FAQ

The enjoyment of audio reproduction has been a fixation of humanity since the invention of radio and the gramophone. People love music and love making music. Musicians get rich singing songs and their audiences swoon from the emotional impact of the creations. Some love music so much that they spend a great deal of time and money creating mind-blowing systems of stereo components and then tuning and tweaking them to make them as perfect as possible.

These are the “audiophiles” and they are as obsessed with their hobbies as car enthusiasts or skydivers.

Of course that means that commercial interests intersect with those of the audiophiles, and engineers and product designers devote their lives to making exemplary equipment to help the product buyers live in audio reproduction nirvana. From direct drive turntables to electrostatic speakers to digital oversampling, the engineering creativity over the last 100+ years has led us to something very close to that promised land where every note is epic and every drum pulse is perfection.

But all this innovation also carries with it the potential for exploitation. As with any free-market pursuit there are those who produce questionable and even bogus products that play to the hopes of the audiophiles. The value propositions that these “audio sneaks” claim is what we call “audio myths.” In the community, the products are often referred to as “snake oil” which references the days of patent medicines before the regulation of medication and medicine in the United States and around the world. By analyzing these myths the goal is to help audiophiles to learn a bit more about science and engineering, maybe a bit about logic and philosophy, and even perhaps some about their own psychologies and biases.

The myths analyzed here are not conclusive and in some cases they are incomplete. The fact is that it takes time and resources for folks with the proper backgrounds to examine the products and theories about why certain things may or may not work the way the myth suggests they do. That is as natural as is the incompleteness of science itself. We are fashioning a more rational world but it is an asymptotic approach to that nirvana, much like our collective goal to have better music listening experiences.

Human Hearing, Biases, and Truth

One of the consistent plays by audio sneaks and their converts is to deny that engineering measurements and science is better than just listening to a piece of audio equipment. No matter how many data points are provided, it is never as good as just borrowing or buying a device and trying it out.

There are plenty of responses to this, like the most obvious one that the engineers who design the products use extensive measurements in order to design and test their systems. If an engineer sets out to design an optimally transparent piece of equipment, since that is largely the goal of these products, then they use devices like oscilloscopes, wave-function generators, ohmmeters, and sophisticated systems like those from Audio Precision that perform Fourier Analysis of the transfer function of the devices. All of the component choices, circuit designs, and algorithms are built around fulfilling those design goals. When an engineer later says that listening to the product was an important part of the design, they are expressing how they might make adjustments that deviate from the central goal of high fidelity audio reproduction; that is, they may want to provide modifications to the reproduction accuracy. Or they are just double-checking that there was no failure to measure properly.

There are some fairly sophisticated claims that occasionally arise in audiophile circles concerning human hearing that are predicated on a kind of mythic reverence of human hearing capacities. These are covered in the myths herein, but here I want to simply point out that many of the claims lack scientific support and no one can demonstrate the value that is claimed. As a consequence, the myth makers resort to grander and grander ideas, like that you will only really notice this profound difference if you listen for long periods.

It’s always possible there is value and not just snake oil, but that leads some philosophy.

Socratic Humility

Much of human existence involves managing uncertainty. We just don’t know whether a drought will hit our farms and so we use technology and science to add in irrigation and better predict the weather. Diseases used to ravage human populations and so we developed water treatment, sewage systems, vaccines, and pre-natal care.

The meta-technology of science relies on using community cross-checking of ideas and results as well as support via observations and measurements. It also requires admitting our own biases and desire to be correct, requiring that we are humble in the face of limited knowledge. This is sometimes called “epistemic humility” and borrows from Socratic ways of engaging with reality. “Epistemic” is just a fancy way of talking about sources of knowledge, knowledge acquisition, and knowledge itself. So the meta-technology that underpins much of our rationality is based on being skeptical and humble about what we know, what we can know, and what others claim they know.

So, yes, it is possible that some of the myths presented here are incomplete or more limited than a hardened mind might think. They will undoubtedly be updated over time.

OK, So What Isn’t a Myth?

All of these myths discussed here point to some very fundamental but sophisticated truths. First, we have access to state-of-the-art audio streams produced using incredible microphones and DAWs (digital audio workstations) and then encoded at bitrates and resolutions that exceed our ability to hear anything more than what the artists and engineers intended. Next, we have bit-perfect streaming services and streamers that deliver that information, without corruption, to DACs that then reproduce the analog stream. Inexpensive DACs now are widely available that are provably perfect in that their ability to reproduce the sounds without coloration or injury.

There is no shortage of exceptional amplifiers that can produce beautiful and faithful renderings of the signals for speakers, though here we start to get into areas where there remain areas of sophisticated considerations as to how much power is needed for given speakers and how much distortion is acceptable for one’s playback preferences. Those considerations amplify (sorry, couldn’t help myself) when we get to speakers and rooms.

If you really want to make a profound impact on your listening experience you start with a transparent reproduction chain of streaming services, servers, streamers, and DACs, then add in competent amplification. But where the most impact occurs is with speakers, headphones, equalization, room treatments, and room correction. Sounds bounce off hard surfaces and different frequency components interact with one another and spaces based on their wavelengths. Sound waves can cancel each other out when emerging from stereo speaker arrangements, and they can reinforce one another when bouncing around in room corners. You can simulate room dynamics for headphones using systems like binaural signal processing, and you can enhance spatialization by improving dispersion of high frequencies.

Increasingly common are room correction systems like DIRAC, Audissey, REW, and related approaches that use calibrated microphones to measure the frequency response of spaces and create equalization profiles that adjust the music at some point in the reproduction chain, usually either the music server or in an AVR.