It’s all bullshit, of course. Like Monster Cable and that $US500 Denon Ethernet cable, there’s more snake oil flowing through this “premium” socket than anything else.

And as with that Denon Ethernet cable, the comments from “satisfied users” are what really make this product worth “investigating”. Buyer beware. [Parts Express via Boing Boing]

The Price

$US495

The Verdict

His new speakers are at least as visually striking as his Sorapot tea kettle. The shiny cones are handmade from pure white ceramic, cork and light birch, with an included amplifier (with toaster-style volume control) made of sheet metal and cast iron. In case its $US500 price didn’t tip you off, this set is in no way a mass-market product, instead designed for that small minority of intense audiophiles who need great sound even at their computers.

Both the ceramic and cork are “dead” in terms of vibration, unlike the more typical (and significantly cheaper) metal construction of other speakers, so the speakers themselves add no sound to your music. The stands, a Baltic birch plywood, hold the horns relatively firmly in place (they’re sturdier than they seem in pictures) and look quite nice.

Within Roth’s creation lie high-end components. There are custom-made Tangbanb 4-inch drivers, the only of their type in this tiny size, rated at 15-watts per channel. The amplifier, based on the well-regarded Tripath 2024 T-Amp, features gold-plated binding posts and one 1/8-inch input (though he includes an interconnect for RCA cables). Also included in the package is 16-gauge oxygen-free copper speaker cables (the kind with banana plugs). There’s no subwoofer — the set is trying to emphasise the mids, and to an audiophile like Joey, thumping bass of the sort you see in 2.1 sets throws off the balance of the music.

If your eyes just glazed over reading that last paragraph, you’re among the 99% of people for whom this speaker set is over the top. Don’t worry about it — I’m in that group too. My high-quality MP3s played through a Zune HD sounded lifeless and dull, and the lack of a dedicated subwoofer was all too noticeable with the less-than-perfect encoding.

But when I got into the sweet spot, and listened to Joey’s high-resolution audio files, connected via his computer, the experience changed completely. The sound was far more subtle and nuanced than what I’m used to — I could even hear some vinyl impurity on the files he’d encoded from old records. It was almost off-putting at first, but it came with a warmth I didn’t know was there. Mids were clearer than I’ve ever heard them, giving more emphasis to vocal harmonies, guitar and piano, and the overpowering highs and lows in lower-end speakers were noticeably downplayed.

The hardware isn’t perfect; it’s handmade — apparently the ceramic cones are difficult to mass-produce — and sometimes it feels like it. The amplifier in particular looks a little messy with all the cables sitting out in the open (though Joey made it clear that that was a design choice) and the volume toggle feels a bit flimsy. It’s not a plug-it-in-and-forget-it system, either: The EQ sometimes needs tweaking, and the gear is a bit delicate, so you want to take care with how you set it up. Still, the speakers themselves are heavy enough to stay put in their wooden cradles, and the 15 watts per channel were enough to fill the room with sweet music.

The question is, will crazy audiophiles go for a low-power, lower-end (for them, at least) 2.0 system? They’re certainly not made for household music listening, and they cost five times more than a typical 2.1 computer set. I can’t think of a better option for audio nerds who spend a lot of time at their computers, but I still think this will remain quite a niche product. If you’re in that niche (and have $US500 to spare), they’re are available for pre-order now from Joey’s site, in a limited first run of 200 that will arrive in early November.

Smaller than expected and gorgeous in person

Delivers audiophile-quality sound

Cheap for audiophiles, very expensive for the rest of us

Hardware feels a bit delicate (especially the plywood stand) and amplifier is a little finicky

Limited power

The Goldmund Eidos Reference Blue Blu-ray Player has all of the touchstones of audiophile snake oil. Gold plating? Check! Heavy dampening? Check! Magnets? Check! But hey, at least if you’re willing to drop that much you can be sure that your player is better than anyone else’s, complete with every feature imaginable.

Actually, you can’t be, because this thing doesn’t support internet access or BD-Live. Yes, this is a $US135,000 Profile 1.1 player. Nice work, audiophiles. The pathetic thing is that Goldmund will sell the entire 50 unit run of these things to rich idiots who don’t do their research. [Ultimate AV Mag via Oh Gizmo! via Dvice]

In other words, Beats Solo provides users looking to tap into Dr. Dre’s formidable experience in quality sound a third option that fits neatly between the Studio Beats and the in-ear Tour Beats product. It also features ControlTalk functionality for on-cable control of your music and phone calls. It’s still not cheap by any means, but it seems to me that Beats Solo might be the porridge that’s just right as far as high quality headphones are concerned. [BusinessWire via DVICE]

But seriously, earwax additions aside, these extremely limited edition (only 100 are being made) speakers are made from many of the same components as a supercar from Swedish automaker and purported Saab saviour Koenigsegg.

Boasting carbon fibre, stainless steel and an unapologetic attitude about their $US85,000 asking price, these speakers deliver the “full audio spectrum” all the way down to 37Hz, courtesy a coaxial two-way driver.

There’s only 100 out there though, so get buying! [Aesthesis via Luxist via DVICE]

We had a few complaints that the MP3s of our last record wasn’t encoded at a high enough rate. Some even suggested we should have used FLACs, but if you even know what one of those is, and have strong opinions on them, you’re already lost to the world of high fidelity and have probably spent far too much money on your speaker-stands.

It’ll be interesting to see if this philosophy holds up as the band moves into more digital-only releases, as they’ve done with a couple of single tracks in the last couple months. It’s all fine and good to not care about MP3 quality when audiophiles can just buy the CD instead, but what about when it’s the only option? It’s not just super nerds who would prefer at least a -v0 bitrate instead of 160CBR.

The whole interview is worth reading (it’s a short one), as Greenwood discusses his personal listening habits and how the band listened to a bunch of 90’s hip-hop via AirTunes while they recorded In Rainbows. [New Yorker via Kottke]

My objective in experiencing a full-bore audiophile’s listening room was not to try to call him on whether or not he or I could hear the difference in speaker cables composed of wire hangers or braided unicorn mane—no, it was to listen to music on a $US350,000 stereo. But while I was there, how could I not try to experience a few before-and-after tests to see if I could spot the harmonic differences that are the audiophile’s raison d’etre?

The differences we are talking about here are, of course, of the most incredible subtlety. But to many critics of audiophiles, a subtle change is quickly reduced to and equated with zero change, whereupon the screams of hysterics and rage against the immense stupidity and utter inanity of the audiophile life begins.

I didn’t think I had to say this, but I guess I do: Anyone who spends $US20,000 on speaker cables is fucking crazy. In fact, anyone who spends $US200 on cable is crazy, in my opinion. But that’s just not the point.

If I was drinking wine with a sommelier or wine critic, I wouldn’t find it irrational to taste subtleties that I might have glossed over when drinking in the presence of normals. In these cases, it’s not about the power of suggestion, it’s about the power of context, and like it or not, there’s context at the heart of all the world’s manias, anything to which we attach the suffix “phile.”

With audiophiles, I am an agnostic rather than an atheist. I believe that these differences, however miniscule, are, to those who have spent their life studying them, based on something real, not invented. Can I hear them? Maybe not, but that doesn’t mean I write them off completely. My belief here is based not on decades of listening on high-end gear, but on a day I spent listening to a $US350,000 system with someone who’s been doing this for forty-some years.

It’s a fact: I was led into hearing things I might not have without guidance. While some look to this possibility as evidence that the whole thing is a sham, I don’t. I would need a lot more time to build up the necessary context to even be near a place where I could pretend to listen critically for such minutiae, but I heard something different than I would hear listening to my own sound system, and that’s also a fact.

With that out of the way, here are three wholly unscientific but incredibly interesting listening tests we did in Fremer’s audiocave. They were a blast.

Power Cable Swap
Test Song: “Avalon” by Roxy Music
Surprisingly not the fishiest test we ran, at play here is the purity and frequency range of the raw AC power that gets fed to the speaker amps. Fremer had two cables laying around that he was reviewing—one from Power Snakes Shunyata Research at a cost of $US4,000 and one from Wireworld, whose $US1,200 cable’s selling point is that it filters out all but the 60Hz frequency of pure, unadulterated US alternating current.

Here’s Wireworld’s filtering claim, from their website:

An ideal audio or video cable would pass the entire frequency range without alteration. However, an ideal power cord would pass only the 50Hz or 60Hz AC power, while blocking all other frequencies, to prevent power line noise and harmonics from degrading the sound and imaging quality of the system.

Not entirely sure how those two are related, but a claim is a claim.

The result: I heard a difference here, but whether or not it was a direct result of AC filtering, who knows. The filtering cables (the cheaper ones) seemed to sound a bit more reserved, but in some ways clearer. There might have been a little less harshness in the high frequencies of cymbals, or when Bryan Ferry sang an “S” sound. The more expensive AC cable was different, but it was hard to quantify how or why. Maybe a fuller sound, but not necessary a better one.

With this one, if there’s any audible change at all from one to the other, one is still not better than the other. That’s an important point to make here—spending more money in the audiophile realm often just means getting something different, not better.

Speaker Cable Swap
Test Song: “Whole Lotta Love” by Led Zeppelin
Let me say now that listening to “Whole Lotta Love” on this system at high volume was transcendent each and every time, no matter what gear was involved. You may want to put a knife in any audiophile you see, but if you heard that song like I did once, and realise that these guys get to listen to it that way every time, you’d be doing it out of jealousy, not contempt.

That said, speaker cable is the most sensitive area to prod on both audiophiles and audiophile reactionaries alike, because it is home to some of the most dramatic swings in price for things that, fundamentally, are doing the exact same thing: carrying an electrical current from amp to speakers. That said, as Wilson explained on Tuesday, it’s the one thing in these tests that may have the most merit. Genuine differences in electrical properties (wire thickness, manufacturing process, and the materials of the wire and its coatings all contribute to differences in capacitance, inductance and resistance) mean that cables are liable to sound different, given speakers with enough resolution to show those differences.

At play in our test was a set of $US200 cables from Monster (here, playing the unfamiliar role of bargain choice) and a pair from Tara Labs that costs a deeply stupid $US22,000, which Fremer had for review purposes.

The result: I strained to hear a difference, but did. Like I said, I was pretty busy trying to keep from shitting myself during both playbacks, but I did identify a change. And again, it was detectable most for me in the high-frequency zone: With the high-end cables, cymbals, tambourines, the high frequency bits of that crazy swirling tape-effects breakdown, all sounded perfectly isolated in the 3D space of the song and came through with crazy clarity. On the Monsters, anything in the high-end tended to blend together into a single entity that was slightly less pleasing perhaps, but still amazing.

Was the difference worth $US21,800 to me—or even Fremer? Of course not. But it’s there.

De-Magnetizer
Test Song: “Oh! Darling” by The Beatles, and others
And if you thought the other stuff was ridiculous, maybe turn away your gaze now. This is a $US1,600 platter that, once activated, neutralises the magnetism that allegedly develops over time in the metallic impurities found in vinyl’s black dye. Since the record cartridge operates with magnets, this allegedly translates to less unintended futzing with the cartridge and therefore purer sound. I say allegedly because there’s nothing in the way of firm scientific evidence that such magnetic impurities are enough to tamper with the cartridge’s signal in a meaningful way. (It should also be noted that the Furutech product in testing here is no longer to be found on Furutech’s website.)

The result: I swear to Lucifer, when listening to “Oh! Darling,” I thought I heard Paul’s voice move back a good foot or two in the soundscape once that record was de-juju’d. “Back” in a way that added clarity. Beyond that, I can’t say I heard much else.

We tried the trick on several other records, and I got nothing. Fremer claims he and his audio buddies can usually tell a difference, which is sometimes drastic, sometimes not.

You can even try for yourself if you want to. Here are two
AIFF files of Tom Waits’ “Step Right Up” (download: File 1, File 2)—both encoded directly from vinyl by Fremer on his system. (Yeah, that process alone seems enough to dispel this myth all by itself, but again, it’s a shaky claim to begin with.) One is pre-demagnetising, another is post. Can you hear a difference? I can’t. But if you have crazy gear at home, give it a try.

So as you can see, there was no hosanna moment in any of these tests, whereupon I drank any snake oil or took receipt of any ear honey. Far from it. My particular experience did not convince me to go out and spend tens of thousands of dollars chasing the minute gains that can be made in an audio system with ridiculously expensive gear. But I did hear something. By experiencing those differences first hand, I acknowledge their existence, and thus, acknowledge that people who have been listening to music at the highest possible level of quality for decades may know more than I do about the comparative sonics involved.

And the point remains, as clear as ever: Those who are listening to music at the highest level of fidelity and can discern the tiny differences at play here are doing a service—in both music production and music reproduction—to everyone who loves music everywhere.

Listening Test: It’s music tech week at Gizmodo.

Fremer, if you have yet to decipher this, is an audiophile of the highest calibre. Literally millions of dollars of premium audio equipment have passed through his listening room under review for Stereophile magazine, and he’s been obsessing about vinyl since he was four years old, memorising the labels of his parents’ 78s. A man who, when digital recording and reproduction methods began to surface culminating in the compact disc’s takeover as the predominant music format, became a figurehead for the vinyl superiority movement, staunchly advocating its greater tonal resolution over a CD’s 44.1 kHz max. (See this MTV clip for Fremer in action, circa 1993.)

In short, a species of human I had never known prior to hanging out with him in his New Jersey basement listening room last week, and a species, frankly, I was sceptical of in just about every possible way.

Upon getting picked up by Fremer at the train station near his home, my fears immediately began to feel all too real. It was but a minute or two into our car ride from the station that a rant on Walt Mossberg’s inferior review of the Airport Express, Apple’s music-streaming mini-router that Fremer and I both enjoy in our home systems, begins in earnest:

“If he’s not going to tell people how it sounds, then what’s the fucking point? Don’t step into my world, Walt!” And so on, referencing multiple emails of complaint he actually sent to Walt. I am definitely thinking “uh oh” at this point.

But then, settled into the lone leather chaise in Fremer’s basement audio temple, nestled right in the sweetspot of his $US65,000 Wilson MAXX3 speakers, I hear the needle drop on Air’s “Run” from Talkie Walkie. It’s a song I’ve never heard (kind of fell off Air after overusing Moon Safari considerably), but one that I’m now listening to all the time. Because, with all honesty, I have never heard anything like that song played on that stereo system at that moment. Ever.

The song ends, and after emerging from an opiate-like haze, I hear a hiss. And yes, while the record was playing, I heard a pop, a crackle or two. Isn’t this as high-end an audiophile system as they come? Shouldn’t the sound be of such purity so as to sustain life in lieu of water for days on end?

I mention this slight—very slight, but noticeable—hiss to Fremer, and it’s probably a frequency that 50 plus years of rocking have eliminated from his spectrum. He doesn’t even care. This is when I start to understand.

After hearing I’m a Bowie fan, Fremer drops into his near limitless stacks and spins a pressing of “Heroes” with part of the title track’s chorus in German. I’m giggling with pleasure at the frankly obscene level of detail I hear (Ich! Ich werde König!), but of course, I’m hearing the pops and crackles that a 30+ year-old record is likely to have. Shouldn’t a $US350,000 stereo system be completely free of such impurities?

“It’s like when you go to the symphony, and the old men are coughing—same thing,” Fremer says. Necessary impurities. Reminders of being in the real world.

We play my solid 256kbps VBR MP3 of “Heroes” off my iPod; it sounds like shit. Free of pops and crackles, yes, but completely lifeless, flat in every way. This is the detail that matters: Audiophiles are basically synesthesiacs. They “see” music in three-dimensional visual space. You close your eyes in Fremer’s chair, and you can perceive a detailed 3D matrix of sound, with each element occupying its own special space in the air. It’s crazy and I’ve never experienced anything like it.

It is within this 3D space where the audiophile lives and operates, and spends all his money. Fremer himself is the first to admit that it would only take $US3,000 to $US5,000 to build a system that will be deeply satisfying to most music fans. On a scale of 1 to 100 completely of my own devising, let’s put this system at around 85. Now, imagine that you’ve tasted 85, and you want to go higher; you want Bowie’s cries of kissing by the wall to inhabit the most perfect point in your system’s matrix, and Brian Ferry’s back-up fly girls on “Avalon” to flank him just beautifully. That, friends, is where you might end up paying hundreds of thousands.

Our little scale, unfortunately, is logarithmic, in that going from zero to 85 doesn’t take a lot of effort or money, but going from 98.6 to 99.1 by swapping out a $US2,600 AC power cable for a $US4,000 one becomes a justifiable end. We did exactly that, and I strained to hear any difference at all (more impressions of our test will follow later in the week), but to Fremer, the difference was abundantly clear—not necessarily better with the more expensive cable, but different, a warmer, fuller sound, as Fremer described it.

The point is, people like Fremer can not only hear the difference, they crave it. I walked into his listening room expecting to discern absolutely zero difference in the comparison tests we had planned, swapping out speaker cables that cost as much as a meal at the best restaurant in New York for another set that cost as much as a year of undergrad at Harvard. I actually did hear a tiny difference. But to people like Fremer, that tiny difference becomes a mind-boggling disparity, and it’s worth paying for if it means a few decimal points closer to perfection. Unfortunately, the logarithmic curve is asymptotic: There is no ceiling. Fremer will be the first to admit that this type of dragon chasing is not and should not be for everyone.

This obsession with tiny differences explains Fremer’s fevered defence of analogue music sources over digital. Two anecdotes from the past are particularly illuminative:

The first is his memories of rushing to the record store in 1979 to pick up Ry Cooder’s Bop ‘Til You Drop, the first mainstream rock release to be recorded using an all-digital process, which at the time was being lauded as the next big thing. But upon getting it home and dropping it into his high-end system, the results were not good:

“It made me feel horrible!” he remembers. Even though it was played on vinyl, Fremer could already detect some missing elements in the 3D audiophile space that just weren’t there. “And it’s not like I was a digiphobe at this point—I had no reason to be. I was as excited as anyone to hear this.”

The second was the first public playing of a compact disc, to a room full of expectant audiophiles a few years later. While they breathlessly applauded the first track played from the then refrigerator-sized device, Fremer was horrified. He heard the same flatness and lack of detail in the 3D audio world he loved to inhabit. “I felt…weird. My hands were shaking. All I could think, then, was WE’RE FUCKED!” A few days later, a new, custom-printed bumper sticker was slapped on Fremer’s car: “COMPACT DISCS SUCK.”

And thus began a long battle, and thankfully, it seems to have ended happily. Both with the advent of SACDs—which Fremer is a great fan of, proving that he’s not hung up on nostalgia; it’s all about sound resolution, maintaining all the peaks and valleys of recording—still a viable format among audio junkies, and the greater acceptance and continued life of vinyl, Fremer is a happy man these days. “I’m on top of the world right now. I set out to save vinyl, and we did it.”

Because the thing is, Fremer loves music first and foremost. The audiophile I had feared was one who cares far more about the overpriced gadgetry than the actual music. This is not who I ended up meeting. This man listens to music and makes sure it was recorded with the best fidelity, that the intents of the artist have been preserved. And thank God he does, because we certainly don’t.

I listen to most of my music on downloaded, compressed, lossy MP3s, and so do you. But even if you can’t hear the sound quality, we need someone like Fremer up on that wall, a preservationist of archival recordings and an ombudsman for new recordi
ng techniques, because one day you’ll want to hear it, and it’ll be there because of audiophiles.

These guardians in and outside of the recording industry ensure that, whether it’s in a movie theatre tomorrow or in your own home listening room on some far off future date, you’ll be able always get back to a recording that expresses every frequency, every ounce of warmth and life, of the original performance. Because if you can hear, it, if you ever get to live in that 3D space, you’ll be glad Fremer helped defend it.

For its 60th anniversary yesterday, McIntosh Labs released the new MC75 tube amplifier (modeled after the original 1961 version) and the C22 preamplifier (modeled from the original 1962 version). The distinctly retro look of both devices remain true to the original designs, while many internal circuit enhancements improve reliability of the equipment to meet modern specifications. The backlit glass and brushed anodized aluminium definitely preserves the iconic character of audio equipment from generations past, and now I have reoccurring flashbacks of dad in his bell bottoms fiddling with his old high-end stereo system trying to get Creedence Clearwater Revival to play at full blast.

At a snub to the current generation music lovers, there’s nary an iPod dock nor HDMI input in sight. The most modern upgrade the McIntosh dudes added was a remote control for the preamp. And in true snobby audiophile style, only 120 of these sonic treasures will be released in the U.S. [McIntosh]