This is my first post. Gee, it's great to be here.
Right. Now before I start, the following comments are intended to be neither incendiary nor mindless criticism and I warmly welcome any controlled, pleasant responses. Also, the start of the next paragraph is not trumpet-blowing, it's purely just me stating where I'm coming from.
I am an acoustician with a masters' degree in acoustical engineering. Like some of you, I am concerned with the high quality reproduction of recorded sound subject to qualitative and sometimes quantitative ideas of what is going on, i.e. the amount of energy present in each octave band, the psychoacoustic considerations introduced by phase differences between loudspeakers, the design of loudspeaker transducers and their respective room/enclosure coupling, the room-speaker interface and the room acoustics of the listening environment. I am immovably of the opinion that when it comes to reproduced sound, if it can't be measured, it is not a difference. And I absolutely totally, utterly refute any claim that listening to music more or less "deeply" makes any difference to anything except perception bias.
And so to the reason for this post (which I hope stirs up a few counter arguments because without being sarcastic, I really am interested to hear them). Why is it that audio companies so rarely actually provide test data quantifying the performance of their kit? If using whizzy cables that have been wound with some sort of mega-shield that somehow "confuses" RFI somehow gives you a better sound, why doesn't anyone ever produce something that shows, quite clearly and in 1/3 octave bands, the difference in output when it is used? Could it be that they can't and that this is all an aesthetics exercise? I suspect it is but I am quite happy to be proven wrong. In fact, I would like to be. Anyone?
Some of the megabucks kit that gets punted to high-spending hi-fi fans with the promise of improving their listening pleasure is sold on the basis on scientific (or often pseudoscientific) ideas that contradict much of what I spent five years studying. For example, if anyone can actually provide an explanation of why replacing the rubber feet of a CD player with a set of spiked feed lathed from a piece of oak actually provides any positive sonic, oscillatory or mechanical advantage when you're taking about a digital output device, I really would be keen to hear it. As I understand it, replacing a soft rubber element with a stiff wooden element actually increases transmissibility of vibration across the bandwidth of interest so if the purpose of such feet is to isolate the device, well, they simply won't work. And when you add this to the fact that the device is not turning out a complex continuous signal but merely a bunch of 0s and 1s, the whole thing seems farsical. Analogue devices might be a different story but again, I have yet to speak to anyone who can either explain why or prove that suspending their electronic equipment in a way that restricts the transmission of vibration due to footsteps, house vibration due to traffic or other everyday shaking makes the sound sound better. This goes for the majority of isolation devices, many of which seem to be very well disguised as 19" units carefully painted and adorned with logos. Again, if anyone can tell me where I can find anything that shows, in explicitly scientific terms, why this stuff *does* in fact work, do tell.
And cables - that's another one. Okay, I don't want to get even more boring here because obviously this topic has already been done to death many times over, but supposed increases in "rhythmic tightness" etc would seem to be to be all about psychoacoustic bias rather than an actual improvement in sonic output.... if not, why can't anyone ever actually prove it? There is plenty of test equipment that could easily be used to indicate, quite clearly and definitively, whether the system output with cable A is better than that with cable B but it would seem that not even the majority of manufacturers are bothered about it.
Finally, two tiny gripes. Firstly, if people are so serious about obtaining high fidelity reproduction, why do so few people ever bother to hire an acoustic consultant??
Secondly, since so much of the moaning is in connection with defeating RFI, why isn't hi-fi kit balanced most of the time?
There, my little tirade has come to an end. Why am I wasting everyone's bandwidth like this? Well, because I honestly haven't seen anyone else asking for hard proof that all this kit works and it seems like someone should start asking.
I thank you.
