by Michael

Stupid Audiophile Troll Tricks #2 – “You have no business being an audiophile if you do not have perfect ears”

Stupid Audiophile Troll Tricks #2 – “You have no business being an audiophile if you do not have perfect ears”

This troll takes several forms:

“Since people start losing their ability to hear high frequencies as they age, they have no business listening to fine audiophile gear they can’t appreciate (i.e. if they can’t hear to 20K Hz)”

With this logic males have no business having sex after the age of 18 and no one over 30 can appreciate a sports car [their reflexes not being what they used to be].

So, bad logic, obviously, but a more important point is how this does not take into account how being better educated / skilled / experienced adds to the level of appreciation of many things in life compared to experiences when one is ignorant of the subtleties and nuances.

What a true audiophile is able to hear, whatever the range of frequencies, whether it be limited by their ears or by the playback equipment, far surpasses what the unskilled listener can hear.

If you spend years and years and years studying and practicing something, whether it be listening carefully or yoga or mathematics or a popular sport, whatever, you get much, much better at it than someone who hasn’t.

Some people are experts at, say, sports statistics and trivia. Just because they are old and their memory has been declining for decades do we tell them that they have no business being an expert? No we do not 🙂

[I use this ‘sports trivia’ expert quite often in my hypothesis when I try to place people in context. Everyone is a genius at something, but often people do not realize this about themselves. One of the first examples of this I encountered in my life was someone who thought themselves stupid by was a whiz at sports trivia, statistics, sports psychology and other related skills. At this this person was pure genius]

An ongoing series of posts where we debunk common comments made by trolls. Because trolls are quite unimaginative, this will not be a very long series of posts. I use the world ‘stupid’ to be charitable – these trolls are bullies seeking attention through their aggressiveness and they just so happen to choose audiophiles to pick on.

in Audiophile 101 0 comments
 by Michael

Stupid Audiophile Troll Tricks #1 – “All cables sound the same”

Stupid Audiophile Troll Tricks #1 – “All cables sound the same” (or “Cables Have No Sound”)

An ongoing series of posts where we debunk common comments made by trolls. Because trolls are quite unimaginative, this will not be a very long series of posts. I use the world ‘stupid’ to be charitable – these trolls are bullies seeking attention through their aggressiveness and they just so happen to choose audiophiles to pick on.

This particular stupid comment is often used to insinuate that, because, if true, our industry would then be lying about cables having a sound [which they are not], so they must be lying about most everything else as well and much if not all of high-end audio is therefore ‘snake oil’.

This is easy to disprove.

We start  by assuming they are right, that cables really do have no sound [or all sound the same]. Then no matter what the electrical properties (capacitance, inductance or resistance) of the cable, there is no affect on the sound.

But the cable is just another [albeit important] part [extension] of the electrical circuit consisting of the source, preamplifier, amplifier and speaker – so if the cable has no sound, regardless of its electrical properties, then nothing else in the circuit has a sound either no matter its electrical properties. All those capacitors, resistors, transformers, they have no sound. That, because cables do not have a sound, no matter how low or high its resistance is, for example, that we can just put resistors in any circuit, no matter how low or high the number of ohms, and it will sound the same.

Hopefully this is obviously untrue to most of you, and so it is obvious cables do indeed have a sound. And if cables do have a sound, there will be those that sound better and those that sound worse. And the ones that sound better will cost more if their manufacturer has any kind of understanding about how capitalism works [which most do].

Of course, most of us just need to use our ears to hear the difference in how one cable sounds versus another

One can also get a cheap sound meter, or sound frequency analyser, and see a visual report on the differences in SPL or sound frequencies if one cannot trust one’s ears.

[you do need a hifi system that is resolving enough to reveal the differences in sound. If you have a very inexpensive system, then cables may not make a measurable of a difference to you and you should spend your money on getting a better system, not cables].

*sigh* Feels good to write this but don’t expect the trolls to go away anytime soon :-/

 

 

 

in Audiophile 101 / Sounding Off 3 comments
 by Michael

Registration for CES 2018 opens

Got our mailer in the mail yesterday. Guess it opened September 6 [it usually opened early / mid Summer]. It is still free if you are an ‘alumni’ [otherwise $100… before it goes up to $300]. We registered, but not sure if we are truly going to attend. It is so small compared to what it was, but it is only 8 hours to drive now from Palo Alto, CA instead of 13 hours from Boulder, CO 🙂 And it won’t be snowy and icy [it has sometimes literally been minus 15 degrees Fahrenheit going over Vail pass [which has a nice rest area that we almost always stopped at. :}].

They still do not have a map of what is going to be at the Venetian so we can see who is going:

“Interactive map of the CES 2018 show floor coming soon.”

You can search by exhibitor name, but that gets old quick. To attend CES 2018 register here.

 

in CES 2018 0 comments