If there’s a god who created the world, wouldn’t that count as simulation?
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I think so. I’m not one of those but i still hear what I hear and sometimes an upgrade or a remastered or remixed version makes it all sound better.
The problems lie in people expecting to hear what others hear. How many times on fora do you read “how does the Roon XP1 compare to the Roon XP2, what can I expect on upgrade and would I be better to try the legendary Soolos XXPP7” Understandable and guilty of this myself but with time i realise it’s like asking someone their favourite colour. -
If I were honest I probably have always spent just what I could afford and often gone for the XP2 because I could. Is more expensive better? In some cases Yes, in others No, and in some cases it’s just gouging/ profiteering/ borderline fraud.
Of course the elephant in the room as @Mike_O_Neill mentions above is our hearing. To think that a 24 year old and a 65 year old will rate a sound similarly (discounting personal preferences) is non-sensical. Most of us have differences in hearing ability and age related hearing loss is a thing, no expects the heart of a 64 year old to be as efficient as that of a 24 year old.
At the end of the day it’s what you like. One has to try and get past the audiophyllia nervosa neurosis every time some says a layer has disappeared, the noise floor has been lowered and the wife heard the difference from the kitchen. The reflex to say Oh my God there’s something better out there I must search it out has been a bit of an illness for me for a few years. (Many enjoy this - the thrill of the chase - and that’s fine but many waste precious years of precious life chasing their hifi tail and I’ve been guilty of this)
As i type in the background this is playing
https://i.imgur.com/jdyFkPv.png
One doesn’t need a Roon XP2 to appreciate this …
Apologies, I realise this is a bit of a stream of conciseness but I’m Irish and at least in’t not Finnegan’s Wake 
.sjb
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Would think so. And science can’t prove the non-existence of a god, so the hypothesis that we are not living in a simulation cannot be proven.
Do you take the blue or red pill?
Precisely!
We have a decent understanding of how certain acoustic cues correlate with auditory perception (general hearing/audiology, music perception, speech perception, etc.), We can model these cues, we can measure them, study them experimentally, etc. What we do not have, however, is a similarly exhaustive understanding of acoustic correlates of the music listening experience (let’s call it “audiophile experience.”). There isn’t even a consistent qualitative language to describe the experience. Even basic terms, such as “warm” and “cool” can mean very different things to different people. More esoteric descriptions (“I can hear the air in the room,” etc.) are even less useful.
The audiophile industry is mostly (with some exceptions) uninterested in pursuing a quantitative understanding of the audiophile experience (beyond some really basic, though very precise, measurements of electrical performance). Why? Many reasons. It would take a lot of time, a lot of money, and it might ultimately reveal that there’s more snake oil in the industry than most consumers are comfortable with. The current status quo benefits the industry, maintaining an aura of elitism. After all, if you cannot hear a difference, it is your fault - either your ears aren’t good enough, or, more likely, your system isn’t expensive enough to appreciate a DAC, a turntable cartridge, or an audiophile network switch.
Finally, I do want to return to my original post, namely, if listeners claim, in good faith, that they can hear acoustic detail of some kind (e.g., ultra high-frequency detail), then it’s quite possible, even likely, that they can truly hear it, even if it means they hallucinate that detail. Auditory perception (much like visual perception) has evolved to convey information that matters to our survival, and not to convey what is “really” there.
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Technically speaking, no. Given that God is understood to be a supernatural being, whereas the creator(s) of a simulation would be part of the material universe. Moreover, in the tradition of the Abrahamic religions, God is held to be uncreated, existing from all eternity, which is not the case of the simulation creator(s).
According to evolutionary theory, every trait is selected for, ultimately in the employ of the the transmission of one’s genes. Now, in psychology, we have the concept of the ideal self, an imaginary projection of what we would (ideally) like to be. In the context of audiophile phenomena, we may wonder what the ethological basis for hearing certain things is. If you can convince yourself that you have hearing skills that are far superior to those of mere mortals, you will feel better about yourself, and feeling better about yourself does help in maximising your chances of survival (and thus transmission of your genes). Why else would we find that people tend to over-estimate themselves while simultaneously under-estimating others?
This is all speculative, of course, but it seems to hint at another reason to understand certain audiophile neuroses. It’s not just then a matter of demonstrating your socio-economic status (which I have argued for), but is also motivated by the usefulness of strengthening your ideal self (this imaginary projection itself being selected for on the basis of maximising your chances of survival).
Evolutionary psychology is seen with great suspicion in certain quarters; I believe this has a lot to do with the fact that it allows us to see through various traits and types of behaviour that we would prefer not to inspect too closely.
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Absolutely. It meshes very nicely with recent research in perception, showing that a lot of our beliefs, preconceptions, attitudes, expectations, etc., all influence perception at some of the lowest of levels.
I must say that I am very impressed with the replies to this post. It seems that most people are very aware of the fact that they are passionate about audio, but understand that most people aren’t. This situation usually degrades to flaming and trolling. So kudos…
I own a system that is firmly in the middle of the road. It isn’t extravagant nor expensive by audiophile standards, but extravagant and overpriced to most people. Were influences such as articles and reviews strongly considered when I bought? Sure, I read a lot before buying, and I narrowed to a few components in mind before I even looked for an audio store to listen and buy them. I would have loved to A/B compare everything first, but that isn’t really possible, especially with the decline of numbers of audio stores. I even bought a few things online, never having listened to them. I have to have some trust in other people ears, and if I read enough articles about the same component, I can get an idea of whether it’s worth considering for me. The people that have the ability to test out all these obscure components are obviously in the industry, or live in NY or LA, I had to drive 3 hours to get to the nearest store that carried what I was looking for.
So, did I get the best sound for my money. The truth is, I don’t know, and likely I never will. Am I happy with it? Absolutely! Do I hear the difference between my system and a $100,000 system in an audio store, sure. Do I hear the difference my system, and my buddy’s new sound bar that he raves about, yes I do, but I don’t tell him that. He can revel in his audio, the same as I do. In fact, I’m a little jealous that he can be as happy for $300 as I am for $20,000.
The whole idea of spending a lot of money on something to show an advanced socio-economic status is kind of ridiculous. They might ooh and aah in front of you, but you would likely be considered by most people to be an idiot for spending a ton of money on an audio system. This is true of anyone that is passionate about any hobby, others won’t understand, please yourself, find the balance.
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While that is indeed what a lot of people say, I think it masks two different issues:
- we can measure a lot, but most people can’t understand those graphs. Most audiophiles can read a freq response graph, but when it comes to freq/impedance, group delay, phase and other measurements… well, they draw a blank.
- what we measure is done in isolation, many times. However, gear interacts between itself (that pesky freq/impedance non-linearity or Kef’s power hungry speakers) and more importantly with the room (consider how a speaker that doesn’t have a high off-axis drop off interacts in a very narrow room - the reflections will make is sound muddy as hell). Therefore, we may be able to measure everything in a general sense, but not what A particular audiophile hears in his room.
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That’s a technicality. The fact remains that the world would be somewhat… artificial.
That’s no reason not to measure. For one, you can use headphones and take the room out of the equation. Then, if you use speakers, room correction should ideally compensate for the room, not for the speakers. You can’t really fix harmonic distortion, and frequency equalization beyond certain limits can saturate.
Oh, but I wasn’t trying to advocate not measuring… I was trying to offer some theories as to why people dismiss measurements as being incomplete.
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A few points. First, bowing, fingering and producing a tone from an instrument is different from passively listening. And a violinist doesn’t typically wear welding goggles while playing.
The article isn’t clear–at least to me–whether the subjects in the test couldn’t distinguish between the instruments, or just mis-identified which was the “better” make. In the movie “Bottle Shock” the wine snobs weren’t necessarily incapable of distinguishing between the French and Napa Valley wines, they just thought the latter tasted better.
The violins of the Cremona builders, Stradivari in particular, have a chache. As if they have something no skilled luthier has ever been able to equal since. That this turns out not to be true is hardly surprising. Modern builders have the benefit not only of their learned craft, but of modern science, including studies of Stradivari violins.
Yes, something like that goes on in high end audio too. In that case the controversy is not just what brand sounds better but in some cases, whether it is possible for any human being to distinguish between them by sound alone. One failed blind test alone doesn’t establish the absolute negative, but repeated instances convince me that, for example, I have better things to spend my money on than $30,000 power cords. The problem is, very few people who consider themselves good listeners are willing to put their ears on the line in a blind test, and a blind test is the only objective way to establish a difference purely in sound does exist. And the “Emperor’s New Clothes” effect looms large in our hobby.
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Most people would subscribe to that sentiment. However, for those who have very deep pockets, things look different. What matters is often not the sound, but the desire to be surrounded by super expensive stuff (and not just audiophile gear). It’s about socio-economic status, prestige, and the conviction that you deserve the very best (why do you deserve it? easy, because I can afford it). A lot of the very expensive equipment isn’t bought by people who care about sound. As to those who care about sound and buy that very expensive equipment, another motivation plays a role – to belong to an exclusive club that prides itself on hearing differences beyond the human audible range.
Objectivists claim that the uber-high-end listeners hear (inaudible or non-existent) differences because of unconscious biases; that is certainly true, but I find that another self-deception is more fundamental: denying that you buy things simply because you can. Admitting it would look too crass to those listeners, so they gesture to their golden ears and thereby blind themselves to the fact that they buy certain things for the very same reason that most people buy very expensive stuff – they can afford it, and because they can afford it, it begins to look necessary. (In moral terms, we call this greed.)
The same, except inversely, is true for those who sing the praises of cheapish equipment. They do so, I suspect, because they cannot afford more expensive gear. Here we have the wide-spread phenomenon of dismissing things you can’t have.
Both camps are wrong when it comes to sound. But where is the middle ground? That’s the question that interests me. And how do we make sure that we get to that middle ground (a reasonable cost-value relation)?
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Not all truth lies somewhere in the middle of two extremes. If one side says the earth is flat and the other that it is round, what is the middle ground? Cylindrical? In case of sound, audio equipment is a commodity now, so the returns start diminishing very early and the middle ground is in the “cheapish” range.
The middle ground between a tent and a 20-room villa with interior swimming pool is not a garden shed.
Good sound doesn’t come cheap. Alas. (Decent room treatment alone can easily run into the thousands.)
You need to back that up with some facts.
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Probably not if taken in context, 
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So audiophile equipment is the ONLY kind of product where price doesn’t mark a difference in quality? Weird. If only I had known.
What then, according to you, is the maximum amount one should spend to get the best possible sound?
What is the purpose of a rhetorical question like “where is the middle ground?” if you already have an unequivocal answer like “good sound is not cheap”?