Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

The dsp required to flatten the pass-band of those horns must be something quite high-order... ;D

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

Some of those amplifiers look like they escaped from Dr Frankenstein's lab

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

Did four crapophones get recycled to donate those horns?

After being cryogenically treated, or something like that, to scale up their esotericity, of course.

David

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

A fool and his money are easily parted.

A million dollar hi-fi system:

https://youtu.be/o7lxYAaJ_oo

Maybe it is still a bargain compared with the Seven Million Dollar Man.:beer:

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

Yep, good job there's no real problems left in the world that need money spending on them!

(I don't necessarily recommend pursuing that train of thought - it is one reason I am somewhat less employed than I used to be :) )

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

Oops, sorry!

Six million dollar man BTW...

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

As someone who's worked in the audio industry, and has interacted with some of the firms mentioned in this thread, I can confirm that however bad the level of pseudo-science appears to be, in the real world it's actually worse. In fact, a quick perusal of Companies House returns will show you that firms which pedal snake oil tend to turn over exponentially more than those whose products are rooted in objective fact. You can see this for yourself: visit 'audiosciencereview' and compare the amount of members against subjectivist web forums.

In my experience, those who buy these products have expendable income and don't do so at the expense of their kids' college funds. Of more concern is the fact that the whole industry contributes to a greater malaise within society, where proven scientific principles are doubted. We are at a juncture in history where such scepticism has the capability to be truly pernicious.

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

It's only a (censored)ing record player. I can think of many better uses for the space required (dreams of new workshop with staff to clean it and order/shelf stack the parts). But knowing me if I had a million dollars spare I would open a free for all workshop and have loads of fun. Teaching basics to enthusiasts is most satisfying.

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

As we have seen, there are at least some manufacturers out there who need to learn the basics, not that they'd be inclined to listen ! The best hope would be if the customers, who generally are enthusiasts, could be equipped to ask sensible questions.

Cheers,

GJ

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

Pick any field of interest and an enthusiast can spend a megabuck in a trice.

Wrist watch?
Car?
Racehorse?
Yacht?
Jewellery?
Paintings?
Musical instruments?
Antiques?
Plane?
Camera?

and so on.

We are at a level where the question "Is it worth it?" has to morph into "Is it worth it to the owner?" and that throws up the question "Why?"

Sometimes it's for the showmanship "Look what I got!"

With the racehorse it might be in the hope of winnings leading to large profits from stud fees. Despite the entire racing industry's results showing how likely that is.

You might be able to get your money back from the yacht, you might make some on the art and jewellery. Planes burn money but can take you places and dodge the tedium of having to go through the worst parts of airports. Supercars are absolutely unpleasant to drive. Less space for luggage than a Fiesta and a Fiesta can be fun if you get the right version.

Maybe you want high performance? Those supercars are fast, but your licence won't last long so maybe it's a case of knowing you could, even though you can't? That expensive mechanical watch is a work of art, but lower performance in telling you the time than a cheap one with a quartz oscillator.

I think showmanship and exclusivity win.

Showmanship is a bit brash. Exclusivity feels nastier... the joy coming not from having one but from knowing that everyone else can't have one.

It's their money. As long as they don't hurt anyone, it's mostly harmless. What a lot of people haven't figured out is that the more they overpay for something, the bigger the prat they look to some other people. However, yet other people look on enviously. The owners of the status symbols like envy (well, only the incoming envy) But the people who see through their antics are a threat.

Back to focusing on hifi, the people who do engineering, produce measurable and reproducible results must look threatening to people building huge expenditures on the foundation of belief systems that would not stand up to impartial scrutiny.

The high value of expensive art resides not in the artwork itself, but in the cloud of opinion surrounding it.

I suspect this expensive hifi is the same

It just isn't our opinions which support the high values placed on it.

We are not the target audience for these things. Rather, we are a threat to the whole .
belief system.

Still, we can have a chuckle when we come across some of the more egregious excesses

And the million dollar hifi looks a right mess, lots and lots of bits and pieces, all designed to have looks clamouring for your attention.

In my world, good hifi vanishes and leaves just you and the music. Whether that is restful or stirring depends on you and the music, the equipment keeps well out of it.

David

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

Um, thinking about what I just said there, if the value is in an opinion-field and not in the item, then it ought to be possible to review the latest high-end ouvre without actually having one.... because it's the opinion-field which is being reviewed not the material thing itself.

David

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

We come round again, though, to the fact that the reproduction of quite a lot of music is a pretty flawed process. The experience of listening to live music, be it a choir and organ in a cathedral, or jazz in a New Orleans club, or stadium rockers, or a lone folk singer with an acoustic guitar is influenced by much, much more than the movement of the air. If equipment, and all the hype that goes with it, helps the listener to recreate that experience in their living room then, well, it does. And if euphonious distortion makes music sound better to people who like it then, well, it does too. In the end it's the internally perceived experience that people are paying for and many of them regard that as more important than measurable results or the findings of impartial scrutiny. Hardly anyone regards 'measurists' as a threat. They think of them instead as an irrelevant irritant, or as nerds with their heads buried in the sand, or as folk who have tragically lost the plot.

Cheers,

GJ

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

I think we are using more silly words denigrating the audiophiles than they do exemplifying their dream stuff.

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

The thing that got me about the million dollar system was the speakers. You cannot get decent bass from a horn of that size. Or any bass worthy of the name.

Nelson Pass built some serious horns and wrote about them here http://www.firstwatt.com/pdf/art_kleinhorn1.pdf along with some rules of thumb.

He says the mouth area, converted to a circle of diameter about 1/3 of a wavelength.

So for 30Hz, that is about 4 meters diameter.

The million dollar system is about a quarter that - so 120Hz cutoff frequency. So little better than a bookshelf speaker. Which is why is sounds to honky and tinny.

Ugh.

Craig

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

Horns are interesting - the cut-on freq is a function of the flare constant (assuming it's exponential, which is a good assumption as most of the other profiles perform even worse :)), and then the mouth size determines the impedance mismatch (at the mouth into free space), so reflected energy, so standing wave behaviour, so pass-band ripple. Really useful for impedance matching / efficiency gains, and so rather out of place in a hi-fi setup with much much more power than anyone needs indoors!

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

Horns can be very efficient, although at the expense of cutoff frequency and ripple. But when people, for religious reasons, limit themselves to specific types of directly-heated triodes in single-ended class-A service, they find themselves with rather limited available power to the speakers.

To get much sound level, they are then forced into the highest speaker efficiency they can find.... horns.

So they wind up with a rather compromised system which will definitely influence what they hear. Fine if the effects suit their tastes, but it makes a joke of claims of accuracy.

David

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

High sensitivity speakers, single-ended amps and directly-heated triodes operating at 500V and beyond (i.e. beyond straightforward non-series PSU electrolytic usage) also means that residual hum becomes a serious concern with expensive implications for supply filtering (admittedly, everything in this particular area tends to imply "expensive" anyway). Maybe it's better that the speakers don't go down too far at LF!

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

This is an excellent point and yes, we are definitely suffering the consequences of that mechanism: this is a far more worrying prospect than that of idiots with too much money who spend it on their audio system.

Steve.

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

There is a whole lot of fundamental horn stuff in Keith Holland's early work, including his doctoral thesis, on horns:

https://www.southampton.ac.uk/engine...e#publications

Re: The Audiophoolery Thread.
 

Also Dinsdale's articles and designs in WW March, May and June 1974 are worth reading. His design for a horn that goes down to 40Hz measures 1.6m wide, 1.3m high and 1m deep. The mouth is 1.4 m^2 . That goes down to 70Hz, but as a result of floor reflections it goes to 40Hz.

But even so it is a beast. And constructed from either ply, or sand filled panels.

I toyed with the idea of building that at one stage, but it was beyond my woodworking skills at that time, and beyond the size of room by some margin!

Craig