Have you ever regretted ABXing?, How has it changed your feelings about your stuff? Options

[BearcatSandor]

By "stuff" i mean equipment and music?

Have you ever ABXed something and found yourself not enjoying it as much as you did now that you know it's not all you thought it to be? Has the opposite ever happened to you?

I don't have the set up to ABX sound files yet (i'm a Linux user and both options seem to be dead). After participating in this forum for only a few days and reading of others experiences with 24-bit vs 16-bit music i'm now looking at my 24-bit collection of DVD-As, SACDs and 24-bit Studio Master downloads and thinking "..Damn it?" with a bit of confusion. I don't feel as secure with them anymore. I thought i had the 'best' sound i could get which is always a goal for folks like me.

Conversely, i might enjoy my redbook CDs more now as i won't be thinking "well they aren't 24-bit :"( " and i might not be hearing deficits that aren't really there.

I'm not sure how to feel about that.

I'm sure i'm not the only one here who's gone though this. Some of you started out as 'audiofools' too, right? How did you deal with this?

In a sense i'm kinda feeling "No, i don't want to look up ABX testing for loudspeakers. I waited 10 years for just the right pair to come to me and i really don't want to know that my $2.5k Anthony Gallo Acoustic Reference 3.1s are 'the same' as a pair of BestBuy specials." That's a bit of an exaggeration given how different speakers can be ...at least i think it is.

I'm uncertain. Honestly, i think i'm changing quickly and looking for support.

So how did you deal when the ABXing didn't work out how how you hoped it might?

Thanks

edit: Brought it back on-topic a bit.

This post has been edited by BearcatSandor: Nov 3 2010, 21:59

[BearcatSandor]

I appreciate all of these posts. I'm still de-programming as i think of it, and the though of taking my lossless file collection and turning them into a lossy format kinda makes me want to run for the hills. I know it's "just music" but i'm one of those people who sometimes, when i play a piece that moves me i feel like i might never have to eat again if i kept listening to it. It "feeds" me so to speak. In resturants and other public places, background music does not exist for me. It's always part of my foreground.

What if one does ABX testing and finds that MP3s at high bitrates are 'good enough'. Then one gets a different amp or moves the audio system to a different room? Then you'd have to test all over again to see if it's still good enough in the new room/with the new amp/and the dog not shedding as much this time of year.

(i assume that dog fur creates a -.005 db suck-out at 80 hz when a dog is standing a meter away from the speaker )

I always knew it was a case of diminishing returns but it is nice to know that a $20k amplifier compared to a $2k amplifier makes little to no difference, according to what i've been reading lately.

[Josh358]

(i assume that dog fur creates a -.005 db suck-out at 80 hz when a dog is standing a meter away from the speaker )

Clearly, you need a second dog so the first one doesn't unbalance the image. :-)

Seriously, I agree that it makes little sense to convert to a lossy format. For one thing, it's been reported elsewhere here that expert listeners were able to distinguish between high BR MP-3 and lossless, so there's always the possibility that, as you surmise, you'll be able to hear the difference yourself. For another, bits are cheap these days, so why bother? I still have some MP-3's that I made back in the days when they weren't, and I still listen to them, but for new files, I stick to flac.

I see that some here have given up on audiophilia entirely after discovering that they couldn't hear some things they thought they could in ABX tests. I'm not going to second guess their choices, because I think everyone has their own reasons for doing things. But from my own perspective, the pursuit of good sound is fun and rewarding, whether one can hear the difference between two amplifiers or not. So I see blind testing more as a tool than a challenge to what I like to do. Even if amplifiers do differ only in frequency response and overload characteristics, they still differ, and other components, such as loudspeakers, differ even more. So there's plenty of room for tweaking.