> When you increase the resolution too much, the problems in old/remastered sources become apparent, and you can't enjoy that material anymore.

It doesn’t need to even be that old. I’ve got stuff from small musicians and they don’t have the equipment to make perfect recordings. You can’t tell with good headphones, but you put it through an amazing pair of speakers and it gets fuzzy.

> even the basic airpods provide plenty of resolution and detail

My information might be outdated, but aren’t those the kind that sort of sit loosely at the outside of your ear canal (like the original iPod headphones)? If so, those are the one kind of headphones that I find basically worthless. I’m not an audiophile by any stretch of the imagination, but in the iPod era I could never understand how people tolerated those when you can get vastly better sound for a few bucks. I figured the distinctive apple-brand headphones were kind of a status symbol.

AirPod pro sounds fine, though.

> it's that speakers don't require any tuning to match a person's specific physiology

But they do interact with the environment. Having walls which reflect the sound can mess with the sound. Changing speakers won't help. Changing headphones can help.

Not a dumb question... I phrased it badly. I was referring to over the ears as something like Koss Porta Pros or similar.

You can't make a bad speaker good, but also: people spend lots on gear, but forget the room. The room can break a good speaker easily.

Also... 'good' is something you first need to agree on when talking with people. Some people like to have 'distorted' playback (compared to the original), because they "like" that better. That is the moment retailers can sell objectively worse but overpriced stuff.

Genelecs for instance are very detailed, neutral etc (there is a reason you see them everywhere in professional settings), but consumers don't necessarily have an appetite for 'objectivity'.

In the past, there was no special speaker wire. It was all mains wire, because all was 100% copper. Today, finding 100% copper cable having the cross-section stamped on it is pretty rare. Electronics being more efficient hence drawing less power allows manufacturers to run 3-4 copper clad aluminum strands as mains cable in some cases.

Today, I'd still use "mains wire" if I can find it in a 100% copper form with the correct cross section. The reason I used "speaker wire" in my set is because the recommended cable was thicker than the standard stuff, and I didn't believe that I'd be able to get 100% copper wire easily.

less about the files, more about the audio equipment in between

Hah, that AM-receiving cable was at a theater and only a couple hundred feet long.

In general, with low-level analog audio and non-ridiculous lengths, additive noise effects are likely to become audible long before attenuation or especially frequency-dependent attenuation. As a decent heuristic, as long as the DC resistance is small compared to load impedance, the cable impedance is unlikely to be a problem. For the connection from the amplifier to the speaker, additive noise is unlikely to be a problem, so the DC resistance is even a decent heuristic: keep the round-trip resistance below half an ohm or so and you should be fine with most speakers.

Ok I’ll bite…

37 miles?!? Why??

I'm not sure it's a really great experiment though?

Outside of the hyper-crazies, no one is really stating that a 6-12 inches of conductor is going to make a giant difference in audio quality. Yes, I'm aware of the super-premium-gold-plated-platinum-encrusted 12" audio patch cords available. But almost no one really makes serious arguments those do anything.

I don't think running a 50ft banana is going to have similar performance to a 50ft properly-sized copper conductor though.

Where you get into the "debate" is the difference between buying a spool of 12ga stranded copper wiring from Home Depot, or buying the same thing only with de-oxygenated or whatever silliness some audiophile brand is selling for 10x the cost.

There are levels to things. I imagine copper speaker wire to be essentially fungible. Just size it to your length of run and max power needs. Calculate the total resistance for your wire run and done/done. All professional level sound installations for venues and what-have-you do this already.

This sort of test just seems to prove nothing in either direction other than provide bait for folks to point and laugh (or defend) in comment sections. Consider me baited, I suppose!

It depends on the experiment done… You need every intermediate point between the wires to be low distortion too. As in, audiophiles cannot distinguish between distortion and distortion+distortion is not really an interesting result.

You need source, digital to analog conversion, pre-amp, amp, speakers to have low distortion too, and you need the room to be appropriately treated too. I didn’t look at whether they did all that but I seriously doubt they did.

I have always said and will always say the same thing:

Up to a point, there's an easily distinguishable sound and detail difference between cheaper and more expensive gear, given that you don't cheat (i.e. put cheaper gear in expensive enclosure), but that difference indistinguishable well before these "true audiophile" level stuff.

For example: I run a pair of Heco Celan GT302s. They are not something exotic. 100W per channel, adequately detailed speakers with great soundstage. The manual gives you a table: Wattage -> Recommended wire gauge. I got a high quality, 100% copper cable (from Acoustic Research, so nothing fancy) at the recommended gauge, and connected them. You can't convince me to get a better cable. It's pointless.

Do I enjoy the sound I get, hell yeah. Do I need to listen to my system instead of listening to the music, hell no. I feed the amplifier with a good turntable (which is 40 years old, shocker!) and a good CD player (which is pretty entry level for what's out there), and that's it.

That set will nail any person who likes to listen to the music to its chair. That's the aim of a good system. Same for personal DAPs and DACs. If you enjoy what you have, who cares!

My hypothesis is that the $1000 cables help sell the $300 cables. I’ve seen comments to the effect of: “I’m not fooled by those $1000 cables, so I saved my money and got the $300 cables instead.”

In other words, they got fooled.

What’s happened in electronics is that there’s a cutoff, above which the audio quality doesn’t get any better, but that cutoff is much lower than anybody can believe. So the psychological cutoff is higher than the physical one, and a role of marketing is to raise that cutoff even further.

it also puts a market value on said placebo effect...

This may be an unpopular opinion, but if people believe they can hear a difference in their $1000 cables, and they enjoy purchasing and testing them, I'm inclined to let them enjoy themselves. I have a basic hi-fi setup with rational cables, and enjoy the cost savings, but to each their own.

I feel the same way about wine. At a certain point, it's not really about objective improvements, it's about vibes and lore.

Dirac won't be able to fully solve the room issues AKA it's not a replacement for proper room treatment, but at least it can reliably make the sound in the room not terrible.

> Or they could buy equipment with active room conditioning like Dirac.

You realize that the pitch for this is basically the same as the pitch for magic pebbles? It's a cure-all box you put on the wire to make things sound better, for a low price of $1,500 or something like that.

I know enough about signal processing to know that magic pebbles probably work worse, but I can think of many reasons why it might not produce the audio you subjectively like better. I suspect it can't really even correct for many of the real-world issues you might have, because equalization doesn't fix echoes, resonance, etc.

In any case, it's a bit of a strawman, because most audiophiles are not buying pebbles in the first place. They're trying vacuum tubes instead of ICs, or are trying out different op-amps, or stuff like that.

> Main upside of those live music shows is that they are not "perfect" like playing a record

That's a very different metric. How good the sound is vs. what the sound is.

My 500$ KEF Q150 setup sound like the band is here when I close my eyes. The sound will be shaped more by the acoustics of the room than by the actual speakers anyway.

It really depends on the music you listen to and what your ears are already use to.

I thought my fathers old setup always sounded amazing when I was younger. Coming back to it 20 years later though, it sounds stupidly scooped to my ears. Same speakers but what has changed is the music I was playing on them and what my ears expect to hear. 20 years ago I was more into guitar/bass/drum/vocal music that these speakers were made for.

There is really no such thing as "sound quality". There is just different EQ, frequency range, etc.

Don't forget to use the full moon to recharge the quartz crystals in that analog gear

Ah, that's why Paix Dieu is such good beer. The electrons are aligned.