Sennheiser PC37X randomly goes bad after disconnecting the cable ?
Greetings, Yesterday I was using my headset like normal with my macbook, just listening to music and on a call with people like usual, and the headset was perfectly fine. The stock wire that came with the headset is extremely long and yesterday it annoyed me very much that it kept getting tangled with itself, so I decided to see if the cable is replaceable. I pulled out the cable from the headset and saw the adapter, and looked online for a replacement. Upon plugging it back in, the audio sounded extremely muffled and washed out. Im not sure what I did wrong to make it mess up like that as I've always taken good care of it, ive had it for about 2 years and its always just been chilling on my desk, but anywho I thought the cable just went bad and ordered a replacement. The replacement came, and the issue is still persistant, so I am not sure what the issue is I've tried multiple different headsets and the issue is not with the port, and I also tried it with my windows laptop and...
Apr 23, 2024
This article by Nelson Pass seems to make sense:
https://www.passlabs.com/press/leaving-class
An amplifier should be transparent, neither adding to or subtracting from the signal. If it comes close (with only minor audible errors) for $1500, it's a well-designed amp. I doubt any of these amps is sonically neutral (which you'd expect at such unbelievable prices), making them poorly designed.
As for response extending well beyond 300kHz, I can only quote Michael Flanders: "All the highest notes, neither sharp nor flat -- the ear can't hear as high as that! Still, I ought to please any passing bat."
Um, what? If your utterly unfounded doubt had any basis in reality you'd be largely right, but it's absurd to make such a statement without backing it up. Care to fill us in on why you doubt they do what "you'd expect" them to do?
As both consumer and reviewer, I'm not obliged to assume any product "gets it right". "Right", in the case of amplification, is neutrality. What comes out is sonically indistinguishable from what went in.
Why would anyone -- designer or listener -- want anything else? Why would someone put a device in their system that audibly colored every recording they played?
Perhaps some listeners prefer such colorations. It's their money, so why shouldn't they choose what pleases them? Loudspeakers vary sufficiently in accuracy and character that, if one desires a certain sound (or lack thereof) one can likely find it. There's no need to sonically compromise the amplfier.
To design such a compromised amplifer, in the hope its distinctive sound would attract buyers, is not only aesthetically wrong, but morally unjustifiable.
I realize I've danced around your objection. My unproven argument is this... I suspect most Horribly Expensive amplifers were designed to prove a technical point, not necessarily have any particular sound quality.
I'm curious to hear the opinions of listeners as fussy as I am about absolute neutrality. How do current amplifiers, in all price classes, stack up in terms of neutrality?
Your other questions are good ones. I don't necessarily share your view that neutrality is the holy grail of amp design — and find it laughable to suggest that there's any moral issue with a non-neutral amp! — but there's room for both you and I to be "correct" in our preferences. In this pursuit of home sound reproduction, some seek neutrality while others pursue things that tickle their pleasure centers. Who's right and who's wrong? Yes.
Valid subjective testing (of which double-blind ABX auditioning is not a part) is hard to do correctly, so nobody bothers. "I heard the difference, so it must be there." (Hearing gross differences one day that vanished the next was what drove me out of reviewing.) The designer of a $100K amplifier is obliged to describe its sound character (if any) and give some reasonable evidence his description is valid. If he can't, then why is he designing amplifiers?
As to the question of whether a designer has some duty to describe, with evidence, the sound of his amp ... I naturally disagree. Along those lines, one of my favorite descriptions comes from right here on Massdrop: "notice every note like never before, adding a dimension of accuracy that’s usually cloaked in distortion ... warm mids ... analytically detailed highs, and fully transparent bass." Wow! So *everything* is better, if not *more* better!
I share your healthy skepticism of these über amps to a degree, Geezer. There's zero chance any of them deliver performance commensurate with their prices. If audio performance was their sole reason for being, we could go around in circles about what serves as the best indicator ... measurements or sound? That's clearly not the only reason these things are made, but my point remains that there's no basis for assuming that they don't sound great.
My attempts to get my publisher to perform long-term listening tests to (hopefully) start casting some light on the truth fell on deaf ears.
The kind of testing needed to determine the real differences between analog and digital, how much measurable distortion is actually audible, would be insanely complex and horribly expensive. So nobody does them -- they just assume.