Comment by smackeyacky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smackeyacky | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I like to blame it on Stereophile magazine losing their mind as digital sources of music took over. Turntables / cartridges etc you can pretty much make up what you want about how they sound due to the sheer amount of noise and medium speed integrity issues involved, making it very hard to call them out on their subjective biases.

Digital isn't perfect but compared to what an analogue playback system does, it might as well be considered as such. It gave them nothing to write about when a $120 disc player could reproduce audio as well as a $2000 player. They seemed to have doubled and tripled down on the nonsense ever since.

Not sure why audiophiles fall for it, other than the general "tweakiness" aspect of some audio enthusiasts who are always looking for the next thing to spend their money on. It's tough to have a hobby when if you buy the gear, you have little to complain about until it's made obsolete.

I'm on the opposite side of finding it interesting though. There is a lot of "your ears aren't good enough" dog piling going on to shout down any doubts about cables and whatnot.

I think a big part of the anti-digital backlash was due to the fact that many early Compact Disc albums sounded terrible. They had a big budget for their original analog production, but the record companies cheaply repurposed their back catalogs to digital media for a quick buck. Albums originally produced during the CD era sound fine in digital.

Not denying that there is a lot of hogwash to go along as well...

Yeah, it's just goofy. I find it interesting only for the novelty aspect of it I guess. Maybe that was the wrong word to use. Maybe horrifying. My hobby, photography, doesn't seem to be nearly as bad though. It has a lot of the same problems, as the Guitar speaker industry, arguments about the art, and coloration, but it's really missing the $3000 IEC cable aspect, that seems to thrive in the audiophile community.

I suspect the relevant difference here between a hobby like photography and something like sound systems is whether it feels like the hobbyist has to exert themselves in addition to using the tool or whether the tools allow for purely passive consumption. Most hobbies where you have to "exert yourself," whether that's in the form of going out and taking pictures or e.g. getting on a bike and riding around have some element of the community that looks down (often with varying degrees of condescension) on people who buy a ton of expensive gadgets but don't have the ability to actually use those gadgets well. There's often some pride in being able to "get the job done" with the cheapest equipment possible to show how much of one's work is individual ability rather than technological help.

That element probably ends up being some sort of counterbalancing social force to unbridled gadget consumption whose end product is $3000 cables.

A thought I've had about the $3000 cables, is that they may serve mostly as loss leaders, in the following sense: A person may believe that the $3000 cables are a rip-off, and satisfy themselves with $300 cables instead.

Oh that's a fun thought.

Japan is part of the problem; all the consumer audio companies over there are selling something called "Hi-Res Audio" that's complete snake oil, but meanwhile all their music is still ultra-compressed loudness war mastering.

Maybe the problem is nothing they make can compare to used Stax electrostatics.

And I definitely agree about Stereophile. They tried to clean up their act in the latest years, but. They are just too tied down to those advertisers, to ever put on a hard stance. I don't take the magazine anymore. Highly recommend ALMA's Voice-Coil magazine still, if you want to read about the industry.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com