Master Beats: Why doesn't audio quality matter these days?

Sennheiser

Even their cheapest pairs are better than anything from Beats.

Hearing damage

I suspect a lot of the lack of interest in audio quality has been caused by the industry itself - the overloading of the volume on everything...

And then overloading the amps causing additional distortion with very bad effects on listener...

As in making them deaf.

The industry has forgotten that music is not just in the notes, or the volume... but also in the silence between the notes.

RHA-audio

RHA SA950i cans - sound better than Beats and cost only £50. British company too. Tell your friends!

Amstrad Faux Hi-Fi

I had to laugh at the bit about the speaker cabinets with three holes (ostensibly for bass, midrange and tweeter) but just one speaker inside.

My friend had one of those Amstrad towers which looked like the classic separates system of the day - with amplifier, tape deck and tuner stacked on each other in a chipboard and veneer cabinet and topped off with a turntable.

All very fine until one day it went wrong, and being a budding engineer I volunteered to fix it. Imagine our surprise to find that the "separates" were in fact just a single sheet of aluminium-faced plywood, with components stuck to the back, divided into three sections to look like discrete units and screwed to a largely empty wooden box.

Genius.

You are now my favorite El Reg hack

"in order to help fund Thatcher’s cock-sucking City trader friends’ plan to steal from the public sector for 30 years and then, when it eventually went wrong, get the public sector to pay for it."

FTW!

Did you really need the political commentary?

I was prepared to read something about audio quality but I stopped reading when you prefaced the article with a bunch of left wing political crap.

Fiat is actually offering Beats Audio as an upgrade to the STANDARD Bose system. What?

Hard to know where to start...

There are so many points here it's hard top know where to start.

Most modern music sounds crap because it's over-compressed at the mastering stage, where too many people think that making their content appear louder than anyone else's would make it sell better, whereas in fact it becomes a tiring muddy mess that makes people NOT buy music. And the technique doesn't work because a) everyone else is doing it and b) virtually everything you listen through has its own method of levelling things out that thwarts maximising. For more details, look up "Loudness Wars".

Most music heard on personal stereo systems whatever the make sounds crap because of lossy compression. MP3 - an ageing technology at best - is worst at this; AAC is much better but still not perfect. Lossy compression claims to remove the things you can't hear to reduce file sizes but in fact it removes plenty you CAN hear too. The only way round this is to use better compression, ie lossless. Apple Lossless and FLAC compress files without losing ANY data at all. Storage is cheap as anything now so why worry about compressing the crap out of your music (and the life out of it too) when you can hear it all? There are also new technologies in the pipeline that will deliver maximum detail if you have a special player and normal quality if you don't.

The main problem with listening on a personal stereo isn't the personal stereo, it's the headphones. Tiny little earbuds manufactured for pence are going to be hard-pushed to sound good. To get any kind of decent sound you will need something better - not necessarily over-hyped over-hyped names but good solid headphones made by reputable audio manufacturers at whatever price you can afford.

The last thing you might like to look at is the replay system. Your computer is not the best environment for music because it's so busy being good at doing other things. If you want to listen on your computer, however, you have many more options than you do if you want a personal stereo. To begin with you can buy an external USB DAC like Meridian Audio's Explorer or one of its competitors - a couple of hundred quid but worth it if you care about your music (and if you don't, why are you bothering?). Coupled with decent headphones, a good USB DAC can transform your listening, and the better the source, the better it sounds.

Hope this helps.

There are very few "names" I would trust....

There are very few "names" I would trust for audio - most performers have no clue about the technical aspects of sound (ESPECIALLY what passes for "music" "performers" now-a-days).

I *might* buy headphones with Tom Scholtz's name on them - the man has a Masters in Mechanical Engineering, as well has having proven himself as understanding production. I *might* buy headphones with Alan Parson's name on them, because again, he's shown he understands production.

But really, the only name I'm really going to jump on would be Bob Heil, because he's shown over the decades that he understands how to make things that make music.

Beats audio quality

I find it interesting that there a no published specs. for any of the 'Beats' kit. Nor for the shorter lived but similar HP branding exercise etc. E.g. Frequency response, sensitivity, THD. I think it's fair enough to promote them on their fashion styling but I find it annoying that they purport to be of superior sound quality yet they refuse to release any figures.

PC Audio

The same thing has been happening in the PC market as well. You used to be able to expect that a high end PC would come equipped with a creative labs, turtle beach, or other comparatively high qualify audio card but these days you're hard pressed to even find them separately let alone buy a machine with a decent audio card pre-installed. I remember I used to be able to find motherboards with creative labs audio chipsets onboard. Now all I see are realtek chipsets. My home theater PC is poorer for it.

But I also agree that the source audio quality is a big problem these days. I have an old album called the Sierra Soundtrack Collection recorded my Mark Siebert that I bought back in the early 90s. The audio fidelity is absolutely amazing. It easily destroys newer stuff like my Disturbed albums in quality. Don't get me wrong, I love Disturbed's stuff but I do really miss the 90s focus on audio fidelity.

A revelation

So Dr Dre's PhD isn't in acoustics then ?

It is ironic that audiophiles...

...have gone in the other direction. I was at the Chester Group audio show in New York a couple of weeks ago, and there were no systems on display under $100,000.

Of course, it's a show, they're going to show off their best stuff, but things have gotten out of hand. The sound was fabulous, but really.

Not only that, but the best music was private double-DSD rips of analogue studio master tapes, which of course are not available at all to consumers at any price. While 5.6 million bits a second can sound mighty good, there's no point to the equipment if no music is available.