My Appreciation

[stereoman]

*lovely audiophiles - It's because I love you guys simply for being audiophiles who ( of course myself included ) unfortunately constitute such a small percentage of world population. We know what good sound is all albout and let us be always loyal to this great and difficult hobby realising how the rest of the world often do not realise. Hopefully it's gonna be changed soon when the technology will eventually allow everyone to enjoy almost a perfect sound reproduction. Which is,unfortunately, still a long way to come...

 

[davidf]

Whilst we MAY see the existence of perfect sound quality one day, it will never be universal - there'll always be some manufacturer hell bent on world dominance that will produce stuff so cheaply that sound quality will always suffer.

 

[stereoman]

Exactly. Pity...it's either because people are not particularly advised as to the advantages of the better sound or simply have this not in their genes.

 

[Electro]

*lovely audiophiles - It's because I love you guys simply for being audiophiles who ( of course myself included ) unfortunately constitute such a small percentage of world population. We know what good sound is all albout and let us be always loyal to this great and difficult hobby realising how the rest of the world often do not realise. Hopefully it's gonna be changed soon when the technology will eventually allow everyone to enjoy almost a perfect sound reproduction. Which is,unfortunately, still a long way to come...

Unfortunately I fear that the majority of people could not give two figs about sound quality .

This fact was brought home to me when a friend was talking about spotify premuim and I happened to mention that he should go into his settings and make sure that he ticked the best sound quality setting as it costs no extra to use the higher bit rate .

He replied that he was quite happy with it on the basic setting and couldn't be bothered to mess about with it as it sounded fine on the lowest setting bitrate setting to him.

He went on to add that none of his friends or family had bothered either, so I asked why and he said, nobody cares !

 

[Nelis87]

I feel you Electro. Experienced the exact same situation. Let alone the misconception about "HiFi", meaning that one friend of mine who is always bragging on how HiFi he is with a Sonos Play 1 in his living room. The group of people interested in this hobby is to darn small.

 

[jjbomber]

there'll always be some manufacturer hell bent on world dominance that will produce stuff so cheaply that sound quality will always suffer.

Cr-Apple and MP3? Wasn't that the start of it?

 

[davedotco]

Although I stopped working in the business some years ago, I do get asked on a regular basis for advice and help on all things audio, generally for friends and family.

I very quickly learned and stopped giving my views on the near universally crap systems that I am played, these days, like on here, I advise on practical and functional matters.

What really clinched it for me was helping a friend set up his new system which involved integrating a subwoofer. The gear was not cheap, well into 4 figures, and after a couple of hours we ended up with a very decent and quite balanced sound, pretty good for the money spent I thought.

I couple of weeks later I was visiting and naturally some music was played, it was awful. The subwoofer had been tweaked by setting the low pass filter to the max of 150Hz and cranking the level way high, boom and rattle was pretty much all you could hear, he thought it was great now that it was 'set up properly'.

I asked him to turn it down a bit and tried to ignore it for the rest of my visit.

 

[steve_1979]

I met another audiophile in person for the first last week. Actually I've known him for about a year but he has only just mentioned it for the first time last week. He's a nice and perfectly normal person too (unlike me ).

Although we are a rare species there are probably more of us than you realise but it generally doesn't come up in day to day conversation so we never usually know when we meet another one.

 

[jonathanRD]

I thought I met another 'proper' audiophile recently.

For some light-hearted reason, I had mentioned that I have a room full of speakers and one of the group made a bee-line straight over to me. 'What kit have you got?' he said with a really interested look on his face, so I started reeling off Exposure and Rega and he just looked at me blankly. Then he told me about his Bose stuff and how good it was *sad*

My brother-in-law doesn't get it and thinks I'm mad.

My Dad loves listening to music in my house, but not enough to have his own setup.

My future son-in-law loves it, and although early days, is already on that slippery slope.

And my son, who's occupation involves a lot of music, is equally happy to listen on his phone as my hifi.

No point mentioning the girls *unknw*

 

[CnoEvil]

*lovely audiophiles

That's good to know - I thought we were a bunch of mad effers! *crazy*

 

[steve_1979]

I thought I met another 'proper' audiophile recently.

For some light-hearted reason, I had mentioned that I have a room full of speakers and one of the group made a bee-line straight over to me. 'What kit have you got?' he said with a really interested look on his face, so I started reeling off Exposure and Rega and he just looked at me blankly. Then he told me about his Bose stuff and how good it was *sad*

This was a real audiophile that I met. He's more into home cinema than true two channel music but he has some very nice Kef floorstanding speakers and a couple of grands worth of Onkyo receiver. You can tell he is genuinely very passionate about it all. To my surprise he'd even heard of AVI. *shok*

 

[Blacksabbath25]

One good thing that's come out of the internet and that is I get to speak to like minded people who like anything hifi , music , film and so on

I've only met one person and that was seemorebtts's who's a member on here and he took the time to come to my house but apart from that the only people that I meet who like hifi is the hifi shop *blum3* or is it my money .

And my family are not interested one bit they look at it as a fool and his money they are quite happy with a £50 Argos mini hifi which gets turned on ones a year if your lucky .

 

[plastic penguin]

For me it's about the sound versus music. The music will always win out. Of course I love the hi-fi but as I get older I analyse the sound less and less.... it's about the overall ambience. I don't see myself as an "audiophile", however, others may see it differently.

 

[davedotco]

For me it's about the sound versus music. The music will always win out. Of course I love the hi-fi but as I get older I analyse the sound less and less.... it's about the overall ambience. I don't see myself as an "audiophile", however, others may see it differently.

I keep trying to explain, I really do not want to fret about hi-fi any more.

The advent of spotify means that I do not have to worry about collecting music anymore and digital playback makes a system little or no fuss, it has become quite possible to build a decent sounding system for not much money.

My current setup cost less than £600, I would like spotify to be lossless and would quite like to upgrade my electronics, mostly for peace of mind rather than anything else.

 

[Alantiggger]

*lovely audiophiles - It's because I love you guys simply for being audiophiles who ( of course myself included ) unfortunately constitute such a small percentage of world population. We know what good sound is all albout and let us be always loyal to this great and difficult hobby realising how the rest of the world often do not realise. Hopefully it's gonna be changed soon when the technology will eventually allow everyone to enjoy almost a perfect sound reproduction. Which is,unfortunately, still a long way to come...

I'm not so sure it HAS to BE PERFECT going by what is said about the Human hearing ?

 

[newlash09]

was hosting a surprise party for her would be. And since drinks and dance were expected to follow. I offered to bring over something to play the music, and also dj for the evening. She assured me, she had that covered, with something properly hifi. I couldn't help getting curious, as she was beaming with pride at her new acquisition.

When I arrived , she had a Bose sound touch II playing via Bluetooth .

Soon thereafter quite a few of my friends asked me to suggest something for their music. And despite what I suggested, they always told me that they can beat me to it with a Bose. So now Bose is all I suggest, to save myself the embarassment of sounding dumb.

 

[emcc_3]

Fortunately my Dad was always into his hifi, when I was growing up and I have someone to chat to about it.

The other half gets it now as well after years of thinking I was mad. She commented that when you turn music up on my system it doesn't sound like noise but just a slightly louder nice sound.

She has also made a conscious choice of using my set up to listen to music to when I'm not around.

TBH think most people haven't heard music on proper systems. This is why they think stuff like Bose is high end as the marketing guff tells them so.

With regards your friend with the play 1 at least it wasn't Bose. The Sonos stuff is decent for what it is and is ok for kitchen/bedroom listening with a good use of tech and a intuitive app. The Bose stuff sounds poor and the tech/app dreadful.