FORUMS
After reading over and over again online and in the press about how audiophiles (or more likely, audiophools) are such ridiculous fools I think it is time for us audiophiles to take a closer look at just why this keeps happening. The following is my analysis of the situation, please feel free to comment and/or enhance.
First of all one must look at who is doing all this audiophile bashing. For the most part, at least in the case of the material that appears online, the people doing the bashing tend to be in love with modern technology and thus believe in the technology driven statement that newer equals better.
On the software side we get: Old 78rpm shellac records are not as good as 33-1/3rpm LP records and mono 33-1/3rpm LP records are not as good stereo 33-1/3rpm LP records and stereo 33-1/3rpm LP records are not as good as stereo compact discs and stereo compact discs are no as good as files stored on a hard drive and ....
On the hardware side: an old unamplified record player is not as good as an amplified (electrical) record player and an amplified record player is not as good as a compact disc player and tubes are not as good as solid state and of course, smaller almost always equals better.
These technophiles are also in love with anything that can be scientifically proven and hold scientific provability as the ultimate statement on the worth of an idea, assertion or statement. Thus abx test results and DBT results are much more valid than any subjective test results regardless of the overall validity of the abx test or DBT.
What the two proceeding statements, love of technology and love of scientific testing, result in is the belief that engineers cannot be wrong. So those guys in the white lab coats, especially the ones with electrical engineering degrees, know all there is to know about how "good" a piece of audio equipment can and will sound. And the guys in the white lab coats know this because any given piece of audio equipment can be measured and tested (tested via abx or DBT).
The problems between audiophiles and technophiles stem from the fact that audiophiles, many of whom are also technophiles but to a lesser degree, tend to put less faith in technology and scientific proof and more faith in their own observations. On the other hand, the technophiles seem to have very little faith in their own observations but complete faith in any scientific proof. And yet it is the audiophile who is attacked for being closed minded and for blind belief in things which can not be scientifically proven.
Now add to all this the fact that there are many solid, scientifically proven methods used in the design and manufacturing of high end audio equipment, methods like using higher quality components or tighter build tolerances, and the waters really start to get muddy. Throw in the fact that many individuals within the high end community are well versed in electrical and audio engineering fundamentals and we've really got a very mixed up situation.
Here's an example of what I'm talking about:
Quote:
As a CD plays, the two channels of audio data (not including overhead) are pulled off the disc at a rate of just over 1400 kilobits per second. A typical MP3 plays at less than a tenth that rate, at 128kbps. To achieve that massive reduction in data, the MP3 coder splits the continuous musical waveform into discrete time chunks and, using Transform analysis, examines the spectral content of each chunk. Assumptions are made by the codec's designers, on the basis of psychoacoustic theory, about what information can be safely discarded. Quiet sounds with a similar spectrum to loud sounds in the same time window are discarded, as are quiet sounds that are immediately followed or preceded by loud sounds. And, as I wrote in the February 2008 "As We See It," because the music must be broken into chunks for the codec to do its work, transient information can get smeared across chunk boundaries.
The above quote is taken from John Atkinson's recent post on lossy versus lossless codecs MP3 vs AAC vs FLAC vs CD. The last sentence is of particular importance. I, for one, don't know exactly what it means soundwise but I can still tell that it may indeed make for an audible difference between the original wav file and the resulting mp3 file. Plus it uses good scientific terms and principles.
From what I can tell, there are still plenty of technophiles for whom this type of well reasoned and scientifically backed up article is still not good enough. Please glance at this thread to see what I mean. Slim Devices Forum thread
Now comes the hard part - how does the audiophile community prove to the technophiles that much of what is believed by audiophiles is indeed based on good scientific reasoning? And that we use our own ears, rather that the ears of engineers in white lab coats, to base our judgments of the sound of a given piece of audio equipment or a given piece of audio software.
