well obviously, all this proves is that copper wires are just as bad as wet mud. Every audiophile knows you need gold oxygen nitrogen purified wires blessed by a voodoo witch doctor.
In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud
Submitted 5 hours ago by muelltonne@feddit.org to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
cecilkorik@lemmy.ca 3 hours ago
D_C@sh.itjust.works 1 hour ago
I’ve got these cables. Yes, they are expensive but they are absolutely fantasti… wait, did you say voodoo witch doctor? Mine were blessed by just a witch doctor. Have I been ripped off?
phutatorius@lemmy.zip 1 hour ago
Hoodoo is 3dB better than voodoo according to my tests.
hardcoreufo@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Silver is the better conductor.
ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com 34 minutes ago
Sheeeit not recently, shot up to $120/oz recently, and it’s back down to ~$80/oz right now, but that’s still more than ~$35/oz last year.
TheFeatureCreature@lemmy.ca 5 hours ago
I’m lightly active in the headphone enthusiast space. Even in the more light-hearted circles there is still an elevated amount of placebo bullshit and stubborn belief in things that verifiably make zero difference.
It’s rather fascinating in a way. I’ve been in and out of various hobbies over the course of my life but there is just something about audio that attracts an atmosphere of wilful ignorance and bad actors that prey on it.
commander@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
I’ve been in the audio enthusiast community for like 17 years now. When I was fresh, the internet commentators had me thinking there was some audio heaven in the high end compared to the mid range priced gear. Now I know better and the gear community is not so high end price evangelicals like it used to be. I feel like there was a before and after the $30 Monoprice DJ headphones and the wave of headphones since. Then especially IEMs. Once ChiFi really got rolling with IEMs and amplifiers and DACs, $1000+ snake oil salespeople got to deal in a way more competitive market
Same with speakers. Internet changed everything. No more at the whim of specialty audio stores stock and Best Buys. Now you got the whole worlds amount of speaker brands at a click of a finger plus craigslist/offerup. Also again ChiFi amplifiers and DACs. Also improvements in audio codecs whether for wireless or not. Bluetooth audio was awful until it stopped being awful as standards improved
These days I mostly see the placebo audio arguments in streaming service and FLAC/lossless encode fanboys. Headphone and speaker communities these days seem a lot more self aware and steeped in self-deprecating humor over the cost, diminishing returns, placebo, snake oil they live in today compared to 17 years ago. I want my digital audio cables endpoints plated with the highest quality diamonds to preserve the zeros and ones. No lab diamonds. Must natural providing the warmth only blood diamonds can provide that excel in removing negative ions. I treat my room with the finest pink himalayan salt sound absorbent wall panels to deal with the most problematic materials used by homebuilders
SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 hours ago
I couldn’t agree more. I got interest in higher-end audio equipment when I was younger, so I went to a local audio shop to test out some Grado headphones. They had a display of different headphones all hooked up to the “same” audio source.
60x vs 80x sounded identical. 60x to 125x, the latter had a bit more bass. 125x to 325x, the latter had a lot more bass and the clarity was a bit better. Then I plugged the 60x into the same connection they had the 325x in. Suddenly the 60x sounded damn similar. Not quite as good, but the 60x was 1/3 the cost and the 325x sure as hell didn’t sound 3x better. They just had the EQ set better for it.
kabe@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
These days I mostly see the placebo audio arguments in streaming service and FLAC/lossless encode fanboys.
The clamour for lossless/high-res streaming is the audiophile community in a nutshell. Literally paying more money so your brain can trick into thinking it sounds better.
Like many hobbies, it’s mainly a way to rationalize spending ever increasing amounts on new equipment and source content. I was into the whole scene for a while, but once I had discovered what components in the audio chain actually improve sound quality and which don’t, I called it quits.
GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml 2 hours ago
No more at the whim of specialty audio stores stock and Best Buys.
I remember in 2017 going into an audio store near where I worked, and the guy was emphasizing how clear the audio sounded on certain (expensive) setups, and how it was streaming in from “Norway” which was better than what you’d find on Spotify or YouTube. It took me a while to piece together what he was on about.
Dude was talking about Tidal. All he meant was they streamed lossless formats via Tidal. As if anyone could tell the difference between, say, stereo 192kbps AAC and flac.
Also, remember the supposed amazing quality of MQA? What a shitshow. It’s rather remarkable that a pair of Airpods Pro 2, when fit into your ears properly, are essentially perfectly tuned headphones for only $250 or less compared to some of what the competition sells. Not to say I don’t love my Sennheiser HD650.
SendMePhotos@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
I’ll agree that sound quality doesn’t seem to be consistent but I will say that Bose is a very nice quality sounding company. Never been disappointed by them.
pet1t@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
I’m a musician. I swear by Beyerdynamic DT700. Fucking great headphones for like an insanely reasonable price
bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 57 minutes ago
Awesome headphones. If you don’t mind the beyer peak. My favorites are my grado rs2. But I prefer music on speakers not headphones, so much space is lost on headphones. Hear a pair of magnepans in a room and you’ll be blown away. Got some original SMGa’s from 1989!
Real audio enthusiasts know the room is the most important, followed by the speaker itself, followed by the actual source. Then the amp etc.
And when you record and mix music you realize how much of it is bullshit in the end. The source is all that matters, really.
UnspecificGravity@piefed.social 2 hours ago
I buy headphone cables based on how nice the cable feels, if it transmits noise when it rubs against stuff, and how well the connectors fit into the devices I am using.
My favorite is when people get picky about cabling for digital transfer. The ones and zeroes either get there or they don’t, nothing in-between. They work or they don’t.
bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 55 minutes ago
Regarding digital, quality spdif cables absolutely matter. One tiny mistake and they crackle out and don’t work. I’ve gone through many pairs of cheap ones until I just spend the money to never have issues again.
Now will the 1 dollar one sound the same as the 80 dolalr one? Yes. It won’t last or hohld up to dust or abuse at all though.
unmagical@lemmy.ml 4 hours ago
I fucking love audio and have an extensive collection of equipment. The last thing in the chain before your ears (so headphones and speakers) will absolutely make a difference and the thing that provides power to that can make a difference. But the cables? The fucking cables?! Absolutely no impact once you’re above like $10. Turns out, electrons are electrons and they behave like electrons. Shockingly that doesn’t change in copper, gold plated copper, pure silver, or mud. Doubly so for the non analog part of the chain. Hell I’ve even seen “audiophile grade” ethernet cables.
The other part of the equation is if the differences made by the things that do make a difference actually matter to the listener. They do to me, but my dad is more than happy to just use the speakers on his Dell monitors.
Joncash2@lemmy.ml 4 hours ago
Well, that’s not entirely correct. Given a long enough run, attenuation will absolutely cause bad cables to perform poorly. Like your not getting a 10 meter run on bananas. That said, for any modern cable, that run has to be greater than 50 meters for it to even start mattering. So if your wiring up a warehouse, you probably need to care about the type of wire your using.
OwOarchist@pawb.social 4 hours ago
A lot of it comes down to a mix of snobbishness, sunk cost fallacy, and tribalism.
You can’t admit that your $5,000 pair of headphones sound exactly the same as a $300 pair, because:
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You’d no longer be able to pretend that you’re better than the people who have $300 headphones.
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You’d have to admit to yourself that you completely wasted $4,700.
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You’d have to realize that the tight-knit community you’ve formed with other $10k headphone people isn’t really bettor or even really distinct from communities of people with $300 headphones.
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phutatorius@lemmy.zip 1 hour ago
It’s a rich playground for the price-equals-value fallacy, and there are plenty of well-heeled rubes that’ll fall for the technobabble.
Rubanski@discuss.tchncs.de 1 hour ago
The one time I was absolutely blown away by a pair of headphones that are not in the insano area, are the beyerdynamic dt1990. They aren’t cheap by any means but not insanely expensive. When I listened to music I’ve listened to hundreds of times, somehow they showed me even more detail I haven’t heard before. For example a Nena 99 red balloons LP, the amp was still the same as always but I couldn’t believe the amount of detail there was in the background, the soundstage those headphones were creating.
brygphilomena@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 hour ago
I have a set of Sony studio monitor headphones. I can hear more nuance and parts of the music I simply can’t hear in any of my ear buds or noise canceling headphones. They aren’t wireless, so I don’t really use them that often though.
It doesn’t matter the cable, the amp, shitty 128kbps mp3 or vinyl. I can’t hear much, much better with the drivers in them.
I’d say 90% of anything that matters is the driver. But past a certain midrange point, there just isn’t really much or any improvement.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 2 hours ago
It mattered more back in the analog days, I think. Now that it’s all digital, and going through dac’s, its all just about being good enough for 1’s and 0’s to get through. “Noise” doesn’t exist for digital audio. It either works, or it doesn’t.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
It’s been like this for decades, according to my dad. Well before the internet.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 hours ago
I think a lot of it is a sort of sunk cost fallacy.
They bought the expensive shit, so they have to believe it’s better.
Goretantath@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
So wait, did they send analoge or digital signals through? Because digital means you could send it through anything and as long as it gets through its the same. The cable only matters when you ARENT using digital signals.
boonhet@sopuli.xyz 1 hour ago
If I read it correctly, it was analog and they found that only the signal amplitude was meaningfully changed, not the quality
neidu3@sh.itjust.works 51 minutes ago
Makes sense. As long as the transfer medium isn’t highly capacitive or inductive, it doesn’t matter as long as you compensate for the loss in signal strength.
…and now I fell into a research rabbit hole regarding mud capacitance.
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Just ask an audiophile what they think about blind tests. If they argue against them you’ve found a snake oil salesman.
edgemaster72@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
“You can’t trust blind tests for audio, that’s the wrong sense bro. You need double deaf studies, obvs.”
Zorque@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Now if they’re deaf tests on the other hand…
MurrayL@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Most people can’t tell the difference between a 320kbps mp3 and an uncompressed file, but hey if folks really want to waste their money on snake oil like gold-plated cables then I say let ‘em.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 hours ago
Most people can’t tell the difference between a 320kbps mp3 and lossless
I’d be surprised if anyone could.
However, 128kbps vs. 192kpbs+ is like night and day, and it’s especially obvious with better equipment.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
I did a blind test, and found it depends on the genre.
Slow, chill music is completely transparent. No matter how hard I “audio peep
But something like System of a Down has distortion. It loosely (not always) coincided with the bitrate of the flac files, which kind of makes sense.
addie@feddit.uk 2 hours ago
Audio codecs like MP3 usually do a Fourier transform to move the sound into the frequency domain, discard any frequencies that you’re unlikely to notice, and encode ‘rate of change’ for the remaining ones. So the encoding problem is usually sound with fast changes in intensity or frequency, which is basically what percussion is.
System is quite percussion heavy, so will sound bad.
Recently moved from Spotify to Qobuz, because fuck Dan Ek, and the fact that they’ve got better bitrates across the board really makes the difference for jazz and jazzy stuff. Neglected, sounds crap on Spotify. Sounds great on Qobuz. But that’s the change from ‘bad’ to ‘quite good’ bitrates; additional bits are very much a case of diminishing returns.
Elgenzay@lemmy.ml 1 hour ago
Reminds me of the lengths people go with their peripheral purchases to save 1-2ms of input latency for playing games with like a 20 TPS tick rate on a wifi connection
state_electrician@discuss.tchncs.de 3 hours ago
The funny thing is that the people who can afford all that overpriced garbage are usually so old, they can’t hear all that well anymore.
lowspeedchase@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 hours ago
I found I can detect VBR but yeah at that bitrate I really can’t tell the difference between 320 and flac, always thought it was just my ears!
klymilark@herbicide.fallcounty.omg.lol 4 hours ago
Hell, I can’t even tell the difference between 128kbps and flac. Realizing that saved me a whole lot of hard drive space :D
phutatorius@lemmy.zip 1 hour ago
My hearing isn’t extraordinarily acute, bit I can hear the difference, especially in transient-rich sounds like cymbals.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 hours ago
With quality headphones, back to back, I’m confident that you could
kabe@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
It’s still a good idea to have your main music library in flac for future proofing, but yeah 128kbps opus or ogg is what I use on mobile devices.
fluxx@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
And even if you can - is it worth it? I mean - do I care and should I care? Is the point of music detecting every detail of the recording or can I appreciate it without paying that much attention to production? For instance, I find it much more convenient to use Bluetooth headphones as it allows me to move around the house. Flac immediately stops being relevant, as Bluetooth codec is really bad compared to almost any codec. I recently tried ldac codec on my headphones - couldn’t really tell the difference. Mp3 128kbps is just fine for me. Almost any situation. I care about musical content much more than production details. Other people might care more. I don’t.
BillyClark@piefed.social 2 hours ago
I noticed something similar with video. Like, if I am paying attention, the difference between the highest quality encoding and the next level is usually visible.
However, I have a harder time telling the difference if I don’t do a side by side comparison.
And even when I can easily tell the difference, once I’m watching the thing, I get into the story and I don’t care anyways.
Obviously a slightly different criteria compared to music, but people do make a big deal out of stuff that even they don’t actually care about.
ashenone@lemmy.ml 3 hours ago
I kinda want to start a snake oil audio cable company. It’s gotta be one of the easiest paths to retirement
mbirth@lemmy.ml 3 hours ago
Yep, and an especially fun fact is that people with high-end equipment prefer MP3 over lossless.
driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br 3 hours ago
I downloaded the same track from soundcloud at 320kbps mp3 and bandcamp FLAC and played them at the same time in the VDJ changing from one song to the other and couldn’t feel any difference (the graphic Soundwave was also exactly the same). I had not tried it in actual club environment, but when the mp3 is really compressed it shows visually on the Soundwave
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Behold:
researchgate.net/…/Electrical-conductivity-of-ban…
5.4 Electrical Conductivity Measurement This method includes electrical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and dielectric analysis (DEA). The physical state of a material is measured as a function of frequency in EIS and the frequency ranges from 100 Hz - 10 MHz. It is simple and easier technique used to estimate the physiological status of various biological tissues49-52. Experimental frequency response of impedance is characterised by electrical equivalent circuits of materials. The physical properties of materials can be quantified by monitoring the changes in parameters at the equivalent circuit, among various equivalent models proposed53-54. DEA measurement is used in high frequency areas, generally 100 MHz - 10 GHz. DEA is used in moisture estimation and bulk density determination
So a overripe banana is an interesting high-pass filter, though the big takeaway is the conductance vs ripeness.
So if you want to test if a banana is ready to eat, hook it up. If the music is too loud, it is ready. Too quiet, and it’s not time.
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
TechnoCat@piefed.social 4 hours ago
I only listen to music with overripe bananas. It sounds best that way. Copper wire just doesn’t sound as good.
phutatorius@lemmy.zip 1 hour ago
You get much better conductivity with plaintains because the cross-sectional area is bigger.
klymilark@herbicide.fallcounty.omg.lol 4 hours ago
Or wet mud
Does dry mud exist? I’m pretty sure we just call that dirt xD
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 3 hours ago
I listen to QUAD 77-11L speakers from like a lifetime ago, and a cheap class-D thing from Aliexpress. It’s fine.
mbirth@lemmy.ml 3 hours ago
But did they use oxygen-free copper (OFC) wire? Because otherwise the results are skewed as regular copper sounds just as bad as a banana stuck in wet mud.
yesman@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Audiophiles get a lot of friction, but this kind of person exists in almost any hobby. People fascinated by equipment and ascetics who loose the plot about what their hobby is all about.
pyr0ball@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 hours ago
I mean, electrically all of those things will just attenuate amplitude, not really effect signal oscillations, which is actually what sound is …
All they’re doing is effectively adding a small resistance to the signal which will just lower the volume in effect. Adding any amplifier will fix that
m3t00@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
but what cables did they use; www.whathifi.com/best-buys/…/best-audio-cables
DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
It was never about sound quality. Sound quality was the justification for spending money and showing off. Just like so much of consumerism.
Zephorah@discuss.online 4 hours ago
So, like the $5 Trader Joe’s wine tasting with wine enthusiasts.
13igTyme@piefed.social 2 hours ago
I consider myself an audiophile-light. I’ve never been one to nit pick over minor things, but I can just tell the slightest difference between some brands.
Gigdragon@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
I just want DECENT audio quality and metal construction so that it lasts and the plastic doesn’t break from light wear&tear
Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.club 3 hours ago
Did the banana have gold plated contacts??
Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Without a good DAC, even the cleanest input gets muddy
ignoble_stigmas@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
Why have I bought airpods two months ago? I should’ve just stick bananas in my ears
three@lemmy.zip 5 hours ago
They tested the stupid audiophiles apparently.
SeeMarkFly@lemmy.ml 4 hours ago
I have a nice setup at my home. The one thing I noticed is when you have a high fidelity setup, EACH song needs a different volume setting. You can’t just turn it on and go about your day. You have to run to the living room and adjust EACH song. It’s a pain unless you just want to listen to JUST ONE song.
A couple of cheap speakers in the ceiling of the kitchen is “better”.
DickFiasco@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
Fun fact: this is where the “banana connector” came from. Before copper was discovered, early humans used bananas for all their audio connections. The name stuck, even though wires are made of metal today.
neidu3@sh.itjust.works 54 minutes ago
Additional reivia: The term “banana republic” originates from countries best known for exporting high-end audio equipment back in the day.
SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 44 minutes ago
“banana split” stems from a failed experiment where scientists tried to split audio frequencies by sticking the connectors into ice cream and running the audio through it
HowAbt2day@futurology.today 36 minutes ago
TIL! It’s fucking bananas that I never knew this.
Presently42@lemmy.ca 1 hour ago
Bravo
phutatorius@lemmy.zip 1 hour ago
This will now be a standard AI response. Well done.