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Interesting read, but.
This passage right here comes off as awfully condescending:
"In truth, if your go-to genre of music is pop or rock, you can relax. These forms of music are traditionally so processed and so compressed (in order to sound clear on lo-fi radio) that there is nothing a hi-fi system can do to make them sound any different. They are stripped of dynamic range and extreme frequencies, and mixed for the masses. Occasionally digital remasters can add a little integrity to old recordings, but on the whole it’s not much."
What he says might be true, to a certain degree. The majority of modern pop/rock recording are brickwalled beyond belief but there's a lot of music that isn't, and it would've been nice of the author to link to http://dr.loudness-war.info/ where people can check the dynamic range of their recordings. I'm sure he's familiar with the site.
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Actually, about 40 years of scientific studies and double blind evaluations shows that it is essentially down to the speakers (and room interactions) far more than interconnects or electronics when it comes to determining overall sound quality. In fact, the vast majority of double blind listening tests have revealed little to no difference in sound quality for amplifiers, interconnects, and CD / DVD / digital audio players. As soon as people don't know which piece they are listening to, big "audible differences" disappear.
I've participated in many of these tests, and even staged them. People will swear to hearing differences between cables, amplifiers, you name it. Yet once the listening test is blinded, their choices come down to essentially random chance. During sighted evaluations I've even had people swear cable A sounded better than cable B, yet in the end it turned out they were listening to cable B all the time.
The problem is not with any one person or group of people, it's simply a matter that our perceptions are malleable and can be influenced by so many factors: expectation bias, confirmation bias, brand loyalty, desire to have our decision to drop a bunch of cash on a high end product validated, you name it. Our brains are easily fooled.
With speakers, on the other hand, there are verifiable large audible differences. These are revealed during both blind and sighted evaluations. It's interesting that the most impressive looking speaker will sometimes do much better during sighted evaluations than ones where the speaker is hidden behind an acoustically transparent screen.
Both the Canadian NRC and Harman International have been doing these kinds of scientific comparative listening tests for over 40 years, involving people of all nationalities and ages. Interesting too that the speakers that have the most neutral, uncolored sound - in other words, speakers that do not emphasize any part of the sound spectrum - win these types of listening tests the vast majority of the time (in fact, Harman can predict which speaker will win over 86% of the time simply by looking at speaker measurements in a format called a Spinorama). The idea that speaker preference is purely subjective has been pretty much debunked, and rather authoritatively.
It really should not be a surprise that speakers that measure as neutral, without emphasis on treble, midrange or bass, are the speakers that are preferred. After all, real life sounds like real life, a saxophone sounds like a saxophone, a vocalist like that vocalist. Why should we want a speaker that alters those sounds? Just like our eyes can tell when a TV is not reproducing colors accurately, our ears can tell when a speaker is not producing sound accurately.
Left out of the above is the variability of recording quality, which Dr. Sean Olive at Harman calls a "nuisance variable." Recordings vary tremendously in quality, and the better the speaker, the more you can hear the limitations of the original recording. It's like the move to HD in video - suddenly you could see flaws in sets, makeup, special effects, etc. Those were obscured in lower resolution mediums. With a highly revealing loudspeaker, it's much the same way. Bad recordings are exposed, warts and all. But good recordings can sound glorious!
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Sorry - meant to point out this is the result of decades of different studies, sponsored by both the Canadian government (the National Research Council) and Harman International. Harman actually has the largest and best equipped acoustical test facilities in the world, with the Canadian NRC right behind.
Dr. Olive has a blog about the research here - I linked to a particularly pertinent post:
http://seanolive.blogspot.com/2012/11/behind-harmans-testing-lab.html
What's interesting - and impressive - about Harman is that they operate their research division separately from corporate, and share all the testing results with the entire audio world. That's where peer review and independent confirmation comes in - the research is published and open to the whole audio industry.
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It's the speakers.
then the amp.
btw The limiting of dynamic range for rock was mostly a product of the era of am radio.
SInce FM and cd took over this is not so common or overdone!
brm
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And wow, that article has so much wrong:
"Music is compressed in order to squeeze it onto a CD. The sampling frequency is usually what people focus on. 44.1 kHz is standard for CD, but pop and rock music is often compressed far below that level."
The writer is confusing sampling rate with compression - two wildly different things. CD is by its very nature an uncompressed medium. And when he's talking about pop and rock music, he's actually talking about dynamic compression, which is different again than lossy compression. What's on a CD is uncompressed, non-lossy, and whatever dynamic compression is there only reflects what is baked into the recording.
"A well mastered classical recording will more than saturate the amount of detail that can fit onto a CD, so there will be loss – not in the frequency range really, but in the dynamic range. So-called high resolution (hi-res) music is 24 bits sampling, with the depth to capture the full range of an orchestra. The difference is astonishing. Suddenly, details that were muddled on a CD can be preserved with a totally new clarity."
Again, wrong. A CD has a dynamic range of about 96 db, which is more than enough to reproduce the sound of an orchestra. An orchestra *might* be able able to hit a peak of 105db during the very loudest moments. So, one could argue that you need 105 db of dynamic range to capture the dynamics of an orchestra. But this isn't true. Even the quietest recording stage or concert hall has a ambient noise floor of about 15 - 20 db or so. Microphones or mix consoles add even more noise. Then you probably have another 20 db of ambient noise in your home (HVAC, road noise, the refrigerator running). Subtract all of those from that 105 db peak, and you have a real world dynamic range of about 75 - 85 db. Those "details that were muddled on a CD" are buried under the sound of the refrigerator running in the kitchen. This is why most of you find yourself turning up your music during quiet passages, as the ambient noise in the room obscures low level detail. And when you turn it up, you find the detail is actually there, unmuddled, because the recording engineer needed to overcome all the noise in the concert hall and in the recording electronics to begin with.
And let's not forget that prolonged exposure to 105 db sound levels can literally make you deaf. For a split second, you're ok. More than that and you will suffer hearing loss.
Add to this the dynamic compression added by most speaker systems and the idea of needing 105 db or more of dynamic range is just ludicrous. It is valuable in the recording and mixing process (where crazy peaks are sometimes recorded, and to prevent loss of fidelity when applying EQ and effects in the mastering process), but as a delivery medium, good old 96 db CD is just fine.
That said, I don't doubt that the writer hears differences with high resolution recordings. However, the reason those differences are there is because more care is taken during the remastering process. Older recordings are listened to on newer, much more revealing studio monitors and tweaks are made to improve the sound (studio monitors used during the 70s were notoriously bad). However, you would still hear those improvements if the new master was transferred to CD. The CD itself is not the problem; it's the quality of the recording. Garbage in, garbage out. Conversely, quality in, quality out. High rez can't in and of itself improve sound quality, but a good quality remastering of original elements certainly can. And that depends on the skill of the remastering engineer and the quality of monitors / mix environment used during the mastering process.
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oNE PROBLEM esp. with some symphonic recordings is when a piece has parts that are very soft and very loud. If you set the sound levels on your system to be able to hear the quiet section you might get blasted when the loud paRT COMES IN.
So, it is the choice of the engineer how to deal with this problem i.e. compressing the dynamic range to avoid the extremes.
brm
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Thanks! Know sometimes I get wordy, lol, so good to know someone hangs in there with me.
I'll make it easy. Since Harman owns all of these facilities and does all of these tests, their speaker brands follow what has been learned over the decades. Revel in particular is an easy choice - they literally use the same double blind listening chamber to test their speakers against competitors and won't release a speaker until it wins during the scientifically controlled listening tests. Since they already know from Dr. Toole's research what matters and what doesn't, they've actually got lots of experience engineering speakers to deliver neutral, wide open sound.
Check out any speaker in the Revel line-up, from bottom to top. Even their entry level speakers have the exact same design goal as the top of the line. All you get when you move from inexpensive to expensive is more levels of refinement, greater dynamics, and the ability to play louder.
If someone is looking for a great set of inexpensive bookshelf / computer speakers, the JBL LSR3 series are outstanding for the money. They are Pro monitors but work great for good old stereo listening. They are available really inexpensively online.
Other brands that have done well include PSB and KEF. KEF has a problem with female vocals, though, due to intermodulation distortion from their Uni-Q design.
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Hey Mitch - sorry, had no intention to ridicule at all. None of what I wrote was directed at you personally; I was making general observations after spending 30 + years on both the pro and consumer side of the audio world. I was trying to make a distinction between claimed differences in sound quality vs. ones that can actually be demonstrated under controlled conditions.
It is well known and documented how readily people are affected by such things as the placebo effect, confirmation bias and expectation bias. It applies to all of us, myself included. And it explains perfectly why I have encountered situations where people swear they've heard differences between components when they were listening to the same component the entire time, or why blinding the comparison between components gives different results than sighted comparisons.
It's why clinical drug trials are blinded as well - biases always creep in whether we like it or not. It's human. And the only method we humans have developed for eliminating unavoidable bias from such situations is the scientific method. Which, when comparing audio components or drugs, involves blinding the test procedure.
I can't of course prove that changing the interconnect between the DAC and the pre-amp DIDN'T make a difference. But I just look at all the double blind tests between interconnects that have been conducted over the years and say that it does not seem likely.
But it's easy to test yourself. If you have the original interconnect, have someone switch back and forth between the old interconnect and the new without ever letting you know which one is being used. If the new interconnect indeed brought sonic benefits, it should be easy for you to tell which one is being played at any given time. The whole key to the test is that you must never know which interconnect is "playing" while making your guesses.
"I don't doubt that better sounding speakers produce a better sound ... but I do wonder:
- is the simple corollary of your statements that the speakers have the most noticeable effect: if you connect a good pair from a decent Hi-Fi set-up (at whatever price points you feel appropriate) to an all-in-one mini/micro CD player ... you'll hardly hear the difference."
This kind of testing has been done. For example, Kevin Voecks - head of acoustics research at Snell, Mirage, then Harman - used to do a test using a portable Technics CD player, connected using the cheapest Radio Shack cable he could find, and comparing it to a super high end player with expensive interconnects. People raved about how much better the more expensive system sounded, then he revealed that he had reversed the connections so that when they thought they were listening to the high end system, they were actually listening to the cheap Technics player. He stopped doing it when people literally started to get markedly hostile when he revealed that he had switched them.
I did something similar with the top of the line Monster Cable vs. lamp cord from a hardware store, except in this case I would tell people we were switching cables when in fact we were listening to the lamp cord the whole time. Yet people swore they heard differences. And it was always something like "tighter bass, better imaging, more focused soundstage," etc. Yet the whole time it was the lamp cord.
There is another test published online where Marc Henninger of the AVS Forum did a blind test of high end cables vs. a STRAIGHTENED OUT WIRE COAT HANGER. No audible differences found during the blind comparison.
That is not to say that a cheap boombox connected to high end speakers would sound as good as a decent receiver, or dedicated amp connected to the same speakers. For one, the boombox probably does not have the power to drive the bigger speakers. For two, the amplifier section probably measures significantly worse, with high levels of distortion and an inability to drive challenging speaker loads. But soon, you start rapidly approaching the law of diminishing returns.
"I'm sure you'll agree that other Hi-Fi components have their part to play and that it is the balanced system which is all-important. So why not the interconnects ... they may not be as weighty as a power amp but they are all-important in carrying the signal from one Hi-Fi component to another."
Let me tell you a quick story. It's from my point of view as someone who has worked in consumer A/V sales from 1983 through to 2008, then again from 2014 up to today:
The reason that there was an explosion of so many esoteric high end cable brands during the 90s is because profit margins on actual AV components started getting thinner and thinner, and the A/V retailers started turning to overpriced accessories and warranties to bolster profits. It was almost impossible to make money on the stereo components and televisions themselves. Monster started this trend, became very successful, and then other companies started following suit. In my 8 years of retail sales floor experience I saw the commissions on the actual A/V components shrink down to barely 3% of the retail price (if you were lucky), while commissions on high end interconnects and extended warranties were usually 20% - or more! In fact, at Soundtrack (a retailer that used to be here in Colorado Springs), one could get fired if their warranty and Monster Cable percentage of sales was less than 10% of overall volume. It was in response to this incredible pressure to sell more Monster Cable that I conducted the aforementioned test. We also had a line of freeze-dried (!) video cables that people swore improved picture quality. Again, I put this to the test. And once again, no one was able to tell any difference when they did not know which cable was being used. Yet the other salespeople kept telling themselves their was a real improvement, probably so they could sleep better at night. Here we run into another very human phenomenon - cognitive dissonance.
My own cognitive dissonance forced me to quit retail, go into the actual sound recording / mixing business, and start a company called Integrity Home Theater in the early 2000s. I left the company I started about 9 years ago, but I wrote this to go on our web page back in 2004: "No pushing extended warranties or overpriced accessories. Ever go into an electronics store and feel pressured to spend more money than you did on the product for accessories and extended warranties? The reason why is that pricey speaker cables, interconnects, and warranties are MASSIVELY PROFITABLE to the dealer. It is not because they are a good deal or necessity for the consumer. We have made it a policy to never push these types of items."
I still stand by the above statement as the truth as to why salespeople and companies spend so much time trying to convince you that some outrageously priced product is worth the $$$. What led me to this conclusion? Eight years of being force fed this stuff, then actually putting it to the test only to find that the Emperor had no clothes.
"if the speakers are so all-important why is it that, with each new acquisition in my (overall modest, far from top-end) set-up, I've noticed distinct improvements, mostly in clarity, in a whole range of music (such as is my music library) ... and yet the speakers haven't changed since 2009."
It is of course possible that improvements were made. I can't prove otherwise. But it is just a fact of human nature that our perceptions are fallible, mine included, and I look to that as the more likely explanation. I could, of course, be wrong.
"e.g. the dedicated streamer I bought to replace the Logitech Touch nearly 5 years ago completely transformed my music appreciation. Adding a Power amp to the integrated amp opened the sound up more and whilst the removal of said integrated amp to be replaced with a dedicated pre- amp at the start of this year was not quite so life-changing I hear improvements in the music day after day. I'm presently listening to Frederic Talgorn/RSNO's 1999 recording of John Barry's Born Free ... a recording I've owned for 18 years and know well. I chose it to play now because I haven't heard it for over two years. It's like listening to it afresh ... so much more detail that it could be a first play ... except that I know every track so well."
Ditto. Many times when I listen to a piece of music, I hear things I did not hear before. Usually it's just because I am focused this time on the flute solo, where maybe last time I was listening to the strings. Or maybe I'm more relaxed today than the last time I listened. All of those things can influence my perceptions.
"I don't doubt everything would sound better still if I replaced our 9 year old speakers with some better ones but please don't tell me that the other Hi-Fi components are less important. But the Hi-Fi sits in the living room and I have to accept some limitations ... and so the speakers' appearance is important, too (otherwise I might not hear the music over the complaints! smile)"
Here I would only say that the science here generally says otherwise. One can Google "double blind ABX comparisons of audio components" and find lots and lots of failures of people failing to distinguish between well executed electronics during double blind comparisons. Of course, the caveat there is "well executed electronics." It's possible a component you replaced was faulty, or was not particularly well engineered to begin with.
My only point here is that any real difference is probably not due to magic, which is what most of the claims of interconnect manufacturers sound like 
"As for your well supported/researched commentary re: double blind tests ... I'd like to know whether the music sampled was music already well-known to the participant and whether the comparison was between the participant's existing Hi-Fi set-up and XYZ or two completely new products. Each would make a big difference to the results."
Sometimes it is well known, sometimes it was not. The best tests have used a wide variety of material, spanning numerous genres and recording techniques. The tests are usually comparing one amp to another, or one DAC to another, or one interconnect to another, or one speaker to another. In the vast majority of cases, the electronics and interconnects have failed the double blind tests. On the other hand, speakers can sound radically different from one another, and clear differences are heard both during blind and sighted test.
The conclusion I draw from the above is that speakers are a far bigger variable in getting good sound than wires, interconnects, amplifiers, and digital sources. The other big variable is the quality of the recordings, which can vary wildly.
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Wow, sorry - I tend to write novels
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