[Joeboy]

> Audiophile grade at least has roots in high fidelity.

Does it though? Audiophiles generally seem to eschew fidelity in favour of something that sounds subjectively nice, including the psychoacoustic effects of spending a lot of money.

Eg. they seem very fond of "warmth". If you asked me to make something sound "warm", I'd be applying some soft clipping and dampening the top end, not eliminating sources of distortion.

Edit: If you actually wanted high fidelity, you'd use studio headphones / monitors, which are designed to be "unflattering", so you can be confident you'll hear any issues when mixing / mastering. People don't normally listen for pleasure with those, because they become fatiguing after a few hours.

Choosing equipment because you like the sound is a very reasonable thing to do, but it's not the same as pursuing fidelity.

[snvzz]

There's all sorts of audiophiles out there. Some hold beliefs rooted in pseudoscience.

And some are all about accuracy and measurements.

For instance, I use Sennheiser HD600[0], which I strongly recommend, attached to Topping DX3 Pro (old model)[1], which I cannot recommend, as the v2 model shipping now is garbage[2], a consequence of a redesign to work around high fault rates. Mine is fine as problem units fail within weeks, and I've had it for years.

[0]: https://reference-audio-analyzer.pro/en/report/hp/sennheiser...

[1]: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/r...

[2]: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/m...

[fsociety]

Our ears are incredibly sensitive sensors and I think attributing warmth to soft clipping and dampening the top end is not a complete picture.

Also warmth is just a single quality. I have a pair of very accurate “cold” headphones that I prefer for music and a pair of “warm” headphones for electronic music and gaming.

Past the headphones, it is not so much warmth as it is space in the sound for me. My headphone amplifier sounds effortless and that’s the best way I can describe the quality of what I hear.

[Daishiman]

But those characteristics are based on objective facts of sound reproduction that can be quantified.

The characteristic of warmth is related to amplification of certain harmonics as well as equalization in the signal. This is fairly well understood by now.

[Drew_]

The audiophile definition of a "warm" sound signature has nothing to do with distortion and audiophile's do not "eschew fidelity" for different sound signatures.

[Joeboy]

> The audiophile definition of a "warm" sound signature

I don't really know what, if anything, that means. But if we're talking about fidelity, surely the ideal would be no sound signature? If a particular "sound signature" makes it sound "warm", surely it's decreasing the fidelity?

[Drew_]

You're lack of knowledge of this matter is very evident and you're skepticism and confusion would be very easily cleared if you made an actual honest exploration into hi-fi audio

[tonyarkles]

I'm an EE and have made an honest exploration into this topic many times, and yet still have no explanation of "warmth" beyond the addition of distortion resulting in even-ordered harmonics. Which is precisely a decrease in the SNR from input-to-output.

That might sound good! But it's a less-than-perfect reproduction of the source signal.

If there's a better explanation than what I've come across every time I've search for this, I'm all ears and honestly open to being corrected.

[SomeoneFromCA]

You've never listened to audiophile equipment have you? If apply "some soft clipping" it will sound bad, I guarantee you, no audiophile would like it.

[Joeboy]

> You've never listened to audiophile equipment have you?

You're saying that I ought to judge the merits of audiophile equipment by the subjective measure of whether I like the sound of it. Which is the metric I said audiophiles would favour.

> If apply "some soft clipping" it will sound bad

Soft clipping often sounds nice, which is why it's very commonly applied to music. You're saying that eg. the sound of a classic Vox amp is bad, which I guess you're free to believe if that's what your ears tell you, but it's certainly not an objective truth.

[SomeoneFromCA]

Because what you are describing is a simplistic picture, describing whole class of people as stupid simpletons who cannot tell low THD and low IMD audio from "soft clipping which sounds nice". If you are referring to vacuum tube amps, soft clipping is only partially the reason why they sound the way they do; in fact most of the time amps are not clipping and are outputting close to 1% of their their total power. Reasons why tube equipment sounds better/different from the solid state amps are a lot more complex than the "common wisdom" of soft clipping.