I've read through this thread with interest, and I fully agree with the sentiments expressed about manufacturers' marketing campaigns being fuelled by the "independent" reviews published by the plethora of magazines. The sad reality is that both the manufacturers and the magazines are trying to sustain their businesses and this is most easily achieved by promoting the concept that this year's product is much better than last year's, and correspondingly that this month's magazine has something brand-new to say.
I have seen the argument advanced that the Wall Street crash of 1929 was at least partially induced by Henry Ford having managed to sell his rugged & user repairable Model T to all possible consumers, including many of his own workers who he remunerated relatively generously (for a capitalist) using some of the economy of scale cost savings derived from his revolutionary production line process to fund their higher wages. Therefore he ultimately ran out of new customers and his revenue stream. Manufacturers have now long learned this lesson, and we now have "planned obsolescence" as a design requirement. Nevertheless, to continue the car analogy briefly, each year each model will incorporate changes of some kind, many of them useless & some of them plain stupid (like electronic handbrakes!). As in many fields, once you manage to penetrate the bs, there is an 80/20 rule at work which means that to achieve any meaningful/audible improvement will require an ever-increasing level of design sophistication & quality control effort in production meaning £££'s being spent in accordance with the law of diminishing returns. Having said all that, I wish my music system to operate in order to suspend my disbelief that I am listening to sophisticated electronics and fancy transducers when I want to think that I am listening to music. Ultimately there must be a subjective element to this, and indeed a personal one, depending upon which aspects of a real musical performance one feels most important: enjoying music is after all an emotional experience. I myself consider that I'm getting close when a reproduction makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up - I most commonly get this response listening to exceptional vocalists, although solo piano is a good test of system to because 1. it's a difficult signal to reproduce accurately because of the initial transients to each note, from the variable hammer action of the internal mechanism of the instrument, and 2. because most of us have a pretty good idea of what a real piano played live sounds like. I usually buy components for my system second-hand whenever possible, or look for ex-demo bargains when something I want cannot easily be acquired s/h. A major reason for this is of course that I am a skin-flint, but joking aside, until you hook a piece of kit up with your other gear in your own listening room and then listen to the result intensively for a couple of weeks at least, you will not know if it improves your musical enjoyment. There are plenty of combinations of kit which don't work well together, and a rare few that have a synergistic effect. And also something that sounds good initially may induce "listening fatigue" after a longer audition. Buyers of s/h audio gear are normally simply bothered by whether it actually works at all or not, and not unduly concerned about the provenance, although there are a strange subset of "original packaging" fanatics around. My point here is that if I buy something this way, and later conclude that it does not suit my needs I can usually sell it on without losing much (if any) money. Just because something doesn't gel with my gear or ring my bell doesn't mean that someone else won't be delighted by it so I don't feel any moral conflict in this approach. Unfortunately, if everyone else followed my approach (I don't buy the magazines either) a number of manufacturers would inevitably go out of business unless they were able readily to diversify their activities into other areas. There would also eventually be a dearth of s/h kit for me to purchase so this is a short-term strategy: however, at age 62 I must accept that my life itself is rapidly assuming short-term characteristics... Like others on this site, I have an enquiring mind and am interested in how the "magic" of producing music from a bunch of boxes can be achieved and I thoroughly endorse the scientific method as the only rational way to proceed. I would note though that "science" is not actually a body of knowledge but rather a set of working hypotheses each of which can never be definitely proved but can only be definitively disproved by readily repeatable experiments the results of which disagree with the prediction of the theory. So we always need to be careful making definitive statements of the nature of "science says x, so you must be wrong" unless the specific matter in question has already been subjected to those repeated experiments which have confirmed the validity of our current hypothesis to this situation, and someone is claiming a result contrary to those experimental findings. Some working hypotheses even after being shown to be incorrect in certain aspects can still be of use in other circumstances: I believe that the USA put their men on the moon using Newton's Laws of Motion, even though they had already been long supplanted by Einstein's Theory Of Relativity. This was acceptable because the calculations were simpler (they were very short of on-board computing power) and the difference between the results which would result was insignificant in the circumstances. Einstein's theories themselves remain unproved - they simply have not yet been disproved. Equally, our latest theories about digital music reproduction are not definitively proven, and we may later reach a greater depth of understanding. Just saying... In the meantime, I'm revelling in my disbelief suspension, and kidding myself very effectively that I'm listening to great music... Dave :) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Golden Earring's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=66646 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=106914
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