The home audio market has moved on, leaving this consolidation in its wake.
There is something wonderful about listening to physical music recordings without using a screen. It's like cursive writing, or knowing how to drive a stick-shift. But barring a Carrington event, or some moderate-to-severe internet catastrophe, its hard to motivate the utility of this kind of "middle path asceticism". "Shed no tears," the futurists say, since not too long ago most if not all "educated people" knew Greek and Latin, how to use a slide-rule, and how to saddle and ride a horse, and we don't particularly miss those things. I would argue caution, not least of which because this argument is too closely aligned with the market forces that know it's far more profitable to charge you per action than per object. It's always hard to know if we lost something important, or shucked off a barnacle holding us back, until we're looking back. I believe there is a sweet spot between the endless toil of "no technology" and the profound ignorance (and helplessness) that comes from putting everything behind a screen. I suspect that the hi-fi gear between the 1970's and 2010 will continue to be collectible for this reason for at least 100 years.
My pet theory is that stupidly powerful rare-earth magnets, and class D amplifiers are the two main things that killed "hifi" type audio. No more black magic needed messing with transistors and op-amps on bespoke circuit boards that used to be the moat for these oldschool brands.
My Alexa Echo Dot 4 sounds better than my home audio setup from the 90s. Now, a fair comparison would be to a modern floor speaker with modern magnets and amps, but I'm too old for this :-)
> My Alexa Echo Dot 4 sounds better than my home audio setup from the 90s
I have a hard time believing this… yes today’s small devices sound better than small devices ever did. A lot of work went into that because people appreciate the reduced footprint. Also, those speakers are super cheap in comparison to the budget people would allocate to their stereo setups in the day.
But I’ve never heard a small speaker sound better than a 1970ies or later hifi amp + speakers from a decent brand. With big speakers you can reproduce all these frequencies without physics tricks. The sound is more laid back and the soundstage fills the room.
All the recent engineering has gone into making speakers small, cheap and wireless, like in the 90ies it went into creating multi-channel audio, but I would say stereo sound quality, as used for popular music, already peaked in the 70ies / 80ies.
Of course you can still get those quality hifi components today, or even better than that, but the median household is not listening on that and I’d wager has worse sound today than was the norm in the physical media era.
In the 80s and 90s the world moved to 6.5-or-less bookshelves which generally struggle with bass compared to a lot of modern smaller stuff. Meanwhile a lot of music started using low bass a lot more.
In addition to this, front baffle width correlates with efficiency, i.e. modern narrow front baffle speakers need a more powerful amp, combine that with the necessary smaller bass drivers and you see why most modern speakers have crap bass
1. In the modern family, everyone wants to listen to something different. In the family of the 1960's to this was not possible, because too many kids, not room for so many big speakers, etc, etc.
2. Now, the speakers are there to carry the audio, status is derived from the size of the video screen. The screens crowded out the speakers. And you need 5 or more speakers now, which makes a set of big speakers exceptionally unfashionable.
3. Speaker size is inversely related to potential big box store volume because of the huge warehouses and sequesterd listening rooms that large speaker retailing would require. Buying without listening first makes does not fit with the idea of spending big on something that you need because your are elite afficianado.
4. The middle class is dead. In the 1960's, 1970's, or early 1980's, a 'good' stereo would cost about a month's net income for a median income worker. Today the good stereo still costs about a month's net income for a median income wroker, but the median median income worker is two weeks net pay away from homelessness or moving back in with his parents. And in that supposed golden age of stereo, the 'good' stereo was expected to last about 10 years and many of them did. Some are still working, many have been in the repair shop several times and keep going. Today, no one expects anything to outlast its warranty by much (except maybe a car), and competent repairs for anything more complicated than shoes are a not easy to come by.
That's a very pessimistic take. I recently sold a Sonos connect - about 15 years old if not older and working as well as when it was new. I have a Google home max speaker, 8 years old, works flawlessly. We have a pair of B&W speakers from 2001 or so - got the speaker insulation replaced, otherwise everything great. And a 5.1 set from Logitech from 2005 also works without issues - the difficult part is to only make sure the PC has the right outputs, but even that is moot with USB sound cards.
We also have some cheap monitor speakers, they work fine after 7 years.
The opamp back in the days were pretty terrible. NE5532 was the king of audio opamp for decades until the early 2000s.
Modern Class D are built on advanced semiconductor processes (they are considered legacy node in the eye of Hacker News's primary audience. They are at least a lot better than the early days in terms of performance in analog domain.) When an IC company spend a lot of R&D money to develop Class D amp, they for sure exhausted what they can do before they tape out. That results in the superbe performance of modern Class D amplifier.
There is still oppertunities in getting analog Class AB type of amplifier working better, such as adding motional feedback control sensor-less or with sensor. KEF recently released a motional feedback soundbar with back-EMF voltage as sensor. It sure improve the sound quality for a soundbar. Although physics is physics, one cannot make a 1 inch speaker sounds like a subwoofer, but motional feedback sure can make 10 speakder sounds like a 15 inch subwoofer.
Sound reproduction is not just a flat frequency response. Perfect reproduction of phase information generates wider 3D sound stage, without the need of DSP to fake it.
Speaker box design advanced dramatically since the 90s too. The start of it was then - Bose made a lot of noise with compact-for-the-time stuff - but it's really advanced since then. Compare the sound quality of a laptop then with a larger MacBook now. And when you can get decent sound at decent volume out of a small package a lot of people don't want to give up a ton of space for extremely-good sound at high volume.
Modern sound stuff doesnt use any dacs, its more of BLDC motor controller bolded to a speaker in a tiny box powered by DSP making it sound great and full of deep base.at any volume.
> My Alexa Echo Dot 4 sounds better than my home audio setup from the 90s.
I think it is more like a "good enough" sound. There are still are hifi-enthusiasts, but I think most people don't see the reason to spend a fortune just to listen to music. Mostly, because people don't even know what a difference a good hifi setup brings to your life or they just don't care.
I always wanted to try building the "World's best speakers"[1] by Technical Ingredients just for fun and education, but in the end I did not care enough to spend the time and money.
40 or more years ago, the big hifi brands were racing to get total harmonic distortion down to 0.05% or less. The average person is unlikely to complain if it is 5.00%.
There was once a hifi show at which one of the most revered hifi reviewers gave a talk and played some samples for the audience. Almost all the audience noticed at once that his samples had a defect, a loud high-frequency tone somewhere around 10,000 Hz. He didn't hear it.
The concept of good enough has won. Many consumers still think that HD radio is high-definition. It is hierarchical digital, a standard developed to be good enough that most people would not complain. And, speaking of HD, lots of HD TV buyers were perfectly happy even though they were unaware that they have not got their TV producing HD pictures.
Digital music through digital systems has a lot of glorious qualities. But listening to records through my tube marantz or zenith amplifiers sounds way better to me. Tell you what, I’ll set up my Smaart rig (rational acoustics) in the room and see if I can find evidence :)
Good class Ds are not that cheap. Hypex and now Purifi based amps are good but not what I’d call cheap. Evenso lots of people like AB amps and some even like the old A amps fooling around with their “valves”.
My SMSL SA-50 sounds an order of magnitude (in price) better than my Marantz PM68 and costs an order of magnitude less - in other words, it sounds fantastic and it was cheap. Some of the early carriers of class D hype (Tripath based) were even cheaper. A good chip and a bunch of quality passives don't need to be that expensive.
So I'm more concerned about Samsung owning B&W (there is no real substitute for good speakers) than Marantz and Denon. It seems like really good amps can be made by sticking to class D chip application notes these days.
There are tons of great speakers and speaker companies, and I think B&W is very, very overrated. Check out the monitor audio gold line. I have two pairs of their floorstanding, and prefer them, unreservedly, to the b&w 702cs that I tried first.
The accepted wisdom in the audiophile community is you get what you pay for, i.e. a good implementation of any given amp topology remains a good implementation regardless of the topology. Once you get to a certain $$$ range, the sound of tube amps and transistor amps (and class D amps I might add) begins to converge.
Maybe but plenty of AB tests have shown that they can't actually hear the difference they talk about. Those who are aware of this and objective save a lot of money by buying quality - still a lot of dollars but not the most you can spend.
The audio business has merged with the "home theatre" business. The pursuit of audiophile quality was always a boutique/niche market.
> listening to physical music recordings without using a screen
You don't need a screen to listen to good audio reproduction. FLAC does of course need a digital device and storage. But there are huge advantages to FLAC over "physical music recordings". You can store FLAC on a USB key and plug it into a modern amplifier to listen. If you must have a spinning wheel (get it?) you can burn FLAC to an optical disc and play that in a player without much "screen". But even optical discs are artifacts of the past.
> It's like cursive writing, or knowing how to drive a stick-shift.
Handwriting is much more profound for personal development and education. The US Constitution, for example, is a hand-written document.
For transportation and tools, technology and innovation will change how people live. Those who remember the past recall how folks lived with trolley buses, ice-boxes, adjusting "rabbit ears", and dialing rotary telephones.
Fortunately we can all watch old films in our home theatres. (^;
Although on the other hand, if you listen with AirPods Pro streaming 5.1, you get a better surround sound and audio experience than 99.9% of speaker setups. For just a couple hundred bucks.
Even beyond the audio quality and spatial processing, the noise reduction is magic that speakers can't do. It's amazing how much more detail you can hear when the sound of the HVAC is removed, the hum of the refrigerator, the rumble of traffic. Not to mention the total elimination of sonic reflections off your walls and ceiling that muddy the sound from speakers, unless you're applying treatments.
>AirPods Pro streaming 5.1, you get a better surround sound and audio experience than 99.9% of speaker setups.
The audio experience itself, sure - "Want high-end audio without breaking the bank and remodeling your room? Get a pair of decent headphones." has been sound (heh) advice for decades.
The surround sound part, though? Eh, not quite yet. I mean, on paper, they have the ingredients - (personalized) HRTF and head tracking. But in practice I found even the personalized HRTF somewhat underwhelming, and knowing what's possible from the VR world the gap is still significant (IMO the Valve Index off-ear solution is still the pinnacle in immersive positional audio without surround speakers, even without personalization of the HRTF, I haven't really tested the AVP implementation yet, though) - which leads me to second, IMO even larger issue:
Extremely limited usage scenarios. For the living room, it's basically just supported Apps/content on AppleTV. Compared to the reality of a standard AVR (or even just Soundbar) plus surround speakers setup - take any multichannel input (LPCM, DD, DTS MA, Atmos you name it) and output surround sound - that's...just not a substitute.
And that's not even getting into latency issues with gaming/interactivity (a general BT issue, though, at least it's slowly improving...).
> The surround sound part, though? Eh, not quite yet.
I dunno -- I find it much better than actual speakers.
With Atmos on the AirPods Pro, I can pinpoint the location of an instrument within about 5°. It's astonishing.
Whereas with the traditional 5.1 speaker setup... you definitely get the sense of center vs. side, and kind of a couple of "zones" in between, but I can never place the location of an instrument or sound as accurately as I can with the AirPods Pro. It's a much more diffuse directionality, rather than "it's coming from exactly there".
Plus, of course, I get to take my surround-sound music and audio everywhere. Not just my living room. So I don't know what "extremely limited usage scenarios" you're talking about? I mean, yes it needs to come through an Apple device, but that's all my media anyways.
Not sure what you're saying -- you know that in-ear sealed headphones (like AirPods Pro) have phenomenal bass? There's no leakage path, and no destructive interference issues. All the issues with driving bass in speakers just... don't apply with sealed headphones. It's basically perfect bass.
The only thing you don't get is the full-body shaking sensation that massive speaker bass provides. But that's not even audio. That's more like amusement-park ride stuff. (Not to say it isn't great too.)
I mean, tell me what you think of the frequency response below 200 Hz here:
I have AirPods Pro (and like the B&O EX much better, personally), but I wouldn't use them for bass-heavy stuff even compared to over-the-ear ones, let alone a system with big woofers. It's just not the same as filling a room, and not just in an "amusement-park" way.
I mean, it's whatever you enjoy, but it's definitely got nothing to do with the frequency response or clarity.
If you want to "fill the room" for bass-heavy stuff that's more of a psychological thing.
I personally like the bass-heavy stuff way more on the AirPods Pro precisely because it's so much clearer, without the muddiness. Because there's nowhere near the level or distortion, reflection, etc. you get with room speakers.
I always wondered if we could replicate the physicality of vinyl / CDs, games ROM etc. through memory cards (like SD Cards) in an enclosure with a label on it with a player made on purpose for them. This way we get physical media, easy to create yourself, not too expensive, in a digital way
The thing with physical media that is often missed is - it never interrupts you for an OS update, you never lose content due to lapsed subscription, artists/labels can't revoke songs, theres no controller app that can be broken by updates, you don't have to worry about your speakers aging out of firmware updates.
You just put the media in and press play.
Sure having infinite streaming libraries is cool yes, but people listen to the same stuff or slowly expand listening habits.
$10-30/mo for life ends up being a lot more money than just buying what you actually enjoy and listening to radio/stream like stuff to sample new.
The streamers are slop slingers now. Ironically I have found that YouTube's recommendation engine is 100x better for me than Spotify/Apple/Tidal ever were, and I don't even pay for Youtube, lol. Or sites like Discogs for more engaged music discovery.
> you never lose content due to lapsed subscription
You do however lose content to phyiscal damage or just misplacement.
I love CDs, but I've also lost some of my favourite CDs to damage or loss.
Yes, the quality of recommendations is generally terrible, but the equivalent in the physical media age, walking into a CD store and hearing something you love, just sadly isn't coming back.
Spotify etc are still unreasonably cheap for what they deliver, it costs the same as a couple of albums a month.
But another problem with online streams is that they are increasingly not the original music. More and more are remastered, autotuned, rebalanced to sound good on a phone speaker or earbuds. This can probably be done largely with AI now. A vinyl album or even a CD or local mp3 file is what it is when it was recorded, and will stay that way as long as it lasts.
To be fair, the stereo versions of The Beatles recordings badly needed remastering. Lots of things were hard-panned. They treated the original stereo mix as some novelty, and put all their focus and effort into the mono mix.
Most people outside their teenage years, unless music is their passion, are not actively engaging with the streaming services enough to consume 2 albums of new content monthly.
The old iTunes pay per song / album model with 30+ second previews is arguably a better model than where we’ve landed.
I beg to differ. Most people I know use streaming for automated relevant recommendations. I’m listening to Tidal’s daily discovery playlist on most days and most of it is meh, but I make a note of a new piece every other day or so.
I'm not sure who is the outlier but I'm like the GP says. Was into music and stereo systems as a teen and into my 20s. Now, I just listen to whatever is on the radio in the car. Even streaming is too much hassle most of the time. I will go to YouTube music occasionally when I get the urge to listen to a specific song, but that's pretty rare.
This is why the happy medium is owning your own data.
You can have the CDs or not, but owning your copy of the MP3 file, which you keep on a hard drive, or on a thumb drive, or on a portable SSD (in any of these cases, with a backup somewhere!), or wherever, means that
1) you can play it any time you want, for no extra money
2) your access to it can never be revoked
3) you can keep copying it onto new physical media any time you're worried about the old one wearing out
> I always wondered if we could replicate the physicality of vinyl / CDs, games ROM etc. through memory cards
I kinda like the idea that the music is stored as a raw analog signal pressed or magnetically stirred onto physical media. There's no file format, no codec , no DRM and no CPU involved. It's more of a protest against the digital assault that turned a ritualistic listening experience into a effortless, passive background task.
There's also a big nostalgia factor where a lot of people like me grew up with vinyl, cassettes and CD's when they came out. High school years were rife with tape trading, DiY mixes and kids who made their own music. In HS I knew kids handing out tapes with their fresh new rap or garage grunge band. You won't get that magic back with an SD card in a cardboard facade (or spotify for that matter.)
They seem quite well made, if not exactly cheap. I believe there's also a way to store your own mp3's, but I don't know how open the interface really is. Ofc you can also make sth like this from scratch.
We recently purchased a Hörbert for our kids, which is everything you (I) want and nothing you don't - music is loaded via a SD card, there are 9 "playlists", it's mostly wood, and there's no need for WiFi or additional purchases.
The only catch is that they don't ship to the US (we just bought one in Europe and brought it back).
This reminds me of the modern fisher price record players.
The old ones were traditional music boxes, and each record had the musical notes.
The new ones have the score built in to the player, and each record just provides an ID for which track to play. So you can only play music that is built in to the device.
Really really really missing the point! Firstly I'd object to your statement that you have to buy a lot of stuff to get into it. Record players aren't expensive, and vinyl is also cheap (and don't look on ebay, go to your local thrift stores / charity shops -- or even better, your parents' house). Secondly the physicality isn't somehow the friction of associating music with a physical object, but the actual experience and sound of a record playing. You won't get this unless you do it, often, with wonderful music, so it's hard to describe.
You're right, that it is a lot of stuff. I'm looking now at 6 shelves filled with records. That definitely doesn't work for people in small apartments.
Asceticism is a term, like "large" or "small", that only has meaning relative to some standard. Relative to "hear whatever I want from the entire history of recorded music right now using a single cheap device", the act of playing a physical format on a complex assortment of devices you integrated is relatively ascetic. Hence the softening of the term with "middle path".
It is more romantic to put on a vinyl record than to play digital music. The physicality of it is a ritual that leads us back into a more physical world, where the things that exist are what you can touch and feel, and every action and reaction comes naturally as a result of raw physical contact, with nothing in between.
I'll copy-paste a comment I saw on Nikon Rumors (not sure whether it's copypasta or not)
---
I drove my electric BMW the other day, blasting a simulated V8 noise from speakers. It was a cold grey murky day but no rain. I stopped by the gas station to fuel my stomach by a bag of chips and the Snickers bar, because I went without eating a breakfast that morning. I saw a lonely dog by the roadside. It looked sad. I took my digital retro-styled camera with film simulation function out of my retro Billingham bag and took a photo. A little speaker in the camera has simulated the film advance noise just like in the past. Doggo looked at me with its sad eyes and went away. I took a glimpse of a photo of a dog and pressed "film grain +2" in the menu. Lovely shot. I'll post it to the Insta, probably. Then I entered the store, bought my bag of chips and the Snickers bar and saw a vinyl record corner. Man, I love vinyl. Those digital files pressed onto tangible, tactile surface. An AI-generated woman looked at me from the record artwork. Fonts were crooked. The price was $8.99 with a discount. I knew it's a pop record right away. Though, I'd love to blast an IDM track from speakers in my electric BMW alongside with simulated V8 noise, a pop record with vocoder vocals and autotune is also good. I took a record to place the vinyl on the bookshelf in my room. I know I'll be listening to the music via Spotify anyway. Man, I love vinyl. Just like film photography, it reminds me I'm alive. I'm real.
That piece is more about inauthenticity of faux replicas rather than true anachronisms. It would be a different message if he was driving a true V8 and using an actual film camera.
Indeed. What the GP is talking about would be a record player that requires vinyl, but plays only enough of the vinyl to do a Shazam-style identification and then stream the remainder, adding vinyl-sounding noise with a DSP. (Alternatively, the stylus is entirely fake and contains a camera that identifies the album by label, and is moved toward the center using a stepper motor.)
I really hope no-one ever makes such a monstrosity.
I've gotten into vinyl in my 40s after never having owned it before. I came of age in the cassette and CD transition era and was quickly on to MP3s in my teens.
I enjoy the Vinyl & CD vibe of being fully offline.
And it's also interesting how much stuff from 90s/00s era, particularly electronic music and the various remixes never made it on to streaming platforms. I assume some of it is just complexity of licensing some niche pressing of Artist C remixing a song by Artists A&B, etc.
Sometimes I see some of the 2-3 CD live albums make it onto a streaming platform with like 1/3 of the songs greyed out missing due to licensing.
To add, as a vinyl enjoyer, it's also that putting on a record is a deliberate action. I'm putting it on with the intent to listen and enjoy it vs. most often when I open up Apple Music it's just background noise while I'm working on other things, where I just hit shuffle on my 10k song+ library. When I put on a record it's because I want to sit with it and listen to that specific album.
Plus there's the aspect of actually owning your media and not simply leasing it with a monthly subscription.
Many (or at least some) vinyl record albums were also not just a collection of 10 tracks but were crafted to be a complete experience. You listened to the album not just one song. With streaming being the predominant way music is consumed now, people mostly just listen to one song by one artist before bouncing to something randomly selected to be next in their playlist.
One nice thing about buying vinyl these days is that they almost all come with a DRM free digital download of the album as well. Buying physical records is what has caused my digital music collection to grow the most since my Hotline 1.2.3 days.
Depends on your perspective. If you’re into the ritual and interested in close, intensive listening, there’s a certain magic and immediacy to knowing you’re using a physically destructive playback mechanism—that this right now is the best this record will ever sound again.
As for myself, I have young kids and this sort of thing doesn’t make the cut these days, so I stream everything. It all feels background-y and I haven’t fallen in love with an album in years and years.
> there’s a certain magic and immediacy to knowing you’re using a physically destructive playback mechanism—that this right now is the best this record will ever sound again
Maybe I just don't get it - I'm much younger than the average HN user, growing up with physical media but not physical media that rapidly degraded on use like how vinyl does. But to me this sentiment is so alien that it seems like some kind of a milder nostalgia Stockholm syndrome.
When we think of other physical media, no one ever romanticizes that type of thing because degradation never really existed there. Would you want a photograph that faded away a significant amount each time you looked at it? A book that had the ink on its pages visibly rub off?
To me it just seems that the hard technical limitations of a long bygone era (that some people would've undoubtedly hated at the time) were given a mystique to them when people come back to them. Is the harsh fact of media degradation really inherently "magical"? Or is it that people ascribe good qualities to it because it's just the way it was?
CDs just seem so much better. Yes it's technically digital, but can you tell?
I didn't think so, until a couple of weeks ago.
I was in a record store and it had a CD player on sale for $30. One of those cheap blister-pack jobs. Just for a laugh, I bought it, and a couple of CD versions of records I own. (Genesis, New Order, R.E.M.)
I thought "digital is digital" so it shouldn't matter that it was cheap.
It wasn't great.
I sounded very flat. Even with my expensive headphones, it just didn't sound right. I'm not sure if "mechanical" is the right word, but it was noticeably different, and I'm not someone who has perfect hearing. It just sounded... boring.
So I compared the CD sound with the record versions that I rip with a $20 USB dongle and Audacity. The record rips sound much better than the CDs.
Maybe someone with perfect hearing will think otherwise. But I'm not an audiophile. I'm just a guy who likes gadgets.
Digital is digital, but you’re ignoring multiple places where things might not be the same:
That $30 CD player… if it’s connected to headphones, how were the headphones driven? Especially if you have nice headphones, it’s very easy for a cheap device to not be able to competently drive them.
Vinyl vs CD mastering is a thing. There could be differences there. Additionally, depending on how you ripped the vinyl (especially with a “cheap dongle”) that may introduce its own color to the record.
There’s a reason why music collectors differentiate between every single source, because often there are differences (sometimes small, sometimes big) between the various sources.
Yeah it depends on where the producer expects the CD to be played.
99% of music is made to be played on radio / in car etc., a noisy environment, where you don't want to be adjusting the volume knob all the time. So the dynamics are stripped in mastering phase.
Music that gets pressed on vinyls isn't mastered for car-play, but home stereo equipment, so it makes more sense to have larger dynamic range.
CDs have objectively lower noise floor (less hissing), and more dynamic range (difference between loudest and quietest note), but it's the mastering that usually destroys the sound. And nothing can be done about it on consumer end. Except find a less remastered version of the album in a thrift store that isn't scratched to oblivion.
There's really no reliable way to tell if a CD is going to have high dynamic range, except perhaps niche audiophile studios like https://www.stockfisch-records.de/sf12_start_e.html, but https://dr.loudness-war.info/ has fantastic list of records with their dynamic ranges, so you can check before you buy, and you can also explore and find new stuff to use to listen to your speakers ;)
If your CD player had cheap anti-skip it probably does lossy digital audio compression before output. A lot of the CD-player-as-a-package chips had older, crappy lossy audio compression and saved to a small bit of RAM on the CD player. Not much of a power envelope for compute power for audio compression logic. With memory being really expensive back in the day and prices being cutthroat there wasn't much memory for the blanti-skip buffer. So you needed fast, cheap, and really compact audio compression. Nobody really bothered improving it once MP3 players came out and memory got cheaper, so even "new" CD players use the same hardware portable CD players were using in the 90s.
And even then, it's not digital square waves coming out of your headphones. At some point that digital signal needs to be converted to analog waves. The quality of the DAC matters as well and can give a different quality of output.
If you used an analog audio output of the cheap CD player then the "digital is digital and it shouldn't matter that it was cheap" argument may not hold. The low quality of sound could be due to low quality of Digital to Analog Converter in the cheap player, not due to low quality of CD records that you have tried.
CDs degrade pretty fast. I know people with CD collections that are basically unplayable now. And the typical plastic cases don't even make for nice shelf deco like books or paper-based vinyl cases.
These are easily fixable problems! M-Disc exists for disc longevity. High quality cases exist.
I realize this isn't the world we live in so I guess I'm just yelling at clouds. But come on, Vinyl is just so obviously a bad way to preserve music...
Kids these days literally have no idea how things can sound, so content is mastered for them and their el cheapo Bluetooth inears, so proper equipment (not necessarily expensive and most definitely not audiophile-tier, mind you, just something that acknowledges physics) owners get scraps and leftovers.
It's not just "kids these days", look at the popularity of sound bars as well. Sure, they're better than what comes built in to a modern TV but as you note physics is still physics and small speakers will never sound as good as large ones.
Hell, we can even chase that one back further, remember how much money Bose spent in the '90s convincing people that tiny speakers plus magic can somehow sound comparable to a proper stereo or home theater system? They were absolutely full of shit, but a ton of people believed every word of it.
> While I don't disagree, I find that small speakers are dramatically better today than they were even 15 years ago.
Then why is what comes out from my "modern" soundbar so crappy compared to the one I bought 15 years ago?
I had to retire my ancient soundbar because it had Bluetooth without security and would regularly pump out 100db of some show that our neighbors were watching at random times.
However, the sound quality was vastly better than any soundbar I can buy now--even my wife complained about the soundbars we tried--they were that obviously worse. I had to suck it up and buy a full blown sound system to match a stupid cheap-ass JBL soundbar from 15 years ago.
JBL is unfortunately one of the brands that people buy nowadays and think of as "good". Well already was a thing 8 years ago... Please do not buy JBL nowadays. Its crap made for being thrown away after a few years. Real speakers are repairable usually. The expensive ones we sold even had 70 year - lifetime warranty. Its true that old speakers often have really good sound though. A lot of it is mechanical which didn't change a lot in the last decades. Modern speakers have electronic shenanigans that might work, but doesn't provide a noticeable difference in my opinion. Except for noise canceling.
No argument. All the "modern" JBL soundbars were just as crappy as the rest of the "modern" soundbars.
I remember buying that soundbar (back at Fry's!) and all the soundbars were pretty much just as good (well, the Bose ones were garbage and overpriced, but let's not get started about that ...). They weren't audiophile quality, but they were good enough that an amateur like my wife really couldn't tell much difference.
What the hell happened that caused soundbars to go to shit?
Soundbars in the past were a niche market for people with expensive Plasma screens so they had to appeal to that group.
Soundbars today are a cheap addition to make up for the horrible sound on everyone's cheap $300 LCD 65 inch TV that in addition to horrible sound looks worse at 4k than the 720 Plasma did.
I vaguely remember reading about heterodyning speakers in the mid 90s - the physics does check out, and such technology should be able to deliver perfectly flat response along the entire audible spectrum and with a tiny footprint. I guess they never managed to make it work or cheap enough or safe enough (yes, it’s also supposed to be flat at the harmful subsonic frequencies)
IIRC the idea is to have two crystals, one at a constant e.g. 100khz, and the other at (100+x)kHz for x corresponding to the sound you want. By physically connecting them, you get the sum (ultrasonic, lost energy but not a problem) and the difference - which is the sound you want - with most of the physics across half an octave so easily flat. Something along those lines.
An interesting idea, but that kind of mixing requires a nonlinear element somewhere. Otherwise the resulting signal is just an independent superposition of both waveforms with no new frequency components. (Think about what a colony of bats would sound like to us, if that weren't the case.)
Given a high enough sound pressure level, your own eardrums might end up providing the required nonlinearity. The warranty sure sucks, though.
The nonlinear element was provided by some intricate physical structure connecting both crystals, with perhaps some other material providing it in the junction.
To be fair to those Bose speakers, to someone that didn't have a proper stereo set up, nor ever experienced one, they sounded amazing and people are notoriously bad at discerning audio quality
Yea I used to listen with Focal speakers for a while. Dali is also pretty good. In the shop I used to work at we would have vinyl play a lot, real vinyl, not the plastic that is mostly fabricated nowadays. But considering to what kinda music some people listen (autotune rap) quality doesn't matter I guess. Its mostly about vibes now.
Same with the headphones. I got a WH-1000xm3 that all reviews praise for sound quality and it sounds like complete shit, muffled, over emphasizing bass, no clarity. You're supposed to "fix" it using EQ. And you can't even adjust eq if you want to use the bettter audio codecs. If I paid the original list price for this i would be furious
objectively or compared to similar bluetooth, noise-cancelling headphone? Most of the reviews I heard agree that even a mid-tier IEM or wired headphone beats shit out of them.
One thing you can try with headphones is changing the earpads: specifically the shape, but maybe also the material. I have Shure SRH840A headphones, and out-of-the-box I was NOT happy with the sound. Someone suggested trying different aftermarket earpads, and I found a pair of "angled" pads that changed the sound quality to exactly what I wanted. I was surprised how dramatic the effect was. The pads are huge and look ridiculous, but I only use these headphones at home so it's fine.
The large number of people complaining that the new iPhone Air only has one speaker instead of two opened my eyes to this. There are a large number of people listening to music and watching Netflix using just the built-in phone speakers. Scary.
I have a complete setup from the 70s. NAD 3045 with new acoustic design on the panel, technics record player and Braun speakers. Sound super super good. The increase in soundquality since that tech is marginal at best. The biggest improvement regarding class-D amps is power consumption and weight.
> The increase in soundquality since that tech is marginal at best.
I'm glad you enjoy your system, but, having upgraded from a very, very good 70s system to a pretty excellent system using contemporary parts, I can assure you that both objectively and subjectively your system from the 70s is inferior, and the difference isn't marginal. It's massive.
I don't think there is any special development other than the cheap comodification of hardware.
Hardware has been largely solved in our everyday domains, and it's not where the money is anymore, or has been for years. Stuff that is "good enough for anyone" is cheap, made in China, and readily available from a manufacturer skimming by on a 5% margin.
I agree, it already is. There are whole YouTube channels already, people collecting "old" hifi gear, collecting and listening to taoes and cds, etc. It's a whole subculture already, I think it'll grow. I think there will be niche brands that bring some of these things back.
> There is something wonderful about listening to physical music recordings without using a screen. It's like cursive writing, or knowing how to drive a stick-shift.
I'm old enough to have bought a lot of vinyl records, cassette tapes, VHS tapes, Laserdiscs, etc back when they were the mainstream consumer formats and there were no better alternatives, so I get what you're saying. However, it feels like you're conflating three different concepts here.
1. The abstract idea (or perhaps 'ideal') of using vintage technologies being an expressive act which demonstrates something about you and your values to yourself and/or others.
2. The internal physical sensory pleasure one might subjectively feel from performing a manual action, separate from the purpose or utility of that action - such as cursive writing, calligraphy, shaping a wet clay pot, etc.
3. The net utility and objective technical fidelity of an action like "playing recorded media".
To me, these are all significantly different things and blurring them together niggles at my pedantic, engineering brain. If you're talking about #2 (internal subjective pleasure you physically feel from 'doing it'), that's great! I'm happy for you - but it's purely a "You" thing which may or may not be experienced by others. As for #1 (expressive act demonstrating your values), your values and whatever emotions performing that act evokes inside you are purely subjective. One person's 'sacred temple' may be another person's 'old building'.
But #3 has elements which can be objectively evaluated on various dimensions. When we're talking about "playing recorded media", vinyl is objectively worse at recreating the full bandwidth present on the original studio master (probably an analog 2-inch master tape back in the day) - and I promise you I'm NOT being biased toward 'new' or 'digital'. Not all new technologies are necessarily better in all respects and not all digital processes are better than analog. For example, I posted here last week pointing out that there are still a few very specific technical parameters in which esoteric, ultra-high performance, high-definition analog CRTs costing >$20,000 (which most people have never seen in person) can outperform today's best reference-grade (>$10,000) flat screens (of course, outside those very rare, highly specific traits - most mediocre flat screens are objectively better than even a good consumer CRT TV).
My point being that with #3, we can have an interesting and potentially useful exchange about traits which can be objectively assessed. We may not always agree about the relative utility or value of various traits, but at least we're talking about traits which can be mutually measured and understood - so we know we're disagreeing about the same objective thing. Whereas with #1 and #2, other people may not share your exact values or the sense of sacredness they evoke in you. And, sadly, I cannot share the internal pleasure Yoyo Ma experiences in the act of playing the cello. Of course, I DO have my own flavors of 'meaningful rituals' which evoke ineffable feelings and sensations in me - but I've always understood they only exist in my own mind, not the external environment.
After a kitchen fire, with a house cleanout, I was actually somewhat disappointed to get back my stereo rather than having it paid for by insurance. I'll hook up my receiver, DVD/stereo, and a couple of fairly large speakers, but I probably won't use much and certainly wouldn't have bought again.
I see a lot of lamentation for high end audio going away but the reality is that it's not that hard to achieve if you are truly interested in its effects.
You can build loudspeaker cabinets yourself without a lot of skills. There are kits everywhere. These will dramatically outperform anything you can buy retail even if you do a mediocre job of assembly. Most aspects of a high quality audio solution involve the room itself, not the equipment inside of it.
Building something that replicates (for instance) the Polk RTI series would take a weekend for a total noob if working from a kit. You can buy pro amplifiers like QSC and Behringer that satisfy whatever topology and power level you desire. Vendors like MiniDSP give you everything you need to build an active crossover solution in an afternoon.
Simply knowing that these things are possible is the first step to achieving them.
You don’t even need to DIY, you can just pay an amount of money similar to the cost of 1970s hi-fi systems after adjusting for inflation. The nice hi-fi systems are still around, but they don’t look at all like old hi-fi (why would they? both taste and technology have shifted drastically) and you don’t see them available at retail brick-and-mortar stores like Best Buy.
Virtually all of it is about the spatial volume and stiffness of the cabinet material & design. The actual type of material, dimensions and surface finish are almost entirely irrelevant to performance. MDF is dirt cheap and highly performant.
I've built a ~700 liter subwoofer using 24" diameter Sonotube concrete forum material ($200-300 right now). The circular shape means that the only unbalanced forces occur at the ends of the tube. Fortunately, this is also where you put the driver (bottom) and the port (top) along with reinforcing material. You can make incredibly deep & powerful LFE cabinetry without even breaking 200lbs of total weight. Mine would go flat to 13Hz and could easily be moved by 1 person.
That "socket" you are showing is something else. It's an xlr to ethernet adapter. Cat5 cable, with it's 4x twisted pairs is an excellent cable for transmitting balanced audio signals over long distances. One ethernet cable can transmit 4 such signals. The signal running in the ethernet is still the analogue signal though.
So it's quite popular these days do use ethernet cable for long signal runs in live audio installations. Much cheaper than traditional snakes too.
Your second link is a rj45-in-xlr-shell plug. It's used where you need a robust and reliable rj45 connection that can withstand more abuse than a typical "naked" rj45. I think it's fairly popular in industrial computing and military settings. There are various types of plugs that are embedded in an xlr shell for the same robustness reason.
specifically, the first one is XLR to RJ45 - the cable could be cat5, cat6, cat7, etc depending on the standard it was manufactured to. and ethernet is the protocol for the digital signal those cables usually carry.
as you say, it's common to use that cable for long analog audio runs, but when it is used that way it's not ethernet.
I don't really keep up with the hifi market and seeing the headline was an eye opener.
I used to work in a building next to a B&W place where they either made speakers or at least the drive units. The day was punctuated regularly by rather loud audio frequency sweeps!
Dali isn't as fancy on the outside as stuff like B&W but oh boy the sound. Zensor 3s sounded a lot better than CM5s, that cost quite a bit more. Still the best budget 2-way I've ever heard.
Also the Oberon 7s pack incredible sound for a price that's closer to B&W's shelf speakers than floor speakers.
You and me both. Love my 600 series-based surround setup, but I dunno if the 800 series would be worth the asking price relative to other, independently-owned brands in the space. I'm firmly in my "I want to support good humans doing good work" phase of life, and that's increasingly incompatible with large corporate conglomerates relying on huge data sets to justify price increases, corner cutting, and offshoring.
Similarly I am sad to hear this about Definitive Technology. The system I have for audio and home theater (not currently running due to receiver failure) is based around their tall speakers and the amazing sound they put out.
Can we expect the Samsungization of these brands? Should we be on the lookout for locked-down audio ecosystems, ever more extraneous features, phone apps, and smart appliances?
I was in a Target yesterday and saw a Samsung TV with a "warning" label on the box. Essentially: "some features not available without consent to tracking of viewing habits".
Never let your TV have access to the Internet. Almost every time someone thinks their phone is listening to them, it is really their TV with a microphone and a WiFi or Bluetooth chip to id the phones nearby.
I have an older Vizio TV, was never connected to the internet but it does have wifi. Last year it started freezing up a lot, and I read that some people had resolved that problem by removing the wifi module. Since I never used it as anything but a dumb screen, I figured why not try it. I opened it up and did that, and it's been stable ever since.
yeah I just bought an apple tv appliance and my nice OLED samsung tv never gets anywhere near my wifi, except the first day I got it to update the firmware. It seems stable so the firmware will probably never be updated again in this or the next lifetime.
It's not self-contradictory at all. Proponents of Chat Control want to be able to spy on their own citizens, and have the technological wiggle room to expand their powers to collect data in the future. At the same time, they generally don't want customers to be abused by large companies that strong-arm them into increasingly lopsided contracts by moving in unison and using the average person's technical illiteracy against them. For people like us, these two things are related because we don't want every bit of our data collected, examined and studied for either tracking or profit - but for them, companies and governments operate on entirely different levels of rights and expectations.
Also, the EU isn't even remotely like "a country".
> Also, the EU isn't even remotely like "a country".
The EU has a currency, parliament, elections, laws, presidents, courts, treaties, and is thinking about forming an army. That sounds an awful lot like a country to me.
Many multi-national organizations and alliances have some of these aspects, does that make them into countries too?
In practice, being a country isn't just about filling out some checklist. The EU neither claims to be a country, nor does any country on Earth see it as a single sovereign state. It has democratic and political processes that are similar to a country's, but its sway over member states is limited. Also, its members aren't forced to stay in the EU, unlike the individual regions that are part of your country.
And if you truly, unironically believe that the EU is a single country, what do you think of its member states? By extension of this argument, is Spain not a country? Or is Poland a country that's contained within another country, being equal and unequal in status at the same time?
different groups, different goals. They are against corps prying into your business, but government overall is pretty in favor of gaining as much power as possible for themselves.
I have a cheap TV powered by Android. The thing takes ages to power on and off. At least, it goes to HDMI directly. My dumb TV took maybe a second to power on and power off was instant.
I just bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab recently. Of course I was well aware of the death of the 3.5mm headphone port, but as I plugged in my 3.5mm to usb-c adapter I was greeted with a new message: "Analog USB C Audio Unsupported.". I tried a pair of regular off-brand usb-c headphones too, which too resulted in the same, with no audio output.
How this is not behavior deserving of some kind of EU fine is a complete mystery to me.
I believe this just means your dongle doesn’t contain a usb audio device, and implements the standard that requires the host device to contain the DAC and expose it over some of the usb c pins. Getting one with a dac shouldn’t be that difficult or expensive though.
Heh, usb-c the connector is used for many protocols only a few of which are actually USB (pci-e /thunderbolt, DisplayPort, i2c, etc). The analog dongle is one of these. There is no usb involved, just using the pins of the connector for analog audio. Dongles with a DAC are actually a usb sound card, and are usable even on desktop computers or using usb-c to usb A converters.
The message you’re describing sounds like it (and most devices) telling you nicely it doesn’t support the legacy, now removed from the spec, function to do direct analog audio over USB-C. I.e., the DAC is built into the phone instead of being built into the dongle.
Most devices do not support analog USB-C audio, and frankly I understand why given how affordable DAC based dongles are these days.
All of my cheaper chinese devices without 3.5mm do support it though. It is only this premium tablet that I paid triple what I'd normally spend on which does not work.
And your point? Samsung is likely more adherent to the USB-C spec than cheap Chinese devices. Audio Accessory Mode (the technical term for the analog audio mode in USB-C) was removed as an optionally supported mode from the specification last year. Adoption among flagship phones was basically nil for years. It's basically the worst of all worlds in terms of complexity: you still need a DAC/ADC in the phone AND you need a muxing switch to switch between data pins and analog audio.
For context on why it was removed: it was replaced with a moisture detection functionality, which can be used to monitor and protect the USB-C port against shorts from moisture ingress into the charging port.
That's really strange. I have recent Samsung devices and regularly use 3.5mm audio with an adapter, and yet need to run into any issues. Have you tried a different any other adapter? Alternatively, does the adapter/headphone work on an Apple device?
P.S. I have been using official Apple/Samsung dongles and they work fine.
Why wouldn’t you want your speaker to automatically play ads when your music is paused? We can even have them be relevant ads by having them covertly listen to your conversations to analyze for context sensitive keywords.
Samsung has owned Harman Kardon and its stable of brands for a long time, and they've been mostly fine. Mainly, I think Samsung doesn't care about them except as names to license in "exclusive" partnerships with automakers.
technically samsung didn't buy these brands, Harman did. And samsung has owned Harman (including JBL and AKG) since 2018.
so you should probably expect that these brands will continue operating the way that Harman, JBL,and AKG have since they were acquired. which is to say, pretty independently of anything samsung does.
Fwiw after Harman bought AKG, the Austrian engineers were laid off or left the company. There is a company called Austrian Audio that is more of a spiritual successor to AKG.
I wouldn't put it past Samsung to find a way to inject ads into gadgets even without screens. Like mandatory open the samsung app every time you connect your headphones and such. They are scummy as fuck.
I worked at Samsung and saw plenty of enshittification (including losing my own job in some kind of sketchy power struggle), but oddly their audio stuff didn't seem like a bad deal.
In TV's they support the higher quality home theater scenario while still making most of their audio money from soundbars that can't compete on audio quality. They're well aware of that fact, and their strategy seems to be to keep all options on the table.
I built the ads audience system. Most of the effects of that are already known here; Ads became a big trophy within the org; everybody had to have ads and post-sale revenue, even the fridge people.
Sometime around when the CEO got out of prison a bunch of weirdness occurred. Good managers left, bad managers got hired, and everything became top-down. The group head "retired" but last year un-retired in a different position; I didn't know you could do that.
Engineering-wise it went from technical free rein to "only use this suspiciously chummy cloud vendor" in a few months. I never got to the bottom of that deal, but costs exploded, and revenue flattened.
I recently had to setup my Denon Home Smart Speaker again after I moved. I’m pretty sure that I didn’t need a HEOS account the first time I set it up.
On the second setup it was required to configure the WIFI. But the Ethernet Port worked fine without an account. I bought the speaker together with a Denon receiver ~3.5 years ago.
Get off my lawn, Samsung. Your "Hi-Fi audio" has been nothing more than speaker redesign paired with the flavor-of-the-year codecs and "we put X chip in it" gimmicks for decades. I don't need nor do I want my living room to sound like the Sydney Opera House. Nor do I have the patience to set up 10 mini speakers on my surround system. Your engineering craftsmanship to build true novelty into an audio brand has been gone since the 2000s. Buying more patents won't solve it.
It is interesting how the market for high end audio has changed with the demise of physical media. I don't associate these high end audio brands with the home, however I do associate them with the options on expensive cars.
For the average person with a big TV and standard issue sound bar, an expensive home audio setup has limited appeal. What they have is good enough. However, in the automotive market it is a very different game. For starters, if you have to pay a five or six figure sum for your vehicle, where you are already in the game of specifying options, that expensive audio option isn't that expensive when compared to all of the other 'necessary' options, so you might as well tick the box.
With high end cars, resale value matters. If you have the base specification then this isn't going to fare too well in the second hand market. With some options you are never going to get your money back, but some are 'mandatory', particularly if they are bundled. It seems to me that this is the lucrative niche for high end audio, not the home or other markets. Plus you can sell someone a ridiculous amount of speakers, for example 22 of them, whereas, in the home, nobody has 22 speakers in their living room.
The thing is a sound bar can cost more than 2 grand, which gets you nice pair of B&W two-way speakers and an entry-level Marantz, a setup that beats the sound bar any day. Of course I'm a bit unsure what kind of number's you're speaking of.
Except that won't put the dialogs where they should be, in the center.
Back in the days I got a surround receiver and added a center speaker to my parent's regular two-speaker setup, and it was dramatically different feel when watching movies.
That's up to the mixing. If it's a surround system, sure it's better the dialogue comes from the right place in the scene.
But if you have stereo speakers properly placed https://www.ecoustics.com/electronics/messages/34579/705942.... (basically on both sides of the TV with you sitting from each speakers by their distance from one another), the stereo imaging will absolutely be able to place dialogue in the center.
But it can also produce wider sound stage than a soundbar, which is half my point, the other being better sound pressure and dynamics from the larger speakers.
Surround is of course better. But the price is usually the issue. One good option is to start with decent pair of two-ways that you can move to rear if you decide to go surround later. Then you only need the three center speakers and maybe the sub. The amp can be either future proofed by going n.1 immediately or upgraded with the jump.
> stereo imaging will absolutely be able to place dialogue in the center
For me, if I were to watch alone while sitting straight up in the middle of the couch. Which I almost never do. Either I'm casual or I'm watching with others.
I agree with regards to sound quality and dynamic range though. We have a soundbar in the main livingroom of good quality, but as expected it has no lower end.
I got the stereo+center speaker setup in the basement with the big TV, they're just bookshelf sized but on stands with center just below TV.
They're enough that our neighbors would complain if they were home when I crank it up, and have much better clarity for normal sounds and dialog.
It will it you sit right in the middle. In fact it will be better than a centre speaker unless you mount the centre speaker behind the screen which hardly anyone does (you need either an acoustically transparent projector screen or Sony make some TVs that support this). Unfortunately this only works for one person, though.
Yeah sure, but this guy was talking about luxury cars. I've seen B&W bundled in Maseratis, Aston Martins and McLarens. BMWs and Volvos too but that's a more recent market expansion.
Personally I think think the soundbars are a waste given that they'll never beat the stereo imaging you get from the second hand entry-level Hi-Fi. Soundbar is more convenient and I totally get many people don't always use it for intensive listening sessions, they just need a bit more tear free volume than the TV can output and maybe some background music.
And for those that still care and are willing to put in the legwork, $150 will score you a nice pair of Advents or similar on Craigslist, and almost any receiver you’ll find at your local thrift store will beat the pants off a cheap soundbar.
Never seen any decent audio gear at a thrift store.
Plus, does all of that stuff integrate with your tv remote like the right soundbar can? Most people don't want multiple remotes or have to manually turn a receiver etc on
There used to be a “mid range” market for $2000 amps and things. I suspect that those people want good enough sound and will happily just use a fancy sound bar and sub. Especially since Marantz was bought and just started churning out middle of the road shite. There still exists a market for $25,000 Trinnov.
I think I was one of the people desiring a mid range setup, but I found it very hard to justify when the "good enough" is 10-20 times cheaper. Based on perceived value, the $2000 mid range price looks 2-4 times too big for me and there is no sign of adjustment, what you can find at $3-500 is mostly garbage.
Audio is not like a graphics card, but people understand that you can buy at $500 a GPU that is ~ 2 times faster than a $200 one. The low end in audio is tens of dollars and there is nothing good in the hundreds of dollars range.
I like Yamaha, I have an older one in my living room, but for the $550 (local price) I am not extatic of what it offers. The digital part is a joke, it has a DAC in it but I cannot use a laptop as a digital source over USB, it has an Ethernet port, but it cannot use it for an embedded management web site, you need to run a phone app for that. My $15 relay controlling the lights has WiFi and embedded management web site, a $550 AV received does not. Also you cannot play movies, only music, even if it has in it what it takes for that. Figured out why?
And this is not Yamaha, everyone is selling the same stuff. You can find cheaper Chinese integrated DAC + amplifiers, WiFi and BT with more modern stuff in it. Yes, the amp part is much lower quality, but you need features, convenience, great user experience, not just good audio. At least with the cheap soundbar you don't have high expectations, no disappointments.
I feel like a big part of it is the masses have less money to burn on big sound systems nor do they have affordable spacious housing to fill with loud sound from the system they can't buy.
My first jobs (1990s) paid largely for restoring large speakers I'd garbage picked from the neighborhood and components to drive them. But I was privileged to have a large space at my parents' home and neighbors far enough away I could enjoy the system without the police showing up immediately.
Young people have way less buying power today vs. then don't they? It seems like the target audience today is living with headphones connected to smartphones in cramped living spaces riding a constant debt train.
I really wish there was a simple solution for streaming audio in a stereo like box. And no, Sonos isn’t it. Neither are the “smart” speakers.
I have several frustrations with Sonos. Just the other day I was trying to setup a 10+ year old Sonos. Doesn’t work with the latest software. So I have to download a different controller. Couldn’t get it to work.
This isn’t something that should deprecate that quickly. Nest does the same thing.
Almost every “smart” appliance has a terrible network stack too. Like my washing machine can get an address on a mobile hotspot but not on my home network for some reason. And the errors are generic and useless.
We should be able to use Bluetooth or NFC or similar to configure the devices seamlessly by now.
Back to Sonos, I used to stream Internet radio. Every now and again it would drop out and I’d have to hit the power button. Why? It should be fault tolerant enough to do this on its own.
Interesting things like Spotify always seemed way harder than they should be.
As for smart speakers, thanks but no thanks. I just don’t want an always on cloud-connected microphone in my house.
So I just end up using my phone and a Bluetooth speaker. I wish there was something better.
Yamaha makes receivers with streaming connectivity (e.g. supporting Pandora, Spotify, Amazon Music, SiriusXM, TIDAL, Deezer) for home theaters that work well.
I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the length of time that Marantz has continued to support and ship updates for my receiver, which I’ve owed since ~2016. It’s not often that anything with software gets that sort of attention for that long.
There are quite a few independent old British brands in audio. I hope they stay small niche and independent in the face of consolidation and some genuine competition from China. There are Danish and Finnish brands too and the odd French one. Anyway I hope they can remain independent even as they move some parts of their manufacturing to Asia.
Curiously you can follow some designers from shop to shop as they move in their career evolution.
Anecdote and personal observation - the odd Finnish brands essentially catapulted from niche obscurity to wider recognition 15-20 years ago. Until then in "the common mind" there was Genelec, and then a vast gulf before anyone else.
Sometime before 2010 Genelec started to focus their offering to two markets: the absolute top-end studio kit, and at the same time expanding downwards in the market towards the top end of consumer range. While they retreated from the space between the two, other local players[tm] were happy to cover the now vacant hi-fi enthusiast space.
For some reason the same locales that originate lots of heavy-metal bands also happen to sport a concentration of high-end audio equipment shops.
(Happy owner of a pair of Amphion monitors. Described by my audiophile friends as "unforgivingly accurate".)
inMusic is just a different conglomerate owning Akai, Alesis, Moog, M-Audio, Denon DJ, Numark, Rane...
If Samsung buys them as well (which didn't happen right now, but I'm sure it's what they're aiming for), the monopolization will be complete and the Live Nation-ification can truly begin.
A similar story is happening to festivals (especially across Europe), with KKR-owned Superstruct Entertainment now having majority stake in like a hundred or so music festivals.
eBay. Plenty of excellent vintage un-shittified sound equipment for sale. You may need to re-cap the amplifiers, but the speakers should still sound perfect.
It's absolutely possible to do whatever amount of channels you want, just buy enough amplifiers. You may need other equipment to "decode", but it's easily possible to get a media PC with 7.1 analog audio outputs, or more if you really wanted to do it for whatever purpose you need. None of this is really impossible, it just takes money.
Minidsp flex ht or htx paired with a buckeye 6 channel amp. As cheap as you can get premium sound quality. Not cheap but you get the software control you actually want via the minidsp
It's a special kind of messed up that not only has consolidation broken competition in many ways, they also get to create the illusion of competition by pretending to be different organizations.
I hope this doesn't imply more Samsung enshittification. I was hoping to get a Denon receiver to fix the Samsung AV issues present on their TVs and sound bars
> "Sound United’s impressive roster of brands is rooted in a deep passion for sound, innovation, and commitment to quality that aligns with Harman’s own values"
This is tangentially related-- I was a professional guitar player in the my 20's. When we were kids there were a handful of really great bands in the western United States like The Warlocks, The Cosmonauts, The Shivas, Super 78!, and especially the Brian Jonestown Massacre that thrived off of a huge culture of music enthusiasm that was especially, "tapes and records first. CD's are for the car."
Now outside of a handful of stalwart groups I don't see anybody making, "canonical" rock n' roll music in the, "post Velvet Underground" sense. It's, "correlation vs causation" but I can't help but feel that it was Spotify and streaming that killed this culture. Music became an, "everybody" thing that had no barrier to entry. Music subculture died. Fashion came next. Film has been declining since the 2000's.
I can stand you destroying my country's political culture but should have left it alone. It feels like an Albigensian Crusade.
I don't think Spotify and streaming killed the music subculture, it's still very much alive but requires more intention to find.
Back in the day how did you find new music? Pre-2000s it was likely MTV/radio for mainstream, or word-of-mouth/local events for niche genres. Nowadays Spotify and streaming services have supplanted the former for mainstream music. Finding new music outside the recommended engines requires a little more effort in knowing where to look. There are a lot of Internet radio programs (shout out to The Lot and Rinse.FM) and smaller record labels that do an amazing job at curating local and diverse sounds.
These days it's never been easier to start your own label or publish a track. Rock-'n'-roll is probably still alive (unfortunately I don't know that modern scene well), but assembling the necessary equipment and people to start a band is a big hurdle requiring practice, space and coordination. So I can see more wanna-be artists opting for pop/electronic having shorter turnarounds to a finished product.
Tell me where the music subculture is living and I'll move there right now. When we were kids it was Austin, Brooklyn, and Philadelphia for the insane IDGAF kids. For awhile it was Paris and maybe parts of Spain. Today I can't think of definitive hub for, "real musicians."
I think self-publishing is the problem. Making music on laptops is neat and everything but where the model in the 1990's was giving the bedroom rock hopeful group eg. Pixies, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Creation Records a million dollar record deal which gave a livelihood to the kids making the music the new model is, "have young artists self-finance their own careers and reward them with exposure when they produce something worthwhile with the hope that maybe their music gets licensed for a film." Touring isn't lucrative for many groups. Many tours are self-financed. Not often mentioned is that musician's a group notoriously deprived of healthcare due to healthcare being tied to traditional employment.
How could we combine the best parts of Johnny Marr's idea of, "being a working musician" while still affording young talented musicians the livelihoods and opportunities presented by the music industry of, "yesteryear?" My feeling always was in expanding the musician's reach into the world of pedagogy and, "play as a means of meaningful research." Delia Derbyshire comes to mind. Brian Eno half comes to mind. There's a better thing but it requires institutions and social democracy-- it requires a society with the social sensitivity to not envy or disdain, "people who make weird noises for a living and get to travel the world." The United States is not that right now unfortunately. The western world is in crisis and needs music but it lacks the scaffolding to create, "great musicians and bands."
As much as the world needs another John Lennon right now much more we need Brian Epsteins that can create John Lennons, Mick Jaggers, and Peter Noones with pen strokes. Where are the Don Kirshners of the world creating product groups like The Monkees and The Archies? I can tolerate greed if we can get another Smiths, Beatles, or another Paul Weller. I can tolerate another Andy Warhol is he'll produce another Lou Reed.
> Tell me where the music subculture is living and I'll move there right now. When we were kids it was Austin, Brooklyn, and Philadelphia for the insane IDGAF kids.
There are still geographical centers for certain genres of music. Austin is still a hub for psych/indie/alt music, New Orleans is where you want to be if bounce is your thing, etc.
But from my perspective, music subculture moved from TV and radio to the internet long ago. I no longer have "120 Minutes" telling me what its creators think is good, but I continue to hear great new music via TikTok and Instagram direct from artists and fans.
> Today I can't think of definitive hub for, "real musicians."
If you had to pick one physical location, that'd probably be Nashville (and not just for country). Other hubs would include L.A., NYC, London, Miami, Atlanta, Austin, and New Orleans.
Give me 5 noteworthy groups from Austin and I'll check them out. Mostly as an expert I don't see anything coming from the, "post Austin Psych Fest wake" that I should care about. Even as someone, "that played that shitty festival" with Joel Gion and all the rest (Black Angels, Loop) it wasn't Glastonbury in 95'; it wasn't anything. Find me a literate person that plays Vox 12-string and I'll form a band with you. I'll wait.
As for your second reply all those places are great but unaffordable for the young hopefuls. That's the filter that keeps the kids locked out. In the 70's moving to New York was, "Suicide" (Get it? If you don't I'd appreciate you'd just upvote this and stop reading. I'll provide a link below.) This is a filter that locks a lot of really talented kids out of the ecosystem.
>> I don't think Spotify and streaming killed the music subculture, it's still very much alive but requires more intention to find
No, I think music as a subculture is dead.
When I was a kid in the 80's I would sneak out of the house and go to a hardcore punk show that was put on by kids for kids with no adult involvement whatsoever.
Right now, on a Saturday night, where is there an all-ages music show going on anywhere in the US where the kids in the pit are 14, 15 years old and no adult knows or cares that they're there? There's a culture now, but there's no subculture. Most kids are watched too closely for that to happen now, which is good! Mostly. And subculture doesn't require a credit card and a subscription plan.
How did I find new music? Word of mouth was good, cassette tapes that your friends made you. Going to shows. A little bit from Night Flight. The Decline of Western Civilization. Urgh! A Music War.
Compilation records. American Youth Report, Flipside Vinyl Fanzine, the Mystic record comps, Rat Music For Rat People, the Blasting Concept, Dope, Guns, and Fucking in the Streets, Let Them Eat Jellybeans, maximumrocknroll. Forced Exposure. No New York. Going to record stores "in the city".
"Right now, on a Saturday night, where is there an all-ages music show going on anywhere in the US where the kids in the pit are 14, 15 years old and no adult knows or cares that they're there?"
I used to go to those kinds of shows in my late teens. For what it's worth, I mostly am out of that because a) I like calmer music and b) the kids should have their own space.
But that doesn't mean that I don't run into small all-ages punk shows. There's usually one going on in Durango, CO a couple weekends a month that I have seen. I'm certain that in larger places the same thing is happening even though I don't know about them.
Consider that older folks not knowing about the show is kind of the sine qua non of what you're looking for, so I am no surprised that I, an "older folk", don't know about them.
But I know enough to know they are there. It's easy to find new music if you're looking for it.
Maybe go read or review Hesse's "Journey to the East" if you want a longer version of what I am getting at.
I'm with you and I while like this myth if there was a modern Velvet Underground, "living in the underground" somebody would be trying to make a buck off it. The Alan McGees of the world need fuel for the fire. The closest thing I can find as an, "industry expert" is Jesse Welles who's blown up on Instagram and YouTube.
If you want music like we had in the 20th century we need institutions, producers, entrepreneurs, a literate public, and a positive economic set. We need to pay musicians money to do their jobs. Music isn't a hobby. As the poet once said, "music is proof that there is more to the human than there seems."
Yeesh. "Those darn 40+-something millennials and their differing tastes!"
Rock 'died' because it's been around for 50 years; were the favourite of boomers who ensured it always had air-time; and now they're out to pasture and other music styles reign. My dad was a pro drummer in the 70s and hated everything that wasn't rock or metal. He was incapable of appreciating anything else. Or so he said.
As a kid of the 90s, I could never quite find music that fit me. Sure, I liked some rock and roll, pop, and so on --- but when I was first introduced to techno (Antiloop - Believe, to be specific) at a LAN party I knew I'd found my home: techno and then trance.
But good luck finding Antiloop or the nascent trance on MTV or commercial radio in the 90s. The people who ran those things didn't like it, know about it, listen to it, or felt it had commercial value. So I had to learn about it from randos at a LAN party.
Rock was on the way out in the early 80s, when millennials were barely being born...because disco won.
The 80s were the rise of synthpop, House music (which started from DJs sampling disco a cappellas and mixing them with TR-909 drums and Korg M1 keyboards), Techno and Italo Disco. From there, we got the next evolution, in the form of Eurodance/Eurobeat/Hi-NRG, and Electronic Dance Music as a genre was born. Notably, they all still largely lean in on the foundational traits of Disco: four on the floor drum beats, off-beat bass, heavy focus on syncopation to create groove, chord stabs, etc..
The 80s were also the rise of hip hop and rap, which also grew out of the same DJ culture. If a song doesn't have a four on the floor beat, it's more likely to have a hip hop beat than a rock "backbeat." (e.g. boom bam boom boom bam, like "Rump Shaker" by Wreckx-N-Effect)
I really don't think so. Punk had exploded after the Summer of Hate and in its wake we got Talking Heads, The B-52's, and Blondie at CBGB's. In parallel we have early Joy Division in Manchester which is going to inspire U2 to eventually become the biggest band in the world for the next 20 or something years. Martin Hannett is going to be a key figure in the development of EDM with his use of samplers and, "using the studio as an instrument." Check out the beginning of, "Transmission." He'll later go on to produce The Happy Mondays who are, "the" seminal Manchester dance group in the early 90's in lieu of an army of Stone Roses fans throwing lemons at me.
If you look at how Johnny Rotten was listening to Neu! and X-Ray Spex (as well as The Monkees and Herman Hermits) and what Bowie was doing after he moved to Berlin with Iggy Pop it's not outlandish to say that Electronic Music wouldn't have existed without being preempted by Punk, Glam, and the emergent, "not progressive" guitar music of the 1970's especially in how it paralleled the development of Krautrock. Disco didn't evolve into EDM; Disco gave DJ Kool Herc a set of turntables to invent Hip Hop with. Techno literally came out of, "a certain guy who might be called Gerald" listening to Kraftwerk; Afrika Bammbatta's, "Planet Rock" samples Kraftwerk directly.
Disco led directly to house, and Italo-disco was hugely influential to techno. US electro developed at the same time as some key Italo tracks like "Robot is Systematic" (1982) and "Spacer Woman" (1983). Italo-disco was played on underground radio in Detroit and Chicago, and is often credited as a core influence. Or just look to Detroit proto-techno track "Share Vari" (1981) which was considered to be Italo-disco in style at the time of its release.
"On and On" (recorded 1983, released 84) is often considered the first Chicago house record, and it was literally a direct attempt to reproduce a disco record using a drum machine and synths.
This isn't to undermine Kraftwerk, which was obviously an enormous direct influence on these producers as well, but my point is they're far from the only influence. Giorgio Moroder should receive the same amount of credit for starters, along with other electronic disco legends such as Marc Cerrone.
My feeling is that without gluing all this music together with emergent gay club culture that the similarities are superficial. House is obviously a take-off of what Disco is trying to achieve on the dance floor but so is Parliament and James Brown ins 70's. We might as well say, "electronic music comes from black music in America" but that can't be right because of Kraftwerk and Delia Derbyshire. It wouldn't be wrong to say that George Harrison is a pioneer because of the Electronic Sound record but it all feels a bit like those blog posts that claim that Ringo Starr invented Breakbeat.
I don't think you're wrong I just think there's a, "more right position." I'm open to a plurality of views. It may be the, "real story" has to be a, "multiple perspectives thing." I'm just taken to the idea my perspective is the best.
Superficial? House is literally the same four-on-the-floor beat originally created in Philly by Earl Young of The Trammps.
Countless early house and techno legends say they listened to disco, sampled disco, made covers of disco songs, played disco in their DJ sets. Some key producers directly overlapped between the synth-heavy forms of disco (Italo-disco, High-NRG, Mutant Disco) and electronic dance music - for example Shep Pettibone, François K, and Material, to name just a few.
I guess believe whatever you want, but everyone else listens to what the people who created electronic dance music actually said and did which puts disco as a direct core ancestor.
Kraftwerk was definitely important, but you're missing Frankie Knuckles and Black Box...
House (from The Warehouse) is as core to EDM as techno (more Kraftwerk), and they were literally remixing disco as well as using disco musical facets. And House and Techno's lines blurred a lot in Europe.
Canonical rock n' roll in the minds of, "the initiated" might include groups like Kraftwerk and Neu! which laid the foundation for most forms of electronic music. It definitely includes the mother of all electronic music Delia Derbyshire (ask Peter Kember!) You might know her from the original Doctor Who theme music. Dig the link below for the arguably the first EDM song ever made. Keep in mind this is pre-synths-- it's all tape manipulation like The Beatles would end up copying on, "Strawberry Fields Forever."
I like all, "genres" and types of music but there's a certain high level of quality that exists in a continuum of music going back a long time. It's hard to define in a formal way. It's there in John Coltrane. It lives sophomorically in The Velvet Underground, Herman's Hermits, and the other, "Bubblegum" groups as well as the Fuzz-Psych-Garage bands that live in the Nuggets compilations like ? And The Mysterians. It's played on Rickenbacker guitars. It has a fuzz pedal and it knows how to use it. It lived on John Peel's radio program.
The home audio market has moved on, leaving this consolidation in its wake.
There is something wonderful about listening to physical music recordings without using a screen. It's like cursive writing, or knowing how to drive a stick-shift. But barring a Carrington event, or some moderate-to-severe internet catastrophe, its hard to motivate the utility of this kind of "middle path asceticism". "Shed no tears," the futurists say, since not too long ago most if not all "educated people" knew Greek and Latin, how to use a slide-rule, and how to saddle and ride a horse, and we don't particularly miss those things. I would argue caution, not least of which because this argument is too closely aligned with the market forces that know it's far more profitable to charge you per action than per object. It's always hard to know if we lost something important, or shucked off a barnacle holding us back, until we're looking back. I believe there is a sweet spot between the endless toil of "no technology" and the profound ignorance (and helplessness) that comes from putting everything behind a screen. I suspect that the hi-fi gear between the 1970's and 2010 will continue to be collectible for this reason for at least 100 years.
My pet theory is that stupidly powerful rare-earth magnets, and class D amplifiers are the two main things that killed "hifi" type audio. No more black magic needed messing with transistors and op-amps on bespoke circuit boards that used to be the moat for these oldschool brands.
My Alexa Echo Dot 4 sounds better than my home audio setup from the 90s. Now, a fair comparison would be to a modern floor speaker with modern magnets and amps, but I'm too old for this :-)
> My Alexa Echo Dot 4 sounds better than my home audio setup from the 90s
I have a hard time believing this… yes today’s small devices sound better than small devices ever did. A lot of work went into that because people appreciate the reduced footprint. Also, those speakers are super cheap in comparison to the budget people would allocate to their stereo setups in the day.
But I’ve never heard a small speaker sound better than a 1970ies or later hifi amp + speakers from a decent brand. With big speakers you can reproduce all these frequencies without physics tricks. The sound is more laid back and the soundstage fills the room.
All the recent engineering has gone into making speakers small, cheap and wireless, like in the 90ies it went into creating multi-channel audio, but I would say stereo sound quality, as used for popular music, already peaked in the 70ies / 80ies.
Of course you can still get those quality hifi components today, or even better than that, but the median household is not listening on that and I’d wager has worse sound today than was the norm in the physical media era.
How big of a speaker, though?
In the 80s and 90s the world moved to 6.5-or-less bookshelves which generally struggle with bass compared to a lot of modern smaller stuff. Meanwhile a lot of music started using low bass a lot more.
In addition to this, front baffle width correlates with efficiency, i.e. modern narrow front baffle speakers need a more powerful amp, combine that with the necessary smaller bass drivers and you see why most modern speakers have crap bass
Some other factors were pretty important:
1. In the modern family, everyone wants to listen to something different. In the family of the 1960's to this was not possible, because too many kids, not room for so many big speakers, etc, etc.
2. Now, the speakers are there to carry the audio, status is derived from the size of the video screen. The screens crowded out the speakers. And you need 5 or more speakers now, which makes a set of big speakers exceptionally unfashionable.
3. Speaker size is inversely related to potential big box store volume because of the huge warehouses and sequesterd listening rooms that large speaker retailing would require. Buying without listening first makes does not fit with the idea of spending big on something that you need because your are elite afficianado.
4. The middle class is dead. In the 1960's, 1970's, or early 1980's, a 'good' stereo would cost about a month's net income for a median income worker. Today the good stereo still costs about a month's net income for a median income wroker, but the median median income worker is two weeks net pay away from homelessness or moving back in with his parents. And in that supposed golden age of stereo, the 'good' stereo was expected to last about 10 years and many of them did. Some are still working, many have been in the repair shop several times and keep going. Today, no one expects anything to outlast its warranty by much (except maybe a car), and competent repairs for anything more complicated than shoes are a not easy to come by.
That's a very pessimistic take. I recently sold a Sonos connect - about 15 years old if not older and working as well as when it was new. I have a Google home max speaker, 8 years old, works flawlessly. We have a pair of B&W speakers from 2001 or so - got the speaker insulation replaced, otherwise everything great. And a 5.1 set from Logitech from 2005 also works without issues - the difficult part is to only make sure the PC has the right outputs, but even that is moot with USB sound cards. We also have some cheap monitor speakers, they work fine after 7 years.
People asociate the non linearity distortion of bad amplifiers as pleasant.
What sounds good for a consumer may not work for profesionals who want pristine converters.
The opamp back in the days were pretty terrible. NE5532 was the king of audio opamp for decades until the early 2000s.
Modern Class D are built on advanced semiconductor processes (they are considered legacy node in the eye of Hacker News's primary audience. They are at least a lot better than the early days in terms of performance in analog domain.) When an IC company spend a lot of R&D money to develop Class D amp, they for sure exhausted what they can do before they tape out. That results in the superbe performance of modern Class D amplifier.
There is still oppertunities in getting analog Class AB type of amplifier working better, such as adding motional feedback control sensor-less or with sensor. KEF recently released a motional feedback soundbar with back-EMF voltage as sensor. It sure improve the sound quality for a soundbar. Although physics is physics, one cannot make a 1 inch speaker sounds like a subwoofer, but motional feedback sure can make 10 speakder sounds like a 15 inch subwoofer.
Sound reproduction is not just a flat frequency response. Perfect reproduction of phase information generates wider 3D sound stage, without the need of DSP to fake it.
Speaker box design advanced dramatically since the 90s too. The start of it was then - Bose made a lot of noise with compact-for-the-time stuff - but it's really advanced since then. Compare the sound quality of a laptop then with a larger MacBook now. And when you can get decent sound at decent volume out of a small package a lot of people don't want to give up a ton of space for extremely-good sound at high volume.
If your Alexa d4 sounds better than your home hifi the your home hifi wasnt.
It's advancements in delta-sigma DACs during around 2005-2015. So amps. Bit depths and noise levels improved massively. It's that that solved audio.
Modern sound stuff doesnt use any dacs, its more of BLDC motor controller bolded to a speaker in a tiny box powered by DSP making it sound great and full of deep base.at any volume.
> My Alexa Echo Dot 4 sounds better than my home audio setup from the 90s.
I think it is more like a "good enough" sound. There are still are hifi-enthusiasts, but I think most people don't see the reason to spend a fortune just to listen to music. Mostly, because people don't even know what a difference a good hifi setup brings to your life or they just don't care.
I always wanted to try building the "World's best speakers"[1] by Technical Ingredients just for fun and education, but in the end I did not care enough to spend the time and money.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKIye4RZ-5k
> "good enough" sound
40 or more years ago, the big hifi brands were racing to get total harmonic distortion down to 0.05% or less. The average person is unlikely to complain if it is 5.00%.
There was once a hifi show at which one of the most revered hifi reviewers gave a talk and played some samples for the audience. Almost all the audience noticed at once that his samples had a defect, a loud high-frequency tone somewhere around 10,000 Hz. He didn't hear it.
The concept of good enough has won. Many consumers still think that HD radio is high-definition. It is hierarchical digital, a standard developed to be good enough that most people would not complain. And, speaking of HD, lots of HD TV buyers were perfectly happy even though they were unaware that they have not got their TV producing HD pictures.
Digital music through digital systems has a lot of glorious qualities. But listening to records through my tube marantz or zenith amplifiers sounds way better to me. Tell you what, I’ll set up my Smaart rig (rational acoustics) in the room and see if I can find evidence :)
tube distortions are one click away in modern dsp designs, or a free VST plugin
Good class Ds are not that cheap. Hypex and now Purifi based amps are good but not what I’d call cheap. Evenso lots of people like AB amps and some even like the old A amps fooling around with their “valves”.
My SMSL SA-50 sounds an order of magnitude (in price) better than my Marantz PM68 and costs an order of magnitude less - in other words, it sounds fantastic and it was cheap. Some of the early carriers of class D hype (Tripath based) were even cheaper. A good chip and a bunch of quality passives don't need to be that expensive.
So I'm more concerned about Samsung owning B&W (there is no real substitute for good speakers) than Marantz and Denon. It seems like really good amps can be made by sticking to class D chip application notes these days.
There are tons of great speakers and speaker companies, and I think B&W is very, very overrated. Check out the monitor audio gold line. I have two pairs of their floorstanding, and prefer them, unreservedly, to the b&w 702cs that I tried first.
The accepted wisdom in the audiophile community is you get what you pay for, i.e. a good implementation of any given amp topology remains a good implementation regardless of the topology. Once you get to a certain $$$ range, the sound of tube amps and transistor amps (and class D amps I might add) begins to converge.
Maybe but plenty of AB tests have shown that they can't actually hear the difference they talk about. Those who are aware of this and objective save a lot of money by buying quality - still a lot of dollars but not the most you can spend.
> and class D amplifiers are the two main things that killed "hifi" type audio
class D amplifiers is to hifi, what lung cancer is to lung. /s
> The home audio market has moved on
The audio business has merged with the "home theatre" business. The pursuit of audiophile quality was always a boutique/niche market.
> listening to physical music recordings without using a screen
You don't need a screen to listen to good audio reproduction. FLAC does of course need a digital device and storage. But there are huge advantages to FLAC over "physical music recordings". You can store FLAC on a USB key and plug it into a modern amplifier to listen. If you must have a spinning wheel (get it?) you can burn FLAC to an optical disc and play that in a player without much "screen". But even optical discs are artifacts of the past.
> It's like cursive writing, or knowing how to drive a stick-shift.
Handwriting is much more profound for personal development and education. The US Constitution, for example, is a hand-written document.
For transportation and tools, technology and innovation will change how people live. Those who remember the past recall how folks lived with trolley buses, ice-boxes, adjusting "rabbit ears", and dialing rotary telephones.
Fortunately we can all watch old films in our home theatres. (^;
> The audio business has merged with the "home theatre" business. The pursuit of audiophile quality was always a boutique/niche market.
That's not really what they meant - most people do not have "home theaters" they have a soundbar or a couple of bluetooth speakers.
Although on the other hand, if you listen with AirPods Pro streaming 5.1, you get a better surround sound and audio experience than 99.9% of speaker setups. For just a couple hundred bucks.
Even beyond the audio quality and spatial processing, the noise reduction is magic that speakers can't do. It's amazing how much more detail you can hear when the sound of the HVAC is removed, the hum of the refrigerator, the rumble of traffic. Not to mention the total elimination of sonic reflections off your walls and ceiling that muddy the sound from speakers, unless you're applying treatments.
Yeah while home audio tech has moved sideways, consumer headphone tech has gone through the roof in every way.
But you touch on another of my pet peeves - took some work, but getting rid of those noises in my tv-watching space was very worth it.
>AirPods Pro streaming 5.1, you get a better surround sound and audio experience than 99.9% of speaker setups.
The audio experience itself, sure - "Want high-end audio without breaking the bank and remodeling your room? Get a pair of decent headphones." has been sound (heh) advice for decades.
The surround sound part, though? Eh, not quite yet. I mean, on paper, they have the ingredients - (personalized) HRTF and head tracking. But in practice I found even the personalized HRTF somewhat underwhelming, and knowing what's possible from the VR world the gap is still significant (IMO the Valve Index off-ear solution is still the pinnacle in immersive positional audio without surround speakers, even without personalization of the HRTF, I haven't really tested the AVP implementation yet, though) - which leads me to second, IMO even larger issue:
Extremely limited usage scenarios. For the living room, it's basically just supported Apps/content on AppleTV. Compared to the reality of a standard AVR (or even just Soundbar) plus surround speakers setup - take any multichannel input (LPCM, DD, DTS MA, Atmos you name it) and output surround sound - that's...just not a substitute. And that's not even getting into latency issues with gaming/interactivity (a general BT issue, though, at least it's slowly improving...).
> The surround sound part, though? Eh, not quite yet.
I dunno -- I find it much better than actual speakers.
With Atmos on the AirPods Pro, I can pinpoint the location of an instrument within about 5°. It's astonishing.
Whereas with the traditional 5.1 speaker setup... you definitely get the sense of center vs. side, and kind of a couple of "zones" in between, but I can never place the location of an instrument or sound as accurately as I can with the AirPods Pro. It's a much more diffuse directionality, rather than "it's coming from exactly there".
Plus, of course, I get to take my surround-sound music and audio everywhere. Not just my living room. So I don't know what "extremely limited usage scenarios" you're talking about? I mean, yes it needs to come through an Apple device, but that's all my media anyways.
> ou get a better surround sound and audio experience than 99.9% of speaker setups
Headphones and earbuds are not the way everyone listens to music, though.
With a good amplifier and speakers, I can be seated a few metres away and enjoy classical music and jazz with comfort and very realistic acoustics.
Nobody is saying headphones can’t deliver a good experience, but you can’t cheat physics when going below a couple hundred hertz.
Not sure what you're saying -- you know that in-ear sealed headphones (like AirPods Pro) have phenomenal bass? There's no leakage path, and no destructive interference issues. All the issues with driving bass in speakers just... don't apply with sealed headphones. It's basically perfect bass.
The only thing you don't get is the full-body shaking sensation that massive speaker bass provides. But that's not even audio. That's more like amusement-park ride stuff. (Not to say it isn't great too.)
I mean, tell me what you think of the frequency response below 200 Hz here:
https://storage.googleapis.com/headphones_com_blog_files/app... (from https://headphones.com/blogs/reviews/apple-airpods-pro-2nd-g...)
I have AirPods Pro (and like the B&O EX much better, personally), but I wouldn't use them for bass-heavy stuff even compared to over-the-ear ones, let alone a system with big woofers. It's just not the same as filling a room, and not just in an "amusement-park" way.
> but I wouldn't use them for bass-heavy stuff
I mean, it's whatever you enjoy, but it's definitely got nothing to do with the frequency response or clarity.
If you want to "fill the room" for bass-heavy stuff that's more of a psychological thing.
I personally like the bass-heavy stuff way more on the AirPods Pro precisely because it's so much clearer, without the muddiness. Because there's nowhere near the level or distortion, reflection, etc. you get with room speakers.
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...what kind of class-based prejudice is this?
"asceticism" with a lot of stuff to buy though
I always wondered if we could replicate the physicality of vinyl / CDs, games ROM etc. through memory cards (like SD Cards) in an enclosure with a label on it with a player made on purpose for them. This way we get physical media, easy to create yourself, not too expensive, in a digital way
The thing with physical media that is often missed is - it never interrupts you for an OS update, you never lose content due to lapsed subscription, artists/labels can't revoke songs, theres no controller app that can be broken by updates, you don't have to worry about your speakers aging out of firmware updates.
You just put the media in and press play.
Sure having infinite streaming libraries is cool yes, but people listen to the same stuff or slowly expand listening habits. $10-30/mo for life ends up being a lot more money than just buying what you actually enjoy and listening to radio/stream like stuff to sample new.
The streamers are slop slingers now. Ironically I have found that YouTube's recommendation engine is 100x better for me than Spotify/Apple/Tidal ever were, and I don't even pay for Youtube, lol. Or sites like Discogs for more engaged music discovery.
> you never lose content due to lapsed subscription
You do however lose content to phyiscal damage or just misplacement.
I love CDs, but I've also lost some of my favourite CDs to damage or loss.
Yes, the quality of recommendations is generally terrible, but the equivalent in the physical media age, walking into a CD store and hearing something you love, just sadly isn't coming back.
Spotify etc are still unreasonably cheap for what they deliver, it costs the same as a couple of albums a month.
But another problem with online streams is that they are increasingly not the original music. More and more are remastered, autotuned, rebalanced to sound good on a phone speaker or earbuds. This can probably be done largely with AI now. A vinyl album or even a CD or local mp3 file is what it is when it was recorded, and will stay that way as long as it lasts.
To be fair, the stereo versions of The Beatles recordings badly needed remastering. Lots of things were hard-panned. They treated the original stereo mix as some novelty, and put all their focus and effort into the mono mix.
Most people outside their teenage years, unless music is their passion, are not actively engaging with the streaming services enough to consume 2 albums of new content monthly.
The old iTunes pay per song / album model with 30+ second previews is arguably a better model than where we’ve landed.
I beg to differ. Most people I know use streaming for automated relevant recommendations. I’m listening to Tidal’s daily discovery playlist on most days and most of it is meh, but I make a note of a new piece every other day or so.
I'm not sure who is the outlier but I'm like the GP says. Was into music and stereo systems as a teen and into my 20s. Now, I just listen to whatever is on the radio in the car. Even streaming is too much hassle most of the time. I will go to YouTube music occasionally when I get the urge to listen to a specific song, but that's pretty rare.
This is why the happy medium is owning your own data.
You can have the CDs or not, but owning your copy of the MP3 file, which you keep on a hard drive, or on a thumb drive, or on a portable SSD (in any of these cases, with a backup somewhere!), or wherever, means that
1) you can play it any time you want, for no extra money
2) your access to it can never be revoked
3) you can keep copying it onto new physical media any time you're worried about the old one wearing out
> I always wondered if we could replicate the physicality of vinyl / CDs, games ROM etc. through memory cards
I kinda like the idea that the music is stored as a raw analog signal pressed or magnetically stirred onto physical media. There's no file format, no codec , no DRM and no CPU involved. It's more of a protest against the digital assault that turned a ritualistic listening experience into a effortless, passive background task.
There's also a big nostalgia factor where a lot of people like me grew up with vinyl, cassettes and CD's when they came out. High school years were rife with tape trading, DiY mixes and kids who made their own music. In HS I knew kids handing out tapes with their fresh new rap or garage grunge band. You won't get that magic back with an SD card in a cardboard facade (or spotify for that matter.)
https://kazeta.org is doing something along those lines for games.
We do have stuff like that, here's an example for kids:
https://tonies.com
They seem quite well made, if not exactly cheap. I believe there's also a way to store your own mp3's, but I don't know how open the interface really is. Ofc you can also make sth like this from scratch.
We recently purchased a Hörbert for our kids, which is everything you (I) want and nothing you don't - music is loaded via a SD card, there are 9 "playlists", it's mostly wood, and there's no need for WiFi or additional purchases.
The only catch is that they don't ship to the US (we just bought one in Europe and brought it back).
https://www.hoerbert.com/
My daughter wakes us up every morning smacking her tonie box (that's how you skip songs).
The figurines don't actually contain the music, they just have an NFC chip in them. The Tonie Box is connected to wifi and downloads the content.
The child doesn't really know any better though, it still gives them the physical experience without a screen.
This reminds me of the modern fisher price record players.
The old ones were traditional music boxes, and each record had the musical notes.
The new ones have the score built in to the player, and each record just provides an ID for which track to play. So you can only play music that is built in to the device.
I never had the music-box style Fisher Price record player, I had the one that was an actual phonograph.
TIL!
https://www.reddit.com/r/vinyl/s/1wTKcVvkCV
Ah ok, sounds like a smarter way to do it. How hackable would you say is it, eg to register your own NFC chips? It seems like a nice platform.
Pretty easy. Same as for yoto
For those looking at these, I highly recommend Yoto over Tonies.
The Yota player for kids is basically this
Really really really missing the point! Firstly I'd object to your statement that you have to buy a lot of stuff to get into it. Record players aren't expensive, and vinyl is also cheap (and don't look on ebay, go to your local thrift stores / charity shops -- or even better, your parents' house). Secondly the physicality isn't somehow the friction of associating music with a physical object, but the actual experience and sound of a record playing. You won't get this unless you do it, often, with wonderful music, so it's hard to describe.
You're right, that it is a lot of stuff. I'm looking now at 6 shelves filled with records. That definitely doesn't work for people in small apartments.
Im only criticising the use of the term asceticism here… of course I know the experience and sound is different
Asceticism is a term, like "large" or "small", that only has meaning relative to some standard. Relative to "hear whatever I want from the entire history of recorded music right now using a single cheap device", the act of playing a physical format on a complex assortment of devices you integrated is relatively ascetic. Hence the softening of the term with "middle path".
Ya but the great things we lost to time were often computer tech.
Vector display tech is dead despite being objectively amazing, for example.
Central vacuums are also uncommon compared to the 70s and they were and still are better than what most Americans use today.
Hi-fi isn’t like this because huge amounts of it is literally placebo. Sorry but your gold plated cables do not in fact improve your sound quality.
It is more romantic to put on a vinyl record than to play digital music. The physicality of it is a ritual that leads us back into a more physical world, where the things that exist are what you can touch and feel, and every action and reaction comes naturally as a result of raw physical contact, with nothing in between.
I'll copy-paste a comment I saw on Nikon Rumors (not sure whether it's copypasta or not)
---
I drove my electric BMW the other day, blasting a simulated V8 noise from speakers. It was a cold grey murky day but no rain. I stopped by the gas station to fuel my stomach by a bag of chips and the Snickers bar, because I went without eating a breakfast that morning. I saw a lonely dog by the roadside. It looked sad. I took my digital retro-styled camera with film simulation function out of my retro Billingham bag and took a photo. A little speaker in the camera has simulated the film advance noise just like in the past. Doggo looked at me with its sad eyes and went away. I took a glimpse of a photo of a dog and pressed "film grain +2" in the menu. Lovely shot. I'll post it to the Insta, probably. Then I entered the store, bought my bag of chips and the Snickers bar and saw a vinyl record corner. Man, I love vinyl. Those digital files pressed onto tangible, tactile surface. An AI-generated woman looked at me from the record artwork. Fonts were crooked. The price was $8.99 with a discount. I knew it's a pop record right away. Though, I'd love to blast an IDM track from speakers in my electric BMW alongside with simulated V8 noise, a pop record with vocoder vocals and autotune is also good. I took a record to place the vinyl on the bookshelf in my room. I know I'll be listening to the music via Spotify anyway. Man, I love vinyl. Just like film photography, it reminds me I'm alive. I'm real.
That piece is more about inauthenticity of faux replicas rather than true anachronisms. It would be a different message if he was driving a true V8 and using an actual film camera.
Indeed. What the GP is talking about would be a record player that requires vinyl, but plays only enough of the vinyl to do a Shazam-style identification and then stream the remainder, adding vinyl-sounding noise with a DSP. (Alternatively, the stylus is entirely fake and contains a camera that identifies the album by label, and is moved toward the center using a stepper motor.)
I really hope no-one ever makes such a monstrosity.
What about a camera that just examines a scene to build a prompt then generates an awesome photo of it, instead of using the actual pixels of light?
I've gotten into vinyl in my 40s after never having owned it before. I came of age in the cassette and CD transition era and was quickly on to MP3s in my teens.
I enjoy the Vinyl & CD vibe of being fully offline.
And it's also interesting how much stuff from 90s/00s era, particularly electronic music and the various remixes never made it on to streaming platforms. I assume some of it is just complexity of licensing some niche pressing of Artist C remixing a song by Artists A&B, etc.
Sometimes I see some of the 2-3 CD live albums make it onto a streaming platform with like 1/3 of the songs greyed out missing due to licensing.
To add, as a vinyl enjoyer, it's also that putting on a record is a deliberate action. I'm putting it on with the intent to listen and enjoy it vs. most often when I open up Apple Music it's just background noise while I'm working on other things, where I just hit shuffle on my 10k song+ library. When I put on a record it's because I want to sit with it and listen to that specific album.
Plus there's the aspect of actually owning your media and not simply leasing it with a monthly subscription.
Many (or at least some) vinyl record albums were also not just a collection of 10 tracks but were crafted to be a complete experience. You listened to the album not just one song. With streaming being the predominant way music is consumed now, people mostly just listen to one song by one artist before bouncing to something randomly selected to be next in their playlist.
Yes, ritual is the right word. I used to do it quite a lot during COVID with cassettes and CDs while working.
Helped me to more consciously get into work mode.
...okay, but like, couldn't we choose a medium that doesn't physically wear out from repeated playback?
CDs just seem so much better. Yes it's technically digital, but can you tell?
One nice thing about buying vinyl these days is that they almost all come with a DRM free digital download of the album as well. Buying physical records is what has caused my digital music collection to grow the most since my Hotline 1.2.3 days.
Content for vinyl is mastered differently than for streaming, not sure about cds, but wouldn’t be surprised.
Early CDs would sometimes be made just from the vinyl master. They didn't sound very good.
Are those the CDs with the pre-emphasis flag? I really hate those.
Depends on your perspective. If you’re into the ritual and interested in close, intensive listening, there’s a certain magic and immediacy to knowing you’re using a physically destructive playback mechanism—that this right now is the best this record will ever sound again.
As for myself, I have young kids and this sort of thing doesn’t make the cut these days, so I stream everything. It all feels background-y and I haven’t fallen in love with an album in years and years.
> there’s a certain magic and immediacy to knowing you’re using a physically destructive playback mechanism—that this right now is the best this record will ever sound again
Maybe I just don't get it - I'm much younger than the average HN user, growing up with physical media but not physical media that rapidly degraded on use like how vinyl does. But to me this sentiment is so alien that it seems like some kind of a milder nostalgia Stockholm syndrome.
When we think of other physical media, no one ever romanticizes that type of thing because degradation never really existed there. Would you want a photograph that faded away a significant amount each time you looked at it? A book that had the ink on its pages visibly rub off?
To me it just seems that the hard technical limitations of a long bygone era (that some people would've undoubtedly hated at the time) were given a mystique to them when people come back to them. Is the harsh fact of media degradation really inherently "magical"? Or is it that people ascribe good qualities to it because it's just the way it was?
> Would you want a photograph that faded away a significant amount each time you looked at it?
Yes!
> A book that had the ink on its pages visibly rub off?
Yes, old paperbacks were exactly like that.
CDs just seem so much better. Yes it's technically digital, but can you tell?
I didn't think so, until a couple of weeks ago.
I was in a record store and it had a CD player on sale for $30. One of those cheap blister-pack jobs. Just for a laugh, I bought it, and a couple of CD versions of records I own. (Genesis, New Order, R.E.M.)
I thought "digital is digital" so it shouldn't matter that it was cheap.
It wasn't great.
I sounded very flat. Even with my expensive headphones, it just didn't sound right. I'm not sure if "mechanical" is the right word, but it was noticeably different, and I'm not someone who has perfect hearing. It just sounded... boring.
So I compared the CD sound with the record versions that I rip with a $20 USB dongle and Audacity. The record rips sound much better than the CDs.
Maybe someone with perfect hearing will think otherwise. But I'm not an audiophile. I'm just a guy who likes gadgets.
Digital is digital, but you’re ignoring multiple places where things might not be the same:
That $30 CD player… if it’s connected to headphones, how were the headphones driven? Especially if you have nice headphones, it’s very easy for a cheap device to not be able to competently drive them.
Vinyl vs CD mastering is a thing. There could be differences there. Additionally, depending on how you ripped the vinyl (especially with a “cheap dongle”) that may introduce its own color to the record.
There’s a reason why music collectors differentiate between every single source, because often there are differences (sometimes small, sometimes big) between the various sources.
Usually that means the record was mastered differently (because you literally physically can't make a record as "loud" as a CD).
It's not the CD's fault, it's the mastering engineers.
Yeah it depends on where the producer expects the CD to be played.
99% of music is made to be played on radio / in car etc., a noisy environment, where you don't want to be adjusting the volume knob all the time. So the dynamics are stripped in mastering phase.
Music that gets pressed on vinyls isn't mastered for car-play, but home stereo equipment, so it makes more sense to have larger dynamic range.
CDs have objectively lower noise floor (less hissing), and more dynamic range (difference between loudest and quietest note), but it's the mastering that usually destroys the sound. And nothing can be done about it on consumer end. Except find a less remastered version of the album in a thrift store that isn't scratched to oblivion.
There's really no reliable way to tell if a CD is going to have high dynamic range, except perhaps niche audiophile studios like https://www.stockfisch-records.de/sf12_start_e.html, but https://dr.loudness-war.info/ has fantastic list of records with their dynamic ranges, so you can check before you buy, and you can also explore and find new stuff to use to listen to your speakers ;)
If your CD player had cheap anti-skip it probably does lossy digital audio compression before output. A lot of the CD-player-as-a-package chips had older, crappy lossy audio compression and saved to a small bit of RAM on the CD player. Not much of a power envelope for compute power for audio compression logic. With memory being really expensive back in the day and prices being cutthroat there wasn't much memory for the blanti-skip buffer. So you needed fast, cheap, and really compact audio compression. Nobody really bothered improving it once MP3 players came out and memory got cheaper, so even "new" CD players use the same hardware portable CD players were using in the 90s.
And even then, it's not digital square waves coming out of your headphones. At some point that digital signal needs to be converted to analog waves. The quality of the DAC matters as well and can give a different quality of output.
If you used an analog audio output of the cheap CD player then the "digital is digital and it shouldn't matter that it was cheap" argument may not hold. The low quality of sound could be due to low quality of Digital to Analog Converter in the cheap player, not due to low quality of CD records that you have tried.
CDs degrade pretty fast. I know people with CD collections that are basically unplayable now. And the typical plastic cases don't even make for nice shelf deco like books or paper-based vinyl cases.
These are easily fixable problems! M-Disc exists for disc longevity. High quality cases exist.
I realize this isn't the world we live in so I guess I'm just yelling at clouds. But come on, Vinyl is just so obviously a bad way to preserve music...
M-Discs are available as DVD and Blu-Ray only, not as CD.
Oops, yes you're right! I bet that could change pretty quickly if a big corporate customer wanted them, though.
You can't scratch an mp3, ruining your copy.
It can bitrot tho.
They're very easy to back up.
Hard to play without a screen though!
I've had several MP3 players with more screen than any hifi CD player. Track number, maybe folder number, current time.
The iPod Shuffle managed it.
Oops, yes! I should have said "hard to use" instead of "hard to play."
With an iPod Shuffle, you needed a screen to load new music. The process of managing your collection happens on screen.
> Yes it's technically digital, but can you tell?
yep
you can tell, and it sounds better :p
> it's far more profitable to charge you per action than per object.
This is a really insightful and concise descriptor.
I worked in this industry for years. Its actually sad what people consider "good" audio nowadays.
Kids these days literally have no idea how things can sound, so content is mastered for them and their el cheapo Bluetooth inears, so proper equipment (not necessarily expensive and most definitely not audiophile-tier, mind you, just something that acknowledges physics) owners get scraps and leftovers.
It's not just "kids these days", look at the popularity of sound bars as well. Sure, they're better than what comes built in to a modern TV but as you note physics is still physics and small speakers will never sound as good as large ones.
Hell, we can even chase that one back further, remember how much money Bose spent in the '90s convincing people that tiny speakers plus magic can somehow sound comparable to a proper stereo or home theater system? They were absolutely full of shit, but a ton of people believed every word of it.
While I don't disagree, I find that small speakers are dramatically better today than they were even 15 years ago.
> While I don't disagree, I find that small speakers are dramatically better today than they were even 15 years ago.
Then why is what comes out from my "modern" soundbar so crappy compared to the one I bought 15 years ago?
I had to retire my ancient soundbar because it had Bluetooth without security and would regularly pump out 100db of some show that our neighbors were watching at random times.
However, the sound quality was vastly better than any soundbar I can buy now--even my wife complained about the soundbars we tried--they were that obviously worse. I had to suck it up and buy a full blown sound system to match a stupid cheap-ass JBL soundbar from 15 years ago.
JBL is unfortunately one of the brands that people buy nowadays and think of as "good". Well already was a thing 8 years ago... Please do not buy JBL nowadays. Its crap made for being thrown away after a few years. Real speakers are repairable usually. The expensive ones we sold even had 70 year - lifetime warranty. Its true that old speakers often have really good sound though. A lot of it is mechanical which didn't change a lot in the last decades. Modern speakers have electronic shenanigans that might work, but doesn't provide a noticeable difference in my opinion. Except for noise canceling.
No argument. All the "modern" JBL soundbars were just as crappy as the rest of the "modern" soundbars.
I remember buying that soundbar (back at Fry's!) and all the soundbars were pretty much just as good (well, the Bose ones were garbage and overpriced, but let's not get started about that ...). They weren't audiophile quality, but they were good enough that an amateur like my wife really couldn't tell much difference.
What the hell happened that caused soundbars to go to shit?
Soundbars in the past were a niche market for people with expensive Plasma screens so they had to appeal to that group.
Soundbars today are a cheap addition to make up for the horrible sound on everyone's cheap $300 LCD 65 inch TV that in addition to horrible sound looks worse at 4k than the 720 Plasma did.
I vaguely remember reading about heterodyning speakers in the mid 90s - the physics does check out, and such technology should be able to deliver perfectly flat response along the entire audible spectrum and with a tiny footprint. I guess they never managed to make it work or cheap enough or safe enough (yes, it’s also supposed to be flat at the harmful subsonic frequencies)
IIRC the idea is to have two crystals, one at a constant e.g. 100khz, and the other at (100+x)kHz for x corresponding to the sound you want. By physically connecting them, you get the sum (ultrasonic, lost energy but not a problem) and the difference - which is the sound you want - with most of the physics across half an octave so easily flat. Something along those lines.
An interesting idea, but that kind of mixing requires a nonlinear element somewhere. Otherwise the resulting signal is just an independent superposition of both waveforms with no new frequency components. (Think about what a colony of bats would sound like to us, if that weren't the case.)
Given a high enough sound pressure level, your own eardrums might end up providing the required nonlinearity. The warranty sure sucks, though.
The nonlinear element was provided by some intricate physical structure connecting both crystals, with perhaps some other material providing it in the junction.
To be fair to those Bose speakers, to someone that didn't have a proper stereo set up, nor ever experienced one, they sounded amazing and people are notoriously bad at discerning audio quality
Yea I used to listen with Focal speakers for a while. Dali is also pretty good. In the shop I used to work at we would have vinyl play a lot, real vinyl, not the plastic that is mostly fabricated nowadays. But considering to what kinda music some people listen (autotune rap) quality doesn't matter I guess. Its mostly about vibes now.
Same with the headphones. I got a WH-1000xm3 that all reviews praise for sound quality and it sounds like complete shit, muffled, over emphasizing bass, no clarity. You're supposed to "fix" it using EQ. And you can't even adjust eq if you want to use the bettter audio codecs. If I paid the original list price for this i would be furious
> all reviews praise for sound quality
objectively or compared to similar bluetooth, noise-cancelling headphone? Most of the reviews I heard agree that even a mid-tier IEM or wired headphone beats shit out of them.
One thing you can try with headphones is changing the earpads: specifically the shape, but maybe also the material. I have Shure SRH840A headphones, and out-of-the-box I was NOT happy with the sound. Someone suggested trying different aftermarket earpads, and I found a pair of "angled" pads that changed the sound quality to exactly what I wanted. I was surprised how dramatic the effect was. The pads are huge and look ridiculous, but I only use these headphones at home so it's fine.
The large number of people complaining that the new iPhone Air only has one speaker instead of two opened my eyes to this. There are a large number of people listening to music and watching Netflix using just the built-in phone speakers. Scary.
> barring a [...] moderate-to-severe internet catastrophe, its hard to motivate the utility of this kind of "middle path asceticism"
Like a music producer contract ending with a streaming service? This is all it takes for you to lose "your" music today.
I have a complete setup from the 70s. NAD 3045 with new acoustic design on the panel, technics record player and Braun speakers. Sound super super good. The increase in soundquality since that tech is marginal at best. The biggest improvement regarding class-D amps is power consumption and weight.
> The increase in soundquality since that tech is marginal at best.
I'm glad you enjoy your system, but, having upgraded from a very, very good 70s system to a pretty excellent system using contemporary parts, I can assure you that both objectively and subjectively your system from the 70s is inferior, and the difference isn't marginal. It's massive.
I don't think there is any special development other than the cheap comodification of hardware.
Hardware has been largely solved in our everyday domains, and it's not where the money is anymore, or has been for years. Stuff that is "good enough for anyone" is cheap, made in China, and readily available from a manufacturer skimming by on a 5% margin.
I agree, it already is. There are whole YouTube channels already, people collecting "old" hifi gear, collecting and listening to taoes and cds, etc. It's a whole subculture already, I think it'll grow. I think there will be niche brands that bring some of these things back.
> There is something wonderful about listening to physical music recordings without using a screen. It's like cursive writing, or knowing how to drive a stick-shift.
I'm old enough to have bought a lot of vinyl records, cassette tapes, VHS tapes, Laserdiscs, etc back when they were the mainstream consumer formats and there were no better alternatives, so I get what you're saying. However, it feels like you're conflating three different concepts here.
1. The abstract idea (or perhaps 'ideal') of using vintage technologies being an expressive act which demonstrates something about you and your values to yourself and/or others.
2. The internal physical sensory pleasure one might subjectively feel from performing a manual action, separate from the purpose or utility of that action - such as cursive writing, calligraphy, shaping a wet clay pot, etc.
3. The net utility and objective technical fidelity of an action like "playing recorded media".
To me, these are all significantly different things and blurring them together niggles at my pedantic, engineering brain. If you're talking about #2 (internal subjective pleasure you physically feel from 'doing it'), that's great! I'm happy for you - but it's purely a "You" thing which may or may not be experienced by others. As for #1 (expressive act demonstrating your values), your values and whatever emotions performing that act evokes inside you are purely subjective. One person's 'sacred temple' may be another person's 'old building'.
But #3 has elements which can be objectively evaluated on various dimensions. When we're talking about "playing recorded media", vinyl is objectively worse at recreating the full bandwidth present on the original studio master (probably an analog 2-inch master tape back in the day) - and I promise you I'm NOT being biased toward 'new' or 'digital'. Not all new technologies are necessarily better in all respects and not all digital processes are better than analog. For example, I posted here last week pointing out that there are still a few very specific technical parameters in which esoteric, ultra-high performance, high-definition analog CRTs costing >$20,000 (which most people have never seen in person) can outperform today's best reference-grade (>$10,000) flat screens (of course, outside those very rare, highly specific traits - most mediocre flat screens are objectively better than even a good consumer CRT TV).
My point being that with #3, we can have an interesting and potentially useful exchange about traits which can be objectively assessed. We may not always agree about the relative utility or value of various traits, but at least we're talking about traits which can be mutually measured and understood - so we know we're disagreeing about the same objective thing. Whereas with #1 and #2, other people may not share your exact values or the sense of sacredness they evoke in you. And, sadly, I cannot share the internal pleasure Yoyo Ma experiences in the act of playing the cello. Of course, I DO have my own flavors of 'meaningful rituals' which evoke ineffable feelings and sensations in me - but I've always understood they only exist in my own mind, not the external environment.
After a kitchen fire, with a house cleanout, I was actually somewhat disappointed to get back my stereo rather than having it paid for by insurance. I'll hook up my receiver, DVD/stereo, and a couple of fairly large speakers, but I probably won't use much and certainly wouldn't have bought again.
> There is something wonderful about listening to physical music recordings without using a screen.
Don't you listen with your ears? Or am I just misunderstanding what you're talking about.
Edit: ah yes, vinyl is quite romantic. Maintaining the equipment and records and moving them is less so.
It's a less embodied experience. I prefer a knob than pressing a button for volume. And sliding on a piece of glass is a soulless UX.
I agree completely. Of course, you can still use your sound systems with digital music.
Fwiw I have a few hundred vinyl myself. I'll admit that I haven't unpacked them since my last move, though.
I see a lot of lamentation for high end audio going away but the reality is that it's not that hard to achieve if you are truly interested in its effects.
You can build loudspeaker cabinets yourself without a lot of skills. There are kits everywhere. These will dramatically outperform anything you can buy retail even if you do a mediocre job of assembly. Most aspects of a high quality audio solution involve the room itself, not the equipment inside of it.
Building something that replicates (for instance) the Polk RTI series would take a weekend for a total noob if working from a kit. You can buy pro amplifiers like QSC and Behringer that satisfy whatever topology and power level you desire. Vendors like MiniDSP give you everything you need to build an active crossover solution in an afternoon.
Simply knowing that these things are possible is the first step to achieving them.
DIY: https://www.parts-express.com/speaker-components/speaker-sub...
Pre-built: https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=43155
Emotiva is also a very good vendor.
You don’t even need to DIY, you can just pay an amount of money similar to the cost of 1970s hi-fi systems after adjusting for inflation. The nice hi-fi systems are still around, but they don’t look at all like old hi-fi (why would they? both taste and technology have shifted drastically) and you don’t see them available at retail brick-and-mortar stores like Best Buy.
Which brands are that?
You can even go all out with making custom enclosures, DIY Perks has some great videos on DIY audio. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEspOD1NHr0&list=PLOJU8YJjFw...
Ohh cool that’s a new hobby unlocked. Could a DIY speaker really sound as good as a high end speaker?
Virtually all of it is about the spatial volume and stiffness of the cabinet material & design. The actual type of material, dimensions and surface finish are almost entirely irrelevant to performance. MDF is dirt cheap and highly performant.
I've built a ~700 liter subwoofer using 24" diameter Sonotube concrete forum material ($200-300 right now). The circular shape means that the only unbalanced forces occur at the ends of the tube. Fortunately, this is also where you put the driver (bottom) and the port (top) along with reinforcing material. You can make incredibly deep & powerful LFE cabinetry without even breaking 200lbs of total weight. Mine would go flat to 13Hz and could easily be moved by 1 person.
Literally, the only thing I know about "Denon" is that they once tried to sell a $500 Ethernet cable.
https://www.cnet.com/culture/denons-500-ethernet-cable/
They've made some really good A/V receivers over the years, I have one in my home theater.
Slightly unrelated, but the coolest audio-ethernet cable I've seen is one that goes inside an XLR shell
Socket: https://www.amazon.com/Cable-Matters-Snake-Over-Ethernet/dp/...
Plug: https://www.gear4music.se/sv/G4M/Neutrik-NE8MC-1-EtherCON-RJ...
Professional Audio has zero time for snake oil, I bet these will never suffer from broken clips.
That "socket" you are showing is something else. It's an xlr to ethernet adapter. Cat5 cable, with it's 4x twisted pairs is an excellent cable for transmitting balanced audio signals over long distances. One ethernet cable can transmit 4 such signals. The signal running in the ethernet is still the analogue signal though.
So it's quite popular these days do use ethernet cable for long signal runs in live audio installations. Much cheaper than traditional snakes too.
Your second link is a rj45-in-xlr-shell plug. It's used where you need a robust and reliable rj45 connection that can withstand more abuse than a typical "naked" rj45. I think it's fairly popular in industrial computing and military settings. There are various types of plugs that are embedded in an xlr shell for the same robustness reason.
specifically, the first one is XLR to RJ45 - the cable could be cat5, cat6, cat7, etc depending on the standard it was manufactured to. and ethernet is the protocol for the digital signal those cables usually carry.
as you say, it's common to use that cable for long analog audio runs, but when it is used that way it's not ethernet.
Yeah I mostly wanted to show the idea. Very interesting to hear it's used outside PA too. Thanks!
They're one of the major receiver brands.
I remember the golden RCA cables (not by Debon). They used to sell them by the meter and people connected 7 channels in a 100 sq.m living room...
But the 0s and 1s are so much warmer with that cable! Well worth the price.
Slightly surprised I haven't seen a tube-based Ethernet preamp. You know, to take away the harshness of those digital square wave signals.
Luckily Cambridge Audio is still fully owned by its founder. ( Or same person running it for the past 30 years. )
Sad when I first heard B&W sold 10 years ago. I had their 600 series and still wish someday I could afford their top range model.
I don't really keep up with the hifi market and seeing the headline was an eye opener.
I used to work in a building next to a B&W place where they either made speakers or at least the drive units. The day was punctuated regularly by rather loud audio frequency sweeps!
I've always liked Dali for speakers. Still independent and Danish-owned so, like Lego, unlikely to sell out.
Dali isn't as fancy on the outside as stuff like B&W but oh boy the sound. Zensor 3s sounded a lot better than CM5s, that cost quite a bit more. Still the best budget 2-way I've ever heard.
Also the Oberon 7s pack incredible sound for a price that's closer to B&W's shelf speakers than floor speakers.
You and me both. Love my 600 series-based surround setup, but I dunno if the 800 series would be worth the asking price relative to other, independently-owned brands in the space. I'm firmly in my "I want to support good humans doing good work" phase of life, and that's increasingly incompatible with large corporate conglomerates relying on huge data sets to justify price increases, corner cutting, and offshoring.
Similarly I am sad to hear this about Definitive Technology. The system I have for audio and home theater (not currently running due to receiver failure) is based around their tall speakers and the amazing sound they put out.
Hsu Research is also independent and makes excellent subwoofers and speakers.
Can we expect the Samsungization of these brands? Should we be on the lookout for locked-down audio ecosystems, ever more extraneous features, phone apps, and smart appliances?
Ewww.
I was in a Target yesterday and saw a Samsung TV with a "warning" label on the box. Essentially: "some features not available without consent to tracking of viewing habits".
I should take a photo and post.
Never let your TV have access to the Internet. Almost every time someone thinks their phone is listening to them, it is really their TV with a microphone and a WiFi or Bluetooth chip to id the phones nearby.
I have an older Vizio TV, was never connected to the internet but it does have wifi. Last year it started freezing up a lot, and I read that some people had resolved that problem by removing the wifi module. Since I never used it as anything but a dumb screen, I figured why not try it. I opened it up and did that, and it's been stable ever since.
yeah I just bought an apple tv appliance and my nice OLED samsung tv never gets anywhere near my wifi, except the first day I got it to update the firmware. It seems stable so the firmware will probably never be updated again in this or the next lifetime.
this would be express ticket to court in EU.
The agreement, or posting the photo?
Ah yes the EU, that country aggressively trying to pass encryption backdoor laws.
It's not self-contradictory at all. Proponents of Chat Control want to be able to spy on their own citizens, and have the technological wiggle room to expand their powers to collect data in the future. At the same time, they generally don't want customers to be abused by large companies that strong-arm them into increasingly lopsided contracts by moving in unison and using the average person's technical illiteracy against them. For people like us, these two things are related because we don't want every bit of our data collected, examined and studied for either tracking or profit - but for them, companies and governments operate on entirely different levels of rights and expectations.
Also, the EU isn't even remotely like "a country".
> Also, the EU isn't even remotely like "a country".
The EU has a currency, parliament, elections, laws, presidents, courts, treaties, and is thinking about forming an army. That sounds an awful lot like a country to me.
Many multi-national organizations and alliances have some of these aspects, does that make them into countries too?
In practice, being a country isn't just about filling out some checklist. The EU neither claims to be a country, nor does any country on Earth see it as a single sovereign state. It has democratic and political processes that are similar to a country's, but its sway over member states is limited. Also, its members aren't forced to stay in the EU, unlike the individual regions that are part of your country.
And if you truly, unironically believe that the EU is a single country, what do you think of its member states? By extension of this argument, is Spain not a country? Or is Poland a country that's contained within another country, being equal and unequal in status at the same time?
I never said that the EU is a country nor that I believe it is (much less a single sovereign one), only that it sounds like one.
If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it still might not be a duck.
different groups, different goals. They are against corps prying into your business, but government overall is pretty in favor of gaining as much power as possible for themselves.
I have a cheap TV powered by Android. The thing takes ages to power on and off. At least, it goes to HDMI directly. My dumb TV took maybe a second to power on and power off was instant.
I just bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab recently. Of course I was well aware of the death of the 3.5mm headphone port, but as I plugged in my 3.5mm to usb-c adapter I was greeted with a new message: "Analog USB C Audio Unsupported.". I tried a pair of regular off-brand usb-c headphones too, which too resulted in the same, with no audio output.
How this is not behavior deserving of some kind of EU fine is a complete mystery to me.
I believe this just means your dongle doesn’t contain a usb audio device, and implements the standard that requires the host device to contain the DAC and expose it over some of the usb c pins. Getting one with a dac shouldn’t be that difficult or expensive though.
The Unintuitive Serial Bus strikes again.
Heh, usb-c the connector is used for many protocols only a few of which are actually USB (pci-e /thunderbolt, DisplayPort, i2c, etc). The analog dongle is one of these. There is no usb involved, just using the pins of the connector for analog audio. Dongles with a DAC are actually a usb sound card, and are usable even on desktop computers or using usb-c to usb A converters.
The message you’re describing sounds like it (and most devices) telling you nicely it doesn’t support the legacy, now removed from the spec, function to do direct analog audio over USB-C. I.e., the DAC is built into the phone instead of being built into the dongle.
Most devices do not support analog USB-C audio, and frankly I understand why given how affordable DAC based dongles are these days.
All of my cheaper chinese devices without 3.5mm do support it though. It is only this premium tablet that I paid triple what I'd normally spend on which does not work.
Just buy the $9 Apple adapter and you will have a better setup than those old Chinese cheap tablets.
And your point? Samsung is likely more adherent to the USB-C spec than cheap Chinese devices. Audio Accessory Mode (the technical term for the analog audio mode in USB-C) was removed as an optionally supported mode from the specification last year. Adoption among flagship phones was basically nil for years. It's basically the worst of all worlds in terms of complexity: you still need a DAC/ADC in the phone AND you need a muxing switch to switch between data pins and analog audio.
For context on why it was removed: it was replaced with a moisture detection functionality, which can be used to monitor and protect the USB-C port against shorts from moisture ingress into the charging port.
That's really strange. I have recent Samsung devices and regularly use 3.5mm audio with an adapter, and yet need to run into any issues. Have you tried a different any other adapter? Alternatively, does the adapter/headphone work on an Apple device?
P.S. I have been using official Apple/Samsung dongles and they work fine.
Why wouldn’t you want your speaker to automatically play ads when your music is paused? We can even have them be relevant ads by having them covertly listen to your conversations to analyze for context sensitive keywords.
Samsung has owned Harman Kardon and its stable of brands for a long time, and they've been mostly fine. Mainly, I think Samsung doesn't care about them except as names to license in "exclusive" partnerships with automakers.
Harman Automotive does a lot more than license names.
technically samsung didn't buy these brands, Harman did. And samsung has owned Harman (including JBL and AKG) since 2018.
so you should probably expect that these brands will continue operating the way that Harman, JBL,and AKG have since they were acquired. which is to say, pretty independently of anything samsung does.
Fwiw after Harman bought AKG, the Austrian engineers were laid off or left the company. There is a company called Austrian Audio that is more of a spiritual successor to AKG.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_Audio
I'd be particularly worried about the ones with screens [1].
[1]: https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-confirms-smart-refr...
I wouldn't put it past Samsung to find a way to inject ads into gadgets even without screens. Like mandatory open the samsung app every time you connect your headphones and such. They are scummy as fuck.
Why not an audio ad? They can buffer the next couple ads when connected to the internet. You can also have the app, monenitazion is not picky.
I worked at Samsung and saw plenty of enshittification (including losing my own job in some kind of sketchy power struggle), but oddly their audio stuff didn't seem like a bad deal.
In TV's they support the higher quality home theater scenario while still making most of their audio money from soundbars that can't compete on audio quality. They're well aware of that fact, and their strategy seems to be to keep all options on the table.
One of the TV execs is an audiophile FWIW.
> saw plenty of enshittification
you can't say that and not share some sample of that :)
I built the ads audience system. Most of the effects of that are already known here; Ads became a big trophy within the org; everybody had to have ads and post-sale revenue, even the fridge people.
Sometime around when the CEO got out of prison a bunch of weirdness occurred. Good managers left, bad managers got hired, and everything became top-down. The group head "retired" but last year un-retired in a different position; I didn't know you could do that.
Engineering-wise it went from technical free rein to "only use this suspiciously chummy cloud vendor" in a few months. I never got to the bottom of that deal, but costs exploded, and revenue flattened.
I recently had to setup my Denon Home Smart Speaker again after I moved. I’m pretty sure that I didn’t need a HEOS account the first time I set it up. On the second setup it was required to configure the WIFI. But the Ethernet Port worked fine without an account. I bought the speaker together with a Denon receiver ~3.5 years ago.
And *ads*.
Get off my lawn, Samsung. Your "Hi-Fi audio" has been nothing more than speaker redesign paired with the flavor-of-the-year codecs and "we put X chip in it" gimmicks for decades. I don't need nor do I want my living room to sound like the Sydney Opera House. Nor do I have the patience to set up 10 mini speakers on my surround system. Your engineering craftsmanship to build true novelty into an audio brand has been gone since the 2000s. Buying more patents won't solve it.
It is interesting how the market for high end audio has changed with the demise of physical media. I don't associate these high end audio brands with the home, however I do associate them with the options on expensive cars.
For the average person with a big TV and standard issue sound bar, an expensive home audio setup has limited appeal. What they have is good enough. However, in the automotive market it is a very different game. For starters, if you have to pay a five or six figure sum for your vehicle, where you are already in the game of specifying options, that expensive audio option isn't that expensive when compared to all of the other 'necessary' options, so you might as well tick the box.
With high end cars, resale value matters. If you have the base specification then this isn't going to fare too well in the second hand market. With some options you are never going to get your money back, but some are 'mandatory', particularly if they are bundled. It seems to me that this is the lucrative niche for high end audio, not the home or other markets. Plus you can sell someone a ridiculous amount of speakers, for example 22 of them, whereas, in the home, nobody has 22 speakers in their living room.
>an expensive home audio setup has limited appeal
The thing is a sound bar can cost more than 2 grand, which gets you nice pair of B&W two-way speakers and an entry-level Marantz, a setup that beats the sound bar any day. Of course I'm a bit unsure what kind of number's you're speaking of.
> pair of B&W two-way speakers
Except that won't put the dialogs where they should be, in the center.
Back in the days I got a surround receiver and added a center speaker to my parent's regular two-speaker setup, and it was dramatically different feel when watching movies.
That's up to the mixing. If it's a surround system, sure it's better the dialogue comes from the right place in the scene.
But if you have stereo speakers properly placed https://www.ecoustics.com/electronics/messages/34579/705942.... (basically on both sides of the TV with you sitting from each speakers by their distance from one another), the stereo imaging will absolutely be able to place dialogue in the center.
But it can also produce wider sound stage than a soundbar, which is half my point, the other being better sound pressure and dynamics from the larger speakers.
Surround is of course better. But the price is usually the issue. One good option is to start with decent pair of two-ways that you can move to rear if you decide to go surround later. Then you only need the three center speakers and maybe the sub. The amp can be either future proofed by going n.1 immediately or upgraded with the jump.
> stereo imaging will absolutely be able to place dialogue in the center
For me, if I were to watch alone while sitting straight up in the middle of the couch. Which I almost never do. Either I'm casual or I'm watching with others.
I agree with regards to sound quality and dynamic range though. We have a soundbar in the main livingroom of good quality, but as expected it has no lower end.
I got the stereo+center speaker setup in the basement with the big TV, they're just bookshelf sized but on stands with center just below TV.
They're enough that our neighbors would complain if they were home when I crank it up, and have much better clarity for normal sounds and dialog.
It will it you sit right in the middle. In fact it will be better than a centre speaker unless you mount the centre speaker behind the screen which hardly anyone does (you need either an acoustically transparent projector screen or Sony make some TVs that support this). Unfortunately this only works for one person, though.
$150 soundbar setup from Best Buy is good enough for "most people"
Yeah sure, but this guy was talking about luxury cars. I've seen B&W bundled in Maseratis, Aston Martins and McLarens. BMWs and Volvos too but that's a more recent market expansion.
Personally I think think the soundbars are a waste given that they'll never beat the stereo imaging you get from the second hand entry-level Hi-Fi. Soundbar is more convenient and I totally get many people don't always use it for intensive listening sessions, they just need a bit more tear free volume than the TV can output and maybe some background music.
And for those that still care and are willing to put in the legwork, $150 will score you a nice pair of Advents or similar on Craigslist, and almost any receiver you’ll find at your local thrift store will beat the pants off a cheap soundbar.
Never seen any decent audio gear at a thrift store.
Plus, does all of that stuff integrate with your tv remote like the right soundbar can? Most people don't want multiple remotes or have to manually turn a receiver etc on
As long as it's a recent enough AVR. The technology name is HDMI-CEC.
It probably is for listening at -30… don’t let it play anywhere louder though.
There are some bad "high end" factory systems. Looking at you, Ford and B&O.
There used to be a “mid range” market for $2000 amps and things. I suspect that those people want good enough sound and will happily just use a fancy sound bar and sub. Especially since Marantz was bought and just started churning out middle of the road shite. There still exists a market for $25,000 Trinnov.
I think I was one of the people desiring a mid range setup, but I found it very hard to justify when the "good enough" is 10-20 times cheaper. Based on perceived value, the $2000 mid range price looks 2-4 times too big for me and there is no sign of adjustment, what you can find at $3-500 is mostly garbage.
Audio is not like a graphics card, but people understand that you can buy at $500 a GPU that is ~ 2 times faster than a $200 one. The low end in audio is tens of dollars and there is nothing good in the hundreds of dollars range.
A Yamaha RX-V4A is $400 and the RX-V line goes up from there.
(Yes, I like Yamaha audio equipment.)
I like Yamaha, I have an older one in my living room, but for the $550 (local price) I am not extatic of what it offers. The digital part is a joke, it has a DAC in it but I cannot use a laptop as a digital source over USB, it has an Ethernet port, but it cannot use it for an embedded management web site, you need to run a phone app for that. My $15 relay controlling the lights has WiFi and embedded management web site, a $550 AV received does not. Also you cannot play movies, only music, even if it has in it what it takes for that. Figured out why?
And this is not Yamaha, everyone is selling the same stuff. You can find cheaper Chinese integrated DAC + amplifiers, WiFi and BT with more modern stuff in it. Yes, the amp part is much lower quality, but you need features, convenience, great user experience, not just good audio. At least with the cheap soundbar you don't have high expectations, no disappointments.
I feel like a big part of it is the masses have less money to burn on big sound systems nor do they have affordable spacious housing to fill with loud sound from the system they can't buy.
My first jobs (1990s) paid largely for restoring large speakers I'd garbage picked from the neighborhood and components to drive them. But I was privileged to have a large space at my parents' home and neighbors far enough away I could enjoy the system without the police showing up immediately.
Young people have way less buying power today vs. then don't they? It seems like the target audience today is living with headphones connected to smartphones in cramped living spaces riding a constant debt train.
I really wish there was a simple solution for streaming audio in a stereo like box. And no, Sonos isn’t it. Neither are the “smart” speakers.
I have several frustrations with Sonos. Just the other day I was trying to setup a 10+ year old Sonos. Doesn’t work with the latest software. So I have to download a different controller. Couldn’t get it to work.
This isn’t something that should deprecate that quickly. Nest does the same thing.
Almost every “smart” appliance has a terrible network stack too. Like my washing machine can get an address on a mobile hotspot but not on my home network for some reason. And the errors are generic and useless.
We should be able to use Bluetooth or NFC or similar to configure the devices seamlessly by now.
Back to Sonos, I used to stream Internet radio. Every now and again it would drop out and I’d have to hit the power button. Why? It should be fault tolerant enough to do this on its own.
Interesting things like Spotify always seemed way harder than they should be.
As for smart speakers, thanks but no thanks. I just don’t want an always on cloud-connected microphone in my house.
So I just end up using my phone and a Bluetooth speaker. I wish there was something better.
Yamaha makes receivers with streaming connectivity (e.g. supporting Pandora, Spotify, Amazon Music, SiriusXM, TIDAL, Deezer) for home theaters that work well.
I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the length of time that Marantz has continued to support and ship updates for my receiver, which I’ve owed since ~2016. It’s not often that anything with software gets that sort of attention for that long.
I hope this doesn’t spell the end of that.
Why does it need updates for?
The main changes I've seen have been for keeping support for streaming services like Spotify working, but there's been a few bug fixes too.
There are quite a few independent old British brands in audio. I hope they stay small niche and independent in the face of consolidation and some genuine competition from China. There are Danish and Finnish brands too and the odd French one. Anyway I hope they can remain independent even as they move some parts of their manufacturing to Asia.
Curiously you can follow some designers from shop to shop as they move in their career evolution.
Anecdote and personal observation - the odd Finnish brands essentially catapulted from niche obscurity to wider recognition 15-20 years ago. Until then in "the common mind" there was Genelec, and then a vast gulf before anyone else.
Sometime before 2010 Genelec started to focus their offering to two markets: the absolute top-end studio kit, and at the same time expanding downwards in the market towards the top end of consumer range. While they retreated from the space between the two, other local players[tm] were happy to cover the now vacant hi-fi enthusiast space.
For some reason the same locales that originate lots of heavy-metal bands also happen to sport a concentration of high-end audio equipment shops.
(Happy owner of a pair of Amphion monitors. Described by my audiophile friends as "unforgivingly accurate".)
I love the small brands like Amphion, Buchardt, Castle, Atoll, etc. To borrow from the Smiths some are bigger than others…
Guessing this doesn’t affect Denon DJ / inmusic?
inMusic is just a different conglomerate owning Akai, Alesis, Moog, M-Audio, Denon DJ, Numark, Rane...
If Samsung buys them as well (which didn't happen right now, but I'm sure it's what they're aiming for), the monopolization will be complete and the Live Nation-ification can truly begin.
A similar story is happening to festivals (especially across Europe), with KKR-owned Superstruct Entertainment now having majority stake in like a hundred or so music festivals.
inMusic or Music Tribe, pick your poison.
What is left? Any recommendations for a modern-day receiver for two-zone 5.1.2 and a 2.1 setup?
Get the denon x1800 while it’s still available and you’ll have to worry about this question in 2035… come to think about it, maybe get two.
There’s always Sony too, who still put out pretty good receivers.
eBay. Plenty of excellent vintage un-shittified sound equipment for sale. You may need to re-cap the amplifiers, but the speakers should still sound perfect.
You're doing 5.1.2 on vintage equipment?
Buy enough speakers and you can do x.y.z
Can you? Doesn't the receiver have to know how to decode it?
It's absolutely possible to do whatever amount of channels you want, just buy enough amplifiers. You may need other equipment to "decode", but it's easily possible to get a media PC with 7.1 analog audio outputs, or more if you really wanted to do it for whatever purpose you need. None of this is really impossible, it just takes money.
> but the speakers should still sound perfect
speakers are wear items
I have a set of 1970s Sansui speakers that are still going strong. Nothing wrong with them. I use them every day, all day long, and have for decades.
Minidsp flex ht or htx paired with a buckeye 6 channel amp. As cheap as you can get premium sound quality. Not cheap but you get the software control you actually want via the minidsp
I like Yamaha.
It's a special kind of messed up that not only has consolidation broken competition in many ways, they also get to create the illusion of competition by pretending to be different organizations.
Niche players like SVS Sound or Devialet are much more appealing now that Samsung owns these storied brands.
I have a B&W 700 series speakers and a devialet phanthom 108db, was quite surprised at the quality that devialet delivers
I hope this doesn't imply more Samsung enshittification. I was hoping to get a Denon receiver to fix the Samsung AV issues present on their TVs and sound bars
This is tangentially related-- I was a professional guitar player in the my 20's. When we were kids there were a handful of really great bands in the western United States like The Warlocks, The Cosmonauts, The Shivas, Super 78!, and especially the Brian Jonestown Massacre that thrived off of a huge culture of music enthusiasm that was especially, "tapes and records first. CD's are for the car."
Now outside of a handful of stalwart groups I don't see anybody making, "canonical" rock n' roll music in the, "post Velvet Underground" sense. It's, "correlation vs causation" but I can't help but feel that it was Spotify and streaming that killed this culture. Music became an, "everybody" thing that had no barrier to entry. Music subculture died. Fashion came next. Film has been declining since the 2000's.
I can stand you destroying my country's political culture but should have left it alone. It feels like an Albigensian Crusade.
I don't think Spotify and streaming killed the music subculture, it's still very much alive but requires more intention to find.
Back in the day how did you find new music? Pre-2000s it was likely MTV/radio for mainstream, or word-of-mouth/local events for niche genres. Nowadays Spotify and streaming services have supplanted the former for mainstream music. Finding new music outside the recommended engines requires a little more effort in knowing where to look. There are a lot of Internet radio programs (shout out to The Lot and Rinse.FM) and smaller record labels that do an amazing job at curating local and diverse sounds.
These days it's never been easier to start your own label or publish a track. Rock-'n'-roll is probably still alive (unfortunately I don't know that modern scene well), but assembling the necessary equipment and people to start a band is a big hurdle requiring practice, space and coordination. So I can see more wanna-be artists opting for pop/electronic having shorter turnarounds to a finished product.
Tell me where the music subculture is living and I'll move there right now. When we were kids it was Austin, Brooklyn, and Philadelphia for the insane IDGAF kids. For awhile it was Paris and maybe parts of Spain. Today I can't think of definitive hub for, "real musicians."
I think self-publishing is the problem. Making music on laptops is neat and everything but where the model in the 1990's was giving the bedroom rock hopeful group eg. Pixies, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Creation Records a million dollar record deal which gave a livelihood to the kids making the music the new model is, "have young artists self-finance their own careers and reward them with exposure when they produce something worthwhile with the hope that maybe their music gets licensed for a film." Touring isn't lucrative for many groups. Many tours are self-financed. Not often mentioned is that musician's a group notoriously deprived of healthcare due to healthcare being tied to traditional employment.
How could we combine the best parts of Johnny Marr's idea of, "being a working musician" while still affording young talented musicians the livelihoods and opportunities presented by the music industry of, "yesteryear?" My feeling always was in expanding the musician's reach into the world of pedagogy and, "play as a means of meaningful research." Delia Derbyshire comes to mind. Brian Eno half comes to mind. There's a better thing but it requires institutions and social democracy-- it requires a society with the social sensitivity to not envy or disdain, "people who make weird noises for a living and get to travel the world." The United States is not that right now unfortunately. The western world is in crisis and needs music but it lacks the scaffolding to create, "great musicians and bands."
As much as the world needs another John Lennon right now much more we need Brian Epsteins that can create John Lennons, Mick Jaggers, and Peter Noones with pen strokes. Where are the Don Kirshners of the world creating product groups like The Monkees and The Archies? I can tolerate greed if we can get another Smiths, Beatles, or another Paul Weller. I can tolerate another Andy Warhol is he'll produce another Lou Reed.
"Tell me where the music subculture is living and I'll move there right now."
How you going to move back to being 20 years old again?
> Tell me where the music subculture is living and I'll move there right now
Berlin
> Tell me where the music subculture is living and I'll move there right now. When we were kids it was Austin, Brooklyn, and Philadelphia for the insane IDGAF kids.
There are still geographical centers for certain genres of music. Austin is still a hub for psych/indie/alt music, New Orleans is where you want to be if bounce is your thing, etc.
But from my perspective, music subculture moved from TV and radio to the internet long ago. I no longer have "120 Minutes" telling me what its creators think is good, but I continue to hear great new music via TikTok and Instagram direct from artists and fans.
> Today I can't think of definitive hub for, "real musicians."
If you had to pick one physical location, that'd probably be Nashville (and not just for country). Other hubs would include L.A., NYC, London, Miami, Atlanta, Austin, and New Orleans.
Give me 5 noteworthy groups from Austin and I'll check them out. Mostly as an expert I don't see anything coming from the, "post Austin Psych Fest wake" that I should care about. Even as someone, "that played that shitty festival" with Joel Gion and all the rest (Black Angels, Loop) it wasn't Glastonbury in 95'; it wasn't anything. Find me a literate person that plays Vox 12-string and I'll form a band with you. I'll wait.
As for your second reply all those places are great but unaffordable for the young hopefuls. That's the filter that keeps the kids locked out. In the 70's moving to New York was, "Suicide" (Get it? If you don't I'd appreciate you'd just upvote this and stop reading. I'll provide a link below.) This is a filter that locks a lot of really talented kids out of the ecosystem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WvG-Z47S60
--so you can pretend to get the reference in my post in your later posts.
>> I don't think Spotify and streaming killed the music subculture, it's still very much alive but requires more intention to find
No, I think music as a subculture is dead.
When I was a kid in the 80's I would sneak out of the house and go to a hardcore punk show that was put on by kids for kids with no adult involvement whatsoever.
Right now, on a Saturday night, where is there an all-ages music show going on anywhere in the US where the kids in the pit are 14, 15 years old and no adult knows or cares that they're there? There's a culture now, but there's no subculture. Most kids are watched too closely for that to happen now, which is good! Mostly. And subculture doesn't require a credit card and a subscription plan.
How did I find new music? Word of mouth was good, cassette tapes that your friends made you. Going to shows. A little bit from Night Flight. The Decline of Western Civilization. Urgh! A Music War.
Compilation records. American Youth Report, Flipside Vinyl Fanzine, the Mystic record comps, Rat Music For Rat People, the Blasting Concept, Dope, Guns, and Fucking in the Streets, Let Them Eat Jellybeans, maximumrocknroll. Forced Exposure. No New York. Going to record stores "in the city".
"Right now, on a Saturday night, where is there an all-ages music show going on anywhere in the US where the kids in the pit are 14, 15 years old and no adult knows or cares that they're there?"
I used to go to those kinds of shows in my late teens. For what it's worth, I mostly am out of that because a) I like calmer music and b) the kids should have their own space.
But that doesn't mean that I don't run into small all-ages punk shows. There's usually one going on in Durango, CO a couple weekends a month that I have seen. I'm certain that in larger places the same thing is happening even though I don't know about them.
Consider that older folks not knowing about the show is kind of the sine qua non of what you're looking for, so I am no surprised that I, an "older folk", don't know about them.
But I know enough to know they are there. It's easy to find new music if you're looking for it.
Maybe go read or review Hesse's "Journey to the East" if you want a longer version of what I am getting at.
There's a lot of great rock made today, it's just not mainstream usually and done with smaller budgets.
They are probably on Bandcamp and sometimes their songs have 500 views on Youtube.
I'm with you and I while like this myth if there was a modern Velvet Underground, "living in the underground" somebody would be trying to make a buck off it. The Alan McGees of the world need fuel for the fire. The closest thing I can find as an, "industry expert" is Jesse Welles who's blown up on Instagram and YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPHafKOd9A4
If you want music like we had in the 20th century we need institutions, producers, entrepreneurs, a literate public, and a positive economic set. We need to pay musicians money to do their jobs. Music isn't a hobby. As the poet once said, "music is proof that there is more to the human than there seems."
Yeesh. "Those darn 40+-something millennials and their differing tastes!"
Rock 'died' because it's been around for 50 years; were the favourite of boomers who ensured it always had air-time; and now they're out to pasture and other music styles reign. My dad was a pro drummer in the 70s and hated everything that wasn't rock or metal. He was incapable of appreciating anything else. Or so he said.
As a kid of the 90s, I could never quite find music that fit me. Sure, I liked some rock and roll, pop, and so on --- but when I was first introduced to techno (Antiloop - Believe, to be specific) at a LAN party I knew I'd found my home: techno and then trance.
But good luck finding Antiloop or the nascent trance on MTV or commercial radio in the 90s. The people who ran those things didn't like it, know about it, listen to it, or felt it had commercial value. So I had to learn about it from randos at a LAN party.
Rock was on the way out in the early 80s, when millennials were barely being born...because disco won.
The 80s were the rise of synthpop, House music (which started from DJs sampling disco a cappellas and mixing them with TR-909 drums and Korg M1 keyboards), Techno and Italo Disco. From there, we got the next evolution, in the form of Eurodance/Eurobeat/Hi-NRG, and Electronic Dance Music as a genre was born. Notably, they all still largely lean in on the foundational traits of Disco: four on the floor drum beats, off-beat bass, heavy focus on syncopation to create groove, chord stabs, etc..
The 80s were also the rise of hip hop and rap, which also grew out of the same DJ culture. If a song doesn't have a four on the floor beat, it's more likely to have a hip hop beat than a rock "backbeat." (e.g. boom bam boom boom bam, like "Rump Shaker" by Wreckx-N-Effect)
I really don't think so. Punk had exploded after the Summer of Hate and in its wake we got Talking Heads, The B-52's, and Blondie at CBGB's. In parallel we have early Joy Division in Manchester which is going to inspire U2 to eventually become the biggest band in the world for the next 20 or something years. Martin Hannett is going to be a key figure in the development of EDM with his use of samplers and, "using the studio as an instrument." Check out the beginning of, "Transmission." He'll later go on to produce The Happy Mondays who are, "the" seminal Manchester dance group in the early 90's in lieu of an army of Stone Roses fans throwing lemons at me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7D5heNRUy0
If you look at how Johnny Rotten was listening to Neu! and X-Ray Spex (as well as The Monkees and Herman Hermits) and what Bowie was doing after he moved to Berlin with Iggy Pop it's not outlandish to say that Electronic Music wouldn't have existed without being preempted by Punk, Glam, and the emergent, "not progressive" guitar music of the 1970's especially in how it paralleled the development of Krautrock. Disco didn't evolve into EDM; Disco gave DJ Kool Herc a set of turntables to invent Hip Hop with. Techno literally came out of, "a certain guy who might be called Gerald" listening to Kraftwerk; Afrika Bammbatta's, "Planet Rock" samples Kraftwerk directly.
"I'm the operator with mine pocket calculator."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSBybJGZoCU
> Disco didn't evolve into EDM
I don't see how you can possibly claim that.
Disco led directly to house, and Italo-disco was hugely influential to techno. US electro developed at the same time as some key Italo tracks like "Robot is Systematic" (1982) and "Spacer Woman" (1983). Italo-disco was played on underground radio in Detroit and Chicago, and is often credited as a core influence. Or just look to Detroit proto-techno track "Share Vari" (1981) which was considered to be Italo-disco in style at the time of its release.
"On and On" (recorded 1983, released 84) is often considered the first Chicago house record, and it was literally a direct attempt to reproduce a disco record using a drum machine and synths.
This isn't to undermine Kraftwerk, which was obviously an enormous direct influence on these producers as well, but my point is they're far from the only influence. Giorgio Moroder should receive the same amount of credit for starters, along with other electronic disco legends such as Marc Cerrone.
My feeling is that without gluing all this music together with emergent gay club culture that the similarities are superficial. House is obviously a take-off of what Disco is trying to achieve on the dance floor but so is Parliament and James Brown ins 70's. We might as well say, "electronic music comes from black music in America" but that can't be right because of Kraftwerk and Delia Derbyshire. It wouldn't be wrong to say that George Harrison is a pioneer because of the Electronic Sound record but it all feels a bit like those blog posts that claim that Ringo Starr invented Breakbeat.
I don't think you're wrong I just think there's a, "more right position." I'm open to a plurality of views. It may be the, "real story" has to be a, "multiple perspectives thing." I'm just taken to the idea my perspective is the best.
Superficial? House is literally the same four-on-the-floor beat originally created in Philly by Earl Young of The Trammps.
Countless early house and techno legends say they listened to disco, sampled disco, made covers of disco songs, played disco in their DJ sets. Some key producers directly overlapped between the synth-heavy forms of disco (Italo-disco, High-NRG, Mutant Disco) and electronic dance music - for example Shep Pettibone, François K, and Material, to name just a few.
I guess believe whatever you want, but everyone else listens to what the people who created electronic dance music actually said and did which puts disco as a direct core ancestor.
Kraftwerk was definitely important, but you're missing Frankie Knuckles and Black Box...
House (from The Warehouse) is as core to EDM as techno (more Kraftwerk), and they were literally remixing disco as well as using disco musical facets. And House and Techno's lines blurred a lot in Europe.
Canonical rock n' roll in the minds of, "the initiated" might include groups like Kraftwerk and Neu! which laid the foundation for most forms of electronic music. It definitely includes the mother of all electronic music Delia Derbyshire (ask Peter Kember!) You might know her from the original Doctor Who theme music. Dig the link below for the arguably the first EDM song ever made. Keep in mind this is pre-synths-- it's all tape manipulation like The Beatles would end up copying on, "Strawberry Fields Forever."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwQIgGQLOQ8
I like all, "genres" and types of music but there's a certain high level of quality that exists in a continuum of music going back a long time. It's hard to define in a formal way. It's there in John Coltrane. It lives sophomorically in The Velvet Underground, Herman's Hermits, and the other, "Bubblegum" groups as well as the Fuzz-Psych-Garage bands that live in the Nuggets compilations like ? And The Mysterians. It's played on Rickenbacker guitars. It has a fuzz pedal and it knows how to use it. It lived on John Peel's radio program.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62XRy-jFCm8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQdo8efJtSs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ToJ2mmlkiE
A special one for you the techno fan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zndpi8tNZyQ
Cheerio.
EDIT: Worth noting I'm 34 so don't give me the Grandpa treatment.
In Europe MTV played Trance and Techno in the late 90s/early 2000, but only at night. They even had a music video for Jeff Mills - The Bells.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KevUFO2moZI
> Antiloop
"In my mind" ... what a throwback.
This reads like "I don't like current music, therefore music is dead". Music subculture is alive and well; you probably just don't care for it.
"Whatever redneck I'm on my way to your girlfriend's house."
-Matt Hollywood.