by Michael

Its ALL Technological Mumbo Jumbo

[This is a hard concept to get across. Suffice it to say that humans know very, very, very little of the science behind what makes a good sound system – and hold on to your wallet around people who imply otherwise]

Now here I go defending Reviewers, after blasting them last post. Just goes to show that things can always get worse.

Most reviewers (there are exceptions) seem to be able to avoid the ‘self-appointed technological expert’ syndrome which is for all intents and purposes almost indisinguishable from the ‘sales techno-babble daze and confuse them in buying what you are selling’ approach.

To put it simply – Whenever someone says that a product is better than another because of some technological detail – they are lying.

This is true in any technological arena – and any real expert will tell you that we as a species don’t know diddly and what we do know has so many qualifications and constraints thatr we might as well not know anything – and in the end it is all just theories and models. That is just the way science works, sorry.

So then we have the Audio Perfectionist, whose role apparently is to, well in the automobile universe it would be to berate auto reviewers for not spending their time informing their readers that the Porsche is a very badly engineered product (in comparison with the Honda and Toyota, for example) and is therefore not worth 1/10 of the asking price (i.e. the car or product should sell for little more than the cost of its constituent parts).

For example, to state that time-aligned speakers are better than non time-aligned speakers is B.S. Even saying that they are more accurate is B.S.

What is not B.S., but verging on meaninglessness, is to say “From what we know about human hearing, a time-aligned speaker will seem to image better and seem more realistically dynamic than a non-time-aligned speaker, all else being equal”.

“All else being equal” requires us to imagine two speakers that are absolutelyidentical except one is time-aligned and one is not. Of course, making the one speaker time-aligned will in actual reality cause side-effects that might render the speaker less ‘real’ and distort imaging – just those areas that time-alignment is trying to improve, so this statement means very little in the real world where you and I listen to and buy speakers.

And we can go on. Suffice it to say that ‘statements’ like the B.S. above, are only true, if they are true anywhere, in an extremely simplified imaginary view of the world. I am not sure that people really want to spend their hard earned dollars on something whose value is based on somebody else’s fantasy life,

whose only goal seems to be the evangelistic promotion of our era’s archaic definition of what accurate sound reproduction is, from spinning aluminum and vinyl disks no less.

Archaic because scientists know almost nothing compared to what they will know in decades and centuries hence – so evaluating equipment based on what is essentually voodoo may not be very smart if you are technologically minded. And things like…uh…. musicality and enjoyment do not appear anywhere in these kind of voodoo doctor proclamations of what has ‘quality’.

It just seems like a bad buying decision to me to buy something you do not like. Hey! It took me a lot of years, and a lot of cars and speakers and cables… to figure this out. Everyday we talk to people who are seriously considering products based on specifications, build quality, measured performance, reviews….people who are just like me.

That is why it is important to actually go for a test-drive and listen to something to see if you like it and not just read the specs or a reviewer’s description of the component’s construction and measured performance.

[Then we have Romy’s critique of the same Wilson MAXX II speakers, coming from a more experiential perspective, much more in the line of how we think speakers and systems need to be evaluated. Why he liked the referenced Audio Perfectionist article, I couldn’t tell ya]

*There are so many examples of this. Another is: “This amps sounds more organic BECAUSE it is using 1% Vishay resistors” B.S. Does it sound more organic? Listen to it! More organic than what? Than no-name cheap-as-dirt resistors from the Far East? Well, I guess it is nice of them to spend the extra buck. But what else is in the system that we are supposed to be listening for the sound of a few resistors in? The electrical music signal is going though a LOT of things, even inside all but the most simple of components. And the system! It is one gigantic, very, very complex technological-ecosystem; it all must work together in harmony. Each component is affected by every other component. Still trying to pin-point the sound of those resistors the saleperson is touting?

The best scientists using the biggest super-computers in the world can only partially simulate a tiny fraction of this system. And gurus, and salespeople, and manufacturers can’t tell you why it sounds exactly the way it does, either.

All you can do is listen. For yourself. It’s OK, take your time. Enjoy the music while you’re at it.

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Philosophy / Popular 5 comments
 by Michael

THE STEREOTIMES CES 2006 SHOW REPORT

I didn’t know they were doing a show report, so I just recently added a link to theirs along with everybody else’s on our show report’s main page.

I particularly like Frank Alles’s report. There is no link to it, because they use frames, but if you click on ‘Show Reports’ at the top of the Stereotimes site and then scroll down using the scroll bar way at the right side of your browser, then you should see a link to it. The pages load slowly so you have to be patient.

He says something about the sound of each room, and you can read between the lines in true carefully-parse-what-the-reviewer-said-to-get-the-secret-message-of-what-they-are-really-saying fashion to determine more or less what really went on. And he lists a number of favorites and runners up, …

all of which Did Actually Sound Better Than the Majority of the Other Rooms!

Well, this guy is in big trouble now, and will probably be run out of Reviewer Town for not throwing in the minimum allowable FUD factor (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) that is required in each days allotment of information disseminated to the Audiophile Community in microscopic packages like some Information Age version of the legendary Chinese water torture.

I’ve never heard of this guy – which don’t mean squat but let’s pretend I do infact remember a name for longer than the refresh rate on my LCD monitor here – and maybe that is the secret. If nobody knows you, you are perceived to have no power to persuade or inform the masses – so you can say more or less describe what you actually heard (Well, he does say it in a nicer way than I do – but here in geek land, clarity of expression is valued more than in Politics and Show Reviewing).

Or maybe it is the age that is important – there are a number of younger reviewer types over at Positive Feedback – they do not appear to have soldout, or perhaps worse, to have so much at stake that they no longer hear what they listen to.

Whatever it is, there comes a time when their days as a hard-hitting reporter are over. Now the days of wine and the never-ending-auditions have arrived. All they need is the page in the thesaurus for the word ‘best’ and thick-skinned ears and they are ready for stardom. Woo hoo!

If by some chance of fate this happens to us please let us know. If there is ever a consensus (and we will be checking where the emails come from so if they all come from the folks at Stereophile it just won’t carry as much weight, sorry) that we have finally soldout to become just another cheerleader – we will shut down Hifi’ing show reports and the Blog – and contemplate the misery of our fate.

in CES 2006 / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Show Reports 2 comments
 by Michael

The CES Mixibitors STRIKE AGAIN

We have received a lot of email lately because of our show report, and one of the more interesting had details concerning a group called The Mixibitors.

Apparently, every year at CES, about 30 people quietly got together in the middle of the Alexis Park courtyard, late, late Saturday night.

Their plan: to hear the unhearable. Too many rooms were unsatisfactorily setup. Too many had fustratingly problematic components paired with the barely legal primo stuff. There were just too many ‘What If’ system setups that were just a few heaves and a helluvalotof ho’s away from realization, perhaps never to exist before or after this special night.

They had carefully crafted, over the previous days and evenings of the show, designs for the systems that would be carefully pieced together, existing only for a few hours, for the pleasure of a very few… for the pleasure of The Mixibitors.

Only they would experience the glory of hearing some of the most awesome and outrageous hifi systems perhaps only glimpsed before during the most hardcore audiophile’s fanatic wetdreams.

Not that the plan hadn’t had it detractors and major revisions.

The email went on to describe some details about the discussions concerning the Kondo room. The Kondo room had been particularly difficult to plan. Everyone agreed they wanted to put different speakers on the Kondo Gakuon system – but which ones? There were the ‘use small speakers and keep it in the same room contingent’.

Everyone agreed that the ‘keep it in the same room’ approach did have some appeal – especially as some of the senior members (and some are apparently very old, but just cannot bear to quit) had starting growing tired of lugging 100s of lbs of equipment across show hotels over the years, and, even more so, because they also remembered that they all had to lug all this stuff back and set it up again before the show started stirring again in the morning.

The choices were of course limited to what was on hand at both T.H.E. Show and CES – but this was not too limiting as there were a number of excellent candidates and the weather was great this year. The small speaker candidates were Audio Note U.K. speakers, the Acapella Filedio II, the Oskar Heil Kithara. The large speaker candidates were the Wilson MAXX II, the Acapella Violon, and the Cogent horns.

The optimal configuration of this and other rooms were debated long and hard. Secret hand signals had been developed over the previous years so that votes could be curried and polled inconspicously during the days as they all appeared to be just like all the other wacky audiophiles wandering in and out of rooms listening for the holy grail.

Only they knew that the Holy Grail was not here, yet was here.

Here is the list of some of the rooms they setup that night (the actual plan goes into much more detail including cables, power cords, electronically calculated speaker system positions, potential tube replacements, etc):

* All Kondo Audio Note system components, on a HRS rack and platforms purloined from the Audio Aero room, driving Coltrane Supreme speakers all installed in the very large room at the St. Tropez where the VR-7 speakers had been setup. The Continuum turntable with the Boulder phonostage from the Alexis Park were used for analog.

* The Audio Note U.K. Gakuon system, except the turntable which was replaced with the Continuum, also on HRS rack and platforms, moved to the very large Thiel room and drivng the big Cogent True-to-life horns.

* The Kharma Mini Exquisites, moved next door to the larger Kharma room, driven by the ML2.1 amps from the Lamm room and the Meitner from the VR-9 room as digital source and pre, all equipment on HRS racks and platforms

* It was decided that the big Joule Electra OTL amps from the Joule room would be put on the Wilson MAXX 2s, largely as an experiment. But the Mixibitors Charter allows this so it was agreed. They needed a larger room and decided on the large Genesis room (which wasn’t very far away). The digital front end and preamp was the Meitner.

I asked, but No, they emphatically DO NOT have any pictures.

What did these rooms sound like? I wish I knew! They did say that many Mixibitors learn to wear diapers during this evening.

in CES 2006 / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Show Reports 0 comments