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Do I value the better picture on a TV? Yes

Same with music. I don’t enjoy watching TV /movies using TV speakers.

Listening to music using phone speakers is not worth it at all.

I’m one of those who don’t care and it annoys my friends. I can tell the difference when comparing setups side by side but when normally watching content, a lower quality doesn’t bother me unless you literally can’t read the words on the screen so anything over 720p is usually good enough. Maybe other people have different thresholds.

It’s also about priorities. If you consider portability good, then no sound system will ever beat your laptop speakers just because they are already on your laptop. I assume it’s the same for people watching Netflix on their phone.

I’m a musician. I can’t afford top tier sound!

Tbh I can live with what I’ve got at home. A garden variety setup today still sounds better than something high-end did when I was growing up. Just give me some decent channel separation and I can zone out.

Where there is still significant room for improvement is in stage sound. Why do monitors always have to sound like sh*t? It’s like bands spend all their budget on amps and PAs and whatever dregs are left over go to the monitors. And house sound. Don’t even get me started. Maybe their gear was good once (probably not) but it’s invariably seen one beer spill too many.

Audio, yes, to a certain degree. With video I don’t care that much, as long as there aren’t any details I’d miss on lower res. The resolution I use on YouTube is usually dictated by the audio quality that comes with.

Back in the 90’s when MP3 sharing via modem was common, the “normal” bitrate was 128kbit/s, and people often commented that I refused to download and save them. 160kbit/s was OK. 256kbit/s was preferred.

I wouldn’t call myself an audiophile, I just really hate it when instruments and voices sound like rusty chains being dragged across a washboard.

As I mentioned above, I’m not that picky. Possibly environmentally damage from sailing the high seas 20-25 years ago to watch myself favorite TV shows. I don’t mind pixels and visual compression artifacts that much.

Depends. It’s a mix of all the reasons you’ve mentioned, and I’m sure this will vary from person to person. For me, high fidelity audio matters only with headphones, and if I’m listening to music. I can absolutely tell there is a difference with speakers but I don’t enjoy them as much so I don’t care as much.

Similarly I’m not much of a HD4k+ person when it comes to video. I do see the difference but for the most part my brain will filter most visual noise, issues and distortion away while I’m engaged in narrative. I don’t need large TVs nor too much high resolution. PC monitors/laptops/phone screens? I want every pixel you can give me, the higher the resolution the better. Completely different experience than TV. I’m annoyed when I can see the pixels on a screen I’m working on.

I’m with you on the binoculars and microscopes. Yeah, quality does make a huge difference and I would absolutely get the best if I can afford it.

Food- I’m a lazy cook and very picky about condiments. I really enjoy most foods plainly. I don’t mind if my stir fry got a bit soggy or if I forgot to salt the roast. I’ll eat it all the same and be content with it like it had been perfect. For me to really appreciate the difference in food quality you need to add significantly more than 1% effort, so I leave that to professional chefs.

I’m into this, especially sound quality. I have a top-of-the-bottom/bottom-of-the-middle 5.2.4 setup for movies and listen to music on that same space as well. I have made solid progress on acoustically treating my space, and it sounds pretty good.

My wife, who has done all the A-B testing with me and understands what high quality equipment and a well-treated space brings to the table would be perfectly happy watching Netflix on her phone speaker.

I know for sure she does not hear things like I hear them. I have a couple of demo tracks I use to evaluate changes in my system, and I have described to her what I’m listening for (soundstage depth, for example), and she cannot distinguish whether or not this quality exists. So, I think one part of this is that there is something cognitive going on that she and I perceive things so differently. Another thing that I think is different between us is the way music affects us. For me, music is an emotional experience and ties deeply with my memories of events/time periods/feelings. When I hear a song, I know the artist, facts about the band and its members, the name of the song, the album, and I can describe the album art. My wife, on the other hand, usually can’t remember the names of her favorite songs or who the artist is. And, like, no shade on my wife for this at all; I’m just saying we experience these things much differently, and I think that may be illustrative of the differences your seeing with other people too.

Additionally, as far as diminishing returns go, I think a lot of people do not understand the importance of acoustic treatment. You’re listening to your room, not your speakers. You can’t out-speaker a bad sounding room at any cost. If you think you want new speakers to upgrade your sound quality and have given zero thought to room acoustics, you should do a little investigation before upgrading your equipment. I think that money is better spent elsewhere first.

Once you have a good sounding space to listen, I really don’t think most people need to spend any more than 10k (at the extreme upper limit) for a pair of speakers for 2 channel listening. That said, I have been in a fantastic room with a $15k pair of Sonus Faber speakers, and I have been chasing that feeling for a couple of years now.

Depends. I’m aware of the difference, but how much I care about it depends entirely on how much I like the hobby or tech. If it’s food, PCs, and clothes (as in, no cheap materials that won’t last a year) I care and will go beyond reasonable expectations to ensure that whatever I buy or cook is the best within reason. Anything else, as long as it works.

I don’t have the energy for more than that.

I like a certain level of quality when it comes to audio.

When I’m making music, I use in ear monitors from shure with a flat response because it would throw off my mixes otherwise. Same with my presonus speakers. Flat response.

But for causally watching content, its fine for me to use some bookshelf speakers or even a bluetooth speaker. Its not super important for watching content for me as long as its not total trash.

I am very aware of the differences in quality but am mostly okay with bad equipment and/or bad settings. The most important thing is to be able to clearly see and hear what’s supposed to be clear and only especially incompetent or especially pretentious media doesn’t get mastered to work well on shoddy displays and/or speakers by those standards.

The one thing I absolutely cannot tolerate is HDR mode on TVs without enough of a maximum luminance to actually do HDR, so they and up looking way worse than SDR.

The idea of not caring about binocular quality is truly mystifying. Binoculars’ only job is to make things as easy to see as possible.

I spend about 300 euros on a really high end usb DAC for my desktop. I honestly don’t hear the difference between the desktop output and the expensive DAC. But I do totally hear the difference between a decent and cheap pair of headphones. I do still like my DAC because it’s able to power basically all large headphones and it also powers my speakers, so I don’t see it as money wasted.

So I don’t value high fidelity video because I don’t see very well even with glasses, so it wouldn’t make a difference for me.

I do value high fidelity audio because:

• I am a musician and producer, although not as much as I used to
• I have ear training
• I went to recording school
• I am autistic with sensitive hearing
• I have audio and acoustical engineering as special interests
• I’m doing a master’s degree in electrical engineering where I’ve already designed audio gear for my projects
• I am teaching myself audio plugin design for fun

But I simply can’t afford high fidelity gear for every day listening. For my studio monitors, I spent as much as I could to get the best speakers I could afford so that I can be certain that what I’m hearing is an accurate representation of what I “commit to tape”. However, for walking to class or going to the market, I’m not gonna pay for expensive headphones that could get stolen, broken, or lost. It’s impractical.

My $20 Bluetooth headphones [1] are sufficient for every day carry. They sound “95% of the way there”, they don’t get in the way when I’m walking, and if I lose them, I can have an identical pair delivered to my door with a couple days. 95% is good enough for me. Actually, I could probably settle for less.

And then there’s storage. My library is already > 110GB in MP3 format, so storing it all in uncompressed formats would be unwieldy.

So in the rare cases that my listening hardware is insufficient, I’ll usually consult a software equalizer. For example, on Linux, Easy Effects allows me to apply equalizers, dynamic compression, and a bunch of other plugins in LV2 format to the PipeWire output (and input). It’s super convenient for watching YouTube college lectures with questionable microphone quality on my shitty TV speakers. Other than dynamic compression for leveling and an equalizer for frequency effects, I am typically not interested in doing anything else for intelligibility. Said differently, I am not interested in exploiting the nonlinearities in real speaker systems (other than possibly dynamic compression), so I should be able to fix any linear defects (bad frequency response) with a digital equalizer. The nonlinearities in real speaker systems are, for HiFi listening purposes [2], defects.

Also, I’m extremely skeptical of products marketed towards “audiophiles” because there’s so much marketing bullshit pseudoscience surrounding the field that all the textbooks that cover loudspeaker design and HiFi audio electronics have paragraphs warning about it as the first thing.

Like I experience the difference between different pairs of binoculars and speakers dramatically, and graphical analysis backs up the differences, so how could they sound/look negligibly different to others?

Next time you do a graphical analysis, check out the magnitudes of the differences in your graphs versus the magnitude of the Just Noticeable Difference in amplitude or frequency. We probably do experience the differences between speakers differently than others. We’re outliers.

What’s your take on both major and, at the high end, diminishing returns on higher quality sensory experiences?

For personal listening, the point of diminishing returns is basically $20 because I can’t afford shit. For listening to something I plan on sharing with others, I’d be willing to put in whatever I can afford. But frankly, I’d be just as likely to straight-up do the math and design my systems myself because I 100% don’t trust any “”“high fidelity”“” system that doesn’t come with a datasheet and frequency response.

Lastly, I do wear glasses. I typically get my glasses online because, once you have the prescription and your facial measurements, it is the same quality as the stuff you get at the big-box stores.

[1] I acknowledge that Bluetooth sucks, particularly for audio.

[2] As a metal guitarist, I’m not against speaker nonlinearity for guitar speakers, but then again, guitar speakers are really convincingly simulated by impulse responses, which are a core linear systems concept, implying that they are nearly linear devices even at the volumes they are typically played at.

Audiophile equipment is full of placebos and scams. But there’s also a lot of very real improvements. I would also say the majority of people are well before the point of diminishing returns but hey.

One big problem is that the source of your music often is the limiting factor. A lot of music sounds not so great on my nice headphones. .Likewise, the songs I really appreciate on my headphones, tend to sound like mush on shitty speakers. That doesn’t make either music bad, they know their audience but If I didn’t like much of the hifi music then I probably wouldn’t care much about my sound setup.

I think like most things there’s a balance to be had. Obsessing about the little stuff can often get in the way of enjoying it, and be a massive waste of money. But I also wear headphones for 10+hrs a day, it’s worth investing in them.

Yes and no. It depends on the circumstance and what I’m listening/watching. Audio fidelity is important to me when I listen to my vinyls, when I’m driving down the road and listening to podcasts or music, I don’t really care because the road noise is strong enough that the fidelity doesn’t really matter much. When watching TV or a movie, I do care about it being 4K and HDR, unless it’s something I’ve seen before.

I just want to say how happy I am that good sounding audio equipment and large screen TVs are relatively cheap. With a bit of research and tinkering, one can have a nice A/V setup for not much $$$. Of note, I am very impressed with the audio quality of Class D amplifiers nowadays. I was conditioned to believe that Class D would always be inferior until I tried it myself.