Real Audio, this sound will blow you away!
Custom built Ale system with Brooks bass and midrange horns
(Credit: Kevin Brooks)Put that silly iPod away--this time it's the real deal--extreme hi-fi by and for fanatics. Chances are you've never heard a truly great sounding audio system, so it'll be hard to imagine living with sound that can take you to another place. The very best systems can summon up hot blooded performances of your favorite artists. It's music in the foreground, upfront and real--sure, your $29 plastic computer speakers can play tunes, but without a hint of passion, totally devoid of human spirit. It's merely music as background noise, a drone to fill in the spaces in your life.
Kevin's turntable
(Credit: Kevin Brooks)Kevin Brooks is a hard-core audiophile, the man is serious about his sound. But in the context of what people obsess about, it doesn't seem all that whacked out to me. You know, some guys blow wads of cash on 1950s baseball cards, clothes, or just to get good and drunk every weekend, Kevin is into hi-fi. Stuff you civilians have never heard of. He offers a line of custom solid African Mahogany horns. This is the sort of artisan audio that formed the foundation of the American high-end audio business in the 1970s and still continues today. It's all about the passion for sound and music. There's something going on, but you don't know what it is. If you want to get more out of your music, check out high-end audio.
A pair of Kevin's horns
(Credit: Kevin Brooks)
A pair of gigantic bass horns that stick out of a house!
(Credit: Kevin Brooks)
Steve Guttenberg is a frequent contributor to magazines and Web sites including Home Entertainment, Playback, and Ultimate AV. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. 
So why does Every! Single! Post! take the approach of, "Listen, folks, you people don't know what good audio is and probably never will, but here are a few notable examples of your ignorance." The average listener like me certainly isn't swayed much by this condescension, and I can't imagine the few people who ARE willing to blow their entire paycheck on a single tweeter would enjoy being grouped in with the know-nothings.
Just a thought.
Why?
It would be a little more respectable if I saw an anechoic chamber, so then I could believe you knew what "good" audio was.
There is nothing like listening to output of a $100k stereo bounced off your $100 drywall.
Stereos don't sound good in a dead room, 'specially something completely dead like an anechoic chamber. Besides, do you know what it takes for a true anechoic chamber? They are few and far between; most anechoic readings are done with shorts bursts of sound - bursts too short to confuse with reflections from surrounding surfaces.
Even if you dampen and equalize the hell out of a normal room, you'll suck the life out of the music. You'd probably also over-tax your amps trying to get the output up to reasonable levels. Drywall? Most normal "lived-in" rooms aren't a problem for systems. Find the right place for your speakers, take care of the primary reflections, if any, and you're good - it's the sparse "dedicated rooms" that typically sound bad.
I guess I should stick to being an engineer instead of hawking crap for megabucks.
...but maybe you should take a look at things from the "other" POV. Steve HAS been taking a "guys, check this out" approach on all of his entries. Most of those articles have been been met by hostility from posters, have they not? ("Turntables suck!" "Anyone that would spend that much on xzy should have their head checked!" Etc, etc, etc.) In your "high-school kid" analogy, most of the posters here are like kids that first snipe at the Mazerati-driver because they think their Mustang is just as good (or better!) and if you spend money on more, you're an idiot.
Then Steve posts something innocent (and likely accurate) like "you probably haven't heard a great stereo before" and the same people previously attacking now have hurt feelings. Go figure.
Anyway, my question - with bass tubes that damn long, how does he keep the timing between drivers properly aligned?
But seriously, can he hear dogs down the street barking? Do rain drops thunder into the living room with astonishing efficiency?
Hilarious.
top. To try to appreciate the potential of horns like these, the next step is to
do modifications of the amplifiers until they think they have come ever so
little bit closer to perfection.
So much money is thrown at these projects so seriously, I wonder just how
much simple enjoyment the owner gets from such a system. I venture it is
neither simple nor spontaneous. When one has to be so serious, where is
enjoyment?
By the time several grand for amp mods are added on top of the hundred
grand or so, I suppose you then couldn't invite many over to show it off as
then the presence of extra people would be screwing up the acoustics !
I know two different "serious" audiophiles & they both have
a similar outlook on their hobby/obsession. They tend to both go on and on endlessly about their latest equipment acquisitions, etc and spend a considerable amount of time criticizing anything which is not up to audiophile standards, such as any piece of solid state electronics or CD players & don't get either of them started on MP3 players or web radio streams!
The pity of it all is that neither person seems to be able to fully appreciate their own systems and enjoy the fruits of their labor as they are constantly searching for ways to make things sound "better" as if that's at all possible. (My one friend once said to me something like "...you hear that?..., the high end just sounds dull, I'm going to change out the tweeters next week..." In my opinion, I don't think I've ever heard a better sounding system anywhere, but he was convinced that it still needed some tweaking.
Now, while I agree that listening to a vinyl LP can indeed be a fine aural experience & a CD reissue of an old recording usually pales in comparison, but my contention is: I just want to put on a recording and bask in the music contained within, be it on LP, CD or MP3 after all, You are listening to the music, NOT the system it's being played on!
Just my .02!
-Steve
- Not all audiophiles are extremists
- by dcstephens November 20, 2007 1:20 PM PST
- I hang out at the Stereophile and Audiogon Forums and there's plenty of evidence of listeners that appreciate really good sound and achieve in the price ranges from just under $1000 up to around $12000. I suspect that if you counted, most of those that consider themselves "audiophiles" spend on average $1500 to $3000. That's still not a really low number, but it's a long ways from the "tweakdom" we've seen in this blog.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(29 Comments)Don't get me wrong, I love seeing what the tweaks are doing. I just think that the average CNET reader may be getting a distorted image of what makes an audiophile. When you look at $3000 vs what some spend on baseball cards, boats, gambling, motorcycles, sports tickets, etc. it's not an incredibly expensive hobby. A person can start with a good turntable, some class A headpones and a headphone amp and get it an incredibly revealing system for $1000.
Dave