Slashdot Mirror
Aural Heaven -- iPod And Analog
Ant writes This Wired News article says there is aural magic in the combination of the very old with the very new: iPod through an old radio or tube-driven amplifier gives it a special warmth and atmosphere. '50-year-old Takeyuki Ishii insists the antique equipment creates an atmosphere that has been forgotten. The softer tones ease listeners and make them feel warm and relaxed.'"
..then it's true for him. Nothing is more subjective than audio quality.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I wonder if this desire for that "warm, soothing" sound will die when those that grew up with it do as well. Is the attraction anything more than conditioning and sentimentality? Sure, a lot modern digital music could be called cold and clinical, but as a perfect representation of what the artist intended to create, is there really anything missing?
It is SFV (stupid fashion victim) syndrome wrapped in pseudo-science language. No more, no less.
And the pseudo-science it comes wrapped in, invariably shows massive ignorance of the real science. It invariably boils down to "uh, you can't see it on any osciloscope or signal analyzer, but transistors do this and that evil thing to your signal." Well, guess what? If it's some mystical thing that can't be measured or detected in any way, it's no more than some poor man's religion.
And it's still ignoring that nowadays it's usually paired with transistors nevertheless. E.g., that signal went first through the transistors in the iPod. Whatever evil satanistic marks those transistors put on the signal, it's already there before it even reached the tubes.
And you talk about 8 bit or 16 bit or 24 bit quantization, which is a good topic to bring up, since they're still playing music from an iPod. It's still quantized, and it still has the artefacts from lossy MPEG or AAC encoding.
Or I've seen at least one mobo which paired an el-cheapo crap on-board sound chip with a tube, and suddenly it was audiophile equipment. As if there was some _magic_ in the tube that goes back on the causality line and also stops the sound chip from doing a crappy noisy job.
The whole bullshit is that passing _any_ signal through a tube magically makes it better. Suddenly it no longer matters that it's quantized at 8 bits, _and_ lost a ton of harmonics and gained new ones due to lossy encoding. The magical +5 tube knew what the sound should have been like, and erased all those artefacts. Basically turning lossy compression into lossless compression.
That's high magic, folks. ('Cause science and technology it sure ain't.) Don't try it at home. Only high elves certified by the Mages' Guild can infuse tubes with that kind of arcane power.
Which is all that this is. People wanting real hard to believe in basically magic. Magical tallismans which solve this or that by magic. Just because they're there.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Don't get me wrong. I agree with most of your post. Just running a signal through tubes doesn't make it better.
But...
You go way too far when you ridicule people who say they hear differences that can't be seen on instruments.
It's just wrong to couch this in terms of "If it's some mystical thing that can't be measured or detected in any way, it's no more than some poor man's religion." Fact is, when someone says they hear a difference, the "thing" IS being detected. The difference IS being measured. It's being detected by the listener's ears. It's being measured on a scale defined by that listener.
The problem is that human ears are not calibrated against any objective standard. In the best cases, they are the finest detectors of subtle differences in sound available to us, far surpassing the sensitivity of the best mikes and racks of measuring equipment. They are also, unfortunately, completely non-standard in their reaction to input, subject to variation depending on a host of external and internal factors, and their results are not repeatable from instrument to instrument. That doesn't mean they are insensitive. That doesn't mean they don't actually hear a difference. It just means that the difference may or may not be obvious to another listener and may or may not be meaningful to anyone except the person listening at that moment.
I have no doubt that if you have good hearing and a love of music, you could listen to a particular orchestra play a particular piece in a particular venue many times over the course of years. That piece could then be recorded by that orchestra in that venue. As a fully-qualified judge, then, you could listen to the recordings through tubes and solid-state, planar and box speakers, etc., and be able to tell not only which ones were different and which you prefer, but which recordings and playback setups are more accurate. Just using your ears. And your results may not track in any meaningful way with the measurements produced by that bench full of instruments.
In that case, I'd consider the conclusions of the qualified listener to be far more authoritative than those of the technician who simply looks at the output of test instruments.
To translate to a more general case: By far, when everything is right, you'll be better guided in your choices of audio gear if you use your ears rather than just look at specs.