The Ten Biggest Lies in Audio
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i'll translator to chinese
The Ten Biggest Lies in Audio
The punch line of Lincoln's famous bon mot, that you cannot fool all
the people all of the time, appears to be just barely applicable to
high-end audio. What follows here is an attempt to make it stick.
I strongly suspect that people are more gullible today than they were
in my younger years. Back then we didn't put magnets in our shoes, the
police didn't use psychics to search for missing persons, and no head
of state since Hitler had consulted astrologers. Most of us believed
in science without any reservations. When the hi-fi era dawned,
engineers like Paul Klipsch, Lincoln Walsh, Stew Hegeman, Dave Hafler,
Ed Villchur, and C. G. McProud were our fountainhead of audio
information. The untutored tweako/weirdo pundits who don't know the
integral of ex were still in the benighted future. Don't misunderstand
me. In terms of the existing spectrum of knowledge, the audio scene
today is clearly ahead of the early years; at one end of the spectrum
there are brilliant practitioners who far outshine the founding
fathers. At the dark end of that spectrum, however, a new age of
ignorance, superstition, and dishonesty holds sway. Why and how that
came about has been amply covered in past issues of this publication;
here I shall focus on the rogues' gallery of currently proffered
mendacities to snare the credulous.
1. The Cable Lie
Logically this is not the lie to start with because cables are
accessories, not primary audio components. But it is the hugest,
dirtiest, most cynical, most intelligence- insulting and, above all,
most fraudulently profitable lie in audio, and therefore must go to
the head of the list. The lie is that high-priced speaker cables and
interconnects sound better than the standard, run-of-the-mill (say,
Radio Shack) ones. It is a lie that has been exposed, shamed, and
refuted over and over again by every genuine authority under the sun,
but the tweako audio cultists hate authority and the innocents can't
distinguish it from self-serving charlatanry. The simple truth is that
resistance, inductance, and capacitance (R, L, and C) are the only
cable parameters that affect performance in the range below radio
frequencies. The signal has no idea whether it is being transmitted
through cheap or expensive RLC. Yes, you have to pay a little more
than rock bottom for decent plugs, shielding, insulation, etc., to
avoid reliability problems, and you have to pay attention to
resistance in longer connections. In basic electrical performance,
however, a nice pair of straightened-out wire coat hangers with the
ends scraped is not a whit inferior to a $2000 gee-whiz miracle cable.
Nor is 16-gauge lamp cord at 18￠ a foot. Ultrahigh-priced cables are
the biggest scam in consumer electronics, and the cowardly surrender
of nearly all audio publications to the pressures of the cable
marketers is truly depressing to behold. (For an in-depth examination
of fact and fiction in speaker cables and audio interconnects, see
Issues No. 16 and No. 17.)
2. The Vacuum-Tube Lie
This lie is also, in a sense, about a peripheral matter, since vacuum
tubes are hardly mainstream in the age of silicon. It's an all-
pervasive lie, however, in the high-end audio market; just count the
tube-equipment ads as a percentage of total ad pages in the typical
high-end magazine. Unbelievable! And so is, of course, the claim that
vacuum tubes are inherently superior to transistors in audio
applications-don't you believe it. Tubes are great for high-powered RF
transmitters and microwave ovens but not, at the turn of the century,
for amplifiers, preamps, or (good grief!) digital components like CD
and DVD players. What's wrong with tubes? Nothing, really. There's
nothing wrong with gold teeth, either, even for upper incisors (that
Mideastern grin); it's just that modern dentistry offers more
attractive options. Whatever vacuum tubes can do in a piece of audio
equipment, solid-state devices can do better, at lower cost, with
greater reliability. Even the world's best-designed tube amplifier
will have higher distortion than an equally well-designed transistor
amplifier and will almost certainly need more servicing (tube
replacements, rebiasing, etc.) during its lifetime. (Idiotic designs
such as 8-watt single-ended triode amplifiers are of course exempt, by
default, from such comparisons since they have no solid-state
counterpart.) As for the "tube sound," there are two possibilities:
(1) It's a figment of the deluded audiophile's imagination, or (2)
it's a deliberate coloration introduced by the manufacturer to appeal
to corrupted tastes, in which case a solid-state design could easily
mimic the sound if the designer were perverse enough to want it that
way. Yes, there exist very special situations where a sophisticated
designer of hi-fi electronics might consider using a tube (e.g., the
RF stage of an FM tuner), but those rare and narrowly qualified
exceptions cannot redeem the common, garden-variety lies of the tube
marketers, who want you to buy into an obsolete technology.
3. The Antidigital Lie
You have heard this one often, in one form or another. To wit: Digital
sound is vastly inferior to analog. Digitized audio is a like a crude
newspaper photograph made up of dots. The Nyquist-Shannon sampling
theorem is all wet. The 44.1 kHz sampling rate of the compact disc
cannot resolve the highest audio frequencies where there are only two
or three sampling points. Digital sound, even in the best cases, is
hard and edgy. And so on and so forth-all of it, without exception,
ignorant drivel or deliberate misrepresentation. Once again, the lie
has little bearing on the mainstream, where the digital technology has
gained complete acceptance; but in the byways and tributaries of the
audio world, in unregenerate high-end audio salons and the listening
rooms of various tweako mandarins, it remains the party line. The most
ludicrous manifestation of the antidigital fallacy is the preference
for the obsolete LP over the CD. Not the analog master tape over the
digital master tape, which remains a semirespectable controversy, but
the clicks, crackles and pops of the vinyl over the digital data pits'
background silence, which is a perverse rejection of reality. Here are
the scientific facts any second-year E.E. student can verify for you:
Digital audio is bulletproof in a way analog audio never was and never
can be. The 0's and 1's are inherently incapable of being distorted in
the signal path, unlike an analog waveform. Even a sampling rate of
44.1 kHz, the lowest used in today's high-fidelity applications, more
than adequately resolves all audio frequencies. It will not cause any
loss of information in the audio range-not an iota, not a scintilla.
The "how can two sampling points resolve 20 kHz?" argument is an
untutored misinterpretation of the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem.
(Doubters are advised to take an elementary course in digital
systems.) The reason why certain analog recordings sound better than
certain digital recordings is that the engineers did a better job with
microphone placement, levels, balance, and equalization, or that the
recording venue was acoustically superior. Some early digital
recordings were indeed hard and edgy, not because they were digital
but because the engineers were still thinking analog, compensating for
anticipated losses that did not exist. Today's best digital recordings
are the best recordings ever made. To be fair, it must be admitted
that a state-of the-art analog recording and a state-of-the-art
digital recording, at this stage of their respective technologies,
will probably be of comparable quality. Even so, the number of Tree-
Worshiping Analog Druids is rapidly dwindling in the professional
recording world. The digital way is simply the better way.
4. The Listening-Test Lie
Regular readers of this publication know how to refute the various
lies invoked by the high-end cultists in opposition to double-blind
listening tests at matched levels (ABX testing), but a brief overview
is in order here. The ABX methodology requires device A and device B
to be levelmatched within ±0.1 dB, after which you can listen to fully
identified A and fully identified B for as long as you like. If you
then think they sound different, you are asked to identify X, I
strongly suspect that people are more gullible today than they were in
my younger years. Back then we didn't put magnets in our shoes, the
police didn't use psychics to search for missing persons, and no head
of state since Hitler had consulted astrologers. Most of us believed
in science without any reservations. When the hi-fi era dawned,
engineers like Paul Klipsch, Lincoln Walsh, Stew Hegeman, Dave Hafler,
Ed Villchur, and C. G. McProud were our fountainhead of audio
information. The untutored tweako/weirdo pundits who don't know the
integral of ex were still in the benighted future. Don't misunderstand
me. In terms of the existing spectrum of knowledge, the audio scene
today is clearly ahead of the early years; at one end of the spectrum
there are brilliant practitioners who far outshine the founding
fathers. At the dark end of that spectrum, however, a new age of
ignorance, superstition, and dishonesty holds sway. Why and how that
came about has been amply covered in past issues of this publication;
here I shall focus on the rogues' gallery of currently proffered
mendacities to snare the credulous.
5. The Feedback Lie
Negative feedback, in an amplifier or preamplifier, is baaaad. No
feedback at all is gooood. So goes this widely invoked untruth. The
fact is that negative feedback is one of the most useful tools
available to the circuit designer. It reduces distortion and increases
stability. Only in the Bronze Age of solid-state amplifier design,
back in the late '60s and early '70s, was feedback applied so
recklessly and indiscriminately by certain practitioners that the
circuit could get into various kinds of trouble. That was the origin
of the no-feedback fetish. In the early '80s a number of seminal
papers by Edward Cherry (Australia) and Robert Cordell (USA) made it
clear, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that negative feedback is totally
benign as long as certain basic guidelines are strictly observed.
Enough time has elapsed since then for that truth to sink in. Today's
no-feedback dogmatists are either dishonest or ignorant.
6. The Burn-In Lie
This widely reiterated piece of B.S. would have you believe that audio
electronics, and even cables, will "sound better" after a burn-in
period of days or weeks or months (yes, months). Pure garbage.
Capacitors will "form" in a matter of seconds after power-on. Bias
will stabilize in a matter of minutes (and shouldn't be all that
critical in well-designed equipment, to begin with). There is
absolutely no difference in performance between a correctly designed
amplifier's (or preamp's or CD player's) firsthour and 1000th-hour
performance. As for cables, yecch... We're dealing with audiophile
voodoo here rather than science. (See also the Duo-Tech review in
Issue No. 19, page 36.) Loudspeakers, however, may require a break-in
period of a few hours, perhaps even a day or two, before reaching
optimum performance. That's because they are mechanical devices with
moving parts under stress that need to settle in. (The same is true of
reciprocating engines and firearms.) That doesn't mean a good
loudspeaker won't "sound good" right out of the box, any more than a
new car with 10 miles on it won't be good to drive.
7. The Biwiring Lie
Even fairly sophisticated audiophiles fall for this hocus-pocus.
What's more, loudspeaker manufacturers participate in the sham when
they tell you that those two pairs of terminals on the back of the
speaker are for biwiring as well as biamping. Some of the most highly
respected names in loudspeakers are guilty of this hypocritical
genuflection to the tweako sacraments- they are in effect surrendering
to the "realities" of the market. The truth is that biamping makes
sense in certain cases, even with a passive crossover, but biwiring is
pure voodoo. If you move one pair of speaker wires to the same
terminals where the other pair is connected, absolutely nothing
changes electrically. The law of physics that says so is called the
superposition principle. In terms of electronics, the superposition
theorem states that any number of voltages applied simultaneously to a
linear network will result in a current which is the exact sum of the
currents that would result if the voltages were applied individually.
The audio salesman or 'phile who can prove the contrary will be an
instant candidate for some truly major scientific prizes and academic
honors. At ISSUE NO. 26 · FALL 2000 7 the same time it is only fair to
point out that biwiring does no harm. It just doesn't do anything.
Like magnets in your shoes.
8. The Power Conditioner Lie
Just about all that needs to be said on this subject has been said by
Bryston in their owner's manuals: "All Bryston amplifiers contain high-
quality, dedicated circuitry in the power supplies to reject RF, line
spikes and other power-line problems. Bryston power amplifiers do not
require specialized power line conditioners. Plug the amplifier
directly into its own wall socket." What they don't say is that the
same is true, more or less, of all well-designed amplifiers. They may
not all be the Brystons' equal in regulation and PSRR, but if they are
any good they can be plugged directly into a wall socket. If you can
afford a fancy power conditioner you can also afford a well-designed
amplifier, in which case you don't need the fancy power conditioner.
It will do absolutely nothing for you. (Please note that we aren't
talking about surge-protected power strips for computer equipment.
They cost a lot less than a Tice Audio magic box, and computers with
their peripherals are electrically more vulnerable than decent audio
equipment.) The biggest and stupidest lie of them all on the subject
of "clean" power is that you need a specially designed high-priced
line cord to obtain the best possible sound. Any line cord rated to
handle domestic ac voltages and currents will perform like any other.
Ultrahigh- end line cords are a fraud. Your audio circuits don't know,
and don't care, what's on the ac side of the power transformer. All
they're interested in is the dc voltages they need. Think about it.
Does your car care about the hose you filled the tank with?
9. The CD Treatment Lie
This goes back to the vinyl days, when treating the LP surface with
various magic liquids and sprays sometimes (but far from always)
resulted in improved playback, especially when the pressing process
left some residue in the grooves. Commercial logic then brought forth,
in the 1980s and '90s, similarly magical products for the treatment of
CDs. The trouble is that the only thing a CD has in common with an LP
is that it has a surface you can put gunk on. The CD surface, however,
is very different. Its tiny indentations do not correspond to analog
waveforms but merely carry a numerical code made up of 0's and 1's.
Those 0's and 1's cannot be made "better" (or "worse," for that
matter) the way the undulations of an LP groove can sometimes be made
more smoothly trackable. They are read as either 0's or 1's, and
that's that. You might as well polish a quarter to a high shine so the
cashier won't mistake it for a dime. Just say no to CD treatments,
from green markers to spray-ons and rub-ons. The idiophiles who claim
to hear the improvement can never, never identify the treated CD
blind. (Needless to say, all of the above also goes for DVDs.)
10. The Golden Ear Lie
This is the catchall lie that should perhaps go to the head of the
list as No. 1 but will also do nicely as a wrap-up. The Golden Ears
want you to believe that their hearing is so keen, so exquisite, that
they can hear tiny nuances of reproduced sound too elusive for the
rest of us. Absolutely not true. Anyone without actual hearing
impairment can hear what they hear, but only those with training and
experience know what to make of it, how to interpret it. Thus, if a
loudspeaker has a huge dip at 3 kHz, it will not sound like one with
flat response to any ear, golden or tin, but only the experienced ear
will quickly identify the problem. It's like an automobile mechanic
listening to engine sounds and knowing almost instantly what's wrong.
His hearing is no keener than yours; he just knows what to listen for.
You could do it too if you had dealt with as many engines as he has.
Now here comes the really bad part. The self-appointed Golden Ears-
tweako subjective reviewers, high-end audio-salon salesmen, audioclub
ringleaders, etc.-often use their falsely assumed superior hearing to
intimidate you. "Can't you hear that?" they say when comparing two
amplifiers. You are supposed to hear huge differences between the two
when in reality there are none-the GE's can't hear it either; they
just say they do, relying on your acceptance of their GE status. Bad
scene. The best defense against the Golden Ear lie is of course the
double-blind ABX test (see No. 4 above). That separates those who
claim to hear something from those who really do. It is amazing how
few, if any, GE's are left in the room once the ABX results are
tallied. There are of course more Big Lies in audio than these ten,
but let's save a few for another time. Besides, it's not really the
audio industry that should be blamed but our crazy consumer culture
coupled with the widespread acceptance of voodoo science. The audio
industry, specifically the high-end sector, is merely responding to
the prevailing climate. In the end, every culture gets exactly what it
deserves.
fum...@gmail.com
The punch line of Lincoln's famous bon mot, that you cannot fool all
the people all of the time, appears to be just barely applicable to
high-end audio. What follows here is an attempt to make it stick.
I strongly suspect that people are more gullible today than they were
in my younger years.
我强烈怀疑, 今天人们比在我的年轻的时候的人们是更加易受欺骗的。
Back then we didn't put magnets in our shoes, the police didn't use
psychics to search for missing persons, and no head of state since
Hitler had consulted astrologers. Most of us believed in science
without any reservations.
当时我们没有把磁石放到我们的鞋里面,警方没有使用心理学搜寻失踪者, 自从希特勒后再没有元首去征询命理。大多数我们相信在科学没有任何不可告人之
处。
When the hi-fi era dawned, engineers like Paul Klipsch, Lincoln
Walsh, Stew Hegeman, Dave Hafler, Ed Villchur, and C. G. McProud were
our fountainhead of audio information.
当高保真时代初期,象Paul Klipsch, Lincoln Walsh, Stew Hegeman, Dave Hafler, Ed
Villchur, and C. G. McProud等工程师带给我们原始的音响资料。
The untutored tweako/weirdo pundits who don't know the integral of ex
were still in the benighted future.Don't misunderstand me. In terms of
the existing spectrum of knowledge, the audio scene today is clearly
ahead of the early years;
那时候还没发现微积分，即使是专家也仍然到在蒙昧之内。不要误会我。根据现有的频谱知识，现今音频领域的知识比以前清晰多了。
at one end of the spectrum there are brilliant practitioners who far
outshine the founding fathers. At the dark end of that spectrum,
however, a new age of ignorance, superstition, and dishonesty holds
sway.
一个杰出的, 技艺高超的,另音响前辈门失色的新技术远脱颖而出. 但是，一个新时代的代表无知，迷信，欺骗的掌权人却在黑暗中产生了。
Why and how that came about has been amply covered in past issues of
this publication; here I shall focus on the rogues' gallery of
currently proffered mendacities to snare the credulous
这就是为什么要出版本文的原因了，这里，我将重点的展示那些恶棍门的嘴脸和经常挂在嘴边的另人容易上当的谎言。
fum...@gmail.com
关于线的谎言
Logically this is not the lie to start with because cables are
accessories, not primary audio components. But it is the hugest,
dirtiest, most cynical, most intelligence- insulting and, above all,
most fraudulently profitable lie in audio, and therefore must go to
the head of the list.
骗性更大，所以必须把他排在第一位。
The lie is that high-priced speaker cables and interconnects sound
better than the standard, run-of-the-mill (say, Radio Shack) ones.
这个谎言是：高价格的喇叭线材比标准的或普通的线材能传达更好的音色。
It is a lie that has been exposed, shamed, and refuted over and over
again by every genuine authority under the sun,
but the tweako audio cultists hate authority and the innocents can't
distinguish it from self-serving charlatanry.
这是一个已经被揭露的谎言，骗子们已经被一次一次的暴露在阳光下面了。
但是tweako audio崇拜者们非常憎恨这些批评，天真的人们却不能分辨其骗子的行径。
The simple truth is that resistance, inductance, and capacitance (R,
L, and C) are the only cable parameters that affect performance in the
range below radio frequencies.
The signal has no idea whether it is being transmitted through cheap
or expensive RLC.
最简单的真理是线材的电阻电感电容（RLC）产生的影响表现在射频范围之下
信号无法意识到自己是否在用一个便宜的或者昂贵的RLC中传送。
Yes, you have to pay a little more than rock bottom for decent plugs,
shielding, insulation, etc., to avoid reliability problems, and you
have to pay attention to resistance in longer connections.
当然，并不反对你增加一点钱去购买一个更漂亮的绝缘性能更好的插座和其他配件，去避免可靠性问题，当然你需要担心长距离传输线的内阻问题。
In basic electrical performance, however, a nice pair of straightened-
out wire coat hangers with the ends scraped is not a whit inferior to
a $2000 gee-whiz miracle cable. Nor is 16-gauge lamp cord at 18￠ a
foot
就基本的电子原理而言，一对很好的拉直的，接口清洁的线不会比一个价值$2000的线材差，即使他只是价值18￠ 一尺的标准口径为16的粗电缆。
. Ultrahigh-priced cables are the biggest scam in consumer
electronics, and the cowardly surrender of nearly all audio
publications to the pressures of the cable marketers is truly
depressing to behold. (For an in-depth examination of fact and fiction
in speaker cables and audio interconnects, see Issues No. 16 and No.
17.)
在消费电子市场，异常昂贵的线材是最大的骗子，另人沮丧的是，几乎所有音像出版物都怯懦地迫于线材供应商的压力而投降。（在Issues No.
16 and No. 17，有一个针对线材的深度测试）