On Audio Equipment and Price

 Audio equipment is a challenging segment for consumers.  

With computers, for example, you can read a spec sheet and get a good idea of what your money will buy you, or at least which system from a list of similar systems would be the "best" according to come criteria.

For example, if you wanted to run a video game or video encoding application, you could find benchmarks that will state the performance in average frames per second for various systems.  Knowing the prices, you could calculate frame per second per dollar spent, and decide if you want the absolute best performance, the best value, or something in-between.  

Sure, even with computers, there are various "soft" factors, like how solid the case feels, how pretty it looks, the overall "build quality", etc., but for the most part, it's clear which feature are hard vs. soft - objective vs. subjective.  

There are also quality of life features such as battery life, touchpad size, ruggedness, and so on which might be worth different amounts to different people, but most of those can be quantified as well.  

Nobody says anything even remotely like "If you use this wooden power switch, the PC will get a 10% speed boost", because it would be easy to prove wrong.  Features that are just for aestetics are marketed as just that - nobody buys an RGB gaming keyboard thinking that the colors maske their computer go faster, or even that the lights will make their keys register more accurately.  Amazingly enough, though, some people do believe that wooden knobs will somehow help their amplifier produce better audio.  The improvements are usually described in subjective terms, using words like "verve" and "punch", without any numbers.  If you think can hear a difference then that is proof that there must be one, and if you can't hear the difference, then you must be an uneducated slob who can't appreciate the finer things in life.  

Appealing to one's ego to get them to spend more is not a new trick, but it is one that I don't approve of.  I work hard, and I earn a decent living.  I enjoy music, and don't mind spending my money on good equipment.  I don't mind paying more to buy from companies with a good track record in quality, customer service, and human rights.  Further, I don't mind paying more for goods produced in high wage companies.  

I don't particularly want to pay more for aesthetics, but I fully understand that some people do, so if a company wants to sell diamond encrusted audio equipment, I'm all for it - just don't claim that it affects the sound.  

In other words, I don't want to pay for snake oil!

The obvious solution to all of this would be rigorous scientific measurement.  The problem with this is that it hasn't really worked out very well.  For example, there are lots of web sites with frequency response graphs for speakers and headphones these days.  There are two problems with such graphs:

1. The graphs only show what is different, not what is better.  

2. Even if you assume a Harman curve or flat line response is better, evryone has their own preferences.

There are also other scientific measurements that can be done, such as things like signal to noise ratio - but this starts off as a completely well intentioned valid measurement and devolves into another test of ego.  Paying an extra $5k in order to get an improvement of 0.0001% in your THD is the equivilant of paying an extra $500 to get the more expensive iPhone with the limited edition color - except at least you can see the difference in colors.  

The problem is that objective testing can help with certain things right now, but it doesn't cover everything.  The reality is that I can have two headphones with very similar frequency response graphs - but I may like one much better than the other.  Why?  Who knows.  I tent to like headphones that allow me to hear all of the separate instruments in a song very clearly, even when the song is very busy - but I haven't seen an objective test for this "separation" yet that gives a number.  Other people talk about "Sound stage", but again I have yet to see a way to put a number on it to make it easy to compare different models.

Another issue is that for some categories of product, if you want something good, but you don't know much about the subject matter and don't want to invest too much time in learning, you can simply throw money at the problem.  For example, if you want the best microwave oven, you can probably just go to the store and buy one of the more expensive ones and be assured that it is among the best - and that the cheaper oens are cheaper for a reason.  

This doesn't work well in all cases, but it especially doesn't work in audio.  Audio equipment seems to be a black hole where money goes to die.  It would seem that manufacturers can charge whatever they want for any product, provided they use the right buzz words.  Granted, this might be true for any field, but usually the buzz words wear off eventually because there needs to be some actually effacy.  

For example, I could sell a fancy new microwave oven with lots of buzz words, but at the end of the day if it actually doesn't cook any better, people will realize it.  

I could go on an on about the subdle improvements to the texture and taste of the food cooked with my oven, but in most cases, people would simply say "Well, I can't taste the difference, and even if there is a small difference, it's not worth paying 30% more for!" - yet for some reason when the same situation appears in the audio world, there is a set of people who either believe they can hear a difference that isn't there, or just don't care.  

If sound quality was all the same, and all differences were just placebo effect, then I would be happy to buy the cheapest things that are manufactured in a durable and responsible way for decent wages.  

The problem is that there are actually differences in audio quality.  A great example would be the Sennheiser in-ear monitors.  I have tried the IE 200, the IE 600, and the IE 900.  They all sound very different.  Why?  I couldn't tell you.  What I do know if I like the IE 600 the best.  In fact, I prefer it by far to items that cost much, much more.  

In my personal taste, the IE600 loses narrowly to the Sony IER-M9 (which costs quite a bit more) - but it is not a simple matter of better or worse, they sound very different.  For that reason, I could see wanting to own both.  What's more, the IE600 is a simple design that just uses one dynamic driver (speaker).  The M9 uses five BA elements, five!  It must be better, right?  But does it sound five times better than the IE 600?  No. Maybe it's "diminishing returns" or perhaps BA elements are by design more limited in frequency range, so more of them are necessary.  Fair enough, but why does the IE 600 sound better to me than the IE 900?  Sure the more expensive model should sound better?  For that matter, even if they sounded exactly the same, one would think the placebo effect would lead me to believe that the IE 900 sounds better because it costs more.  Not in this case, though.  Worse yet, 64 Audio sells an 18 BA model (the U18t) - that should sound way better than the IE600 or m9, right?  I mean come one, eighteen!  But... no, not to my ears. 

This is all subjective talk coming from a single person, which is anecdotal at best, but that is kind-of the point.  Everyone will have their own preferences.  The more important point is that just buying the most expensive or fancy sounding thing (IEMs, in this case) doesn't even guarantee  the best sound for you, much less the best value.  

Think about it, I am telling you that a $675 pair of IEMs sounded better to me than a $3,000 pair.  You might strongly disagree, but I still highly doubt that if you were to try 10 random IEMs and plot their sound quality as judged by you against the price on a graph that you would end up with any sensible line.  Even if you include other factors like comfort, fit, and aesthetics, it's just seems to me to be a random jumble of data points.  

In any other product category, you expect the lowest priced items to be poor quality and poor value.   As you move up in price, you also move up in quality, and typically in value.  At some point  when you get to the high end of price, you get dimishing returns on value, until the only value you might get would be bragging rights.  

Ballpoint pens, for example, follow this well known curve well.  a $0.25 pen is likely to leak everywhere, run out quickly, leave a blotchy trail when writing, use ink that smudges, and half of the pens in the box may not even write to begin with.  A $2 pen might still feel cheap and smudge a little, but it should at least work.  A $20 metal pen might be a quality item - something you want to keep, and thus it feels good to write with and has replacible ink cartridges.  A $500 pen made out of diamond encrusted Rhinosaurous tusk, though, doesn't write any better than the $20 pen, and any additional "value" it has is just as some sort of misguided status symbol.   The point here is that it should at least write as well as the $20 pen.  I've found that in the world of audio products, sometimes the more expensive ones are worse than the cheaper ones - or at least I prefer them less.  

The problem is that I can't always explain exactly why I like something more or less, and even if I can, there aren't really reliable objective meaasurements for everything that a listener might value available in an easy to use database like there are with computer benchmarks.  Different sites may make objective measurements for some things, but not others.  For sites that do provide overall numbers, those may often reflect the weightings of different factors as determined by the reviewer.  

Other reviews are siimply qualititative fluff.  

At the end of the day, I have to say I believe in the following:

1. Don't assume expensive = better, at least in audio quality.  This is especially true onc eyou move above mid-priced equipment.  

2. Don't assume a brand is always good just because they have produced some decent items in the past.

3. If you can't hear a difference, don't pay more.  Maybe there is no difference.  Maybe there is a difference you can't hear- be happy and save some cash.

4. If you can hear a difference, think about if it might be placebo effect.  Even if it's not, if the difference is minor and the cost difference is large, then you might considering investing your money elsewhere.  

5. In my personal experience, chassis knobs and speaker wire don't matter.  If silver and gold laced solder matter at all, it's not something I can discern, even with an expensive amplifier and $5,000 headphones.  I don't believe that oxygen free matters either, electricity will travel just fine down coat hangers and lamp wire.  These are all things that some people swear they can hear, and I won't call them liars, but I also strongly believe that they would fail a double blind A/B test.  

6. Then there are the things that don't matter even theoretically - as in there is no possible mechanism of action.  These include special ethernet cables and audiophile network switches.  Anyone who thinks these will help doesn't have basic computer literacy.  That's okay, but then they should trust those of us who do.  I've also heard the opinion that FLAC is somehow worse than WAV.  That is silly in the extreme.  FLAC is lossless, that means that when you play a FLAC file, it reproduces the original WAV file exactly.  The only possible scenario where playing a FLAC file could result in worse audio than a WAV file would be if you were playing it on a very, very poorly shielded audio source, and the extra processing of decoding the FLAC file back into PCM caused some digital noise.  If you equipment is that bad, then the WAV file is going to sound bad too.

7. I don't completely 100% but the argument that "HD Audio" is BS, but it certainly isn't as much better aas it's marketed to be, simply because humanns have limited hearing.  even is 44khz16 bit isn't enough, 48khz/20 bit should be.  Computers tend to handle things in bytes, so 24bit is commonly used.  This is a bit wasteful of space, but it's fine.  32 bit is just silly, though.  likewise, 96khz is a bit overkill, but if your equipment is certified for High Resolution audio, then it shouldn't be harmful at least.  Going to higher sampling rates than that is again just wasting bandwidth.  If you claim to hear the difference between 24 bit and 32 bit audio, I promise you that is the placebo effect at work.  Likewise, even if you can hear the difference between 48khz and 96khz, it's not really a useful difference because musical instruments don't operate in the 24khz - 48khz range.  Again, unlike some others, I won't claim that "more is worse", but paying more for differences that can't be reproduced or heard is not a useful way to spend money.  It's kind of like paying for a monitor that can display 200 billion shades of color instead of only 100 billion shades of color.  Moving from Monochrom to 4 color or 16 colors was a huge step up.  Moving from 16 colors to 256 colors, and then into the millions of colors we have now was fantastic, but once we exceed our ability to perceive, we are just throwing money into the fire.  

8. I advocate for lossless formats for purposes of future proofing.  It used to be that you needed lot bit rate codecs like mp3 in order to store your music library.  Back when expensive hard drives only held a few gigabytes of data, this made sense.  We live in a world where a high quality 256GB micro SD card costs less than $30, and can store hundreds of CDs worth of data without lossless compression.  I can't really tell the difference between 360kbps AAC and FLAC, but I can very eaily tell the difference between old poorly encoded 128kbps MP3 files and either of those - so I do suggest you upgrade your music library to FLAC or at least modern high bitrate OGG or AAC if you can.  If you use FLAC, you can always create lossy versions in the format de jure later on.  

9. Casette Tape, Vynal Records, and Tube amps all have objectively worse Signal to noise ratios than any modern technologies - so they are worse in the sense of accurate reproduction of sound quality, and that difference is within the range of quality that most (or at leastmany) people can hear.  If you are paying extra for a tube amplifier or vynal records, don't delude yourself, you are not getting more accurate sound.  On the other hand, if you like the less accurate sound or the aesthetic, then who is anyone to tell you that you're wrong?