Hey hey hey!
Long time no see, whoever you are! Unless this is your first time here, in which case... I've never seen you before. But still. Hey!
Today I want to talk about headphones and ABX tests and luxury.
HEADPHONES:
The other day I grabbed a Sennheiser HD800s. I'm not going to list the entire story here, because that's irrelevant and this isn't a diary. Sennheiser is a German company that makes microphones and headphones. It just so happens that the HD800s are the highest end Sennheiser headphones, which came out after (what people say is) 5 years of research and development. It replaces the HD650 as the top level headphone for Sennheiser. Oh yeah, and it costs a pretty penny too; The HD800 costs $1500 full retail, ~$1200 used if you are patient. Or less if you're really the bargain hunter. The HD650s are ~$350 used.
HOLY SHIT DID YOU JUST SAY YOU SPENT THAT MUCH MONEY ON FUCKING HEADPHONES?!
Welcome to post-purchase rationalization! Lol.
Let's look at it this way. The HD800s are top level headphones. The top tier single GPU solution from Nvidia is currently the GTX 780ti which costs what, $750? $800? The top tier single card GPU solution is the admittingly actually overpriced GTX Titan Z which retails for $3000. But it's like $500 overpriced. The soon-to-be octocore Haswell-E CPU is going to be $1000 at least for sure.
How much is a Lambo? $500k? How much is a luxurious house compared to a cheaper house? How much does it take to install a kitchen counter? How much is a top end piano? I guarantee you over $1000. A headphone does not become obsolete within 5 years like a graphics card or CPU. It does not get into traffic accidents and require a shitload of money to repair. No sir, it just pipes music into your ears. Or what about the instruments used to record a song played on my headphones? More than $1000, I guarantee you.
Why do companies get away with such expensive prices? Because the consumers are not perfectly rational. We buy things based on emotion contrary to what we want to believe. We don't all have good information, we don't all bother to seek out good information, and we can't tell good information apart from misleading information that sounds good. We don't have the budget to test everything personally and even when we do, we fall prey to our own expectation biases. But moreover, business 101. My accounting teacher coincidentally mentioned this point and drove it home a week ago. You NEVER sell things based upon the price it takes to make a product. You sell a product based upon perceived value of the product. You want to strike a balance between price and volume. And having a high price and low volume might produce intangible benefits like prestige. You see this all the time with expensive amps and dacs in the audiophile world. It's more expensive, therefore it's better! Isn't this greedy? Let's fact it: Our world relies upon companies. The greed of men forces men to produce things the best they can to earn more money and hopefully in the process, better mankind. It's when sales tactics are deceptive or flat out lies that the line is crossed. When people make the statement that so and so company is GREEDY, well NO FUCKIN' SHIT SHERLOCK, why do you think the company was founded in the first place, to make you happy? The issue is, when does a company become so greedy they lie and cheat and steal to get money?
Ok, but some people want to attack expensive headphones, citing a placebo effect. I think this is horseshit. You can easily hear a difference from one headphone to the next. You don't need to be a golden-eared audiophile to hear a difference. It's whether you think the difference is an improvement and whether it's worth the money. Whether something is worth the money is subjective. There are people who pay tons for vintage cars, or old stamps and coins. How much research and development went into producing an old stamp? Not that much.
But speaking of golden-eared audiophiles and placebo effect... These two do have some relation. There are these 'audiophiles', right? Well now, this is where semantics is a bitch - Nobody really knows what 'audiophile' means, it's like defining god. Most people have a similar idea but a vague-ish idea that varies from person to person. Is an audiophile a person that loves high fidelity music? Or one who spends tons on audio? Or one who can appreciate high end gear vs low end? There is a negative depiction of an audiophile, listening to their equipment rather than their music. In other words, some people are so obsessed with their audio hardware to the point where they don't enjoy the music. And it plays out in some ways to many wannabes, who think they have 'golden-ears', hearing things most humans cannot. Here are some examples:
-MP3 vs FLAC
MP3 is a music format that compresses music lossly, meaning data is lost to decrease disk space usage. FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, which is compression that does not lose data when compressing and in theory produces better audio at the cost of more space usage. The problem here is, a properly done, modern MP3 rip is almost identical to a FLAC track for human ears. Now there ARE people who undergo training to hear nuances in lossy vs lossless tracks but normal people cannot hear them for the most part even when played side by side. So when a ton of people claim 'OMG FLAC MAKES NIGHT AND DAY DIFFERENCE', they're talking out of their ass. Placebo is very nasty.
-Higher end DACs and Amps
The DAC is a digital to analog converter, it makes music possible. Turns 1s and 0s into actual music. The amp is a seperate item that amplifies the signal from the DAC for headphones. There are amps for speakers but that is irrelevant and too much of a tangent to talk about. The thing here is, modern day technology has caught up fast; a $10 DAC has the ability to be transparent. That means it does not color the sound. Coloring the sound means causing the track to play out distortions, which may be anything from hissing to having too much or too little bass, midrange, or treble. And people have this feeling that "Well, I spent $1k+ on headphones, it seems ridiculous to spend so little on a dac and amp".
This has some merit but usually does not. DACs are susceptible to interference and other issues if the implementation is flawed. For example, a DAC placed inside a computer is affected by electronic interference. This is true and a poor implementation on the motherboard may cause your computer audio to have audible hisses and distortions. Fair enough. In the past, free DACs included on the motherboard were trash but they have gotten way better to the point where the distortions are no longer audible.
The same thing for amps as with DACs. If they perform their job properly, THEY SHOULD ALL SOUND THE SAME. It is not the job of the DAC or amp to change the sound. They should be reproducing sound exactly as the artist made it.
-High End Cables
Sorry bro. High end cables are sealed to prevent the snake oil from leaking out.
-24 bit vs 16 bit, 44khz vs 44khz+ sample rates
Long story short: A standard 16 bit, 44khz track is perfect.
-CD vs Vinyl
Vinyl has made a comeback the last several years. Long story short: Vinyl does NOT sound better than CDs and are likely to sound WORSE, but if done right, the degradation is not really audible. But vinyl is EXPENSIVE.
SO WHAT IS YOUR POINT ERIC TELL ME ALREADY
Sorry, I went a bit too much into detail.
Let me just say this: ABX testing. It is the fucking holy grail of objective, scientific experimentation to figure out if all these things make audio better. A blind test. Double blind. Where the subject has to detect whether two sources sound the same or different. Person hears, switches back and forth, determines answer, moves on to the next pair. Of course, we need to cover up the source or expectation bias may set in.
NWavguy has an EXCELLENT albeit long-winded post about expectation bias:
http://nwavguy.blogspot.com/2012/04/what-we-hear.html
If you cannot demonstrate that you hear, how the hell are you supposed to prove there is a difference and that the difference is preferable? And here is where some audiophiles go into kookoo territory and it becomes its own religion/superstition. This is where people buy thousand dollar cables and dacs and amps but forget to properly treat their room for sound wave reflections off of a small room with large speakers. People want to believe their rituals and money spent are not wasted.
What about HD800s?
I fully concede that HD800s are a small upgrade from HD600s. Every single high end headphone gets glowing reviews because the people reviewing them are fucking MORONS. It's the same thing with CPU reviews on Newegg, no worries. People typically have no idea what they are talking about and the ones that do get ignored or are too busy trying to praise their own purchase to care.
I'm sick and tired of this anti-scientific anti-abx bullshit from subjectivists. If there is a difference, you should be able to pick it apart.
Expectation bias, expectation bias. We all have it, nobody is immune, it's human psychology. There is a reason why drug tests work the way they do. And when people get angry and want to defend their position they commit the same fallacies as religious people defending their religion. A billion reasons why they are right but zero proof can ever be given.
Anyways.
One last thing, about Beats and their headphones.
The old Beats, they suck. They suck horribly, ok? I heard the new flagships are decent. Decent but not the best for their price range. Little kids want to get them for their status and looks and coolness. Beats has a rock solid marketing campaign. Some argue that beats contribute to audio, in that it makes kids care about audio quality. Some say Beats do more harm than good because they don't actually deliver top end audio. But you know, if at the end of the day you want to get Beats because it looks cool and you want a $300 fashion accessory that costed $30 or less to make (literally), so be it. Your money. Just don't try to argue that it has the best audio.
And along with Beats and mainstream is the Loudness War.
See this is where regular non-audiophile crap gets in the way of good audio. Loud music makes us instinctively feel the song is better and the audio quality is better. This is well known. So in order to make a song loud, artists crank shit up. The problem with THAT is, a track has a maximum and minimum range. If everything is loud, it can and almost always will go past the limit. This can cause distortions like clipping, very audible in Imagine Dragon's "Radioactive". The sad part is, when the Loudness War came about, there is no counter because the music was recorded or mastered poorly. FLAC vs MP3 doesn't help. And the real sad part is, the volume should be adjusted by the LISTENER, not the artist. When you do it in reverse, and you get a compressed track that sounds bad. And even if I turn down the volume, the data where the distortion now occurs is lost forever. And these audio engineers, which get so much money, I have no idea why they have a job. They are supposed to be the nuts that listen to every last detail and obsess over these things and the put out this junk. They have no fucking self respect for their work and the industry.
When there is no quiet, there is no loud. Nowhere is this more evident in mastering.
