janehamble,
’My philosophy about these things...if I need to ’blind test’ or switch the product in and out of my system, to double-check if it’s really improving anything - then it’s not doing enough for me.’
Does not compute.
If it’s so stunningly obvious to you then surely you’d welcome any comparison - sighted or unsighted.
Wouldn’t you?
For many years I also ’knew’ my Marantz CD player was better than my Sony MP3 player as a source for my main system.
Then one day, just for easy access to 64GB of stored music/playlists and unwillingness to keep getting up to change discs I wired up the MP3 player to my Creek amplifier with a bog standard RCA to to Sony connector (as that was all that was available).
All went well but I was a little concerned with the sound quality. It somehow sounded flat and dull to my ears.
To console myself that I shouldn’t be expecting too much from a mere £100 MP3 player I decided to compare some tracks with those ripped from the original CDs. I think they were mostly Doors tracks taken from Morrison Hotel and LA Woman and maybe a few from U2s Achtung Baby.
The next 15 minutes left me feeling very strange indeed.
Each and every comparison between the CD and MP3 output, with levels matched by ear, proved to be indistinguishable from one another.
I kind of felt sick and confused for a while. This was going in the face of everything I knew about audio - and I thought after 20 years I knew a few things.
I even tried to alter the EQ settings on the portable device but they had no effect on the feed going to the amplifier.
Then I remembered some of the stuff that I’d seen mentioned occasionally hidden away in the margins of the audio press. One such name was the writer / enthusiast Peter Aczel.
I managed to find some pdf copies of his magazine The Audio Critic, and then began to take a closer look.
That was my first steps on the road to Damascus, or at least its audio equivalent.
It was shocking, it was heretical, and it was disturbing. It was worse than Proust’s Marcel finding out his girlfriend was a lesbian and that his macho uncle a masochistic homosexual. Ok, maybe quite not that bad, but on the same page.
Yet some 10 years later I still have to find something he wrote that I know to be a falsehood.
Sadly it’s unsurprisingly getting harder and harder to access those magazines now, far too many vested interests who’d wish the name Peter Aczel to disappear from history, but you can still find the odd reference here and there.
In a perfect world I’d love to see decent reviewers such as Steve Guttenberg, who must have known Peter, at least discuss his writings and opinions, but I guess the business politics of the industry doesn’t work that way.
Aczel doesn’t seem to have made many friends in the audio press and in a world drowning in euphemism, he wasn’t one to pull his punches.
Here’s just a snippet of Aczel’s work. Once again calling out the lies that seem to pervade the world of consumer audio.
https://www.ecoustics.com/articles/ten-biggest-lies-audio/
https://www.biline.ca/audio_critic/audio_critic.htm
’My philosophy about these things...if I need to ’blind test’ or switch the product in and out of my system, to double-check if it’s really improving anything - then it’s not doing enough for me.’
Does not compute.
If it’s so stunningly obvious to you then surely you’d welcome any comparison - sighted or unsighted.
Wouldn’t you?
For many years I also ’knew’ my Marantz CD player was better than my Sony MP3 player as a source for my main system.
Then one day, just for easy access to 64GB of stored music/playlists and unwillingness to keep getting up to change discs I wired up the MP3 player to my Creek amplifier with a bog standard RCA to to Sony connector (as that was all that was available).
All went well but I was a little concerned with the sound quality. It somehow sounded flat and dull to my ears.
To console myself that I shouldn’t be expecting too much from a mere £100 MP3 player I decided to compare some tracks with those ripped from the original CDs. I think they were mostly Doors tracks taken from Morrison Hotel and LA Woman and maybe a few from U2s Achtung Baby.
The next 15 minutes left me feeling very strange indeed.
Each and every comparison between the CD and MP3 output, with levels matched by ear, proved to be indistinguishable from one another.
I kind of felt sick and confused for a while. This was going in the face of everything I knew about audio - and I thought after 20 years I knew a few things.
I even tried to alter the EQ settings on the portable device but they had no effect on the feed going to the amplifier.
Then I remembered some of the stuff that I’d seen mentioned occasionally hidden away in the margins of the audio press. One such name was the writer / enthusiast Peter Aczel.
I managed to find some pdf copies of his magazine The Audio Critic, and then began to take a closer look.
That was my first steps on the road to Damascus, or at least its audio equivalent.
It was shocking, it was heretical, and it was disturbing. It was worse than Proust’s Marcel finding out his girlfriend was a lesbian and that his macho uncle a masochistic homosexual. Ok, maybe quite not that bad, but on the same page.
Yet some 10 years later I still have to find something he wrote that I know to be a falsehood.
Sadly it’s unsurprisingly getting harder and harder to access those magazines now, far too many vested interests who’d wish the name Peter Aczel to disappear from history, but you can still find the odd reference here and there.
In a perfect world I’d love to see decent reviewers such as Steve Guttenberg, who must have known Peter, at least discuss his writings and opinions, but I guess the business politics of the industry doesn’t work that way.
Aczel doesn’t seem to have made many friends in the audio press and in a world drowning in euphemism, he wasn’t one to pull his punches.
Here’s just a snippet of Aczel’s work. Once again calling out the lies that seem to pervade the world of consumer audio.
https://www.ecoustics.com/articles/ten-biggest-lies-audio/
https://www.biline.ca/audio_critic/audio_critic.htm