Perception, Common Sense, and Audiophiles

Recently I've seen a resurgence of the "audiophile product makers are snake-oil dealers" meme. I'm not going to defend any particular make of audiophile product (I don't know anything about Pear Cable, which has been getting the attention recently) but I do feel compelled to defend audiophile stuff from out-of-hand dismissal, because I hate the false reasoning used by a lot of the critics and because I know from a couple years working at an audiophile store that some of the stuff is honestly pretty amazing.



I think the reason this particular topic draws the kind of debate it does has a lot to do with the nature of our sense of hearing.

Human hearing is incredibly sensitive, but it's a fundamentally indirect sense. Sight is direct in that you can look at something and describe it in great detail, and will probably say very similar things to another person describing the same object. If two people hear the same sound, however, they are more likely to perceive it differently ("did you hear something from over there?"). Nonetheless, there is a huge amount of information you can get from a single sound: things like the direction and range of the sound, size and shape of the space you're in, proximity and sometimes materials of objects nearby -- and those don't even address what the sound itself is.

The problem is that the indirect nature of hearing makes it much harder to make direct, objective comparisons. No matter how much art and science is put into the design of an audio product, some people will always disagree about the goodness of the product, or even if it sounds "better" when differences are heard, because they're listening for different things or are focusing to a greater or lesser degree on details. Conversely, if you put two TVs next to each other, they are very easy to directly compare."

Ah, but that's why we use performance metrics to make objective comparisons," some will say. That's true, but with something as very subtle as audio reproduction, performance metrics will only give you the crudest of comparisons. In fact this is true for video reproduction as well, where things like contrast, brightness, and color gamut are used for comparisons. But having worked in the HDTV industry for a few years now, I can tell you that while those statistics tell you something, they tell you far from everything. The same holds true for audio gear.

Take the numbers that people always use to slam on audiophile stuff: frequency range, signal-to-noise, and total harmonic distortion. All three are useful measures of audio performance, but let me try to illustrate how little they tell you.



Imagine a man blowing a note on a trumpet in your living room (ahem). If we put a curtain between you and the player, high frequency information is lost. If we run the microwave while he plays, the ratio between the noise level relative and his "signal" gets much worse. And finally, if we place a bunch of chimes of a variety of tones in the room, resonating with harmonics of the trumpet note, total harmonic distortion goes way up.

The performance is now quite ruined, but with your eyes closed you would still be able to tell that the performer was physically in the room when compared with a perfect recording of him playing, even if you used a single speaker at the same spot in the room, at the same volume and so forth. How can you tell? There is a lot more audio information that your ear is picking up beyond frequency range, signal-to-noise, and THD -- subtle cues such as how crisp the "attack" sounds (transient response, in engineering terms) and being able to hear quiet sounds like the rush of air from the horn even when overwhelmed in volume by the horn's tone.

It's that subtlety that audiophiles pay for, even when regular audio gear does the basic stuff right. Well, in theory they do; some audiophiles are out of their minds and they'll claim they can hear the difference when placing wood blocks under their CD player. But like the video systems that I've worked on at an engineering level, you might be surprised how much various pieces in an audio system can materially improve sound. So I get annoyed when people create false justification to back up the "common sense" that audiophile stuff is rubbish and it's impossible to hear the difference.

Yes, I have heard differences between "regular" cables and insanely expensive ones. Those are about the lowest-order differences I've heard, but they are there (and they are very much about matching the right cable to the right amp/speaker combination, if you wanted to know). And yes, the stuff can get outlandishly expensive, but the performance is (at least sometimes) there to back it up, just as surely as it is if you buy a Porsche instead of a Honda -- it's just a less direct thing than a drag race to "prove" it in the case of the audio gear.

Of course I'll create a different debate entirely if I try to claim that a Porsche is better than a Corvette, despite having a slower 0-60 time. Don't dismiss the subtle.