<story><title>History of the Nautilus loudspeaker</title><url>https://www.bowerswilkins.com/blog/products/history-of-nautilus</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>electrograv</author><text>I am surprised there aren’t more mentions here of AudioScienceReview.com&lt;p&gt;For anyone interested in buying speakers (or other audio products), it’s a fantastic resource and an &lt;i&gt;essential&lt;/i&gt; one to avoid getting ripped off with severely overpriced and underperforming products; sadly, the high fidelity speaker space is crowded with such products (many of which are borderline scams), using a ton of pseudoscientific marketing babble to push products ranging from “snake-oil” bunk, to mediocre garbage that still costs the price of an exotic car for no good reason.&lt;p&gt;If you’re curious to cut through the garbage, and learn how to achieve the best sound quality for the best price with a no-nonsense approach, AudioScienceReview is the place to go. They have the highest quality objective measurements on many speakers (that goes &lt;i&gt;far beyond&lt;/i&gt; frequency response, before you brush it off thinking that’s what I’m talking about) and tutorials on the well-established science of what makes a speaker sound better than others, and how we design and evaluate this.&lt;p&gt;It turns out you can get sound quality ~90% as good as it gets for just a few hundred dollars, and ~95% as good as it gets for a few thousand dollars (obviously just rough numbers here). Beware of speakers sold for exorbitant prices and exotic visual designs that tout how they are built, rather than what measured performance they achieve objectively.&lt;p&gt;B&amp;amp;W speakers are not bad, and I enjoyed mine very much when I had them. But there exist &lt;i&gt;far better speakers at a fraction of the cost,&lt;/i&gt; and this includes their high end (like the Nautilus).</text></comment>
<story><title>History of the Nautilus loudspeaker</title><url>https://www.bowerswilkins.com/blog/products/history-of-nautilus</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>em500</author><text>Never heard these myself, but I remember that Nautilus speakers were used in an MP3 listening test by the German c&amp;#x27;t magazine in 2000[1]. Conclusion:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; In plain language, this means that our musically trained test listeners could reliably distinguish the poorer quality MP3s at 128kbps quite accurately from either of the other higher-quality samples. But when deciding between 256 kbps encoded MP3s and the original CD, no difference could be determined, on average, for all the pieces. The testers took the 256 kbps samples for the CD just as often as they
took the original CD samples themselves.&lt;p&gt;This article made me (1) never worry about &amp;quot;lossy audio encoding&amp;quot; again and (2) ignore everyone starting about &amp;quot;better equipment&amp;quot; wrt compressed audio.&lt;p&gt;Granted, they used the cheaper Nautilus 803 rather than the 801 in the test. But they also had Sennheiser Orpheus available in the listening test.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;hydrogenaud.io&amp;#x2F;index.php?topic=27324.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;hydrogenaud.io&amp;#x2F;index.php?topic=27324.0&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>