Montserrat said:
I'm not trying to fan the flames, but I too ridiculed Audiophiles around 3 years ago. I mean, how could having physically separate boxes influence the sound made? How could there be any variation when it's all digital now anyway?
I was so wrong, just a trip down to your local decent hi-fi shop (Audio-excellence is a good start in the UK) with a couple of good CDs (Leftfield Rhythm and Stealth was a particular eye-opener) taught me not to take the piss out of things I don't know about. Detail, clarity, dynamics and separation all became regular parts of my vocabulary! (Much to my girlfriend's annoyance)
You make a good point that "audiophile" level gear does sound good, but I think the big problem with audiophiles is that they have no real idea why particular equipment sounds good and they often attribute the sound quality to the things that don't matter at all. This is what causes the audiophile mythology and make most of them seem like blathering idiots to more informed people. If most so-called audiophiles new a little more about the physics behind audio recording and reproduction they wouldn't waste their money on useless items (or spaz about the quality of the APx
).
That being said, a lot of the vocabulary of audiophiles like detail, clarity, separation, warmth, imaging, are valid, though often abused, terms. They are subjective, but also are related to real physical attributes than can be measured. Speakers have the most effect on the sound, and all those qualities listed are effected by things like phase coherence, frequency response, distortion of the cones, resonances in the enclosure, crossover quality and choice of crossover frequencies. Since you hear "clarity", and not the exact combination of frequency response, phase coherence, etc. that effect clarity, it's useful to talk about it in terms of clarity, not the physics. But it's also useful to understand what really makes a speaker have clarity.
I think digital audio has thrown a lot of audiophiles because certain things are exact and it doesn't matter if you have a $50 CD player with a digital out, or a $1000 CD player with digital out, they both give you the exact same stream of bits. The typical audiophile finds this counter-intuitive because they like to think more expensive = better. I remember how many audiophile types I knew were very puzzled when Stereophile magazine (I think) recommended a $50 RadioShack portable CD player as the best CD player to get because it had digital out, wasn't prone to skipping, and was cheap. Then again, these were people who bought into the whole green marker thing. (not every audiophile myth is expensive I guess).
As for power cables, they can matter for certain things, but it's pretty minimal. The thicker and shorter the cable, the less resistance and the more power delivered to the equipment. This usually isn't an issue, but I play music and sometimes the whole band is running off one extension cord. Amps can sound worse or get damaged if they're not getting enough power, so I have a huge, thick extension cord for those situations, and I will use it over a thinner extension cable already provided. My amp also has a much thinker power cable than my keyboards, because it draws more juice. However, in a home, with a 3 or 6 foot distance, the cable that came with the amp is more than adequate.
There is such a thing as "bad" electricity though, and this is a much bigger deal than power cables. Once both my bassist's and guitarist's amps blew up on the same night. One of my effects started acting funny and so did a house amp. What probably happened is that we were just drawing too much power on a crappy electrical system and the equipment wasn't getting enough voltage. Bad things can happen when you run equipment below it's required voltage. I also live in a house that eats light-bulbs. It's ridiculously bad. Anyway, I do recommend a power conditioner. They protect against brown outs and filter the AC to get nice 60Hz AC. Tripp-Lite makes some good ones. I'm sure power amps and pre-amps without enough filtering on their own can be effected by noisy power, whether you could hear that is another question.
