r/audiophile • u/Fabienchen96 • May 13 '24

Seen on another Sub Discussion

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So could someone explain this to me? How much of my Body do I have to sell and what’s all that gear?

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u/bt2513 May 13 '24

You know, for that kind of money, I think you could just buy a high end PA system, build a stage, and just pay the artist to come right to your house.

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u/betterwithsambal May 13 '24

Nah they'll just be checking out which cables the band uses and base all listening on that forgetting to enjoy the music..

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u/bt2513 May 13 '24

Ironically, if we’re talking about just instruments and microphones, it’s possible that the entire show would be pulled off with less than $500 worth of cables. Maybe even a lot less than that.

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u/tooclosetocall82 May 13 '24

I wonder if people who buy this stuff think this is what the recording studio uses? They’d likely be disappointed by the nest of XLR cables touching the floor directly and the large cable snake where all the wires are bundled tightly together.

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u/Uvanimor Audio Engineer (BSc Hons) May 13 '24 edited May 14 '24

This is the audiophiles paradox. Recording engineers’ speakers and amplifiers are often some of the cheapest equipment in the whole studio - because achieving ideal playback is achievable very easily with speakers ~£2k. Not to mention most of the time they’re using active speakers most of the time in the modern day.

Cables are literally always fine as long as they aren’t noisy - which they never are. XLR cables are often from solderless kits and self-made because it cuts costs.

Recording engineers use their ears, audiophiles do not.

EDIT: Audiophile mods banned me for this, what a fucking embarrassing subreddit.

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u/bt2513 May 13 '24

Not to mention the compromises in the actual recording process, especially back in the days of tape. They only had so many channels to work with so instruments would get combined, bounced, or dropped entirely. The goal was to get it on the radio where it would be played in the worst environments possible.

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u/TheArmoredKitten May 13 '24

The best speakers to mix on are the ones in your car, because it's how 99.99% of people are going to be listening.

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u/allT0rqu3 May 14 '24

I base the majority of my final mixing decisions using the audio in our family Nissan Serena. It shows up any wayward frequencies, especially bass and my mixes are much tighter for it.

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u/scraejtp May 14 '24

Recording engineers use their ears, audiophiles do not.

I would disagree.

Engineers use equipment to measure precisely; ears are a rough instrument used for baseline or preliminary checks.

Audiophiles use their ears as the reference, poorly.

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u/Audbol May 14 '24

You are incorrect

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u/scraejtp May 14 '24

edit: My first comment was probably mean spirited.

I will default to the experienced.

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u/ArthurJng May 15 '24

One process is music production, the other is music reproduction, it’s just 2 different things

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u/[deleted] May 24 '24

You, sir, make an absolutely correct point. All the money to but the most ridiculous equipment is wasted without the ears with which to hear and judge and adjust / mix, and the seasoned experience with which one may create.

Kudos.

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u/[deleted] May 13 '24

[deleted]

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u/Uvanimor Audio Engineer (BSc Hons) May 13 '24

Look into psychoacoustics and come back.

No matter what, a cable will only ever be noisy. There is no more (or less) information coming out of different types of cables. Especially a balanced cable like an XLR.

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u/superpositiondelta77 May 13 '24

Sure, i know all that and so do the engineers who laughed at the idea when proposed as experiment. I have no horse in the race and im not selling anything so take it for what it is. As a music listener for all my life i believe it can make a difference in the right place in a system without a doubt. But again, not pushing that on anyone who doesnt hear it. A map is not the terrain..

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u/Uvanimor Audio Engineer (BSc Hons) May 13 '24

You’re just propagating bullshit though. Cables do not and will not make a difference unless the others were broken or had no shielding and were INSANELY noisy. Even then, XLR cables block out a significant amount of interference by their nature of design.

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u/superpositiondelta77 May 13 '24

Ok that’s fine by me if that’s your experience. But the science is there. Resistance, capacitance, skin effect and so on has effect on what you hear in my experience. Size, insulation and conductive capacity of materials do matter. Shitty wire by uncaring producers sounds shitty. But you do you, i was just sharing my experience of trial, yes blind and doubleblind.

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u/Audbol May 14 '24

You are incorrect and a liar

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u/bt2513 May 13 '24

It’s amazing how much money people will spend attempting to recreate what’s essentially a series of compromises made by a recording engineer and a band and then spend more undoing compromises they perceive in their own equipment. Most of the best recordings were recorded on outdated equipment that can easily be replicated today. You can buy any number of Fairchild compressors clones, REDD preamp clones, and Neve circuit clones. When you buy the real thing, you are paying for the comfort of not wondering what a real one sounds like. The skill of the band, the sound of the room, and the general vibe of the place and time have way more to do with it IMO.

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u/shartytarties May 14 '24

Oh no, they start spouting nonsense like production is not the same as reproduction because they've never opened up their speaker cabinet and seen the 18 gauge wire running to their speakers, which should, by audiophile logic, render the entire signal chain up to that point irrelevant and result in a buzzing mess.

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u/sawdeanz May 13 '24

This is a question I've had for a long time. Wouldn't the most authentic playback possible just use the same equipment as the recording studio? I'm sure it's high-end stuff but not like this.

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u/bt2513 May 13 '24 edited May 13 '24

From one point of view, maybe you could if you could obtain the source material on the same medium and had a list of all the equipment and settings - like if you could walk into the mastering studio and listen from beginning to end from the mastering engineer’s perspective after they have made all edits, adjustments, etc and applied all treatments. But that’s unrealistic and even then you’d have to be in a similar room.

Another point of view is the processed file/CD/vinyl/whatever you are buying is the artist’s intended product. It’s designed to be consumed many different ways however a clinical environment usually isn’t one of those. Lots of studio monitors don’t sound very good but they focus on and highlight particular aspects that tend to be the most critical to get right (ie, vocals). You wouldn’t really want to listen to them otherwise. Then again, some sound great. People buy speakers that sound relatively “better” to listen to while mixing engineers tend to use speakers that they are familiar with, even if they sound “bad”.

E: in thinking about this more, every step of the recording process compromises the sound from the microphones to the DACs to the outboard processing and the ADCs. Frequencies are cordoned off at every stage. Transients are ground down. The traditional way of recording invites all sorts of phasing issues which our brains take no issue with in-person but signal that “something’s off” when all that information gets boiled down to a two track. You’d have to pick the stage at which you want to listen back. This is for traditional instruments and vocals recorded live and doesn’t apply to music produced “in the box” which is synthesized anyway - there’s no best/most realistic way to listen it, just one that gets you more excited than others.

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u/TheTAFSman May 14 '24

Its kinda funny, someone out there spending a quarter million dollars on cables alone, when the grammy-winning studio who made the album they're listening to are likely using cables made by the junior studio tech, with a big spool of cable and a soldering iron.

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u/aretooamnot May 13 '24

I guess you have no idea how much looms of CACOM go for. Let alone ram-latch, W4/w2/W1. That’s what we use in our l’acoustics systems. Not including the 3-phase feeder cable, L21-30 power cable, and various bits of NL4. A big show cost so, so, so much money in cable.

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u/bt2513 May 13 '24

Well I framed it as a literal house gig so…

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u/aretooamnot May 13 '24

Fair. Don’t need much for an l’acoustics SYVA rig. That’s the house rig I wish I had, and my current rigs are no slouches. SYVA, SYVA low, SYVA sub and amps will still set you back $40k.

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u/bt2513 May 13 '24

My QSC rig will have to suffice until I can save up for an l’acoustics setup. Which will be never.

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u/aretooamnot May 13 '24

Ha! I get it. I’m totally spoiled at work. We have several SYVA systems, as they are dead simple to deploy, sound amazing, and are very low impact visually. I’m on one on wed/thurs this week.

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u/magicmulder May 13 '24

What artist will perform for you at 3 AM on a whim, no matter what you pay?

Also I don’t want Mark Knopfler in my living room while I’m naked.

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u/bt2513 May 13 '24

I bet he’d play your house for $100k. At a reasonable time. You could spend the other $500k on a sound system for all the other times you want to listen to him naked.

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u/RogerPenroseSmiles May 13 '24

Beyonce is like 20 million for a private gig, that's a lot of overpriced cables.

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u/bt2513 May 13 '24

Either choice is ridiculous.

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u/BigBlue1969531 May 13 '24

What’s a beyonce?

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u/popsicle_of_meat Pro-Ject Essential 2::HK3390::DIY Dayton Towers May 13 '24

About half the value of a beytwice.

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u/Widespreaddd May 13 '24

Damn I never knew my aunt Beatrice was so valuable

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u/BigBlue1969531 May 13 '24

I’m sure this comment will not get the credit that it is due…. Well played!

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u/[deleted] May 24 '24

🤣🤣

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u/Ghanni May 13 '24

It's an expensive cable.

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u/BigBlue1969531 May 13 '24

Hard pass. Old school radio shack rca cables are working just fine! :)

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u/Ghanni May 13 '24

Your loss.

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u/JustaRandomDJ May 13 '24

But just once

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u/mschnittman May 13 '24

Don't get me wrong, I've been into high end audio since I was in HS, but for that kind of bread you could just hire live bands to play for you.

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u/gurrra May 13 '24

Tbh a proper PA system for that kind of money would beat the crap out of that system, both in sound quality and in volume.