Eric Carroll wrote:
But let me ask you something: where did you buy your Tp and SBs? At a
high end audio store?
Direct from Slim.
The SB will be the mass market approach. I have been showing some
friends how to use SBs to avoid speaker cabling their new house build.
One SB per room without laying cables! At 300 per room, its cheaper
than cable pulls if the walls are up!
It is cheaper if you didn't plan ahead. I didn't when I had my house
built 25 years ago, but a few years ago I got tired and ran four plastic
conduits from the basement to the attic so I could have six Ethernet
drops in my upstairs office, and three in my daughter's room.
While dragging cable is a PITA, it is cheap, especially if you buy 1000
foot rolls and have all the punchdown and testing tools.
The Transporter (or devices like it) will replace the sources of
yesteryear in the stereo: phono, tape deck, CD player. Its simpler.
Yes, in the 80s, I had phono, tape deck, tuner, CD player, Stereo TV
tuner and other stuff in a huge rack. Now I have a Transporter sitting
on top of an integrated amp, nothing else.
The music quality, like any disruptive technology, is a side effect of
the primary market metrics.
Except that music quality was never much of a mass market, except for a
short while in the early 70s. "Hi Fi" was a hobby in the 50s. Stereo in
the 60s meant huge cabinet furniture, most of which had very low
fidelity. Until the KLH and AR "bookshelf" speakers, to get vague
quality mean a giant Bozak unit. And compared to modern speakers the
classic AR-3A was not very high fidelity.
The "all amps sound alike" theory of the late 70s, combined with disco,
really put a hurt to the popularity of stereo, it was nearly dead until
the "high end" fringe started, which didn't gain steam until the 90s.
The primary mass market today is iTunes, which are generally marginal
quality recordings of pop drivel. The majority of music is listened to
either in the car (which is a terrible place to listen to audiophile
music) or with crappy earbuds connected to an iPod.
I just don't see a mass market for quality recordings of quality
performances.
For example, the MTBF increase in 3.5 inch drives is a total side
effect of the disruptive replacement of 8" platter drives of the
mainframe days (and took a number of years to get - initially 5.25"
drives were less reliable).
I'm not sure about this analysis. I remember the 3.5 inch drives as bing
lots cheaper, which drove down their prices. One of the major push
today, away from the 3.5 inch drives and towards smaller sizes is that
smaller physical media is easier to control. Things like size of the
platters in response to thermal conditions change less, just because
there is less metal to grow. Besides, rotating memory is gonna die
soon, replaced by flash and other solid state memory. At least for the
smaller than terabyte sizes. I know this is true, because flash has been
ready to replace rotating drives for 15 years. Just that the break even
point keeps moving. :-)
Pat
--
Pat
http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimserver/slimsoftware.html
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