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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?
I beg to differ. Static and Magnetic planar speakers, as well as conventional voice-coil and paper cone speakers are vastly better today than fifty years ago. Stronger magnets, stiffer, lighter cones, better crossovers, all add up.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Although I am a fan of the iPod (and Apple Computer) there is nothing new here: Some years ago (about 16) I spent a couple of days at Stevie Wonders studio (Wonderland) and was stunned to see a couple of CD players that had been custom built to have tubes hooked up to them. It was explained to me that this "new fangled CD technology" sounded too "crisp" and that playing the signal back through tubes warmed things up considerably. I never would have been able to tell the difference until they hooked them up to some seriously high end speakers and lo and behold, you really could tell a difference. Unfortunately I do not remember who build these CD players, but I seem to recall a $20k price tag.
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So you are saying that an mp3 on an ipod played via FM out of my old dad's radio sounds better than the ipod on it's own. Or maybe you are just trying to sell old radios?
Actually, plasma is the best driver, and that was used in commercial speakers back in the 1970s (I'm talking about Hill's Plasmatronic tweeters which use a DC glow discharge, not the crappier RF corona discharge designs you find more often). Take a look at the second set of response graphs on this guy's page for performance of slightly modified ones. With new technologies (MHCD instead of simple cathodes), even better is possible, with full range drivers not as unreasonable as might have seemed back then. Unfortunately Hill used helum plasma, so a helium tank was necessary. I'm working on DIY air plasma drivers, and the MHCD method makes a lot of difference. The only real problem is efficiency, as thermal relaxation is non-linear and that becomes a problem unless most of the power is bias rather than audio frequency modulation.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
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.
Sound with even harmonic distortion is said to sound warm, that is 2f,4f,6f etc.
Sound with odd harmonic distortion sounds harsh to our ears, that is 3f,5f,7f etc.
Valves usually produce even harmonic distortion, transistors usually produce odd harmonic distortion.
Cheers
John
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.
And yes, audiophiles do quite a bit of blind testing. Or at least scientist audiophiles do. Unfortunately, this is not true. Far too few people do blind testing, and when they do, they are often unable to tell the difference between electronics. There is a guy named Richard Clark who will give anyone $10,000 if they can tell the difference between two car audio amplifiers that have their levels and distortion matched exactly. I think you have to guess correctly 9 out of 10 times, and you can compare anything -- tube vs. solid state, $8,000 McIntosh vs. $29 WalMart, etc. Thousands have tried, and no one has succeeded yet. Stereophile magazine did a similar study several years ago, and their participants could only tell the difference between two amps 52% of the time, well within a margin of error. The Tice Clock (http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&i e=UTF-8&q=%22tice+clock%22) is a $10 Radio Shack wall clock that was sold for $500 because it was modified to control the quantum behavior of electricity and thereby improve sound. Seriously. Plug it into the room with your stereo, and your music instantly becomes more open and your soundstage gains depth. Of course, the inventors have no scientific explanation of how they control the quantum behavior of electrons. Nonetheless, thousands of listeners and professionals heard a difference. Psychoacoustics are a powerful force.
This is not to say that source units (like an iPod) and amplifiers make no difference. Tube amps provide a degree of euphonic distortion that give them their "warmth". But cables, power cords, etc -- I'd appreciate it if you could link to one blind test that shows a noticable difference between these.