If Samsung buys them as well (which didn't happen right now, but I'm sure it's what they're aiming for), the monopolization will be complete and the Live Nation-ification can truly begin.
A similar story is happening to festivals (especially across Europe), with KKR-owned Superstruct Entertainment now having majority stake in like a hundred or so music festivals.
Curiously you can follow some designers from shop to shop as they move in their career evolution.
Sometime before 2010 Genelec started to focus their offering to two markets: the absolute top-end studio kit, and at the same time expanding downwards in the market towards the top end of consumer range. While they retreated from the space between the two, other local players[tm] were happy to cover the now vacant hi-fi enthusiast space.
For some reason the same locales that originate lots of heavy-metal bands also happen to sport a concentration of high-end audio equipment shops.
(Happy owner of a pair of Amphion monitors. Described by my audiophile friends as "unforgivingly accurate".)
> "Sound United’s impressive roster of brands is rooted in a deep passion for sound, innovation, and commitment to quality that aligns with Harman’s own values"
For the average person with a big TV and standard issue sound bar, an expensive home audio setup has limited appeal. What they have is good enough. However, in the automotive market it is a very different game. For starters, if you have to pay a five or six figure sum for your vehicle, where you are already in the game of specifying options, that expensive audio option isn't that expensive when compared to all of the other 'necessary' options, so you might as well tick the box.
With high end cars, resale value matters. If you have the base specification then this isn't going to fare too well in the second hand market. With some options you are never going to get your money back, but some are 'mandatory', particularly if they are bundled. It seems to me that this is the lucrative niche for high end audio, not the home or other markets. Plus you can sell someone a ridiculous amount of speakers, for example 22 of them, whereas, in the home, nobody has 22 speakers in their living room.
The thing is a sound bar can cost more than 2 grand, which gets you nice pair of B&W two-way speakers and an entry-level Marantz, a setup that beats the sound bar any day. Of course I'm a bit unsure what kind of number's you're speaking of.
Plus, does all of that stuff integrate with your tv remote like the right soundbar can? Most people don't want multiple remotes or have to manually turn a receiver etc on
Personally I think think the soundbars are a waste given that they'll never beat the stereo imaging you get from the second hand entry-level Hi-Fi. Soundbar is more convenient and I totally get many people don't always use it for intensive listening sessions, they just need a bit more tear free volume than the TV can output and maybe some background music.
Except that won't put the dialogs where they should be, in the center.
Back in the days I got a surround receiver and added a center speaker to my parent's regular two-speaker setup, and it was dramatically different feel when watching movies.
But if you have stereo speakers properly placed https://www.ecoustics.com/electronics/messages/34579/705942.... (basically on both sides of the TV with you sitting from each speakers by their distance from one another), the stereo imaging will absolutely be able to place dialogue in the center.
But it can also produce wider sound stage than a soundbar, which is half my point, the other being better sound pressure and dynamics from the larger speakers.
Surround is of course better. But the price is usually the issue. One good option is to start with decent pair of two-ways that you can move to rear if you decide to go surround later. Then you only need the three center speakers and maybe the sub. The amp can be either future proofed by going n.1 immediately or upgraded with the jump.
For me, if I were to watch alone while sitting straight up in the middle of the couch. Which I almost never do. Either I'm casual or I'm watching with others.
I agree with regards to sound quality and dynamic range though. We have a soundbar in the main livingroom of good quality, but as expected it has no lower end.
I got the stereo+center speaker setup in the basement with the big TV, they're just bookshelf sized but on stands with center just below TV.
They're enough that our neighbors would complain if they were home when I crank it up, and have much better clarity for normal sounds and dialog.
Audio is not like a graphics card, but people understand that you can buy at $500 a GPU that is ~ 2 times faster than a $200 one. The low end in audio is tens of dollars and there is nothing good in the hundreds of dollars range.
(Yes, I like Yamaha audio equipment.)
And this is not Yamaha, everyone is selling the same stuff. You can find cheaper Chinese integrated DAC + amplifiers, WiFi and BT with more modern stuff in it. Yes, the amp part is much lower quality, but you need features, convenience, great user experience, not just good audio. At least with the cheap soundbar you don't have high expectations, no disappointments.
My first jobs (1990s) paid largely for restoring large speakers I'd garbage picked from the neighborhood and components to drive them. But I was privileged to have a large space at my parents' home and neighbors far enough away I could enjoy the system without the police showing up immediately.
Young people have way less buying power today vs. then don't they? It seems like the target audience today is living with headphones connected to smartphones in cramped living spaces riding a constant debt train.
There is something wonderful about listening to physical music recordings without using a screen. It's like cursive writing, or knowing how to drive a stick-shift. But barring a Carrington event, or some moderate-to-severe internet catastrophe, its hard to motivate the utility of this kind of "middle path asceticism". "Shed no tears," the futurists say, since not too long ago most if not all "educated people" knew Greek and Latin, how to use a slide-rule, and how to saddle and ride a horse, and we don't particularly miss those things. I would argue caution, not least of which because this argument is too closely aligned with the market forces that know it's far more profitable to charge you per action than per object. It's always hard to know if we lost something important, or shucked off a barnacle holding us back, until we're looking back. I believe there is a sweet spot between the endless toil of "no technology" and the profound ignorance (and helplessness) that comes from putting everything behind a screen. I suspect that the hi-fi gear between the 1970's and 2010 will continue to be collectible for this reason for at least 100 years.
Helped me to more consciously get into work mode.
CDs just seem so much better. Yes it's technically digital, but can you tell?
With an iPod Shuffle, you needed a screen to load new music. The process of managing your collection happens on screen.
I realize this isn't the world we live in so I guess I'm just yelling at clouds. But come on, Vinyl is just so obviously a bad way to preserve music...
As for myself, I have young kids and this sort of thing doesn’t make the cut these days, so I stream everything. It all feels background-y and I haven’t fallen in love with an album in years and years.
Maybe I just don't get it - I'm much younger than the average HN user, growing up with physical media but not physical media that rapidly degraded on use like how vinyl does. But to me this sentiment is so alien that it seems like some kind of a milder nostalgia Stockholm syndrome.
When we think of other physical media, no one ever romanticizes that type of thing because degradation never really existed there. Would you want a photograph that faded away a significant amount each time you looked at it? A book that had the ink on its pages visibly rub off?
To me it just seems that the hard technical limitations of a long bygone era (that some people would've undoubtedly hated at the time) were given a mystique to them when people come back to them. Is the harsh fact of media degradation really inherently "magical"? Or is it that people ascribe good qualities to it because it's just the way it was?
Yes!
> A book that had the ink on its pages visibly rub off?
Yes, old paperbacks were exactly like that.
I didn't think so, until a couple of weeks ago.
I was in a record store and it had a CD player on sale for $30. One of those cheap blister-pack jobs. Just for a laugh, I bought it, and a couple of CD versions of records I own. (Genesis, New Order, R.E.M.)
I thought "digital is digital" so it shouldn't matter that it was cheap.
It wasn't great.
I sounded very flat. Even with my expensive headphones, it just didn't sound right. I'm not sure if "mechanical" is the right word, but it was noticeably different, and I'm not someone who has perfect hearing. It just sounded... boring.
So I compared the CD sound with the record versions that I rip with a $20 USB dongle and Audacity. The record rips sound much better than the CDs.
Maybe someone with perfect hearing will think otherwise. But I'm not an audiophile. I'm just a guy who likes gadgets.
That $30 CD player… if it’s connected to headphones, how were the headphones driven? Especially if you have nice headphones, it’s very easy for a cheap device to not be able to competently drive them.
Vinyl vs CD mastering is a thing. There could be differences there. Additionally, depending on how you ripped the vinyl (especially with a “cheap dongle”) that may introduce its own color to the record.
There’s a reason why music collectors differentiate between every single source, because often there are differences (sometimes small, sometimes big) between the various sources.
It's not the CD's fault, it's the mastering engineers.
99% of music is made to be played on radio / in car etc., a noisy environment, where you don't want to be adjusting the volume knob all the time. So the dynamics are stripped in mastering phase.
Music that gets pressed on vinyls isn't mastered for car-play, but home stereo equipment, so it makes more sense to have larger dynamic range.
CDs have objectively lower noise floor (less hissing), and more dynamic range (difference between loudest and quietest note), but it's the mastering that usually destroys the sound. And nothing can be done about it on consumer end. Except find a less remastered version of the album in a thrift store that isn't scratched to oblivion.
There's really no reliable way to tell if a CD is going to have high dynamic range, except perhaps niche audiophile studios like https://www.stockfisch-records.de/sf12_start_e.html, but https://dr.loudness-war.info/ has fantastic list of records with their dynamic ranges, so you can check before you buy, and you can also explore and find new stuff to use to listen to your speakers ;)
And even then, it's not digital square waves coming out of your headphones. At some point that digital signal needs to be converted to analog waves. The quality of the DAC matters as well and can give a different quality of output.
yep
---
I drove my electric BMW the other day, blasting a simulated V8 noise from speakers. It was a cold grey murky day but no rain. I stopped by the gas station to fuel my stomach by a bag of chips and the Snickers bar, because I went without eating a breakfast that morning. I saw a lonely dog by the roadside. It looked sad. I took my digital retro-styled camera with film simulation function out of my retro Billingham bag and took a photo. A little speaker in the camera has simulated the film advance noise just like in the past. Doggo looked at me with its sad eyes and went away. I took a glimpse of a photo of a dog and pressed "film grain +2" in the menu. Lovely shot. I'll post it to the Insta, probably. Then I entered the store, bought my bag of chips and the Snickers bar and saw a vinyl record corner. Man, I love vinyl. Those digital files pressed onto tangible, tactile surface. An AI-generated woman looked at me from the record artwork. Fonts were crooked. The price was $8.99 with a discount. I knew it's a pop record right away. Though, I'd love to blast an IDM track from speakers in my electric BMW alongside with simulated V8 noise, a pop record with vocoder vocals and autotune is also good. I took a record to place the vinyl on the bookshelf in my room. I know I'll be listening to the music via Spotify anyway. Man, I love vinyl. Just like film photography, it reminds me I'm alive. I'm real.
I really hope no-one ever makes such a monstrosity.
I enjoy the Vinyl & CD vibe of being fully offline.
And it's also interesting how much stuff from 90s/00s era, particularly electronic music and the various remixes never made it on to streaming platforms. I assume some of it is just complexity of licensing some niche pressing of Artist C remixing a song by Artists A&B, etc.
Sometimes I see some of the 2-3 CD live albums make it onto a streaming platform with like 1/3 of the songs greyed out missing due to licensing.
Plus there's the aspect of actually owning your media and not simply leasing it with a monthly subscription.
I always wondered if we could replicate the physicality of vinyl / CDs, games ROM etc. through memory cards (like SD Cards) in an enclosure with a label on it with a player made on purpose for them. This way we get physical media, easy to create yourself, not too expensive, in a digital way
They seem quite well made, if not exactly cheap. I believe there's also a way to store your own mp3's, but I don't know how open the interface really is. Ofc you can also make sth like this from scratch.
The figurines don't actually contain the music, they just have an NFC chip in them. The Tonie Box is connected to wifi and downloads the content.
The child doesn't really know any better though, it still gives them the physical experience without a screen.
The old ones were traditional music boxes, and each record had the musical notes.
The new ones have the score built in to the player, and each record just provides an ID for which track to play. So you can only play music that is built in to the device.
The only catch is that they don't ship to the US (we just bought one in Europe and brought it back).
You just put the media in and press play.
Sure having infinite streaming libraries is cool yes, but people listen to the same stuff or slowly expand listening habits. $10-30/mo for life ends up being a lot more money than just buying what you actually enjoy and listening to radio/stream like stuff to sample new.
The streamers are slop slingers now. Ironically I have found that YouTube's recommendation engine is 100x better for me than Spotify/Apple/Tidal ever were, and I don't even pay for Youtube, lol. Or sites like Discogs for more engaged music discovery.
You do however lose content to phyiscal damage or just misplacement.
I love CDs, but I've also lost some of my favourite CDs to damage or loss.
Yes, the quality of recommendations is generally terrible, but the equivalent in the physical media age, walking into a CD store and hearing something you love, just sadly isn't coming back.
Spotify etc are still unreasonably cheap for what they deliver, it costs the same as a couple of albums a month.
The old iTunes pay per song / album model with 30+ second previews is arguably a better model than where we’ve landed.
You can have the CDs or not, but owning your copy of the MP3 file, which you keep on a hard drive, or on a thumb drive, or on a portable SSD (in any of these cases, with a backup somewhere!), or wherever, means that
1) you can play it any time you want, for no extra money
2) your access to it can never be revoked
3) you can keep copying it onto new physical media any time you're worried about the old one wearing out
You're right, that it is a lot of stuff. I'm looking now at 6 shelves filled with records. That definitely doesn't work for people in small apartments.
I kinda like the idea that the music is stored as a raw analog signal pressed or magnetically stirred onto physical media. There's no file format, no codec , no DRM and no CPU involved. It's more of a protest against the digital assault that turned a ritualistic listening experience into a effortless, passive background task.
There's also a big nostalgia factor where a lot of people like me grew up with vinyl, cassettes and CD's when they came out. High school years were rife with tape trading, DiY mixes and kids who made their own music. In HS I knew kids handing out tapes with their fresh new rap or garage grunge band. You won't get that magic back with an SD card in a cardboard facade (or spotify for that matter.)
Hell, we can even chase that one back further, remember how much money Bose spent in the '90s convincing people that tiny speakers plus magic can somehow sound comparable to a proper stereo or home theater system? They were absolutely full of shit, but a ton of people believed every word of it.
Then why is what comes out from my "modern" soundbar so crappy compared to the one I bought 15 years ago?
I had to retire my ancient soundbar because it had Bluetooth without security and would regularly pump out 100db of some show that our neighbors were watching at random times.
However, the sound quality was vastly better than any soundbar I can buy now--even my wife complained about the soundbars we tried--they were that obviously worse. I had to suck it up and buy a full blown sound system to match a stupid cheap-ass JBL soundbar from 15 years ago.
I remember buying that soundbar (back at Fry's!) and all the soundbars were pretty much just as good (well, the Bose ones were garbage and overpriced, but let's not get started about that ...). They weren't audiophile quality, but they were good enough that an amateur like my wife really couldn't tell much difference.
What the hell happened that caused soundbars to go to shit?
Soundbars today are a cheap addition to make up for the horrible sound on everyone's cheap $300 LCD 65 inch TV that in addition to horrible sound looks worse at 4k than the 720 Plasma did.
IIRC the idea is to have two crystals, one at a constant e.g. 100khz, and the other at (100+x)kHz for x corresponding to the sound you want. By physically connecting them, you get the sum (ultrasonic, lost energy but not a problem) and the difference - which is the sound you want - with most of the physics across half an octave so easily flat. Something along those lines.
Given a high enough sound pressure level, your own eardrums might end up providing the required nonlinearity. The warranty sure sucks, though.
objectively or compared to similar bluetooth, noise-cancelling headphone? Most of the reviews I heard agree that even a mid-tier IEM or wired headphone beats shit out of them.
This is a really insightful and concise descriptor.
The audio business has merged with the "home theatre" business. The pursuit of audiophile quality was always a boutique/niche market.
> listening to physical music recordings without using a screen
You don't need a screen to listen to good audio reproduction. FLAC does of course need a digital device and storage. But there are huge advantages to FLAC over "physical music recordings". You can store FLAC on a USB key and plug it into a modern amplifier to listen. If you must have a spinning wheel (get it?) you can burn FLAC to an optical disc and play that in a player without much "screen". But even optical discs are artifacts of the past.
> It's like cursive writing, or knowing how to drive a stick-shift.
Handwriting is much more profound for personal development and education. The US Constitution, for example, is a hand-written document.
For transportation and tools, technology and innovation will change how people live. Those who remember the past recall how folks lived with trolley buses, ice-boxes, adjusting "rabbit ears", and dialing rotary telephones.
Fortunately we can all watch old films in our home theatres. (^;
That's not really what they meant - most people do not have "home theaters" they have a soundbar or a couple of bluetooth speakers.
Even beyond the audio quality and spatial processing, the noise reduction is magic that speakers can't do. It's amazing how much more detail you can hear when the sound of the HVAC is removed, the hum of the refrigerator, the rumble of traffic. Not to mention the total elimination of sonic reflections off your walls and ceiling that muddy the sound from speakers, unless you're applying treatments.
The only thing you don't get is the full-body shaking sensation that massive speaker bass provides. But that's not even audio. That's more like amusement-park ride stuff. (Not to say it isn't great too.)
I mean, tell me what you think of the frequency response below 200 Hz here:
https://storage.googleapis.com/headphones_com_blog_files/app... (from https://headphones.com/blogs/reviews/apple-airpods-pro-2nd-g...)
I mean, it's whatever you enjoy, but it's definitely got nothing to do with the frequency response or clarity.
If you want to "fill the room" for bass-heavy stuff that's more of a psychological thing.
I personally like the bass-heavy stuff way more on the AirPods Pro precisely because it's so much clearer, without the muddiness. Because there's nowhere near the level or distortion, reflection, etc. you get with room speakers.
But you touch on another of my pet peeves - took some work, but getting rid of those noises in my tv-watching space was very worth it.
Headphones and earbuds are not the way everyone listens to music, though.
With a good amplifier and speakers, I can be seated a few metres away and enjoy classical music and jazz with comfort and very realistic acoustics.
The audio experience itself, sure - "Want high-end audio without breaking the bank and remodeling your room? Get a pair of decent headphones." has been sound (heh) advice for decades.
The surround sound part, though? Eh, not quite yet. I mean, on paper, they have the ingredients - (personalized) HRTF and head tracking. But in practice I found even the personalized HRTF somewhat underwhelming, and knowing what's possible from the VR world the gap is still significant (IMO the Valve Index off-ear solution is still the pinnacle in immersive positional audio without surround speakers, even without personalization of the HRTF, I haven't really tested the AVP implementation yet, though) - which leads me to second, IMO even larger issue:
Extremely limited usage scenarios. For the living room, it's basically just supported Apps/content on AppleTV. Compared to the reality of a standard AVR (or even just Soundbar) plus surround speakers setup - take any multichannel input (LPCM, DD, DTS MA, Atmos you name it) and output surround sound - that's...just not a substitute. And that's not even getting into latency issues with gaming/interactivity (a general BT issue, though, at least it's slowly improving...).
I dunno -- I find it much better than actual speakers.
With Atmos on the AirPods Pro, I can pinpoint the location of an instrument within about 5°. It's astonishing.
Whereas with the traditional 5.1 speaker setup... you definitely get the sense of center vs. side, and kind of a couple of "zones" in between, but I can never place the location of an instrument or sound as accurately as I can with the AirPods Pro. It's a much more diffuse directionality, rather than "it's coming from exactly there".
Plus, of course, I get to take my surround-sound music and audio everywhere. Not just my living room. So I don't know what "extremely limited usage scenarios" you're talking about? I mean, yes it needs to come through an Apple device, but that's all my media anyways.
Music actually worked quite good regarding positioning (and yeah, to get that kind of precision from speakers they'll have to be well positioned, room calibrated and any strong flaws in room acoustics corrected, otherwise phase info is all over the place and it gets as muddled as you describe) - but there still was noticable coloring of the sound that didn't go away after recalibration. And TBH that's more important for me with music.
Where I sadly wasn't blown away was movies with full Atmos - especially height channel stuff I would have hoped to be significantly better than old-school HRTF...but it wasn't really (well, apart from the tracking, of course, which is cool).
The usage scenarios though...well, basically everything not an AppleTV 4k I can connect to an AVR, i.e. BluRay, TV/SetTop boxes, HTPC, and my personal biggie: any kind of gaming device (including the aforementioned PC). From what I've read, at least the app compatibility with spatial audio on ATV4k has gotten better ('bout time, Amazon!), but several european streaming providers still don't seem to work (e.g. Sky, Dazn) Spatial audio on the go is admittedly not a priority for me, though
My Alexa Echo Dot 4 sounds better than my home audio setup from the 90s. Now, a fair comparison would be to a modern floor speaker with modern magnets and amps, but I'm too old for this :-)
Modern Class D are built on advanced semiconductor processes (they are considered legacy node in the eye of Hacker News's primary audience. They are at least a lot better than the early days in terms of performance in analog domain.) When an IC company spend a lot of R&D money to develop Class D amp, they for sure exhausted what they can do before they tape out. That results in the superbe performance of modern Class D amplifier.
There is still oppertunities in getting analog Class AB type of amplifier working better, such as adding motional feedback control sensor-less or with sensor. KEF recently released a motional feedback soundbar with back-EMF voltage as sensor. It sure improve the sound quality for a soundbar. Although physics is physics, one cannot make a 1 inch speaker sounds like a subwoofer, but motional feedback sure can make 10 speakder sounds like a 15 inch subwoofer.
Sound reproduction is not just a flat frequency response. Perfect reproduction of phase information generates wider 3D sound stage, without the need of DSP to fake it.
I have a hard time believing this… yes today’s small devices sound better than small devices ever did. A lot of work went into that because people appreciate the reduced footprint. Also, those speakers are super cheap in comparison to the budget people would allocate to their stereo setups in the day.
But I’ve never heard a small speaker sound better than a 1970ies or later hifi amp + speakers from a decent brand. With big speakers you can reproduce all these frequencies without physics tricks. The sound is more laid back and the soundstage fills the room.
All the recent engineering has gone into making speakers small, cheap and wireless, like in the 90ies it went into creating multi-channel audio, but I would say stereo sound quality, as used for popular music, already peaked in the 70ies / 80ies.
Of course you can still get those quality hifi components today, or even better than that, but the median household is not listening on that and I’d wager has worse sound today than was the norm in the physical media era.
In the 80s and 90s the world moved to 6.5-or-less bookshelves which generally struggle with bass compared to a lot of modern smaller stuff. Meanwhile a lot of music started using low bass a lot more.
1. In the modern family, everyone wants to listen to something different. In the family of the 1960's to this was not possible, because too many kids, not room for so many big speakers, etc, etc.
2. Now, the speakers are there to carry the audio, status is derived from the size of the video screen. The screens crowded out the speakers. And you need 5 or more speakers now, which makes a set of big speakers exceptionally unfashionable.
3. Speaker size is inversely related to potential big box store volume because of the huge warehouses and sequesterd listening rooms that large speaker retailing would require. Buying without listening first makes does not fit with the idea of spending big on something that you need because your are elite afficianado.
4. The middle class is dead. In the 1960's, 1970's, or early 1980's, a 'good' stereo would cost about a month's net income for a median income worker. Today the good stereo still costs about a month's net income for a median income wroker, but the median median income worker is two weeks net pay away from homelessness or moving back in with his parents. And in that supposed golden age of stereo, the 'good' stereo was expected to last about 10 years and many of them did. Some are still working, many have been in the repair shop several times and keep going. Today, no one expects anything to outlast its warranty by much (except maybe a car), and competent repairs for anything more complicated than shoes are a not easy to come by.
What sounds good for a consumer may not work for profesionals who want pristine converters.
So I'm more concerned about Samsung owning B&W (there is no real substitute for good speakers) than Marantz and Denon. It seems like really good amps can be made by sticking to class D chip application notes these days.
class D amplifiers is to hifi, what lung cancer is to lung. /s
I think it is more like a "good enough" sound. There are still are hifi-enthusiasts, but I think most people don't see the reason to spend a fortune just to listen to music. Mostly, because people don't even know what a difference a good hifi setup brings to your life or they just don't care.
I always wanted to try building the "World's best speakers"[1] by Technical Ingredients just for fun and education, but in the end I did not care enough to spend the time and money.
40 or more years ago, the big hifi brands were racing to get total harmonic distortion down to 0.05% or less. The average person is unlikely to complain if it is 5.00%.
There was once a hifi show at which one of the most revered hifi reviewers gave a talk and played some samples for the audience. Almost all the audience noticed at once that his samples had a defect, a loud high-frequency tone somewhere around 10,000 Hz. He didn't hear it.
The concept of good enough has won. Many consumers still think that HD radio is high-definition. It is hierarchical digital, a standard developed to be good enough that most people would not complain. And, speaking of HD, lots of HD TV buyers were perfectly happy even though they were unaware that they have not got their TV producing HD pictures.
Don't you listen with your ears? Or am I just misunderstanding what you're talking about.
Edit: ah yes, vinyl is quite romantic. Maintaining the equipment and records and moving them is less so.
Fwiw I have a few hundred vinyl myself. I'll admit that I haven't unpacked them since my last move, though.
Like a music producer contract ending with a streaming service? This is all it takes for you to lose "your" music today.
Vector display tech is dead despite being objectively amazing, for example.
Central vacuums are also uncommon compared to the 70s and they were and still are better than what most Americans use today.
Hi-fi isn’t like this because huge amounts of it is literally placebo. Sorry but your gold plated cables do not in fact improve your sound quality.
I'm old enough to have bought a lot of vinyl records, cassette tapes, VHS tapes, Laserdiscs, etc back when they were the mainstream consumer formats and there were no better alternatives, so I get what you're saying. However, it feels like you're conflating three different concepts here.
1. The abstract idea (or perhaps 'ideal') of using vintage technologies being an expressive act which demonstrates something about you and your values to yourself and/or others.
2. The internal physical sensory pleasure one might subjectively feel from performing a manual action, separate from the purpose or utility of that action - such as cursive writing, calligraphy, shaping a wet clay pot, etc.
3. The net utility and objective technical fidelity of an action like "playing recorded media".
To me, these are all significantly different things and blurring them together niggles at my pedantic, engineering brain. If you're talking about #2 (internal subjective pleasure you physically feel from 'doing it'), that's great! I'm happy for you - but it's purely a "You" thing which may or may not be experienced by others. As for #1 (expressive act demonstrating your values), your values and whatever emotions performing that act evokes inside you are purely subjective. One person's 'sacred temple' may be another person's 'old building'.
But #3 has elements which can be objectively evaluated on various dimensions. When we're talking about "playing recorded media", vinyl is objectively worse at recreating the full bandwidth present on the original studio master (probably an analog 2-inch master tape back in the day) - and I promise you I'm NOT being biased toward 'new' or 'digital'. Not all new technologies are necessarily better in all respects and not all digital processes are better than analog. For example, I posted here last week pointing out that there are still a few very specific technical parameters in which esoteric, ultra-high performance, high-definition analog CRTs costing >$20,000 (which most people have never seen in person) can outperform today's best reference-grade (>$10,000) flat screens (of course, outside those very rare, highly specific traits - most mediocre flat screens are objectively better than even a good consumer CRT TV).
My point being that with #3, we can have an interesting and potentially useful exchange about traits which can be objectively assessed. We may not always agree about the relative utility or value of various traits, but at least we're talking about traits which can be mutually measured and understood - so we know we're disagreeing about the same objective thing. Whereas with #1 and #2, other people may not share your exact values or the sense of sacredness they evoke in you. And, sadly, I cannot share the internal pleasure Yoyo Ma experiences in the act of playing the cello. Of course, I DO have my own flavors of 'meaningful rituals' which evoke ineffable feelings and sensations in me - but I've always understood they only exist in my own mind, not the external environment.
Hardware has been largely solved in our everyday domains, and it's not where the money is anymore, or has been for years. Stuff that is "good enough for anyone" is cheap, made in China, and readily available from a manufacturer skimming by on a 5% margin.
I'm glad you enjoy your system, but, having upgraded from a very, very good 70s system to a pretty excellent system using contemporary parts, I can assure you that both objectively and subjectively your system from the 70s is inferior, and the difference isn't marginal. It's massive.
speakers are wear items
Sad when I first heard B&W sold 10 years ago. I had their 600 series and still wish someday I could afford their top range model.
I used to work in a building next to a B&W place where they either made speakers or at least the drive units. The day was punctuated regularly by rather loud audio frequency sweeps!
Also the Oberon 7s pack incredible sound for a price that's closer to B&W's shelf speakers than floor speakers.
Now outside of a handful of stalwart groups I don't see anybody making, "canonical" rock n' roll music in the, "post Velvet Underground" sense. It's, "correlation vs causation" but I can't help but feel that it was Spotify and streaming that killed this culture. Music became an, "everybody" thing that had no barrier to entry. Music subculture died. Fashion came next. Film has been declining since the 2000's.
I can stand you destroying my country's political culture but should have left it alone. It feels like an Albigensian Crusade.
Rock 'died' because it's been around for 50 years; were the favourite of boomers who ensured it always had air-time; and now they're out to pasture and other music styles reign. My dad was a pro drummer in the 70s and hated everything that wasn't rock or metal. He was incapable of appreciating anything else. Or so he said.
As a kid of the 90s, I could never quite find music that fit me. Sure, I liked some rock and roll, pop, and so on --- but when I was first introduced to techno (Antiloop - Believe, to be specific) at a LAN party I knew I'd found my home: techno and then trance.
But good luck finding Antiloop or the nascent trance on MTV or commercial radio in the 90s. The people who ran those things didn't like it, know about it, listen to it, or felt it had commercial value. So I had to learn about it from randos at a LAN party.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwQIgGQLOQ8
I like all, "genres" and types of music but there's a certain high level of quality that exists in a continuum of music going back a long time. It's hard to define in a formal way. It's there in John Coltrane. It lives sophomorically in The Velvet Underground, Herman's Hermits, and the other, "Bubblegum" groups as well as the Fuzz-Psych-Garage bands that live in the Nuggets compilations like ? And The Mysterians. It's played on Rickenbacker guitars. It has a fuzz pedal and it knows how to use it. It lived on John Peel's radio program.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62XRy-jFCm8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQdo8efJtSs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ToJ2mmlkiE
A special one for you the techno fan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zndpi8tNZyQ
Cheerio.
EDIT: Worth noting I'm 34 so don't give me the Grandpa treatment.
The 80s were the rise of synthpop, House music (which started from DJs sampling disco a cappellas and mixing them with TR-909 drums and Korg M1 keyboards), Techno and Italo Disco. From there, we got the next evolution, in the form of Eurodance/Eurobeat/Hi-NRG, and Electronic Dance Music as a genre was born. Notably, they all still largely lean in on the foundational traits of Disco: four on the floor drum beats, off-beat bass, heavy focus on syncopation to create groove, chord stabs, etc..
The 80s were also the rise of hip hop and rap, which also grew out of the same DJ culture. If a song doesn't have a four on the floor beat, it's more likely to have a hip hop beat than a rock "backbeat." (e.g. boom bam boom boom bam, like "Rump Shaker" by Wreckx-N-Effect)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7D5heNRUy0
If you look at how Johnny Rotten was listening to Neu! and X-Ray Spex (as well as The Monkees and Herman Hermits) and what Bowie was doing after he moved to Berlin with Iggy Pop it's not outlandish to say that Electronic Music wouldn't have existed without being preempted by Punk, Glam, and the emergent, "not progressive" guitar music of the 1970's especially in how it paralleled the development of Krautrock. Disco didn't evolve into EDM; Disco gave DJ Kool Herc a set of turntables to invent Hip Hop with. Techno literally came out of, "a certain guy who might be called Gerald" listening to Kraftwerk; Afrika Bammbatta's, "Planet Rock" samples Kraftwerk directly.
"I'm the operator with mine pocket calculator."
House (from The Warehouse) is as core to EDM as techno (more Kraftwerk), and they were literally remixing disco as well as using disco musical facets. And House and Techno's lines blurred a lot in Europe.
I don't see how you can possibly claim that.
Disco led directly to house, and Italo-disco was hugely influential to techno. US electro developed at the same time as some key Italo tracks like "Robot is Systematic" (1982) and "Spacer Woman" (1983). Italo-disco was played on underground radio in Detroit and Chicago, and is often credited as a core influence. Or just look to Detroit proto-techno track "Share Vari" (1981) which was considered to be Italo-disco in style at the time of its release.
"On and On" (recorded 1983, released 84) is often considered the first Chicago house record, and it was literally a direct attempt to reproduce a disco record using a drum machine and synths.
This isn't to undermine Kraftwerk, which was obviously an enormous direct influence on these producers as well, but my point is they're far from the only influence. Giorgio Moroder should receive the same amount of credit for starters, along with other electronic disco legends such as Marc Cerrone.
I don't think you're wrong I just think there's a, "more right position." I'm open to a plurality of views. It may be the, "real story" has to be a, "multiple perspectives thing." I'm just taken to the idea my perspective is the best.
Countless early house and techno legends say they listened to disco, sampled disco, made covers of disco songs, played disco in their DJ sets. Some key producers directly overlapped between the synth-heavy forms of disco (Italo-disco, High-NRG, Mutant Disco) and electronic dance music - for example Shep Pettibone, François K, and Material, to name just a few.
I guess believe whatever you want, but everyone else listens to what the people who created electronic dance music actually said and did which puts disco as a direct core ancestor.
"In my mind" ... what a throwback.
Back in the day how did you find new music? Pre-2000s it was likely MTV/radio for mainstream, or word-of-mouth/local events for niche genres. Nowadays Spotify and streaming services have supplanted the former for mainstream music. Finding new music outside the recommended engines requires a little more effort in knowing where to look. There are a lot of Internet radio programs (shout out to The Lot and Rinse.FM) and smaller record labels that do an amazing job at curating local and diverse sounds.
These days it's never been easier to start your own label or publish a track. Rock-'n'-roll is probably still alive (unfortunately I don't know that modern scene well), but assembling the necessary equipment and people to start a band is a big hurdle requiring practice, space and coordination. So I can see more wanna-be artists opting for pop/electronic having shorter turnarounds to a finished product.
I think self-publishing is the problem. Making music on laptops is neat and everything but where the model in the 1990's was giving the bedroom rock hopeful group eg. Pixies, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Creation Records a million dollar record deal which gave a livelihood to the kids making the music the new model is, "have young artists self-finance their own careers and reward them with exposure when they produce something worthwhile with the hope that maybe their music gets licensed for a film." Touring isn't lucrative for many groups. Many tours are self-financed. Not often mentioned is that musician's a group notoriously deprived of healthcare due to healthcare being tied to traditional employment.
How could we combine the best parts of Johnny Marr's idea of, "being a working musician" while still affording young talented musicians the livelihoods and opportunities presented by the music industry of, "yesteryear?" My feeling always was in expanding the musician's reach into the world of pedagogy and, "play as a means of meaningful research." Delia Derbyshire comes to mind. Brian Eno half comes to mind. There's a better thing but it requires institutions and social democracy-- it requires a society with the social sensitivity to not envy or disdain, "people who make weird noises for a living and get to travel the world." The United States is not that right now unfortunately. The western world is in crisis and needs music but it lacks the scaffolding to create, "great musicians and bands."
As much as the world needs another John Lennon right now much more we need Brian Epsteins that can create John Lennons, Mick Jaggers, and Peter Noones with pen strokes. Where are the Don Kirshners of the world creating product groups like The Monkees and The Archies? I can tolerate greed if we can get another Smiths, Beatles, or another Paul Weller. I can tolerate another Andy Warhol is he'll produce another Lou Reed.
There are still geographical centers for certain genres of music. Austin is still a hub for psych/indie/alt music, New Orleans is where you want to be if bounce is your thing, etc.
But from my perspective, music subculture moved from TV and radio to the internet long ago. I no longer have "120 Minutes" telling me what its creators think is good, but I continue to hear great new music via TikTok and Instagram direct from artists and fans.
> Today I can't think of definitive hub for, "real musicians."
If you had to pick one physical location, that'd probably be Nashville (and not just for country). Other hubs would include L.A., NYC, London, Miami, Atlanta, Austin, and New Orleans.
As for your second reply all those places are great but unaffordable for the young hopefuls. That's the filter that keeps the kids locked out. In the 70's moving to New York was, "Suicide" (Get it? If you don't I'd appreciate you'd just upvote this and stop reading. I'll provide a link below.) This is a filter that locks a lot of really talented kids out of the ecosystem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WvG-Z47S60
--so you can pretend to get the reference in my post in your later posts.
How you going to move back to being 20 years old again?
Berlin
No, I think music as a subculture is dead.
When I was a kid in the 80's I would sneak out of the house and go to a hardcore punk show that was put on by kids for kids with no adult involvement whatsoever.
Right now, on a Saturday night, where is there an all-ages music show going on anywhere in the US where the kids in the pit are 14, 15 years old and no adult knows or cares that they're there? There's a culture now, but there's no subculture. Most kids are watched too closely for that to happen now, which is good! Mostly. And subculture doesn't require a credit card and a subscription plan.
How did I find new music? Word of mouth was good, cassette tapes that your friends made you. Going to shows. A little bit from Night Flight. The Decline of Western Civilization. Urgh! A Music War.
Compilation records. American Youth Report, Flipside Vinyl Fanzine, the Mystic record comps, Rat Music For Rat People, the Blasting Concept, Dope, Guns, and Fucking in the Streets, Let Them Eat Jellybeans, maximumrocknroll. Forced Exposure. No New York. Going to record stores "in the city".
I used to go to those kinds of shows in my late teens. For what it's worth, I mostly am out of that because a) I like calmer music and b) the kids should have their own space.
But that doesn't mean that I don't run into small all-ages punk shows. There's usually one going on in Durango, CO a couple weekends a month that I have seen. I'm certain that in larger places the same thing is happening even though I don't know about them.
Consider that older folks not knowing about the show is kind of the sine qua non of what you're looking for, so I am no surprised that I, an "older folk", don't know about them.
But I know enough to know they are there. It's easy to find new music if you're looking for it.
Maybe go read or review Hesse's "Journey to the East" if you want a longer version of what I am getting at.
They are probably on Bandcamp and sometimes their songs have 500 views on Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPHafKOd9A4
If you want music like we had in the 20th century we need institutions, producers, entrepreneurs, a literate public, and a positive economic set. We need to pay musicians money to do their jobs. Music isn't a hobby. As the poet once said, "music is proof that there is more to the human than there seems."
-Matt Hollywood.
Socket: https://www.amazon.com/Cable-Matters-Snake-Over-Ethernet/dp/...
Plug: https://www.gear4music.se/sv/G4M/Neutrik-NE8MC-1-EtherCON-RJ...
Professional Audio has zero time for snake oil, I bet these will never suffer from broken clips.
So it's quite popular these days do use ethernet cable for long signal runs in live audio installations. Much cheaper than traditional snakes too.
Your second link is a rj45-in-xlr-shell plug. It's used where you need a robust and reliable rj45 connection that can withstand more abuse than a typical "naked" rj45. I think it's fairly popular in industrial computing and military settings. There are various types of plugs that are embedded in an xlr shell for the same robustness reason.
as you say, it's common to use that cable for long analog audio runs, but when it is used that way it's not ethernet.
I hope this doesn’t spell the end of that.
You can build loudspeaker cabinets yourself without a lot of skills. There are kits everywhere. These will dramatically outperform anything you can buy retail even if you do a mediocre job of assembly. Most aspects of a high quality audio solution involve the room itself, not the equipment inside of it.
Building something that replicates (for instance) the Polk RTI series would take a weekend for a total noob if working from a kit. You can buy pro amplifiers like QSC and Behringer that satisfy whatever topology and power level you desire. Vendors like MiniDSP give you everything you need to build an active crossover solution in an afternoon.
Simply knowing that these things are possible is the first step to achieving them.
DIY: https://www.parts-express.com/speaker-components/speaker-sub...
Pre-built: https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=43155
Emotiva is also a very good vendor.
I've built a ~700 liter subwoofer using 24" diameter Sonotube concrete forum material ($200-300 right now). The circular shape means that the only unbalanced forces occur at the ends of the tube. Fortunately, this is also where you put the driver (bottom) and the port (top) along with reinforcing material. You can make incredibly deep & powerful LFE cabinetry without even breaking 200lbs of total weight. Mine would go flat to 13Hz and could easily be moved by 1 person.
I have several frustrations with Sonos. Just the other day I was trying to setup a 10+ year old Sonos. Doesn’t work with the latest software. So I have to download a different controller. Couldn’t get it to work.
This isn’t something that should deprecate that quickly. Nest does the same thing.
Almost every “smart” appliance has a terrible network stack too. Like my washing machine can get an address on a mobile hotspot but not on my home network for some reason. And the errors are generic and useless.
We should be able to use Bluetooth or NFC or similar to configure the devices seamlessly by now.
Back to Sonos, I used to stream Internet radio. Every now and again it would drop out and I’d have to hit the power button. Why? It should be fault tolerant enough to do this on its own.
Interesting things like Spotify always seemed way harder than they should be.
As for smart speakers, thanks but no thanks. I just don’t want an always on cloud-connected microphone in my house.
So I just end up using my phone and a Bluetooth speaker. I wish there was something better.
You can turn any normal hi-fi setup into streaming speakers in various ways.
I’m using a fifteen year old Airport express right now. Works well, lossless, although only for Apple devices.
If you mainly listen to Spotify, connecting an old laptop or phone works great too (through Spotify Connect — it’s resilient because it doesn’t need to stream the actual audio).
Finally a bluetooth dongle that you connect to your amp is platform agnostic, the only downside being that bluetooth always uses lossy compression.
These are the cheapish ways, hi-fi companies also make streaming boxes to add to a setup but I never tried those. I’ve also tried amp/receivers with Airplay on them and that seems to work just fine.
theandrewbailey•4mo ago
Ewww.
jen20•4mo ago
[1]: https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-confirms-smart-refr...
63stack•4mo ago
catlikesshrimp•4mo ago
koolba•4mo ago
JKCalhoun•4mo ago
I should take a photo and post.
vincnetas•4mo ago
sejje•4mo ago
drnick1•4mo ago
tavavex•4mo ago
Also, the EU isn't even remotely like "a country".
theandrewbailey•4mo ago
The EU has a currency, parliament, elections, laws, presidents, courts, treaties, and is thinking about forming an army. That sounds an awful lot like a country to me.
tavavex•4mo ago
In practice, being a country isn't just about filling out some checklist. The EU neither claims to be a country, nor does any country on Earth see it as a single sovereign state. It has democratic and political processes that are similar to a country's, but its sway over member states is limited. Also, its members aren't forced to stay in the EU, unlike the individual regions that are part of your country.
And if you truly, unironically believe that the EU is a single country, what do you think of its member states? By extension of this argument, is Spain not a country? Or is Poland a country that's contained within another country, being equal and unequal in status at the same time?
theandrewbailey•4mo ago
If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it still might not be a duck.
EasyMark•4mo ago
sroussey•4mo ago
SoftTalker•4mo ago
EasyMark•4mo ago
skydhash•4mo ago
mkozlows•4mo ago
RossBencina•4mo ago
Jackson__•4mo ago
How this is not behavior deserving of some kind of EU fine is a complete mystery to me.
Kirby64•4mo ago
Most devices do not support analog USB-C audio, and frankly I understand why given how affordable DAC based dongles are these days.
Jackson__•4mo ago
Kirby64•4mo ago
For context on why it was removed: it was replaced with a moisture detection functionality, which can be used to monitor and protect the USB-C port against shorts from moisture ingress into the charging port.
NetMageSCW•4mo ago
MobiusHorizons•4mo ago
theandrewbailey•4mo ago
MobiusHorizons•4mo ago
rs186•4mo ago
P.S. I have been using official Apple/Samsung dongles and they work fine.
kurayashi•4mo ago
kwillets•4mo ago
In TV's they support the higher quality home theater scenario while still making most of their audio money from soundbars that can't compete on audio quality. They're well aware of that fact, and their strategy seems to be to keep all options on the table.
One of the TV execs is an audiophile FWIW.
aucisson_masque•4mo ago
you can't say that and not share some sample of that :)
kwillets•4mo ago
Sometime around when the CEO got out of prison a bunch of weirdness occurred. Good managers left, bad managers got hired, and everything became top-down. The group head "retired" but last year un-retired in a different position; I didn't know you could do that.
Engineering-wise it went from technical free rein to "only use this suspiciously chummy cloud vendor" in a few months. I never got to the bottom of that deal, but costs exploded, and revenue flattened.
aucisson_masque•4mo ago
You don't need corruption to make bad decisions, though.
subscribed•4mo ago
notatoad•4mo ago
so you should probably expect that these brands will continue operating the way that Harman, JBL,and AKG have since they were acquired. which is to say, pretty independently of anything samsung does.
NewJazz•4mo ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_Audio