the coffee community and the audio community

DavecUK and I’d say they gone in all levels of quality and different levels of must haves and many noticeable differences etc etc..!! There must be some that specialise for the audiophile too😂

a good post to read, when reading reviews of stuff they might as well be speaking a foreign language sometimes as I cannot understand what they talk about or I think it’s a load of Bollocks some differences they hear must be minuscule or only show up on a piece of measuring equipment, how about just listening using yous ears however iffy they may be because you are stuck with whatever hearing you have mine is not very good but hey ho it is what it is

I was looking at hifi Zen DAC’s but I wanted one with 2 Digital Coaxial inputs and settled on a Topping DX3Pro Plus, sounds ok to me but have not heard anything to compare it to so I will stick with it

Hi Fi is full of invented techno babble, like star trek.

it’s a bottomless pit, if you have the money, I cannot believe how much some Coffee machines are and the same for grinders it must be nice to have the money to be able to afford some of the stuff but WAY out of my price range but I am happy with my stereo and my Lelit

gordy53 a good post to read, when reading reviews of stuff they might as well be speaking a foreign language sometimes as I cannot understand what they talk about or I think it’s a load of Bollocks some differences they hear must be minuscule or only show up on a piece of measuring equipment, how about just listening using yous ears however iffy they may be because you are stuck with whatever hearing you have mine is not very good but hey ho it is what it is

That’s quite an interesting dichotomy, though.

Quite when is not being able to detect something a lack of training, education or experience and when is it mere techno-babble? Because, if a subject is inherently complex, unless you understand the terminology you won’t understand the subtleties.

Case in point - quantum physics. I am not any sort of physicist, but I have done a fair bit of reading, and I do have some friends that are physicists …. including one actively working on research at a very large particle accelerator. I can cope with some of what he says, to the extent of understanding roughly what he’s on about when he explains it. But as soon as he starts getting into quantum physics, it makes my head hurt. I mean, some of the concepts are sufficiently abstract that he might as well be talking an alien language. He could be imparting earth-shattering gems of wisdom, or describing a gobbledygook nursery rhyme for all I understand. That it goes right over my head is due to my lack of education, training and experience, not the terminology he uses. Unless he’s playing silly beggars with me, that is.

When it comes to coffee, I personally have no doubt that there are people that simply have a better ability to taste than I do. These are the so-called ‘super-tasters’ that have many more taste buds than the majority of us. So …. given that physiological difference, things that genuinely make a difference to them, I can’t detect. I have personally confirmed that much. But, when they describe things I cant detect, it doesn’t mean they can’t.

Same for hifi, up to a point. We all have different hearing, and two of us could be sitting side by side in the same concert hall, or hifi demo room, listening to the same thing, but cannot know what the other is hearing. One might be able to hear things the other can’t, because our hearing is different.

Many years ago, I took part in some experiments on hearing at university. I was a volunteer lab rat, if you like. It turns out I had hearing that went extremely high. High to the point that the technicians couldn’t quite believe I was hearing what I said I could …. so they tested it. With signal generators and some very expensive speakers, they tested me on various frequency of tones, and I had to push a button when I heard something, not knowing if they actually were playing anything at all. Sometimes they were playing a very high tone, sometimes they tested but played nothing. I hit a 100% score, on dozens of such tests, only ever saying I heard the tone when it was playing, with zero falso positives, but also zero false negatives.

That was decades ago, though. These days, age and a mild dose of left-ear tinnitus (thanks, I believe, to blood pressure) have degraded my hearing way below what it was, back then. In those days, I was pretty particular about hifi equipment choice because I could hear the difference. Several friends thought I was nuts buying some of the gear I did, because they couldn’t hear the difference. Well, so be it, but I sure could. Back then. Now, of course, I’m far less fussy about audio gear because the limitation is my hearing, not the gear.

All that stuff gives reviewers a problem. Do they have what it takes to review stuff in this or that category, or not? Are they physiologically equipped t taste or hear it, or to understand those quantum concepts? Is the terminology pure marketing psychobabble, like I believe a good many audio products to be, or is it terminology to describe something I just don’t understand?

Probably, a bit of both.

Reviewers also have to know quite who their target reader/viewer is. Trying to explain a concept in quantum physics to 14-year old school kids is going to be different to trying to explain it to Nobel-winning physicists. What, to that latter group, is conventional terminology is going to sound like babble to the former group. Ever tried listening to two senior doctors discussing a medical issue? They might as well be talking Martian for all I can get, yet it’s been ME they’re talking about.

It’s also one of the problems in this age of vast amounts of free ‘reviews’ on the internet - just how much does the reviewer understand? Do they know their stuff, or just can talk a good game? And who are they aiming their review at …. a novice, an expert, or somewhere in-between? The vast range of information available on the net certainly is hugely useful, but it should be treated with a degree of caution too. Especially “reviews”.

as well as Tinnitus I have no sense of taste or smell at the moment, it happens every year about this time and early Spring, it lasts about 6 weeks all I can tell is that something is sweet or savoury but not what it actually is so I cannot taste my lovely Coffee at the moment not that I will stop drinking it, I could eat an onion like it was an Apple and not taste a thing!, oh the joys of old age. I used to work for a company that had the contract for the NHS in Haringey delivering repairing and servicing NHS wheelchairs and if I had a pound for every person that was issued with a wheelchair that said to me "I never thought I would ever need a wheelchair’' I would be a rich man but I also used to reply to them that I may need one in the future but at least I would be able to repair it.

Forgetting the audiophile snake oil for a minute, everyone will agree that some audio systems sound better than others. I’m pretty sure that everyone could tell the difference between an 80’s Amstrad music centre and a Linn for example. But it is remarkably difficult to give a written description of the differences in sound. A jargon has developed where people start taking about timings, transient attacks etc. It’s a harmless attempt to explain the difference is sound, up until the point that it is used to deceive the gullible - see the gold plated fuses for example.

I don’t even try to describe sound quality as I find it impossible and ultimately it’s irrelevant as we all have different ears. I’m 55 and anything over 13 kHz is attenuated and anything over 14.5kHz is inaudible to me. But that doesn’t stop some stuff sounding better - nothing much worth listening too much above 13kHz anyway!

Another point with fancy audiophile hifi is that these guys seem not to care about room treatment. I remember years ago decorating the living room, got rid of carpets and put down a wooden floor and my hi-fi became unlistenable! That’s one of the reasons that I have pretty modest speakers as I know that often the room is the weakest link. I usually listen on headphones now, Audeze LCD-X which strangely don’t sound like headphones at all - they sound like listening in a treated room, to me at least. They are pretty impractical though, big and very heavy. I have a pair of Sennheiser HD 6XX (probably the best bang for the buck headphones around) that are more practical for anything other than lying on the couch, and a pair of excellent old Shure 846 that I use outside.

Yup, the opposite works too - pick a busy track with loads going on all at one that you know well. I often use Alan Vega version of Be Bop A Lula - it’s an absolute racket and perhaps something of “an acquired taste”! It takes a well tuned system for it to sound anything but a muddy noise. Sounds sh!t through my speakers but great on headphones.

If a fast amp is beneficial, then the stereo on the SR71 must have sounded amazing through the headphones.