A Wisdom Archive on Audiophile - Objective Versus Subjective

An audiophile — literally, one who loves to hear — is a person dedicated to high-fidelity sound reproduction and achieving high-quality results in the recording and playback of music. Audiophile values may be applied at all stages of the chain — the initial audio recording, the production process, and the playback, which is usually in a home setting. High-end is commonly applied to audiophile vendors, products, and practices. There is great skepticism inside and outside the audiophile community as to whether these practic ... Including:

• Audiophile - Core values
• Audiophile - Consumer practices
• Audiophile - Professional practices
• Audiophile - Current trends
• Audiophile - Objective versus subjective
• Audiophile - Objectivists' criticisms of subjectivism in audio
• Audiophile - Subjectivists' criticisms of objectivism in audio

Read more here: » Audiophile: Encyclopedia - Audiophile

A gramophone record, (also vinyl record, phonograph record, LP record, or simply record) is an analogue sound recording medium: a flat disc rotating at a constant angular velocity, with inscribed spiral grooves in which a stylus or needle rides. Analogue audio recording onto a disc was the main technology used for the storing of recorded sound for most of the 20th century. The record, in one format or another, was the dominant musical format for 70 years. It overtook the phonograph cylinder in the fi ... Including:

• Gramophone record - Basics
• Gramophone record - Common formats
• Gramophone record - Less common formats
• Gramophone record - Structure of a typical record
• Gramophone record - Early history of the medium
• Gramophone record - History of the materials
• Gramophone record - History of the speeds
• Gramophone record - Progress and the War of the Speeds
• Gramophone record - Stereo and beyond
• Gramophone record - Other developments
• Gramophone record - The record mastering and pressing process
• Gramophone record - Recording the disc
• Gramophone record - Mass producing records
• Gramophone record - Packaging and Distribution
• Gramophone record - Record Labels
• Gramophone record - Disc limitations
• Gramophone record - Recording medium comparison
• Gramophone record - Beyond the 1990s: Records versus the digital media
• Gramophone record - Arguments about sound fidelity
• Gramophone record - Disc jockeys
• Gramophone record - Making your own records
• Gramophone record - Studios
• Gramophone record - Personal recording devices
• Gramophone record - Preservation of disc recordings

Read more here: » Gramophone record: Encyclopedia - Gramophone record

Groove recordings, first designed in the final quarter of the 19th century, held predominant sway for an impressive amount of time - just about a century. Even the technologies designed to supersede the record - Reel-to-reel tape, the 8 track and the audio cassette - could not fully kill it. Only now, in the age of the CD and the MP3 player, has the record been fully replaced on a commercial level. In spite of their obvious flaws, such as the lack of portability, the record still has enthusiastic support, and there is still a small ma ...

Read more here: » Gramophone record: Encyclopedia II - Gramophone record - Beyond the 1990s: Records versus the digital media

Audiophiles tend to hold commercial-music recording practices in low regard. Particularly in the pop-music domain, most recordings are based on the heavy use of multitrack technology, the studio dominated by a huge mixing board with as many as eighty channels, each channel operating in the digital domain and subjected to a wide variety of tonal and "effects" processing. Audiophiles believe that this complex signal chain degrades the quality of the signal and lessens the spontaneity and integrity of the musical performance. There are some pro ...

Read more here: » Audiophile: Encyclopedia II - Audiophile - Professional practices

Perhaps the clearest and most widely-accepted statement of audiophile values is due to Harry Pearson, longtime editor of The Absolute Sound: "We believe that the sound of music, unamplified, occurring in a real space is a philosophic absolute against which we may judge the performance of devices designed to reproduce music." Audiophiles widely share the belief that even the world's best music-reproduction equipmen ...

Read more here: » Audiophile: Encyclopedia II - Audiophile - Core values

Audiophiles regularly listen to music from compact discs (CDs), records, and frequency-modulation (FM) radio. Currently, CDs are the most common source of high-quality music, and thus the CD player will serve as the primary source component. A small minority of people, however, still buy and use records: turntables, tonearms, and cartridges are among the most exotic and lavish high-end audio products. The debate is particularly harsh in this area with analog proponents claiming a warmer analog sound and loss of information in the sampling pr ...

Read more here: » Audiophile: Encyclopedia II - Audiophile - Consumer practices

In terms of revenue, the high-end electronics business is now dominated by multi-channel home theater rather than high fidelity. In fact, almost every major vendor has introduced a full line of home-theater products, even those who traditionally eschewed such products. Audiophiles are interested in newer higher-bandwidth digital-recording formats such as SACD and DVD-Audio. These formats encode music at data rates of 24-bit / 96 kHz or even 192 kHz compared to 16-bit / 44.1 kHz for CDs, and thus are referred to as high-resolution audi ...

Read more here: » Audiophile: Encyclopedia II - Audiophile - Current trends