The "is there a difference" Hi-Fi/Home Cinema Discussion thread

[9designs2]

Hey, it's OK guys, the world really is still flat, people do spontaneously combust when travelling at high speeds and the end of the world is nigh.

Talk about armchair sceptics.
How about actually getting out there and giving it a try sometime, instead of simply regurgitating stuff originally quoted by people that you've no idea about, or their motivations.

If you genuinely go give it a try and think that these things don't make any appreciable difference, that's cool, and you'll be able to talk from a position of strength. In the meantime, you're simply acting as forum trolls.

Nicely summed up Mr_S..... Too many myths for as against are born on the net, and then just trolled out by the many, who never actually get there hands dirty.... or should that be their ears damaged !!! lol .....

Well as an mechanical engineer, and some 25 years playing with HiFi kit as a hobby etc, a lot of it does make a difference...... Then for sure there are the con's about.... stuff like £1000 for a mains cable are a bit OTT....

Can you measure it..... To use a comment from an IT engineer I spoke with once..... He can see a "kink" in a CAT5 cable on a scope, as it causes a reflection in the signal !!!...... So do digital cables make a difference ?????... who knows..... try it and find out.

A thought to ponder, why do people believe what they see, but not what they hear ??? Is one sense more credible than the other ?...... Or are people to lazy to learn how to use their ears.......

9D

PS the world is flat all the way from Salisbury to Glasgow..

 

[Bear]

I've been expecting you

Go and read the links and come back later!! I'm not disputing that ABX testing is a pain in the bum to do, but i haven't yet seen any reasonable argument to suggest there is anything flawed in the methodology. So if the method is sound and the results do not support the original hypothesis, then surely there is only one conclusion to make?

Some of those links are talking as much BS as the Hifi mags.

 

[oli collett]

Nicely summed up Mr_S..... Too many myths for as against are born on the net, and then just trolled out by the many, who never actually get there hands dirty.... or should that be their ears damaged !!! lol .....

Well as an mechanical engineer, and some 25 years playing with HiFi kit as a hobby etc, a lot of it does make a difference...... Then for sure there are the con's about.... stuff like £1000 for a mains cable are a bit OTT....

Can you measure it..... To use a comment from an IT engineer I spoke with once..... He can see a "kink" in a CAT5 cable on a scope, as it causes a reflection in the signal !!!...... So do digital cables make a difference ?????... who knows..... try it and find out.

A thought to ponder, why do people believe what they see, but not what they hear ??? Is one sense more credible than the other ?...... Or are people to lazy to learn how to use their ears.......

9D

PS the world is flat all the way from Salisbury to Glasgow..

Myths propogated on the internet.. have you guys actually looked at any of the links i posted? I am not the one propogating myths here, i'm just pointing to some tests of audio equipment done under controlled conditions.

Can you measure it? Yes. It's called an A/B/X test. I've posted links in the beginning of the thread. I have not yet heard a credible argument to disprove these tests. Can't identify A vs B? then it's all in your head.

Why do people believe what they see? Have you heard of optical illusions? Magic tricks? Do you trust your sense of taste and smell? Do you trust all of your senses? I don't. Hi-fi enthusiasts are incredibly willing to dismiss the placebo affect, isn't that a bit odd when it is known to have such a powerful effect on your senses?

 

[Mr_Sukebe]

...If these products do make a difference to your hi-fi, prove it. That's all I and all the other "armchair sceptics" are asking. That's not trolling, if anything it's the complete opposite.

To quote a phrase, "the only person in life you can prove anything to, is yourself".

And believe it or not, I did. Do you really believe that I would spend the amount of money I did on kit (which is not great in high end circles), just because of some also equally biased/motivated review stating that "X" product was the dogs danglies.
Amazingly, I trust to the most useful way to define whether one piece of kit is better than another, i.e. my ears.

Frankly, your rant is about as useful as me trying to convince a prospective Ferrari Enzo driver that his car is less involving than a 73' 911 RS (bearing in mind that I've never driven either).

Stop wasting our time on here and GO OUT AND LISTEN FOR YOURSELF.
At the moment, all you're doing is commenting from a position of ZERO experience.

Let me put it another way, newbie joins the OCUK forums and comes looking on this forum for thoughts. Reads your thread and feels even more confused because of your comments.
Whilst you may well be getting a kick out of creating a pointless argument on here, you're actually doing a disservice to other forum goers with information based on 2nd and 3rd hand comments.

 

[oli collett]

Some of those links are talking as much BS as the Hifi mags.

?

 

[Mr_Sukebe]

?

You really haven't got this yet have you.
Pretty much seemingly anyone interested in the hi-fi industry is seemingly biased in one way or another.
Mags are full of mega-hyped kit, most online reviewers take no account of personal preferences, and most owners when asked for advice will simply tell the OP to buy what he has, cos otherwise it would hurt his ego. If you don't believe me on that, checkout the AV forums. Here's a typical exchange:
"I'm looking for a CD costing £400, what do you recommend" (in other words I can't be bothered to use the search function).
Poster 1:
"I bought Product X, yes it costs twice the amount, but it's the dogs, just buy it".

In short, don't trust ANYONE'S thoughts but your own and the only way to prove that either way is to have a listen.

For another example, go lookup the old WHF review of the Denon 7200, a reasonable stereo amp costing IIRC around £250, which at the push of it's "class A" button, could rival £1000 amps. Interesting that within a year questions were being raised by owners of "what £800 should I buy to replace my PM7200".

 

[waspy88]

I wonder what systems the people saying "arrgghh they all sound the same" have.

I have a second hand Naim Nait amplifier and it has shown me levels of musicality that I have never experienced on a Rotel / Cambridge Audio or Yamaha. The amp was only a couple of hundred quid, and it has such musical refinement that none of my other amps can ever come close to it.

Naim are awesome in my opinion. They take the **** out of certain audiophile trends and set their own standards. I believe they make good gear because they engineer and hope word of mouth markets their product, rather than hefty advertising.

Electronically I am sure most engineers can tell you a cheap integrated amp with snide amplification chips will have lots of interference. Isolating these interferences and having a good amp is what it is all about. Bi-amping etc by-pass cross-overs and lift the sound and power reserve resulting in a highly dynamic sound.

Why do dynamics matter? Well if you are listening to anything other than crap rock or rap, like proper classical music you need a fair amount of power reserve to pick up the thunderous crescendos of many master works. To me most stereo integrated amplifiers including the Rotel RAO series failed at this. The Naim on the other hand drives with such power its unbelievable.

Speakers are very important too. Most modern speakers are not too good on their own. A book shelf speaker on its own cannot cover all of the lower frequencies demanded by classical music. Back in the day speakers had a large woofer array to provide the thundering bass that was required. Now we have twee Book standers and lean floor standers. Unless these are TL enclosures in a large room you will not get the overwhelming power of music.

For this reason most people compliment their 2 channel set ups with a quality sub woofer. This raises the type of music you can listen to. So you need to be aware of this when reviewers make silly claims of speaker capabilities like "room filling bass"
look for the Xmas value of the driver. This is the travel of the speaker in its chassis. Anything less than a 10" longthrow is useless.

I am going off topic here, but I do agree that hi-fi reviewers do make silly claims, however I will say that most honest hi-end stuff is expensive due to the cost of parts too. For example the Krell Tsunami subwoofer.. those drivers have a travel of something silly like 2" I know the sub costs close to £20,000.00 but the materials it uses and the amplification it has are all researched things that cost a bomb to make.

B&W is another one of those companies that proves itself. You can have tasters of its top of the like £44,000 speaker but for the real deal your going to need all that.

Some companies do cash in on people's naivety. Most people who buy expensive gear and arent loaded, listen and read hundreds of opinions before ever making a purchase.

 

[oli collett]

To quote a phrase, "the only person in life you can prove anything to, is yourself".

And believe it or not, I did. Do you really believe that I would spend the amount of money I did on kit (which is not great in high end circles), just because of some also equally biased/motivated review stating that "X" product was the dogs danglies.
Amazingly, I trust to the most useful way to define whether one piece of kit is better than another, i.e. my ears.

Let me put it another way, newbie joins the OCUK forums and comes looking on this forum for thoughts. Reads your thread and feels even more confused because of your comments.
Whilst you may well be getting a kick out of creating a pointless argument on here, you're actually doing a disservice to other forum goers with information based on 2nd and 3rd hand comments.

I really don't care about how you made your decisions - you are free to do so at your own will.

I seriously think you have got my intentions entirely wrong - this thread was started to have a discussion on whether certain aspects of hi-fi actually are what they say they are or not. This came about because i noticed an increasing number of people discussing HDMI cables and how people were happy to accept one HDMI cable does not look/sound any different to another (providing it works etc.). This goes completely against what the mass hi-fi media will tell you. I started this thread to point out that maybe it's not just HDMI cables and that you cannot trust everything you read in a magazine.

As for your last point - what is wrong with suggesting to someone new to hi-fi that they don't need to spend a fortune on cables and other bits? As for quoting 2nd/3rd party sources, are you now telling me that we should only post personal opinion and not bother referencing anything?

I really think you have my intentions completely wrong here - and i don't want to let this thread descend into people hurling insults at one another. If you don't agree with my opinion, fine, if you want to put across your side of the argument, fine. But this thread is not about "i know A sounds better than B because i heard it", that's exactly what i was trying to get away from!

 

[oli collett]

You really haven't got this yet have you.
Pretty much seemingly anyone interested in the hi-fi industry is seemingly biased in one way or another.
Mags are full of mega-hyped kit, most online reviewers take no account of personal preferences, and most owners when asked for advice will simply tell the OP to buy what he has, cos otherwise it would hurt his ego. If you don't believe me on that, checkout the AV forums. Here's a typical exchange:
"I'm looking for a CD costing £400, what do you recommend" (in other words I can't be bothered to use the search function).
Poster 1:
"I bought Product X, yes it costs twice the amount, but it's the dogs, just buy it".

In short, don't trust ANYONE'S thoughts but your own and the only way to prove that either way is to have a listen.

Again, echoing above, you seem to have missed my point of this thread (i'm not getting at you, i just might not have made that clear).

This isn't about people's opinions on whether X is better than Y - it's about finding some credible evidence that gets away from peoples opinions by using scientific measurement. How can you accuse the results of an A/B/X test of bias? I have looked all over the net and am yet to find any kind of test that suggests people can tell a difference with this stuff and all i'm getting in reply is "i know it makes a difference because i can hear it myself".

 

[Bear]

This is what really baffles me about hi-fi.

But here's the thing. When you point out that there is no credible evidence (i've still not seen anyone post any on this thread yet) that this stuff makes a difference, you are accused of heresy! I mean, you are comparing my views in your post to that of people who believe the world is flat. Do you not see the irony there? Wasn't that theory blown away through a mixture of science and common sense? How about the IT industry. Would you start buying new SATA cables at 5 times the price of a normal one if you read some reviews that said they thought it made file transfers a bit quicker, without them running any before/after comparison tests? I'd hope not.

Scientists don't come up with theories and just publish them along with a load of marketing rubbish without any evidence to back it up, but that's exactly what happened in the hi-fi industry when these products entered the market.

If these products do make a difference to your hi-fi, prove it. That's all I and all the other "armchair sceptics" are asking. That's not trolling, if anything it's the complete opposite.

It is trolling because they miss the fundamental point and that what sounds great to one person doesnt sound great to another. Its like asking someone to measure how lovely a wallpaper is in someones house, prove it by measuring it. If you cant prove it then why doesnt everyone have the same wallpaper ?? Whats measureable about why one person prefers one from another ?? That sort of arguement which you seem to want to get into is just plain retarded.

Take for instance valves and transistors. If you do real world measurements of certain transistor amplifiers and the same with valve amplifiers, you will find the transistor amplifier will always measure better in terms of distortion, harmonics etc. But if you listen to both, the poorly measureing one being the valve amp might not sound as bad as you would think purely by meaurement. In no way am I saying valves are better than transistors because they are not, but they definately sound different compared with transistors which is measureable and personally I prefer them in general because of the type of music I listen to.

Different types of music lend itself better to differing reproduction methods. Whilst I agree that there is a lot of snake oil in the hifi world, morons insisting that people should have to prove via measurement of what sounds better to them needs their heads seen to as much as someone that is willing to spend £7.5k on a kettle lead.

 

[oli collett]

It is trolling because they miss the fundamental point and that what sounds great to one person doesnt sound great to another. Its like asking someone to measure how lovely a wallpaper is in someones house, prove it by measuring it. If you cant prove it then why doesnt everyone have the same wallpaper ?? Whats measureable about why one person prefers one from another ?? That sort of arguement which you seem to want to get into is just plain retarded.

Bear,

An A/B/X test has nothing to do with what sounds great to one person or another. It is about whether you can tell the difference - It's in the thread title Please read up on the A/B/X test because it is quite clear that it has nothing to do with an opinion on something, only on whether you can identify A from B.

 

[waspy88]

Again, echoing above, you seem to have missed my point of this thread (i'm not getting at you, i just might not have made that clear).

This isn't about people's opinions on whether X is better than Y - it's about finding some credible evidence that gets away from peoples opinions by using scientific measurement. How can you accuse the results of an A/B/X test of bias? I have looked all over the net and am yet to find any kind of test that suggests people can tell a difference with this stuff and all i'm getting in reply is "i know it makes a difference because i can hear it myself".

Part of that is, people do not have a standardized test to say this product is better than that. I believe in adapting statistics to think how they will interact with the music I feed them. So, for example my dream system would include the ATC SCM12, because they are extremely transient and very hard to drive. Hard to drive suggest to me they are dynamic and would be great to suite my kind of music.

You will not find a common consensus in which is better than the other. Because people's listening habits vary so much. Some people listen to music passively, some people listen to music very closely and intimately like they would be in a theatre or opera. So a geek with his monitor on, and his am tucked underneath his monitor and his music comic from FLAC is going to be less discriminating than an opera fan who has 8 recordings of one work all because they have minor differences in them.

 

[Mr_Sukebe]

...This isn't about people's opinions on whether X is better than Y - it's about finding some credible evidence that gets away from peoples opinions by using scientific measurement. How can you accuse the results of an A/B/X test of bias? I have looked all over the net and am yet to find any kind of test that suggests people can tell a difference with this stuff and all i'm getting in reply is "i know it makes a difference because i can hear it myself".

As for evidence, we didn't understand:
Electricity until the 19th century
How to break the sound barrier until the 50s (IIRC)
and still don't understand what newly hatched lobster do (according to the TV last night).
Doesn't that infer that maybe, just maybe, we might not have worked out how to measure absolutely everything in life as yet?

What more credible evidence do you need than your own ears?
I'm not asking you to believe what I say about kit differences, as (a) I don't care, and (b) as stated by Bear, different people have different audio priorities, thus influencing what they like the most.
What I find to be so frustrating is our repeated comments of "go have a listen", simply falling on deaf ears.

At the end of the day, either find a decent dealer or if you really want, say hi in south London and I can dem the difference between some cables.

 

[oli collett]

Part of that is, people do not have a standardized test to say this product is better than that. I believe in adapting statistics to think how they will interact with the music I feed them. So, for example my dream system would include the ATC SCM12, because they are extremely transient and very hard to drive. Hard to drive suggest to me they are dynamic and would be great to suite my kind of music.

You will not find a common consensus in which is better than the other. Because people's listening habits vary so much. Some people listen to music passively, some people listen to music very closely and intimately like they would be in a theatre or opera. So a geek with his monitor on, and his am tucked underneath his monitor and his music comic from FLAC is going to be less discriminating than an opera fan who has 8 recordings of one work all because they have minor differences in them.

I agree!!! and i've never suggested that you can, and this thread has nothing to do with preferring product A over B and i'm certainly not suggesting that.

As i have stated several times - it is about whether you can identify A from B. If you think that a £10K Krell amp sounds entirely different from a £500 Yamaha, or a £2/m speaker cable different to a £2000/m one, then you should be able to pass an A/B/X test. It doesn't matter which you prefer!

 

[oli collett]

What more credible evidence do you need than your own ears?
I'm not asking you to believe what I say about kit differences, as (a) I don't care, and (b) as stated by Bear, different people have different audio priorities, thus influencing what they like the most.
What I find to be so frustrating is our repeated comments of "go have a listen", simply falling on deaf ears.

At the end of the day, either find a decent dealer or if you really want, say hi in south London and I can dem the difference between some cables.

Again, as i've said to bear, it's nothing to do with audio priorities OR preferences! The fact that i've not yet seen anyone able to tell the difference between such equipment in A/B/X testing yet claim they can outside of the test just using their ears, i'd suggest that ears are not as reliable as they should be!

 

[Bear]

I agree!!! and i've never suggested that you can, and this thread has nothing to do with preferring product A over B and i'm certainly not suggesting that.

As i have stated several times - it is about whether you can identify A from B. If you think that a £10K Krell amp sounds entirely different from a £500 Yamaha, or a £2/m speaker cable different to a £2000/m one, then you should be able to pass an A/B/X test. It doesn't matter which you prefer!

So go and prove it yourself, go to a decent hifi shop and either get a demo and specify the conditions or ask to borrow some kit and take it home with you and you can do all the double blind testing you want.

In all seriousness, how are we supposed to do the research for you unless we have stacks of kit sitting around ??

 

[oli collett]

So go and prove it yourself, go to a decent hifi shop and either get a demo and specify the conditions or ask to borrow some kit and take it home with you and you can do all the double blind testing you want.

In all seriousness, how are we supposed to do the research for you unless we have stacks of kit sitting around ??

I'm not suggesting you do the research, but do you not think it's a bit odd that there doesn't seem to be any A/B/X tests that suggest that such things do make a difference? I was hoping someone might be able to provide links to such tests but i've yet to see any.

 

[Bear]

I'm not suggesting you do the research, but do you not think it's a bit odd that there doesn't seem to be any A/B/X tests that suggest that such things do make a difference? I was hoping someone might be able to provide links to such tests but i've yet to see any.

But without personally doing the research we cant answer. The "is there a difference" title in this thread can only be answered if we can discern a difference through the double blind test and as most of us dont have enough equipment to actually do a test we cant answer.

Do I think it strange that no one had done these tests ?? No, because I dont think many people care enough about it, just like I didnt care about doing a double blind test when purchasing a £750 Miele washing machine to see which came up the cleanest.

Saying that though, you have piqued my interest in trying it out, but unfortunately I dont have enough equipment to try it. Perhaps I might give some door bell wire and speaker cable a go as its not going to cost a bomb.

 

[oli collett]

But without personally doing the research we cant answer. The "is there a difference" title in this thread can only be answered if we can discern a difference through the double blind test and as most of us dont have enough equipment to actually do a test we cant answer.

Do I think it strange that no one had done these tests ?? No, because I dont think many people care enough about it, just like I didnt care about doing a double blind test when purchasing a £750 Miele washing machine to see which came up the cleanest.

Saying that though, you have piqued my interest in trying it out, but unfortunately I dont have enough equipment to try it. Perhaps I might give some door bell wire and speaker cable a go as its not going to cost a bomb.

I mean in terms of magazines. Take that amplifier test for example - the conclusions from that were difficult to argue with, but the same magazine went back to reviewing amplifiers as they did before a few months later!! I don't expect anyone to have the time to do such a test easily, it's just a shame that there aren't more magazines doing them.

 

[Mr_Sukebe]

I'm not suggesting you do the research, but do you not think it's a bit odd that there doesn't seem to be any A/B/X tests that suggest that such things do make a difference? I was hoping someone might be able to provide links to such tests but i've yet to see any.

You clearly either (a) haven't listened to a word of what we've said, or (b) really are simply here to deliberately provoke people.


Either way, CONGRATULATIONS, YOU'RE A WINNER.
You've won second place!

I've been on the OCUK forums for six years now and you've become only the second person I've ever come across worthy of being "ignored".



Go on, you know you owe it to yourself, go listen and stop wasting other peoples time...