Powered speakers show audiophiles are confused

Why are you listening? To hear the mistakes the engineers made or to enjoy the music? I have a pair of unforgiving loudspeakers coupled to an excellent Sophia A/B amp. Listening to re-mastered Hot 5s & Diana Krall is bliss. There's a lot else, any Little Feat CD for instance, that hurts my ears.

tkhill
I’m not sure if you were talking about me but I’ll answer. The reason I started this post was because it seems like many of the people on Audiogon are searching for magical sessions with music. As technology gets better the closer we’ll get to musicians being in our listening rooms, It’s not even close now not by a long shot. Apple has created convenient music that sounds bad but young people now prefer it. I mentioned powered speakers (speakers and amps designed for each other) that no one here should have 1 seconds hesitation as to the fact that is a much better way to get to high sound quality. Then I mentioned the irrational cult like beliefs many audiophiles have toward sound like vibration dampening and hugely expensive AC cables. I spoke to one of the top people at Apple about how his company was causing the quality of music and all the ancillary industries around music to have the quality sucked out of them, he seemed surprisingly interested about what I had to say I hope it made a difference. Audiophiles are about the only group that can make a difference in the sound industry by demanding better sound quality but not snake oil. You should see the presser on sound engineers to do a crapy job the pressure isn’t to make great recordings it’s usually do it faster and cheeper.

Communities can make a difference and we have lots of money that can definitely make a difference.

I have never used an Apple product so can’t comment on the SQ. I have a thread here on Atmos music and posted a video where Steve Wilson states that when Apple began offering spatial audio the demand for mixes in Atmos went through the roof overnight. My system is setup for Atmos as well as 2 CH, 5.1, 7.1, Auro 3d, etc. Atmos doesn’t compete with two channel, its a companion, not a divorce. Where some music fans lose it is they think it is an either or proposition, either 2 ch or atmos. Atmos is backward compatible, you can listen to an atmos mix on headphones, 2 CH, 5.1, or 9.2.7, or whatever. I think that innovation moves the industry forward and like it or not, Atmos music is innovation. So for this reason I give Apple Music props. We have already moved from lossy to lossless (except spotify users) and some streaming services are doing "hirez". When you talk about hirez Tomlinson Holman (THX)made an interesting observation. He said:

"Any audio engineer confronted with the question, “what do you want to do with a higher bitrate?”; will always ask for more frequency range and more dynamic range because they don’t know what to do with more channels. "It’s a new paradigm." "Just to go to 192 KHz sampling rate to satisfy passing bats instead of human beings is pretty crazy, but adding channels is of very great value."

I still use the codec he developed at USC with Audyssey-DSX where the focus is wide channels, then height, and finally rear channels. When atmos came along with object based audio it kind of left the channel based approach behind. Well any way I give Apple props for championing spatial audio.

steakster

Ok I did overreact I shouldn't have taken your note so personal.

I apologize for my reaction.

@donavabdear , I think this thread is spot on, you asked an obvious question and I don't know there is an obvious answer. As an active speaker user myself I agree with all the benefits.