Not necessarily. In fact, we are in a golden age of well-engineered and less expensive devices, from DACs to amplifiers to headphones and IEMs. Good speakers tend to be a bit pricier simply due to the masses needed to damp out vibration modes, larger magnets, and so on, but there are fantastic speakers at relatively low prices as well. Sites…
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When Compact Discs were invented they encoded analog music using 16 bits of resolution at a sample rate of 44.1 kHz. A rate of 44.1 kHz gives the Nyquist frequency of 22.05 kHz (half the sample rate) and supports unaliased reproduction of frequencies from 0 to the Nyquist frequency. 22.05 kHz covers the hearable frequency range of human beings. As…
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It’s a very common complaint that sites that focus on measuring the frequency reponses of DACs, amplifiers, speakers, and headphones don’t fully capture the capabilities of human hearing. This goes to the heart of the “subjective vs. objective” debate with subjectivists arguing that only by listening to equipment can audiophiles really understand if it is good or bad for their…
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This is a rather sophisticated topic that is based on a cool research paper from 2013 that examined human hearing. In our cochlea there may be shapes that allow for nonlinear processing of audio. If this is the case, so the hypothesis goes, then linear systems of measurement like Fourier Analysis may not be able to measure audio to the…
