Generalized Statements: What's held up and what's fell flat?

General Discvssions & Theory/Vnderstanding
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We all hear a lot of overgeneralized statements throughout our audio experience, what are ones you have found to be accurate, and what ones have been disproven for you? If you can share an experience to go along with that it would be pretty neat.

To start a few myself, one I commonly see all the time is the idea of tube amps having “tube sound” and always being described as “rich, warm, sloppy, non technical, lacking clarity, etc.” For me this is pretty much falls flat on it’s face for about half of the good tube amps I’ve heard. Things like the woo wa33, eddie current studio t, lta mz3, dragon inspire ha-1, hagerman tuba, etc (many more) have been cleaner and more accurate and technical than other solid state at their respective price range. It’s very possible, a fair amount of the times you might even never be able to tell they are tube lol. I’ve found that notion of “tube sound” tends to emanate from the lower end side of things, with some of the more crappy tube amps like a little dot mk2, darkvoice 336se, etc, and in that case they would be right, but move to any of the decent quality tube amps and it all falls apart.

Another one is that class a or a/b is always better better than a class d amp, which I think has really has not been the case for me after hearing some of the modern class d amps, they can sound fantastic imo (also people falsely associate class a or a/b with warmth but that’s another topic lol). I’ve really enjoyed amps from jeff rowland, mola mola, merrill, ps audio, etc. They can sound just as good if not better than some of their competing class a counterparts, the idea that one topology is always better is just foolish, it’s all down to implementation

One that has held up for me is a very simple one: “You get what you pay for.” Basically hard to argue with that after what I have heard (most of it), it’s one of the few consistent statements that has held true for me lol (although it’s unfortunate this is the case)

What are some of these that you have heard around and your experiences with them?

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You’ve covered some big ones. Another on the Class A and A/B is that it is always warm and smooth. While my experience may largely line up with that generalization, that’s more because my preferences lean a bit that way, so it’s what I’ve chosen.

Another is that balanced armatures can’t do bass and can’t sound natural. I might have at least partially agreed with that sentiment until I got the Infinity Mk2, which is all BA and has some of the most natural timbre of any IEM I’ve heard, and bass that is superior to most, if not all, dynamic driver sets I’ve heard.

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The idea that spending more $$$$ on audio gear (dacs/amps/headphones etc.) has diminishing returns in what you get back in terms of performance. This is usually spoken about as in getting a 1% increase if you upgrade and assuming you are at a 99% max possible discernable quality difference already. It’s incredibly stupid to attach a percentage to technical performance and apply it to literally every product you’ve never heard and even the choice of such a percentage (1% difference) is hyperbole used only to say ‘something more expensive is never worth it’.

In my experience anytime I’ve ever upgraded any of my dacs or amps there are always sizable differences that can be heard through any of my headphones and articulated in writing. 1% would imply the difference is almost undiscernable or placebo, and I’ve just never encountered such a thing. I hate this statement because it shuts down possible gains in enjoyment for people who fall for it.

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To be fair the improvement in class D amps is a relatively recent thing.
Even the class A better than A/B is a gross generalization.

And we can extend the tube point to the similar R2R vs DS DAC’s sound assumptions.

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That’s true, I have heard vintage class d, and I can see how that started. But that being said, I still see it often enough where it just isn’t the case anymore and shouldn’t still be said

Yep lol

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One for me that has held up is synergy matters. Early on with more budget gear I found, albeit to a lesser extent, that this statement had merit. Moving up synergy mismatches become more and more obvious. Thankfully this was brought to my attention early on and I was given solid suggestions along the way. I feel bad when people buy a more expensive toy and it’s just a bad fit for their system. This can lead to a bad impression of an otherwise great product as well. Also unfortunate.

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To touch on what @don just said about synergy, properly mating equipment can be very important especially when playing with costlier pieces. I am also starting to really experience changes that can be discerned from carefully thought out upgrades along the entire signal chain from the wall outlets to the final cable. As your equipment increases in capabilities I find that a “tweak” here or a flat out change “there” can bring a tuning or sound change that an individual who is well experienced in their equipment/environment can hear for the better or worse based on their own preferences and sometimes so obvious that it is simply performance related.

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“These speakers are so good, they don’t need a subwoofer”

Yes, they’re good, yes they will benefit from a subwoofer.

One of the big surprises for me was how much dimension a sub can add to a system. It’s not about the bass, it’s about a sense of three dimensional space that a sub adds. Perhaps it’s because you’re actually getting bass from a third or fourth source depending on whether you go with one or two. But I’ve found that I what I miss is more of that spacial information than the actual bass when the subs go away. Yeah there’s nothing like your chest cavity resonating with certain tracks, a sub is needed for that, but I am still floored as to how much detail about the room a track was recorded in there is when you engage a well set up sub.

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Yeah synergy can make or break things and you dont ever realise it until you hear it. Good and bad synergy can also be explained with the same words too
Ex:
Radiance + Cowon Plenue S = ear melting :blush:
Radiance + R6 2020 = ear melting :grimacing:

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I think one of the most common one is bright sounding = detailed sounding. I think this is completely wrong. Bright sounding headphones for example can makes it easier for you to pick up the details, but if the details are not there to begin with, then there’s nothing to pick up. It’s very similar to pictures. Brighter pictures are often perceived as more detailed, while actually no. It simply makes it easier to see the detail, but if the detail is not there then, you simply get a bright picture.

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This is something where I can’t really understand where this misunderstanding even comes from… but I’ve noticed reviewers even do it, when I used to watch BGGAR, he seemed to do that a lot. I know most people in this hobby have had to have gotten something new and been able to say, hey, I can hear details that I didn’t notice before and not mean treble when they say that, so it’s just so weird to me.

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Talking about reviewers… I think they are quite responsible for many of the misunderstood terms.

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I guess it could just be equated to overall forwardness, whatever can push forward the most detail is more immediately impressive to some, giving the illusion that it’s more detailed than other things. Sometimes things get set aside as not as detailed than others, when in reality some can be more detailed, it’s just less forward with it’s detail.

Detail is always great, but the hard part is actually presenting said detail. If detail is presented inorganically it can be mess up an experience. This kinda leads into the misconception of some people not wanting more detail, when in reality most people would appreciate the extra detail so long as it’s presented in a convincing/organic and non offensive manner. What some people don’t like that say they don’t want a detailed headphone is something that artificially pushes everything forward or presents that detail in an offensive way (too analytical and harsh for example, they likely want to avoid things like fatigue, harshness, over forwardness, compression, etc, not detail itself). If detail is presented correctly, it’s seldom a bad thing imo

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That’s how I felt with IEMs before, but they’ve improved since then

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IEMs have indeed gotten really really good within the last 10 years, drastically improved since then and continuing to improve. They are starting to slow down a bit, so each year you aren’t getting things that completely outdid the previous years like in the past at least lol

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I guess this isn’t common in the audiophile world anymore, but I think this statement still applies generally:

Louder sounds better.

Definitely not true since our brain perceives dynamics better when we listen at lower or safer listening levels. That being said, it is still enjoyable at times.

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This statement is very spot on. Yes. The rest of your statement is also very spot on, but this is what turns many folks off.

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So I sat on this post for a while after I read it, and kept it on the back of my mind for months. I currently have a casual 2 channel setup, ran without a sub, since yeah, the 8" woofer seemed sufficient for providing adequate bass. I didn’t feel compelled to add a sub, but wanted to know what I was missing.

I finally had an opportunity to introduce a sub to my system and more importantly, the time to get aquatinted. Changed my life. Whether it be the extra bass extension, the enhanced spatial presentation, the perceived added dynamics, it was a benefits of a sub. I’m still fine tuning the sub, but I could foresee issues of excessiveness of one thing or another had I not made proper adjustments.

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One statement that is used a fair bit is something to effect of ‘this new gear is the best or better than anything else’. When in actuality it is the newness that is being heard.

It is a different listening experience than before and couple that with anticipating something new or spending money on an item and wanting to be justified in a purchase it can lead to clouding your judgement.

Examples of this would be hype train items like the GL2000, Tin P1 (insert other items from the long list :grinning: ). In cases like these it is always better to leave the initial hype die down and read about gear six months down the line to see if people are still interested. If it was your own purchase, then does it still get listened to after a few months.

That’s not to say that early listening experiences with new gear aren’t accurate but rather that there is a honeymoon period and the real test is a long marriage.

Some people are very good at seeing past this initial phase and providing critical feedback, it’s just something to take with a grain of salt.

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Another example would be if you are running older gear, and you feel the need to “upgrade” to newer gear. Sometimes people even willingly downgrade or sidegrade just because something is “newer” in design compared to their older stuff. And sometimes that “newer” design isn’t better lol (example might be having a 500 buck dac from 2010 like let’s say an emotiva xda-1, and then feeling like it’s old so they grab something like a d90 or something and end up worse off than they started lol). Audio has certainly improved over the years, but things move much more slowly than people realize, a lot of the older gear still holds up quite well (or it doesn’t, depends on piece at hand)

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