Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

Are you sure there isn't just one and that's how it sounds on the two different (which is to say differently painful) systems ?

Cheers,

GJ

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

I notice the occupants of the cars twitching in time to the thumping, so the pain must be considerable, allowing for the length of exposure and the inevitable desensitisation.

The ones with earbuds don't seem to be in agony, rather they have a blank, glazed expression while they stare at their phone, and, on the university campus where I worked, walk off the edge, into the loch

David

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

There is a weird activity with cars - a competition to generate the highest SPL inside a vehicle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTY4Q2nE63E

Total distortion, no pretense to music. Just 80kW+ of amps feeding a massive array of speakers. These apparently often blow the windscreen out.

Craig

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

Yes cheap earbuds can sound dreadful but good quality ones fitted well can sound very good. Many musicians onstage now use earmoulds as per hearing aids custom made for their ear canals. The isolation is so good they need to have the sound of the audience mixed in with the band's performance.

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

The sound brings back memories of The Nice Five Bridges and the grinding sound effects made by Keith Emerson by shoving knives in the back of (I think) a Hammond L100..... prog rock got there first!

David

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

Indeed. I've had a long love of the five bridges suite since it was commissioned by Newcastle Arts Council to represent the five bridges over the river Tyne. Emerson was only in his mid 20's at the time

Of course after the Nice, Keith Emerson went on to be one third of ELP. This https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2zurZig4L8 is a splendid recording of them rehearsing Fanfare for The Common Man in a snow bound empty stadium in Canada in 1977.

Alas Carl Palmer is the only one still alive. Greg Lake (bass) died at 69 from cancer in late 2016 and Keith Emerson at 71 committed suicide earlier that year by shooting himself in the head.

Just to bring you all down...

Craig

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

I must admit as a lifelong ELP fan the earliest stuff was IMHO the best.
Lucky man and Knife Edge.

I enjoyed Brain Salad surgery enormously but found Works frankly hard Work.

Works 1 and 2 were the last albums I bought from ELP but of course I borrowed later albums from my friends and I didn't enjoy those nearly as much.

Saw them live twice what talents.

In the 70's I was an Audiophool I spent lots of money on speakers, amplifiers and turntables. The birth of my first son in 1985 as soon as he became mobile it all had to go away. He ripped the stylus out of my V15 with his jumper :o Once I was back using a cheap and basic system I discovered I had spent more time fiddling with the equipment I had forgotten to enjoy the music.

As I type I am listening to Cream on you tube, live recording on a £20 pair of plantronics headphones it sounds great!

Cheers

Mike T

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

I made a quip earlier, and in retrospect, I may have stumbled on another definition of an audiophool... Someone who when listening on headphones puts on a pair of spiked shoes.

So if your footwear is normal while you use those plantronics phones, then you're fully recovered, Mike.

David

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

No spikes David just socks which to my knowledge have no special audio properties. :thumbsup:

Glad to hear I am cured.

Cheers

Mike T

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

You're obviously buying the wrong socks, if you wait a while Nick Parks will likely come up with something :)

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

This is an openly accessible website, so who knows how many entrepreneurs are trawling it, looking for ideas for their next product? Someone could be stoking up a Chinese megafactory right now, and the socks could be in the hifi shops before Christmas, and on the Sunday market in the new year.

As for the shoes; Ones with fancy metallurgy on the spikes and matt leather for the high-end shops, and cheap knock-offs with too-shiny PVC and a thin gold flash on the spikes (to justify having the word 'Digital' printed on the shoes), for the Sunday market trade.

David

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

Surely they'd just need to be open-toed ;D ?

Cheers,

GJ

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

I don't think they'd get that joke on Ingliston Sunday market (as-was) but they did have a simple precedent:

Old fashioned 'analogue' headphones had a shiny silver plated jack plug.

'Digital' headphones had a gold-flashed jack plug. It was the only difference apart from the wording on the box and maybe on the headband.... and a small increase in price.

David

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

Not HiFi of course, but Baird started his career making socks!

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

Ah - grounded sleeping is already here https://www.groundology.co.uk/earthi...iAAEgLLq_D_BwE

So grounded listener would not be novel - an examiner would judge grounded sleeping to be prior art...

Craig

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

Ah - on another page of the same site - grounded socks and shoes https://www.groundology.co.uk/earthi...nding-footwear

Not for handling static sensitive semiconductors, but for some weird well-being reason.

So nothing new under the sun.

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

I inadvertently did. I discovered the issue after a friend visiting where we spent an evening comparing a few pairs of loudspeakers that we had recently bought. At the end he kindly reconnected my usual speakers for me and I then spent a good few days wondering why the heck my system just didn't sound 'right'.

After lots of fiddling, cleaning, repositioning and general tidying up, I discovered the swap of the speaker cable cores. I changed them back and all was well.

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

I was thinking of spiked shoes as a derivative of the spiked stands they seem to need for their speakers and each piece of equipment. There is something gloriously smile-inducing in seeing a system with individual stands all on pointy feet for speakers, turntable, CD, DAC, preamp, power amp..... but why not the power generator and the listener?

Are grounded sheets really necessary? If they sleep with their tinfoil hats on, just grounding that with a croc clip on a flying lead ought to be sufficient to keep them happy.

David

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

There is an interview from a few yrs back with Rupert Neve, where he was questioning whether super-pancaked dynamics at high SPLs elicits aggression in society... In the same article he also cites the Oohashi study, where they tried to measure the effect of frequencies about 20KHz on the human brain: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc...=rep1&type=pdf

(NB - much as he is a bona-fide legend, I am not stating that I'm in agreement here)

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

There is another academic study I've read regarding functional MRI and CT scans to test subjects' brain activity when listening to Gamelan music. This has significant output well beyond 20kHz. When the full frequency range was played areas of the brain lit up which did not when band limited (20-20kHz) was played.

It is somewhere on my hard drive; when I find it I'll post it.

Craig