it's true. you can't listen to music with an audiophile in the room without having to listen to them go on and on about the production and "the bass is too loud" this or "too much compression on the vocals" that-- like bro...listen to the song or GTFO
Me and my dad can't watch a movie or a sports broadcast without going on about the cameras and the lenses and the angles and the framerate and the exposure etc... and it drives my mom nuts. So hi mom.
I am an audio engineer for those events, I can't watch one with out calling out bad Camera and Audio...I'm well aware of all my mistakes too.
He was a radio engineer for CBC, so that makes sense.
That's a cool ass job ngl.
I mean the whole dub music genre that influenced half of modern music came from bbc studios in jamaica
Be honest, how many audiophiles do you actually know? I work in pro AV and have been surrounded by audiophiles for 20+ years and this applies to exactly 1 person I've ever known and it was freshman year of college
Sounds like this person you're describing is just a douchebag who wants to sound smart. We'd love to tell you all about our systems but we're not gonna complain about your Walmart soundbar unprompted
My friend is a different sort of audiophile. He finds every setup and location to be a new opportunity to hear the music he loves in a way that he's never heard it before.
Your friend is one of us. A normal audiophile!
It's like anything else people obsess over--food, wine, cars, health, exercise, drugs, guns, etc.
The problem isn't the obsession--you do you, glad you have a hobby--the problem is they won't shut the fuck up about it, and the air of superiority. Go geek out at your audiophile conventions, which I assume is a thing. Control yourself around we normies. Or don't, I guess, and be annoying.
But what you describe is still listening to music. The things they pick on is still part of the audio track, not part of the audio equipment.
Yeah it's just stuff someone thinks about when they've refined their taste over "bass goes boom". It can still be annoying when they try to force their opinions down on you when you haven't even asked.
I cannot listen to Rihanna with my good DAC/amp/headphone combo. The mixing is poop. The compression is poop. It's all i notice. I bought hi-res .flac files for Good Girl Gone Bad, and it didn't help. It was just produced poorly. So, I have to listen to her in the car with the average people stereo to enjoy it.
Flat response gang checking in. A flat response speaker/monitor is the superior system. What Parsons said is true though. That’s why I listen on flat response monitors, because that is exactly how the music was meant to be recorded and heard.
Audiophile: "The aluminum cones on these tweeters were precision engineered to give an unbiased audio signal at up to 30,000hz."
Musician: "Some asshole barfed into my amp and now it has this buzz and catches on fire if I leave it plugged in for too long, but I still like how it sounds so we recorded the whole album on it."
Reminds me of Phil Collins' In The Air Tonight. In addition to the hi-fi recording lines, there was basically a phone line designed to allow the sound engineer in the booth and the musician(s) to talk 2-way. Collins liked the effect it gave so they rigged up a way to pipe that audio into the desk. It gives his vocal performance a distant, numb feeling that reinforces the theme of antipathy. Because the equipment was worse.
I'll tell another one: The first time I ever heard The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, it was an mp3 my father downloaded. He managed to find a version that sounded like it was taped off of the radio and then the tape played into the PC capturing at a low bitrate. It's my definitive version of the track; the result sounds foggy and mysterious like it's being played from somewhere in the fog across the lake, it bolsters the legend of the piece.
Lo-Fi certainly certainly has an appeal all its own.
The reason why GBV's Vampire on Titus sounds the way it does is precisely because they treated sound quality as an afterthought. Makes it unlistenable to some, a diamond in the rough to others. To me, it's the greatest underground album of the '90s. As Jason Hernandez once so brilliantly put it: "[The album] conjures up mazes of crushed basement beer cans. [...] What keeps us coming back are all the solid tunes beneath the grime. This is great, unsettling cartoon-land psychedelic pop from front to back. [...] Several classics lurk in this murk."
Well you still need a decent pair of cans to properly hear the barf on the recording
My headphone's app has a DSP effect for puke and a slider to adjust the chunkiness.
exactly how the music was meant to be recorded and heard.
Is it? Every producer is different, every studio has different equipment and most importantly, everyone's ears are different. You can't possibly know what they intended.
The truth is that the correct way to listen to music is however you like it to hear it!
It absolutely is not. Albums aren't mixed to be listened to on studio monitors, they are mixed to sound good on consumer grade speakers because that's where people listen to music. Nowadays if you're listening on air pods that's probably the way it was meant to be listened to.
Yeah, not to mention the loudness war changing how things were mixed.
And like with most art, the artist doesn't get a say in how you appreciate it
every studio has different equipment
That's why flat monitors and sound dampening are important.
A lot of money is spent to try and make a neutral room.
I haven't fact-checked whether this quote is legit attributable to Alan Parsons but considering his production mastering pedigree it's believable. My dad used to sell audiophile equipment in the 80's and he would play Dark Side of the Moon and Alan Parsons Project to show off their hi-fi equipment. He said customers would put on their lower-quality records and it wouldn't sound as good (obviously), making their gear a harder sell.
EDIT: Parsons didn't say this, a web commenter did on an article about an interview with Parsons:
https://boingboing.net/2012/02/10/alan-parsons-on-audiophiles.html
I think we can trust Alan Parsons. The dude put a frickin laser on the moon!
Ahh yes. The Alan Parsons’ Project.
Whatever
He didn't manage to get one on a frickin' shark's head though did he!
Audiophiles get a lot of shit outside their little online dens and it's always the same cable memes everywhere (that's not even the gear most people sell their kidneys for, afaik), but if you're one and you have a shred of self-awareness, this kinda makes ya laugh out loud.
When I was in high school, late 90s, I dated a chick whose mom worked in a bakery. She started work at like 2AM and for some reason I don't remember, my gf had to go there and she asked me to go with her...sure fuck it (we pretty much ran free back then, different time) and we went down there. About a half dozen middle-aged women making batter and dough and whatever they did and their boss, the bakery's owner.
He was in his early 40s, and was like the love child of David Lee Roth and Otto the bus driver from The Simpsons. Cargo shorts, dirty sneakers, Motley Crue tshirt with a blond curly mullet and an earring in one ear. For being 2 in the morning he was wide eyed and he practically exploded as soon as I walked in the door "HEY MAN HOWS IT GOING?! WELCOME TO MY BAKERY!! YOU LIKE MUSIC?! WHAT KIND OF MUSIC DO YOU LIKE?! WANT TO SEE SOMETHING?!" I was honestly on the edge of fight or flight for a moment but despite the coke or just how fuckin excited he was to have a visitor, he seemed safe, so I was like "Yeah sure, what's up?"
Leads me back to the far corner of the bakery to his office. There are speakers fucking everywhere. In his office he has racks and racks of high end stereo equipment, and he immediately launches into all this technical detail about the setup that I'm just nodding through...."SO THE SIGNAL COMES DOWN HERE THROUGH THIS SPECIAL CABLES...100 BUCKS A FOOT BUT ITS SO WORTH IT...THIS TAKES THE SIGNAL AND MUXES IT WITH THE AMPLIFIER THAN PIPES IT TO THE FLUX CAPACITOR THEN..." and eventually he wraps up and says "CHECK THIS OUT!!!"
Pulls out one of those gold, high bitrate CDs, Peter Gabriel's So, slots it into a CD player that by itself was bigger and more complicated looking than my whole stereo at home with so many knobs and shit, and cranks it to what he called about 30%. Lights blinking, animated EQs, level meters at the ready...
Red Rain kicks in and literally takes my breath away, not just in awe, but I mean the goddamn bass was so heavy and so crystal clear that it disrupted the airflow in the entire bakery. The volume was beyond screaming over, it was like you were standing on fucking stage in an arena next to the amps, but not only was it ear-shatteringly loud, it was crystal clear. Like the level of detail and fidelity in the recording broadcasted all these little human moments in the playing that I never had heard before and my mom pretty much blasted that record all the time for most of the tail end of the 80s. After a minute of Red Rain he skips to track two, Sledgehammer and holy shit, that bass riff on that system...felt like when you're standing waist deep in the ocean and a wave comes up with enough force to rock you on your feet before you recover.
And through all this, these women in the bakery just doing their thing, not a care in the world. Clearly a common occurrence there, 2 oclock in the morning, deep in an industrial area with nobody for miles around, this dude and his like $100,000+ stereo and him just running around like a madman making whatever the hell they were making.
Anyways, definitely nothing I would ever spend that kind of money on, but man, it was hard as hell to go back home to my shitty $20 headphones and my discman after hearing what $100k worth of high end stereo equipment sounds like lol
The moral of the story is cocaine
or capitalism. People toiling at 0200 in the morning while some guy has a 100,000 dollar toy.
Dudes living the dream with a $100K stereo, a kilo of cocaine, and all the pastries he can eat. Not a bad life, I gotta say.
I don't think anyone with self awareness or love for sound or music would call themselves an audiophile tbf.
I actually think thats fine.
the problem starts when they thkink everyone else is doing it wrong.
Or when they help phone manufacturers enshittifying phones. They're the reason, why the "integrated DACs are too noisy" argument exists, and then they're telling you that unless you're willing to spend $500 on an audiophile DAC, $1000 on an external headphone amplifier, and $8000 on an audiophile-grade headphone, you'll be fine with cheap airpods.
I only know Alan Parsons from a quick reference in Austin Powers
He produced Dark Side of the Moon
https://youtu.be/Q6ZRGzx31iQ?list=RDQ6ZRGzx31iQ
You're welcome
I know it from 30 Rock
PETE: Oh, my god, you're gonna heckle him, like that time I invited you to see my cover band.
LIZ: Yeah, and today the world is better off without the Pete Hornberger Alan Parsons Project Project.
Well; he's right.
Buy good enough hardware and play some old music and it sounds old.
On plateau tier stuff, you just hear whatever it is. Including if the mastering was crap.
(Spoiler: I can't tell)
Man, tinnitus is such a money saver
Whenever anyone asks for a quick get rich scheme I always tell them either Psychic stuff or Audio. 😂
Anyone ever try combining both to make a gold-plated amethyst fiber toslink cable for $25000 that wards off 5G interference?
You can make any audiophile claim your system now sounds better by futzing around behind it for a while and claiming that you installed a "polarity aligned non-hertzian oscilation dampener" or whatever but in reality make no alterations other than turning the volume up one notch.
This is a well documented phenomenon, and reproducible with almost 100% accuracy. It turns out that humans are, objectively speaking, tin-eared gits. This expressly includes audiophiles.
As a hobbyist electronic musician with two decades of experience and also a really nice home theater system, I can confirm that this is accurate.
I use your music to avoid going to therapy
I‘d argue, that’s what one does when comparing equipment. But as soon as one has found the right equipment, the goal is still enjoying the music.
Exceptions are of course the kind of audiophile who constantly need newer and better equipment and especially the kind of audiophiles who buy „audiophile network switches“ so the bits of their tidal subscription come through „cleaner“.
Most of us just want to get the most out of our favourite songs.
The kind of audiophile that thinks vibrations on a fiber cable are going to distort sound is never going to be happy with the equipment.
Sell more cables to those people.
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