It often surprises me to see people with time, money, and knowledge settling for subpar experiences that have night and day differences to me. Even at my brokest (pretty darn broke), speakers, headphones, and glasses were always worth researching and some saving up, and the difference between what I’d end up with and the average always feels like it paid off tenfold.
I’ve got a surprising number of friends/acquaintances who just don’t seem to care, though, and I am trying to understand if they just don’t experience the difference similarly or if they don’t mind. I know musicians who just continue using generation 1 airpods or the headphones included with their phone, birdwatchers who don’t care about their binoculars, people who don’t care if they could easily make their food taste better, and more examples of people who, in my opinion, could get 50% better results/experiences by putting in 1% more thought/effort.
When I’ve asked some friends about it, it sounds as much like they just don’t care as they don’t experience the difference as starkly as I do, but I have a hard time understanding that, as it’s most often an objective sensory difference. Like I experience the difference between different pairs of binoculars and speakers dramatically, and graphical analysis backs up the differences, so how could they sound/look negligibly different to others? Is it just a matter of my priorities not being others’ priorities, or do they actually experience the difference between various levels of quality as smaller than I seem to? What’s your take on both major and, at the high end, diminishing returns on higher quality sensory experiences?
I am very aware of the differences in quality but am mostly okay with bad equipment and/or bad settings. The most important thing is to be able to clearly see and hear what’s supposed to be clear and only especially incompetent or especially pretentious media doesn’t get mastered to work well on shoddy displays and/or speakers by those standards.
The one thing I absolutely cannot tolerate is HDR mode on TVs without enough of a maximum luminance to actually do HDR, so they and up looking way worse than SDR.
The idea of not caring about binocular quality is truly mystifying. Binoculars’ only job is to make things as easy to see as possible.
Do I value the better picture on a TV? Yes
Same with music. I don’t enjoy watching TV /movies using TV speakers.
Listening to music using phone speakers is not worth it at all.
Our car has an awful sound system. I swear there are frequencies simply missing, and that transforms music in ways that are impossible to miss.
Or one would think, but my spouse doesn’t care at all. I offered to go through the trouble of upgrading the entire thing – receiver, dsp, amp, speakers, adding a sub – but they said no, why bother? Almost makes me weep when some of my favorites play on the radio.
Yeah this is pretty similar to my experience. My wife supports upgrades because she knows they make a difference to me and she can actually recognize it often, but it’s clear she’d be pretty indifferent if she was making audio decisions just for her.
That said, we’ve spent about 2 years with a nice Yamaha power amp, Elac floorstanders, and SVS sub, full setup around $5k, and she really appreciates it for our focused listening now. Passive listening might as well be out of phone speakers for her, but when we put a record on over Sunday coffee, she always remarks how grateful she is that we invested in the setup.
It’s not worth it to me to improve on our car’s sound system because the stock one is fully integrated into the dash, and there’s no DIN slot to replace the head unit. It hurts to listen to music in the car, so it’s either podcasts or nothing for me. And usually, it’s nothing…
Besides, for my tastes, you can’t make a car sound good enough for me to invest much in the way of audio improvement. Maybe a head unit, some reasonably priced replacement speakers, and a small sub would be plenty (and maybe overkill) for me in a car
I’m into this, especially sound quality. I have a top-of-the-bottom/bottom-of-the-middle 5.2.4 setup for movies and listen to music on that same space as well. I have made solid progress on acoustically treating my space, and it sounds pretty good.
My wife, who has done all the A-B testing with me and understands what high quality equipment and a well-treated space brings to the table would be perfectly happy watching Netflix on her phone speaker.
I know for sure she does not hear things like I hear them. I have a couple of demo tracks I use to evaluate changes in my system, and I have described to her what I’m listening for (soundstage depth, for example), and she cannot distinguish whether or not this quality exists. So, I think one part of this is that there is something cognitive going on that she and I perceive things so differently. Another thing that I think is different between us is the way music affects us. For me, music is an emotional experience and ties deeply with my memories of events/time periods/feelings. When I hear a song, I know the artist, facts about the band and its members, the name of the song, the album, and I can describe the album art. My wife, on the other hand, usually can’t remember the names of her favorite songs or who the artist is. And, like, no shade on my wife for this at all; I’m just saying we experience these things much differently, and I think that may be illustrative of the differences your seeing with other people too.
Additionally, as far as diminishing returns go, I think a lot of people do not understand the importance of acoustic treatment. You’re listening to your room, not your speakers. You can’t out-speaker a bad sounding room at any cost. If you think you want new speakers to upgrade your sound quality and have given zero thought to room acoustics, you should do a little investigation before upgrading your equipment. I think that money is better spent elsewhere first.
Once you have a good sounding space to listen, I really don’t think most people need to spend any more than 10k (at the extreme upper limit) for a pair of speakers for 2 channel listening. That said, I have been in a fantastic room with a $15k pair of Sonus Faber speakers, and I have been chasing that feeling for a couple of years now.
This mirrors my experiences exactly. It’s just hard for me to understand sometimes that people aren’t experiencing a difference that is objectively present and significant. But I guess I may miss plenty of details in other things that are significant to others. My mind goes to frame rate for certain games, where resolution feels super noticeable to me, but the difference between 40 and 60fps just doesn’t seem as massive as I see other describing it.
It’s also possible people just don’t care about those details, so they’re not primed to notice them. For example, another difference between my wife and I: she’s into sunsets, clouds, the moon, and celestial happenings. She’s constantly in awe about these things, points them out to me, and talks about them all the time. It’s cute; I love that about her. However, I really couldn’t care much less about any of it. For me, that kind of stuff happens all the time (every day, in the case of sunsets). It’s not novel or interesting to me in the same way as it is to her. We all have things we nerd out about, and I think the world would be kind of boring if we all only cared about the same stuff.
Really, my only regret about this situation is that I want to give my wife the gift of feeling like I do when I hear music and when I notice the details, and I know she wants to give me that gift of the way she feels when there’s a really cool cloud or sunset. It’s very fulfilling to share feelings like that with someone you care about, and it’s sad to me that we sometimes can’t.
Yeah that’s my biggest bummer, too, both in wanting to share the experience and wanting support in dropping some cash on a pair of headphones or something lol.
Yes I do, and a price increase of only $10 (so $30 vs $20) can make a big difference in sound quality for a pair of headphones for work (meetings and some music off Youtube). So it’s not even about hifi (at that price range, of course not), it’s about giving a shit and do a little research / testing before settling on a slightly better low end consumer product. Or, given a certain budget, maximise the quality for it, again, by doing some research beforehand, no matter what you plan to buy. But, most people are lazy.
When it comes to music, it also depends on a person’s tastes. Ariana Grande sounds the same to me weather played on Sennheiser headphones or a microwave oven.
