Would you rather have $10,000 speakers of $10,000 worth of records?

(I can't even think of what music I would spend $10K on - I'm sure it's there - but to be able to hear, say, Selected Ambient Works vol 2 on $10K speakers would be priceless to say nothing about being able to play through them.)

2xpost

So... records.

By the way, nothing is more amusing than listening to some tool rattle on about how much better monster cables make their systems sound. Just proves that audiophiles must have been nodding off during their physics classes, I guess.

Surely you'd be better off getting the speakers, selling them, far more easily, for a hefty wad, then buying loads of records and the speakers stolen, for 3000.

(My serious answer is records though, because fuck speakers that are higher-quality than my ears.)

-- bro jackson (he knows) (power.strike@gmail.com ), April 1st, 2005.

this doesn't make sense. even without being picky about vinyl selections, the resale (especially after certain albums go out of print) would still be above the 20-30% resale value of retail price that 2nd-hand speakers command

the vinly pressing of this reeeealy sucks.

I just sit really close to the needle anyway.

I hope that made you feel good. Anyway, I was replying to what I perceived as a sort of willful "audio quality doesn't matter at all to me" attitude I saw upthread at times and have encountered among friends, etc. And trying to speak also to my own resistance to the notion of spending money that I'm certain will bring me increased pleasure in one of my favorite activities. I'm not sure what in my post prompted you to reply in such a snarky and mean-spirited way, but it wasn't my intent to come off as condescending or anything.

people have to hear/taste/etc the difference to really get it. its easier to be dismissive if you honestly have no idea what the differences can be like and how vast they can be. you get what you pay for can truly be the case with audio equipment. and wine!

but honestly you could get yourself a sweet sounding stereo system for under 3 grand. new audio system. there are great turntables for under a thousand dollars. you could get a pair of decent speakers for a grand. a nice new receiver for under a thousand and you are good to go. you are on your own if you want a cd player too though.

Eephus, there definitely are those audiophiles out there who see their stereos as status symbols and "demonstrations of their discerning taste", but screw those guys. (Yes, they're probably all guys, right?) I just want more pleasure and more immersion in my listening experience, and as Scott says it doesn't take $2000 speaker cables to get that. Nor this thing:

http://cdn.most-expensive.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/expensive-turntable-work-of-art.jpg

I see those "Beats By Dre" headphones on the train a lot. These things cost £279, and other than paying for the "dre" name, how good can these things be? I mean really? I have a pair of £40 cans that sound FUCKING INCREDIBLE - I can't imagine paying seven times more and getting seven times the quality.

That said, this reminds me to start a thread about http://minirigs.co.uk/

for some people with the money its just an expensive hobby like owning a yacht or whatever. nothing wrong with that. but it doesn't have to cost a fortune, no. i'm sure there are ten thousand dollar speakers that sound amazing. but there are also great craftsmen out there who will build you really great custom speakers for less than that amount. the more educated you are the better off you are. and hearing different systems/speakers helps a lot. there are people who only swear by vintage gear. people who always want the latest thing. people who build everything by scratch. etc.

this guy is fun to read:

http://lampizator.eu/

http://lampizator.eu/NIRVANA/nirvana.html

i WOULD actually like to own a nice cd player. preferably used. like a nice marantz. i realize that they can make a big difference. a difference, again, that most people don't care about at all.

Those Ascend speakers I'm after are $850, and I'd hope to have them and be happy with them for at least a couple decades. I've been doing a lot of research as well and these just seem really cool--factory-direct so no big ad money or retail markups involved in the pricing, and built by a really small company whose owner is very obviously involved in an intense labor of love. And nearly unanimously praised to the skies. Researching all this stuff is pretty intimidating, though; the stuff just costs a lot of money, no two ways about that, and it's hard to rack up a lot of experience listening to different systems. Even when you listen to something in a store, it's not your system--not your room, not your amp (probably), not your turntable, etc. There are so many variables involved in the listening experience that it rapidly becomes a wormhole when you start spending a lot of time thinking about it and researching.

That site is wondrous, Scott...

what's the difference between a nice CD player and just the standard $5 one?

i have a 5 disc changer that works fine, not audiophile quality, that i will send to anyone for the cost of shipping

there are people who buy expensive tube-driven cd players. or use tube preamps for their players. i dunno, there are all kinds of reasons why one cd player would be better than another. better parts. better cd-reading capabilities. though by now i don't know why dvd audio isn't the norm for audiophiles. maybe it is. their are record labels now who only put out audio dvds.

http://www.lector-audio.com/010.htm

http://www.decware.com/newsite/ZCD.htm

SACDs are still a thing too, apparently. And a couple of recent Neil Young records came out in dual CD/DVD-audio formats (even though Neil's deaf and likely can't tell the difference himself).

i could see how a better-built CD player could produce less read errors or compensate for them somehow, but it seems fishy to me, especially if you're using optical out (where i can't imagine pre-amping ought to make a difference for the better)

i have a teac cd player at the store and its okay, but i want something better. i actually own some nice cds! that sound amazing. i'm an analog guy, but i'll be the first person to extoll the virtues of a well-made cd. and they deserve good equipment just like my good records do. if you are a classical fan, an experimental electro-acoustic fan, or an electronic music fan, CDs can kinda rule and you should have something good to play them on. i don't have a cd player at home. i did just switch out my ancient marantz receiver at home to try this yamaha receiver i picked up and i kinda love the yamaha! i am not always anti-new. hooked up to the yamaha are 40+ year old pioneer turntable and speakers and the thing makes them sound great. its a 90's receiver (i think?) actually made for people who own a cd player AND a turntable. which i appreciate. its part of their "natural sound" line. and pretty high-end for a yamaha. i dig it.

ya i'm perfectly happy to accept that in the mysteries of analogue sound there are tiny details making a difference in there, but without bothering to research it (or try out a ~good~ cd player) i just refuse to believe that £5000 can do reading a bunch of 0s and 1s noticeably better than £50 can.

becoz i am some kind of luddite ignoramus i guess.

xp haha scott about 6 months ago I traded my dying/dead 90s Yamaha receiver for a Marantz 1060 amp. Love it.

just on paper, I'd suspect that a computer-based system under $500 where you ripped all the CDs with some anal ripping program, with some fancy DAC card ought to be better than 99% of CD players, if something better is detectable. Maybe even a playstation3?

i could play people stuff on my pioneer speakers that would really blow them away. and they aren't the most powerful speakers or whatever. they are for finesse. solo strings or quartets as opposed to big orchestral things. the more acoustic the better. but man they surprise me every day. played a pristine first pressing of electric warrior last night and definitely heard things that i'd never heard before. the guitars! woooo boy. so great. i could even make a sgt. pepper lover out of a sgt. pepper hater. played rufus this minty first stereo pressing the other day and it just makes you appreciate the sounds so much. no matter how tired you think that album is. sounds so different too from what you would hear on the radio or at the supermarket or on a cd version. its sounds so homemade in a weird way that is hard to describe. hand-crafted. CD versions sand the edges off. no, really, come over some time. i'll prove it to you.

i just refuse to believe that £5000 can do reading a bunch of 0s and 1s noticeably better than £50 can.

I think it's less the 1s and 0s and more the quality of the DAC(s) (Digital-to-Audio Converters). Also, you don't need to shell out heavy cash for a decent CD player: $400 will get you something that sounds noticeably (and sometimes dramatically) better-sounding than a $100 unit.

cheap cd players are made...cheaply! like really cheaply. more attention to detail and better parts and people who know what they are doing, its like anything that people make. are some of them selling a bill of goods that isn't as great as the high price tag? sure. but just like there are engineers who really know how to make a good cd and lots who can't there are people who make great audio equipment and others that don't really care and who are churning stuff out for the assembly line. a nice piece of audio equipment should sound good and last a long time. cheap stuff isn't made to last or sound particularly good. most people don't care how good it sounds! they just want it to work.

I agree with this principle in general but CD players really feel like they are closer to the monster cable paradigm just from my understanding of how they work.

i could even make a sgt. pepper lover out of a sgt. pepper hater. played rufus this minty first stereo pressing the other day and it just makes you appreciate the sounds so much. no matter how tired you think that album is. sounds so different too from what you would hear on the radio or at the supermarket or on a cd version. its sounds so homemade in a weird way that is hard to describe. hand-crafted. CD versions sand the edges off. no, really, come over some time. i'll prove it to you.

― scott seward, Monday, August 13, 2012 1:52 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's really so true, Scott. That's what it's all about. Even with my pretty modest setup now, I have a nice turntable (Pro-Ject Xpression III I got about five years ago), and it makes you hear stuff you'd think you'd be totally burned out on with new ears. Stuff like Rumours or Zep IV or whatever, you play these LPs on a decent setup and it's like hearing deep into the records and getting at their real personalities. It's not just "oh, these songs I've heard a million times."

I think it's less the 1s and 0s and more the quality of the DAC(s) (Digital-to-Audio Converters).

This is it, I think. I'm thinking about just ripping all my CDs to FLAC and buying a decent DAC and just playing music through that when my CD player (a cheapish Marantz) packs up.

I'll go for the rekkerds, because there's always some little manufacturer i've never heard of pumping out amazing-sounding $1,500 speaker pairs

i guess if you had a good dvd player you could use that to play CDs if its hooked up to your stereo. probably sound good. dvd players are pretty nice these days. NAD cd players are supposed to be really good. and supposedly you are better off with a single disc machine as opposed to a 5 disc changer. dunno why. i don't doubt that the little things do count though.

£10,000 worth of records, of course!!

i hear new stuff on records playing vinyl all the time....i was just playing this dollar bin beat up copy of bridge over troubled water and heard all this percussion on cecilia that i'd never heard before

I'll take the speakers. I already have more than $10k in records.

Having just downgraded my hi-fi I can tell you there's nothing like a radical change of gear - in either direction - to make you dig through the records and rediscover the joy of just...listening.

i just refuse to believe that £5000 can do reading a bunch of 0s and 1s noticeably better than £50 can.

You're right, you can recover the data perfectly with a very cheap optical disc transport. It's the downstream analogue electronics (and the power regulation around that D/A stage and the noisy servomechanism that's actually reading the disc) that costs the money. Whether there's any discernible *improvement* beyond a few hundred dollars is a matter for conjecture. You can certainly tailor the sound (expensive valve stages adding second-order harmonic distortion) but... well, I'm not getting into it. I'm an ex-audiophile and I remember the rec.audio.high-end wars of the '90s.

daddy, what did you do in the rec.audio.high-end wars?

but poo and mike raises an interesting question - what do digital audiophiles do? and is that better? (solid state decoding of lossless files = no mechanical noise for one thing)

Thankfully, I mostly observed the skirmishes from the sidelines.

Being an ex-audiophile is a bit like leaving a cult; I have a real aversion to the high-end now, and don't go anywhere the forums, as I regard a serious amount of it as BS. Having a decent stereo is a good thing though. And money really does talk with analogue sources and speakers. If I won the lottery tomorrow, Michell Orbe SE / SME IV / Lyra Atlas would be on order almost immediately.

xp - yeah, I think archives of lossless files played back through a high-end DAC has become the digital source of choice for many audiophiles; I imagine the lunatic fringe still imagines that ripping a disc loses "rhythm or musicality" or somesuch, but I'm not going there.

are there dedicated devices that'll take a sdhc card(*) full of flacs and give you spdif(**) output?

(* or whatever)
(** or whatever)

There are rackmount DJ/live/broadcast SD-based players available, but they don't seem to have digital output as standard.

Actually, after having it sat on the floor for several weeks and realising I couldn't sell it for very much, I've reintroduced my 13yo Sony MD deck to the system, just to have an A/D and D/A loop in there. So I can run optical S/PDIF to/from from computer/etc.

thinking about it, my BD player has digital output and a usb socket on the front. as does the PVR and the TV (although none of them do flac and i doubt the D/A would pass audiophile muster). but i was thinking of something a bit more like a slingbox. would need some kind of display though (although my portable mp3 player does ok with 6 lines-worth, 92x92 pixels or so) and could make it disable-able like those high-end cd players of old.

(using an actual computer, with hdd etc, i'd've thought would introduce a lot of electronic noise to the signal. would optical out solve that?)

http://www.canford.co.uk/Products/2001658/79-7404_DENON-DN-F400-SD-CARD-PLAYER-SD-SDHC-WAV-MP3-bal-unbal-out-1U-rack-mounting-kit

"media player", of course, there are lots of these, mainly for tv but...
http://www.philips.co.uk/c/blu-ray-dvd/hdmi-usb-2.0-sd-sdhc-card-slots-hmp3000_05/prd/

Well, here's a bunch of stuff I didn't know about USB audio...

http://www.cambridgeaudio.com/assets/documents/Audiophiles_guide_to_bit_perfect_USB_Audio_October_2011.pdf

"perfect"

what kind of music is this?

i have the low end 500 dollar magnepans, after 10+ years the ribbons are delaminating. what now?

I'm not sure what in my post prompted you to reply in such a snarky and mean-spirited way, but it wasn't my intent to come off as condescending or anything.

If you are an actual user of this site, I apologize for misreading you, but in that case every single thing you've said in this thread is the most pitch-perfect imitation of grody social-media marketing I have ever encountered.

ok, sorry, just did a search and saw that you are a real person -- but go back and read what you wrote and tell me it doesn't sound like undercover PR!

It's cool, I've posted on and off for about 12 years, but never with intense regularity or frequency. And I can kinda see what you're saying... But it's a weird and depressing world when genuine enthusiasm can be so easily brought under suspicion. Not your fault that your radar for that sort of insidious PR stuff is hyper-honed, though; mine is as well. David Foster Wallace had a great essay about this very thing, the way subtle marketing has eroded our ability to trust people. It sucks! (No, I don't work for DFW's publishing house.)

The quote, FWIW: "An ad that pretends to be be art is – at absolute best – like somebody who smiles at you warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what’s sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwills’s real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair."

if you care, I think what really set off my detectors was the way your original post sort of ended up saying "maybe you think you don't need this expensive thing because years aren't good enough to appreciate its superiority, but believe in yourself, man, you won't regret it!" which can indeed be read as genuine enthusiasm, and this case was, but which is SO CHARACTERISTIC of a certain kind of insidious marketing that takes people's natural desire to be praised and remaps it onto a product

Going back, I can see that... I think in my mind I went from talking specifically about the speakers I hope to get to talking in a more broad sense immediately following that mention, but it reads like I'm still talking about those particular speakers. I have FB "friends" that do the undercover PR thing and I fucking hate it! I cringe to think of myself having come across that way.

"years" should have been "yr ears" above btw, and don't sweat it, I think it's an interesting exercise in unpacking our own reactions to things. I don't have any FB friends who do this -- OR DO I -- now have to go read news feed v carefully