Discussion: Music lovers and audiophiles, network players and built-in acoustics

Our showroom on the metro station Elektrozavodskaya

In the 21st issue we are talking about a community of lovers of good sound and a couple of interesting examples of interior solutions.

[ More on the Sound Podcast ] [ Listen to this issue ]


Alina: We have been recording podcasts for a long time, we are telling people about audio equipment, various subtleties, but we have not figured out the terminology. There are music lovers, there are audiophiles. The question arises: what is the difference between them?

As I understand it, the term “audiophile” is often used in English literature, and there is no negative connotation in it. Audiophiles are people who just listen a lot. Why do we have any differences between these terms?

Timothy: There are a lot of funny stories with the English language. If the audiophile, who is meant in English, is really a very enthusiastic person, moreover, carried away not only by music, but also by technology, and the hobby merged into a single channel.

This person really does everything: he is engaged in technology, experimenting, constantly changing something, listening. Music is necessarily involved in this. Music is an inspiration for this.

In Russia, it turned out that there is a certain category of people, although, I think, in the West it is also there, maybe not so numerous, which, unfortunately, is not based on music, but on sounds, sound reproduction. They conduct experiments with equipment, with the replacement of the cable, with some kind of coasters, not with the aim of listening to music and enjoy, enjoy, enjoy the music itself, but try to find some details in the sound, which, in their opinion, should or should not should or should sound anyway.

In my opinion, this is a strange position. The task is to get that audio system from those components that will allow you to enjoy music. I came home, turned on my favorite song, and it pleases. These people, apparently, will never be pleased with anything, because there is no limit. The absolute that they are trying to achieve is not attainable. Even the most expensive system will not be able to play music the way it originally sounded in the studio. Too many variables, too many things stand in the way from the performer to the end listeners. A bunch of equipment that changes everything.

Therefore, the position that “the cymbals should sound with such an aftertone here” is nonsense. People were not physically present in the studio, they did not know how these cymbals actually sound, they were not familiar with the sound engineer and had no idea what he was up to, and whether it really should sound like that in this case. But they have their own opinion of how the system should sound, and, as a rule, this is the opinion of listening to some specific acoustics, which they consider to be standard. Then the comparison begins. These are audiophiles. These are the audiophiles that currently exist in Russia.

Alina: As they say, the main thing is high quality.

Timothy: And what is “high quality”?

Alina: This is a philosophical question.

Timothy:I now think that we answered enough to him in previous issues. Returning to the question about music lovers and audiophiles in Russian terminology. If we try to create some kind of Russian terminology that is different from the western one, in which everything is clear, an audiophile is just a well-provided music lover.

Who is a music lover in Russia? This is a man who just loves music. He doesn’t really care about any specific points, for example, he heard at the twentieth second of some kind of composition “cycle”. It is important that music gives him pleasure.

Music gives pleasure when the same, favorite song, listened for the hundredth time, still gives pleasure to goosebumps. If this turns out, then the equipment is selected normally, and the person really enjoys the music.

A music lover does not forever select equipment. If he does this, then rather he is already an audiophile, he is more immersed in technology than in music. In my opinion, the division is just that. DIY


Parts & Selection Tips

They say that Audiomania is a company that works for audiophiles. Good, but for audiophiles in the international sense, not in Russian. In Russian, rather, we work for music lovers, for those who want to listen to music. I think most of these people, because without music I can not imagine life. For audiophiles, we have a bunch of everything that will satisfy them, although, probably, an audiophile cannot be completely satisfied. Nevertheless, we have products that allow them to do their favorite thing, experiment with acoustics, change something in it, and modernize.

We have a huge number of customers who buy expensive capacitors in order to change the cheaper analogs that are in their speaker systems. Yes, we work for them, but I would say that if you look at the entire industry from above and take a "helicopter view", then there are not many audiophiles. The vast majority of people still focused on music. They collect precisely musical compositions, not technology. It is logical to divide people in this context in a similar way. Although, of course, there are hybrids.

Alina: Audiomaniac.

Timothy: Yes. Which are both one and the other, but this is an exception to the rule.

Alina: It's time to introduce a new term.

Timothy:I think it exists, you do not need to enter it. There are people who call themselves that.

Alina: And who do not work in Audiomania at the same time.

Timothy: No. By the way, we have such a title on the forum - a status that is automatically distributed when a certain number of messages is reached. We already talked about this - about people who flood in the forums. This does not apply in any way to what qualifications they have, or who they are: audiophiles, music lovers or audiophiles. However, we attribute such a characteristic.

Alina:Speaking of the site and its contents. Recently I was browsing the contents and came across network players. Is it for music lovers, is it for audio fans, or maybe it's for a narrow group of audiophiles? Why are they needed, and how to use them correctly? Who will use them more?

Timothy:Great question. Another trouble with terminology. When the first devices of this class appeared, we thought for a long time how to call them in Russian. “Streamer” is a device that receives sound from a stream from somewhere and plays it. When we say “stream”, it’s already clear that this is some kind of stream. What is a network player, it's hard to say. But we did not find a more suitable name for these devices. Although there are situations when the market is gradually shifting from one name to another. So it was with smartphones. They did not become smartphones right away.

Alina: Yes, there were different PDAs.

Timothy:Communicators were. By the way, the CCP also did not appear immediately. First called HPC. The terminology does not stabilize immediately. The class of devices is quite new for Russia, although it is quite manufactured and popular in the world. I think that the popularity of devices in Russia is not very strong due to the fact that people do not understand what it is. If you recall how the stereo system is arranged, it is clear that there are speakers to which the amplifier is connected.

And what is connected to the amplifier? Sources of music. Traditional sources are CD players, which still exist, despite the fact that there are no large stores in Moscow that sell music on CDs. Our polls show that people in bulk and most often use a CD player as a source of music.



Network Player Onkyo C-N7050

Alina:Moreover, there are already not so many devices that have a drive. If we are not talking about a technique that only plays music, but generally about something.

Timothy: I bought my last laptop and only then realized that there was nowhere to insert disks. I realized this only at that moment, when someone asked me to write several files to disk.

Alina: In principle, as a carrier of information, he is already exhausting himself.

Timothy: On the whole, yes, but a lot of discs were released. Unlike vinyl, they do not lose their relevance, they continue to be read, you can listen to them. Therefore, people who have collections of disks and more or less decent equipment lose nothing, continuing to listen to them.

Returning to network players, these are devices that allow you to play music, roughly speaking, from somewhere, but not from the media. You can, of course, stick a flash drive and play music from it, and in various formats. Now this is not a problem, network players play a huge number of formats. Now there is no war of formats that was in the early 2000s.

One of the main advantages of the network player is that it can pull sound from the web. There is, for example, a hard drive that is connected to the network with an ordinary Ethernet cable and is located on your local network. Almost everyone has a lokalka at home, at least everyone has a Wi-Fi router. “Streamer” or the network player pulls music from the network storage, from this hard drive that is connected to the network, it does not matter how.

One of the main ideas is that one streamer can be delivered in different rooms, and you can listen to different music from one, in fact, place. No need to run around with flash drives, stick them in and switch. Anywhere in the house or apartment you can listen to different music recorded once on one source.

Alina:One storage can be used simultaneously by different streamers.

Timothy: Yes. Similar devices exist for video. Oddly enough, they are more common. In the case of audio, there is a different approach to quality. Rather, it is for music lovers who value, let’s say so ...

Alina: ... of whom many have gathered in one place.

Timothy: Including, yes. Which appreciate better sound quality and convenience. Of course, all of these devices can pull sound from the Internet. There are many network stations now. Despite the fact that FM tuners are still sold, in my opinion, this class of devices is already dead. Radio has now gone into the narrow niche of motorists. I have the feeling that they only listen to the radio in the car now.

Alina: And sometimes in the form of podcasts.

Timothy: Yes. And then this process gradually recedes into the past. Wireless Internet is becoming fast, and carrying a router with you in your car, which turns the mobile network into Wi-Fi, from which you can pull podcasts in real time or the same network radio stations, is no longer difficult.

The radio is preserved, it seems to me, only for cars. At home, this radio goes on the Web, because everyone has it, and that's enough for music. No matter how super-high quality it is recorded, home Internet is almost always enough. I would say always, but there are exceptions.

Network players are very convenient devices. And as an alternative to other sources of music and sound reproduction, they are the most convenient, modern and logical at the moment. Such a hybrid can reproduce almost anything from any media and, including, on a local or global network. Very comfortable and very logical. Why aren't they massive? Most likely, because people do not ...

Alina: ... they know in general what they are.



Network player Denon HEOS Link

Timothy:Yes. By the way, such devices are often also DACs. You can connect a computer, and the device is defined as a sound card. The network player is a universal processor that can receive almost any music from almost any source in almost any way and feed it to the amplifier. It seems to me very useful, and it is really strange that they are not so super popular.

Alina: This is a great solution if there is a question of saving space and eliminating a large number of devices from the home system, on the one hand. On the other hand, it saves wires and the entire maintenance infrastructure.

Timothy:Yes. By the way, speaking about saving space, I have long wanted to talk about a very unusual solution. On the one hand, it is built-in acoustics, and on the other, it is so built-in that it is not visible at all. When we show this solution, people first experience a kind of shock, because it cannot be. Then comes the surprise. I am talking about German engineering. The company did Ceratec speaker Cerasonar .

It is built directly into the wall, which is painted over and, in fact, acoustics do not exist in the field of view. Everything is in the wall. The equipment, as it is now fashionable, is carried out in the back room, control is carried out from the iPhone, iPad, another smartphone or from a programmable remote control, which are not few now. And it turns out that we have a wall playing.

Alina:Horror!

Timothy: Yes! Unlike traditional loudspeakers, which have a fairly large back and forth, conventional conventional dynamic heads work this way. Here, rather, we can say that at every point in the speaker system there is a small speaker. That is, the stroke is small, literally 0.3 millimeters, it looks like it plays a huge number of small broadband speakers.

Alina: And they are distributed on the surface of the wall? Or is it a separate point in the wall that sounds brighter than everything around it?

Timothy:You can, of course, come up and catch on your ear where the acoustics are installed in a particular place on the wall. But when you go a certain distance, it is not entirely clear. The wall sounds. The only thing is not to be called a drawback, but small holes in the wall are needed to install a subwoofer of the same technology. As a rule, they are made in a corner, somewhere below, where they are not visible. But in this case, we also get such a good low-frequency link. Full Hi-Fi sound without any speakers.

The minimal style, which is now fashionable, was simply brought to the absolute. The equipment is hidden in the back room, completely absent in the room, the acoustics are built into the walls, and the control is always in your pocket from your smartphone. A completely unusual thing. Unfortunately, few people know about this.
Already several companies produce such speakers, they are very different. For example, Cerasonar prices cannot be called cosmic. There are different models of the order of sixty thousand rubles. At the moment, this is probably not the money to be afraid of, especially if a really serious approach is taken to repair and design.

Alina: When all this begins already at the repair stage, obviously a person can pledge certain amounts.

Timothy:I moved and came across many things that we talked about in previous podcasts. Especially the theme of the ecosystem. My wife and I argued. I specifically chose a pair of speakers that we will have, and then it turned out that this pair of speakers is absolutely not suitable for the room according to my wife. It just does not fit into the design, does not fit furniture.

Alina: Aesthetically not suitable.

Timothy: I had to negotiate with the production, so that acoustics of a different color were made specially for me, since this is our acoustics, which is done in our production. Of course, I have been waiting for her for the second month, but this is a compromise. This is a big problem, I felt it on my own skin. I want the equipment to dock not only with the ear.

Speakers should play music the way I like, they are mine. Next, the second question arises that they should also fit into the interior. In the context of the embedded solutions that we are talking about, such a problem cannot arise, since there is virtually no acoustics, it is hidden.



Built-in speakers Monitor Audio Soundframe 1 InWall

Alina: But how is it hidden? She eats up some useful space, thickens the wall?

Timothy:As a rule, interior partitions are made of drywall and with a certain empty space inside. Such speakers are only 5-7 centimeters deep, so there is no problem. A hole is cut according to the template, inserted, screwed on and then completely sealed with standard building materials in an absolutely normal way.

Alina: Is the choice of building materials somehow limited?

Timothy: No. The only thing that should not be more than 3 millimeters of coverage.

Alina: You should not lay decorative brick.

Timothy: Especially a lot just do not need to be spread. But again, in the case of the same drywall, this is not a problem, because it is smooth, you do not need to work hard on leveling.

Alina:The main thing is not to lay tiles on top.

Timothy: Yes. Where tiles are laid, that is, for bathrooms and bathrooms, there are other solutions. We have a large number of waterproof speakers or even special acoustics for a sauna, for a bath. For each application, it is better to use a specialized solution, specialized speaker systems.