Are you an audiophile?

I would say I'm more of an audio enthusiast than an audiophile. If it sounds good to me, it sounds good. I'm not going to ramble on about soundstage, palpability (?), speed, and all those other non-technical terms I hear a lot of audiophiles (90% of whom are probably average joes) spewing out.

"Oh yes, there's too much mid-bass, the midtones are muddy, and the highs are a bit too rolled off." Ugh. Some of the people on the Head-fi forums are especially bad about this. One of them just made a post stating that he had spent $5000 on headphones and amps since finding that forum. Five-thousand dollars? What a waste. Nobody needs a pair of AKG K-1000 headphones. (Headspeakers?)

Jam it back in, in the dark.

No, I suppose we don't. Although I must say I would be very sad indeed without my music. Sometimes I feel that it is the only thing maintaining my sanity.

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I can hear mp3 artifacting from a mile away. I mean, you really can't miss it. Nothing below 256kbps is acceptable. Personally, I use MPC for all of my music.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I think I may be becoming an audiophile. I recently bought my first DAC/Amplifier, a portable Total Bithead from HeadRoom. I have three pairs of rather high-end headphones, and I'm already looking at another. Although, in the end, the equipment is still a means to an end, rather than an end in itself.

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What I want to know is when did being an audiophile have so much to do with the manner in which you encode your audio? There is a lot more to being an audiophile than being able to tell the difference between an uncompressed WAV file and an Mp3.

I was speaking idiomatically.

That holds specially true for high-end headphones. Listening to a poorly encoded Mp3 on my Shure E4Gs or Etymotic ER-4Ss is a nightmare. Even my Grado SR-60s, which aren't quite as detailed, easily reveal any flaws. The high-quality DAC in my amplifier only exacerbates the problem.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Originally Posted by Arainach

A fantastic point. Audio is only as strong as the weakest link in the chain (million dollar cable freaks excluded from this argument).

Haw, yeah. I recently visited a page which was selling a $3,000 power cable. At first I laughed, but then realized that people actually do buy those things. And it isn't even an interconnect or an audio cable at all; just a power cord.

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People go nuts worrying about how they encode their (usually horribly mastered) CDs and then play them through iBuds. Talk about screwed up priorities.

Don't even get me started on poor mastering. I absolutely detest what the loudness war has done to music these days. It gets me steamed just looking at a waveform that has been compressed to hell, hard-limited, and normalized past 0dB. Why? I mean, Jesus Christ... I better stop before I break into a rant.

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I've found the SR-60 to actually be one of the more forgiving high-end pairs of headphones I've owned. My HD-580 can put out better audio quality than even my AV-710+Pimeta can channel to them, but they're tolerable with lower grade stuff (you know it when you hear it, however). My HD-280 are flat and analytical, which leads to them being incredibly harsh on low-quality recordings. My SR-60 are great cans, and in my opinion scale up lower quality recordings better than the other two. They're the pair I listen to the least, but they're good for that use.

Huh. I've found my SR-60s to be very detailed, but then again, I haven't tried many other full-size headphones, so I don't have a frame of reference from which to make any valid comparisons. I know that I absolutely love their sound signature, and I listen to them more than any other headphone I own. I would like to get a pair of SR-225s or even RS-1s some day.

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Noticable quality differences?

I want to say that the first file is more heavily compressed, but it's more of a feeling than anything I can hear. So in the end, no, I cannot truly tell the difference with any accuracy. Although I do know artifacting when I hear it.

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I have my laptop computer hooked up to a HeadRoom Total Bithead DAC/Amplifier, a pair of Grado SR-60 headphones, a pair of Shure E4G IEMs, and a pair of Etymotic Research ER-4S IEMs. What I want to get in the near future is a Meier Corda Aria amplifier and a pair of AKG K701s, and a pair of Grado RS-1s. Possibly, I would like to get a Micro DAC as well.

I have a fifth generation iPod that has been RockBoxed. I use my Total Bithead with it. I have an AudioLineOut bling bling interconnect. I normally use my Shures and Etymotics with it.

I don't own any speakers.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Originally Posted by LiquidAcid

If you're into DIY Piccolo maybe I can interest you in this:
http://www.tangentsoft.net/audio/pimeta/ (or any other DIY amp on the site)

Currently I don't have enough free time for another DIY project (still have to finish a few things on the second b-tech like socketed opamp and new power connector)... so the PIMETA has to wait

This is what I want:

http://www.meier-audio.homepage.t-online.de/aria.htm

I hear it has good synergy (ugh) with the K701s. I'm not sure that I buy that, but I've heard it's good, and it's very snazzy looking to boot.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I was told by a Head-Fier that they do in fact still make them, and than the line about only 500 being made isn't true.

Originally Posted by Alu

Dr. Meier still makes the Aria and sells it. The 500 pieces that are being referred to here have been cheaper than it is right now. He might want to change that in the description.

How ya doing, buddy?

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I'm of the very strong opinion that you're doing something wrong if you spend more money on your sound system than on your music collection.

Well, I don't know about that. Anything that can increase my musical enjoyment is good and worth buying. And a good pair of headphones does just that. I can't believe I ever used those crappy Sony MDR-V600s! My SR-60s are better in every way! (And $30 cheaper, too.) And the amplifier I bought, well, the crossfeed effect alone is more than worth the entire cost. It makes listening so much easier and more natural, especially when using soundstage-impaired headphones such as IEMs.

And there are always nicer headphones to get you even closer to your music...

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Hey, I need one more, so don't go taking mine.



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Umm.

Yes, it can.

I was speaking idiomatically.

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I can actually tell the difference between audio encoded with 320cbr and lossless.

Wow, what a corpse!

At any rate, I sincerely doubt you could pass a double-blind test comparing 320kbps mp3s and FLAC files. Nobody's perception is that acute.

What kind of audio system do you have?

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

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Why not? I've been comparing them for awhile now. But for the most part, like I've said before, it's not just the CD quality accurateness of lossless but also its ease of use when encoding/decoding and changing to different formats.

Pass a double-blind test with all variables (such as volume level) accounted for, and I'll believe you.

As for your system, what kind of headphones? Amplifier? Source? Cables? (If any, personally, I am not a believer in cables.)

How ya doing, buddy?

You call that a nice pair of headphones? My nice pair of headphones cost $300! They are an incredibly high-quality product, with a very smooth, even frequency response, very little harmonic distortion, and a very high build quality to boot. I find it even more suspect that you could tell apart high-quality mp3s and lossless files on a pair of low-end phones like that.

If you're a serious audiophile, you should at least upgrade to a pair of Grado SR-60s. You will not regret it.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

At high quality levels, almost certainly not.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

From a technical perspective, digital is far superior to analog, (if "analog" in this context is refers to vinyl records). The available dynamic range is greater, there is no hiss, no rumble, and no crackle. The medium does not degrade with use. The so-called "warmth" of vinyl records is a form of distortion. It may sound good, yes, but it isn't realistic.

As for the redbook audio format itself, there is nothing wrong with it. There is no reason to believe a properly recorded, mixed, and mastered CD will sound worse or somehow contain less musical information than a record. 44,100 samples per second at 16 bits per sample is more than enough. Enough to reproduce frequencies up to 22kHz with nearly 100db of dynamic range. CDs today are often mastered poorly, which leads many to the conclusion that the problem is with the format itself, which is untrue. Records often receive much more gentle treatment in post processing.

"All-digital" sound is nothing more than a selling point that companies that sell audio equipment use to convince people to purchase their products. It has no real meaning. What is "all-digital" anyway? Such a thing is impossible! Eventually, the sampled digital waveform will have to be sent to a DAC in order to be converted into an analog electrical signal, otherwise there would be no way to play it through speakers or headphones.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

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This strikes me as intuitively wrong, but even if it's not, 99% of digital masterings/recordings have the dynamic range so compressed that it's horribly wrong in practice anyway.
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Why does it strike you as intuitively wrong? What you say about mastering is true, though. I'm sure you've seen me mention the loudness war at least a couple of times...

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And the reason I spend so much on audio isn't for a 'realistic' reproduction, it's for one that sounds good. And I don't even use vinyl. Imagine that.

Can't we have both? That is what I aim for. My system reproduces music realistically, and also sounds excellent. Personally, I think the two are correlated.

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"More than enough"? Look, it's simple math: A continuous (i.e. analog) scale has an infintely greater amount of precision than even the most precise discrete (i.e. digital) scale. Period. If you want to claim that you can't hear a difference, that's an argument you could make. But to claim that there is no difference in information, or, worse, that there's no reason to believe that there's more information, is absolutely wrong.

Haven't you heard of the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem? If the sampling frequency is twice frequency in question, the analog waveform can be reproduced perfectly from the sampled waveform. In reality, there are aliasing effects, but these are negligible. On an absolute scale, yes, there is more information in the original continuous waveform, but how much of this information is relevant? How many instruments produce frequencies greater than 22050hz? How many vocalists? This is why I said 44100 samples per second is more than enough, because it is. More than enough to reproduce all of the audible information.

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Actually, there are now 100% digital amplifiers that literally amp the digital signal without a DAC. See the Panasonic XR-57 for one example.

I know about digital amplifiers. But the signal still has to pass through a DAC at some point. Unless you also happen to have digital speakers hooked up to your system.

How ya doing, buddy?