Archive for December, 2008
Audiophilia Nervosa: A Curable Disease?
Here at Wirewize, we’re often amused by requests from friends asking us which “stereo” system they should buy. By stereo they usually mean “audio,” because most playback systems these days are surround and not old-school 2-channel stereo. But in particular, we chuckle nervously when they say “I want something good, how much should I spend?”
Well, we could point them to a nice receiver and home theater speaker package, which could set them back less than a grand in total. Or we could point them to speakers that cost $125,000 per pair and a 2-channel tube (!) amplifier that costs $20,000. Of course they’d need five of the speakers and 3 of the amps for surround sound. Then they’d need a preamp-processor of equal quality, not to mention appropriate cabling. So before they’d even added a disc player or any other source components, the outlay is close to half a million dollars.
Good enough for you? That, friends, is the question that plagues serious audiophiles the world over.
Before we go on to make fun of people who would spend as much on a DVD player as many folks do for a car, let’s get one thing right – they’re not wrong. Ugg boots and Michael Bolton aside, how can taste be wrong?
When we stop by the wine shop for a nice Bordeaux, we’ll typically spend around $20. If the in-laws are visiting or there’s a special occasion, we’ll splurge and drop $40 or more. But we know there are bottles – from the same vineyards, mind you – that cost well over $1,000.
Are those wines 50 times more delicious than the stuff we’re drinking? Probably not. But for a wine enthusiast who has the experienced palate and knows what a Premier Grand Cru Classe St. Emillon tastes like, these bottles can produce sensations that are remembered for a lifetime.
The same is easily said for high-end audio gear. We always get a kick watching someone listen to their favorite music on a truly high end system. Suddenly they’re hearing details they’ve never heard before. They hear Walter Becker tapping on milk bottles in the background of Aja. They hear Glenn Gould humming along with The French Suites. They hear how wet Miles Davis played on Kind of Blue and James Jamerson’s bass imitating the harmony vocals on Tracks of My Tears.
It’s exactly this sensation – the revelation of hearing exciting, subtle things in every recording you listen to – that serves as the gateway drug for “audiophilia nervosa” (AN). This syndrome is similar to a bipolar disease, with the individual fluctuating between intense euphoria (“My system sounds so good I’m going to stay in on New Year’s Eve and listen to that Charlie Parker boxed set”) and extreme anxiety that their system could sound even better with a couple of tweaks. Tweaks to the AN sufferer could mean anything from a few thousand bucks on new cables to re-decoration of the listening room in order to change its acoustics.
Time and finance are the only cures for this syndrome. Over time the afflicted either get tired of upgrading AC cords and replacing amplifier tubes last manufactured in the old Soviet Union, or the expendable cash for these “improvements” simply runs out. In any case, few patients recover completely. The ones that do often try to spread the disease, which is highly communicable. At this level of the listening experience, misery and joy both love company.
How can you protect yourself from audiophilia nervosa? The answer can be summed up in one word – denial. You simply pretend that there is no such thing as the kind of musical experience that these people talk about. You say to yourself that your iPod sounds just fine. You turn music into an ambient background experience, best enjoyed at the gym or on the commuter bus through $2 earbuds. You tell yourself that the plastic speakers that came with your HTIB do a great job. You buy an overpriced clock radio as proof that you appreciate good sound.
It’s a cliché that in an insane world, only the insane person is truly sane. So the next time you smirk at the individual who worries over moving coil and moving magnet phono cartridges, think of another cliché you’ll often see in fortune cookies: Wise men learn more from fools than fools learn from wise men.
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Add comment December 31, 2008
A Wirewize Holiday List
Dear Santa,
We’ve been very good this year! We helped thousands of people connect their confusing A/V systems, which should get us a place in heaven, if not a few extra parcels from your magic sack. And we know there have been a lot of naughty kids this year too, so we’re sure there’s plenty of room in your sleigh for the stuff we want. Let’s not waste time, we know you have a lot of stops to make.
1) We want a Blu-Ray player! But we want one that loads a disc and starts to play before New Years kicks in. Really, what’s up with these machines? We feel like we’re booting Windows 3.1 from a floppy drive every time we want to watch a movie. Everything else in high tech gets faster, how come disc players get slower?
2) We also want a handshake. No not with you, just between our cable box, receiver and TV. We’ve connected them with HDMI and we keep getting funny error messages. We’re all for copy protection, so why does everyone assume we’re thieves?. We pay for our programming and spent good money on these cool new components. We prefer peace on earth but will settle for it in our living room.
3) We want surround sound from all our sources! Why is it that every time we consider a home theater in a box sound system there’s only one or two inputs for audio from our other components? Are we supposed to chuck our game console and VCR or something? And please don’t tell us get a receiver. The reason why we we’re considering an HTIB is because our old receiver was so complicated.
4) That being said, how about a receiver that’s easy to use? Apple’s iPod has destroyed its competition, not because it sounds better or because it’s cheaper, but because it’s easier and more fun to use. When you show us an AV receiver that’s fun to use we’ll be sure to leave out extra cookies and milk.
5) We want a good TV! Spend a little time and pick out something decent for us, will ya? Some of these cheap LCD sets we’re seeing are so bad we flash back to the days of QuickTime 1.0. We know everything can look good in HD. But we’ve got dozens of DVDs and VHS cassettes too, not to mention our non-HD TV shows. The two-dollar scalers built into some of these sets aren’t cutting it. A new TV should give us a better picture not worse, wouldn’t you agree?
6) We want a video game where nobody gets shot or dismembered, nobody runs over a pedestrian, and nobody gets punched or kicked as soon as they show up on screen. Please don’t tell us to get Rock Band. We’ve already got it and if we wanted bad karaoke, there’s a Korean neighborhood down the block.
7) We want a remote control that Mom, Dad, Sis and little Boo Boo can work too. We know they’re out there. But we don’t think a good remote control should cost more than a receiver and ten times as much as a DVD player. That’s why we still struggle with our six remotes on the coffee table. Help us Santa, we’re seeing little buttons in our sleep!
We’d like satellite radio for Christmas, but we’re not sure which one to get, Sirius or XM. Oh wait, they’re the same thing now (as if they were different before), so we’ll take either one. On second thought never mind. We think people should pay us to listen to Howard Stern, not the other way around.
9) We want bass! Bass that’s able to play more than the same one-note thud that just about every cheap subwoofer foists on us. We know that eliminates almost every HTIB on the market. But we can’t help it, we remember when music used to sound like music and not a cell phone.
Normally we’d have a 10th request for you Santa, but we know that this has been a troubled year for everyone. So we’re willing to take a 10 percent cutback in our holiday requests and hope that others are willing to do the same.
Hope you have a nice holiday, and give our regards to the folks making all our electronic gadgets in your workshops!
Best,
The Wirewize Team
Add comment December 24, 2008
Are Expensive Cables Worth It?
Some months ago, one of the IT-centric geniuses here at Wirewize sent around a link from a highly respected AV manufacturer’s web site. It described a 1.5 meter data cable designed to pass digital audio between components without compromise. The cost? A mere $499, which worked out to roughly $100 per foot. It isn’t easy to convey derisive laughter in email, but somehow he managed to do it.
Not long before that, another Wirewizeguy stopped in at the local big electronics chain to buy a DVD player selling for $99. The salesperson dutifully tried to attach an HDMI cable to the purchase – which cost $120. A simple “no thank you” wasn’t acceptable, so another floor jockey followed the buyer to the cashier. “Sir, do you have a digital TV? Did you know that without that cable the upconverting feature won’t work and you’re wasting your money?”
Actually, he did know that he needed HDMI for the player’s upconverting feature to work – he’s with Wirewize. That’s why he went to Amazon that night and bought a perfectly fine HDMI cable for $12.99. But another customer less interested in the subtleties of home theater (such as a normal person) probably would have done the simpler thing upon hearing that he needed a $120 cable for his $99 DVD player or else he was wasting his money. He’d say thanks anyway and walk out of the store without buying anything.
The argument over cables and their value to the home entertainment experience has raged for decades, first in the audiophile community (bless their hearts and shrinking numbers) and now in the videophile/home theater world. There are those that say any perceivable difference in cables is complete BS, and those who will gladly purchase a $600 “cable cooker” that will properly burn-in cables prior to use for maximum performance. Which side is right?
Let’s start with a fact that we can all agree on — the goal of any cable is to pass signal from one component to another with as little change to the signal as possible. When you’re talking about analog signals, particularly speaker connections, cable integrity is clearly capable of affecting performance. The makeup of the cable, the type of conductor used, the quality of the terminations (plugs, connectors, etc.) are all capable of introducing “nonlinearity” to the signal. These can be – though not always — quite audible, if you’ve got the kind of revealing (read: expensive) components that will let you hear them.
But what about digital signals, such as those that travel through HDMI? They’re just a stream of ones and zeroes, and like any other digital transmission, they either work (i.e., you’ve got a picture) or they don’t (no picture). Right?
Well, yes and no. One side of the argument says that for short distances (say less than 20 feet) there is absolutely no difference in quality in an HDMI cable. CNET has been particularly vocal about this, saying straight out that “you should never spend more than $10 for a standard six-foot HDMI cable.”
Then there are those who would argue this point. When you send a digital signal over HDMI where the amount of sent data overwhelms the ability of the cable to carry it cleanly, the results at the TV can be plainly visible – sparklies, dropouts, pixel blocks and all the other artifacts that make people scratch their heads when they buy a new HDTV. This is why there are speed ratings for HDMI cables.
Further, the TV that’s interpreting the ones and zeroes at the end of the chain may not be able to accurately correct for all the anomalies that would be present when it receives a compromised HDMI signal. When the interpreting circuitry is overwhelmed by irregularities in the ones and zeroes, problems can be quite visible. Pixels that need to be associated with other pixels get misassigned, timing errors can cause missing pixels, blockiness and other annoying artifacts.
We certainly don’t want to get into religious wars here at Wirewize, and the value of cables to the AV chain are without question, a matter of faith to many. We do think that legitimate, quality HDMI cables are important for 1080p sources like Blu-Ray and some video games. But are the expensive ones worth the money?
Hey, there are folks out there who would gladly spend $7250 for a 12-foot length of speaker cable. Almost everything is “worth it” to someone.
What’s your experience with high (or low) end cables? Post your comments below!
Add comment December 16, 2008
All The Black Fridays In The World
If you’re one of the lucky ones out shopping for home tech in what retailers are saying will be the slowest holiday shopping season in decades, you’re lucky in more ways than one. The state of the U.S. economy, most notably the credit crunch and the downturn in consumer spending, has created a perfect storm of woe for the major consumer electronics companies.
Which is great news for you, the lucky one out shopping for a deal this holiday season.
Take HDTVs. Please. No really, pretty please? The deals that are out there, fueled by a glut of oversupply from guess where in Asia, are a seller’s nightmare and a buyer’s dream. Last year Sharp introduced its 52-inch LC-52D64U LCD TV at a list price around $3,800. Now you can find one for $1,499 and oh what the heck, they’ll throw in a shiny new Blu-Ray player for free. Samsung was asking $2,699 for the similarly sized LN52A630 LCD TV when it was introduced it this past summer. Shop around now and you’ll find one for about half the price. Just last year the smart reviewers were recommending Panasonic’s TX-42PX80U 42-inch plasma to their friends at around $1400. Now you can easily find it for $650 or less. Granted, it’s “only” a 720p set, but that’s plenty good enough for most folks, and compared to the dreck (and we mean dreck) one might otherwise buy in a cheap 1080p LCD set at the local CostClubMart, the thing is a steal.
And that’s just TVs. A cursory look at HTIBs shows full systems with DVD built in for as little as $200, not that we recommend dreck, as noted earlier. But watching Sony, Panasonic, Samsung and others gamely asking $1000-1500 for HTIBs with Blu-Ray built in this holiday, we can only smile and say talk to us again in February.
Speaking of audio (someone’s got to), recent forecasts from the Consumer Electronics Association have confirmed what most people already knew; that MP3 players and docks are pretty much what’s selling these days. Full-size receivers and speakers (remember?) are rarely demonstrated or even connected at the places where most people buy their electronics — and clueless retailers wonder why nobody’s buying them. So why not check out a 100-watt 5.1 Dolby Digital receiver for less than $120, or a 7-channel model with HDMI for $200, over the web instead of at a brick and mortar retailer? Your ability to judge its sound quality would be the same. Just make sure that the return and warranty policies are too.
In this winter of the consumer electronics industry’s discontent, sobering lessons about supply and demand will be learned. Hopefully this will bring about a stronger overall CE landscape out the other end, when the consumer economy recovers. It had better, because the oversaturated status quo of the consumer electronics industry as we know it simply can’t hold much longer.
What if there really were too many brands out there on the market, and too few legitimate retailers to sell them? A quick look at Amazon shows a whopping 259 surround sound speaker systems to choose from, not to mention 1,180 DVD players and 1,299 televisions. Would it be un-American to suggest that this may in fact be too much freedom of choice?
It goes without saying that in a cut-throat selling environment like this one, profit margins – the stuff that keeps the CE makers and sellers in business – are also at an all time low. What would you say if we told you that the average profit margin on a DVD player was only $1.00?
Now what if we told you that was true as far back as 2004?
Enjoy the too many choices and the too deep discounts while you can. They won’t go on forever.
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Add comment December 9, 2008
