Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards Audiophile Post - Another.. a touching story..

You realize that CDs deal with digital information and use error correction, correct? I sincerely hope you're being somewhat facetious in your writing.

I am not an audiophile - far from it. I was simply summarizing what I read on that audiophile room. A high end CD player (marantz or technics - I don't remember) - with a solid block on top to remove vibrations. They said that CD produces 1.4 mbps quality and the connected headphones translate that quality truly.

As you can infer from my noob description of what is a very technical matter - I don't know much about audiophilia. I do own a lot of classical music CDs, and simply play them on my Sony blu-ray player and listen to them on beyerdynamic headphones - that's all I need.

I hope they chose the right material for that block.

The more porous the stone the better it is at eliminating unharmonious delta-wave modulation.
If it lacks the proper porosity that could induce excessive sub-space interference.

So ... always be cautious before buying such things!

This all sounds rather wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey. And what if we reversed the polarity of the neutron flow? ...

Funny, because I see it exactly the same way. Well, it took me some time but I came to the same realization and is why I stopped being annoyed too much with those guys. I accept that even though they may be hearing things only in their imagination, it's a valid thing, it's a psychoacoustic phenomenon and so be it. I guess I still have my own rational resistance coming up from time to time but out of respect of those guys, I vent it here and not in the audiophile forum. Which is silly, because it's disrespectful towards the audiophiles here... For which I apologize. After all, in this forum we're not much different and I've been guilty myself, obsessed with escapement, real actions, half-pedaling timings and whatnot. There's a saying here: every lunatic has his own act 😀

Agree. Good counter-example BTW, since I really despise hunting and hunters and with that in mind I realize I'm sometimes way too harsh towards audiophiles when only thing they do is spend their money in a harmless way for something they love. If I had to choose, I would replace all hunters in the world with audiophiles without a blink!

I have a friend who is just like that sometimes -- he has had some really serious health problems and recently had a stroke... But he still... keeps... listening!!! I admire his love for good music. But what he loved the most was sitting down and hear me play a piece or two. Sadly he is in my home country of China while I'm currently studying abroad in the US. I miss him... He taught me what good and enjoyable sound should sound like, and though I don't have a system as detailed as his, I enjoy it when I play my piano VSTs, or when I put on a CD rip to listen to. I've learned to both make music, and to enjoy it, thanks to this audiophile friend. Now I consider myself an audiophile too.
Note: I just have a pair of powered speakers hooked up to an audio interface.
Thanks for sharing this story!!!

I would say true audiophiles -as far as pianists are concerned- lived centuries ago, with their ultimate fidelity acoustic instruments. What we call audiophile (digital) pianists today, are actually trying to minimize the loss in trading sound quality for comfort.

Hope you don't mind correcting terminology here. "Psychoacoustics" has nothing to do with imaginary sounds per se, but it refers to the field of scientific study of the perception of acoustic phenomena (sound). Basically it is the study of hearing, especially of 'lower level' acoustic features, things like frequency, amplitude, location.

Hearing something that has no acoustic basis because you paid $1000 for a cable would be a valid topic to study, but psychoacoustics is not limited to that.

Hearing something that has no acoustic basis happens all the time, usually because the brain incorporates information from other senses and memory. A famous example is the McGurk effect (there are nice Youtube videos on this). It is difficult (impossible?) just to perceive sound in isolation. The brain always incorporates the context from other senses and prior knowledge.