Audiophiles and the Perfect Sound

or high fidelity. So today I thought we should talk a little bit more about hi fi and the tech that feeds into an obsession. So first, what is that obsession? Well, generally speaking, audio files seek out a listening experience that gets them as close to the originally produced sound as possible.

So in an ideal world, it would sound as you listen to playback, it would sound as though you were in the recording studio as a producer was putting together a master tape you know, of a recording of a session, or alternatively, that you were actually in the studio when say a band was laying down the recording tracks, because you know even the act of producing can emphasize some stuff all de emphasizing other stuff. So you could make a good argument that even the master recording could muck

things up all down the rest of the line. But the idea is, how do you create a system. What components do you need and in what combination and um and at what quality in order to get the ideal listening experience. And you want to be able to accurately reproduce the full range of sound frequencies and harmonics that were present in the original sound, and preferably you want to be able to also boost that to higher levels

of volume without losing any of the precision. Right, So the idea being that the louder you turn the system, you don't lose it, Like things don't distort as you turn up the volume, until you get to a point where you know you don't want to go any higher because you're gonna end up in a twisted sister music video if you do so. This is tricky, not the part about avoiding being in a twisted twisted sister music video.

I've successfully done that all my life. But no, creating a system like this is tricky because there are a lot of different components to a sound system, and one bad component can mess up pretty much everything else. It's not always true that the more expensive something is the better it is, though that frequently can seem to be the case in the stereo like the high fidelity stereo world. Uh. However, it is fairly safe to bet that the cheapest stuff on the market is not going to be the best.

You can be pretty sure that the cheapest stuff is not going to be great. You cannot be sure that the most expensive stuff is going to be the best of the best. Now, when you boil down a sound system, which I should add you should never do because most of the time they are not waterproof, what you have is a signal chain. So on one end, you've got a component designed to playback some form of media or, in the case of a radio, to pick up a transmission of a broadcasted media, and the playback is in

the form of an electrical signal. And ultimately that electrical signal has to make its way to some form of speakers, whether they are like a standalone speaker system or headphones or something along those lines. Now, the whole chain from that component to the speakers, every part of that chain is important, and just like physical chains, your experience tipically is only as good as whatever the weakest link in

that chain is able to manage. Like, if there's one component in that in that chain that is not up to snuff, then it doesn't matter how good this everything is on either side of it, you're not going to get better on the other end than what's going through that weak link. So this is an idea that an entire industry is built upon. So let's consider some of these components. And we'll start with the speakers, because that's

the part that plays the sounds that we hear. I could have started from the other end, but I figured let's go to the output. So a speaker, when you really get down to it, consists of a diaphragm, at least one diaphragm that vibrates according to magnetic signals, and those magnetic signals correspond with that electrical signal that represents an encoded recorded sound. So the electrical signal powers and electro magnet which interacts with a permanent magnet in the speaker.

This creates the attractive and repulsive forces that caused the diaphragm inside the speaker to vibrate, the vibrating diaphragm begins to move air at specific frequencies and amplitudes, and this generates the sounds we hear when those air fluctuations here hit our ear drums. So human hearing spans a pretty wide range of sound frequencies. At the low end is

twenty hurts. That's twenty full vibrations per second. So imagine a very long string and you pluck the string and you're able to slow down time and count how many times it does a full vibration that is, from the starting point all the way to the other side and back to the starting point again twenty times a second. That's the lowest end of pitches that humans typically can hear. We have to use words like typical because not everyone can hear sounds that low, and some may be able

to sense them a little bit lower. We can actually sense lower vibration, but typically we are not hearing them. We feel them, because again we're talking about fluctuations vibrations, uh, and you can feel vibrations, particularly if they're at pretty high amplitudes. So then on the opposite side of the range, we have the highest pitches within human hearing typical human hearing, and we usually say that this tops out around twenty thousand hurts, also known as twenty killer hurts, so that

would be twenty thousand full vibrations per second. As we get older, our ability to perceive the highest pitches diminishes mine certainly has. I think I mentioned this in the San Sui episode. But this means that if you want to keep those punk kids away from your convenience store, you can play a piercing high pitch sound over the store's speakers and only the kids will be able to hear it. All the adults will have lost that ability.

Fun with physics and ages, um, I guess anyway, twenty hurts to twenty thousand hurts, that's a pretty big range of frequencies, and that doesn't factor in harmonics. Harmonic is a sound wave that has an integer multiple of a fundamental tone. And you might think, what are you talking about? All right, So this is easier if we talk about

musical notes. Let's say we've got a musical instrument like a guitar, and let's say we pluck a string, and the lowest frequency sound produced by that string vibrating is what we call the fundamental tone frequency, and if we were to multiply that frequency by two, we would get what we call the second harmonic. If we multiplied it by three, we get the third harmonic, and so on and so forth, the fourth harmonic, the fifth harmonic, each

time multiplying by the next highest integer. So if you pluck a guitar tuned to middle C the second harmonic, you would multiply the frequency of middle C by two, and you would end up with C again, but one octave up or C ish, because it ends up being a little more wibbly wobbly than that. But you're essentially playing another C note, but it's an octave higher. The third harmonic would be a G, the fourth harmonic would be another even higher C. The fifth harmonic will be E,

and so on and so forth. Now, a musical instrument's tone or tambre is largely shaped by the relative strength of each harmonic to the fundamental frequency. This is why we've got lots of different musical instruments that can produce a C note, but they don't all sound exactly the same. They're playing the same note, but they don't sound the same. If you played the same note on a clarinet as you did on a piano. Well, you would still be able to tell which was which, right, you'd say, oh,

they're playing the same note. But this is a clarinet and that's a piano, and that's largely due to harmonics. Now there's other stuff too that plays into tamber, but to it into all that would get us off track. Plus I've done an episode about it. So we perceive

these harmonics as collectively being a single sensation. So when you hit a C on a piano, what we're essentially hearing is that fundamental frequency of C. And rather than perceiving all the harmonics distinctly, like saying, oh, I also hear a higher C and a G and an E, rather than saying that these harmonics combine into what we think of as the timbre of a piano, we perceive

it as a single experience. And if you were to play that same C on a clarinet or on a guitar or on a xylophone, we'd be able to tell the same note. But difference in which harmonics are emphasized that would determine the timbre of each instrument. We'd be able to tell them apart, all right, Now, the reason all that is important is that really good speakers will be able to play back a wide range of frequencies

with incredible accuracy. And it's important to represent not just the individual notes, but those harmonics Otherwise, like your piano wouldn't sound like a piano right if it couldn't represent all the harmonics that the piano was creating when it

was being played, then it wouldn't sound right. So this range can stretch well beyond human hearing, because the idea is that harmonics that can even go above where the typical human can hear can still shape the notes we do here, and it's hard for for speakers to be able to represent the full range, even really good speakers. Often high end speakers will have specific voice coils dedicated to replicating a certain subset of frequencies in order to

cover the full spectrum. And this is where we can get into sub whoffers, whoffers and tweeters. Subwhiffers have the largest diaphragms and replicate the lowest frequency sounds, so they need those big diaphragms in order to move enough air at low frequencies and large enough and plitudes so that we can actually experience them, hear them, or feel them. They also tend to require their own power source in

order to make this happen. Like they can't just draw power through speaker wires the way some other speakers do. You typically have to plug these into a wall socket on their own. Whoofers tend to cover most of the frequencies we experience when we're listening to music from the low tones. They're not the lowest to replicating most of

the tones we hear from musical instruments. Human voices also fall into this frequency range covered by whoofers, so these are really important for the vast majority of the sounds we can distinctly hear. And the tweeters those are speakers that are designed to replicate sounds above the threshold of whoofers. They can also replicate sounds that go beyond human hearing. Again, you might need to have those in order to represent

those harmonics I was talking about. Now. A combination of these speakers is usually necessary to create a true high fidelity experience, and UH where you put the speakers ends up mattering to both because of stuff like stereo or quadrophonic sound or surround sound. UH in that you're sending specific channels of sound to specific directions, So you want to have your speaker set up to two replicate that, right, It wouldn't make sense to have your left and right

speakers all just directly in front of you. You wouldn't really benefit from the stereo sound that way. Uh. And also some speakers, like the tweeters in particular, can be very highly directional, so you need to have them positioned just right. So for true audio files, where you put speakers ends up being a very big part of the equation. And suffice it to say, cheap speakers typically can't do

all of this. Many of the cheaper speakers are kind of marketed as full range speakers, meaning they're meant to replicate sounds throughout the range of human hearing. But these speakers are limited by their size. If the diaphragm and the speakers is like of a medium size, well the speakers should be able to cover most, but not all, of the frequent these we can experience. If it's a larger diaphragm, well then you might lose some of the higher pitches. You might not be able to replicate those

as well. If it's a smaller speaker, then you might end up losing some of the base tones. Materials, wiring, and engineering all matter when it comes to speaker quality. However, you can reach a point of diminishing returns, and in fact, that is going to be true for pretty much every component we're going to be talking about today. And by that I mean you might listen to a dinky, cheap speaker and then listen to the same music on a moderately priced speaker, and you could hear a huge difference

in quality. You could say, all right, this, this more expensive speaker is clearly leagues better than the cheap one. But then you might go from the moderate speaker to an expensive speaker and you say, yeah, I can tell there's a difference, but it's not nearly as dramatic a

jump as the first one. Then you might go to like a luxury speaker, some ludicrously expensive speakers, and they are some really expensive ones, and you might not be able to tell the difference between the you know, expensive speaker and the ludicrously expensive speaker. Uh. There are a lot of people who suggest that if you were to do a double blind study where neither the person administering the test nor the person experiencing it knows which system

is being played. You probably wouldn't be able to pick out too many differences between some of these, you know,

high end and ultra high end speaker systems. Now, it might mean that if you were to take some very sensitive electronic equipment to measure stuff like signal loss or the purity of tones being omitted, that maybe on those instruments you might be able to see a difference, like these very highly tuned instruments might indicate that, But that doesn't mean your ears and brain would pick up on that.

So that's another red flag for audio files. Just because something might technically perform quote unquote better doesn't mean you to actually perceive any meaningful improvements. So don't just jump out there and by the most expensive stuff on the market. All right, where we've got a lot more ground to cover. But before we get into any of that, let's take a quick break. Okay, we're back now. For speakers to be able to play anything at all, you need an amplifier.

So an amplifier's job is to take a weak incoming electrical signal and boost it to a more powerful signal that can drive speakers all the while avoiding the introduction of unwanted changes to the signal. In other words, you want to turn up the power without adding in noise or distortion. This is easier said than done. Now it helps if we think about the nature of the signal we need to boost. Uh. And let's take the example of a microphone, which is typically, you know, the opposite

of a speaker. You can think of like a microphone and a speaker working on the same principle, just in reverse. So with a speaker, we have an electrical signal going to a device that that electrical signal is essentially encoded audio is what it really boils down to, and it goes to a voice coil that ends up causing a diaphragm to vibrate. Those vibrations end up causing air to fluctuate. Air molecules start to fluctuate, and our ears pick up

on that and we hear the sound. With a microphone, we have a device that has a tiny little diaphragm inside it that vibrates when sound hits that diaphragm, and the diaphragm's vibrations generate and a very weak electrical signal. Uh And and this is all thanks to electromagnetic physics that I'm not going to get into here because I've covered it to death now. As you might imagine, the diaphragm and a microphone is really small and it does vibrate,

but the movements are very small as well. So what you're generating is an incredibly weak electric signal with a microphone that represents those vibrations, and it's too weak to do anything really useful with it. Right, you wouldn't have enough umph there to drive a speaker. The speaker wouldn't have enough electricity to make the magnets move the diaphragm to a point where you could play an audible sound. So typically you would then pass this very weak signal

to what is called a preamp. That's an amplifier that can take a very weak signal and make it less weak, like to align level feed. This would then move along to a power amplifier, which would take this slightly stronger signal and then boost it to a point where it could drive a speaker system. But if you have a bad amplifier, one that's prone to introducing noise and distortion, well,

that signal gets corrupted as it continues down. The signal chain, and you know, anywhere could be the point where you have a problem. If the preamp is bad, then a little change in that week's signal will get boosted into bigger changes further down the line. Now, numerous companies have developed different circuit designs to reduce the possibility of introducing background noise and distortion into a signal, or you know,

introducing disharmonics and things of that nature. There are far too many different types of circuits and components to really go into here. Uh And it does get very technical about how you align these things in order to accurately boost the signal without altering it otherwise. Uh. And amplifiers are kind of like speakers. Some are really really good at boosting signals that represent certain frequency ranges and not

as great at other frequency ranges. So you occasionally end up with amplifiers or receivers which very frequently have amplifiers built into them, that get a reputation for being really good with certain ranges of sound representation, but not so

good at others. Also, amplifiers can introduce harmonic distortion. There's usually a measure of an amplifier's total harmonic distortion plus noise, so if you ever are looking at hi fi equipment and you find that there's a number that represents total harmonic distortion plus noise, you want that number to be as low as it can be. The lower that number, the better it is. Higher numbers indicate that the amplifier is more prone to introducing unwanted signal. Meanwhile, there's another

metric called signal to noise ratio. In that case, you want the number to be very big because indicates that the amplifier is is very effective at boosting signal and uh suppressing background noise. Then you have a thing called cross talk. So with stereo systems, you've got a left

channel for sound and a right channel for sound. Now, ideally you would have perfect isolation for those two channels, so that only the stuff that's intended for the left side goes to the left and only the stuff intended for the right side goes to the right. And you could even have it where you've got two instruments that are essentially doing like a call and response and have them perfectly isolated so that you're hearing like a guitar on your right and a violin on your left or something.

But there's this effect called cross talk, which describes to what extent the stuff that was meant for the right channel bleed over into the left channel, and vice versa. So you don't want a lot of cross talk. You want cross talk to be at a minimum so that you have as pure and isolated experience as you can for the stuff that was recorded for that purpose. Keep in mind, what I'm describing here is completely dependent upon

the media you're playing. Right, If you're playing back media that's say mono, well none of that matters because the same signal is going to go to every single speaker. That's what mono is. If it stereo, but the mix doesn't go to that level of separation, then it doesn't matter quite as much there either. But generally speaking, you don't want a lot of cross talk, so you want

that number to be low. Uh and we typically measure that in negative deciples, So the lower the number, like negative one decibles, is better than negative sixty deciples for cross talk. Now, you might also have a separate receiver, which is the device that manages all the input connections to your speakers, which would be the output, or you might have a receiver that has its own amplifier, So the receiver and amplifier are the same piece of equipment.

That simplifies the signal chain a little bit. But generally speaking, the stuff I refer to with amplifiers also largely applies to receivers. And again the signal chain is very important here. The simpler it is, to an extent, the better it can be. The more stuff you're adding in, the more filters and things adding in, uh, the more opportunities you

have for a point of failure. However, you could also argue that these are things that could potentially compensate should there be another issue with the signal chain somewhere else. And then beyond that you have your actual music sources like a turntable or a tape deck or CD player, radio, that kind of thing. These also range in quality. There are folks who will drop more than ten thousand dollars

on a turntable alone. So does it ten grand turntable sound a hundred times better than a hundred dollar turntable. That's hard to quantify, especially if you aren't otherwise using the exact same system from that point forward. Right, if you're talking about an all in one turntable that has its own little speaker. Obviously that's going to sound different from a high end turntable that's part of a finely

tuned audio system. But it does get to this point again of diminished returns, of at what point is the improvement perceptible or not perceptible. Obviously, components can range from excellent to terrible. A turntable that isn't weighted properly might introduce unwanted motion while playing back albums. You might get some wobble in there that can end up coming through with the playback and you're not going to get an

ideal listening experience. Or it could be that the stylists isn't picking up vibrations as since as sensitive as you wanted to, so you might be missing some of the subtle parts of the recording that you would otherwise get if you had a better quality cartridge in your in your turntable. So these are all things that matter, but again diminishing returns do come into play, and it also again depends upon matching the turntable up with the rest

of your components. If everything else isn't tuned properly, then you could have the best turn table in the world and still not it an ideal experience. At the other end of it, um, I will say that I've I looked into turntables a lot. I ended up buying a very simple one like audio files would immediately consider me a total pleab which I am. That's fine, But I didn't go for one that would need its own like preamp or amplifier. Uh. It was not that kind of thing.

It was sort of an all in one little radio CD player turntable system, which from my purposes is fine. I know I'm not getting the highest quality audio experience out of it, but for what I like, it's fine. But if you really want that rich audio experience, obviously you have to take even more time and put more money toward it in order to achieve that. And then finally we've got all the wires that we use to

connect all these different pieces together. There are companies like Monster Incorporated that have built up an entire industry around the idea of high end cables, some of them with like precious metals that are said to provide the absolute best connection so you have no signal loss. And here's the thing. It is true that really bad cables can

have a negative impact on a high fidelity experience. A cable with poor shielding might pick up interference from radio signals or other electrical wires, for example, and that will affect output. You will get noise in the output if in fact that's what you're using. But that's like the worst cables that you can find. Most cables these days are decently shielded, and anything better than like the bargain bin stuff is likely to work just fine and last

a good long time. Uh. In fact, there are home theater sites out there that go so far as to say that once you get over a thresholder around fifty dollars for high end cables, you're not really going to see any perceptible difference in output quality, and arguably you won't even see it before you hit that d dollar threshold.

And again, you might be able to tell a difference if you're using sensitive electrical instruments that can detect things like a signal leak or anything alone those lines, but that's again a very finely tuned piece of equipment. The human ear would not necessarily be able to register any difference or any decline in quality, So buyer beware when it comes to high end cables. In particular, I feel like that, out of all the different high thigh world stuff,

has got the most snake oil around it. Now, I'm gonna have some really tough news to deliver to audio files and to people who are interested in getting into like a high fidelity situation. Uh, but you know, I feel like we need to brace ourselves. So let's take another quick break and when we come back then hopefully we'll all be ready for it. All right, here's that harsh news I was talking about. I am sad to

tell you there is no best audio set up. There is no ultimate collection of receivers, amplifiers, speakers, audio components and wires that categorically makes that system superior over every other one on the market. The reason I feel confident saying this is because of the gray matter between our ears. Yep, we're talking brains, the stuff what processes our thoughts and senses.

It's also Zombie's favorite snack food. And we're gonna talk about some really obvious stuff here, but it's also stuff that we often take for granted or just outright forget. So one of the things we tend to forget is that our sensory experience is filtered through our brains. You've probably heard the philosophical question, if a tree falls in the forest and there's no one around to hear, it doesn't make a sound. Well, on the one hand, you could say, well, of course it makes a sound because

sound is vibration. Sound travels through the air because air molecules vibrate. We get these little pockets of air pressure fluctuation, and when those fluctuations interact with the tympanic membrane that is our ear drum in our ears, we then experience this as sound. We perceive it as sound, we hear the vibrations. And of course it doesn't just travel through the air. Sound can travel through solids and liquids as well.

This is why sound doesn't exist out in space, or at least sound doesn't travel in space, rather because you don't have enough particles out in space that are close enough together to allow vibration to propagate through a medium. So that's why there's no sound in space. There's not enough stuff to wiggle against each other to make sound go. So we can be confident that if a tree falls in the forest, there will be vibrations. Stuff will be vibrating.

But then you get to the more philosophical question, if there is no one to hear those vibrations, do we really call it sound? Or is sound actually what we call the experience of perceiving of hearing vibrations, Because if there is no one to experience it, well, then maybe there is no sound. Not that there isn't something to hear, but rather there is no one there to hear it. And it's the hearing that is sound rather than the vibration that is sound. So it all depends on how

you define it. Now why would I even bother to bring up this philosophical conundrum, Well, it's because it kind of gets to the heart of the matter. The experience of sound is a personal one, a subjective one. It isn't just physics. It's a point where physics and our minds interact with each other. The vibrations are ear jumps pick up, get translated into electrical signals that our brains process and interpret, and we experience it as sound. So at least part of what makes sound happen is in

our heads, and that gets right to the point. Sound is somewhat subjective, and I have no way of knowing if what you hear and what I hear sounds the same, even if it's coming from the same source. I don't know that your experience is exactly the same as mine, and because I have no way of experiencing the way you experience it, I'll never know. And that means that I could theoretically build out a sound system that I

find to be a perfect one. You know, to me, it reproduces sounds in a way that I find flawless, that all the levels are perfect, the volume from each component is perfect, and the tone is sublime. But it's possible that to you listening to it, that the experience would seem a little long. Maybe there's some harmonics that you can sense that I can't just because of like hearing loss that I have, Or maybe there are certain

frequencies that you just hear better than I do. Because again, I'm getting older, so those higher frequencies are starting to drop out for me, and I may not be able to hear them the way you can, So I don't realize that I don't have my system tuned properly to deal with those. There are many factors that might mean what sounds good to me doesn't sound good to you.

Now complicating this is the vocabulary used by audio files, and they rely on words like round and warm and full and brittle to describe sound, And there they've essentially had to appropriate words from other contexts in order to describe sound properly, because we just never really coined words specific to sounds qualities, at least not beyond some pretty simple ones like loud or soft, or low pitched or

high pitched, that kind of thing. Now, I have read enthusiastic reviews of high end sound systems, and after reading them, I've walked away not knowing what the heck the reviewer meant in their review, Like, clearly the reviewer loved the system, but the words the reviewer used to describe the sound didn't have any real meaning for me. So in my experience, and I admit this is from my perspective, I have to actually hear something for myself to kind of understand

what people are getting at. I don't think I could adequately describe what it means when a sound is warm, for example, but I know it when I hear it, so it creates a certain feeling, and that's where perception is coming in, right. So the collection of components you gather will determine the range of tones and volume that you can get out of your sound system, and high fidelity systems typically have several controls you can tweak to play with the output to get it just the way

you want it. It might be that you know, out of the box it doesn't sound that great, but then you spend some time tweaking levels. Maybe you change how much base is coming through to the speakers, how much

of the troubles coming through. You might have have to deal with the balance slightly because maybe you've set up a listening environment where let's say you've got a couch set up, and your couch is just slightly closer to the left speakers than to the right speakers, and so with the balance, you tweak it just a bit so that the right speakers get a little more juice to make up for the fact that they're a little further

away from you. Tiny things like this do matter, especially if you're trying to recreate the feeling that you were there when something was being recorded. A lot of people talk about orchestral recordings because with a really good orchestral recording in stereo, you get the sensation that you are in the middle of the orchestra that you can hear the you can hear the position of the instruments like they sound like they are ahead of you, into your right or off to the left or whatever when you

have it set up really well. But that requires putting in that work right, and a lot of Hi fi systems have tons of different controls so that you can manage this down at a micro level in order to get exactly the experience you one out of it. And when you do hit upon an experience that appeals to you, it can be magical, like it can feel amazing to experience music at that level. It's transcendent in some cases. But keep in mind that if it feels transcendent to you,

it doesn't necessarily translate like that to someone else. Right. That's why I go back to saying there's no universal perfect sound system out there. Uh. There are lots of really expensive systems and components out there. Some of them are very very good. They have a very high build quality, They have tried and true circuitry that reduces the level

of distortion and noise that get introduced to a signal. Uh. There are speaker systems that are known to be able to replicate sounds faithfully and with minimum distortion, even at high volume. But there are plenty of them out there that are overhyped considering what they're capable of. I mean, I took a quick peek online just to find, you know, what some of the most expensive speaker systems were, and I found some that were over a million dollars just

for the speakers, that's without anything else. And I feel pretty confident to say that I personally would be unable to tell the difference in quality between a million dollars of speakers and a two thousand dollars set of speakers, maybe even less. And that's me, like, that's that's because of my capabilities and my limitations. I also will admit that there could be people out there who could be

able to tell the difference. I don't know that it would be such a dramatic difference that you'd say, oh, it's night and day um. And I do think that if we were to do a lot of double blind tests with some of these components, you would find that most people would not be able to tell significant differences, assuming that each system was set up with comparable settings.

And by that, I mean like if you had the two thousand dollars set of speakers set up, but you turn the base way down for those, and you didn't do that for the million dollars, says speakers. Of course there'd be a more perceptible difference. You have to make sure that everything else is as equal as it can be, and then test to see if there's a perceptible difference. And I don't think, especially at the high high end,

that you come across that much. Anyway, A true audio file seeks out the system and settings then most closely matches their perception of acoustic perfection. This is also a point of debate in the audio file world. I mentioned in San Sui that you know, you have amplifiers out there that still work with vacuum tubes, and you've got amplifiers that work with solid state transistors, And there are

proponents in both camps. There are some who say the acoustic amplifiers are really the best because they create a round, warm sound. There are others who say no transistor based amplifiers are best because they are the most accurate in representing the original sounds signal. Right, you you get the most true copy or boosted copy of the original signal with transistor based amplifiers, and this debate goes back and forth, and I think it really just comes down to your

own personal preference. And again me, I'm simple. I'm a plebium. I love a good sound system, but I have so far resisted the sirens all to become obsessed and to dive into the world of high end audio. It's not to say that I won't ever do it. I think as far as hobbies go, it's one that I would probably find a lot of pleasure in, assuming that I wasn't, you know, spending an irresponsible amount of money to pursue it, which is a big assumption because again, some of these

components get into like tens of thousands of dollars. I can't ever imagine spending money on a sound system, you know, at that level. But um, you know, I I could see myself getting kind of into this hobby. I just worry that there is no kind of I feel like once you start, it starts to pull you in, kind of like tattoos. I got one, said that was it, and none. I've got two more after that, and I keep thinking about getting another one. So I already know

that pathway would lead me to a dangerous place. But anyway, I thought it was important to talk about because it's not that the audio files are delusional or anything like that. It's that it's difficult to talk about an experience so subjective as the perfect listening experience and then pourt that over into a discussion about what technical equipment allows you to achieve that, because it's two different things. It's almost like trying to make an art a science or vice versa.

And that I think is where a lot of the frustration for me comes in when I look into things like the audio file world. But that's me. I thought that would be great for a tech Stuff tidbit. There's another long tidbit episode. Hope you enjoyed it. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me. You can do so on Twitter the handle for the show's tech Stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again

really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.