This is a lengthy post because there are a number of facets that warrant further consideration:Originally Posted by Mr. Widget
1. There is no uniform standard for how we listen to equipment and express what we here.
I agree that sited bias ( listening with our eyes) can play an influence on what people think they hear. This can start a domino effect when a group of listeners share their perceptions. We love symmetry and images that symbolise certainty or other emotional reassurances.
Our Asian hifi friends often refer to scepticism or cynicism of their auditory perceptions when they sit down in front of a hifi system they aren’t familiar with. This also tends to occur after unboxing and setting up a new component when it doesn’t visually appeal to them.
2. The Product Marketing of HiFi equipment is quite diverse across brands and equipment ranges. This is another influencer in how we judge or pre judge audio equipment.
Exotic loudspeaker and interconnect cables are a classic example of snake oil marketing. Don’t blame you amp purchase when you can modify the sound with a cable. This is when things get decidedly murky.
But then there are more honest advances in sound reproduction based on science and more to the point excellence in the design and execution of fine audio equipment.
Examples of this are Hegal and Nad. Both are understated brands with their core about what goes on inside the product.
The key is to know when the marketing department are taking these developments a bit too far with bold claims.
Examples of this might be Marantz and Luxman brands. Their approach to artisan industrial design and flashy descriptions of circuit innovations seem too good to be true. Their products tend to present a coloured view of the original recording. But some people like that all the same. That raises another whole discussion on niceties of sound reproduction. Should HiFi equipment translate only the original recording or should it make the recording more enjoyable to listen to? Based on sales l think Marantz have their market cornered.
3. Value Added Product Upgrade Marketing and Engineering Insights.
Back to the Naim power supply thing Naim have been advocating power supply upgrades for literally decades. I think this is in part their approach to product marketing “you can always improve on good, better and best”.
But logically why not do it right the first time?
For technical implementation reasons the blameless power supply is often a compromise when placed in a single chassis product.
Physical transformer noise, magnetic interference, rectifier noise and mains line noise to name a few are very difficult to deal with in a single chassis.
Most recently Texas Instruments have demonstrated they can now put a switch mode power supply into a very tiny chip which emits very little noise. They literally rewrote the book on the physical design of SMPS.
Without going off the deep end any toroidal or iron core transformer has major issues once placed inside a single chassis. Heavy shielding, C Core transformers and elaborate filtering and regulators can get the noise down but at a significant manufacturing cost and added weight to the product. Products with both digital and analogue processing add further complexity.
This also impacts on pcb design and layout which can easily result in compromising the implementation of audio circuits. The layout of audio circuits is as much an art as it is a science to obtain the theoretical perfect performance. This ultimately means freeing up space inside the chassis. So without compromising the internal chassis layout an external power supply is the alternative. Audiophiles take this as a thumbs up to the ultimate. But not all customers have room for a two chassis component. This causes a lot of head scratching in the R&D Lab when engineers, accountants and the marketing department sit down to conceptualise a product.
Some good examples of this are the Sutherland phono preamps. Ron Sutherland was once involved high precision equipment for other industries so he thinks beyond just it’s a HiFi component.
The Vendetta preamp is another example of a no compromise design.
A separate power supply adds considerable cost due to fabrication, hardware, parts and labour not to mention adding to freight costs. The $5000 component now becomes the $8,000 component. The HiFi reviewer is frothing that it must sound better. But in what way or how much better really is it? Can the improvements be picked up in a snap shot double blind test? Or will the differences take time to establish once the ear and the brain un learn and re learn what it’s decoding? Or is the siting of a new component the trigger for unlearning and re learning? Food for thought.
4 The Law of Diminishing Returns
There is also the principle of diminishing returns and unfortunately hi end audio is prone to playing the pointlessly over build product as a ploy to attract big spenders.
Examples of this are the Dan Agostino’s latest amplifiers. These products are unaffordable except for the minority that includes Dentists, Surgeons and stock brokers on Wall Street. Their prowess and egos crave for examples of over the top spending that has no rationality.
5. Are Double Blind Tests always the only perceptual measure of differences in sound reproduction??
On the double blind tests l believe the validity of such tests really depends on the threshold(s) and types of audible differences we are attempting to discern? The human ear and the brain are not rational in the sensitivity to all aspects of decoding and thresholds so it’s grey area unless your Greg Timbers or someone like that. These highly skilled engineers with decades of experience understand what people listen for, their likes and their dislikes. Earl Geddes has shared some of his findings in books he has authored and in online discussions with the diy loudspeaker community.
Both Toole, Oliver and and other researchers acknowledge this and they hold their closer to their chests than they let on. There’s a lot more too it than meets the eye.
Are the differences in the frequency domain, time domain, amplitude domain, phase domain. Are these random artefacts or constant aberrations at the audible frequency extremes. When this is a guessing game you have hifi buffs regularly swapping out equipment.
Are the listeners trained or un trained. Is the room acoustically treated or not?
It’s generally acknowledged that how people hear or interpret sounds varies. So who is right and who is wrong? This is acknowledged across geographic regions around the world.
Conclusion
So it’s a bit of pot luck to make an accurate judgement against what any one person or a listening group says they hear and don’t hear. This post attempts to explore some of the more interesting aspects of how we think about and listen HiFi equipment.
All that matters is what you hear in the moment.
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