Home Theater Geek 434 Transcript
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00:00 - Scott Wilkinson (Host)
On this episode of Home Theater Geeks. I talk about an interesting blind test to see if people can hear the difference between a tune played on a $500,000 turntable and a $78 turntable. You don't want to miss this. Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is TWIT. Hey there, scott Wilkinson. Here the home theater geek.
00:41
I recently ran across a very interesting thread on AVS Forum. It's a couple of years old now but in it the poster, a guy by the name of M Zilch, his AVS Forum username posted a couple of audio files and invited people to download them and to see if they could tell the difference or identify which one was recorded from a $500,000 turntable versus a $78 turntable. We put the link to the thread in the show notes. We put the link to the thread in the show notes. This AVS member, m Zilch, started with a 2496 digital recording of the song 50 Ways to Leave your Lover from Paul Simon's album Still Crazy After All these Years. Still crazy after all these years. The file was provided by Michael Fremer, the editor of Analog Planet and a legend in the turntable and vinyl world. Michael had digitized three different versions of this recording, all played on this $500,000 plus turntable from a company called TechDAS, and the model is the Air Force Zero, and he invited his readers to do a blind listening to see if they could discern which version was which. One of them was a high-end audio file pressing of the recording, and one of them was the regular release of the LP. Now the Air Force Zero starts at $450,000 and goes way up from there based on the options that you choose for it, but in any event, it's ridiculously expensive. Now this exercise inspired M Zilch to invite AVS Forum members to do a different blind test, listening to one of those files that Michael had put on his website, analog Planet. One of those files that Michael had put on his website, analog Planet, and one that M Zilch made of the same track using his Acoustic Research ARXA turntable, which cost $78 in the 1960s. It's equivalent to about $600 today, but that's what it cost when it first came out. M Zilch listened to Michael's three files and chose the one that he thought sounded the closest to the 2017 LP version that he had. He then digitized that track using the ARXA turntable and matched its level to the Fremer file as best he could. This is important because if the two files were not at the same level, then your determination of which was, which could very well be biased.
04:06
We have a graphic here that compares the two turntables in terms of size. As you can see, the Air Force Zero is tremendous compared to the AR-XA. And we also have a comparison of the entire recording system that Michael used on his file and M Zilch used on his. Now, as you can see, he used Michael used the TechDAS Air Force Zero with the tungsten platter, which is $500,000. He used a $13,000 cartridge and a $53,000 plus tone arm and a really expensive preamp and a switcher and an AD converter and, by the end of it, all of all this equipment that he put together, the total cost of that system is $721,000. As opposed to M Zilch, who used an ARXA, a $99 cartridge, the supplied tone arm with the XA, the XA, a preamp from a Yamaha AV receiver, a Behringer USB interface, monoprice cables. Basically, you know he didn't use anything fancy at all. The total cost of his system $587. The difference being $720, 756 dollars. Holy smokes, wow. And he.
05:56
So he put these two files up, the one from michael fremer and the one that he recorded, for 720 000 plus less dollars, and he, he put those files on on avs in this thread and he said okay, download them, listen to them, tell me which one you think is the Air Force One, air Force Zero? Pretty interesting question. And the result he got is shown here and, as you can see, he flipped a coin to determine which was A and which was B. He really flipped a coin, so he'd wanted to be completely random about that. Turntable A got 58.3% of the votes saying that's the Air Force Zero, whereas Turntable B got 41.7% of the votes. Notice, he got 60 votes altogether.
06:47
So this is not a scientific test. I did something similar in a different realm on AVS as well, but let's talk about this one. So the majority of people thought turntable A was the half a million dollar turntable. It wasn't. It was the ARXA, the $78 turntable.
07:11
Oh man, now granted, as I said, this is not a scientific test by any means. It depends on the system used to play the file back. You know, did you play it on your crappy computer speakers? Did you play it on your crappy computer speakers? Did you play it on your really nice stereo system? And other factors as well. But it's really interesting and it supports my contention that you don't have to spend astronomical amounts of money to get good sound. To get good sound Now, the AR-XA has been lauded as a really fine-sounding turntable, especially for the money.
07:50
Even Michael Fremmer said so. But you don't need to spend good money tons of money, I should say to get good sound. That 500,000, half a million, more than half a million, three quarters of a million dollars is really unnecessary in the vast majority of cases. And who could afford it anyway? Only the top 0, 0, 1% could afford that anyway and you don't really need it. At least that's according to this grantedly unscientific test. But I thought it was interesting and I thought I'd share it with you. So I hope you found it as interesting as I do. Now, if you have a question for me, you can send it along to htg at twittv. I love answering questions on this show and I answer as many as I can. And, as always, we thank you for your support of the TWIT Network with your membership in Club TWIT. Until next time, geek out.
