Hi-fi

Hi-fi adjectives#

High-end audio is a swamp of pseudoscience, snake oil and marketing so slimy it could make a used car salesman blush. Scroll through hi-fi reviews and one DAC sounds creamy, another lush, another ethereal, and one is glistening like dew on a mountaintop as the sun ascends in the sky. Headphone amps are airy, revealing, enlightening and moist.

I can say that stuff too.

But it doesn't make it meaningful.

A 1.5 dB boost is already subtle#

So how big is a difference you can actually hear? I recorded a ukulele and a drum loop and made a 1.5 dB EQ boost, once at 400 Hz and once at 10 kHz. I could pick them reliably in an ABX test, even after uploading to YouTube and recording it back. But it was hard. It was a subtle difference, and you need trained ears for it.

If you compare two competent DACs, the difference is maybe 0.01 dB, at most about 0.1 dB in the high frequencies. That is orders of magnitude smaller, and it gets described as mighty and enormous next to the feeble one. If you put the same reviewers in an ABX test with a 2 dB boost at 10 kHz, they would probably fail it. The adjectives come either from people who don't know what they are talking about or from people with sponsorship deals and affiliate links. See DACs and reviews.

Expensive is not automatically snake oil#

High quality things cost money. Sometimes the question is not "is this snake oil" but rather "is this needed"?

Some expensive gear is genuinely superb engineering. You find out by measuring it, not by reading the adjectives in reviews.

Buying gear because you like it#

There is nothing wrong with buying luxury gear as a status symbol, or because the knobs are beautiful and the metalwork is machined. I own Swiss watches. Does one tell the time better than my iPhone? No. One of them doesn't tell the time at all, because it stopped. I still wear it, because I like it.

People who own a watch worth more than a house don't go around saying it tells the time better than your iPhone, because they are not that stupid. The problem starts when you say your expensive box sounds better than mine. That is a qualitative claim, so now you have to prove it in a blind test. See blind testing.