Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: And how the tech are you? You know? Recently I
Speaker 1: did an episode on the rise and fall of san Sui,
Speaker 1: a Japanese company best known for its audio receivers and amplifiers,
Speaker 1: though it did make other things, and San sue had
Speaker 1: its heyday in the late sixties and into the seventies
Speaker 1: and became a sought after brand associated with hi fi
Speaker 1: or high fidelity. So today I thought we should talk
Speaker 1: a little bit more about hi fi and the tech
Speaker 1: that feeds into an obsession. So first, what is that obsession? Well,
Speaker 1: generally speaking, audio files seek out a listening experience that
Speaker 1: gets them as close to the originally produced sound as possible.
Speaker 1: So in an ideal world, it would sound as you
Speaker 1: listen to playback, it would sound as though you were
Speaker 1: in the recording studio as a producer was putting together
Speaker 1: a master tape you know, of a recording of a session,
Speaker 1: or alternatively, that you were actually in the studio when
Speaker 1: say a band was laying down the recording tracks, because
Speaker 1: you know even the act of producing can emphasize some
Speaker 1: stuff all de emphasizing other stuff. So you could make
Speaker 1: a good argument that even the master recording could muck
Speaker 1: things up all down the rest of the line. But
Speaker 1: the idea is, how do you create a system. What
Speaker 1: components do you need and in what combination and um
Speaker 1: and at what quality in order to get the ideal
Speaker 1: listening experience. And you want to be able to accurately
Speaker 1: reproduce the full range of sound frequencies and harmonics that
Speaker 1: were present in the original sound, and preferably you want
Speaker 1: to be able to also boost that to higher levels
Speaker 1: of volume without losing any of the precision. Right, So
Speaker 1: the idea being that the louder you turn the system,
Speaker 1: you don't lose it, Like things don't distort as you
Speaker 1: turn up the volume, until you get to a point
Speaker 1: where you know you don't want to go any higher
Speaker 1: because you're gonna end up in a twisted sister music
Speaker 1: video if you do so. This is tricky, not the
Speaker 1: part about avoiding being in a twisted twisted sister music video.
Speaker 1: I've successfully done that all my life. But no, creating
Speaker 1: a system like this is tricky because there are a
Speaker 1: lot of different components to a sound system, and one
Speaker 1: bad component can mess up pretty much everything else. It's
Speaker 1: not always true that the more expensive something is the
Speaker 1: better it is, though that frequently can seem to be
Speaker 1: the case in the stereo like the high fidelity stereo world. Uh. However,
Speaker 1: it is fairly safe to bet that the cheapest stuff
Speaker 1: on the market is not going to be the best.
Speaker 1: You can be pretty sure that the cheapest stuff is
Speaker 1: not going to be great. You cannot be sure that
Speaker 1: the most expensive stuff is going to be the best
Speaker 1: of the best. Now, when you boil down a sound system,
Speaker 1: which I should add you should never do because most
Speaker 1: of the time they are not waterproof, what you have
Speaker 1: is a signal chain. So on one end, you've got
Speaker 1: a component designed to playback some form of media or,
Speaker 1: in the case of a radio, to pick up a
Speaker 1: transmission of a broadcasted media, and the playback is in
Speaker 1: the form of an electrical signal. And ultimately that electrical
Speaker 1: signal has to make its way to some form of speakers,
Speaker 1: whether they are like a standalone speaker system or headphones
Speaker 1: or something along those lines. Now, the whole chain from
Speaker 1: that component to the speakers, every part of that chain
Speaker 1: is important, and just like physical chains, your experience tipically
Speaker 1: is only as good as whatever the weakest link in
Speaker 1: that chain is able to manage. Like, if there's one
Speaker 1: component in that in that chain that is not up
Speaker 1: to snuff, then it doesn't matter how good this everything
Speaker 1: is on either side of it, you're not going to
Speaker 1: get better on the other end than what's going through
Speaker 1: that weak link. So this is an idea that an
Speaker 1: entire industry is built upon. So let's consider some of
Speaker 1: these components. And we'll start with the speakers, because that's
Speaker 1: the part that plays the sounds that we hear. I
Speaker 1: could have started from the other end, but I figured
Speaker 1: let's go to the output. So a speaker, when you
Speaker 1: really get down to it, consists of a diaphragm, at
Speaker 1: least one diaphragm that vibrates according to magnetic signals, and
Speaker 1: those magnetic signals correspond with that electrical signal that represents
Speaker 1: an encoded recorded sound. So the electrical signal powers and
Speaker 1: electro magnet which interacts with a permanent magnet in the speaker.
Speaker 1: This creates the attractive and repulsive forces that caused the
Speaker 1: diaphragm inside the speaker to vibrate, the vibrating diaphragm begins
Speaker 1: to move air at specific frequencies and amplitudes, and this
Speaker 1: generates the sounds we hear when those air fluctuations here
Speaker 1: hit our ear drums. So human hearing spans a pretty
Speaker 1: wide range of sound frequencies. At the low end is
Speaker 1: twenty hurts. That's twenty full vibrations per second. So imagine
Speaker 1: a very long string and you pluck the string and
Speaker 1: you're able to slow down time and count how many
Speaker 1: times it does a full vibration that is, from the
Speaker 1: starting point all the way to the other side and
Speaker 1: back to the starting point again twenty times a second.
Speaker 1: That's the lowest end of pitches that humans typically can hear.
Speaker 1: We have to use words like typical because not everyone
Speaker 1: can hear sounds that low, and some may be able
Speaker 1: to sense them a little bit lower. We can actually
Speaker 1: sense lower vibration, but typically we are not hearing them.
Speaker 1: We feel them, because again we're talking about fluctuations vibrations, uh,
Speaker 1: and you can feel vibrations, particularly if they're at pretty
Speaker 1: high amplitudes. So then on the opposite side of the range,
Speaker 1: we have the highest pitches within human hearing typical human hearing,
Speaker 1: and we usually say that this tops out around twenty
Speaker 1: thousand hurts, also known as twenty killer hurts, so that
Speaker 1: would be twenty thousand full vibrations per second. As we
Speaker 1: get older, our ability to perceive the highest pitches diminishes
Speaker 1: mine certainly has. I think I mentioned this in the
Speaker 1: San Sui episode. But this means that if you want
Speaker 1: to keep those punk kids away from your convenience store,
Speaker 1: you can play a piercing high pitch sound over the
Speaker 1: store's speakers and only the kids will be able to
Speaker 1: hear it. All the adults will have lost that ability.
Speaker 1: Fun with physics and ages, um, I guess anyway, twenty
Speaker 1: hurts to twenty thousand hurts, that's a pretty big range
Speaker 1: of frequencies, and that doesn't factor in harmonics. Harmonic is
Speaker 1: a sound wave that has an integer multiple of a
Speaker 1: fundamental tone. And you might think, what are you talking about?
Speaker 1: All right, So this is easier if we talk about
Speaker 1: musical notes. Let's say we've got a musical instrument like
Speaker 1: a guitar, and let's say we pluck a string, and
Speaker 1: the lowest frequency sound produced by that string vibrating is
Speaker 1: what we call the fundamental tone frequency, and if we
Speaker 1: were to multiply that frequency by two, we would get
Speaker 1: what we call the second harmonic. If we multiplied it
Speaker 1: by three, we get the third harmonic, and so on
Speaker 1: and so forth, the fourth harmonic, the fifth harmonic, each
Speaker 1: time multiplying by the next highest integer. So if you
Speaker 1: pluck a guitar tuned to middle C the second harmonic,
Speaker 1: you would multiply the frequency of middle C by two,
Speaker 1: and you would end up with C again, but one
Speaker 1: octave up or C ish, because it ends up being
Speaker 1: a little more wibbly wobbly than that. But you're essentially
Speaker 1: playing another C note, but it's an octave higher. The
Speaker 1: third harmonic would be a G, the fourth harmonic would
Speaker 1: be another even higher C. The fifth harmonic will be E,
Speaker 1: and so on and so forth. Now, a musical instrument's
Speaker 1: tone or tambre is largely shaped by the relative strength
Speaker 1: of each harmonic to the fundamental frequency. This is why
Speaker 1: we've got lots of different musical instruments that can produce
Speaker 1: a C note, but they don't all sound exactly the same.
Speaker 1: They're playing the same note, but they don't sound the same.
Speaker 1: If you played the same note on a clarinet as
Speaker 1: you did on a piano. Well, you would still be
Speaker 1: able to tell which was which, right, you'd say, oh,
Speaker 1: they're playing the same note. But this is a clarinet
Speaker 1: and that's a piano, and that's largely due to harmonics.
Speaker 1: Now there's other stuff too that plays into tamber, but
Speaker 1: to it into all that would get us off track.
Speaker 1: Plus I've done an episode about it. So we perceive
Speaker 1: these harmonics as collectively being a single sensation. So when
Speaker 1: you hit a C on a piano, what we're essentially
Speaker 1: hearing is that fundamental frequency of C. And rather than
Speaker 1: perceiving all the harmonics distinctly, like saying, oh, I also
Speaker 1: hear a higher C and a G and an E,
Speaker 1: rather than saying that these harmonics combine into what we
Speaker 1: think of as the timbre of a piano, we perceive
Speaker 1: it as a single experience. And if you were to
Speaker 1: play that same C on a clarinet or on a
Speaker 1: guitar or on a xylophone, we'd be able to tell
Speaker 1: the same note. But difference in which harmonics are emphasized
Speaker 1: that would determine the timbre of each instrument. We'd be
Speaker 1: able to tell them apart, all right, Now, the reason
Speaker 1: all that is important is that really good speakers will
Speaker 1: be able to play back a wide range of frequencies
Speaker 1: with incredible accuracy. And it's important to represent not just
Speaker 1: the individual notes, but those harmonics Otherwise, like your piano
Speaker 1: wouldn't sound like a piano right if it couldn't represent
Speaker 1: all the harmonics that the piano was creating when it
Speaker 1: was being played, then it wouldn't sound right. So this
Speaker 1: range can stretch well beyond human hearing, because the idea
Speaker 1: is that harmonics that can even go above where the
Speaker 1: typical human can hear can still shape the notes we
Speaker 1: do here, and it's hard for for speakers to be
Speaker 1: able to represent the full range, even really good speakers.
Speaker 1: Often high end speakers will have specific voice coils dedicated
Speaker 1: to replicating a certain subset of frequencies in order to
Speaker 1: cover the full spectrum. And this is where we can
Speaker 1: get into sub whoffers, whoffers and tweeters. Subwhiffers have the
Speaker 1: largest diaphragms and replicate the lowest frequency sounds, so they
Speaker 1: need those big diaphragms in order to move enough air
Speaker 1: at low frequencies and large enough and plitudes so that
Speaker 1: we can actually experience them, hear them, or feel them.
Speaker 1: They also tend to require their own power source in
Speaker 1: order to make this happen. Like they can't just draw
Speaker 1: power through speaker wires the way some other speakers do.
Speaker 1: You typically have to plug these into a wall socket
Speaker 1: on their own. Whoofers tend to cover most of the
Speaker 1: frequencies we experience when we're listening to music from the
Speaker 1: low tones. They're not the lowest to replicating most of
Speaker 1: the tones we hear from musical instruments. Human voices also
Speaker 1: fall into this frequency range covered by whoofers, so these
Speaker 1: are really important for the vast majority of the sounds
Speaker 1: we can distinctly hear. And the tweeters those are speakers
Speaker 1: that are designed to replicate sounds above the threshold of whoofers.
Speaker 1: They can also replicate sounds that go beyond human hearing. Again,
Speaker 1: you might need to have those in order to represent
Speaker 1: those harmonics I was talking about. Now. A combination of
Speaker 1: these speakers is usually necessary to create a true high
Speaker 1: fidelity experience, and UH where you put the speakers ends
Speaker 1: up mattering to both because of stuff like stereo or
Speaker 1: quadrophonic sound or surround sound. UH in that you're sending
Speaker 1: specific channels of sound to specific directions, So you want
Speaker 1: to have your speaker set up to two replicate that, right,
Speaker 1: It wouldn't make sense to have your left and right
Speaker 1: speakers all just directly in front of you. You wouldn't
Speaker 1: really benefit from the stereo sound that way. Uh. And
Speaker 1: also some speakers, like the tweeters in particular, can be
Speaker 1: very highly directional, so you need to have them positioned
Speaker 1: just right. So for true audio files, where you put
Speaker 1: speakers ends up being a very big part of the equation.
Speaker 1: And suffice it to say, cheap speakers typically can't do
Speaker 1: all of this. Many of the cheaper speakers are kind
Speaker 1: of marketed as full range speakers, meaning they're meant to
Speaker 1: replicate sounds throughout the range of human hearing. But these
Speaker 1: speakers are limited by their size. If the diaphragm and
Speaker 1: the speakers is like of a medium size, well the
Speaker 1: speakers should be able to cover most, but not all,
Speaker 1: of the frequent these we can experience. If it's a
Speaker 1: larger diaphragm, well then you might lose some of the
Speaker 1: higher pitches. You might not be able to replicate those
Speaker 1: as well. If it's a smaller speaker, then you might
Speaker 1: end up losing some of the base tones. Materials, wiring,
Speaker 1: and engineering all matter when it comes to speaker quality. However,
Speaker 1: you can reach a point of diminishing returns, and in fact,
Speaker 1: that is going to be true for pretty much every
Speaker 1: component we're going to be talking about today. And by
Speaker 1: that I mean you might listen to a dinky, cheap
Speaker 1: speaker and then listen to the same music on a
Speaker 1: moderately priced speaker, and you could hear a huge difference
Speaker 1: in quality. You could say, all right, this, this more
Speaker 1: expensive speaker is clearly leagues better than the cheap one.
Speaker 1: But then you might go from the moderate speaker to
Speaker 1: an expensive speaker and you say, yeah, I can tell
Speaker 1: there's a difference, but it's not nearly as dramatic a
Speaker 1: jump as the first one. Then you might go to
Speaker 1: like a luxury speaker, some ludicrously expensive speakers, and they
Speaker 1: are some really expensive ones, and you might not be
Speaker 1: able to tell the difference between the you know, expensive
Speaker 1: speaker and the ludicrously expensive speaker. Uh. There are a
Speaker 1: lot of people who suggest that if you were to
Speaker 1: do a double blind study where neither the person administering
Speaker 1: the test nor the person experiencing it knows which system
Speaker 1: is being played. You probably wouldn't be able to pick
Speaker 1: out too many differences between some of these, you know,
Speaker 1: high end and ultra high end speaker systems. Now, it
Speaker 1: might mean that if you were to take some very
Speaker 1: sensitive electronic equipment to measure stuff like signal loss or
Speaker 1: the purity of tones being omitted, that maybe on those
Speaker 1: instruments you might be able to see a difference, like
Speaker 1: these very highly tuned instruments might indicate that, But that
Speaker 1: doesn't mean your ears and brain would pick up on that.
Speaker 1: So that's another red flag for audio files. Just because
Speaker 1: something might technically perform quote unquote better doesn't mean you
Speaker 1: to actually perceive any meaningful improvements. So don't just jump
Speaker 1: out there and by the most expensive stuff on the market.
Speaker 1: All right, where we've got a lot more ground to cover.
Speaker 1: But before we get into any of that, let's take
Speaker 1: a quick break. Okay, we're back now. For speakers to
Speaker 1: be able to play anything at all, you need an amplifier.
Speaker 1: So an amplifier's job is to take a weak incoming
Speaker 1: electrical signal and boost it to a more powerful signal
Speaker 1: that can drive speakers all the while avoiding the introduction
Speaker 1: of unwanted changes to the signal. In other words, you
Speaker 1: want to turn up the power without adding in noise
Speaker 1: or distortion. This is easier said than done. Now it
Speaker 1: helps if we think about the nature of the signal
Speaker 1: we need to boost. Uh. And let's take the example
Speaker 1: of a microphone, which is typically, you know, the opposite
Speaker 1: of a speaker. You can think of like a microphone
Speaker 1: and a speaker working on the same principle, just in reverse.
Speaker 1: So with a speaker, we have an electrical signal going
Speaker 1: to a device that that electrical signal is essentially encoded
Speaker 1: audio is what it really boils down to, and it
Speaker 1: goes to a voice coil that ends up causing a
Speaker 1: diaphragm to vibrate. Those vibrations end up causing air to fluctuate.
Speaker 1: Air molecules start to fluctuate, and our ears pick up
Speaker 1: on that and we hear the sound. With a microphone,
Speaker 1: we have a device that has a tiny little diaphragm
Speaker 1: inside it that vibrates when sound hits that diaphragm, and
Speaker 1: the diaphragm's vibrations generate and a very weak electrical signal.
Speaker 1: Uh And and this is all thanks to electromagnetic physics
Speaker 1: that I'm not going to get into here because I've
Speaker 1: covered it to death now. As you might imagine, the
Speaker 1: diaphragm and a microphone is really small and it does vibrate,
Speaker 1: but the movements are very small as well. So what
Speaker 1: you're generating is an incredibly weak electric signal with a
Speaker 1: microphone that represents those vibrations, and it's too weak to
Speaker 1: do anything really useful with it. Right, you wouldn't have
Speaker 1: enough umph there to drive a speaker. The speaker wouldn't
Speaker 1: have enough electricity to make the magnets move the diaphragm
Speaker 1: to a point where you could play an audible sound.
Speaker 1: So typically you would then pass this very weak signal
Speaker 1: to what is called a preamp. That's an amplifier that
Speaker 1: can take a very weak signal and make it less weak,
Speaker 1: like to align level feed. This would then move along
Speaker 1: to a power amplifier, which would take this slightly stronger
Speaker 1: signal and then boost it to a point where it
Speaker 1: could drive a speaker system. But if you have a
Speaker 1: bad amplifier, one that's prone to introducing noise and distortion, well,
Speaker 1: that signal gets corrupted as it continues down. The signal chain,
Speaker 1: and you know, anywhere could be the point where you
Speaker 1: have a problem. If the preamp is bad, then a
Speaker 1: little change in that week's signal will get boosted into
Speaker 1: bigger changes further down the line. Now, numerous companies have
Speaker 1: developed different circuit designs to reduce the possibility of introducing
Speaker 1: background noise and distortion into a signal, or you know,
Speaker 1: introducing disharmonics and things of that nature. There are far
Speaker 1: too many different types of circuits and components to really
Speaker 1: go into here. Uh And it does get very technical
Speaker 1: about how you align these things in order to accurately
Speaker 1: boost the signal without altering it otherwise. Uh. And amplifiers
Speaker 1: are kind of like speakers. Some are really really good
Speaker 1: at boosting signals that represent certain frequency ranges and not
Speaker 1: as great at other frequency ranges. So you occasionally end
Speaker 1: up with amplifiers or receivers which very frequently have amplifiers
Speaker 1: built into them, that get a reputation for being really
Speaker 1: good with certain ranges of sound representation, but not so
Speaker 1: good at others. Also, amplifiers can introduce harmonic distortion. There's
Speaker 1: usually a measure of an amplifier's total harmonic distortion plus noise,
Speaker 1: so if you ever are looking at hi fi equipment
Speaker 1: and you find that there's a number that represents total
Speaker 1: harmonic distortion plus noise, you want that number to be
Speaker 1: as low as it can be. The lower that number,
Speaker 1: the better it is. Higher numbers indicate that the amplifier
Speaker 1: is more prone to introducing unwanted signal. Meanwhile, there's another
Speaker 1: metric called signal to noise ratio. In that case, you
Speaker 1: want the number to be very big because indicates that
Speaker 1: the amplifier is is very effective at boosting signal and
Speaker 1: uh suppressing background noise. Then you have a thing called
Speaker 1: cross talk. So with stereo systems, you've got a left
Speaker 1: channel for sound and a right channel for sound. Now,
Speaker 1: ideally you would have perfect isolation for those two channels,
Speaker 1: so that only the stuff that's intended for the left
Speaker 1: side goes to the left and only the stuff intended
Speaker 1: for the right side goes to the right. And you
Speaker 1: could even have it where you've got two instruments that
Speaker 1: are essentially doing like a call and response and have
Speaker 1: them perfectly isolated so that you're hearing like a guitar
Speaker 1: on your right and a violin on your left or something.
Speaker 1: But there's this effect called cross talk, which describes to
Speaker 1: what extent the stuff that was meant for the right
Speaker 1: channel bleed over into the left channel, and vice versa.
Speaker 1: So you don't want a lot of cross talk. You
Speaker 1: want cross talk to be at a minimum so that
Speaker 1: you have as pure and isolated experience as you can
Speaker 1: for the stuff that was recorded for that purpose. Keep
Speaker 1: in mind, what I'm describing here is completely dependent upon
Speaker 1: the media you're playing. Right, If you're playing back media
Speaker 1: that's say mono, well none of that matters because the
Speaker 1: same signal is going to go to every single speaker.
Speaker 1: That's what mono is. If it stereo, but the mix
Speaker 1: doesn't go to that level of separation, then it doesn't
Speaker 1: matter quite as much there either. But generally speaking, you
Speaker 1: don't want a lot of cross talk, so you want
Speaker 1: that number to be low. Uh and we typically measure
Speaker 1: that in negative deciples, So the lower the number, like
Speaker 1: negative one decibles, is better than negative sixty deciples for
Speaker 1: cross talk. Now, you might also have a separate receiver,
Speaker 1: which is the device that manages all the input connections
Speaker 1: to your speakers, which would be the output, or you
Speaker 1: might have a receiver that has its own amplifier, So
Speaker 1: the receiver and amplifier are the same piece of equipment.
Speaker 1: That simplifies the signal chain a little bit. But generally speaking,
Speaker 1: the stuff I refer to with amplifiers also largely applies
Speaker 1: to receivers. And again the signal chain is very important here.
Speaker 1: The simpler it is, to an extent, the better it
Speaker 1: can be. The more stuff you're adding in, the more
Speaker 1: filters and things adding in, uh, the more opportunities you
Speaker 1: have for a point of failure. However, you could also
Speaker 1: argue that these are things that could potentially compensate should
Speaker 1: there be another issue with the signal chain somewhere else.
Speaker 1: And then beyond that you have your actual music sources
Speaker 1: like a turntable or a tape deck or CD player, radio,
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. These also range in quality. There
Speaker 1: are folks who will drop more than ten thousand dollars
Speaker 1: on a turntable alone. So does it ten grand turntable
Speaker 1: sound a hundred times better than a hundred dollar turntable.
Speaker 1: That's hard to quantify, especially if you aren't otherwise using
Speaker 1: the exact same system from that point forward. Right, if
Speaker 1: you're talking about an all in one turntable that has
Speaker 1: its own little speaker. Obviously that's going to sound different
Speaker 1: from a high end turntable that's part of a finely
Speaker 1: tuned audio system. But it does get to this point
Speaker 1: again of diminished returns, of at what point is the
Speaker 1: improvement perceptible or not perceptible. Obviously, components can range from
Speaker 1: excellent to terrible. A turntable that isn't weighted properly might
Speaker 1: introduce unwanted motion while playing back albums. You might get
Speaker 1: some wobble in there that can end up coming through
Speaker 1: with the playback and you're not going to get an
Speaker 1: ideal listening experience. Or it could be that the stylists
Speaker 1: isn't picking up vibrations as since as sensitive as you
Speaker 1: wanted to, so you might be missing some of the
Speaker 1: subtle parts of the recording that you would otherwise get
Speaker 1: if you had a better quality cartridge in your in
Speaker 1: your turntable. So these are all things that matter, but
Speaker 1: again diminishing returns do come into play, and it also
Speaker 1: again depends upon matching the turntable up with the rest
Speaker 1: of your components. If everything else isn't tuned properly, then
Speaker 1: you could have the best turn table in the world
Speaker 1: and still not it an ideal experience. At the other
Speaker 1: end of it, um, I will say that I've I
Speaker 1: looked into turntables a lot. I ended up buying a
Speaker 1: very simple one like audio files would immediately consider me
Speaker 1: a total pleab which I am. That's fine, But I
Speaker 1: didn't go for one that would need its own like
Speaker 1: preamp or amplifier. Uh. It was not that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: It was sort of an all in one little radio
Speaker 1: CD player turntable system, which from my purposes is fine.
Speaker 1: I know I'm not getting the highest quality audio experience
Speaker 1: out of it, but for what I like, it's fine.
Speaker 1: But if you really want that rich audio experience, obviously
Speaker 1: you have to take even more time and put more
Speaker 1: money toward it in order to achieve that. And then
Speaker 1: finally we've got all the wires that we use to
Speaker 1: connect all these different pieces together. There are companies like
Speaker 1: Monster Incorporated that have built up an entire industry around
Speaker 1: the idea of high end cables, some of them with
Speaker 1: like precious metals that are said to provide the absolute
Speaker 1: best connection so you have no signal loss. And here's
Speaker 1: the thing. It is true that really bad cables can
Speaker 1: have a negative impact on a high fidelity experience. A
Speaker 1: cable with poor shielding might pick up interference from radio
Speaker 1: signals or other electrical wires, for example, and that will
Speaker 1: affect output. You will get noise in the output if
Speaker 1: in fact that's what you're using. But that's like the
Speaker 1: worst cables that you can find. Most cables these days
Speaker 1: are decently shielded, and anything better than like the bargain
Speaker 1: bin stuff is likely to work just fine and last
Speaker 1: a good long time. Uh. In fact, there are home
Speaker 1: theater sites out there that go so far as to
Speaker 1: say that once you get over a thresholder around fifty
Speaker 1: dollars for high end cables, you're not really going to
Speaker 1: see any perceptible difference in output quality, and arguably you
Speaker 1: won't even see it before you hit that d dollar threshold.
Speaker 1: And again, you might be able to tell a difference
Speaker 1: if you're using sensitive electrical instruments that can detect things
Speaker 1: like a signal leak or anything alone those lines, but
Speaker 1: that's again a very finely tuned piece of equipment. The
Speaker 1: human ear would not necessarily be able to register any
Speaker 1: difference or any decline in quality, So buyer beware when
Speaker 1: it comes to high end cables. In particular, I feel
Speaker 1: like that, out of all the different high thigh world stuff,
Speaker 1: has got the most snake oil around it. Now, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna have some really tough news to deliver to audio
Speaker 1: files and to people who are interested in getting into
Speaker 1: like a high fidelity situation. Uh, but you know, I
Speaker 1: feel like we need to brace ourselves. So let's take
Speaker 1: another quick break and when we come back then hopefully
Speaker 1: we'll all be ready for it. All right, here's that
Speaker 1: harsh news I was talking about. I am sad to
Speaker 1: tell you there is no best audio set up. There
Speaker 1: is no ultimate collection of receivers, amplifiers, speakers, audio components
Speaker 1: and wires that categorically makes that system superior over every
Speaker 1: other one on the market. The reason I feel confident
Speaker 1: saying this is because of the gray matter between our ears. Yep,
Speaker 1: we're talking brains, the stuff what processes our thoughts and senses.
Speaker 1: It's also Zombie's favorite snack food. And we're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about some really obvious stuff here, but it's also stuff
Speaker 1: that we often take for granted or just outright forget.
Speaker 1: So one of the things we tend to forget is
Speaker 1: that our sensory experience is filtered through our brains. You've
Speaker 1: probably heard the philosophical question, if a tree falls in
Speaker 1: the forest and there's no one around to hear, it
Speaker 1: doesn't make a sound. Well, on the one hand, you
Speaker 1: could say, well, of course it makes a sound because
Speaker 1: sound is vibration. Sound travels through the air because air
Speaker 1: molecules vibrate. We get these little pockets of air pressure fluctuation,
Speaker 1: and when those fluctuations interact with the tympanic membrane that
Speaker 1: is our ear drum in our ears, we then experience
Speaker 1: this as sound. We perceive it as sound, we hear
Speaker 1: the vibrations. And of course it doesn't just travel through
Speaker 1: the air. Sound can travel through solids and liquids as well.
Speaker 1: This is why sound doesn't exist out in space, or
Speaker 1: at least sound doesn't travel in space, rather because you
Speaker 1: don't have enough particles out in space that are close
Speaker 1: enough together to allow vibration to propagate through a medium.
Speaker 1: So that's why there's no sound in space. There's not
Speaker 1: enough stuff to wiggle against each other to make sound go.
Speaker 1: So we can be confident that if a tree falls
Speaker 1: in the forest, there will be vibrations. Stuff will be vibrating.
Speaker 1: But then you get to the more philosophical question, if
Speaker 1: there is no one to hear those vibrations, do we
Speaker 1: really call it sound? Or is sound actually what we
Speaker 1: call the experience of perceiving of hearing vibrations, Because if
Speaker 1: there is no one to experience it, well, then maybe
Speaker 1: there is no sound. Not that there isn't something to hear,
Speaker 1: but rather there is no one there to hear it.
Speaker 1: And it's the hearing that is sound rather than the
Speaker 1: vibration that is sound. So it all depends on how
Speaker 1: you define it. Now why would I even bother to
Speaker 1: bring up this philosophical conundrum, Well, it's because it kind
Speaker 1: of gets to the heart of the matter. The experience
Speaker 1: of sound is a personal one, a subjective one. It
Speaker 1: isn't just physics. It's a point where physics and our
Speaker 1: minds interact with each other. The vibrations are ear jumps
Speaker 1: pick up, get translated into electrical signals that our brains
Speaker 1: process and interpret, and we experience it as sound. So
Speaker 1: at least part of what makes sound happen is in
Speaker 1: our heads, and that gets right to the point. Sound
Speaker 1: is somewhat subjective, and I have no way of knowing
Speaker 1: if what you hear and what I hear sounds the same,
Speaker 1: even if it's coming from the same source. I don't
Speaker 1: know that your experience is exactly the same as mine,
Speaker 1: and because I have no way of experiencing the way
Speaker 1: you experience it, I'll never know. And that means that
Speaker 1: I could theoretically build out a sound system that I
Speaker 1: find to be a perfect one. You know, to me,
Speaker 1: it reproduces sounds in a way that I find flawless,
Speaker 1: that all the levels are perfect, the volume from each
Speaker 1: component is perfect, and the tone is sublime. But it's
Speaker 1: possible that to you listening to it, that the experience
Speaker 1: would seem a little long. Maybe there's some harmonics that
Speaker 1: you can sense that I can't just because of like
Speaker 1: hearing loss that I have, Or maybe there are certain
Speaker 1: frequencies that you just hear better than I do. Because again,
Speaker 1: I'm getting older, so those higher frequencies are starting to
Speaker 1: drop out for me, and I may not be able
Speaker 1: to hear them the way you can, So I don't
Speaker 1: realize that I don't have my system tuned properly to
Speaker 1: deal with those. There are many factors that might mean
Speaker 1: what sounds good to me doesn't sound good to you.
Speaker 1: Now complicating this is the vocabulary used by audio files,
Speaker 1: and they rely on words like round and warm and
Speaker 1: full and brittle to describe sound, And there they've essentially
Speaker 1: had to appropriate words from other contexts in order to
Speaker 1: describe sound properly, because we just never really coined words
Speaker 1: specific to sounds qualities, at least not beyond some pretty
Speaker 1: simple ones like loud or soft, or low pitched or
Speaker 1: high pitched, that kind of thing. Now, I have read
Speaker 1: enthusiastic reviews of high end sound systems, and after reading them,
Speaker 1: I've walked away not knowing what the heck the reviewer
Speaker 1: meant in their review, Like, clearly the reviewer loved the system,
Speaker 1: but the words the reviewer used to describe the sound
Speaker 1: didn't have any real meaning for me. So in my experience,
Speaker 1: and I admit this is from my perspective, I have
Speaker 1: to actually hear something for myself to kind of understand
Speaker 1: what people are getting at. I don't think I could
Speaker 1: adequately describe what it means when a sound is warm,
Speaker 1: for example, but I know it when I hear it,
Speaker 1: so it creates a certain feeling, and that's where perception
Speaker 1: is coming in, right. So the collection of components you
Speaker 1: gather will determine the range of tones and volume that
Speaker 1: you can get out of your sound system, and high
Speaker 1: fidelity systems typically have several controls you can tweak to
Speaker 1: play with the output to get it just the way
Speaker 1: you want it. It might be that you know, out
Speaker 1: of the box it doesn't sound that great, but then
Speaker 1: you spend some time tweaking levels. Maybe you change how
Speaker 1: much base is coming through to the speakers, how much
Speaker 1: of the troubles coming through. You might have have to
Speaker 1: deal with the balance slightly because maybe you've set up
Speaker 1: a listening environment where let's say you've got a couch
Speaker 1: set up, and your couch is just slightly closer to
Speaker 1: the left speakers than to the right speakers, and so
Speaker 1: with the balance, you tweak it just a bit so
Speaker 1: that the right speakers get a little more juice to
Speaker 1: make up for the fact that they're a little further
Speaker 1: away from you. Tiny things like this do matter, especially
Speaker 1: if you're trying to recreate the feeling that you were
Speaker 1: there when something was being recorded. A lot of people
Speaker 1: talk about orchestral recordings because with a really good orchestral
Speaker 1: recording in stereo, you get the sensation that you are
Speaker 1: in the middle of the orchestra that you can hear
Speaker 1: the you can hear the position of the instruments like
Speaker 1: they sound like they are ahead of you, into your
Speaker 1: right or off to the left or whatever when you
Speaker 1: have it set up really well. But that requires putting
Speaker 1: in that work right, and a lot of Hi fi
Speaker 1: systems have tons of different controls so that you can
Speaker 1: manage this down at a micro level in order to
Speaker 1: get exactly the experience you one out of it. And
Speaker 1: when you do hit upon an experience that appeals to you,
Speaker 1: it can be magical, like it can feel amazing to
Speaker 1: experience music at that level. It's transcendent in some cases.
Speaker 1: But keep in mind that if it feels transcendent to you,
Speaker 1: it doesn't necessarily translate like that to someone else. Right.
Speaker 1: That's why I go back to saying there's no universal
Speaker 1: perfect sound system out there. Uh. There are lots of
Speaker 1: really expensive systems and components out there. Some of them
Speaker 1: are very very good. They have a very high build quality,
Speaker 1: They have tried and true circuitry that reduces the level
Speaker 1: of distortion and noise that get introduced to a signal. Uh.
Speaker 1: There are speaker systems that are known to be able
Speaker 1: to replicate sounds faithfully and with minimum distortion, even at
Speaker 1: high volume. But there are plenty of them out there
Speaker 1: that are overhyped considering what they're capable of. I mean,
Speaker 1: I took a quick peek online just to find, you know,
Speaker 1: what some of the most expensive speaker systems were, and
Speaker 1: I found some that were over a million dollars just
Speaker 1: for the speakers, that's without anything else. And I feel
Speaker 1: pretty confident to say that I personally would be unable
Speaker 1: to tell the difference in quality between a million dollars
Speaker 1: of speakers and a two thousand dollars set of speakers,
Speaker 1: maybe even less. And that's me, like, that's that's because
Speaker 1: of my capabilities and my limitations. I also will admit
Speaker 1: that there could be people out there who could be
Speaker 1: able to tell the difference. I don't know that it
Speaker 1: would be such a dramatic difference that you'd say, oh,
Speaker 1: it's night and day um. And I do think that
Speaker 1: if we were to do a lot of double blind
Speaker 1: tests with some of these components, you would find that
Speaker 1: most people would not be able to tell significant differences,
Speaker 1: assuming that each system was set up with comparable settings.
Speaker 1: And by that, I mean like if you had the
Speaker 1: two thousand dollars set of speakers set up, but you
Speaker 1: turn the base way down for those, and you didn't
Speaker 1: do that for the million dollars, says speakers. Of course
Speaker 1: there'd be a more perceptible difference. You have to make
Speaker 1: sure that everything else is as equal as it can be,
Speaker 1: and then test to see if there's a perceptible difference.
Speaker 1: And I don't think, especially at the high high end,
Speaker 1: that you come across that much. Anyway, A true audio
Speaker 1: file seeks out the system and settings then most closely
Speaker 1: matches their perception of acoustic perfection. This is also a
Speaker 1: point of debate in the audio file world. I mentioned
Speaker 1: in San Sui that you know, you have amplifiers out
Speaker 1: there that still work with vacuum tubes, and you've got
Speaker 1: amplifiers that work with solid state transistors, And there are
Speaker 1: proponents in both camps. There are some who say the
Speaker 1: acoustic amplifiers are really the best because they create a round,
Speaker 1: warm sound. There are others who say no transistor based
Speaker 1: amplifiers are best because they are the most accurate in
Speaker 1: representing the original sounds signal. Right, you you get the
Speaker 1: most true copy or boosted copy of the original signal
Speaker 1: with transistor based amplifiers, and this debate goes back and forth,
Speaker 1: and I think it really just comes down to your
Speaker 1: own personal preference. And again me, I'm simple. I'm a plebium.
Speaker 1: I love a good sound system, but I have so
Speaker 1: far resisted the sirens all to become obsessed and to
Speaker 1: dive into the world of high end audio. It's not
Speaker 1: to say that I won't ever do it. I think
Speaker 1: as far as hobbies go, it's one that I would
Speaker 1: probably find a lot of pleasure in, assuming that I wasn't,
Speaker 1: you know, spending an irresponsible amount of money to pursue it,
Speaker 1: which is a big assumption because again, some of these
Speaker 1: components get into like tens of thousands of dollars. I
Speaker 1: can't ever imagine spending money on a sound system, you know,
Speaker 1: at that level. But um, you know, I I could
Speaker 1: see myself getting kind of into this hobby. I just
Speaker 1: worry that there is no kind of I feel like
Speaker 1: once you start, it starts to pull you in, kind
Speaker 1: of like tattoos. I got one, said that was it,
Speaker 1: and none. I've got two more after that, and I
Speaker 1: keep thinking about getting another one. So I already know
Speaker 1: that pathway would lead me to a dangerous place. But anyway,
Speaker 1: I thought it was important to talk about because it's
Speaker 1: not that the audio files are delusional or anything like that.
Speaker 1: It's that it's difficult to talk about an experience so
Speaker 1: subjective as the perfect listening experience and then pourt that
Speaker 1: over into a discussion about what technical equipment allows you
Speaker 1: to achieve that, because it's two different things. It's almost
Speaker 1: like trying to make an art a science or vice versa.
Speaker 1: And that I think is where a lot of the
Speaker 1: frustration for me comes in when I look into things
Speaker 1: like the audio file world. But that's me. I thought
Speaker 1: that would be great for a tech Stuff tidbit. There's
Speaker 1: another long tidbit episode. Hope you enjoyed it. If you
Speaker 1: have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes
Speaker 1: of tech Stuff, please reach out to me. You can
Speaker 1: do so on Twitter the handle for the show's tech
Speaker 1: Stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again
Speaker 1: really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production.
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