It often surprises me to see people with time, money, and knowledge settling for subpar experiences that have night and day differences to me. Even at my brokest (pretty darn broke), speakers, headphones, and glasses were always worth researching and some saving up, and the difference between what I’d end up with and the average always feels like it paid off tenfold.
I’ve got a surprising number of friends/acquaintances who just don’t seem to care, though, and I am trying to understand if they just don’t experience the difference similarly or if they don’t mind. I know musicians who just continue using generation 1 airpods or the headphones included with their phone, birdwatchers who don’t care about their binoculars, people who don’t care if they could easily make their food taste better, and more examples of people who, in my opinion, could get 50% better results/experiences by putting in 1% more thought/effort.
When I’ve asked some friends about it, it sounds as much like they just don’t care as they don’t experience the difference as starkly as I do, but I have a hard time understanding that, as it’s most often an objective sensory difference. Like I experience the difference between different pairs of binoculars and speakers dramatically, and graphical analysis backs up the differences, so how could they sound/look negligibly different to others? Is it just a matter of my priorities not being others’ priorities, or do they actually experience the difference between various levels of quality as smaller than I seem to? What’s your take on both major and, at the high end, diminishing returns on higher quality sensory experiences?
I absolutely do, but admit it’s diminishing returns. I have a 4k OLED screen with nice tower speakers and I really enjoy my setup. The problem is once you really experience and notice high quality it’s hard to go back
I absolutely agree with you on friends and family. “Ugh I hate that I have to turn it up to hear the dialog but turn it down in the fight scenes”. That’s because you’re using the TV SPEAKERS those 1" drivers aren’t going to deliver the range you need! Get something else!_
For me the true moment of truth was when I bought the OLED and my wife even agreed while watching Maverick “okay that looked amazing”. Justified! Once you see it, you can’t believe you ever didn’t see it
You’re not wrong but there is such a huge cost of entry for even a decent speaker set up.
Like I said though, diminishing returns. Pretty much any speakers are better than the TV speakers. Even a cheap soundbar is going to do more than the TV speakers. As the other comment said even an old system from the 90s with speakers that aren’t blown will sound better. Hell my first system back in college was a craigslist find. You don’t have to go full hi-fi massive $1000 system to get a better experience
You can find great deals on the used market. People often give this stuff away because they don’t get it, and they just want it gone
you can usually pick up a setup better than your TV speakers for ~100 dollars from a thrift shop/used electronic store/craigslist, then upgrade incrementally as you feel necessary. the real problem IMO is that it permeates floors and wall more and takes up more space which makes it a shitty choice for apartments. Setting it up is also a PITA. I prefer headphones for almost everything., but of course that doesn’t work for group stuff.
You can get very good stereo speakers and a quality amp for a few hundred bucks.
The idea that you need to spend thousands is a myth. It’s more about form factor than specs. Sound bars suck. Full range woofers don’t.
The problem is once you really experience and notice high quality it’s hard to go back
I had this with earphones. Once I bought a better pair, going back to my old ones, it just sounded like cardboard. Don’t invest in good audio equipment, even once. It will cost you for a lifetime!
The problem is once you really experience and notice high quality it’s hard to go back
I can’t stress how true this is
It’s definitely a one way street. Once you notice compression, or color banding, or here the tinni-ness of audio… you just can’t not notice it anymore.
Here’s a factor that seems to be underappreciated. Those differences are a lot less important when you aren’t comparing side by side. Just because you can hear or taste the difference between a thing and a more expensive version doesn’t mean you will really appreciate that difference later. Diminishing returns does play into this, and the small differences between two things at a high level is often too small for your memory to even capture.
And even when it comes to the bigger differences, how it affects enjoyment has a large psychological component, in how much satisfaction do you get just knowing you are using something excellent, and does it bother you knowing what you are experiencing could be better.
I have nice quality speakers and headphones, but sometimes I’m lazy and will listen to a piece of music through my crappy laptop or phone speakers. I still enjoy that music. And if that was all I had access to, I’d still enjoy the hell out of music. I’m not about to give away or stop using my nice speakers, but I’m not convinced they make me happier in any significant way.
I disagree personally. I don’t think they need to be side by side to appreciate the difference, so long as you’ve ever experienced both. I miss the things that I know I’d get with better speakers when I listen on a different setup, and I still enjoy the experience, but it doesn’t move me as deeply when I feel something missing. And I don’t think it’s (all/entirely) placebo. A subwoofer that reaches 10hz lower, moves more air, and fires faster gives you a lot more to hear/feel/appreciate, and to me really changes my physical and emotional reaction to music.
I didn’t mean that you can’t tell the difference between any two things if they aren’t side by side. Yes I do recognize, when I play music through my laptop speakers, the sound is not nearly as nice as through my nice floor speakers. But when I use $30 earbuds, I’m not particularly aware of what I’m missing by not using my $100 pair. If I compared them side by side, yes. It’s the same for a lot of things, like wine or whiskey.
So I don’t value high fidelity video because I don’t see very well even with glasses, so it wouldn’t make a difference for me.
I do value high fidelity audio because:
- I am a musician and producer, although not as much as I used to
- I have ear training
- I went to recording school
- I am autistic with sensitive hearing
- I have audio and acoustical engineering as special interests
- I’m doing a master’s degree in electrical engineering where I’ve already designed audio gear for my projects
- I am teaching myself audio plugin design for fun
But I simply can’t afford high fidelity gear for every day listening. For my studio monitors, I spent as much as I could to get the best speakers I could afford so that I can be certain that what I’m hearing is an accurate representation of what I “commit to tape”. However, for walking to class or going to the market, I’m not gonna pay for expensive headphones that could get stolen, broken, or lost. It’s impractical.
My $20 Bluetooth headphones [1] are sufficient for every day carry. They sound “95% of the way there”, they don’t get in the way when I’m walking, and if I lose them, I can have an identical pair delivered to my door with a couple days. 95% is good enough for me. Actually, I could probably settle for less.
And then there’s storage. My library is already > 110GB in MP3 format, so storing it all in uncompressed formats would be unwieldy.
So in the rare cases that my listening hardware is insufficient, I’ll usually consult a software equalizer. For example, on Linux, Easy Effects allows me to apply equalizers, dynamic compression, and a bunch of other plugins in LV2 format to the PipeWire output (and input). It’s super convenient for watching YouTube college lectures with questionable microphone quality on my shitty TV speakers. Other than dynamic compression for leveling and an equalizer for frequency effects, I am typically not interested in doing anything else for intelligibility. Said differently, I am not interested in exploiting the nonlinearities in real speaker systems (other than possibly dynamic compression), so I should be able to fix any linear defects (bad frequency response) with a digital equalizer. The nonlinearities in real speaker systems are, for HiFi listening purposes [2], defects.
Also, I’m extremely skeptical of products marketed towards “audiophiles” because there’s so much
marketing bullshitpseudoscience surrounding the field that all the textbooks that cover loudspeaker design and HiFi audio electronics have paragraphs warning about it as the first thing.Like I experience the difference between different pairs of binoculars and speakers dramatically, and graphical analysis backs up the differences, so how could they sound/look negligibly different to others?
Next time you do a graphical analysis, check out the magnitudes of the differences in your graphs versus the magnitude of the Just Noticeable Difference in amplitude or frequency. We probably do experience the differences between speakers differently than others. We’re outliers.
What’s your take on both major and, at the high end, diminishing returns on higher quality sensory experiences?
For personal listening, the point of diminishing returns is basically $20 because I can’t afford shit. For listening to something I plan on sharing with others, I’d be willing to put in whatever I can afford. But frankly, I’d be just as likely to straight-up do the math and design my systems myself because I 100% don’t trust any “”“high fidelity”“” system that doesn’t come with a datasheet and frequency response.
Lastly, I do wear glasses. I typically get my glasses online because, once you have the prescription and your facial measurements, it is the same quality as the stuff you get at the big-box stores.
[1] I acknowledge that Bluetooth sucks, particularly for audio.
[2] As a metal guitarist, I’m not against speaker nonlinearity for guitar speakers, but then again, guitar speakers are really convincingly simulated by impulse responses, which are a core linear systems concept, implying that they are nearly linear devices even at the volumes they are typically played at.
I’m a computing/music student thinking of getting into plugin design and similar stuff, I’m curious what plugin design is like and what it consists of. Is there any like quick tips or bits of information you could give me about the field?
It’s so hard!
It’s really hard! But it’s really rewarding too. And as a computing/music student [1], you’re in a great major to start!
First off, if you just want to make your own effects and you’re not really interested in distributing them or making them public, I recommend using JSFX. It’s way easier. You can read through the entire spec in a night. JSFX support is built into REAPER, and apparently YSFX allows you to load JSFX code into other DAWs, although I haven’t tested it. JSFX plugins are compiled on the fly (unlike VST plugins, which are compiled ahead of time and distributed as DLLs), so you just write them up as text files.
However, their capabilities are limited compared to VST, AU, LV2, AAX [2], and other similar plugin formats. Also, pre-compiled plugins perform better. That’s why plugins are released as such.
So if you plan on writing pre-compiled plugins for public consumption, you’ll need to do some C++ programming.
IMO the most important thing to learn for plugin design is how to code well, particularly in C++ with Git and JUCE.
If you learn how to code with good practices, you can compensate for all other deficiencies.
Between “music”, “engineering”, and “software development”, plugin design feels the most like “software development”.
99.9% of all plugins are written in C++, and most of those are done (both proprietary and FOSS) with the JUCE library. School taught me the basics of C++ but they don’t teach you how to code well. Particularly, your DSP code needs to meet a soft real-time constraint. You have to use multithreading because you have a thread for the audio signal (which must NEVER get interrupted) and at least one thread for the GUI.
You also need to figure out which parts of the C++ standard library are real-time safe, and which aren’t. Here’s a good talk on that.
If you use JUCE or a similar development library then they have well-tested basic DSP functions, meaning you can get by without doing all the math from scratch.
Start watching Audio Developer Conference talks like TV as they come out. JUCE has a tutorial, and MatKat released a video tutorial guiding the viewer through coding a simple EQ plugin [3]. JUCE plugins are basically cross platform, and can typically be compiled as VSTs on Windows, AU plugins on Mac, and LV2 plugins on Linux.
JUCE is a really complicated library even though it vastly simplifies the process (because audio plugin development is inherently hard!). You’re going to have to learn to read a LOT of documentation and code.
I also recommend learning as much math as you can stomach. Start with linear algebra, calculus, Fourier analysis, circuit theory, and numerical analysis (especially Padé approximants), in that order. Eventually, you’ll want to roll your own math, or at least do something that JUCE doesn’t provide out the box. Julius O Smith has some really good free online books on filters, Fourier Analysis, and DSP with a music focus.
If you’re willing to
sail the high seas to LibGenbuy a book, I recommend Digital Audio Signal Processing by Udo Zolzer for “generic” audio signal processing, and DAFX: Digital Audio Effects by Zolzer for coverage of nonlinear effects, which are typically absent from DSP engineering books. I also recommend keeping a copy of Digital Signal Processing by Proakis and Manolakis on hand because of its detailed coverage of DSP fundamentals, particularly the coverage of filter structures, numerical errors, multirate signal processing, and the Z transform.A little bit of knowledge about machine learning and optimization is good too, because sometimes you need to solve an optimization problem to synthesize a filter, or possibly in a fixed time as your actual output (example: pitch shifting). Deep learning is yielding some seriously magical effects, so I do recommend you learn it at your own pace.
DSP basically requires all the math ever, especially the kind of DSP that we want to do as musicians, so the more you have the better you’ll be.
[1] IMO that would have been the perfect major for me, that or acoustical engineering, if anything like that existed in my area when I went to recording school 10 years ago. While my recording degree taught me some really valuable stuff, I kinda wish that they pushed us harder into programming, computing, and electronics.
[2] AAX requires you to pay Avid to develop. So I never use AAX plugins, and I have no intention of supporting the format once I start releasing plugins for public consumption, despite its other technical merits.
[3] Over half of MatKat’s tutorial is dedicated towards GUI design, i.e. the audio part is basically done but the interface looks boring and default. GUI design and how your GUI (editor component) interacts with the audio processor component are extremely important and time-consuming parts of plugin design. Frankly, GUI design has been by far the most complicated thing to “pick up”, and it’s why I haven’t released anything yet.
Dude I can’t thank you enough this is incredible! Seriously this is really useful :)
Perspective: My SO didn’t really care at first why I didn’t want to use the built-in TV speakers, but rather install some higher-end speakers and a DAC to drive them. After a while, she went to visit a friend and came back to celebrate our setup.
Value: Do you need a super-big, expensive TV or a smaller, higher PPI TV that you can sit closer to? What you really want is clarity, brightness, color, and smooth video. If people could never afford such a display and only had crappy TVs with bad video sources and only some smartphones as an alternative, the smartphone beats everything they know, of course. But if they could never afford high quality video sources and displays, how could they appreciate those things?
IMHO better than average is enough for everyday life. There’s more to life than spending money and not experiencing life to the fullest. That means I focused on a nicer Bluetooth headset, some better than average speakers for both TV and PC, … so I simply approach the point of diminishing returns on the quality scale, knowing full well I could do much better. But it’s not worth the effort to me if it slowly turns into either a game of high spending or a full-blown refurbishing hobby. Same with my car: I buy them used at about 4~6 years old and sell them at 8~10 years old, spending the least amount of money while driving mostly luxury cars with lots and lots of extras.
Audiophile equipment is full of placebos and scams. But there’s also a lot of very real improvements. I would also say the majority of people are well before the point of diminishing returns but hey.
One big problem is that the source of your music often is the limiting factor. A lot of music sounds not so great on my nice headphones. .Likewise, the songs I really appreciate on my headphones, tend to sound like mush on shitty speakers. That doesn’t make either music bad, they know their audience but If I didn’t like much of the hifi music then I probably wouldn’t care much about my sound setup.
I think like most things there’s a balance to be had. Obsessing about the little stuff can often get in the way of enjoying it, and be a massive waste of money. But I also wear headphones for 10+hrs a day, it’s worth investing in them.
It’s the biggest downside of having a transparent audio setup: the music that wasn’t well recorded/mastered is going to stick out like a sore thumb.
Shit in, shit out. But at least I know when to blame the producers this way!
Our car has an awful sound system. I swear there are frequencies simply missing, and that transforms music in ways that are impossible to miss.
Or one would think, but my spouse doesn’t care at all. I offered to go through the trouble of upgrading the entire thing – receiver, dsp, amp, speakers, adding a sub – but they said no, why bother? Almost makes me weep when some of my favorites play on the radio.
It’s not worth it to me to improve on our car’s sound system because the stock one is fully integrated into the dash, and there’s no DIN slot to replace the head unit. It hurts to listen to music in the car, so it’s either podcasts or nothing for me. And usually, it’s nothing…
Besides, for my tastes, you can’t make a car sound good enough for me to invest much in the way of audio improvement. Maybe a head unit, some reasonably priced replacement speakers, and a small sub would be plenty (and maybe overkill) for me in a car
Yeah this is pretty similar to my experience. My wife supports upgrades because she knows they make a difference to me and she can actually recognize it often, but it’s clear she’d be pretty indifferent if she was making audio decisions just for her.
That said, we’ve spent about 2 years with a nice Yamaha power amp, Elac floorstanders, and SVS sub, full setup around $5k, and she really appreciates it for our focused listening now. Passive listening might as well be out of phone speakers for her, but when we put a record on over Sunday coffee, she always remarks how grateful she is that we invested in the setup.
I care a little bit. I’ve got my good 5.1 sound system for the TV but I don’t see the necessity to invest into an Atmos system. The TV can display 4k with HDR but I’m satisfied with HD SDR stuff. When playing games 60 fps is nice but I won’t die if my Steam Deck can only manage 30 fps.
So, most stuff is usually good enough for me. And at the moment I can’t leave my bed anyways so I can live with laptop speakers.
I’m one of those who don’t care and it annoys my friends. I can tell the difference when comparing setups side by side but when normally watching content, a lower quality doesn’t bother me unless you literally can’t read the words on the screen so anything over 720p is usually good enough. Maybe other people have different thresholds.
It’s also about priorities. If you consider portability good, then no sound system will ever beat your laptop speakers just because they are already on your laptop. I assume it’s the same for people watching Netflix on their phone.
I never cared a lot. While I do notice the difference immediately, it never makes the experience differ in the long run. I have watched full length movies on the cover screen of my Samsung Zflip5 without feeling that I missed out on anything.
I have a nintendo switch which I have used a lot. Even though I have a nice 55" TV and a decent soundbar, I very rarely connect the switch to the TV. I much rather use it in handheld mode so I can sit in any angle in the sofa. I guess I value comfort a lot higher than high fidelity.
I had a 13" black and white television in my bedroom when I was a teen. The big, color Trinitron TV that we got later was amazing. Beyond that, I don’t recall the improvement in quality making sitcoms funnier, or the stories better.
In fact, to me, the old, fuzzy NTSC video is better in some ways. It helps with the suspension of disbelief, the feeling of watching a story on the screen. Even 1080p is sometimes too good, to the point that the actors fall into the Uncanny Valley, like I’m watching a live play, but not quite. Instead of a story, I see the makeup on skin, the wardrobe choices, the blocking, and the bad CGI backgrounds.
I can certainly hear the quality differences in audio, but I feel like past a certain minimum, I’m listening to the music, not the equipment. Like, my Shokz had a noticeable lack of bass when I got them, but I’ve adapted, and don’t hear them that way any longer. The convenience of open-ear headphones far exceeds any gain in quality.
There’s a term for that. It’s called “The Soap Opera Effect”. You can look up settings for each brand of TV to minimize it.
Never heard of it, but I’ll check it out. Thanks!
I keep YouTube videos turned down to 360 for this reason.
I get a strange feeling of vertigo if I see hd content above 30fps. The first time I met friends in a bar that was plastered with big screens playing a football game at 60fps was very uncomfortable.
I’m into this, especially sound quality. I have a top-of-the-bottom/bottom-of-the-middle 5.2.4 setup for movies and listen to music on that same space as well. I have made solid progress on acoustically treating my space, and it sounds pretty good.
My wife, who has done all the A-B testing with me and understands what high quality equipment and a well-treated space brings to the table would be perfectly happy watching Netflix on her phone speaker.
I know for sure she does not hear things like I hear them. I have a couple of demo tracks I use to evaluate changes in my system, and I have described to her what I’m listening for (soundstage depth, for example), and she cannot distinguish whether or not this quality exists. So, I think one part of this is that there is something cognitive going on that she and I perceive things so differently. Another thing that I think is different between us is the way music affects us. For me, music is an emotional experience and ties deeply with my memories of events/time periods/feelings. When I hear a song, I know the artist, facts about the band and its members, the name of the song, the album, and I can describe the album art. My wife, on the other hand, usually can’t remember the names of her favorite songs or who the artist is. And, like, no shade on my wife for this at all; I’m just saying we experience these things much differently, and I think that may be illustrative of the differences your seeing with other people too.
Additionally, as far as diminishing returns go, I think a lot of people do not understand the importance of acoustic treatment. You’re listening to your room, not your speakers. You can’t out-speaker a bad sounding room at any cost. If you think you want new speakers to upgrade your sound quality and have given zero thought to room acoustics, you should do a little investigation before upgrading your equipment. I think that money is better spent elsewhere first.
Once you have a good sounding space to listen, I really don’t think most people need to spend any more than 10k (at the extreme upper limit) for a pair of speakers for 2 channel listening. That said, I have been in a fantastic room with a $15k pair of Sonus Faber speakers, and I have been chasing that feeling for a couple of years now.
This mirrors my experiences exactly. It’s just hard for me to understand sometimes that people aren’t experiencing a difference that is objectively present and significant. But I guess I may miss plenty of details in other things that are significant to others. My mind goes to frame rate for certain games, where resolution feels super noticeable to me, but the difference between 40 and 60fps just doesn’t seem as massive as I see other describing it.
It’s also possible people just don’t care about those details, so they’re not primed to notice them. For example, another difference between my wife and I: she’s into sunsets, clouds, the moon, and celestial happenings. She’s constantly in awe about these things, points them out to me, and talks about them all the time. It’s cute; I love that about her. However, I really couldn’t care much less about any of it. For me, that kind of stuff happens all the time (every day, in the case of sunsets). It’s not novel or interesting to me in the same way as it is to her. We all have things we nerd out about, and I think the world would be kind of boring if we all only cared about the same stuff.
Really, my only regret about this situation is that I want to give my wife the gift of feeling like I do when I hear music and when I notice the details, and I know she wants to give me that gift of the way she feels when there’s a really cool cloud or sunset. It’s very fulfilling to share feelings like that with someone you care about, and it’s sad to me that we sometimes can’t.
Yeah that’s my biggest bummer, too, both in wanting to share the experience and wanting support in dropping some cash on a pair of headphones or something lol.
I sent this to her a long time ago, and now we call my hobbies (home improvement/woodworking/audio) “my Legos” as an inside joke. I don’t spend frivolously, and my wife doesn’t mind when I make purchases relating to my hobbies. We’re financially secure and we’re very much aligned in our financial goals and philosophies, so when I buy anything (which isn’t very often), she trusts that the purchase won’t have a negative effect on our finances. She even gets a little excited for me when something arrives at the house. It’s very nice to be supported in this way
Same exact situation here (incredibly luckily), so I guess I mean “support” not in the sense that my wife isn’t excited for me when I find something worth getting, but more that I wish her excitement came from a similar place as mine, a selfish excitement to use whatever is on the way herself, rather than a much sweeter excitement about me being excited lol. And excellent meme, wil certainlyl be sending it along.
I feel the same way. It’s a bummer, but there’s always conversations like these!
Fortunately, my 21 year old is super into music and cinema, so I can share with her. She wasn’t much of a believer in quality components or acoustic treatment until we bought a new house and I could go wild(ish). Now, I have ruined her life because she’s broke and wants what I have. I did square her away with a pair of decent IEMs though, so at least she can have a little of what she wants
I can’t tell the difference between the highest, top tier audio and like, decent audio, but shitty tv speakers or headphones and such absolutely kills me.
I just want to say how happy I am that good sounding audio equipment and large screen TVs are relatively cheap. With a bit of research and tinkering, one can have a nice A/V setup for not much $$$. Of note, I am very impressed with the audio quality of Class D amplifiers nowadays. I was conditioned to believe that Class D would always be inferior until I tried it myself.
I mean, to a point.
In the end it’s all a matter of priority. Do I want a sound system for 10k+? Sure. But that money would probably be better spent elsewhere
For me, I wanted a 65inch OLED tv and splurged a bit on that, but on discount. And I got a surround sound Sonos setup. That’s good enough
I’m a musician. I can’t afford top tier sound!
Tbh I can live with what I’ve got at home. A garden variety setup today still sounds better than something high-end did when I was growing up. Just give me some decent channel separation and I can zone out.
Where there is still significant room for improvement is in stage sound. Why do monitors always have to sound like sh*t? It’s like bands spend all their budget on amps and PAs and whatever dregs are left over go to the monitors. And house sound. Don’t even get me started. Maybe their gear was good once (probably not) but it’s invariably seen one beer spill too many.
A garden variety setup today still sounds better than something high-end did when I was growing up
Man, if this ain’t the truth! Speaker technology has really improved in the last 40 years, and is substantially cheaper than it ever was. And Class D amps?!? HiFi is crazy affordable ( relatively speaking) these days!
