Thank you all for the replies while I was sleeping :) Couple of comments:
Pat Wrote: > I've seen several credible reports that iPods and the like combined with > high efficiency headphones is causing (enabling?) folks to seriously > damage their hearing. And it is usually permanent. Take care of your > hearing. Turn it down. It is interesting that most (or at least a huge > number of) audiophiles > are middle aged men, most of whom have listened to too much loud > rock and have hurt their hearing. I have not used headphones much in the past; only recently with the SB2. The sheer convenience of the SB2 has really opened up the music world for me. But now I probably have been listening a bit too loud. Pat Wrote: > Large Advents have a serious problem with linearity. They sound great > when played fairly loud with an amplifier that delivers a lot of watts. > But they do not sound good at low levels. You need to crank them up to > near live sound levels. Funny you mention this. They are not large Advents (Prodigy Towers), but I recently re-foamed them and they sound bad now, compared to what I remember before the buzzing(!) There is a whole midrange missing--I can tell this without comparing to anything, so it must be bad. I've been wondering if the foam needs to break in, but I've run them many hours while out of the house and don't notice any difference. And I have also thought that the sound is not nearly as good at low levels, which is where I listen most of the time when not using headphones. I'm waiting for av123 to offer their new XLS speakers. Then I'll retire these Advents. I was very surprised at the Labtecs. About 8-10 years ago, my brother visited and brought with him several sets. He said they sounded so good that when they went on sale, he couldn't resist picking up more to give away. Pat Wrote: > Try this, re-encode them at something far lower fidelity, like 120 CBR. > See if you can tell then. Or even worse. For a lot of music, moderate > VBR can sound pretty decent. What you need to listen to are subtle > things like the sense of acoustic space, the way that the piano sounds > decay slowly, or the snap and sizzle of hit hats. Or brushes on a snare > in a jazz trio. You and Sean mentioned something similar. I will try this experiment. Sean Wrote: > However when you add background noise, audience noise, disortion from > tubes and guitar amps etc you get an extremely complex signal. Also > drums and cymbals especially can have a wide freuency content and fast > transitions which mp3 has trouble with. You generally won't hear the > most artifacts in the main, loudest element of the program, because > that's where mp3's psychoacoustic model can get the most perceived > quality per bit. The best example I can think of is on one of the DMB > live albums (sorry forget which one) during the into to "two step". > They're getting into the intro and the audience is clapping in unison. > On each clap, with mp3 the clapping sounds like an "envelope" of noise > but on the CD it actually sounds like lots of hands coming together. > The thing is you'd have to really be familiar with the CD in order to > know that you're missing something. But this one example where I can > repeatably tell the difference blind (at 160K anyway). Ok, I understand. This is an excellent example because it describes the aspects of the MP3 artifacts, and they certainly are things I should be able to hear. Thank you! Robin Wrote: > Also, your main system - Advent speakers and Onkyo TX-860. Again, I have > no direct experience of those components, but you say yourself that you > believe the Labtech headphones to be better. As I mentioned above, I think the Advents are kaputt. The _specs_ on the TX-860 are better than any low-midrange home theater receivers I've been considering recently from Denon and HK. Have not looked at 2-channel amps. I really have a hard time justifying spending money on separate components (2-channel vs. HT), and I'd like to add HT sometime in the next year or two. I'm going to start with new speakers, since that I _can_ justify. Thank you again for all your thoughtful replies. - Dave -- Dave D _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
