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Are you one of those Luddites who hated CDs because of the sampling, or born too late?

I once owned a first generation CD player. The audiophiles were not wrong. The analog recording process had evolved over decades to use microphones that were intrinsically too bright, to compensate for the LP recording process, which was intrinsically low-pass.

All the original CD transfers from the early 1980s are ludicrously shrill. On the other hand, every audio CD I've ever bought going all the way back to 1983 is still playable, but I have to manually equalize everything from the 1980s differently than what came later. The original CDs also ruined stereo staging, as perceived by a listener with sufficiently good speakers. The vast majority used a single DAC, which was multiplexed between the two channels (rendering the two channels permanently half a sample out of phase). In addition, the earlier recordings (especially when played on the earlier players) had a lot of structural quantization noise. Both of these last two problems disappeared with the advent of the 1-bit DAC, interpolated to 20-bit precision, combined with changes to recording technology which computationally dithered out the quantization error term.

Yes, there were plenty of idiots who blamed all these very real problems on the digital process itself. The digital process itself was a broken panacea before an additional decade of secret sauce was quietly supplied behind the scenes. And there is still a group of people out there who think that digital signals travel best over uni-directional, oxygen-free copper wire. But I wouldn't call these people Luddites. I'd call them nearly anything else—but not Luddites.

Some of these people now have hermetically-sealed listening rooms equipped with HEPA filters and helium recirculation pumps—because not even regular indoor air is pristine enough until fully ensconced in a Goldfinger money pit.

Another effect worth mentioned is the analogy to the transition from incandescent bulbs to modern LED lighting. If you've been used to the yellowish incandescent colour-temperature for decades and decades, the new whiter-whites seem peculiar. Then when you get used to the new whiter-whites and you go back to the yellow incandescents, it's now the incandescents that seem weird.

Some of the early CD problems was simply a change of customary colour temperature.

All of this was hotly contested back in 1983 and 1984. Some of the loudest voices in the room were the audiophiles with $30,000 of analog gear in their listening rooms, many of whom claimed to hear nuance that mere mortals couldn't detect.

There was one voice of reason in the wild-west wilderness of the early digital era, and this was the NRC psycho-acoustic research center in Ottawa, Canada.

National Research Council

Over the course of more than 20 years, the validity of these measurements has been confirmed by double-blind listening tests conducted in a nearby NRC listening room that approximates the size and furnishings of a typical living room. The program was guided by Dr. Floyd Toole, a Canadian physicist and psycho-acoustician who received his PhD in England in stereo localization, and continued his experiments at the National Research Council beginning in the 1970s. In his search for an accurate speaker with which to conduct his experiments, he discovered wild inconsistencies in speaker design and measurement, and an absence of controlled scientific research. Since he was already an audiophile, Toole invited several young Canadian speaker designers, including Axiom's Ian Colquhoun, to work with him in evolving new speaker measurements and listening tests (part of the NRC's mandate was to assist Canadian firms in product development).

The facility also tested audiophiles, and they gradually identified a group of people they called "golden ears", who really could hear more a

I never said I was neutral at all, so get your head out of wherever you've stuck it.

I never claimed the PS3 was worth $600 based on features it doesn't have, but on features it does in fact have, and if you don't want to buy one, then don't. I refused to pay more than $150 for an N64 when that came out and waited until it was that cheap before buying one for example.

That said, Linux is still free on the PS3, I know, I'm running it. Having an HDTV makes all the difference in the world, as does a good receiver with DD/dts support and at least a 5 point speaker system.

Do you think a set of speakers is worth $10,000? A lot of people do it would seem, so they'll keep selling just fine without you. They'll target a specific market and do just fine at it.

PS, since games cost $70 each already, do you really think Sony wants cheap people as primary users? No, didn't think so. Get a clue -- the price will come down some day, but for early adopters, the price was actually lower than it should have been (and almost everyone agreed on that on day 1, including on Slashdot).

You can have good sounding speakers, or you can have Bose. You can't have both. Here are a few links for more information:

• The Dumbing Down of Audio
• Placement Suggestions For Cube Speakers
• Ten Biggest Mistakes of Speaker and Home Theater Shopping
• FAQ about Bose home theatre products

Serious audiophile sites/publications ignore Bose equipment completely. Perhaps that is because they refuse to waste their time on stuff they know is junk, or it could be because Bose has been known to deploy lawsuits in response to bad reviews.

There are very, very few useful summaries. Try starting with this synopsis

Cheat-sheet of the some of the basic lingo I found frustrating:

Formats:

Interconnects:

It's amazing how seldom things match up with computer components:

"Posting anonymously " ... I don't think so. No matter. Thanks for responding.

I won't go tit-for-tat.

Your Paradigms are very nice speakers. Part of the reason Paradigm, and several other Canadian manufacturers like Energy, Szabo, PSB, Camber, were so successful is that the National Research Council of Canada built a big psychoacoustic research facility. Budget cuts have since seriously curtailed this facility but not before it helped spawn a number of outstanding manufacturers.

There's a tremendous amount of scientific psychoacoustic literature. My testimonial on the matter is as useless as yours. As far as I'm aware, there are no controlled experiments that show that anybody can tell the difference between correctly functioning CD players.

Note that this does not prove there is no difference. Science cannot prove this; nor can it prove that there aren't little green gremlins in my attic. But anything lacking scientific evidence or any justifiable theory qualifies as paranormal.

Large differences may indeed be obvious. For example, tube amplifiers sound different from solid state. That's because tube amplifiers introduce audible distortion within their operating limits. And considerably different distortion from solid state when both are operated outside their limits.

Some "audiophile" equipment introduces distortions that are similarly obvious. I know of two sorts of experiments to measure which is more accurate: one is to compare to the original source. Another, used heavily in analog-vs-digital, is to digitally record the output of the turntable, tube amp, whatever, and play back the recording against the original. Guess what? No percievable difference.

My comment on your Precious Paradigms was gratuitous sarcasm. It pertained to an irrelevant component of the discussion.

If you must know, I have a Brand-X DVD player, a Technics stereo (not surround-sound) amplifier, and Paradigm Studio Monitors. At least that's my main system.

I had the advantage of living near an excellent audio store here in Seattle, of which I availed myself before buying my audio gear. They have an excellent page on exactly how you should structure your listening tests: you should listen to the tune.

(The rest of this comment is a small rant; feel free to ignore it.)

I ended up buying my integrated amplifier from NAD (which has the added benefit of a humorous name), CD player from Marantz, and speakers from Axiom. (You can't imagine how good these inexpensive speakers are.) I aimed for decent sound in my office without spending too much money. I'm not an audiophile, but I also know a particularly obvious imperfection will bother me. The system is pretty well-balanced for the price.

After replacing my crapomatic integrated bookshelf stereo in the office with decent components, the issues of MP3/OGG/etc. became irrelevent. They're all crap, and your only options are separating less stinky crap from really stinky crap, if you're listening to generated waveforms coming from your internal DAC. My SGIs, which spank any PC with an internal sound card for fidelity and noise level, don't even match up.

I really want to try one of the USB-connected external DACs, because I like the ability to manage my entire CD catalog from one place, without having to switch CDs. However, I couldn't continue kidding myself that the sound from the computers was the least bit faithful.