J. Gordon Holt grows up

I recently found this gem of a quote from Stereophile's founding editor, thanks to a friend who alerted me to Harman engineer/designer Sean Olive's blog. "Audio as a hobby is dying, largely by its own hand. As far as the real world is concerned, high-end audio lost its credibility during the 1980s, when it flatly refused to submit to the kind of basic honesty controls (double-blind testing, for example) that had legitimized every other serious scientific endeavor since Pascal. [This refusal] is a source of endless derisive amusement among rational people and of perpetual embarrassment for me..” Of course, people who "hear" differences in identical-sounding commodity audio boxes (DACs, switchers, amps, and certainly digital media readers and wires; basically everything but turntables, room-correction processors, and speakers) based on brand names and price tags won't understand JGH's lament. But that's their problem.

You only say that because you're too deaf to hear the improvements in fidelity between good-measuring gear and badly-measuring gear. Such as speakers with uniform, controlled polar response and all of the other crappy speakers out there.

Well, JGH didn't say anything about measurements. He specifically referenced "basic honesty controls (double-blind testing, for example) that had legitimized every other serious scientific endeavor since Pascal."
BUT, if you could point to something that measured the same (assuming serious and relevant measurements of known audible things) but came out sounding different at a statistically significant level in legitimate audio testing, that would be very interesting. You can't, of course.

So you use price-tags of gear as your proxy. Obviously if someone's willing to charge $3k for a CD spinner, it must be better-sounding than the $70 one!


That is just plain stupid. If anything, the iPod has opened up more niches for music listening and created more demand for hi-fidelity reproduction. A decade ago, for instance, the only widely-available IEM's were the Etymotic ER-4. Now at airport electronics shops they're giving demos of $500 Shure IEM's!

And downloading just gives access to more music, which is only good for gear. And if said music is full-rez or losslessly compressed, fidelity is equal at worse.


You and I spent in the same general range on wires? That surprises me.

Oh right, you don't have a real hi-fidelity system, but a cheap hack. By "hi-fidelity" I mean one with at least three channels - left, center, right - of identical speakers with controlled midrange directivity and bolstered by multiple subwoofers, in a room that incorporates well-designed acoustic treatments installed and tweaked through iterative measurement-listening loops, and modern room-correction software such as Audyssey MultEQ XT or the ones used by Meridian, Anthem, etc.

To spend "hundreds of dollars" to wire up a silly 2-channel system is just poor allocation of resources.

Actually, anyone with a moderate-to-below-average familiarity with this sort of things knows that inductance is generally referred to by "L" or "Le" (the latter in the Thiele-Small loudspeaker model, maybe other places as well), not "I."


Cable "resonance?" Are you fucking kidding us?

I'm beginning to wonder if you aren't actually, as opposed to metaphorically, deaf.

Do you think the others who have posted in this thread "measure inductance for a living?" No wonder you love Sarah Palin so much. There is no such thing as "cable performance." They're just wires!!! Perhaps because you've never heard a real, modern system designed to play music. One designed around science, and not around the bizarre voodoo assertions of con-men such as George Cardas. My offer to make money off of you failing a double-blind listening test - which, remember, "High End" icon JGH wrote is a "basic honesty control...that ha[s] legitimized every other serious scientific endeavor since Pascal" - between your electronic box or wire of choice and a generic model still stands, for the record.

Not in the context of domestic audio, if someone approaches it reasonably. Yes, maybe running a 28AWG magnet wire for 30' between a 2kW amp and an 18" subwoofer driver or a pair of Apogee Scintillas is a bad idea. Yes, maybe an RCA or XLR cable needn't be made out of 3/0 welding stock. But for all practical purposes any generic wire with the right ends will serve its purpose just as well as any expensive wire with the right ends. We spend excess money on wires and their dressing (TechFlex, bananas/spades, locking RCAs, and so on) entirely for the aesthetic improvement. Or sometimes because they make things more efficient, such as the comparative ease of swapping out speakers or moving a system when the speaker wires are terminated with Speakon ends or bananas compared to bare wire or spade lugs. There's nothing wrong with spending money on wires or electronics boxes over and above what is going to sound the same, based on looks or feel or whatever. I do think one should just be honest about it, and not justify his purchase by claiming nonexistent sonic differences.