Your subject line caught my eye. I'm a computer geek of the first order, and have actually designed high end audio equipment for audiophiles. Back in the day I was an audiophile, but now I find the title quite insulting.

Zippy - LOL, which part would be "oxy" and which part would be "moron."
Why do you think this would be an oxymoron?

WhiteS2k - Just as one example, an SET amp will make thin recordings sound fuller, and to some, "better," so there are valid reasons for their popularity.

DrCloud - Note that this is an SET (single ended triode) amp. They go best with big horns, and this amp has plenty of power if the speakers that are used have 600 or more times the effeciency of more typical loudspeakers. Besides, SET amps clip in a way that is not overly offensive to the ears. It's more a matter of compressing the dynamic range of the sound, and producing more of the euphonic distortions (which SET lovers love).

boltonblue - Not to be argumentative, but no decent SS audiophile amp ever clips. LOL, or maybe I sould say that no SS system that clips, even in the slightest, can't really be considered an audiophile system. No serious audiophle system uses passive crossovers either, but that's another debate.

Just to give you guys an idea of the opposite end of the spectrum, a few years ago I invented (patent pending) a new way to build electrostatic panels, and the resulting commercial drivers (called "Ultra Stats") are the most effecient (and most reliable) ESL's ever produced. The amp that drives my electrostatic panels can deliver over 2000 watts per channel to the load. My TL mid-woofers are driven by 1000 watt per channel amps, and my sub is driven by a 1250 watt amp, so I'm running a total of 7250 watts of power. Of course, that's overkill, but you're ears will bleed before any of my amps clip. The amps can slap the diaphragms into the stators, and burn out the voice coils in the other drivers, without ever getting close to clipping. Obviously I prefer undistorted sound to SET euphonics, but in spite of the kinds of arguments an audiophile will make, it's really just a matter of preference (and sometimes some misplaced beliefs). Same as with cars; LOL, as hard as it is to believe, there are people out there who don't like the S2000.

 

OK...who let the propeller head in here....



oh, its you, Red. Welcome to the forum. So glad to have you here to tamp down some of these impolite posts.

Seriously...very interesting thread. My interest is mostly academic since my golden ears have turned to lead.

 

[quote name='RED MX5' date='Jan 14 2009, 03:44 PM'] Zippy - LOL, which part would be "oxy" and which part would be "moron."

 

For what it's worth, I was reading a thread on a Mac forum yesterday and most of the people in the discussion were advocating re-ripping their music libraries (some with 14,000+ individual songs) in Apple Lossless format (or FLAC or AIFF.) HDDs (and iPods as well) have become large and cheap enough that storage space is pretty much no longer an issue.

An audiophile using a computer to store their digital source material is not at all odd.

 

^ I may do that.

Thanks to Apple's "user-friendly" approach to things, I had ripped about 99% of my 400 or so CDs before I discovered, by burrowing way, way down into the menus, that the default iTunes settings are nowhere near lossless, but, as Zip noted, more oriented toward compression. I'm still pissed at Apple for that trick.

I can't say I've noticed the compromise, but, then, I don't tend to listen to my iPod on high-end equipment. In the car, with road noise and a merely OK sound system, or on airplanes using headphones hardly counts.

Still, I'm thinking I'll re-rip some of the symphonic CDs. HPH

 

[quote name='Zippy' date='Jan 14 2009, 07:01 PM']1. Most people rip their music so that they can store it in the smallest possible space.

 

No, it's not at all uncommon.

However, most "serious audiophiles" (always a self proclaimed title) consider digital anything to be the work of the Devil.

 

[quote name='RED MX5' date='Jan 15 2009, 03:21 PM']

 

One potential (and good) side effect of discussions of this nature is that it just might lure Dean out of hiding. He's serious at this level, too.

Also, the upshot of all this seems to boil down to "if it sounds good enough to you, then it's good enough" unless, of course, you just want to be a poser and show off all your expensive toys. HPH

 

I normally don't talk high end audio in public forums, but this is turning out to be intertesting.

I think you must have misunderstood my meaning. If you run a particular bit stream through any given DAC, and measure the noise (which includes the effets of jitter) with sufficient granularity, and then you repeat the test with the same bit stream, you'll get the same results. It does not matter how that bit stream was stored, unless of course the method of storage somehow affects the jitter of the output clock. The clocks are on the DAC chip now, and are extremely well isolated (though obviously not perfectly isolated) from jitter inducing influences. Well enough that you can't measure any noise difference at all between a CD and a bit for bit copy of the CD, at least not with any kind of audio tester I'm aware of. Of course golden ears can hear things that can't be measured, but a discussion of what they are experiencing isn't an appropriate topic for public discussion. We may have some audiophiles in the audiance, and they're often easily offended.

A golden ears hearing goes all the way out to 20 MHz.

Ok, now I have to tell you my best wire story.

I was doing R&D for a small high end audio company (that shall remain nameless) that was owned by a man who takes a rigorous engineering approach to audio design. His loyal customers were constantly asking why he didn't sell any quality speaker wire, and it was obvious that he could be adding quite a bit to the bottom line by selling magic wire, but he's an honest man and wasn't about to deceive his customers, so magic was out of the question. Then somebody sent him some low value resistors that their company had just started making, and the little resistors (1/4 ohm to 1 ohm, high wattage, near zero inductance) and some test they'd conducted using his ESL's. As you probably know, all ESL's have a resonance, usually between 27kHz and 33kHz, and this resonance creates a bump in the frequency resonse, with a tail that usually tips up the the high frequency response of the panel. Throwing a little resistance in series with the panel reduces the amplitude of the resonance and can flatten out the top of the audible spectrum, so I brough the resistors home and played around with my panels until I got the response perfectly flat at 20kHz. I then e-mailed my FR plots to the man, and suggested that this might be a nice mod for his speakers. He argued (correctly) that the 2db difference at 20k wasn't significant enough to merit the cost of the resistors, and that was the end of that.

But then some guy in Europe sent the company some wire he'd made, that had just enough resistance to do exactly the same thing. Problem was, the wire had to be cut to length based on the speaker it would be used with, so while it was interesting, it was just a novelty. But then somebody else figured out that wire with the right impedance at the resonant frequency could accomplish the same thing, and the company decided to design a wire for their ELS's based on the idea. The wire was (and still is) manufactured by Vampire, and the company buys the wire in 100' rolls for $39.00 per roll.

So anyway, the company was about to start selling the stuff, and the owner couldn't decide how much to charge for the wire. He reasoned (rightly) that if he sold it too cheaply, no audiophile worth his salt would take it seriously, so he couldn't sell it at what would have been a fair price. No, he had to charge more, to make the buyers happy. LOL, go figure. Anyway, he asked me, "What do you think is the lowest price I can sell this stuff for without losing credability?" My answer was that it all depends on how much credability you want. Sell it for $100.00 per foot, and you'll have lots of credability, but given your reputation in the world of high end audio, I think you can probably sell the stuff for $150.00 in any length the customer wants, without losing credability. And to this day, the company still sells the wire at that price. No increase in price in 20 years, because it started out so overpriced, and all because audiophiles won't take anything seriously unless it's expensive.

LOL, and golden ears hear "huge" improvements when using the companies wire in conjunction with their loudspeakers. LOL, whatever.

[QUOTE]BTW I sold high end audio before heading back to school, so I've been in the space.
amazing field is psycho-acoustics.