Do people hypnotize themselves over the real worth of expensive equipment?

[AnitaPeterson]

Hi folks,

After seeing this thread (http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2281186), I kinda feel obligated to tell you a story....

I have a friend who's been quite seriously bitten by the HiFi bug. Make no mistake, I'm not into boomboxes, either, but he's already jumping the shark in my opinion... talking about expensive ($15K) turntables, oxygen-free cables and so on... To top it all, he's not rich, either. I believe in the sweet spot and the law of diminishing returns: once I hit a comfortable level of acoustic fidelity with my Yamaha/Onkyo system, I'm not going to jump into the esoteric work of Krell and Arcam Alpha... But I digress.

Some months ago, my friend and I had a discussion one evening about audio quality. After trashing 320 kbps MP3 files, but also FLAC and CDs, and extolling the virtues of vinyl, he went off the deep end and told me a story about how even the fact that you plug your equipment into the wall improperly (yes, in a wall plug!) will make a difference, and how he has another acquaintance with such a keen sense of hearing that he was able to tell another person that he'd "plugged his stuff wrong" - and he proceeded to unplug and then replug the AC power cord with the pins rotated at 180 degrees...

I was listening to all this incredulously, hoping to wake up from a bad dream. I am not an electrical engineer by any means, but this claim about power being somehow "out of phase" because the plugs were "reversed" hit me as a bunch of hogwash.

So my question is: Are these people gullible enough to fall for this absurdity?

It looks to me like a placebo effect: once you spend $50k on a system, you WANT to believe that it sounds better than a $5k system... but really? Shouldn't common sense kick in at some point?

 

[purbeast0]

a $50k system WILL sound better than a $5k system. that is just a fact.

some people care about the details while others are easily pleased.

 

[AnitaPeterson]

a $50k system WILL sound better than a $5k system. that is just a fact.

some people care about the details while others are easily pleased.

Will it also sound 10 times better?

And at what point do you start taking into account that even the construction/size/composition of room you're in makes a difference?

 

[videogames101]

a $50k system WILL sound better than a $5k system. that is just a fact.

some people care about the details while others are easily pleased.

thats the wrong word, you need to define what you mean by "better"

Also, about the A/C polarity idea. Sure, swapping polarity will invert the signal, however nothing would be out of phase unless you had two different devices connected to the A/C source, each with opposite polarity. In that case, your A/C power signals will be 180 out of phase form each other. Despite that, I see no reason why this should affect the output of the devices, which will transform the power multiple times before outputting anything.

 

[sdifox]

Will it also sound 10 times better?

And at what point do you start taking into account that even the construction/size/composition of room you're in makes a difference?

The room is the most important component. But yeah, some people are just nuts.

 

[uhohs]

Will it also sound 10 times better?

And at what point do you start taking into account that even the construction/size/composition of room you're in makes a difference?

10 times? more like 10%. 🙂

 

[boomhower]

I'd say to and extent yeah. But it's going to vary. For some folks that are very into acoustics and have a fine ear, I can believe they can tell a difference in things I cannot. I have no doubt I couldn't tell the difference between a $5k speaker and a $25k speaker, no less between a high end amp and ultra high end amp. But for someone with a fine ear and fat bank account, why not.

Now Joe down the street who says he can tell a difference in his HTIB because he swapped in Monster speaker cables and line conditioner is a whole other ball of wax.

 

[Anubis]

a $50k system WILL sound better than a $5k system. that is just a fact.

some people care about the details while others are easily pleased.

thats actually not always true, when you see the really super expensive installs a huge portion of the budget goes to things like ascetics, automation and integration, which has nothing to do with SQ

 

[Pacfanweb]

When people upgrade to or hear higher-end stuff and think it's better, sometimes it is. Sometimes, it's just different.

Theoretically speaking, if a speaker reproduced say, a piano and it sounded exactly like listening to the piano itself, then you can't get any better than that, right? That would be perfect.

So if all this high-end or even mid-range equipment was doing what it was supposed to, it SHOULD all sound the same, right?

Not only that, but unless you sat in the studio and heard the piano yourself, how do you know your system is accurately reproducing its sound?

Point is, what's "better" is oftentimes subjective. If someone changes amps and that changes the sound, they might perceive that as "better"....or they might not. But it doesn't mean it is.

There's a point of diminishing returns, where no matter how much you spend, music just can't sound but so much better, if any. Only different.

 

[poofyhairguy]

I can appreciate expensive equipment, but with the audio stuff most people ignore the most important parts like the acoustics of a room. To me if you spend up to 5k on your setup then fine the room is what you have. If you are spending 50k+ then either most of that money is you getting the room rebuilt by an audio professional for acoustic quality or your setup is just a big joke to me.

That is part of the reason I MUCH prefer video stuff to audio stuff. With something like TVs professionals with tools can measure the TV's qualities and tell you how good it is. And baring tons of light or reflections in the room a top TV will work the same no matter the shape of a room or the materials it is made out of.

Of course another issue is that the open concept design that is so popular in the houses of the rich people than can afford this stuff is terrible for sound AND video. So many rich folks I know are proud of their sound setup, but they have it in one of those open concept living rooms with terrible acoustics. Or they are proud of their huge and nice TV, but the living room has a billion windows that wash out the picture. Or they spent a ton on the receiver and wiring, only to use built-in speakers that sound worse than my $1k Polks.

 

[Knavish]

I can appreciate expensive equipment, but with the audio stuff most people ignore the most important parts like the acoustics of a room.

This x1000!

I know one high-end audio guy (Thiel speakers, some tube amp, etc), and I have seen many more online, who have their setup in a living room or some other common room in their house. I want to see someone with high end equipment set up in a room with one minimalistic chair in the center and all surfaces covered with anechoic foam!!

 

[Vdubchaos]

I have heard all kind of audio worth 200k, 10k and 1k . I never really heard the difference that justifies the price difference.

give me a billion and I could never justify spending more than 1-2k k for all speakers and more than 500-1000 for receiver.


Posted from Anandtech.com App for Android

 

[JackBurton]

I have heard all kind of audio worth 200k, 10k and 1k . I never really heard the difference that justifies the price difference.

give me a billion and I could never justify spending more than 1-2k k for all speakers and more than 500-1000 for receiver.


Posted from Anandtech.com App for Android

Give me a freakin' break. Either you are hard of hearing or just don't give a crap about sound quality.

Generally speaking, a $50K system will sound MUCH better than a $5K system. But there are a lot of factors involved: the size of the room, acoustics, how many speakers, type of speakers (DIY, online seller, boutique speakers), aesthetics, finish, etc. These are all factors when deciding on a speaker system and they all play a part in the final cost of the system. There is also a point of diminishing return, but it is WAY past $5K, especially for a 5.1 setup. On the contrary, it's stupid to cram $50K worth of equipment in a small room, just so you can say you have $50K worth of equipment. The room should dictate what type of equipment to use\purchase.

As for sound quality being subjective, it definitely is. But the goal of the equipment is to reproduce live instruments as accurately as possible, and that is something that is easier said than done, especially when trying to reproduce something like a pipe organ.

All that being said, just because something is expensive, doesn't necessarily mean it is better. The audio world is full of VERY expensive land mines, so choose carefully.

 

[Number1]

thats the wrong word, you need to define what you mean by "better"

Also, about the A/C polarity idea. Sure, swapping polarity will invert the signal, however nothing would be out of phase unless you had two different devices connected to the A/C source, each with opposite polarity. In that case, your A/C power signals will be 180 out of phase form each other. Despite that, I see no reason why this should affect the output of the devices, which will transform the power multiple times before outputting anything.

The first thing that happen to the AC inside the gear is that it gets converted to a DC signal. The way your plug is oriented in the wall plug has NO effect on the conversion process. Just check this typical power supply diagram. Cut pin 3 and turn the AC plug around and as you can see, there is no changes to the output voltage.

 

[Paul98]

a $50k system WILL sound better than a $5k system. that is just a fact.

some people care about the details while others are easily pleased.

That is not a fact, many people end up spending lots of money on things that don't improve the sound at all.

 

[Howard]

That is not a fact, many people end up spending lots of money on things that don't improve the sound at all.

There are effective changes you can make that you cannot with only $5k.

 

[Aristotelian]

It looks to me like a placebo effect: once you spend $50k on a system, you WANT to believe that it sounds better than a $5k system... but really? Shouldn't common sense kick in at some point?

In my experience, 'placebo effect' is most commonly espoused by people who have divergent beliefs about this world. For example, I own a very expensive Bottega Veneta bag. Some people have commented that this bag was a huge waste of money and is "not worth" what I paid for it. But what these people fail to realize, is that they cannot understand the pleasure that I derive from the leather, from the craftsmanship, and from the subtle style that is coupled with the overall utility of the item. Common sense dictates to those people that "fashion items" are absurd and "not worth it", but those people commit themselves to a view about the world that mistakes itself for objective but is necessarily subjective because what they really mean to state (but merely imply) is that "Your Bottega Veneta bag is not worth it to me".

There is a similar phenomenon that occurs in many sectors of purchasing - and audio equipment is one such sector because people attempt to espouse that "better" is subjective. In the loosest sense of the term, "better" is necessarily subjective because the "best headphones" for my friend Tim are the ones that give him "the most bang for the buck" and the "best headphones" for me are the ones that I can wear comfortably for hours, provide a good amount of noise isolation, and are measured to provide a very accurate representation of the recorded music (i.e., without internally biasing the sound towards bass for "bass-heads" or so on).

Will it also sound 10 times better?

And at what point do you start taking into account that even the construction/size/composition of room you're in makes a difference?

And this kind of reasoning is where the 'mistake' I describe above is applied. That the Earpods, or whatever Apple's new heaphone is called, cost 30 dollars or so, does not mean that my 1000 dollar custom inner earphones need to be quantifiably 33.333 times better-sounding than Apple's offering. They just needed (and they did) to blow me away in a way that I'll describe with a food analogy, as follows:

When I was a student, I often ate at a sushi place called New Generation Sushi. The sushi was cheap, plentiful, and tasty. I could walk out of the place having spent 20 dollars while being totally full and satisfied. After I got a very lucrative job, I asked a friend out of criosity where he went for sushi. He mentioned a place to me, owned and run by Japanese people (this meant nothing to me). I went there and because it was so expensive I ordered 4 pieces of salmon sashimi, and the waitress walked away in disappointment. When she delivered the sashimi, I tried a piece and before she could get far away from the table I moaned and gesticulated in such a way which meant one and only one thing: I felt as if I had been lied to about sushi for my entire life prior to that moment and from then onwards, I was willing to pay a significantly higher price in order to capture that emotion over and over again.

Others in this thread have made points that there are mine fields, there are relabelled audio products that are not good at that price range and so on, but to reduce "expensive audio" to mere "placebo effect" is to deny yourself a sector of hedonism that certainly ought to be pursued.

 

[Vdubchaos]

Give me a freakin' break. Either you are hard of hearing or just don't give a crap about sound quality.

Ohh stop with the sound quality crap.

I have a pretty good system both at my home and in my car.

I'm simply not willing to pay more than certain amount of money as the difference in what you get is minimal and difference in price is huge.

I'm not saying that 2k system > 50k system. Just saying it's hard to justify the difference in price.

 

[zebrax2]

It depends on how much joy the owners derive from the said product. For some hearing those extra little details or having the tone that they like even for exorbitant price may be well worth it. For other spending the extra money they save from building a good enough system to something else like say a car, a gift for their grand children, etc. may provide them better satisfaction. In the end its in the perception of the beholder

 

[Kaido]

Some months ago, my friend and I had a discussion one evening about audio quality. After trashing 320 kbps MP3 files, but also FLAC and CDs, and extolling the virtues of vinyl, he went off the deep end and told me a story about how even the fact that you plug your equipment into the wall improperly (yes, in a wall plug!) will make a difference, and how he has another acquaintance with such a keen sense of hearing that he was able to tell another person that he'd "plugged his stuff wrong" - and he proceeded to unplug and then replug the AC power cord with the pins rotated at 180 degrees...

There are several factors going on here. Part of it is better audio quality, part of it is that there are people with a keener sense of hearing, part of it is the placebo effect, part of it is social pressure, and part of it is the fun of the hobby.

To me, audio is a lot like processors or anything else really - there's a range of quality, and as you get into the higher end, the bang-for-your-buck tapers off into very small incremental changes. The top CPU's are usually hundreds more than the next step down, for only a minor bump in speed, but if you're an enthusiast and you want the best and it tickles your fancy to have it, then more power to you. In 6 months something will come out better, fast, and cheaper, but if you're into it as a hobby, it doesn't really matter because it's something that is fulfilling to you.

Audio is an interesting thing. I've listened to $40,000 worth of audio equipment that sounded exactly like the $150 kit I bought from Parts Express. Granted they filled the room better because they were physically larger than my pair, but I don't have good enough hearing to notice any difference that would make me want to spend $39,000 more.

There's also the argument for the weakest link in the chain. Most high-end microphones only run a few thousand dollars - if you spend $100,000 on an audio system to listen to audio recorded on a $4,000 microphone, are you really getting your money's worth? And then there's the "magic cables" group - special speaker cables, special power cables, etc. Again to the weakest link idea - you can have oxygen-free cables made in outer space with unobtainable wire and adamantium plugs, but the jacks inside your player are soldered from recycled soda cans by a 6-year-old in China, so are you really getting your money's worth from that?

I do think there are levels of quality to be had. I got into high-end headphones for awhile - Sennheiser HD650's, a special amp, lossless audio, etc. It was pretty cool because I heard things I had never heard before, but it actually made my music-listening experience worse because I also heard things I didn't want to hear...I had never heard an MP3 sound bad. I didn't know about the snap, crackle, pop, and hiss noises that compressed audio contained until I listened to music on high-end gear. And most of my music wasn't in lossless format, and I listen to Youtube and other online sources sometimes, so I ended up downgraded to a set of HD280's - really good, but not totally revealing like my 650's. And I've been happy with those for years!

And if you want to get really into the snakeoil argument...you can spend all the money in the world, but if your listening environment isn't setup properly, it's going to be useless. Is the room a proper rectangle shape? Do you have audio dampeners on the walls and in the corners? Are you sitting in the optimal position? If you're into audio and you like doing that stuff, then go for it. But I don't think most people need or want to go that extreme.

It's like people who spend thousands in car audio for great-sounding music (I'm not talking about the super bass systems) and go on and on about their amazing audio system, but really cars are the most horribly-shaped audio-listening enclosures on the planet, so you're never going to get as good as even a basic rectangle room in a house. But that doesn't mean you can't get great audio from it.

So yes, some people take it to extremes. There's a lot of snakeoil in the business. But there's also something to be said for good gear. It can be a fun hobby, it can be fun if you have a keen sense of hearing and appreciate good audio, it can be a social thing, and it can be a delusional thing. That's what makes it fun :awe:

 

[Kaido]

I'm not saying that 2k system > 50k system. Just saying it's hard to justify the difference in price.

And even that, I dunno...my old Logitech Z680/Z5500's systems sound better than my local movie theater does for 5.1 surround-sound movies 😛

 

[JackBurton]

Ohh stop with the sound quality crap.

I have a pretty good system both at my home and in my car.

I'm simply not willing to pay more than certain amount of money as the difference in what you get is minimal and difference in price is huge.

I'm not saying that 2k system > 50k system. Just saying it's hard to justify the difference in price.

Yes, you're right. When talking about a sound system, let's "stop with the sound quality crap." There are people that can't justify paying more than $20K for a car, but that doesn't mean a $100K is not "worth it." Same with audio. If you don't care about audio, "good enough" will suffice.

I'm sorry to break it to you, but $5K is nowhere near the point of diminishing return in a home theater system. It's not even at the point of diminishing return with 2 channel setup, let alone 5.1 setup. And you not willing to pay more than a certain amount really doesn't mean anything.

That being said, just because something is more expensive, doesn't necessarily mean it will perform better. A $20K Krell BD player won't perform much better than a $500 Oppo BD player.

 

[Pacfanweb]

Ohh stop with the sound quality crap.

I have a pretty good system both at my home and in my car.

I'm simply not willing to pay more than certain amount of money as the difference in what you get is minimal and difference in price is huge.

I'm not saying that 2k system > 50k system. Just saying it's hard to justify the difference in price.

Maybe 2k, but how about 10k?

I probably have that in my setup. I can guaran-damn-tee you that it sound better than any movie theater I've even been in, IMAX included. IMAX has a shitload of speakers, but the room is so big it doesn't seem like it. You FEEL the music or movie sound track in my living room.

Now the difference in sound quality between my setup and a 50K one? Probably the speakers. I could spend a bit more on some better ones and probably hear some difference.
IMO, I could spend a LOT more on my amp and preamp without hearing much, if any difference.

Here are my price points:

B&K Reference 20 SII Preamp: 2k (slightly over, IIRC)
Also occasionally used:
McIntosh MC2205 Amp, for the mains. Was close to 2k when my Dad bought it
in about 1978. Been having trouble finding someone good to get it working reliably, so I won't count it in the price, but it's awesome when working.

Anthem MCA 50 Amp: About 1500 MSRP. ish

Speakers: Definitive BP 2002 mains. 1k each, so 2k, new. (they have subs with 125 watt amps in each of them)

Surrounds: Also Definitives. Center was 500-ish, don't remember on the surrounds.

edit: Forgot my sub:
M&K V75. 750-ish, new.

That's roughly 8k or so in just the main audio stuff, not counting any input devices or the TV.

IMO, I wouldn't hear a bit of difference if I bought a more expensive preamp or amp. And even if I did, it certainly wouldn't be enough to justify the extra cost.

About the only place I could see that might make an improvement that was both noticeable AND cost-effective, would be my speakers. And even then, I'm not sure they would be THAT much better.

Now, going for a "more expensive when new" set of speakers in the used market, that would make more sense, but if I only wanted "new", then IMO I'm at the point of diminishing returns if I decide I want to upgrade.

 

[sdifox]

Maybe 2k, but how about 10k?

I probably have that in my setup. I can guaran-damn-tee you that it sound better than any movie theater I've even been in, IMAX included. IMAX has a shitload of speakers, but the room is so big it doesn't seem like it. You FEEL the music or movie sound track in my living room.

Now the difference in sound quality between my setup and a 50K one? Probably the speakers. I could spend a bit more on some better ones and probably hear some difference.
IMO, I could spend a LOT more on my amp and preamp without hearing much, if any difference.

Here are my price points:

B&K Reference 20 SII Preamp: 2k (slightly over, IIRC)
Also occasionally used:
McIntosh MC2205 Amp, for the mains. Was close to 2k when my Dad bought it
in about 1978. Been having trouble finding someone good to get it working reliably, so I won't count it in the price, but it's awesome when working.

Anthem MCA 50 Amp: About 1500 MSRP. ish

Speakers: Definitive BP 2002 mains. 1k each, so 2k, new. (they have subs with 125 watt amps in each of them)

Surrounds: Also Definitives. Center was 500-ish, don't remember on the surrounds.

edit: Forgot my sub:
M&K V75. 750-ish, new.

That's roughly 8k or so in just the main audio stuff, not counting any input devices or the TV.

IMO, I wouldn't hear a bit of difference if I bought a more expensive preamp or amp. And even if I did, it certainly wouldn't be enough to justify the extra cost.

About the only place I could see that might make an improvement that was both noticeable AND cost-effective, would be my speakers. And even then, I'm not sure they would be THAT much better.

Now, going for a "more expensive when new" set of speakers in the used market, that would make more sense, but if I only wanted "new", then IMO I'm at the point of diminishing returns if I decide I want to upgrade.

I have the 2000 for mains, clr 2000 for centre and BP-10B for rears 😎

 

[Pacfanweb]

You made me go look.

Center is a C L R 2000

Rears are BP 2X's, I think. Not taking them off the wall to see if my memory is correct.

Been very pleased with them.