Does "everything" REALLY matter? (A No-Arguing Thread...)

[Ron Resnick]

caution to anyone never to try to judge a system's sonics based on unfamiliar recordings through an unfamiliar audio system in an unfamiliar environment

+1 with regard to attributing particular sonic attributes to a particular component.

 

[PeterA]

for that to happen, it would have to be listening to audio recordings that you are already very familiar with, and had played it before in that very system.

Actually, no. Not for me at least or some other people I know. As the cartridge warms up, the whole system starts to sound more alive. It doesn’t matter what the music or recording is and I don’t need to have heard it before. A friend of mine noticed the same thing hearing my system for the first time. He commented about how the sound changed about 20 minutes until listening.

weren't there always been caution to anyone never to try to judge a system's sonics based on unfamiliar recordings through an unfamiliar audio system in an unfamiliar environment, which is probably the case in that above mentioned audionote demo?

I completely disagree. One can always judge the system he hears. When I heard what ultimately became the best system I’ve ever heard, I knew quite quickly that it was special because of the way it presented the music. I heard familiar recordings and unfamiliar recordings, but I had never heard this system before nor had I been in the room.

All you need to do is use your ears and past experience with live and recorded music to judge the quality of a system.

Audio show reports are exactly this: judgments made on hearing unfamiliar systems in unfamiliar rooms, often with unfamiliar music. Now, obviously the same system might sound different in a different environment, but that doesn’t change what you heard the first time.

 

[Holmz]

If other factors keep unchanged an increase in humidity causes an increase in density of the air (more water vaporized in the air and water is heavier than air) and sound speed. In that specific situation you hear slightly lifted high frequencies.

Yeah liquid water is heavier than air, which certainly helps it flow downhill and stay in oceans.

Straight from Wiki:

Impact on air density​

Water vapor is lighter or less dense than dry air.[11][12] At equivalent temperatures it is buoyant with respect to dry air, whereby the density of dry air at standard temperature and pressure (273.15 K, 101.325 kPa) is 1.27 g/L and water vapor at standard temperature has a vapor pressure of 0.6 kPa and the much lower density of 0.0048 g/L

One can just take two of “H” and a single Oxygen and get the mass 1+1+16 =18
N2 would be 2x14=28.

 

[Maryland]

Have made a difference
1. Naim Powerline
2. Fiber media converter power supply
3. Signal grounding to power strip
4. 20A dedicated line


No difference
1. Other power cables
2. Power conditioner (add-on)
3. Ethernet filter
4. Swiss Digital Fuse Box

 

[tima]

Actually, no. Not for me at least or some other people I know. As the cartridge warms up, the whole system starts to sound more alive. It doesn’t matter what the music or recording is and I don’t need to have heard it before. A friend of mine noticed the same thing hearing my system for the first time. He commented about how the sound changed about 20 minutes until listening.

...

I completely disagree. One can always judge the system he hears. When I heard what ultimately became the best system I’ve ever heard, I knew quite quickly that it was special because of the way it presented the music. I heard Familia recordings and unfamiliar record recordings, but I had never heard this system before nor been in the room.

All you need to do is use your ears and past experience with live and recorded music to judge the quality of a system.

Audio show reports are exactly this: judgments made on hearing unfamiliar systems in unfamiliar rooms, often with unfamiliar music. Now, obviously the same system might sound different in a different environment, but that doesn’t change what you heard the first time.

I agree that warm-up is a real phenomena. I deal with it by turning on my system for ~ 1-2 hours before serious listening.

It is much easier for me to judge the quality of a system playing acoustic music I've never heard before.

In the case of pop or electronic music with a lot of post-recording editing for effects (and often used at shows,) usually I have no idea what it should sound like. This leads me to ask myself "does it matter what it sounds like?" Maybe that's the wrong question for judging. With no reference in my head for assessment I'm left with 'sonic attributes', music-less audiophile attributes and my general preference or lack thereof for what I"m hearing. Is it organic orange juice sound or rhubarb?

 

[tima]

We can tell if a listener is applying this method while listening to sound reproduction from audio equipment via the language/vocabulary that they later use to describe their listening experience. They will tend to use "visual" terms to describe their listening experiences.

Case in point:
A listener may describe a particular equipment that is brand new and just taken out of the box as sounding "smallish", "narrow", and "forward", "hazy", or "vague" and "unfocused"
And after an extended run in period, he may describe the resultant sound as "spacious", "cavernous" or "having wall-to-wall soundstaging", and "hall ambience that extend as high as the ceiling" and "solid focussed imaging" or "palpable image that I could touch with my fingers".

Using the visual mapping method, even the most subtlest of sonic changes can be easily detected and remembered. So that even after an interval of hours, days, or even weeks, the listener can still remember what he had perceived and be able to recall it for use in another comparison.

That is how we can have long aural memories. Ha!

This is a fascinating notion. Imaging as a mnemonic.

By remembering the image in our head that a recording conjures up, we remember what ...
...the music itself?

Is that what you're saying?

I do believe many audiophiles use visual language to describe what they hear. If one's primary sense is visual that is where a vocabulary may be strongest. Yet there is no holography in a score. Describing sound is difficult.

 

[Rensselaer]

I agree that warm-up is a real phenomena. I deal with it by turning on my system for ~ 1-2 hours before serious listening.

It is much easier for me to judge the quality of a system playing acoustic music I've never heard before.

In the case of pop or electronic music with a lot of post-recording editing for effects (and often used at shows,) usually I have no idea what it should sound like. This leads me to ask myself "does it matter what it sounds like?" Maybe that's the wrong question for judging. With no reference in my head for assessment I'm left with 'sonic attributes', music-less audiophile attributes and my general preference or lack thereof for what I"m hearing. Is it organic orange juice sound or rhubarb?

I too would warm up equipment for an hour before playing … I still get an improvement in sound after playing records for an hour thereafter. I am not sure if it is the cartridge warming up, or the speakers or both. One idiosyncratic thing about my system is that the record weight actually degrades the sound quality when used.

 

[Zuman]

Have made a difference
1. Naim Powerline
2. Fiber media converter power supply
3. Signal grounding to power strip
4. 20A dedicated line


No difference
1. Other power cables
2. Power conditioner (add-on)
3. Ethernet filter
4. Swiss Digital Fuse Box

Thank you, Maryland, for contributing to the original post's goals!

 

[Republicoftexas69]

Have made a difference
1. Naim Powerline
2. Fiber media converter power supply
3. Signal grounding to power strip
4. 20A dedicated line


No difference
1. Other power cables
2. Power conditioner (add-on)
3. Ethernet filter
4. Swiss Digital Fuse Box

Must have Naim equipment?

 

[Republicoftexas69]

100% Made a difference in my system.
1. Fiber Media Converter.
2. Ethernet Filter and cable prior to OmD V2 and ER Fiber Media conversion.
3. SDFB on Amplifiers.
4. Puritan Audio Design LOOM all IC, Power and Speaker cable.
5. 20A dedicated Line.
6. LessLoss Firewall 640x Power Conditioning on DAC and Innuos Zenith.
7. Room Treatments (should be number 1)

 

[Maryland]

Must have Naim equipment?

I do. My next upgrade will be to NACA5 wire as recommended by Naim, but mine is newer so probably less of a necessity than in previous vintages of their gear.

 

[Republicoftexas69]

I do. My next upgrade will be to NACA5 wire as recommended by Naim, but mine is newer so probably less of a necessity than in previous vintages of their gear.

That’s nice.

 

[Rensselaer]

Again, I don't understand your reasoning here. Ted is posting comparison videos where he is only changing the variable, ie. the accessory, in question. If you are being honest about wanting to learn how to improve your sound, wouldn't those before and after videos be valuable?

Sorry for the late reply. Did any neutral party check the standard item being used as the before? I could knock up some bad power cables/interconnects of high impedance, capacitance and induction and use then as a before than change them for what I am selling and you’re going to hear an improvement. Perhaps a video with his number one competitor’s cable, inserted by his competitor, switched by a neutral party for his own. If you witness this test in person, hear the improvement, then that study would be valid.

 

[Lee]

Sorry for the late reply. Did any neutral party check the standard item being used as the before? I could knock up some bad power cables/interconnects of high impedance, capacitance and induction and use then as a before than change them for what I am selling and you’re going to hear an improvement. Perhaps a video with his number one competitor’s cable, inserted by his competitor, switched by a neutral party for his own. If you witness this test in person, hear the improvement, then that study would be valid.

I have been at the SR factory when a few of these videos are being done. SR doesn't cheat in this manner. And usually it's more about turning on and off the SR accessory. They are clean comparisons.

 

[Rensselaer]

I have been at the SR factory when a few of these videos are being done. SR doesn't cheat in this manner. And usually it's more about turning on and off the SR accessory. They are clean comparisons.

I had the first 24 printed editions of Sound Practices, loved that magazine. Since you write for them (albeit on-line), I will say nothing to contradict what you testify herein, only that I would like to see the comparisons being with leading manufacturers. But if you say his cables outperform stock cables, ok.

Oops, you write for Positive Feedback, not Sound Practices … nevermind.

 

[highstream]

Some things matter, some things don't. I'm not going to say what does and what doesn't (well, maybe one or two) - but here's the pragmatic view:

pre-1. What we hear is not all based on sound that goes into our ears - it is more dependent on the ear-brain interface. IE: how we interpret and react to what we hear. And the emotion that's generated.
pre-2. We have very bad auditory memory. Sound for human beings is mostly an in-the-moment things.
pre-3. The brain's interpretation can be based on many things, including mood, biases, desires, etc.

Remember those three points for the rest of it.

1. We know what we put into our systems. Unequivocally. We put a single waveform into our systems. No more, no less. We can define that. Easily. Nothing else goes into the system, so nothing else can come out.
2. We can very accurately measure what comes out of our systems.
3. The ideal / perfect system can only be as good as when 1 (above) = 2 (above). It can't do any more than that.
4. Therefore: If any change we make can not be detected as a change in the reproduced waveform, then it is not doing anything. That's an unassailable fact.
5. Granted, some inaccuracies (where 1 intentionally DOES NOT = 2) can be perceived as "good" - eg. even-order distortion, or frequency response inaccuracies that generate "warmth". Fine, but you can still see that in the generated waveform.

So that's looking at the whole system.

If we look at just digital components, it's even easier to determine if anything is going on. We can easily test the bits-in and bits-out, and perform a basic mathematical checksum to actually confirm if there is any change. No measurement required!

Many reasonable DACs (such as RME ADI-2 and many others) actually have "bitperfect testing" built into them, so you can see this very easily - all the work is done for you. You just get a "correct" or "incorrect" displayed on your screen.

So whether it's gone from your SSD, through an audiophile switch and to your DAC (or whether it's come from the cloud, through the Qobuz servers, bounced through 20 or 30 very (non) audiophile switches and routers in data centres around the world, through kilometers of cable in the streets, maybe even bounced once or twice to a satellite and back, through your ISP, modem, etc and through a cheap USB-IF compliant cable), the result is identical. Disagree? Too bad, we can prove it.

Therefore, I'm confident enough to go out on a limb and say things like audiophile switches, USB cables, ethernet cables, power cables, digital "cleaners", etc (and basically anything on the digital end) have absolutely zero effect. It's all in your brain. (Unless there is a flaw / problem).

Some of these things are actually flawed and quite laughable from a technical standpoint. eg. No matter what marketing guff anyone wants to carry on with - you can't "re-clock" a unclocked stream (asynchronous USB stream). The definition of asynchronous is "no clock data, no bearing on time". So if a so-called engineer can't even understand the parameters of what he is working with, what confidence should we have that the product is not actually harming something?

As we're all here to obtain the best sound possible - there are plenty of things that **DO** have a huge impact on the sound generated, for example speakers, room treatments, and positioning to name but three.

The sad thing is that attending the things that matter usually involves much more work than connecting up a sexy, oversized and impressive-looking braided USB cable with chunky gold plugs. Laughably, some don't even meet USB-IF specs. So most people take the easy route and pretend it makes a difference.

So if we're going to invest time / money / consternation on something to improve our sound, our efforts are best directed to those things that we know will make an audible difference rather than things that we can very easily prove will not make a difference.

All argument.

 

[KPC]

In high-end audio, I ascribe “everything matters” as the audio components, cabling, power quality, and room, but not to tweaks that may or not be beneficial.

 

[Rensselaer]

This is an interesting scientific comparison. The claim is that soundstage, detail, realness etc., of CDs all improve if you use this device. He records one before and one after tweek then inverts the signal of one and puts them together. Obviously if there was distortion by scattered laser light in the untreated disc you would see it, but …Tweek

 

[PYP]

short answer: yes.

Some impacts were expected, like a dedicated outlet, acoustic treatments and reducing vibration. Others, like power cables, grounding and a network switch were unexpected (I'm a skeptic).

Once it became clear that the setup is a circuit and that every piece of gear also impacts all the others, the "everything matters" made sense. That led to a desire to eliminate possible unexpected interactions, thus all cables from one manufacturer, XLR cables, preamp and amp from same manufacturer.

 

[Lee]

I would like to add two I discovered recently.

1. Grounding the router.
2. Using a dedicated server over the hard drive in my MacBook Pro. Love the MacBook but it is quite the noisy beast.