My background has been in what was once simply called Hifi but now encompasses, multichannel home theatre but basically I am a music lover and have been involved in this industry for well over 50 years. I was introduced to Hifi at a very early age, as my nextdoor neighbour was a jazz loving HiFi nut who made his living repairing electronics. Another Neighbour was also an electronics technician and a HAM radio operator, who in the 50’s built his own TV. Being able to communicate with people all over the world via HAM radio was something I found fascinating as a young child so I decided to try and obtain my HAM radio operators license which involved having a basic understanding of electronics, so both my neighbours helped me learn.
As a teenager, with the help of my Dad, I fitted speakers to my bedhead that Dad and I had built, which I plugged into my clock radio. Now I fitted 2 I had liberated from old radios, so technically it could play stereo but my clock radio only had a mono output. I didn’t care though as listening to the music from the radio was such a joy and music would become a massive part of my life, as it is for many people.
I also convinced my parents to let me learn to play guitar. Naturally that led to getting a small electric guitar and amplifier set up. A few years later the amplifier stopped working so I thought I would have a poke around inside and see if i could find the problem. Now at this point I had successfully dismantled an old radio my Dad had found but I hadn’t worked out how to get it going. This is where I learned a valuable lesson. I was carefully disconnecting the amp from power, then pushing on connectors and then plugging it back in and turning it on to see if would then worked. Then I forgot to disconnect it and touched a live wire. It was the only time I got a 240 Volt blast and luckily it threw me backwards, so I didn’t get electrocuted and die, but I did learn. A valuable lesson that I do NOT recommend.
When I was about 17 my brother turned 21 and his friends got him a high end Pioneer component car audio system with a separate radio, cassette player and amplifier and a pair of speakers. So as the guy who at this point understood about electronics I was tasked with fitting it into his car. This resulted in his friends and my friends also wanting me to install systems into their cars. At this stage I rode a motorbike so before I had gotten a car I had installed about a dozen car audio systems. I also set up a few home hifi systems too.
Now another neighbour got me into photography in my early teenage years and that was my passion. I studied physics with an emphasis in particular on light. It was an incredible time as holographs had just been invented and I was lucky enough to see and study all about them which obviously involved learning about wave theory and particle theory, and lasers and other cool stuff. Little did I know but that was a great grounding for audio as things like standing waves and wavelengths were something I already understood, as many of the same theoies of light waves applied to audio waves.
Now life often has a way of things converging that you haven’t planned but can work out for the best. For me I got into my photography but lost the passion for it, doing wedding photography. Now I love weddings but not working at them and thankfully I have got back into photography but am grateful to not do it for work. One of my photos I took while I studied photography was exhibited at the Victorian National Gallery which was quite an honour. Any way I ended up working in various jobs related to audio for many years until I had a bad motorcycle accident and had to have a serious think about where I wanted to go into the future. I had formed a good relationship with my local car audio store over the years, so while going through rehabilitation, I mentioned to the owner I would be looking for part time work while I recovered and he hired me on the spot.
I didn’t know it at the time but this was an incredible blessing as Chris the owner(R.I.P) was an engineer who had worked for Motorola, and Alpine car audio came originally from Motorola. Now our store was at the time doing amazing work and we did things well beyond the scope of most car audio stores. For example, we fitted out the cars that did the first mapping for GPS based navigation systems in my country. We were also the only outlet given Alpine F#1 status accreditation, to fit the first 2 generations of the F#1 system in my country. We had a great relationship with Alpine Japan and during my time there we had several visits from various Alpine executives including the President. On one visit I spent a great deal of time with the head of engineering discussing amplifiers. This directly lead to him designing and building the MSV-1050 which was only sold in Australia and Japan and is considered by many one of the best amplifiers Alpine ever made. It was a twin mono design, which was through my input as I has explained the benefits of zero crosstalk for staging and imaging to the head of engineering. I am not saying he was unaware of this but it was the first and I believe only stereo amp they ever made of twin mono design. All the other stereo or multi channel amps didn’t do this as it didn’t allow the amp to be bridged and that was a very versatile feature all their amps had. Bridging an amp allows you to combine a stereo pair of channels into one channel and dramatically increase the power output.
During my time there I did Alpines G.A.I.T. (Global Alpine Institute Training) which was arguably the most advanced training at the time. I also did Rockford Fosgate RTTI (Rockford Technical Training Institute) training as well as Phoenix Gold, MTX, Pioneer, and many others. I then got involved in car audio Sound Quality(SQ) competition. Initially as a judge as I didn’t have what I felt was a worthy competition system. I was later on the IASCA Commitee and became head national judge, and trained many judges over the years. In competition we evaluated cars on spectral balance, imaging and staging, safety, and other factors including integration. Now personally I wasn’t a fan of the integration part as I didn’t think it was relevant and it could lead to cars that had amazing installs but didn’t sound quite as good as another car, winning, and for me as a purist I felt it should be about the best sounding car. Later we developed a series where install wasn’t part of the judging criteria in particular classes. We had show classes and non show classes that excluded installation judging. These became the toughest to win as you couldn’t get extra points for spending large amounts of time or money or both on a fancy install and the system had to sound good in pure SQ judging. You didn’t get extra points for the head unit lighting matching your gauge lighting for example.
Over the years I listened to 100s of cars evaluating how well they performed, which was a valuable experience as it totally eliminated any brand bias and taught me a lot about just listening. I have also installed 100s of systems and I also won both and national SQ championships in pro class. A lot of hifi enthusiasts dismiss car audio as they believe any road noise ruins audio performance which is fair enough but car audio competition wasn’t done with vehicles driving and most competitors and car audio enthusiasts go to great lengths to use sound deadening products to help reduce road noise dramatically. I would actually argue that due to the hostile environment with mixed surfaces like reflective glass, plush seats, the off centre seating position, and other factors, we had to learn far more to get great results compared to home audio where you sit in the middle with fairly consistent room environments. Digital Signal Processing(DSP) was in car audio well before it was used in HIFI like it is today.
I see it a bit like how motor racing pushes cars further and the technology ends up in everyday cars. Even today the technology in Alpines 3rd generation F#1 status system is well ahead of anything in home audio, largely due to higher complexity of the car environment. The time alignment used can be adjusted in 0.9mm steps, which is far more precise than any traditional DSP. It uses an oven to maintain a precise temperature to the crystal oscillator used for the master clock to help eliminate timing errors(jitter). The data bus uses A2B and the processor has a 64Bit/1GHz processing power, to handle the huge amount of data in a 384kHz 32 bit Hi-Res system.
I was also lucky enough to work in an audio engineering company that fitted out some of the best studios in the world. I also have done time behind the desk mixing sound for live gigs and have my own little studio producing my own music on basically an hobby basis.
What I have learned in this time is unfortunately Audio and Hifi is full of myths and what we call snake oil. Now in many industries if you tried to sell products that didn’t actually do anything, you would go broke very quickly but in Hifi it seems you can get quite wealthy selling things that do nothing. To be fair our audio memory is incredibly short and unlike video for example where you can compare 2 or more screens side by side, in audio we are stuck listen to one and then swapping to another and trying to remember if and how the sound changed if at all, but with video screens you can literally see the difference at the same time. Selling speakers I have used comparitor boards where you can switch with a button press from one speaker to another, and had to stand there swapping speakers back and forth for 5 and 10 minutes over and over again, as customers struggle to remember what they literally heard a second ago as the other speaker makes that very hard to do. So when someone claims a cable improved their system, I am highly skeptical as that defies physics and engineering we rely on. It’s very hard to swap cables quickly and as our sound memory only lasts about 5 seconds or less, getting definitive results is virtually impossible, so we rely on anecdotal opinions, not science.
So despite people shouting loudly cables make a difference, I personally have never heard it and I have tried, there is no science to back up the claim and if it such a subtle benefit it is definitely not worth the high cost. I can play you music on a very basic system and then on a very high quality system and you will hear the difference easily, even if you are not someone into hifi or audio. I can’t do that with any cables.
Power cords. For some unknown reason people believe that replacing the last few feet of cable will somehow change the sound, ignoring the many meters of power cable in the wall that isn’t special or the 100s of kilometers from the power station. Clearly that fail to understand the power transformer that is inside every amplifier that makes this impossible. Ironically they happily admit that you should forget science and just listen yet when I do I still don’t hear anything.
Speaker cables and interconnect cables. Another area of magic. Even though science tells us you can’t have directional cables with an AC signal, apparently again we need to forget science and just listen. Same results for me but I do have less money trying to hear if this made any difference. Note some cables can be directional but its about the shield being only connected at one end, and certainly doesn’t apply to a speaker cable that has no shielding. The shield situation can help with a specific ground loop noise issue but cannot improve the sound.
Vibration dampers. These actually do reduce vibrations but only below about 20Hz so well below anything we hear and without any proof solid state components are effected by vibrations. Might be handy if listening during an earthquake but probably be hard to notice with all the distractions earthquakes usually bring.
Dots on the wall, speaker cone, and green pens to colour in the edges of CDs. Just buy a colouring in book as I have heard that can be therapeutic. The dots and pen do nothing
Now while I tend to think no rational person could be so gullable as to buy into this sort of voodoo magic, I then remember people also can believe in the stars in the sky predicting their future, so really shouldn’t be surprised these are multi-million dollar industries. Some people really want to believe and so are happy to ignore science and engineering, well, until they break their leg and then they’ll definitely opt for the drugs science has suggested instead of magic
Now with some hifi products the differences can be very subtle for example I swapped CD players and while there was no difference in spectral balance, I could hear better imaging and staging but I have had years of experience listening for that specifically and think most people may not notice, so think for most spending big on a CD player wont bring any significant benefit.
DAC’s. Again I have heard a difference on 1 specific test track that had with a triangle decaying and it was claimed you could in theory hear it decay out to 20 seconds. Using this track on nearly every system in competition judging, I could not hear it beyond 10 seconds until I heard it go out to 12 or 13 seconds with 1 DAC. That DAC was an $8000 DAC in 1990’s(Apogee DA-1000). Personally for such a slight and subtle change I couldn’t justify the expense but this DAC was mine and came with a system I picked up pre-owned and I on sold the parts of the system for more than I paid, so it was basically free to me. Apart from this one specific track I doubt I could ever pick this DAC out of a line up, so again I wouldn’t suggest anyone pay too much for something that does so little over the cheaper DACs that sound fantastic and measure perfectly when tested.
So with all my experience I highly recommend buy the best speakers you can afford as its the 1 area anyone can hear the benefits. Add a sub(or more) as we want all the octaves to play. Amps come down to providing the required power and the class is in my honest opinion is irrelevant. Ive heard great class A and great class AB and great Class D. I have also heard many cheap amps that I wouldn’t touch with a barge pole but I would never base it on the the class, only on if it sounds great or has issues and to me it is that simple, amps either sound great or they don’t, they have a hum, poor channel separation so image badly from crosstalk, or have poor spectral balance. Majority of them have none of these issues, so my advice is don’t go cheap and buy the amp that makes too many bold claims and remember the good amps will provide specs that back up their claims like testing with a 20-20K test signal, not a 1kHz test tone and will list a very low 0.00x THD figure.
Buy good quality cables but don’t waste your money on any that sound to good to be true as we all know what that means. Don’t waste your money on expensive speaker cables or inter connect cables, as you’ll never hear it unless you also believe in magic and horoscopes. Quality means you will be able to use them for years and they won’t fall apart but it doesn’t mean they will magically improve your system.
So be careful with your money and what you are prepared to believe and always listen and if you think you cannot hear a difference you will be totally correct so trust that instinct. If you think you can hear better results, then test that as much as you can before you spend your money to be 100% confident because if there is even the slightest doubt, then trust the doubt and save the money, as you can always use that money to buy more music or movies, and that is what it is all about
Good luck on your journey into this perilous area, its easy to be fooled but often very hard to get that money back if you are fooled.
KewlHunter.com 