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Too good a post to waste

On a thread that is a running example of the textual equivalent of nonstop cat videos. So here it is again.


I could understand the cables are snake-oil doubters and take them seriously- in 1980. Back then there was no internet, Stereo Review was pretty much it, and Julian Hirsch was the Oracle of all things audio. Stereo Review and Julian Hirsch said if it measures the same it sounds the same. Wire is wire, and that was that. 

Even then though J. Gordon Holt had already started the movement that was to become Stereophile. JGH took the opposing view that our listening experience is what counts. Its nice if you can measure it but if you can’t that’s your problem not ours. 

Stereo Review and the measurers owned the market back then. The market gave us amplifier wars, as manufacturers competed for ever more power with ever lower distortion. For years this went on, until one day "measures great sounds bad" became a thing.

Could be some here besides me lived through and remember this. If you did, and if you were reading JGH back then, I tip my hat to you, sir! I fell prey to Hirsch and his siren song that you can have it all for cheap and don’t really have to learn to listen. Talk about snake-oil! A lot of us bought into it. Sorry to say.

But anyway like I was saying it was easy to believe the lie back then because it was so prevalent and also because what wire there was that sounded better didn’t really sound a whole lot better.

Now though even budget wire sounds so much better than what comes off a reel you’d have to be deaf not to notice. Really good wires sound so good you’d notice even if you ARE deaf! No kidding. My aunt Bessie was deaf as a stone but she could FEEL the sound at a high enough volume, knew it was music. The dynamic punch of my CTS cables is so much greater than ordinary 14 ga wire I would bet my deaf from birth aunt Bessie could "hear" the difference. Certain so-called audiophiles here, I'm not so sure.

Oh and not done beating the dead horse quite yet, according to my calendar its 2020, a solid 40 years past 1980. Stereo Review is dead and buried. Stereophile lives on. A whole multi-billion dollar industry built on wire not being wire thrives. Maybe the measurement people can chalk up and quantify from that just how many years, and billions, they are out of date and in denial. 
128x128millercarbon
glupson
7,842 posts
 
My experience is that you do not need a buffer in the car CD player, at least from late 1990s.

At the same time, that discussion is, in practice, a little outdated. SD cards, USB jump drives, etc, have made car CD players all but obsolete. And they sound just fine.

"... if they can build a CD player good enough to isolate a car, rather inexpensively,"
I suspect that whole "upgraded" mechanism/isolation cost pennies to produce. Maybe it was not even that complicated. I do not know either of those for a fact. However, whole 6-CD changer was $300. Not to mention that I bought it in the dealership so aftermarket would have been even less. Adjusting for inflation, it would be what? $500 today? Without taking into consideration that prices of such electronics did fall. It really makes you wonder about expensive slabs of wood sold as fancy isolation platforms.
roberttdid
534 posts
 
The ESP (Extended Skip Protection) if I remember correctly was about a $8-10 solution at OEM quantities when it first came out. We spent about $25 but had a lot more budget to play with and did some other things in a low end DSP.
geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
23,365 posts
 
Just to clarify for those who or either slow or pretending to be slow buffering the data doesn’t prevent all errors any more than Reed Solomon error codes do. When the data is buffered it still contains the errors that occur right when the laser reads the data. Either the industry is unaware of these issues with CD players, or they chose to ignore them. Take your pick. If you don’t remember these conversations keep a log, eat more fish. 
glupson
7,842 posts
 
Just to clarify, not all car CD players have buffers to prevent skipping. They still work just fine.
roberttdid
534 posts
 
Sorry Mr. Pebbles, but what you have stated is an out and out lie. That is right. You are lying.  This is a really easy test, as many PC based readers will give you the C1 and C2 and uncorrectable C2 error rate. If there are no uncorrected C2 errors, then all you blathering and rambling is meaningless. Typical manufactured CDs have only a couple uncorrectable C2 errors on the CD, and it takes larger scratches to create more.

All your mumblings about scattered light, wobble, is just meaningless deflection in the face of real data, i.e. uncorrectable C2 errors. You claim to be a scientist, or physicist or something. Show us your data.
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