it's true. you can't listen to music with an audiophile in the room without having to listen to them go on and on about the production and "the bass is too loud" this or "too much compression on the vocals" that-- like bro...listen to the song or GTFO
Me and my dad can't watch a movie or a sports broadcast without going on about the cameras and the lenses and the angles and the framerate and the exposure etc... and it drives my mom nuts. So hi mom.
I am an audio engineer for those events, I can't watch one with out calling out bad Camera and Audio...I'm well aware of all my mistakes too.
He was a radio engineer for CBC, so that makes sense.
That's a cool ass job ngl.
I mean the whole dub music genre that influenced half of modern music came from bbc studios in jamaica
Your mom says, "Hi!"
Can you tell her we say we love her and to make sure to put on a sweater tonight? It's going to be chilly.
My friend is a different sort of audiophile. He finds every setup and location to be a new opportunity to hear the music he loves in a way that he's never heard it before.
But what you describe is still listening to music. The things they pick on is still part of the audio track, not part of the audio equipment.
Yeah it's just stuff someone thinks about when they've refined their taste over "bass goes boom". It can still be annoying when they try to force their opinions down on you when you haven't even asked.
Well, but it's not about the music itself (like what it means to you, how it makes you feel etc.) - it's like talking about a picture and focusing on what kind of brushes were used. Valid and interesting to a degree, but not what art is about. It's impossible without techne (practical stuff) but transcends it.
Or whatever.
I cannot listen to Rihanna with my good DAC/amp/headphone combo. The mixing is poop. The compression is poop. It's all i notice. I bought hi-res .flac files for Good Girl Gone Bad, and it didn't help. It was just produced poorly. So, I have to listen to her in the car with the average people stereo to enjoy it.
I mean i have that as a musician. Knowing how music's made takes away part of the magic i'm afraid.
On the other hand the more i know about music the less i care about genre and the more i hear the artists intention / authenticity (or lack thereof).
I don't know if I qualify as an audiophile or not... I like expensive headphones and high resolution audio but I'm not one of those idiots that pays $10,000 for an HDMI cable.
I listen to music to enjoy it. The only thing that really stops me enjoying it is if it sounds like shit, which 99% of the time is because it's some badly encoded lossy stream being played through a shitty Bluetooth speaker on SBC codec. That is not what music is supposed to sound like.
Give me some basic appointment that correctly reproduces what the artist created, and I'll be happy. That doesn't have to cost a fortune, you just need a lossless stream with a half decent DAC/amp into decent headphones, and you'll be blown away. Spend like $300 on a pair of non-wireless analog headphones, $50-$75 on a USB DAC, and by a subscription to Tidal or Qobuz. It'll change how you think about music. But it doesn't turn you into an asshole.
Flat response gang checking in. A flat response speaker/monitor is the superior system. What Parsons said is true though. That’s why I listen on flat response monitors, because that is exactly how the music was meant to be recorded and heard.
Audiophile: "The aluminum cones on these tweeters were precision engineered to give an unbiased audio signal at up to 30,000hz."
Musician: "Some asshole barfed into my amp and now it has this buzz and catches on fire if I leave it plugged in for too long, but I still like how it sounds so we recorded the whole album on it."
Well you still need a decent pair of cans to properly hear the barf on the recording
My headphone's app has a DSP effect for puke and a slider to adjust the chunkiness.
It's meant to be heard on shopping mall speakers 30 years later. That's when most of the royalties come in.
I think it's like any other piece of art. It's up to the person listening / watching / viewing to decide how it appeals to them.
I love bass, I play bass (badly), I like hearing the bass in songs. Sometimes I'll listen so that I can really hear and appreciate the bass. I've even been known to isolated Bass stems of songs not to learn them, just because I love the bass part. Other times I'll listen so that the bass blends in to the overall sound and appreciate the entire thing.
I haven't fact-checked whether this quote is legit attributable to Alan Parsons but considering his production mastering pedigree it's believable. My dad used to sell audiophile equipment in the 80's and he would play Dark Side of the Moon and Alan Parsons Project to show off their hi-fi equipment. He said customers would put on their lower-quality records and it wouldn't sound as good (obviously), making their gear a harder sell.
EDIT: Parsons didn't say this, a web commenter did on an article about an interview with Parsons:
https://boingboing.net/2012/02/10/alan-parsons-on-audiophiles.html
I think we can trust Alan Parsons. The dude put a frickin laser on the moon!
Whatever
He didn't manage to get one on a frickin' shark's head though did he!
Ahh yes. The Alan Parsons’ Project.
Audiophiles get a lot of shit outside their little online dens and it's always the same cable memes everywhere (that's not even the gear most people sell their kidneys for, afaik), but if you're one and you have a shred of self-awareness, this kinda makes ya laugh out loud.
When I was in high school, late 90s, I dated a chick whose mom worked in a bakery. She started work at like 2AM and for some reason I don't remember, my gf had to go there and she asked me to go with her...sure fuck it (we pretty much ran free back then, different time) and we went down there. About a half dozen middle-aged women making batter and dough and whatever they did and their boss, the bakery's owner.
He was in his early 40s, and was like the love child of David Lee Roth and Otto the bus driver from The Simpsons. Cargo shorts, dirty sneakers, Motley Crue tshirt with a blond curly mullet and an earring in one ear. For being 2 in the morning he was wide eyed and he practically exploded as soon as I walked in the door "HEY MAN HOWS IT GOING?! WELCOME TO MY BAKERY!! YOU LIKE MUSIC?! WHAT KIND OF MUSIC DO YOU LIKE?! WANT TO SEE SOMETHING?!" I was honestly on the edge of fight or flight for a moment but despite the coke or just how fuckin excited he was to have a visitor, he seemed safe, so I was like "Yeah sure, what's up?"
Leads me back to the far corner of the bakery to his office. There are speakers fucking everywhere. In his office he has racks and racks of high end stereo equipment, and he immediately launches into all this technical detail about the setup that I'm just nodding through...."SO THE SIGNAL COMES DOWN HERE THROUGH THIS SPECIAL CABLES...100 BUCKS A FOOT BUT ITS SO WORTH IT...THIS TAKES THE SIGNAL AND MUXES IT WITH THE AMPLIFIER THAN PIPES IT TO THE FLUX CAPACITOR THEN..." and eventually he wraps up and says "CHECK THIS OUT!!!"
Pulls out one of those gold, high bitrate CDs, Peter Gabriel's So, slots it into a CD player that by itself was bigger and more complicated looking than my whole stereo at home with so many knobs and shit, and cranks it to what he called about 30%. Lights blinking, animated EQs, level meters at the ready...
Red Rain kicks in and literally takes my breath away, not just in awe, but I mean the goddamn bass was so heavy and so crystal clear that it disrupted the airflow in the entire bakery. The volume was beyond screaming over, it was like you were standing on fucking stage in an arena next to the amps, but not only was it ear-shatteringly loud, it was crystal clear. Like the level of detail and fidelity in the recording broadcasted all these little human moments in the playing that I never had heard before and my mom pretty much blasted that record all the time for most of the tail end of the 80s. After a minute of Red Rain he skips to track two, Sledgehammer and holy shit, that bass riff on that system...felt like when you're standing waist deep in the ocean and a wave comes up with enough force to rock you on your feet before you recover.
And through all this, these women in the bakery just doing their thing, not a care in the world. Clearly a common occurrence there, 2 oclock in the morning, deep in an industrial area with nobody for miles around, this dude and his like $100,000+ stereo and him just running around like a madman making whatever the hell they were making.
Anyways, definitely nothing I would ever spend that kind of money on, but man, it was hard as hell to go back home to my shitty $20 headphones and my discman after hearing what $100k worth of high end stereo equipment sounds like lol
The moral of the story is cocaine
or capitalism. People toiling at 0200 in the morning while some guy has a 100,000 dollar toy.
Not to disagree with the capitalism part but 2AM is a pretty common time to start work in a bakery. They have to allow time for the dough to proof and obviously need to have enough stuff coming out the oven early enough to get it packaged and delivered wherever its going.
My wife worked in a bakery for a time and she always started work at 3am so that the donuts and muffins and shit would be ready by 630am when people started showing up in droves to buy them.
I was a greenskeeper for a 36 hole golf course and we similarly had to start at like 2am because we had to be done all our mowing and cup moving and trap raking on the front 9s before dawn...the golfers would be fucking irate if we weren't lol.
I don't think anyone with self awareness or love for sound or music would call themselves an audiophile tbf.
I actually think thats fine.
the problem starts when they thkink everyone else is doing it wrong.
Or when they help phone manufacturers enshittifying phones. They're the reason, why the "integrated DACs are too noisy" argument exists, and then they're telling you that unless you're willing to spend $500 on an audiophile DAC, $1000 on an external headphone amplifier, and $8000 on an audiophile-grade headphone, you'll be fine with cheap airpods.
cheap airpods
Damn I'm so broke
Ugh yeah i just bought a dac just to do something that i was doing back in 2005 (plugin my headset into m'y phone)
I at least hope the sound is better
I only know Alan Parsons from a quick reference in Austin Powers
He produced Dark Side of the Moon
I know it from 30 Rock
PETE: Oh, my god, you're gonna heckle him, like that time I invited you to see my cover band.
LIZ: Yeah, and today the world is better off without the Pete Hornberger Alan Parsons Project Project.
Whenever anyone asks for a quick get rich scheme I always tell them either Psychic stuff or Audio. 😂
Anyone ever try combining both to make a gold-plated amethyst fiber toslink cable for $25000 that wards off 5G interference?
You can make any audiophile claim your system now sounds better by futzing around behind it for a while and claiming that you installed a "polarity aligned non-hertzian oscilation dampener" or whatever but in reality make no alterations other than turning the volume up one notch.
This is a well documented phenomenon, and reproducible with almost 100% accuracy. It turns out that humans are, objectively speaking, tin-eared gits. This expressly includes audiophiles.
As a hobbyist electronic musician with two decades of experience and also a really nice home theater system, I can confirm that this is accurate.
I use your music to avoid going to therapy
I‘d argue, that’s what one does when comparing equipment. But as soon as one has found the right equipment, the goal is still enjoying the music.
Exceptions are of course the kind of audiophile who constantly need newer and better equipment and especially the kind of audiophiles who buy „audiophile network switches“ so the bits of their tidal subscription come through „cleaner“.
Most of us just want to get the most out of our favourite songs.
The kind of audiophile that thinks vibrations on a fiber cable are going to distort sound is never going to be happy with the equipment.
I love that someone did a test years ago where they had audiophiles listen to music using different cables that got increasingly more expensive.
Turns out they couldn't tell the difference between a ridiculously expensive Monster cable and a wire coat hanger.
Sell more cables to those people.
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