10 Wonderful things and 10 bad things about the audiophile world.

Great story....

A story with two sides, if someone understand a bit about psycho-acoustics ...

A side about the easy way we can deceive ourself, and walk in what the objectivist crowd accuse not without reasons the subjectivist crowd of : victims of deceptive placebo ...

The other side is very different and as true as the first side is true in his own way : sound quality is created by a complex set of electrical,mechanical and acoustical parameters, but it is also created by human biases , creativity , and motivation and conditioned be the moving and sound producing and perceiving body ...We contribute actively in the perceptive evaluation and interpretation with not only our brain but our heart ... It is why wise mothers and empathic doctors use positively the placebo effect to help and catalyse the body self healing process...Only drug company want to suppress it for statistical methodological reason in the testing of drugs we dont need most of the times ...

Myself being not a subjectivist nor an objectivist, but being interested by the true core of the sound process , psycho-acoustics, i push myself into ectasy by staying creative , even at the risk or i prefer to say with the profit of the placebo effect, which work by the way in the neural path of the body and in some organs the same way some drug work... It is verifiable with modern technology if we scan the body in real time ...

Also sound memory is not stored in a singular place in the brain, as books on a shelves but in all the gesturing body mapped in mutiple layers and in many zones of the brain associated with emotion which is the trigger of musical memory...

Viva placebo! If it makes musicians happier and participating they play better and they sound better and even the engineer will profit from it ...

Thank you for your kind words ...my deepest respect ...

@mahgister Hey brother I’m cheering you on every time I se you sticking up for acoustics and psychoacoustics. There is a famous story about a recording studio in LA that was very popular they had a box called the "funk box" sitting between the monitors it had only an on/ off switch on it and an input and output. The box had nothing in it but producers and musicians came to this studio for the sound of that funk box, when things needed a little extra something in the mix the engineer would carefully turn it on and watch the producers reaction to the great new sound.

@hilde45 

#1  Speakers and amps need to be made synergistically.

Why "made"? Why not just matched?

I know being an audiophile is really pretty tame and doesn't hurt anyone but I really don't like to see smart people believing in not so true ideas. To get the most out of a speaker the driver needs to be designed with a particular amp. There are many reasons for this if there is one amp and 2 drivers putting out different frequencies you are compromising the potential performance of the speaker. A high end speaker engineer selling a speaker without a designed amp is like selling a Ferrari body body being sold without without a suspension and saying just add or match a suspension until you get it right, no one would put up with that. It is understood that expensive cars need to be designed expensive stereos also need to be designed not mixed and matched.

My Doctor told me to eat less human, and more leafy greens.

@donavabdear 

To get the most out of a speaker the driver needs to be designed with a particular amp. There are many reasons for this if there is one amp and 2 drivers putting out different frequencies you are compromising the potential performance of the speaker. A high end speaker engineer selling a speaker without a designed amp is like selling a Ferrari body body being sold without without a suspension and saying just add or match a suspension until you get it right, no one would put up with that. It is understood that expensive cars need to be designed expensive stereos also need to be designed not mixed and matched.

This is really stunning news to me. After reading for years now about the ability to find good and synergistic matches between different speakers with different amps -- so many people are wrong about this. Audiophiles are incredibly misinformed and uneducated about this critical fact that you are pointing out. That is, if it's true.

https://www.themasterswitch.com/how-to-match-speakers-and-amps

@hilde45 
Here's a little cut and past of my studio speakers on some of the benefits of being powered in just the crossovers. A small part of the design.

The active crossover design offers multiple benefits:

• The frequency response becomes independent of any dynamic changes in the driver’s electrical characteristics or the drive level.
• There is an increased flexibility and precision to adjust and fine tune each output frequency response for the specific drivers used.
• Each driver has its own signal processing and power amplifier. This isolates each driver from the drive signals handled by the other drivers, reducing inter-modulation distortion and overdriving problems.
• The ability to compensate for sensitivity variations between drivers.
• The possibility to compensate for the frequency and phase response anomalies associated with a driver’s characteristics within the intended pass-band.
• The flat frequency response of a high-quality active loudspeaker is a result of the combined effect of the crossover filter response, power amplifier responses and driver responses in a loudspeaker enclosure.

There are so many reasons why powered and active speakers are the future the sports car analogy is one most audiophile understand. Everyone knows powered speakers are the future in every category of playback, I started a thread about how audiophiles were confused about powered speakers, 65k views later people still didn't have a clue. Yes you can put a "A"  or "AB" or whatever kind of amp you want in a speakers you just need big heat sinks (Pass did it).

Look at it from this point of view, today speaker cables cables are becoming some of the largest costs in a system, assuming that this is a proper use of audio money then why not bypass the cables completely. If there is merit in the idea that cables create such a huge deeper, wider, higher, lower, more accurate, tighter bass, blacker backgrounds, more musicality which is caused by hyper priced 1 meter speaker cables then why not do without cables all together just think of the musicality then wow. For that reason alone (if it is valid) designed powered speakers make sense.