"Is Audiophile Snobbery Ruining our Hobby ?"

[Spkrdctr]

They also think all DACs sound different and that there is a sliding scale from very poor to excellent sound quality and that's what the SINAD chart shows.

You tell them the top ranked DAC and the bottom ranked DAC will sound identical to most people in most systems and they just won't have it. It's not what they have been taught to believe by decades of reading magazine reviews.

Exactly! Good old snake oil marketing.

 

[DanielT]

Sobbery, in my world is the connotation of clothes. That's the first thing I will think of. Then, in general, bullying, or rather condescension, smart- ass messersmitter attitude. Like James May here:
(yes I know they do it consciously, push with that attitude, deliberately joke with it)

On the other hand, having HiFi as a hobby, without writing people on the nose, is just a hobby. Sure quirky and goofy in most other people's eyes but hey that's the case with all hobbies. If you are not in to them.

 

[ryanosaur]

Sure quirky and goofy in most other people's eyes but hey that's the case with all hobbies. If you are not in to them.

Fcuking hobby weavers and their clicky-clacky looms!

 

[steve59]

then there's those adolescent's that just don't want to be told what's good for us. If I had a dollar for every time somebody told me what to do with my dollar I could burn all the money I earned and just live off all the 'well intended' advice.

 

[coonmanx]

Did the snobs ruin audio yet because I listened to some music today and it sounded really good.

 

[ryanosaur]

Did the snobs ruin audio yet because I listened to some music today and it sounded really good.

No.
But do you feel inferior because you don't have pure Jade Cable Risers?

 

[coonmanx]

No.
But do you feel inferior because you don't have pure Jade Cable Risers?

That's the funny thing. No I don't feel inferior at all. LOL.

 

[Matthew J Poes]

Gene and (especially) @Matthew J Poes used to post quite frequently in this forum. I don't remember seeming much of them recently.

Gene left the forum. I am still around, I just have been busy. I basically moved into my new house, have been working on unpacking (still) and getting all the little projects done around the house that didn't get finished when we moved in, dealing with family live and two young kids, and two fairly sizable projects. It's all just kept me so busy I haven't had a lot of time to spend on the forums.

 

[Matthew J Poes]

Topic already opened elsewhere...

In addition:

ASR is not mentioned at all (Edit: my bad, it really is...) and I'm sorry but he's actually right : A lot of (guest) readers here are widely relying on SINAD charts to rank products and even imagine their subjective listening based on it. Just check others forums, YT, etc... what people say outside ASR.


Unfortunately, you don't speak for all objectivists. From my perspective, the majority of readers (not experts) seem to believe that to be the case. Choosing electronic solely based on one SINAD number, or speaker on Olive's Score... I lost the count how many times I red that. Here or elsewhere, for that matter.

I would really hope folks don't do that. Two speakers can have equally good "scores" and still sound quite different. These systems are for entertainment and you like them, that is for nobody else to judge. Ultimately speakers are very personal and should be chosen because they meet your needs. Olive's score gets at a number of very important dimensions for sound, but I don't know that even Sean would agree it is the be all/end all in assessing speakers. For one thing, the score doesn't include anything related to dynamic output. It also was primarily focused on the big factors in sound. But what happens when you get a bunch of speakers that get the big things right? Equally good Spin data, smoothness of response, bandwidth, etc.? Do they all sound the same? Not likely. As certain factors improve sufficiently, other factors become more prominant. Even distortion can start to become a concern at some point.

As for SINAD, it has 0 correlation with perception of sound quality. Those studies were done and THD was a very poor metric of sound quality. THD or THD+N is a way to assess a products engineering, and it too is only one dimension. Amir measures many other dimensions. What we can't say/don't know is the SINAD value that reflects the audibly perfect product. In fact, there is a number at which SINAD likely reflects an audibly perfect product (from that standpoint) and its likely around 100. However, its also very probably that other products with much worse SINAD reflect an equally audibly perfect product because of the makeup of the distortion. Successful attempts to develop a metric that is a better correlate to distortion audibility have been developed over the years, but none ever caught on. So SINAD really needs to be treated as nothing more than a sign of good engineering. Products that don't quite measure up shouldn't necessarily be written off as bad sounding either. Many "bad" products sound great, they just don't measure as well as they maybe should for their category or price point.

For what it's worth, I have taken to an approach to reviews in which I listen first and then measure to avoid biasing myself. I recently measured a multizone amplifier. It measured bad, like...Really bad. Yet I didn't hear what I was measuring. After confirming that the measurements were right, I shared the data with a number of folks I trust to try and make sense. What I learned was that the types of problems this product was showing were actually not all that highly correlated with our perception of bad sound. They make for bad measurements, but are otherwise not so awful. Given that it was a multizone amplifier and listening tests were being done with in-wall or in-ceiling speakers, it was just a more forgiving environment for that. So...is it a well engineered product? Well the amp isn't good (but its not the engineers fault, its the nature of the chip), but it sounds fine for its intended purpose and I still would recommend the product given its utility and price point.

 

[amirm]

As for SINAD, it has 0 correlation with perception of sound quality. Those studies were done and THD was a very poor metric of sound quality. THD or THD+N is a way to assess a products engineering, and it too is only one dimension. Amir measures many other dimensions. What we can't say/don't know is the SINAD value that reflects the audibly perfect product. In fact, there is a number at which SINAD likely reflects an audibly perfect product (from that standpoint) and its likely around 100. However, its also very probably that other products with much worse SINAD reflect an equally audibly perfect product because of the makeup of the distortion. Successful attempts to develop a metric that is a better correlate to distortion audibility have been developed over the years, but none ever caught on. So SINAD really needs to be treated as nothing more than a sign of good engineering. Products that don't quite measure up shouldn't necessarily be written off as bad sounding either. Many "bad" products sound great, they just don't measure as well as they maybe should for their category or price point.

There is a lot to unpack here:

1. I didn't invent SINAD. What I did do was put the SINAD values in a bar graph and showed how a $99 DAC ran circles around many DACs -- some costing thousands of dollars. The rest was followed by readers. They could clearly see that they were being sold products that on this industry standard metric were underperforming cheap desktop DACs. What you and Gene are implying is that we should have left the consumer in the fog as far as understanding this metric. Just hand them measurement numbers like "THD+N is 0.025" and leave them be. Well, they didn't understand it and so nothing useful came out of this measurement when done by others.

2. Once I created that comparison -- something anyone in real life would to to convey significance of a metric -- a race started to do better. Same $99 DAC now clocks at 115 dB instead of 100. It cost the consumer nothing extra but they are getting better performance. And a strong spotlight is put on companies that charge thousands of dollars for DACs on claims of better fidelity yet they do poorly on this metric. Isn't this important in itself or again, did you want consumers to live in a fog thinking the marketing and high cost of the product meant higher fidelity?

3. AVR/AVP market was sitting idle while the above was going on. I started to test them and quickly realized despite charging thousands of dollars for some of their products, a $9 dongle would have lower distortion and noise than them. I put this fault not only at the feet of the AV industry companies but also Gene and Audioholics. Gene is big on constantly saying his analyzer costs $35,000. But he gave a free pass to all of these companies. "Here are a bunch of measurements and they are all good." Yes, once in a while he would pick on something but other than that, nothing critical was said.

Simple, dead simple things AVR companies could do to improve their products was not done. Performance was left on the table because they was no watchdog. It was seemingly for show and selling ads and sponsorship I am afraid. So I come and put the spotlight on real performance of these products with much more extensive measurements. Heck, I even cut these products a slack by giving them their own category of SINAD. Consumer then has revelations such as Denon products being better than the more expensive Marantz. Do you/Gene want to tell me there was zero significance to SINAD and that we are being snobs???

Fortunately I am seeing change in this segment of the market. Love to see Gene object and tell them to stand still.

4. SINAD absolutely has audible implications. As you know, it has two components: distortion+noise. As you climb above 100 dB or so, noise dominates. And noise is absolutely audible. It is simply matter of how loud you play. You say above 100 dB it matters not. That then implies that you never listen louder. Because if you did, the noise level would be above threshold of hearing. Hook up any of these amps to an active speaker and you immediately hear hiss from the tweeter. Hook up a Topping LA90 to the same speaker and it would be dead silent, demonstrating the value of higher SINAD. How is this without value then?

As to your story, I have an active speaker here that costs thousands of dollars. It is driven by an external amp. The hiss is quite audible at a few feet. This amp if measured, would have that passable SINAD in your book. Yet here, it definitely is sign of poor fidelity. Reducing this noise simply requires better design, not more expensive parts. It is not done because folks are not critical. Would you like me to turn a blind eye to this as to not be called snobbish by Gene? How far do we go to cut the industry a slack?

5. There is a ton of confusion on audibility of distortion. People confuse audibility of linear distortion with non-linear. When it comes to linear distortion, such as frequency response errors or loudness, all of us are more or less created equality. If I boost the bass by 3 dB, everyone will hear it. They may not be able to quantify it but will pass a blind test of that easily. Now, encoding a song in MP3 at 256 kbps and compare it to original. 99% of listeners would fail. Yet there are trained (and a few untrained) listeners which can detect lack of transparency. For this reason, better codecs such as AAC were developed and bandwidth limits were capped quite high as to allow encodings at higher rates than "good enough." Likewise, lossless encoding is provided because why not? It provides 100% fidelity and in this day and age, has no penalty for the consumer.

When I look at handful of papers on audibility of distortion, they are all after gross levels of distortion. None of their listeners are "trained." What they call trained is properly called "experienced" meaning they were producing music, etc. That does NOT at all qualify you as a trained listener to now what to listen for, how to listen and what artifacts sound like. So I put no value on those papers. Go and look up papers on lossy compression and you see the large variation between listeners when it comes to artifacts.

So the fact that you/Gene, etc. can't hear distortions is not material. Forgive me for being blunt but you don't have the qualified training to hear these artifacts. So please don't generalize this to rest of us. I get that you don't hear these artifacts any more than my wife caring about the sound of one speaker vs another. Non-linear distortions are not the same as linear ones.

Just in case you think this is empty boasting, I have post countless double blind test results of difficult to hear artifacts such as 384 kbps MP3, 24-bit audio vs 16, high-res vs standard res audio, etc. It was part of my professional career to be able to hear small impairments. In this field, my qualification both as in the industry and demonstrated abilities trumps observations from others who are not so situated. As a result, I hold a very high bar for fidelity as to make sure when we say something is transparent, it is transparent for all people, all content and all situations. If you have a lower quality bar, then be transparent about it. Don't use your position as a public reviewer to say such things don't matter when they are outside your abilities or frankly, deep understanding of the topic. Any statement about distortion, no mattering much should be prefaced with, "I am not trained in this field." Not one where you are setting yourself up as authority as Gene is doing and then making assertions.

How much value would you give to average blogger saying this and that speaker is great? Very little, yes? Now you know how I feel when I read statements about audibility of distortion, SINAD, etc. Should you be called a snob when it comes to speaker assessments? That you run such tests as spinorama and put value on it? That your ears say something different than average Joe? I sure hope not.

Conclusion
There is more to measurement than spitting out a few numbers and graphs. Information needs to be put in context and then the picture becomes clear. That there are performant and non performant products. The latter need to move forward and not enjoy the cover of, "it doesn't matter." If it doesn't matter, why do they say in their marketing material that it does and charge a lot more money for it? We bring transparency to performance of product. Gene doesn't for the most part. To then create a video and claim his way is more correct is preposterous in my view. It allows complacency at the expense of consumer.

As far as I am concerned, if Gene believes in what he says, he should stop measuring and focus on feature list of products -- a job that he does well. Don't throw rocks at us because we are too good at measuring and educating consumers on products. No one has ever called what we do snobbish. To do so is incredibly poor form.

 

[sarumbear]

Agreed but many don't read they just look at the panther and the SINAD rank.

They don't understand that the context is different from what they are used to looking at.

They also think all DACs sound different and that there is a sliding scale from very poor to excellent sound quality and that's what the SINAD chart shows.

You tell them the top ranked DAC and the bottom ranked DAC will sound identical to most people in most systems and they just won't have it. It's not what they have been taught to believe by decades of reading magazine reviews.

It also doesn't help that critics of ASR reinforce the falsehood by claiming ASR just relies on 'one measurement..'

You assume a lot…

 

[sarumbear]

Let´s put it in layman terms: I am debating if it is worth to change my current KEF IQ speakers for a more recent R series. My guess is that both are passive, both are designed by the same company with the same philosophy, and both will be used in a similar space. I assume the R series will be, logically, better in every way. However, the connandrum here is, how much better will they be? 50%? 100%? 10%?

Why don’t you audition and decide?

 

[Vacceo]

Why don’t you audition and decide?

Because that is not possible in one of the most rural areas of Europe.

 

[Mart68]

You assume a lot…

I'm assuming nothing, all the things I listed you will see said on other forums, especially if ASR is mentioned.

 

[ryanosaur]

There is a flipside to all this.
There are many who just look at that Panther... At that SINAD score... I dare not endeavor to claim who those people are, but we all know they exist; not really any different than those who insist folk like Danny Richie/Paul McGowan/etc. are in fact expert in their field or can do no wrong... those who are willing to be led by alternate fact (or whatever) to believe in something as they choose simply because it suits them or their convenience.
The flip is that both Amir and Poes are each correct in their own way. The two do not require some blind adherence or mutual exclusivity.
The people I mention above are more akin to Pop-Science magazine readers who form a cult around their physicist of choice.

All of this still comes back to a simple question about judging basic human worth somehow by Audio status-symbols? "You aren't as important as I because I have a complete matched set of single crystal extruded pure copper audio and power cabling, monogrammed in diamonds made from the ashes of Klipsch owners."
Humans are unfortunately too good at celebrating divisiveness and what makes us somehow different from some other human.
So much so that the love of Audio or HT (gawd forbid you have a dual-purpose system with stock power cords) is now a bludgeon being wielded.

 

[sarumbear]

I'm assuming nothing, all the things I listed you will see said on other forums, especially if ASR is mentioned.

They are hearsay. Most forums are just noise.

 

[sarumbear]

Because that is not possible in one of the most rural areas of Europe.

I’m sorry to hear that.

 

[Vacceo]

I’m sorry to hear that.

That´s why I am here and that´s why I ask people more experienced and knowledgeable than me.

Sure, not the same as getting the speakers on the very place you intend to use them; but it is better than audio-poetry about potential candidates.

 

[blueone]

The flip is that both Amir and Poes are each correct in their own way. The two do not require some blind adherence or mutual exclusivity.

That's ridiculous. When Poes says there is zero correlation between SINAD and perception of sound quality it is obviously incorrect. Zero correlation means that noise and distortion levels in a unit's output are irrelevant, no matter what their level relative to the input signal. That isn't correct; it's clueless grandstanding. And his anecdote about the multi-zone amplifier is silly.

 

[blueone]

There is a lot to unpack here:

1. I didn't invent SINAD. What I did do was put the SINAD values in a bar graph and showed how a $99 DAC ran circles around many DACs -- some costing thousands of dollars. The rest was followed by readers. They could clearly see that they were being sold products that on this industry standard metric were underperforming cheap desktop DACs. What you and Gene are implying is that we should have left the consumer in the fog as far as understanding this metric. Just hand them measurement numbers like "THD+N is 0.025" and leave them be. Well, they didn't understand it and so nothing useful came out of this measurement when done by others.

2. Once I created that comparison -- something anyone in real life would to to convey significance of a metric -- a race started to do better. Same $99 DAC now clocks at 115 dB instead of 100. It cost the consumer nothing extra but they are getting better performance. And a strong spotlight is put on companies that charge thousands of dollars for DACs on claims of better fidelity yet they do poorly on this metric. Isn't this important in itself or again, did you want consumers to live in a fog thinking the marketing and high cost of the product meant higher fidelity?

3. AVR/AVP market was sitting idle while the above was going on. I started to test them and quickly realized despite charging thousands of dollars for some of their products, a $9 dongle would have lower distortion and noise than them. I put this fault not only at the feet of the AV industry companies but also Gene and Audioholics. Gene is big on constantly saying his analyzer costs $35,000. But he gave a free pass to all of these companies. "Here are a bunch of measurements and they are all good." Yes, once in a while he would pick on something but other than that, nothing critical was said.

Simple, dead simple things AVR companies could do to improve their products was not done. Performance was left on the table because they was no watchdog. It was seemingly for show and selling ads and sponsorship I am afraid. So I come and put the spotlight on real performance of these products with much more extensive measurements. Heck, I even cut these products a slack by giving them their own category of SINAD. Consumer then has revelations such as Denon products being better than the more expensive Marantz. Do you/Gene want to tell me there was zero significance to SINAD and that we are being snobs???

Fortunately I am seeing change in this segment of the market. Love to see Gene object and tell them to stand still.

4. SINAD absolutely has audible implications. As you know, it has two components: distortion+noise. As you climb above 100 dB or so, noise dominates. And noise is absolutely audible. It is simply matter of how loud you play. You say above 100 dB it matters not. That then implies that you never listen louder. Because if you did, the noise level would be above threshold of hearing. Hook up any of these amps to an active speaker and you immediately hear hiss from the tweeter. Hook up a Topping LA90 to the same speaker and it would be dead silent, demonstrating the value of higher SINAD. How is this without value then?

As to your story, I have an active speaker here that costs thousands of dollars. It is driven by an external amp. The hiss is quite audible at a few feet. This amp if measured, would have that passable SINAD in your book. Yet here, it definitely is sign of poor fidelity. Reducing this noise simply requires better design, not more expensive parts. It is not done because folks are not critical. Would you like me to turn a blind eye to this as to not be called snobbish by Gene? How far do we go to cut the industry a slack?

5. There is a ton of confusion on audibility of distortion. People confuse audibility of linear distortion with non-linear. When it comes to linear distortion, such as frequency response errors or loudness, all of us are more or less created equality. If I boost the bass by 3 dB, everyone will hear it. They may not be able to quantify it but will pass a blind test of that easily. Now, encoding a song in MP3 at 256 kbps and compare it to original. 99% of listeners would fail. Yet there are trained (and a few untrained) listeners which can detect lack of transparency. For this reason, better codecs such as AAC were developed and bandwidth limits were capped quite high as to allow encodings at higher rates than "good enough." Likewise, lossless encoding is provided because why not? It provides 100% fidelity and in this day and age, has no penalty for the consumer.

When I look at handful of papers on audibility of distortion, they are all after gross levels of distortion. None of their listeners are "trained." What they call trained is properly called "experienced" meaning they were producing music, etc. That does NOT at all qualify you as a trained listener to now what to listen for, how to listen and what artifacts sound like. So I put no value on those papers. Go and look up papers on lossy compression and you see the large variation between listeners when it comes to artifacts.

So the fact that you/Gene, etc. can't hear distortions is not material. Forgive me for being blunt but you don't have the qualified training to hear these artifacts. So please don't generalize this to rest of us. I get that you don't hear these artifacts any more than my wife caring about the sound of one speaker vs another. Non-linear distortions are not the same as linear ones.

Just in case you think this is empty boasting, I have post countless double blind test results of difficult to hear artifacts such as 384 kbps MP3, 24-bit audio vs 16, high-res vs standard res audio, etc. It was part of my professional career to be able to hear small impairments. In this field, my qualification both as in the industry and demonstrated abilities trumps observations from others who are not so situated. As a result, I hold a very high bar for fidelity as to make sure when we say something is transparent, it is transparent for all people, all content and all situations. If you have a lower quality bar, then be transparent about it. Don't use your position as a public reviewer to say such things don't matter when they are outside your abilities or frankly, deep understanding of the topic. Any statement about distortion, no mattering much should be prefaced with, "I am not trained in this field." Not one where you are setting yourself up as authority as Gene is doing and then making assertions.

How much value would you give to average blogger saying this and that speaker is great? Very little, yes? Now you know how I feel when I read statements about audibility of distortion, SINAD, etc. Should you be called a snob when it comes to speaker assessments? That you run such tests as spinorama and put value on it? That your ears say something different than average Joe? I sure hope not.

Conclusion
There is more to measurement than spitting out a few numbers and graphs. Information needs to be put in context and then the picture becomes clear. That there are performant and non performant products. The latter need to move forward and not enjoy the cover of, "it doesn't matter." If it doesn't matter, why do they say in their marketing material that it does and charge a lot more money for it? We bring transparency to performance of product. Gene doesn't for the most part. To then create a video and claim his way is more correct is preposterous in my view. It allows complacency at the expense of consumer.

As far as I am concerned, if Gene believes in what he says, he should stop measuring and focus on feature list of products -- a job that he does well. Don't throw rocks at us because we are too good at measuring and educating consumers on products. No one has ever called what we do snobbish. To do so is incredibly poor form.

Well said.