Scott Dolan

No kidding. Snyder is second only to Jones when it comes to an egomaniacal owner clueless about the game of football. He just tends to be a little more hands off than Jerry. If they don't have someone come in and mentor RGIII with his mechanics this off season, that team could be in the toilet for many years to come. I know he still favors that knee, but his mechanics this season made him look like Troy Aikmann last season.

And that's the crux of the problem. Jerry will never have a good HC ever again, because the good ones won't put up with his bullshit. I'm still shocked to this day that Parcells coached a single game for him, but wasn't surprised at how short-lived his tenure was. Jerry Jones loves one thing, and one thing only: Jerry Jones. And if you don't also love Jerry Jones you are disposable. He has taken over the role of the neo Al Davis quite competently. And that's a shame. He builds a billion dollar monument to himself and puts the most infuriatingly incompetent team on the field to fill the stands. The cat simply makes no sense. He didn't avoid it!! I know. How pathetic was that?

I agree with that 100%, Mr. Russell. It's one of the reasons why I've stuck with mid-fi rigs throughout the years. I just don't believe in spending more than $5K on one. To me, the returns you get from $10,000 rig over one that is $5,000 simply doesn't justify the extra dollars. Now folks like Kevin and Lon draw that line a little higher up, and that's cool because I know they both have great rigs that do indeed sound better than mine, and I'd love to hear both. And would do so with a huge grin on my face. Everyone has to decide for themselves when to say when.

Jim, you do realize that the next time you add anything to the conversation it will be the first, right? That's two completely off-topic posts so far. And Paul, I'll gladly accept your unnecessary pejorative of "prophet" as long as I can prevent some con artist from making a profit. And I never said to not get new speaker wires. All I've been saying is that people need to be aware of where the point of diminished returns lies. Those, including Kevin, who recommended Blue Jeans Cables are steering you in the right direction. I have the utmost respect for them and budget hi-end companies like Emotiva who aren't looking to scam buyers by offering over-priced nonsense. They at least have the integrity to tell you the truth, rather than con you for profit. Copper and silver can only do so much when it comes to carrying electrical signals. There are no magical formulas to improve on that.

Actually, yes there is. Having been that newbie once, I wish the level-headed and informed had spoken up over the flock of true believers who weren't informing so much as indoctrinating. Which is exactly what I saw earlier in this thread.

Well, I think the biggest problem is that the results have been in for a very long time. If people haven't studied them and gained any insight at this point, it simply isn't going to happen. The great thing about science is it is studied, corrected, peer-reviewed, and then established. Simply saying you can hear things that don't exist, well, isn't any of those things. And they lead to the unwitting who are dipping their toes into the water for the first time to spend absurd amounts of money on unnecessary products. Like $XXX+ speaker cable and absurd power cable replacements. All that really remains at this point is to speak up whenever you see snake oil being peddled. The true believers can have their perceived audio bliss, and the skeptics can have more money in their bank accounts.

Pardon me, Lon, but the only one here claiming superiority of any kind is you claiming you can perceive things that others can't with your bionic hearing. Science and audiophiles who have participated in double blind testing for decades prove your assertions wrong, but Super Lon says NO! But, as with believing in God, your faith-based proclamations cannot be "disproven". So congrats to you and your golden ears. Though, you'd think with the money you've spent that if you really believed everything you're saying is true you wouldn't be riddled with such a persecution complex.

Kinda snarky, but I got a kick out of this. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Audio_woo

I wish we all lived within spitting distance because I'd put up $100 if you could pick out your speaker cables over mine in a double blind using your own rigs. Let's just say I'd be leaving my checkbook at home. The one thing I do kinda dig, though, is the rising number of skeptics in the audiophile community. Nice to see folks coming to their senses. Man, I was raised in a Christian household, I had enough of that garbage as a kid.

Whatever you've convinced yourself of is just fine with me. It's when you make assertions like: "I think the key was having electronics and speakers that had the capacity to make fine distinctions. For a mid-fi system, that ability to resolve sounds is much less, and speaker wires are less critical." That's when you leave me no other choice than to call bullshit. If there is an appreciable difference in changing out wiring, it happens across the board. Not just in higher end components. If you put racing fuel in a Farrari, it will make a difference in performance. Conversely, if you put racing fuel in a Honda Civic, there will also be an increase in performance. Statements like the one I quoted are where audio snobbery get the better of folks. "I drive a Ferrari and you drive a Civic. Naturally, racing fuel will have a more pronounced effect in my car, and very little in yours." Sorry, brother. It simply doesn't work that way. In the audio world you can run into diminishing returns very, very quickly. There are cutoff points to everything. It's perfectly natural for any of us to say, "this is better because I paid a lot of money for it". I have no real problem with that just as long as the person saying it fully comprehends that is a faith-based statement. If you pay $1000 dollars for speaker cables, you're convinced before you even listen to them that they are superior. If you weren't, you wouldn't have paid that kind of money for them. As the saying goes, the most important employee for a company that manufactures speaker cable is the head of the marketing department.

Good lord, don't say that! I've ripped more than 22,000 files! I'm using XLD on a Macbook with an external disc drive. Widely recommended. Should be OK. It might just be my ears. The sound initially wasn't worse, it was just different. I'm happier with it now that JRiver has replaced Replay Gain with their own system. In fact I can't tell the difference. Ah, OK. Could just be power of suggestion as I've been talking about in the speaker wire thread. As humans we possess a maddening ability to fool ourselves into hearing differences that do not exist. Hey, I've been guilty of it myself. The important part is that you're enjoying what you're listening to. I don't know if you have any direct suppliers in your country, but if you do And they have 30 day return policies, I would highly recommend getting a nice DAC and audition it. If it doesn't make noticeable changes in your audio you can always send it back and have your money refunded. I knew one tune in that mine was a keeper. The most appreciable audio enhancement since I went from a low-fi to a mid-fi system. It was far more than an incremental improvement.

At least you're not burdened by humility. The self-delusion is troubling, but there are a ton of audiophile companies out there that really appreciate a client that does their job for them. I wonder if I can buy stock in Less Loss? http://www.lessloss.com Skin filtering power cables! A fool and his money...

No tantrum, just making it clear some folks see through your veiled insults. The one thing I've learned over the years about many in the audiophile community is how little they actually know, yet how much they pity others for not sharing in their superior intellect. At the end of the day what too many of them know is "this is really expensive, so it must be superior". And companies like Pear and AudioQuest are eternally grateful. http://www.pearcable.com/sub_products_anjou_sc.htm http://www.bestbuy.com/site/audioquest-diamond-3-3-high-speed-hdmi-cable-dark-gray-black/2383276.p?id=1218324437192

Well, even with that historically awful defense they've been in pretty much every game they've played until Romo threw a last minute INT. So, if Orton can avoid that, then why not, right?

Sorry, that's a bunch of elitist nonsense. I've heard a fair enough share of "highly resolving" rigs. The term itself is a silly self-congratulatory term audiophiles made up to validate their own decisions to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a stereo system. And they always take great pleasure offering their phony sympathy to those who didn't get fooled into spending hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on speaker cables. Most audiophiles, in my experience anyway, went straight from whatever they grew up with to hi end equipment and have no clue what lies between. I've had the good fortune to hear low, mid, and hi-fi. Not only do I know the difference, but I also know the high-minded full of shit attitude that is somewhat pervasive amongst those who take a little too much pride in their five and six figure rigs. Even though I know high-end rigs sound phenomenal, and have always enjoyed hearing them whenever I had the chance, I will always be a mid-fi guy because the bang for the buck factor exceeds the high end stuff by enormous leaps and bounds. Kevin Bresnahan summed it up perfectly earlier in this thread: "I guess it's the 4 years of college (BSEE) and almost 30 years of working in a test lab, but wires simply cannot do what some people claim. Buy better cables because they'll last longer and look better, but don't buy them to somehow improve the sound of your system. It won't." Electrical engineers, oddly enough, know far more about the capabilities of wires carrying electrical pulses than the layman does. Not to mention he's a well-established audiophile.

Hmmm, that's odd. You actually shouldn't hear any difference between the FLAC files and the CD waveform. Lossless audio is simply a zipped file. Once the codec processes the file it should be absolutely no different than the original .wav file. I wonder if the ripping software is letting you down somehow...

Fair enough, though I'm trusting the words of fellow audiophiles. Not to mention my own experiments on both my own rigs, and those of others who have much more higher end systems. There are two things I've learned over the years that are completely worthless when it comes to increasing sound quality. Speaker wire beyond the 12-16 gauge level at more than a dollar a foot, and bi-wiring. Some audiophiles will swear by both, but I've never experienced a shred of evidence to back up either.

Who said anything about being superior? Don't go strawman on me just because I'm presenting a balanced counter-argument to your beliefs. You stick with your belief, and I'll stick with the evidence that proves it's all in the mind. Perhaps the findings are incorrect, but they aren't in my experience. It's like an audiophile buddy of mine once asked me: "I've spent over ten thousand dollars on my system, why would I only put $50 speakers cables on it?!" That mindset perfectly sums up what too often ails the audiophile community.

Crisp, for some reason I can't post the link here, but Google "Think MP3 Sucks?" and read the article. Pretty impressive stuff. I almost went with the Peachtree Audio DAC they demo'd, but found equally favorable reviews for the Emotiva I ended up with a few hundred bucks less. And I'm right there with you with CD and ALAC (Apple's FLAC). The exception being anything I purchase through Emusic or iTunes. But even those sound simply wonderful through the DAC. I don't even play CDs anymore. I rip them to lossless, and stream them through my Apple TV. It's like I was saying on another site earlier, I was very skeptical concerning the difference a DAC would make, but having spent the last 72 hours with one I can now guarantee with 100% certainty that it, and not speakers, is the most crucial link in your digital audio system. My wife usually yawns and rolls her eyes when I ask if she hears a difference when I make changes to my system. She was stunned, and has said so multiple times, after the first few seconds of the first song I played after hooking up the DAC.

I'm not. Please re-read what I wrote. I want others to hear the other side of the coin from someone who is also an audio enthusiast. If I can prevent someone from blowing a massive amount of money on something that is 100% unnecessary, I will. I had a buddy at work that had recently purchased a HDTV and Blu-ray player. Well, the snake handler that helped him pick everything out (commission free, BTW) convinced him he "needed" this $95 HDMI cable so he could get the highest resolution in picture and sound. Even went through the contortions of "explaining" the degradation and signal loss he'd experience with cheaper cables. Someone else at work, who is a pretty dedicated audiophile, congratulated him on his purchase and praised him for taking the leap and springing for a high quality cable. I, OTOH, had hime bring his worthless HDMI cable over to my place where I switched it out several times with my $8 Dynex HDMI cable until he realized he'd been had. Luckily, this store had an excellent return policy and he got his money back and went to Best Buy and got the same $8 Dynex cable. I'm more concerned with making smart decisions so that you can stretch your audio budget and only spend big money on those things that are actually worth it. And only having someone tell you that $1.00 a ft speakers cables will not give you peak audio performance leads those new to the game to believe that's the case. And it isn't. So instead of having a couple hundred bucks extra to go towards their pre-amp/amp/speakers/whatever they end up with that money wrapped up in astoundingly diminished returns. jazzbo, look up speaker wire A/B/X tests on Google. Several audiophile groups from all over the world have conducted them. Please explain to me how the overwhelming majority of those tests, conducted by and tested upon fellow audiophiles, end up somewhere in the 50-60% range of accuracy.

I'm not sure how one doesn't trust science. Your only alternative is faith. Actually, it's pretty interesting that in many A/B/X tests for HDMI cables the test subjects never see any difference in picture quality, but erroneously claim to hear differences in sound quality. I learned a long, long time ago that our ears have a bizarre and innate power to conspire with our brains to lie to us. Your ears can tell you that transistor amps sound different than vacuum tube amps. This is true. (which is better is an argument for the ages. I lean tubes, personally. But I like both) Your ears can tell you that a $100 dollar turntable doesn't sound quite as good as a $1,000 turntable. True again. Your ears can tell you that your old $500 a pair Pioneer speakers do not sound anywhere near as good as your $5,000 a pair Martin Logans. True. True. True. But when they tell you $1.00 a ft speaker cables aren't "transparent" enough for your system they are lying their asses off. It's great that you can afford it, enjoy it, and allegedly hear it. I'm just concerned that others will buy into it. Chasing audio unicorns is expensive enough without over-paying for something that is completely unnecessary. Save that money and use it for things that actually do increase the sound quality. Acoustical room treatments, for example. I'm no James Randi, but having bought into way too many audiophile myths back in the day I like to provide a counterbalance when the bullshit starts to thicken.

Even this is no longer true. As long as the sampling rate is at least 256k VBR/44.100, and it is played through a standalone DAC it is all but impossible to hear the difference between a CD waveform and a MP3. I prefer lossless audio, but a properly sampled MP3 can sound just about as good. The Emotiva DAC Mrs. Claus bought me for Christmas even takes those files and puts a nice warm, round tone on them getting them as close to the tube amp and LP sound that you will get without using that exact medium and media.

And I'm happy for you. My main point was only that the mythology of speaker wires leads many to pay far more than they ever should for something they've been led to believe is superior. It's the Monster Cable syndrome, IMO. It was through their slippery advertising and infiltration into the market that folks started believing the "better speaker wire" fairy tale. And as I stated before it has now graduated to digital Toslink and HDMI cables, and leads far too many to buy the most expensive versions of each that they can afford. $1.00 per ft is more than enough for non-terminated speaker cable that will deliver peak performance. And find the absolute cheapest Toslink and HDMI cables you can. All they are delivering is packetized digital data streams which do not suffer degradation.

Here is some excellent reading. http://www.roger-russell.com/wire/wire.htm

Can you expand on that?