It's fashionable to dunk on audiophiles because many of their beliefs are silly and there are businesses that prey on them selling them "oxygen-free" cables and stuff like that. And some of their beliefs are auto-suggestion. But here's another way to look at it: some audio setups will sound better than others in your living room, because of a million variables you can't really control for. Maybe one manufacturer compensates for speaker characteristics in a different way and that accidentally works better with the speaker you have and the room you're in. Maybe it's the deficiencies of the amplifier that prevent resonance from a nearby bookshelf. Or a ceiling lamp. Or maybe they cause resonance that actually sounds good to you.
So yeah, audiophiles are in over their heads and tend to attribute near-mystical properties to individual electronic components, but the only tool they can rely on is trial and error. So if you can afford it, and if some of it seemingly sounds better... have fun? You're going to make mistakes, but that's not the end of the world.
Or they could buy equipment with active room conditioning like Dirac. I have Dirac receivers in two rooms that are absolutely terrible listening areas, and running the full Dirac calibration on the room creates a soundstage where you don’t hear individual speakers anymore.
But it’s much more fun to spend crazy money on magic rocks and snake oil that make your rich audiophile friends want their own magic rocks.
I would advise against systems that apply complex EQ curves on the outputs to compensate for distortions caused by the room. These systems can only optimize for a single listening position in the room (the sweet spot).
The problems are multiple;
1. When you move out of the sweet spot to listen anywhere else in the room, the music becomes distorted because you can are now hearing an EQ curve that is compensating for the sweet spot, but has nothing to do with the frequency response in the other listening positions.
2. These automatic systems tend to apply dozens of small EQ bands to the output, which smears the phase relationships of the record and dulls transient response. The feeling is of the record being mushy and dull.
3. These systems cannot account for time-domain ringing issues in the listening room. So a corrective EQ boost to compensate for a dip in the sweet spot will become a loud ringing at that frequency elsewhere in the room.
4. Corrective EQ cannot compensate for the deepest frequency nulls, no matter how much of a compensatory boost you make. A heavy handed boost to compensate this way will cause massive ringing elsewhere in the room.
I could go on.
These automatic room correction devices cause far more problems than they solve. There are ways to apply some EQ correction, but you will get 10x larger returns on performance by addressing acoustic issues introduced by the room, rather than trying to compensate on the speaker outputs.
Source: I design and build high-end recording studios for working audio professionals and tune speaker rigs for Grammy-winning artists.
Dirac won't be able to fully solve the room issues AKA it's not a replacement for proper room treatment, but at least it can reliably make the sound in the room not terrible.
Yes. In my experience, hi-fi enthusiasts almost entirely overlook the importance of addressing acoustic issues caused by the room. The ones that do, often do too little and in ways that are ineffectual.
Granted, the space is not easy for people to intuit on their own. It opens the door to a lot of terrible ideas that get propogated by people who don't know any better.
Source: I design and build high-end recording studios for audio professionals.
> Or they could buy equipment with active room conditioning like Dirac.
You realize that the pitch for this is basically the same as the pitch for magic pebbles? It's a cure-all box you put on the wire to make things sound better, for a low price of $1,500 or something like that.
I know enough about signal processing to know that magic pebbles probably work worse, but I can think of many reasons why it might not produce the audio you subjectively like better. I suspect it can't really even correct for many of the real-world issues you might have, because equalization doesn't fix echoes, resonance, etc.
In any case, it's a bit of a strawman, because most audiophiles are not buying pebbles in the first place. They're trying vacuum tubes instead of ICs, or are trying out different op-amps, or stuff like that.
> some audio setups will sound better than others in your living room, because of a million variables you can't really control for
Erin over at Erin's Audio Corner did a really nice video[1] recently which focuses on room treatment, but dives into some of these variables which gives a good insight in why something that works well for you might be horrible in my living room.
This presupposes that audiophiles are finding real improvements in sound quality in their cases.
They aren't. They aren't even seeing statistical noise. There is nothing an "oxygen-free" cable can do to your sound, regardless of your unique particulars. They will still insist it sounds better.
But trial and error is not the only tool. So many of these audiophile scams fall apart with even the most basic knowledge. You don’t need to be an audio engineer to understand that an expensive audiophile SATA cable won’t make your music sound any different. Analog components are less obvious, but it doesn’t take too much to know that speaker cable is a lot less important than the speakers, and special deoxygenated cables are a waste of money, or that there’s dozens or hundreds of miles of wire between your outlet and the power plant so spending a thousand dollars on a power cable for the last two feet is unwise.
One problem is that they will try to convince other people to follow in their obvious nonsense. Convincing someone to spend a bunch of money on an Ethernet cable to make their sound better is victimizing them.
It’s also just symptomatic of a general failure of critical thinking that can become properly dangerous. There’s little fundamental difference between “I swapped in an expensive USB cable and it sounded better so high end USB cable is worth it” and “my kid got his shots and then he got diagnosed with autism so vaccines caused it.”
So yeah, audiophiles are in over their heads and tend to attribute near-mystical properties to individual electronic components, but the only tool they can rely on is trial and error. So if you can afford it, and if some of it seemingly sounds better... have fun? You're going to make mistakes, but that's not the end of the world.