The State of High End Audio
- Thread starter FrantzM
- Start date
Hi
I didn't know where to begin on this. This thread can quickly die or burst in Flames. It is about the price of Audio Equipment nad the state of affairs in High End Audio.
After a long hiatus during which I have been using only headphones with great pleasure I must add and frankly an education in tonal purity. I am ready to jump back into speaker-based systems. I simply don't like to throw money at a problem expecting a solution to raise from the ashes of burnt currency. I am an engineer by profession and prefer the approach of having a schedule and cost limit in building a system. It is my strong belief that such approach leads to rewarding and sustainable results. I hate to tweak constantly and to change equipment on a constant basis. I buy, optimize and just enjoy what I have if I can... This not about me but rather of the state of things in High End Audio. A luxury sector let's not fool ourselves in believing it is not that.
The idea of this thread came to me when Lee asked on his thread for a 12~14 K$ speakers and I could only come with a few perhaps 2 and of just one brand: Magnepan. I, then , noticed that most of the speakers I am considering at this point for my next system are over $20 K MSRP : Giya G3, G2 , G1, Magico Q3, Q5 and S7 with 2 exceptions Magnepan 3.7i and 20.7 i at respectively 5K and 15K ... Woah! This is a disconnect. Would "normal" folks who love music, care about a >20 K pair of speakers, let alone a $20,000 music system?
Then I noticed on Lee's thread that few unusual brand came up aside from Vapor Audio whose systems look like a Good deal but I saw no mention of, for the lack of a better words, outside of the box manufacturers such as Salk, Legacy, Emerald Physics, etc... Are they completely absent from the Audiophile psyche?
I believe some things bad happened between the birth of what we come to call High End Audio, late 70’s, early 80's and now, 30 years later. We may have lost our way. Once upon a time the Wilson Audio and the Lamm, et all, were garage affairs. Audio Magazines would go and listen to these garage affairs and give them the necessary exposure. Is it being done these days? Have we become so averse to risk as to go for what we consider the current day status quo? How will those other small, definitely unknown manufacturers ever come to the forefront? Are we getting so old as to become entirely risk-adverse and "orthodox"? Go with the conventional, the admitted? The agreed-upon? How we moving forward? Are we progressing? Will we come up with a better way to measure progress? One that is a consensus? Not a world of preferences of the very same brands, telling us they are making progress when it is simply a variation on an old theme? Will High End Audio grow to include younger people not the >50 that populate this board? Can this industry of ours grow?
And while we are on the them can we come up with a full range system for less than $30K… Digital , analogue, Digital and analogue? Would like to see some examples…
As usual full participation is welcomed even from you Blizz …. Just joking
Hello all in the WBF world. This is the original post of this thread.........I wonder how may posts on this thread were *actually* on topic.
Tom
Hello all in the WBF world. This is the original post of this thread.........I wonder how may posts on this thread were *actually* on topic.
Tom
More than one.
So I consider it a successful thread.
That's the Pinotage talking. I think more audiophiles need to follow your lead and find practical ways to truncate left brain activity and simply enjoy the music.....
Hello all in the WBF world. This is the original post of this thread.........I wonder how may posts on this thread were *actually* on topic.
Tom
The General subforum should be renamed "Freestyle Forum". It could also be called "Fightclub".
Unfortunately, this is not the goal of the forum. I must sadly say that I am embarrassed at the state of some of the things said on this forum........with that, I will withdraw from further comment.
It's unfortunate. We are better than this sir.
Tom
It's unfortunate. We are better than this sir.
Tom
Probably so. It has been that way from day one. Here is the second thread in this forum from when we just formed: http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showthread.php?420-Live-music-vs-Recorded-music
As you can see, the gauntlet was thrown right then and then.
This forum has been and continues to be most popular forum here. It also has the dubious distinction of having most people angered over what is discussed, and most sanctions handed out. That is balanced by being the best reality show around in audio!
What goes on now is actually quite tame and source of many informative threads. So maybe it should be called General Audio Discussion Forum.
I like that a lot, and I want to ask a question to the criminal attorney, and others could answer. BUT, I am not sure about the TOS.
zz.
Looks like you had a refined palate at the early age of 16! Voted the best of the worst.
http://drinks.seriouseats.com/2011/02/taste-test-best-malt-liquor-forty-colt-45-mickeys-private-stock-olde-english-king-cobra.html
Nice work Bob. This was my beverage of choice in high school, and it always made music sound better through my Bose 501s:
Not that this is the Forest Gump thread. Actually Forest never knew squat about the shrimp business. He needed divine intervention to create a monopoly
to succeed. His real money came from Apple.
The beauty of Forest is he was comfortable in his own skin. "Simple is as simple does."
Sony had a monopoly on software. If you wanted music you bought digital.
Even though I invented the Internet (Al Gore heard the idea from me), my Internet service has been down for a few days so can't look things up in Wikipedia to post here.
If you like to add something to the conversation, you are more than welcome.
Hmmm. I refreshed the thread because Robert had sent me no less than 3 PMs, insisting that I answer him. I kept saying he should post his objections here for all to see but he would not. This is his last PM to me:
Instead of posting that here, he went ahead and reported my post as violating our forum rules. While waiting for my cohorts to decide if they are going to do that, I figured I go ahead and answer the technical part.
His point as you see is that A-weighting of an SPL meter is psychoacoustically correct and matches our hearing sensitivity per Fletcher-Munson.
Fletcher-Munson research was done in 1933 (?) by the two AT&T Fellows by the same name. They tested a number of people playing them sine waves and plotting the same perception of loudness as frequencies changed. The result was a graph like this as I showed before:
Overall we have a bit less than 120 dB SPL of dynamic range. This is a huge range. The way it is implemented is through a feedback system working hand in hand with the Outer Hair Cells (OHC) in your inner ear. By stiffening the OHC the ear is able to change its sensitivity. In other words, the OHC acts like a mechanical pre-amplifier gain control!
Being a rather crude mechanism, the change in gain also modifies the ear's frequency response. You can see this in Fletcher-Munson curves. If you start at the bottom where it is the faintest sound we (on the average for the population) can hear and go all the way up, you see that the curve flattens. At very low levels, we become ultrasensitive to mid-band frequencies 2 to 4 Khz. Likely an evolutionary trait to hear other humans better and detect pray coming to eat us. As everything gets super loud, such sensitivity is not needed and the curve flattens.
Regardless, we don't have a response anywhere like an amplifier. We are pretty deaf when it comes to extreme low and high frequencies. A SPL meter therefore that is measuring "flat" response would not show anything collaborating to what we hear. It would assume a 60 db tone at 20 Hz is the same as 40 db tone at 2 Khz as far as audibility which clearly is wrong. The 40 dB 20 Khz tone may be inaudible whereas the same tone at 2 Khz is hugely audible.
Now, Robert says that using A-weighting solves this problem because it tracks the Fletcher-Munson curve. The first problem is which curve? There are a family of curves in the above graph, not just one. The A-weighting came a few years after Fletcher-Munson research. In other words, it is about 80 years old! It is based on Fletcher-Munson and uses one of those graphs: the one that has "40 phon" written on it. A phon is the name/level of those graphs. For now, just ignore that. Just look at the fact that 40 phon is NOT the same as the bottom line which is the "threshold."
We got into this track of discussion based on what noise is inaudible. Steve said he could not hear noise in his room. Well, such a test requires using the "Threshold" line in Fletcher-Munson, NOT the 40 phon which is well into the audible range of tones. The 40 phon and threshold lines have different shapes so there is significant error in using the former/A-weighting of the SPL meter as the measure of whether we have audible tones or not.
But let's say 40 phon is correct. Let's turn it upside down and compare it to the filter that represents A-Weighting:
As noted under the graph from Wiki, the blue line is our A-weighting. The red line is the Fletcher-Munson frequency response at 40 phon. Yes the kind of, sort of have the same shape but there is considerable amount of deviation. As much as 10 db error as I eyeball it. The simple curve for A-weighting was designed with ease of implementation in 1930s electronics. Today we can use computer analysis and do it correctly.
I gave a hint of this to Robert. The criticism is widely known and is right here in the Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-weighting
Deficiencies of A-weighting
A-weighting is only really valid for relatively quiet sounds and for pure tones as it is based on the 40-phon Fletcher–Munson curves which represented an early determination of the equal-loudness contour for human hearing.
It couldn't have been more simply stated. That this is a valid measurement only for "quiet sounds" not threshold of hearing. It also mentions the other major issue: that the Fletch-Munson graphs are for *tones* not *noise*. Perceptually and physically noise is very, very different than pure tones. When we are discussing whether we hear equipment noise, you cannot use a measurement designed around sensitive to tones.
The solution to analyzing noise then requires conversion of noise to sine wave power (by computing the ERB), and then comparing it to the bottom graph of Fletcher Munson as I explained in my article which I linked to earlier: http://www.madronadigital.com/Library/RoomDynamicRange.html. At the there are two AES links that go into far more detail here.
So no, you can't take a single number out of a SPL meter and make sense out of it for detection of audible noise in your room. As I said, you can use it in relative terms to calibrate your speakers and such but don't go talking about it as if it is a valid measurement of audibility. It is not despite the prevalent use of this ancient measurement.
BTW, if you insist on using SPL values out of a meter (which better be calibrated rather than what comes out your phone), it can easily be shown that the dynamic range that you need for music is just 70 to 80 db as I explain in my article. That translates into 12 to 13 bits of resolution! In other words, even CD is good enough. So you sure you want to go that way? I hope not.
Personal Rant
The article has been out for a couple of years and has been read by countless professionals. I don't pull rank on you guys often but guys, this is my core expertise. Understanding psychoacoustics and relationship to signal processing and audio was a requirement of my job before I retired. I had to speak the language of 20+ PhDs in signal and audio processing that worked on my team. This is why no one has written and say, "why don't you use an SPL meter?" The notion then that I have no idea what A-weighting is as Robert asks, is a pure insult to me, not the other way around. Ditto for Peter who also reported my post to management as an insult and violation of TOS. Sometimes you guys make me pretty unhappy to have created this forum....
rbbert said:
Instead of posting that here, he went ahead and reported my post as violating our forum rules. While waiting for my cohorts to decide if they are going to do that, I figured I go ahead and answer the technical part.
His point as you see is that A-weighting of an SPL meter is psychoacoustically correct and matches our hearing sensitivity per Fletcher-Munson.
Fletcher-Munson research was done in 1933 (?) by the two AT&T Fellows by the same name. They tested a number of people playing them sine waves and plotting the same perception of loudness as frequencies changed. The result was a graph like this as I showed before:
Overall we have a bit less than 120 dB SPL of dynamic range. This is a huge range. The way it is implemented is through a feedback system working hand in hand with the Outer Hair Cells (OHC) in your inner ear. By stiffening the OHC the ear is able to change its sensitivity. In other words, the OHC acts like a mechanical pre-amplifier gain control!
Being a rather crude mechanism, the change in gain also modifies the ear's frequency response. You can see this in Fletcher-Munson curves. If you start at the bottom where it is the faintest sound we (on the average for the population) can hear and go all the way up, you see that the curve flattens. At very low levels, we become ultrasensitive to mid-band frequencies 2 to 4 Khz. Likely an evolutionary trait to hear other humans better and detect pray coming to eat us. As everything gets super loud, such sensitivity is not needed and the curve flattens.
Regardless, we don't have a response anywhere like an amplifier. We are pretty deaf when it comes to extreme low and high frequencies. A SPL meter therefore that is measuring "flat" response would not show anything collaborating to what we hear. It would assume a 60 db tone at 20 Hz is the same as 40 db tone at 2 Khz as far as audibility which clearly is wrong. The 40 dB 20 Khz tone may be inaudible whereas the same tone at 2 Khz is hugely audible.
Now, Robert says that using A-weighting solves this problem because it tracks the Fletcher-Munson curve. The first problem is which curve? There are a family of curves in the above graph, not just one. The A-weighting came a few years after Fletcher-Munson research. In other words, it is about 80 years old! It is based on Fletcher-Munson and uses one of those graphs: the one that has "40 phon" written on it. A phon is the name/level of those graphs. For now, just ignore that. Just look at the fact that 40 phon is NOT the same as the bottom line which is the "threshold."
We got into this track of discussion based on what noise is inaudible. Steve said he could not hear noise in his room. Well, such a test requires using the "Threshold" line in Fletcher-Munson, NOT the 40 phon which is well into the audible range of tones. The 40 phon and threshold lines have different shapes so there is significant error in using the former/A-weighting of the SPL meter as the measure of whether we have audible tones or not.
But let's say 40 phon is correct. Let's turn it upside down and compare it to the filter that represents A-Weighting:
As noted under the graph from Wiki, the blue line is our A-weighting. The red line is the Fletcher-Munson frequency response at 40 phon. Yes the kind of, sort of have the same shape but there is considerable amount of deviation. As much as 10 db error as I eyeball it. The simple curve for A-weighting was designed with ease of implementation in 1930s electronics. Today we can use computer analysis and do it correctly.
I gave a hint of this to Robert. The criticism is widely known and is right here in the Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-weighting
Deficiencies of A-weighting
A-weighting is only really valid for relatively quiet sounds and for pure tones as it is based on the 40-phon Fletcher–Munson curves which represented an early determination of the equal-loudness contour for human hearing.
It couldn't have been more simply stated. That this is a valid measurement only for "quiet sounds" not threshold of hearing. It also mentions the other major issue: that the Fletch-Munson graphs are for *tones* not *noise*. Perceptually and physically noise is very, very different than pure tones. When we are discussing whether we hear equipment noise, you cannot use a measurement designed around sensitive to tones.
The solution to analyzing noise then requires conversion of noise to sine wave power (by computing the ERB), and then comparing it to the bottom graph of Fletcher Munson as I explained in my article which I linked to earlier: http://www.madronadigital.com/Library/RoomDynamicRange.html. At the there are two AES links that go into far more detail here.
So no, you can't take a single number out of a SPL meter and make sense out of it for detection of audible noise in your room. As I said, you can use it in relative terms to calibrate your speakers and such but don't go talking about it as if it is a valid measurement of audibility. It is not despite the prevalent use of this ancient measurement.
BTW, if you insist on using SPL values out of a meter (which better be calibrated rather than what comes out your phone), it can easily be shown that the dynamic range that you need for music is just 70 to 80 db as I explain in my article. That translates into 12 to 13 bits of resolution! In other words, even CD is good enough. So you sure you want to go that way? I hope not.
Personal Rant
The article has been out for a couple of years and has been read by countless professionals. I don't pull rank on you guys often but guys
, this is my core expertise. Understanding psychoacoustics and relationship to signal processing and audio was a requirement of my job before I retired. I had to speak the language of 20+ PhDs in signal and audio processing that worked on my team. This is why no one has written and say, "why don't you use an SPL meter?" The notion then that I have no idea what A-weighting is as Robert asks, is a pure insult to me, not the other way around. Ditto for Peter who also reported my post to management as an insult and violation of TOS. Sometimes you guys make me pretty unhappy to have created this forum.... 
Hmmm. I refreshed the thread because Robert had sent me no less than 3 PMs, insisting that I answer him. I kept saying he should post his objections here for all to see but he would not. This is his last PM to me:
Instead of posting that here, he went ahead and reported my post as violating our forum rules. While waiting for my cohorts to decide if they are going to do that, I figured I go ahead and answer the technical part.
His point as you see is that A-weighting of an SPL meter is psychoacoustically correct and matches our hearing sensitivity per Fletcher-Munson.
Fletcher-Munson research was done in 1933 (?) by the two AT&T Fellows by the same name. They tested a number of people playing them sine waves and plotting the same perception of loudness as frequencies changed. The result was a graph like this as I showed before:
Overall we have a bit less than 120 dB SPL of dynamic range. This is a huge range. The way it is implemented is through a feedback system working hand in hand with the Outer Hair Cells (OHC) in your inner ear. By stiffening the OHC the ear is able to change its sensitivity. In other words, the OHC acts like a mechanical pre-amplifier gain control!
Being a rather crude mechanism, the change in gain also modifies the ear's frequency response. You can see this in Fletcher-Munson curves. If you start at the bottom where it is the faintest sound we (on the average for the population) can hear and go all the way up, you see that the curve flattens. At very low levels, we become ultrasensitive to mid-band frequencies 2 to 4 Khz. Likely an evolutionary trait to hear other humans better and detect pray coming to eat us. As everything gets super loud, such sensitivity is not needed and the curve flattens.
Regardless, we don't have a response anywhere like an amplifier. We are pretty deaf when it comes to extreme low and high frequencies. A SPL meter therefore that is measuring "flat" response would not show anything collaborating to what we hear. It would assume a 60 db tone at 20 Hz is the same as 40 db tone at 2 Khz as far as audibility which clearly is wrong. The 40 dB 20 Khz tone may be inaudible whereas the same tone at 2 Khz is hugely audible.
Now, Robert says that using A-weighting solves this problem because it tracks the Fletcher-Munson curve. The first problem is which curve? There are a family of curves in the above graph, not just one. The A-weighting came a few years after Fletcher-Munson research. In other words, it is about 80 years old! It is based on Fletcher-Munson and uses one of those graphs: the one that has "40 phon" written on it. A phon is the name/level of those graphs. For now, just ignore that. Just look at the fact that 40 phon is NOT the same as the bottom line which is the "threshold."
We got into this track of discussion based on what noise is inaudible. Steve said he could not hear noise in his room. Well, such a test requires using the "Threshold" line in Fletcher-Munson, NOT the 40 phon which is well into the audible range of tones. The 40 phon and threshold lines have different shapes so there is significant error in using the former/A-weighting of the SPL meter as the measure of whether we have audible tones or not.
But let's say 40 phon is correct. Let's turn it upside down and compare it to the filter that represents A-Weighting:
As noted under the graph from Wiki, the blue line is our A-weighting. The red line is the Fletcher-Munson frequency response at 40 phon. Yes the kind of, sort of have the same shape but there is considerable amount of deviation. As much as 10 db error as I eyeball it. The simple curve for A-weighting was designed with ease of implementation in 1930s electronics. Today we can use computer analysis and do it correctly.
I gave a hint of this to Robert. The criticism is widely known and is right here in the Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-weighting
Deficiencies of A-weighting
A-weighting is only really valid for relatively quiet sounds and for pure tones as it is based on the 40-phon Fletcher–Munson curves which represented an early determination of the equal-loudness contour for human hearing.
It couldn't have been more simply stated. That this is a valid measurement only for "quiet sounds" not threshold of hearing. It also mentions the other major issue: that the Fletch-Munson graphs are for *tones* not *noise*. Perceptually and physically noise is very, very different than pure tones. When we are discussing whether we hear equipment noise, you cannot use a measurement designed around sensitive to tones.
The solution to analyzing noise then requires conversion of noise to sine wave power (by computing the ERB), and then comparing it to the bottom graph of Fletcher Munson as I explained in my article which I linked to earlier: http://www.madronadigital.com/Library/RoomDynamicRange.html. At the there are two AES links that go into far more detail here.
So no, you can't take a single number out of a SPL meter and make sense out of it for detection of audible noise in your room. As I said, you can use it in relative terms to calibrate your speakers and such but don't go talking about it as if it is a valid measurement of audibility. It is not despite the prevalent use of this ancient measurement.
BTW, if you insist on using SPL values out of a meter (which better be calibrated rather than what comes out your phone), it can easily be shown that the dynamic range that you need for music is just 70 to 80 db as I explain in my article. That translates into 12 to 13 bits of resolution! In other words, even CD is good enough. So you sure you want to go that way? I hope not.
Personal Rant
The article has been out for a couple of years and has been read by countless professionals. I don't pull rank on you guys often but guys
Don't feel sad amir, the comedy channel awaits you
I read through all that though I must confess to having suicidal thoughts half way through.
That was a good post, interesting comparison of F-M to A-weighting.
It also explains a bit of why I feel like volume changes at very high volumes seem so different vs lower volumes. When the stereo is cranked, increasing volume 1 dB seems like it makes a huge difference but it seems much less of a difference at low volumes.
It also explains a bit of why I feel like volume changes at very high volumes seem so different vs lower volumes. When the stereo is cranked, increasing volume 1 dB seems like it makes a huge difference but it seems much less of a difference at low volumes.
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