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takeaway at end:
Measured THD doesn’t appear to correlate particularly with our reviewers’ subjective impressions.
It is rare to find commercially available headphones where harmonic distortion is even an issue worth drawing attention to.
Turns out most listeners can't tell or aren't bothered as long as the quality is good-enough.
It's astonishing to read some of the online audio forums and see just how much garbage is touted about noise in hi-fi systems, although most of the forums seem to have moved on from worrying about THD measurements and onto a variety of invented problems.
- people who can "hear" different ethernet cables to their system. Audiophile ethernet switches.
- endless wittering about jitter, despite nobody ever getting a measurement of jitter in a system newer than about 1985 that would possibly be audible.
I'm not sure where most of it comes from other than some unscrupulous operators making devices that "solve" your jitter or ethernet issues with nonsense products that can't possibly work in the way the manufacturer describes.
It has made most of the forums worthless as sources of decent information about hi-fi. Any suggestion that the worries about jitter or digital cables (or even good old RCA cables) cannot possibly affect what you are hearing are shouted down by hordes of screaming jitter monkeys. Something of a shame if you were a beginner and wanted some concrete information about what you should be looking for in a hi-fi.
It's just orthorexia for your ears.
Guys (I have never encountered a female audiophile of the "fancy cables and magic pens" variety) like talking about gear. Many hobbies have forums in which microscopic details of expensive products get scrutinized. Bikes, cameras, cars, outdoor gear, knives. Audiophilia is the same.
It certainly used to be the case in the valve era that results were extremely variable. It is still the case that speaker construction matters a lot. But now, in 2021? At the kind of volumes you might reasonably want in your house, pretty much any class D amplifier that has been competently constructed will do the job really well. You need reasonable efforts to avoid PSU noise and accidentally amplifying EMI and that's it. You can get high-quality DACs on a single chip for about $10.
https://www.mouser.co.uk/c/?marcom=110885714
That creates a serious problem for hobbyists: there's no longer a barrier to entry! There's no longer an expensive climb up to the higher echelons. What do you do when the gate you were keeping has been bypassed by the affordable electronics barbarians? You have to retreat to a more esoteric ivory tower.
I don't really follow the forums as much as I used to, but diyAudio [1] always seemed like it had a good distribution of domain experts to help quash the craziness.
[1]
audiosciencereview is also okay.
It seems to get worse the more money the posters have (maybe because salesmen get to sell them more weird speakers), and also if they're British they start talking about special power cables and something called PRAT.
Headphone reviews often seem to have incorrect claims about "speed" and "effortlessness", although I think those might actually describe something, just not what they think it is.
While looking for a longer TOSLINK cable today I ran across some gold plated ones on Amazon. I guess nothing sounds better than thinking it's the best.
I think that folks just like to dabble in domains where you can "be your own expert" or at least "choose your own expert." This is impossible if you need to be a technical expert to understand electrical and acoustic measurements, and have a pile of test equipment. And it becomes utterly demotivating if working harder to get better results only proves that what you're seeking is nonexistent or irrelevant.
It may also be related to why people want to "do the research" and discover things like their own homegrown immunization protocol, rather than just going and getting a vaccine.
This is an aspect of the audiophile community, I've never quite understood. At work, we have clear cut engineering goals, based on customer requirements, we strive to reach, with empirical measurements of product prototypes. Whether it's loudspeakers or cabinets designs, we're optimizing for variables such as coverage pattern, sensitivity, long-term power handling, etc. It's a holistic, system design approach to the "product". We rarely even think about a lot of the metrics the audiophile cares such much about, except in the design of QC systems for End-of-line testing, to catch manufacturing defects. Most of these items, like various avenues of distortion, are designed around in the early phases of development, by simple mechanical or electrical engineering choices, such as motor design, suspension design, cone material choices, etc.
I just always find it interesting. No customer has ever asked me for the plot of distortion products vs freq for a loudspeaker in pro-audio. Or the metallurgic compositions of the tinsel wires.
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.
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.
I've observed similar things as a musician who plays an amplified instrument. I'm also quite curious about the inner workings of gear, and am a measurement scientist by day.
I think there's a social custom in the community, that relates to "you can be your own expert." That is, opinions are weighted by some function other than technical knowledge and expertise, such as status as a musician, enthusiasm, cost of equipment owned, etc. Nobody wants to come out and say: "You're imagining things." Technical discussions often erupt into flame wars.
And there are some areas where things are probably measurably different, and it boils down to taste, but the measurements are hard to do. I can hear differences between the two instruments that I own. Does that mean I'm bonkers?
At the same time, engineers who aren't immersed in this field tend to be polarized into two extremes: Some are audiophiles. Others simply dismiss _everything_ as audiophile nonsense.
But the issues that come up in such experiments, are never about audiophile variables. No one has ever said, this Monitor has too much distortion, or that I need to increase the the sampling rate to to 192kHz to fix the tops, or that it would sound better if I had used oxygen free silver wire, etc. etc. What comes up is practical concerns about loudspeakers on stage. Reduce the boominess of the low end, reduce the propensity to feedback on stage, etc. Same goes with working on guitar speakers.
I wholeheartedly agree with this. I ended up starting my own sound company to help lessen the divide between engineering and the end-user, where I get to go out and try and use our products for a number of real shows every year. But it's not really the same issue, as the non-sense the pervades in the audiophile industry.
In my typical setup, I try and work as a stage hand, and let normal FOH and monitor engineers work with the products, where I can observe all the issues that crop up. That way I can get clean feedback from band members, and production staff without, being tainted by association with the brand.
As a mixing engineer: The truth is that most audiophiles get the the factors that impact the perception of music completely wrong.
They are all shiny toys, but care surprisingly little about acoustics — a field that is known to have _the_ highest impact on any listening environment. Then you have to realize you are human. I hear the same mix differently, when I listen to it for a second time without a break inbetween. I listen to it differently at any time of the day, depending on the mood, if I ate, depending on the weather. And I need to know these differences in perception because I have to deal with them when mixing.
Isn't the end goal of Hifi to listen to music in a way you can enjoy? Of course looks and how a setup "feels" makes a difference there, but I got the feeling many audiophiles are beyond enjoying music. I guess there is a reason why they are 99% male
This is today. 20 years ago you had $400 "Logitech Z-5500 THX-Certified 5.1 Digital Surround Sound Speaker System"
"The Z-5500 will consistently give you great sound on a daily basis and was tested by THX experts as well as our audio team."
"The Logitech Z-5500 is the best all-around PC speaker system we have used to date."
etc. This thing sports 10% THD and sounds like ass (or cheap boombox) when compared to run of the mill home system amplifier from the eighties/nineties (those were usually 0.1-0.9%).
Indeed, without a good audio reference it might be difficult to tell if the additional harmonics on a note played by a violin are the result of harmonic distortion or simply a more "harmonically rich" violin.
I've heard a lot of discussion about jitter by knowledgeable-sounding people. Caring a lot about the jitter of their various digital sources. What I don't understand is how does it matter? Why not just put a really stable clock next to your D-A converter? If you have to, add a buffer to transition between clock sources.
Its pure nonsense. Hearing jitter being mentioned is how you recognize crackpots.
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ast/26/1/26_1_50/_pdf
Table 1 sums it up pretty nicely. Just for some reference cheapest clock crystals have jitter measured in single digit picoseconds, with PLLs somewhere in low teens.
In an ideal system, there is just one nice stable clock as you describe.
In real systems, for example a video call, there is one clock for the microphone ADC, one clock for the video frame rate, one clock for the sender's computer, one clock for the receivers computer, one clock for the receivers screen refresh rate, one clock in the receivers DAC, etc.
Whenever these clocks drift slightly (or a lot), most software will try to compensate by stretching or compressing the audio waveform (check logs for 'audio 67 us ahead, adjusting').
Such an effect is very noticeable in some cases. The main one being if you're doing a voice/audio call to someone in the next room and you can hear them both directly and via the call. If they sing, you can hear the result going in phase and out of phase seemingly at random.
You get the same if you hit play on the same MP3 on a Mac and a windows PC at the exact same time. While the on-screen timers never visibly drift, there are enough millisecond level drifts to really notice. Doesn't happen with two Mac's.
http://www.gedlee.com/Papers/papers.aspx
An introductory talk is
http://www.gedlee.com/Papers/The%20Perception%20of%20Distort...
Is the real expert on both linear and non-linear distortion. The link contains links to all of his papers that are available freely.
End result is that linear distortion isn't much of a problem (we tend to ignore it), but non-linear distortion is a major issue.
I found the article linked at the end to be quite informative.
https://www.soundguys.com/what-is-dither-23700/
Basically you add noise to reduce noise. Fascinating...
You add noise to reduce distortion (and to shift noise to less audible frequencies).
Monty did a pair of great videos on digital audio, including this:
https://xiph.org/video/vid1.shtml
https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml
>Basically you add noise to reduce noise. Fascinating...
for a video demonstration:
https://youtu.be/cIQ9IXSUzuM?t=873
Add noise in non-audible frequencies to reduce noise in audible frequencies.