Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

It's sole purpose is for showing-off. You don't think anyone is going to spend much time listening to music with it, do you?

You'll also need a ferrari stopwatch to time how long it takes before a visitor is told what it cost.

David

Note the subtle differene between listening to music with it, and listening to it.

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

That is the d'Agostino Relentless power amp that we were discussing a few posts back. The similarly styled smaller product is the matching preamp.

The rest of the gear is unashamedly British, by dCS https://www.dcsltd.co.uk/. They started life in defence and aerospace electronics, then morphed into very expensive, but superbly designed digital domain audio.

But the majority of the four Ferrari strap line is in the d'Agostino Relentless. I honestly think they produced something that physically heavy so that they could compare the weight of two mono amps at half a ton with a full size concert grand piano. Seriously.

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

It's just the press' preferred unit of money. Length has to be given in London buses, volume in olympic swimming pools.

David

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

I have an idea about how long a London bus is, but Olympic swimming pools? I wouldn't even be able to guess a close figure. It's the same with football pitches... not a Scooby. ??? We were all taught conventional units, so why do the media think that we are as dumb as they seem to be? They can't even get the possessive right though, with gems like "Belgium resident...".

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

They could not even get the scaling correct in the image in the Telegraph. The dCS equipment is much, much smaller than that image suggests. They just badly photoshopped three images they grabbed from the web without scaling the dimensions.

The stack of four dCS Vivaldi products (DAC, Upsampler, Master clock and CD/SACD transport) is £75k. Expensive, but small beer compared with the £250k Relentless. The preamp is the d'Agostino Momentum, which is a mere £40k. He is yet to release the Relentless preamp.

So the products listed are a total of £365k of which the dCS products are only 20%.

Of course that does not take cables into account, which could easily add another £50k, so £415k. Then you need speakers of course (for which the sky is the limit), and a deck/arm/cartridge (another sky). So it is entirely possible to spend well over a million for a complete system. So yes - four Ferrari's plus.

But there are a surprising number of people for whom that is loose change. As would four Ferraris.

What would such a system sound like? Well I have heard some exceptionally impressive systems (at the very, very occasional hifi show I've attended); but of course the determining quality is dominated by the loudspeakers. I have also heard exceptionally expensive systems that sound dire! In one room my long-suffering wife burst out laughing - I had to usher her outside the room and explain that they had to work very hard indeed to make something that sounded so awful ;-)

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

Blimey, they clearly hiked the price of the Momentum at £80k.

But you have to take into account that Absolute Sounds is run by a guy called Ricardo Franassovici. Their mark ups are punishing, and he has made a very great deal of money over the years as the purveyor of audio for the rich.

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

I have just relocated my hifi, the interconnects (RCA leads) are what I found in the draw, probably 50p jobs*, no hum, no noise, just what screened cable does. Now what to do with the £414,996 I have saved?

*From a great load of stereo phono leads I got from ARCAM 30 odd years ago, these where supplied as "get you going starter leads" of course getting a much more expensive one was suggested in the leaflet.

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

The target market for daft priced audio is quite large. There are 2,300 billionaires in the world with an average net worth of $3.5 billion. But there are well over a quarter million with net worth greater than $30 million.

Net worth is "investible assets minus liabilities".

Is high end audio a worthwhile market for the manufacturers and distributors? Well of course, looking at the above numbers. Is it well designed (often yes) mechanically beautiful (yes) and aspirational (yes), in the same way as a Hublot watch or Ferrari.

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

The solid-state stuff may well be well-designed, but I'm afraid that not all the high-end valve stuff is. The best of it is almost as good as the best vintage designs, and can exceed them substantially in available power. But the worst of it is unreliable, noisy, distorting and arguably dangerous :(.

It's also a poor investment, I'm afraid. Vintage equipment can hold its value or even appreciate, but is inevitably second-hand. New modern kit suffers the same sort of rapid initial depreciation that new cars do as soon as they're driven off the forecourt. In hifi circles the phrase "I only want what I paid for it" is thrown back at prospective sellers with hoots of derision and outrage !

Cheers,

GJ

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

Well, I'm only 50, but I think I could probably conspire to largely retire on that, so long as I continued to enjoy hi-fi I found in the road!

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

Hi all

I am taking note of an audiophool type thread on another forum. That one started about expensive cables for between the guitar and amp as well as amp to speaker. Personally I just use a decent cheap cable as the only way to upgrade what comes out of my own amplifier speaker is to upgrade the player...

However, someone posted this, and I can't quite work out whether there is anything in what they say or not. I certainly don't want to test it for fear of mucking my amp up.

Anyway...

"Hifi speaker cable definitely makes a difference - if you run speaker cable from your amp to your speaker, and get another identical length of it and run it from the amp, get someone to hold the other ends and touch them to the speaker spades and off again, while you listen with your eyes closed. It’s amazing. The midrange and bass really fill out in volume. You can hear it switching on and off as clearly as if someone was pressing a button marked “bass”. If you have cheap speaker cable and lots of it, just try doubling up and see what you think. "

Martin

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

Ohm’s law I guess. Speaker impedance wanders all over the shop at different frequencies - sometimes by factors of 10 to 1. Most audible audio differences, including ‘magical’ effects, can be explained by frequency response changes.

Martin

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

A rule of thumb is that if the speaker cable resistance is less than 10% of the nominal speaker impedance then lowering it any further won't make an audible difference to the sound that comes out. Of course if you can find cable thin enough that its total resistance ('there and back') is a few ohms, then putting another length in parallel with it will halve that, and with an 8 ohm speaker (which might well be more like 6 ohms these days) you might be able to hear that difference.

The trick is to use decently thick cable to begin with. A 5m length of this stuff https://cpc.farnell.com/pro-power/27...eaker%20cables will cost £3 and will have a total resistance of 0.11 ohms i.e. negligible.

Cheers,

GJ

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

Thanks chaps.

So the key really is if you have lots of rubbish cable, use twice as much and it will be a bit less rubbish... :)

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

oh at least, at resonant frequencies very high indeed, with a high resistance wire twix amp and speaker other bits get to wobble about changing the sound. In the 80's when a friend of mine was going on about the "sound" of cables (over all of a couple of yards) I put a 100m drum of bell wire in series with one of my modest (ESL57's, and they don't resonate, must have been the room) speaker pair, he said it sounded better. When shown (to him, it was a single blind test) it was all embarrassment and other bull droppings.

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

That's just dropping a knowledge bomb: cheap speaker cables are lossy. If you double up the cable thickness, you reduce the resistive loss in the cable, and the sound gets louder. Of course it is going to sound fuller and richer! Wire on -- orchestra gets closer! Wire off -- orchestra gets further away! Wire on -- orchestra closer! Wire off -- orchestra further away!

There must be a downside to being so easy to amuse .....

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

Yup. The downside shows up in bank statements.

David

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

I have just spent £4.90 on a return railway ticket to Marlow, I got off at Bourne End and walked to Marlow (rather nice Thames side job). During the walk I had the very best bird song HiFi imaginable. Should I have gone first class to improve this, then it may have sounded fuller and richer.

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

Just happened upon a post on a Facebook hifi page where a guy asks if him spending £20k on cables is enough?!

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

The folk-wisdom in some hifi magazines and webpages is that you must spend a certain fraction of the cost of your entire system on "Interconnects".

!

David