An Audio Allegory

nothing wrong with those speakers, they have plenty of open box around them. the type i like building for myself.

The hifi industry is a minefield, almost everything you read is a lie or a mistake. The single most important component apart from the original recording is the listening room, it has such a massive effect on the tonal balance. I always laugh when I read people complaining about things like too much or too little bass from a pair of speakers. When I measured the response of my lounge, it exhibited a +25dB boom around the 70-90 Hz range. That is really going to mess up your sound and most rooms have severe problems. The sound you attribute to your speakers is mostly the sound of your room. I use digital room correction as a partial correction. But mostly I have just given up worrying about it.

I did some volunteering for a high end boutique speaker manufacturer in the UK more than a decade ago. Their listening room was amazing. It's quite extraordinary what a state of the art listening room does for sound. As was the 6 channel Ambisonics surround sound system the designer put together for himself. We spent a lot of time getting people to volunteer to record for the Ambisonics. It is quite remarkable. But I can't manage anything like that, so I found myself a pleasant sounding system using a Google chromecast audio feeding a MiniDSP HD24/digital room correction (to take out the room boom) into my vintage Naim 42.5/110 and Epos ES11 and stopped worrying about it. I'm thinking about building my own amps as a retirement project, but lots of stuff to learn first.

I can recommend Audio Science Review website as a BS free audio review site, but you won't find any mystical, magical, subjective reviews there, if that's what you want.

Yes, the Audio Science Review site was a good source of information.

Anyway my Naim XR3 and PMC speakers sound fine to me. So I guess I got it more or less right. The headphone amp in the Naim sounds very good with my Beyerdynamic headphones. It has made my headphone amp redundant.

I am in the photographic doldrums at the moment, and I am also reorganising my Audio system, and finally putting some sort of order to my CD collection.

Photography is quite a cheap pastime compared to Audio, if you really get the bug. I posted some questions I had about my Naim XS3 to a forum. I was sniffily told by one guy, that the problem with my €3000+ amp, was that it was "midrange". I tried to find a longer cable for my new Sennheiser HD800S headphones. You can literally spend thousands of Euros on interconnect cables. i eventually found an almost sane price, from a company that makes interconnects for recording studios. I discovered you can buy from them the same cable and identical interconnects for €40, that another company with a fancy site is selling for €200+

Before getting my new headphones, I read lots of reviews and forum posts. Unlike photography, where professional camera gear mostly sits in the same market and price range as amateur oriented gear. Audio seems to have two very separate markets and a massive gulf in price. It seems a good pair of studio cans, costs €200-€300. Headphones for home use arrive at astronomical prices; Sennheiser HE-1 a snip at €60,000 discounted anyone?

But with Audio a lot of very heavy discounting goes on. I bought my HD800s headphones from a shop in Milan, with a 40% discount. You really do have to shop around to get a good deal.

Better get back to photography.

I think it's far to say that the price of audio and similar things is always proportional - for some order greater than linear - to the hype that exists in the consumer space.
One would assume a pair of headphones suitable for studio work would more than suffice for personal use.
i remember 30 or so years ago I had a kit amp I had built with a rated THD less than 0.1 or 0.01%. A friend had a Rotel (from memory) which definitely enhanced the sound quite a bit - just like jpeg sooc not raw. To him his was better quality and he couldn't accept that I could get the same out of mine with some level of mixing - I never had a mixer so couldn't show it...

im still using my playmater twin 25 kit i built nearly 50 years ago when i was 16 yo 😊

Was that the one that was in Electronics Australia or one of those mags? Many of us built one when we were trainees at Telecom circa 1980 - got the parts cheap as a bulk lot. We also built speakers but I wont vouch for any quality there... Also got a 240V boot through the chest fault finding some error... 😳

Yes that was the one, i also built the graphic equalizer and the am fm radio, i went to radio school at liverpool full ham licence when i was 17 and used a Kenwood 520s with a huge multi element quad towering over my radio shed.

The one hobby that has remained relatively cheap is hiking. If you buy from a serious outdoor shop, a good rucksack, boots and clothing need not be very expensive. I hiked for years in the Apennines, without special clothing. I did have a good pair of boots and a rucksack with proper suspension.

I use a small rucksack I bought in an outdoor shop to carry camera gear when I want to go light, it cost a fraction of the price of a photo rucksack, and does not give me backache.

The gossip concerning the new Nikon Z6iii has parallels with the recent research I did, when I upgraded my headphones.

The new Z6iii it seems has some step backs in image quality, thanks to the userbase that has changed in this segment. Video seems to be becoming far more important, and at it seems the Z6iii has made a step backwards with DR, to make the video offering stronger.

I found a similar thing has happened with the top of the range Beyerdynamic T1iii headphones. The mark ii needed a powerful headphone amp as they were rated at 600om. The Mk iii needs much less power at 30om, and has been redesigned so that they can be used with portable audio devices, DAC devices connected to a computer, and even a cell phone. Interestingly, the sound has also been tweaked to sound good with compressed loudness, endemic in modern pop music files. The consensus is that they sound worse, than the Mkii. Pure sound quality has been sacrificed to chase a different market.

We live in a world that does not seek engineering perfection anymore.

So, I almost totally renewed my HiFi system. I had some questions to ask about my Naim amp, so I signed up to their forum. I got the answers , but they have quite a nice music section, which is quite fun. I also see their marketing stuff.

Hi Fi has already reached a destination, where the photography market is going. Ever pricier gear for a steadily shrinking market. Spotify has killed the Audio market, just as cell phones are killing the dedicated camera market.

The resurgence of the vinyl record had breathed some breath into the sector. We have come a long way from my Garrard SP25. Naim are proposing a special edition turntable which consists of a huge cylinder on top of a plinth. €16000 will get you the basic version and the ambitious buyer will have to spend €20000.

Photo credit Naim

Of course you need to spend this sort of cash to play your Audiophile special edition €100 vinyl records. The record companies have discovered which way the wind is blowing too.

A kind fellow the other day on that forum informed sombody that the minimum spend for speakers is €5000 and should be €10000

And to think I bought my first HiFi system with my Saturday job in a shop.

My Project has about 20 years and still works fine.

Their is a lot of snake oil out thre in the HiFi world. I can understand a really precision turntable costing a couple of thousand, but twenty thousand is an exaggeration.

i must admit, im loveing all the remastered music from the 70s and 80s on utube. and some of the current music from my 21 yo daughters gen is awesome.

I made a mistake. This was actually an old thread that resurfaced from 2021, when some of the people who actually bought these monster turntables found that thanks to a design fault, they might have difficulty replacing the stylus, and were stuck with the stock cartridge ( I did not follow the all the long thread), through lack of parts. The design meant, that using another cartridge was not possible.

A €16000 doorstop!

It is a problem of actually buying a new one, or it seems the whole cartridge needs to be replaced. Pages of complaints. It seems they are trying without much success to get Naim to make a little counter weight so as other cartridges can be used.

It is amazing they sold so many. But then we are in a world where cables cost €1000+ a yard.

The cable only cost 0.50c a yard.

It's a world where people are silly enough to pay €1000+ a yard... 😳

I needed some special connects (Din RCA) to connect my headphone amp to the amp. I had the connects made by a local company that used good components and recording studio grade wire. It cost me €50 with labour. I saw a commercial product with the exact same connects, but with fancy wire on a site with a cost of several hundred Euro. I am sure if I went to a wholesaler and did it myself, I could save even more. But soldering Din connects is tricky.