the NEC.)

Get some nice TC cable instead.

Where the NEC applies, you can use the white conductor in a multiconductor cable for anything as long as it is "permanently reidentified", that is color coded where it is exposed. cf NEC 200.7.

I am not suggesting you dual-use your high voltage romex and also send audio signals on it ...

I am suggesting you run additional runs of romex dedicated solely to audio.

This would be NEC compliant.

Red and black are fine for this purpose. I’m not so sure about white and bare.

The reason for the 4 AWG rule is probably an economic one. Having spools of larger conductor cables in a variety of colors is not inexpensive. Allowing the reidentification seems reasonable, though I'd probably argue the cutoff could be thinner than 4. The multi-conductor cable exception is a practical [and economic] one. You might not be able to get multi-conductor cable assemblies with the exact color coding you need.

It’s stranded copper with 2 conductors. Easy to run, fits in all the connectors, is cheap, and comes on big spools.

Speakers are typically around 4-8 ohm. With long cables, it is easy to get several ohms of resistance, meaning a significant part of the current is going to end up heating the cable instead of producing sound. Not only it is a waste, but impedance is frequency-dependent, so sound quality will be affected. It is not audiophile bullshit, you can hear it clearly. What you need are the thickest and shortest cables that you can reasonable use. For very long distances, active speakers are preferable, or a high voltage (typically 100V) line and transformers.

Interference doesn't matter. You are putting lots of power in these wires, enough to move the speaker membranes, then move the air, then move your eardrums. Compared to that, what you get from external sources is negligible. If you hear humming, that's a ground loop, and your speaker wires are not at fault.

Now CAT5 cable could make great subwoofer cables. I don't know, but it kind of makes sense. Subwoofer cables are low current, and therefore more likely to pickup parasites. They also tend to be longer than typical interconnects. So shielding and twisting may help.

Yah. Take an 8 ohm speaker, which might vary from 5 to 20 ohms, but is relatively close to 8 ohms for much of its range.

At 5 ohms, your voltage is attenuated by 5% -- this is -0.45dB. Re: the "heating the cable" waste, you're losing .45 dB of sound output to heat.

At 20 ohms, your voltage is attenuated by almost nothing (.05 dB).

In any room, and with any real driver and amplifier you're going to have far bigger concerns for flatness of response than this .4 dB variation.

Bigger concerns are--- having something stranded and chonkier with big thick insulation is good for robustness and strain relief instead of trying to abuse network cables (even stranded) for the job. You can get thicker, nicer wire for this purpose than network cable for less money.

It's a bit humorous to think audiophiles might be spending thousands of dollars on speaker cables to listen stuff that could have passed through literally $5 cables in the studio.

If induced noise is a problem in such a setup, the actual improvement to be made would be to use twisted pair or shielded cable, rather than bare parallel wires. This helps eliminate differential-mode noise due to near-field EMI which parallel wires are susceptible to.

I dispute that. Source: I could hear at a previous apartment where I used to live that something was off when I was listening to music. It was subtle, but it was there. It drove me mad until I realized that by lifting the speakers cable off the floor the interference was gone.

I don't care about the science in this case. I just don't for I've witnessed it myself (well, heard it really). I've tested my theory (lifting the cable of the ground) and repeated the experiment. It is a fact (for you it may just be a comment on the Internet, but for me it is factual).

Putting the cables on little wooden pieces I made got rid of the interference (at least I couldn't hear it anymore).

That was happening on a "budget" (less than $1 K) setup (including a DAC). Very clean source: bitperfect rips of my CD collection.

Quiet room. The added noise was noticeable and was perturbing the listening.

Swapped for better shielded cables and the hiss/hum went away and it was dead silent when it was supposed to be.

But it was also only noticeable on the satellite speakers that had 50ft+ cable runs. It was inaudible on those short <6ft runs.

The extreme case is when you can receive radio signals on the speaker wire that are rectified and amplified by the amplifier; but you can get wonkiness short of that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gL4O_Do2PuQ

This is why you find things like this in design manuals. These are focused on offset errors in instrumentation amplifiers hooked to long cables (but intermodulation is an equal or larger concern in applications that care about frequencies above DC):

"In addition to filtering the input and power pins, amplifier outputs also need to be protected from EMI/RFI, especially if they must drive long lengths of cable, which act as antennas. RF signals received on an output line can couple back into the amplifier input where it is rectified, and appears again on the output as an offset shift."

https://www.analog.com/media/en/training-seminars/tutorials/...

Microchip says the same thing: "Amplifier outputs also need to be protected from EMI/RFI, especially if they must drive long lengths of cable, which act as antennas. RF signals received on an output line couple back into the amplifier input where they are rectified and appear again on the output as an offset shift."

https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/appnotes/00001767a.pd...

https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/how-does-an-amplifier-... post #4

Note that I'm not really saying you need anything special on speaker cables, other than common sense: don't separate the pair for as much of the run as possible, and make sure the terminations at the end are not total garbage. If you have strong RF sources nearby, like when I had a 50W HF transmitter in my apartment, you may need to add RF chokes/ferrites on the amplifier end of speaker cables to reduce interference (I did).

Indeed, the ARRL (American Radio Relay League, an amateur radio association) describes that adjusting speaker cables is a frequent way to cure interference for neighbors of people with high power transmitters:

"Speaker wires are often 8 to 16 feet long. When you put two of them together, you make an efficient receiving antenna. Try bundling the speaker wires to reduce their effectiveness as an antenna. This procedure has been known to eliminate the interference all by itself."

"A: For a detailed explanation, you can refer to the ARRL Handbook's section on controlling RFI, and the section of the ARRL web site on EMI/RFI Products and Other Resources. You can build two of them, one for each speaker output. Wrap ten to fifteen turns of speaker wire onto an FT-140-43 ferrite core. Use an FT-240-43 if the speaker wires are large, and use "73" material for interference from 80 or 160-meter signals. Alternately, type "31" material is an excellent general purpose choice for HF. Install them right at the amplifier. If the system uses amplified speakers, you should install one at each speaker, too."

https://www.arrl.org/audio-1

Asking me to figure out what you're arguing based on a 17 minute video is not reasonable. I skimmed the video and took my best guess of what you're advocating. (It's not a representative or useful test; yes, it's harder to measure RF on a cable when it's plugged into an amplifier, but that doesn't tell you that RF on cables can't be rectified and amplified by the amplifier). You can use your words yourself.

In any case, the people who have asserted that RFI can get into ampifiers from speaker wires and cause problems are correct.

Your assertion "this is not an issue for anyone" contradicts the direct experience of lots and lots of people who have lived close to large RF sources and had RFI problems in audio fixed by adjusting speaker wires, such that it's the first step for engineers and radio amateurs working with angry neighbors.

Buying more expensive cables isn't generally the cure and is snake oil. Indeed, shielding itself can add enough capacitive loading to actually reduce speaker high frequency response.

But having to put in an RF choke on speaker wire to prevent RFI from having negative audible effects is common. And using a little bit of care to keep as much of the cables paired as possible, keeping runs as short as reasonably possible, and making reasonably good terminations is good insurance against it being a problem for you.

I've given plenty of high quality evidence, while you've given a long video of someone making a measurement that is meaningless to what I'm asserting.

The ARRL wouldn't have to help neighbors of amateurs put chokes on speaker wires if this couldn't happen.

Most of us have the experience of having a cellphone close to speaker wiring and hearing LOUD buzzes and clicks. It was a bigger problem in the AMPS days (with higher output power), and more often the interference gets into the amplifier by signal lines than it does by getting in through power lines and speaker wires, but it can certainly go in the output (or power) as well. Have you never experienced this?

I still remember the first time I experienced this. I was 12, returning from a road trip with my (older) sister and her significant other's family, where we had handheld CBs. The hifi inside the house was demodulating and amplifying our CB signals; they could be clearly heard when we used the CB from the driveway. 5 meters of speaker cable was a good antenna for a 10 meter wavelength RF signal; a poorly filtered amplifier stage was demodulating and amplifying the signal.

https://www.reddit.com/r/audio/comments/rfmfkq/home_audio_sp...

One would think so...

https://toshiba.semicon-storage.com/us/semiconductor/knowled...

Where the triangle isn't perfectly linear. If any RF gets into the output, it can be converted to audio frequencies by the nonlinearity and amplified. The open loop gain of the amplifier component can increase the magnitude of signals like this by tens of decibels.

Nah-- it's about high frequency noise getting in via the speaker lead, and coupling to the negative feedback of the amplifier stage, and getting rectified and amplified.

Yes, most interference is via line level inputs, but it can easily be via the "output" as well.

Which is why you get nonsense like directional cables, cable supports to keep cables off the floor, cables with magic insulation, magic rocks that go on top of components, magic knobs, magic creams, "quantum" anything, grounding boxes full of pebbles that don't ground anything, and so on.

Also, most of the people who can afford this hobby are rich old boomers who often can't hear much above 7k on a good day.

One time he and another guy had just completed an installation in a very wealthy customer's home. Hundreds of thousands of dollars on an ultra-high-end amplifier, CD player, speakers, etc. He started playing one of the customer's CDs on the systems. The customer went on and on, lavishing praise at how "warm" and "crisp" his music sounded on the new system. Suddenly my friend's co-worker leaned over and whispered, "Do you hear that?..." My friend knew exactly what he was referring to: they had accidently wired the speakers out of phase.

[1] yes this really does actually exist as a thing.

Hdmi and DP cables also have a range of shielding and termination quality, and pushing more data through them will show the difference, especially in longer lengths that are at the limit of the spec. Everything looks good when you are only doing 1080p30, try doing 2160p120 on a tv or UWQHD 160 hz on a pc, with a max-length (2m) cable and tell me every cable is just as good. Even every DisplayPort 1.4 cable or hdmi 2.1 cable is not “as good” let alone a rando lower-tier cable with the older shielding.

Oculink folks know damn well that not every cable is just as good either. Copper oculink cables are a fucking mess.

I’m not saying Monster wasn’t ripping you off for some gold-plated connectors, especially back in 2000 when hdmi stated with 1.x in the name. But the reality is that if nothing else we have manifested the world where digital cable quality matters. And really the “hurr durr digital signals” thing has always been a little bit of an oversimplification, even as someone who’s said it before too.

There isn’t a correlation with price in the high end, going from a $30 cable to a $150 cable doesn’t get you anything, but going from a $5 cable to a $30 cable you certainly do get better shielded cable and better termination if nothing else, and yes, it does make a difference when you are actually pushing the spec to the limit. You will definitely find out that not even all 10gbps usb-c or hdmi 2.1 UHBR cables are created equal let alone ye olde hdmi 1.3 bullshit cable.

Digital audio, no matter how high quality and how many channels, uses vastly less bandwidth than even the lowest quality video signal these days. At absolute best, lossless audio with 16 channels is still less total bandwidth than even USB2.0 speeds. It’s just not fast.

Although signal integrity matters, signal integrity in digital signals is almost always not silent degradation. And often is extremely obvious degradation. So if your cable has problems, you know almost immediately (or, when it happens you know). Unlike analog audio, it either works or it doesn’t. In the marginal case you don’t just get worse sounding audio… you just don’t have audio periodically which sounds super obvious to the ear.

https://www.rme-audio.de/rme-usb-technology.html

And for reference, I was assuming 384 kHz, 32 bit depth, which would be 196 Mbps at 16 channels. You cannot even do 32 channels over USB2 which would be the next logical step.

I was just adding context, and I'm happy you provided even more. 32/384 is indeed at the extreme top of digital audio signals, beyond what many people consider to be useful. Even in such cases, USB2 can still do the job, but most modern devices will use USB3 or Thunderbolt, simply to avoid issues and ensure enough headroom on the digital bus.

This is nonsense for recording or playback. Maybe someone works with this internally but there is no reason to output this over usb.

some inexpensive SDR dongles sidestep the question of getting a really good high-bandwidth ADC (still not cheap even today!) by just hooking up an intermediate frequency stage which downmixes RF to AF, and then you just hook it to one of the innumerable sound cards on the market to pull it into the PC for processing etc.

Wider bandwidth is wider bandwidth, the faster your sample rate the wider the range that you can sample. Iirc it's nyquist rate, so, with 384kbps rate you can sample a 192khz window.

Even in that case 32 bit sampling is nonsense, the resolution of detecting voltages is never going to be accurate enough to need 4 billion different levels.

Regulation and stabilization is a whole ""niche"" area of electronics called "voltage regulation" and yes, you can improve it a lot (and you can only do your best regardless of instability of the base). Actually a lot of audio engineers would be feeding it clean (linear regulated) power in this case as well. My Astron linear supplies are quite clean for radio and would be excellent for audio too.

https://www.eham.net/reviews/view-product?id=1616

https://www.eham.net/reviews/view-product?id=9570

USB optoisolator + linear regulated supply on a hub on the other side is something I've seriously considered for a nice SDR setup even short of that.

Again, of the people who buy this stuff, yes you will find a lot of people paying attention to the details and buying/building esoteric setups. Hams exist and the hobby almost inherently involves opening up the checkbook lol. Even decent audio gear is generally going to be $500-1000 most of the time.

Even a hugely overkill uncompressed 8-channel, 32 bit, 192kHz sample rate audio stream[1] is under 50 megabits/second.

Any digital cable and transceiver from USB 2 (480Mbps) or 100BASE-T Ethernet (100Mbps) onwards will handily do that, with headroom for so much forward error correction that you probably won't expect a single bit error in your lifetime.

[1]: good luck getting a clock with low enough sample aperture jitter to actually record that in the first place, it's probably under a femtosecond.

What are you talking about here? A femtosecond is a quadrillionth of a second. 10gbs would mean one 10 billionth of a second.

This is called "sample aperture jitter". Requirements scale linearly with frequency and exponentially with bit depth.

These a calculator here:

https://www.analog.com/en/design-center/interactive-design-t...

https://www.analog.com/en/technical-articles/aperture-jitter...

Sure enough, 32 bits sampling a 96kHz signal, which is the Nyquist frequency of 192kHz sampling rate, is 0.3fs. At 24 bits, it's more like 100fs, which is much more doable, but still not easy. Which is why audio bit depths usually don't go to 32 bits, despite formats like FLAC supporting that.

The practical upshot of this and other noise sources is that higher audiophile-grade bit depths and sampling frequencies are quite likely to have at least some of those bits swamped out by noise on real hardware.

This is just getting the audio recorded. Playing it back as physical sound waves adds something between quite a bit and radically more noise to the signal, even if there's never any lossy compression.

The point isn't that you shouldn't record audio at 32-bit depth (which you probably shouldn't if you expect it to bring much benefit, but that's by-the-by), it's that even if you did, and you have a 7.1 system with 8 uncompressed streams, you still won't be anywhere near the point where USB 3 cable grades will start to matter.

You're the one who asked for clarification on the footnote specifically.

I agree, sending Alphabet Soup down those cables isn't going to end well. Those things aren't designed to carry liquids.

That is a device problem, not a "there is a need for better cables" problem.

> Dynamics are better and overall naturalness is improved. Here is a test for all you Silver Rock owners. Try removing the bakelite knobs and listen. You will be shocked by this! The signature knobs will have an even greater effect…really amazing! The point here is the micro vibrations created by the volume pots and knobs find their way into the delicate signal path and cause degradation (Bad vibrations equal bad sound). With the signature knobs micro vibrations from the C37 concept of wood, bronze and the lacquer itself compensate for the volume pots and provide (Good Vibrations) our ear/brain combination like to hear…way better sound!!

Source: https://bobbyowsinski.blogspot.com/2012/05/485-volume-knob.h...

I was listening to some speakers at a relatively high end store (they sold 10k$ CD player power supplies, along with a selection of more reasonable gear), where they'd only have one set of speakers in the room at a time to prevent passive effects on the sound. (which is sort of reasonable, but a lot of work). So they bring in the Magneplanars and the (incredibly inappropriate) amp I was interested in, wire them up, and within 5 seconds I know they're out of phase, and then in another 30 seconds, pretty strong clipping.

Sales person was going on about how good they sounded.

[1] There are some differences based on whether the cable is going to carry just audio or audio+phantom power and also whether it's line level or speaker level or whatever it's called. It's been a while.

The positive is that you can just embrace the convenience of 'good enough' compressed audio and wireless headphones.

Now that I'm middle-aged, I can tell there's a little loss around the vocal frequencies... but damn if those old tubes and pest devices aren't as annoying as ever. Ears are weird.

it looks my hearing drops off between 13k (noticeably quiet compared to 12k) to 14k (can't hear it at all).

The source of the sound is the transformer which resets the scan line back to the original side of monitor.

Last year I was in a mall where they had a Tesla store and it was emitting a horrible high pitched sound.

Where I live some houses have Seagull scaring devices and they also emit a horrible high pitched squeal which I'm guessing others can't hear, otherwise it would honestly drive you nuts.

Some malls do that deliberately to get rid of teenagers.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bewaring-of-the-green/

In my foolishness I bought such a pen. It was a fun thing to try with friends for maybe £10.

Freezing CDs was another one. We tried that too. We were probably mildly stoned for that.

This was the early nineties. It was an interesting time in Hifi. 1-bits DACs and other fun marketing blurb.

I listen to CDs almost daily, on the same amplifier I had back then. I still have the CD player but it needs a new laser and controller board.

I laugh to myself every time I pull out a CD with a green edge. It's a lovely reminder of my young self and my friends in our late teens.

Do I apply it to the speakers or the walls or the listeners or what?

Hifi hand lotion: Deep down you know spending this much for better audio is masturbatory, skip the middle man.

Replace "hifi" with any other product and the sentiment remains the same. High-end houses, high-end cars, high-end clothes, high-end food, high-end technology... the ostensible quality of the product is entirely divorced from the price, because the actual product isn't the speaker or the handbag or the smartphone or etc; the real product is social signaling via conspicuous consumption.

Me, I used 150 foot 18-gage twisted pair when I put my speakers down in the courtyard. I can't say the sound was perfect, but it was at least pretty good, which tells me 20 feet of the same would be plenty good inside a room.

(Yes, IANAaudiophile...)

I didn't realize how much of a problem it was until our family bought a very modest house rather than renting for the first time--because the stereo-spending never allowed saving for a downpayment. The stereo-spending resumed with both my father and sibling starting separate stereo companies. They weren't good at it because they were in it for the fidelity and not the busine$$ aspects. My dad passed and it's all shut down now, but infrequently a call will come (on the number that was kept) from someone who's trying to service a unit that they'd been searching for, missed out on, then finally got but wasn't quite working right. If we have a small part to fix it, we'd just send it to them with instructions.

The system described in TFA costs substantially more than the gear used to record, mix and master probably at least half of the record collection. There are studios with insanely "high end" playback systems, but they are not common - the gear in most recording studios is very good, but any audiophile would find faults with it (whether they exist or not, heh).

And then there's Ye Olde RIAA equalization curve for vinyl, which is a complete abomination if you're going to view things through the lens "I want to hear exactly what was recorded" - you just never can, because the curve was applied when the vinyl master was created.

Fidelity often comes second to simply sounding cool. Sources recorded on $6k microphones will often get overloaded, distorted, and then re-amped through a tin can because the sound is compelling. If it sounds good it is good.

In my experience the place that fidelity is most important is in the monitoring. An accurate listening environment is critical to ensure that the choices we're making will translate to listeners at home. If our listening environment is flawed we will have to fight much harder to realize our intentions.

Some high-end headphones are marketed as "studio" headphones. Meaning for professionals such as you when doing the monitoring at the recording studio, and not for the consumer at home.

I never managed to understand why what's good for the pro is not good for the consumer. Might you be able to help explain?

Korn's "Freak on a Leash", to test the low end

Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song", to watch the implementer's reaction to source hiss

imo "Stairway to Heaven" is one of the dirtiest recordings of all time w.r.t. airtime; maybe that 'noise' is what actually made it so successful...?

A normal person uses their sound system to listen to music. An audiophile uses music to listen to their sound system.

I figure as long as I haven't sorted those out, the Monoprice Monolith speakers I'm using are totally fine

For vocals -- Paul Simon's Graceland or Cowboy Junkies Trinity Sessions.

What good is a record that requires a $50k system to enjoy?

one thing I learned is to appreciate a lot of new music by how good it was mastered.

I mean yes, there’s a lot of good but badly recorded music, you don’t upgrade for those.

I had always thought Clapton Unplugged was really nicely mastered and then after I heard Folk Singer, I realized they were trying to replicate it almost in its entirety.

I was happy to start reading another treatment, with a new perspective, and from WaPo, who might have the funds to spend even more time on research. However, I found OP to be ignorantly disparaging on the tech side, and quite cold and glib in the human interest side.

Audiophiles are often foolish, and fathers are sometimes cruel, cold, and dictatorial. In my opinion this story doesn't justify its criticisms on either front. The author hears the stereo at its worst and can't get the wow factor. We have the story of one son who himself has truly cruel words for an ill old man, and for the rest, there were no vacations, there were lots of early mornings, etc.

To me, the above doesn't justify the depressive and dismissive subtext and resolution of the article.

The aftermath post is explicitly from the perspective of a fellow hobbyist obsessive, so it is not attempting to accurately state whether it was "worth" it, in an objective sense, as a listening experience. It has a prior that hobbyist obsession can be fulfilling for oneself, and most importantly, others that you share wtih. It also completely ignores/avoids his family life. But in spite of that, to me it provides a richer portrait.

Sometimes the truth is cruel.

> I don't know. I feel like the story hit quite close . . .

I agree. I've been on both ends of bad parenting. I've been the parent who crafts bad parenting notions out of empathy-free theory.

When covering intra-family mistreatment, cold and clinical is a good method. The outcomes are naturally striking. I feel anything beyond a witness adds little and risks much.

On the "people" aspect, the family story can be hugely significant. But Fritz doesn't seem to have alienated anyone except one son, and the story itself seems to resolve to he-said, he-said on that relationship.

You mean the son who hates him and the wife who divorced him and the other kids who seem at best ambivalent about him?

Of course. Much was achieved and that included systemic harm to those around him.

He was a man who never understood that he was prioritizing things and accomplishments over people. I suspect empathy didn't factor into the calculations in his head.

I'm not damning him here. Having been him to a degree, I can testify the distance to working empathy isn't trivial. It gets crossed with a great deal of time and difficulty. Further, I see signs of pronounced OCD which may complicate his challenges in ways I may not understand.

These things are good to understand. So is the harm he brought to people who trusted him.

Perfectly put, but this happens more frequently than you think.

My father is pretty much like Fritz but without the audio obsession. He's now in his 60's and his whole life he only cared about making money an being busy all the time with work.

Everytime I ask my father how he is he will always reply how well his business is going. I wasn't surprised by the following quote from the article because it's exactly how people like him are:

>A hard-driving boss at his company, he brought the same energy to his after-hours hobby, which he sometimes seemed to think of as everybody’s hobby.

Interesting. I was discussing the article with a friend who is a bit of an audiophile (I'm not) this morning and we both agreed that the article was a lot more gentle towards its subject than it might have been.

> It also completely ignores/avoids his family life. But in spite of that, to me it provides a richer portrait.

Sad.

A common shortcoming I see in the setups of many hi-fi enthusiasts is a lack of attention to the acoustic response of their room. Or if they do appreciate the problem their treatment betrays a profound misunderstanding of how to address it. The room we listen in has a profound effect on how we hear the audio coming from our speakers and it is mostly negative interference.

Treatment like absorptive ceiling clouds, absorptive panels at the early reflection points, and a means of neutralizing low-end room modes are severely under-valued relative to their influence on performance and their ROI.

If you want to hear the influence your room has, use a signal generator like this (https://onlinetonegenerator.com/) to play a steady sine wave at 60 Hz. You'll need speakers low enough to produce them. A higher frequency (100Hz) would suffice if your speakers don't go that low. Now, with that steady tone playing, walk around your room and listen to what happens. It will fluctuate wildly in volume, becoming much louder or nearly disappearing entirely, while only moving by a matter of feet.

Now imagine this phenomena happening at every single audible frequency in your room (low to high).

Getting the acoustic treatment right in your listening space is the single biggest thing that you can do to improve the listening experience; on par with your choice of speakers. And I'll argue that it's not worth investing in high-end speakers until your room is sorted, or else the room will distort your perception far too much for to appreciate much difference.

I won't pick on hi-fi enthusiasts who obsess over choices of wiring, de-coupling, and clean electricity (that's beyond the point), but solving those problems is fighting for gains in inches while your choice to address the room modes and time-domain issues is going to gain you yards in how you perceive records. It must be addressed before anything else.

Source: I manage a high-end studio-design consultancy: https://www.unfckprojects.com/

SPEAKER POSITIONING:

In 9/10 cases I would push your speakers against the front wall firing longways down the longest dimension of your room. You can safely ignore most people warning you about SBIR reflections if the topic arises.

With your speakers against the back wall, space them symmetrically between the walls to the left and right of your listening position, but avoid placing them in positions that fall 1/4 or 1/3 of the width between your side walls.

For Example: If your front wall is 8' wide, your speakers should not be placed 2' from each side wall (1/4 of the room width) and they should not be placed 2' 8" off of each side wall (1/3 of the room width). Place them somewhere in between these nodes to minimize destructive interference from room modes.

LISTENING POSITION:

With your speakers against the front wall, place your listening position (your chair) in between both speakers in the spot that is 38% of the room length off the front wall. So if your room is 100 inches deep from front wall to back wall your chair should be located 38" away from the front wall that has your speakers.

Ideally, your listening position should be dead center between the walls to the left and the right of your listening position.

For Example: If your room is 8' wide your listening position should be located in the center, 4' from the walls to your left and to your right.

COVERING YOUR FIRST REFLECTION POINTS:

Covering your first reflection points means hanging at least a 4' x 4' cloud on your ceiling and hanging an equivalent amount of coverage on both the wall to the left and to the right of your listening position. Specifically these should be placed at your first-reflection points.

When ordering absorptive panels don't bother with features like diffusor panels or any hard reflective surfaces. They're mostly pointless. Just get the simple soft absorptive panels (4" thick) and don't worry about the add-ons and up-sells.

Covering your first reflection points will dramatically improve the performance of your listening position from roughly 600 Hz up to 20 kHz. If you mount the panels off of the wall with an air gap equal to the panel thickness it will extend your midrange coverage by an additional octave. So mounting your 4" thick panel on the wall with a 4" air gap behind it improve it's performance by absorbing as low as 300 Hz (instead of 600 Hz). This is good. There is no additional benefit for mounting with a larger air gap.

Locating your early reflection points for your ceiling and side walls is beyond the scope of this reply, but you can look up other explanations of how to find them in your room.

FINAL NOTES:

This (very rough) guide will only treat the midrange and high-end in your listening position (from 300 Hz - 20 kHz) and only for your listening position. Building a room that can manage low-end cancellations and also sound balanced in every position (not just the main listening position) is not a trivial thing, and cost-prohibitive for 99% of people. So you'll have to accept that these solutions are out of reach unless you want to tear down your room and rebuild it.

The fact is, learning acoustic principles to do this yourself is not something that is practical for 99% of people. So don't drive yourself crazy trying to sort it unless you feel very well-versed in physics AND professional audio.

Unfortunately the acoustics space is full of hacks and cargo-cult acousticians who don't truly understand the physics or the practical needs of listeners. It's a lot of voodoo and a great way to waste money unless your designer really knows what they're doing. Unfortunately most people aren't qualified to understand what they need, which makes it that much more difficult to find clarity in an already tricky problem-space. Our team has almost given up trying to make a dent in the field, but the fact is a lot of clients don't know what they don't know and hire people whose expertise is at best outdated and at worst complete nonsense.

In your advice your optimising for a single listening position.

I found, in my home, optimising for a coach with three listening positions, and a hard glass surface wall close to one speaker, that aiming the speakers away from the sidewalls and towards the corner position at the opposite end made for an ok result.

Theory being that this configuration would even out the drop in high frequency response at the corner listening positions, (closest speaker off-axis response matching farthest speaker on-axis response)

At the same time minimising first reflection from side walls.

I should stress that most casual listeners probably don't need to fret about this stuff unless they're really committed to the experience. My work studio may be well-optimized, but when I listen to music in my living room there is zero room treatment and it doesn't get in the way of a pleasurable listening experience.

> “Growing up, I had to get up at 6 in the morning to work,” [son] Kurt, 55, said. “I basically was his slave.”

> Judy drank too much in those days. She also was unimpressed by her husband’s music. When he played “Swan Lake,” she’d call it “Pig Pond” in front of the kids and crank up the TV to annoy him.

I got to the point where I discovered you cannot built the ultimate stereo that is suitable for "all generes".

On a typical audiophile setup extremely well recorded music is an enormous joy. The soundscape is amazing, the small details you can hear.

Sadly, there are fewer and fewer genuinely great recordings seen from that perspective.

Listening to metal, industrial or rap (with some exceptions), was painful. You could not get the extra resolution because there was nothing to get.

The frequency range was not there. The drums adjusted for maximum bass, the guitars had little dynamic ranger, and the sometimes shouted lyrics where not a joy either.

But.. If you had a stereo that was optimized for listening to this kind of music, which fit the soundscape the record expected, is sounds much better than "high end audiophile stereo".

You really need more than one stereo so you can play the record at its best.

To me its odd if you are building out such a system to try to make it surround sound system since it will not enhance anything for classical music on vinyl

Two much more conventional looking ones, which appears to be good at the lower end, either source bass and / or surround speakers. Then there is the center channel.

In one photo they are on either side of the fireplace. (Another potential acoustic disaster.) I think.

In this image there are

I dont get concrete walls. I dont think that is common as the first wall in most general spaces for philharmonic or opera is heard.

The two giant grandfather clocks in the background also makes no sense. Those panes of glass would be joining in on the vibration and sound annoying.

Perhaps he had super treated them to avoid it. They way they are positioned and the fact that he has two of them symmetrically placed indicates it was purpose.

Porcelain dogs are rather surprising aswell. perhaps they are the proud participants in being sonically optimized two.

[1] https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://...

Lifelong passion projects really resonate with me (sorry) and frankly, I have no doubt that this guy knew 10x more about sound systems than both of us put together.

My frustration is that I think this kind of extreme audiophile stuff is a legitimate mental illness. The sad truth about the fireplace and the porcelain dogs is that no, it literally doesn't make any difference that a human could perceive. Put them in or take them out, there's no way a 70+ year old man could tell you if he was blindfolded.

Still, I'm glad that he finished his project. Getting 4-5 years to enjoy something like this puts him in an incredibly rare demographic of human.

Squint, and I see Colin Furze's ever-growing tunnel system under his house in the same light.

Probably. He would also probably fail a double-blind test in telling the difference between an ultra-hi-end system and a merely adequate high-end system.

IOW, he spent all that money on equipment and environment, but he almost certainly would have gotten the same result with less spend on equipment.

> My frustration is that I think this kind of extreme audiophile stuff is a legitimate mental illness.

Maybe some is and some isn't, but in this case he really was mentally ill. By his own account, he worked his children hard in pursuit of his happiness, and then when one of them wanted a keepsake worth a $100 or so, he disinherited them.

This man is genuinely mentally ill.

The porcelain dogs would vibrate and create an easy to hear extra noise. Unless as I pointed out they were modified. Perhaps by making them heavy and letting them sit on a robber mat or some such.

Noise from a good bass makes all manner of things vibrate. Some of which is noticeable.

About the fireplace. An open fireplace would be noticeable. Perhaps he has filled it in. even with some absorbing material.

I am not convinced about his skill level on matters like acoustics. I dont think he could sit down and the do all the math. What he could do was to try things out, and incrementally make improvements.

Ultimately, he created a system he thought was great and that was what mattered.

In my day I would spend endless hours moving things down to a mm here or there. Moving acoustic treatments all around, all such stuff. Aside from the general rules, I did not have the math, so I tried to find a solution that I loved.

For fun and pedagogy, I did build some speakers recently and it was educational. I bought full-spectrum speakers (IE, a speaker that handles both highs and lows, rather than using tweets and woofers and a crossover) and a simple stereo amplifier breakout board from Adafruit. 3D printed some speakers, and did all the soldering/wiring/enclosing myself.

What did I learn? That building good speakers is hard! There definitely are parts of the spectrum the speakers don't handle well (low frequencies; I can't hear above 15khz any more). But what I really noticed is that because I didn't do any isolation (no padding inside the speaker enclosure, the speakers are directly on my wooden desk) I can hear a lot of artifacts. I'm actually glad I can notice them, because in some sense it validates my own sense of hearing, as well as my understanding on how to improve sound.

If I were to do it again, I'd add a crossover, subwoofer, tweeters, and a ton of physical isolation (replace the 3d printed speakers with wood, add padding, and a mount under the speakers to reduce the table vibration.

One of the best speaker systems ever was an absurdly simple system: the Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound. Because large auditoriums with PAs had terrible sound, they did something nobody else tried: a huge array of speakers, each band member with their own subset of speakers (no mixing). It was absurdly expensive but it had a very high quality sound field even at low volumes (very clear 1/4 mile away).