Giving credence to what “people with good credentials” (whatever that means) say about products and how they cannot work and are “snake oil” and lies is in itself erroneous. I’m well aware of such posts from “experienced sound engineers” or whatever. They always follow exactly the same line, which is basically “I’m an engineer and I can tell you it’s all just snake oil and can’t make a difference”. It’s always, and depressingly predictably, the same. Most of these so called experts haven’t even bothered to listen to the products that they rubbish. They don’t need to, because they “just know, because I’m an engineer”, that they can’t work.
If you want to place your trust in such people and make buying decisions based on their outpourings then that’s up to you of course. I really don’t understand why anyone would though. Neither can I understand why anyone would need to read a Harman Curve to determine if headphones are bass heavy or not.
The only sensible way to determine whether a product does what the manufacturer claims it does is to listen to it for yourself. There just is no other way. Certainly you shouldn’t just believe what manufacturers tell you and equally you certainly shouldn’t believe what self appointed engineering experts on forums tell you. Especially when, by their own admission, they haven’t even heard the products.
You must determine for yourself using your own ears. That’s the way to save a mountain of money. Or not - depending on whether you find that the product works or not when you listen to it.
On the other hand there are those people who seem to have the enviable ability to determine whether a product is any good or not without listening to it based on nothing more than their incomplete understanding of science.
For many of us getting to trail and hear gear before we buy is not possible, so alternative strategies need to be put into action. Personally I use a mix of reviews and forum opinions to build a picture of an item. I also look at some technical information like the Harman curve for headphones, to read certain characteristics. Picking the right opinions, it is easy to build a fairly accurate picture. It has worked 100% for me so far. Unbiased expert opinions are useful. I use headphones a lot and they have all sounded as the consensus picture described them. You just need to have a strong BS filter and a little technical basic knowledge.
Listening for yourself: well, I have three high level headphones, which I use for different musical situations. Our ears play tricks and our ears adapt to a sound signature. My HD800s cans sound crap if i do an instant A/B switch with my Heddphone 2GT. But if I have a session with just these headphones, they are my favourite. What is happening?
Listening for yourself: well scientific papers have been written about how our ears are fooled by our expectation. The Harman audio company spent a lot of time and money on what we hear and what we expect to hear when we listen to gear. We expect expensive stuff to sound better than cheap stuff, and our ears often satisfy our expectations. So listening for yourself is not always the best way to judge.
Whilst I have no intention of buying something like a Melco, that doesn’t mean I’m not intrigued by what might be responsible for differences people hear as if you get a better understanding of what’s happening, you could be able to improve your own system by doing something differently. I can’t afford to spend £10k on a switch, so also can’t afford to just listen and see.
I also really dislike some of the lies the manufacturers use, as they are absolutely and provably not what’s going on. The biggest one being there’s this widespread data integrity issue on networks. There is not. Unless you have broken cables, data moves around perfectly well. It’s highly convenient that none of the audiophile switches are managed which would tell you there were no errors.
File standards like FLAC also don’t have much leeway in how you build them, so whilst in a FLAC file each frame of audio has metadata, and this approach actually allows you to switch between different resolutions of music in that file, all FLAC files must use this rigid structure else decoders won’t recognise them. The song metadata that tells you it’s Milly Molly Mandy by whoever on 78 is only at the beginning, the metadata telling you it’s 44.1kHz at 16 bit, is around all the compressed audio frames. Melco can only vary the compression rate and possibly some padding, but really only if they write their own library which is unlikely but also not impossible,
So I don’t doubt people are hearing a difference, but many of the reasons cited really don’t stack up… which I’m ok with, it just means we don’t know why…
Is it better then to judge the sound of something based on what somebody else tells you it sounds like? What makes their judgment more valid than yours? Do they not use their ears? And if they do then why will they not be subject to exactly the same errors of judgement that you believe yourself to be? Or do you believe that it’s possible to determine the sound of a product without listening to it based purely on how it measures?
Sure it is better to listen for yourself. But this is not always possible. I rely on a large consensus of opinions when I buy stuff I cannot trail.
Let’s look at cables. There is no technical or scientific reason why a €10 Amazon Basics cable affects the sound on your HiFi Compared to a €16,000 cable. Electronics Engineers can explain why. They can more importantly debunk the pseudo engineering sales guff that is used to sell these hyper expensive cables. A data cable passes bits of data or it does not. Corrupted data does not pass. Cable salesmen rely on psychoacoustics. We really want to believe that the expensive cable is much better than the cheap €10 one that came with the gear. Our ears are happy to oblige.
I hear no difference between WAV and FLAC when I listen to files stored on my USB drive on my revealing HP setup BTW.
This sort of thing would be trivial to explore with freely available tools.
But I don’t think anyone has made available two FLAC files (one from a Melco D100, one from another device of same CD track rip) to allow this simple analysis of a FLAC and a “better sounding” rip.
There was one internet thread where the audio data was proved to be 100% identical, but I don’t recall the full block structure being compared.
If someone with a Melco D100 and any other physical device could provide the two rips it would be fast and easy to analyse.
Perhaps we can explain the unexplained.
And if there is some advantage found, it would be easy to use freeware tools to repackage ANY FLAC to the same structure to gain the SQ advantage. Remember any audio file has to meet the FLAC spec, which provides limited room for manoeuvre.
There was indeed a thread on it, the guy received two files from the same album, one made by Unitserve, the other by D100.
But then the guy, instead of listening and compare, he removed the additional 12 s and removed the metadata. Then said the files are identical.
It would be great if you have a read of some of the recent postings on my thread, starting perhaps here where (IMO) BBK has made some very astute comments.
Hey buddy. I mean no offence but I just don’t understand your position on this at all.
In a hobby where we literally sit and listen to our electronics I don’t understand how that’s isn’t the best way to judge what we should buy and what is good for “us”.
We all have different taste and I disagree with many hifi reviewers and other hifi enthusiasts on many things. We all have our preferences and will often like gear that doesn’t measure well or isn’t well reviewed.
I really think your way of thinking will lead to many mistakes along your hifi journey. You may be pleasantly surprised what your ear brain mechanism actually prefers. To hell with what somebody else thinks about it. It’s YOUR hifi, not theirs.
Ps. I’ve read some of the work that they do at Harman. I disagree with most of it.Their methodology of speaker testing is warped imo I.e. single speaker, ABX testing. I’d much rather trust my own ears over the Harman curve. I’m not saying science doesn’t have its place in design and build but I do not think it serves a purpose for the end user.
Well, first of all corrupted data will pass along the cable. I presume what you are trying to say is that with a digital cable it either works or it doesn’t. If it works then you believe it can’t possibly sound different to any other digital cable as the data will be identical in terms of bit content. This shows a lack of understanding of the factors that affect digital audio data transmission. The belief that bit perfect in every case equals identical sound in every case. It doesn’t. For example digital cables can introduce jitter to varying degrees. This affects the timing of audio signals which will be apparent in the sound. This is not data corruption and you are correct in saying that if a cable works then it will pass all the data uncorrupted. But this does not mean that all digital cables sound identical. This is not snake oil or sales guff but well understood and accepted science. It’s just that because you are unaware of it or don’t understand it you have come to a completely wrong conclusion about digital cables. You need to recognise that this is a shortcoming in your own knowledge/understanding which is causing you to reach an erroneous conclusion. No slur on you at all for not having this knowledge or understanding but it’s leading you to reach invalid conclusions.
Do we? You must be very different from me then. I would much rather find that a cheap £10 mains cable from Amazon sounds as good or better then a Naim Powerline at over £600. Despite my wishing this to be the case my ears don’t oblige and I find that the Powerline sounds better.
Incidentally if the hyper expensive cable sounds better to you than the cheap cable that came with the gear then why do you believe that your ears are fooling you? How do you know that the expensive cable doesn’t in fact sound better? Is it because someone has said that it can’t sound better because it’s impossible for it to and you prefer to believe their wrongly drawn conclusions, which are due to a lack of scientific understanding, than to believe what you actually hear?
Do they? I thought they relied on their cables sounding good.
I’m unclear as to exactly what your postion is. You seem to be saying that if an expensive cable sounds better to you than a cheap one then you don’t believe your ears and you will buy the cheap one. Has this ever happened to you? Or are you just saying that you believe that expensive cables don’t sound any better than cheap ones because it’s what some people say and you don’t actually have any experience of this yourself?
The question is, how/why has the Harman Curve become seemingly widely accepted for headphones but not for speakers? But to answer that the first question is whether it is accepted for people wanting best sound quality as in highest fidelity to the sound as recorded and mastered, or simply that it makes music sound good to some (or many)?
One suggestion is that the Harman curve for headphones simulates the response of a neutral speaker in a room of typical listening room size but acoustically ideal. (But does it?)
Received wisdom some years ago suggested to me that neutral speakers in a well set up room would have an upwards slope across the spectrum, rising steadily towards the bass end, though I don’t recall by how many per octave. There was no suggestion of msking it ruse at both ends of the doectrum.
it seems to me that this is a prime case for a DSP control box doing room correction but with a user selectable choice of room response curves, including various strengths of Harman curve, various degrees of bass oriented slope, and of course flat in case wanted. But that of course is quite another subject and nothing to do with this thread’s subject!
I find this fascinating. Studio headphones are usually considered “boring” and manufactures usually have two distinct ranges for studio and home use. We all have preferences with headphones. I have three rather expensive sets of cans, that I use when I want a certain aspect of the recording I am listening to to shine out.
Speakers and headphones certainly have easily discernible tuning. How a set of speakers interact with a room is also easy to hear.
Logical reasoning, and reading what experts in this field say. I buy good quality cables and connectors hand constructed by an artisan in Ravenna.
I was using a cheap USB cable that came with a printer to connect a HD to my streamer. I bought a Chord USB cable cheaply in a closing down sale. But with revealing headphones I hear no difference.
Well, first of all corrupted data will pass along a cable
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Here are the results of some lab tests concerning jitter:
I think the most important revelation is that even 10 times more jitter than is usual for inexpensive audio devices is innocuous and doesn’t harm the music. The usual scapegoats “fullness and width” are clearly not affected by the addition of jitter noise. Even with the jitter at 10µs, which is huge and limits the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to only 35dB, you can appreciate the power of the masking effect. Unlike tape hiss and vinyl record crackles and pops, jitter noise is present only when the music plays. So, it’s always masked by the music and never audible between songs. Then, why do so many people believe that bass response and imaging are affected by jitter?
Google Ethan Winer + audio pages, if you want to read some interesting thought provoking things about audio, written by an audio Engineer .
I have replaced cheap looking cables supplied with gear, with seemingly better cables and connectors. Frankly I have never heard any difference.
Ok, my point is this. when considering WAV vs FLAC, cables audio accessories and a whole lot of other HiFi questions, we cannot always trust our ears. A qualified second opinion can help us out.
I have proved for myself that our ears cannot be trusted with the headphone example in a previous post.
I’ve deleted my original reply as Richard has pointed out this is not a cable thread and I just got carried away in my response to your comments about cables.
I’ll just say that the quote from the "lab tests’ regarding jitter makes very clear that the author has a poor understanding of the matter. To say that “jitter noise is always masked by the music” is a ludicrous statement to make and makes it very clear that the author has no understanding at all of how jitter relates to audio signals.
Maybe you can’t trust your own ears - I don’t know. Personally my ears have served me very well for more than 50 years of making hi-fi purchases.
I wonder if this thread would follow a slightly different trajectory if the title were “FLAC vs WAV”? If there were a difference, would it be too small to discern?
In all these arguments including Flac vs Wav the problem is that serious academic studies tell us that we cannot trust our ears, because the differences are so small to be imperceptible, we cannot remember sound differences for longer than about 15 minutes or just that our ears and brain tell us what we want to believe.
My HP system is pretty high end. I ripped or bought downloads in WAV, as many say that this is the better format. A secondary system I bought has WAV metadata problems. I switched to FLAC. I cannot say that the music I listen to is degraded. or less enjoyable. I find getting the volume level right often makes a huge difference to an album.
It is pointless fretting and worrying about microscopic differences. The thing is to enjoy your music collection.