"Delusional Nice People" - Kessler still on a rampage

Lord knows what he'd think about me considering splashing 5 big on isolating components, and not just once
Btw, did Kessler ever feel the Caliburn was overpriced at £100k a decade ago?
No?
I think many of us did

Hot air!

He's right that you can often get amazing gear for less. That is true. But really his complaint is like so many others... "prices are too high, and should be down where I can consider buying, but probably not really buy much"

These people always forget things like, say, a company such as Schiit make only enough money to have full time employees for the wharehouse and assembly. The guys on top don't make much and only do it part time as a hobby. Fact of the matter is depressed fiat is the enemy, not the people with companies that are running as best they can, making products in markets in which they can sell.

Now if he wanted to criticise companies that are fuelled as pet projects, and flooding the very high end with pseudo gear, he might be onto something.

Is that him in the picture? He looks a little stressed out.

Good luck to those that price their stuff outrageously .. it all trickles down ..
Price doesnt seem to be an issue with those that buy in.. its not like they robbing banks to fund a hifi addiction

Looking at pics of Munich 2017 it hardly looks like the uberexpensive high end is dying...

Folsom said:

Now if he wanted to criticise companies that are fuelled as pet projects, and flooding the very high end with pseudo gear, he might be onto something.

Click to expand...

But that exactly seems part of what he does.

Talking about Schiit, here is Jason Stoddard from his book "Schiit Happened". It sounds pretty much like Ken Kessler. It is of course up to the individual readers if they agree or not:

The Audio Biz and Loss of Perspective

Okay, let’s get some stuff out of the way. In my opinion, we work in an industry with some profoundly broken corners. I’ve mentioned that Mike *) and I got out of high-end largely because we didn’t want to chase the then-new trend of “superprice audiophilia.” The price escalation for the sake of price escalation, with no new ground broken in terms of technology—that wasn’t for us.

And today, it’s a hundred times worse. People argue over $20k+ DACs. Reviews of $40k preamps are common. There are dozens of speaker models with retail prices over $100k. I was told that a “moderate price” system was $250–500k at a recent show, by a guy who said it with no trace of irony in his voice.

Let’s be clear. This is insanity.

Obsessing over a $250k system is out-and-out nuts, no matter how much you make. Period. Get out. Buy a Ferrari. Get laid. Listen to real music. Start a band. Travel the world. This is what people do when they haven’t lost perspective.

Similarly, producing products that cater to this uber-priced segment is nuts. It just fuels an additional “my price is bigger than your price,” escalation—and this escalation usually doesn’t result in pushing the limits of actual audio performance, except in a handful of cases where implementation is astoundingly challenging (I’m thinking of discrete R2R DACs, and, to a lesser extent, turntable designs.)

Yes, I’m indicting an entire sector of the industry, but that is my honest opinion.

[...]

Traditional two-channel audio has the “Buick disease.” It’s moribund, almost literally. Over 70, you lose 10% of your customers a year. Over 60, 5%. That’s basic actuarial table stuff. And you can’t make up for the loss by increasing your product costs forever. Eventually, the last 200 people who think a $120,000 DAC is a good idea will die off, and you’re done.


__________

*) he refers to the co-owner of Schiit, Mike Moffat of Theta Digital fame, one of the pioneers of digital audio

While it's a never ending story we've heard for years in the hifi world, I would agree the problem continues to get more and more extreme as the sparce, desert canyon between the ultra-exotic and high-value gear continues to expand.

I do think there are some key factors not acknowledged in the article. Most importantly, salesmen have conditioned customers and love the story of making sure every component of the system is "on par with" the most prominent components. Salesman Translation: "Why should we sell only a $10,000 preamplifier with $140,000 speakers? Give us something priced to match!" From there we get excuses to find the largest dimension hunk of high grade aluminum or copper we can find to machine into a new piece of audiophile jewelry. The related issue here are the realities boutique retailers face where the big ticket items are good ways to keep their business going, especially with some of the margins the exotic gear tempt them with while seeing the profit of 10-25 more common customers vs only one customer to take care of.

I have no issue with the accordingly high price of artfully crafted, limited production creations, and certainly not with skilled experts making money to get the best from a system. A huge chunk of what you pay for an Aston Martin is the hand craftsmanship and the feel that imparts to the final product. It would be nice to see a little more honesty and acknowledgement in what is really being offered. In the best cases it is less about the absolute technology, and much more about the attention to detail and personal touch to insure every unit out the door was something the owner of the company would be proud to own. That can certainly translate into performance gains and more likely performance guarantees.

Ken Kessler says in his article:

Increasingly of late, I find myself applauding, in every area of which I am interested and write about, the less-expensive solutions. The world is awash with sublime wines for under $20 a bottle.

Click to expand...

That is true. A few years ago I was at a business trip with my boss in California and we went for dinner at the famous Chez Panisse in Berkeley, CA. One of the best dining experiences I've had, and for each course the wine was perfectly matched. My boss who loves a good wine wrote down all the brands and year served. Looking them up later that night on the web he found that some of the wines sold at $ 15/bottle, while some were much more expensive. The restaurant clearly knew how to choose wines and to choose them well regardless of price tag.

Similarly, there are indeed great audio bargains, you just need to know how to look. But then, many audiophiles appear to reflexively going for the more expensive item.

Al M. said:

(...)
Similarly, there are indeed great audio bargains, you just need to know how to look. But then, many audiophiles appear to reflexively going for the more expensive item.

Click to expand...

Probably they are waiting that those who spend their free time ranting about high prices write down something constructive and credible about complete systems that outperform the extremely high priced ones using those fantastic bargains ...

And surely I disagree with your current favorite guru and his parochial therapist style. For me, considering that people who feel differently on this hobby are nuts and have lost perspective is just aggressive market style, intended to please those do not understand what we can get from expensive high end gear when properly used.

Al M. said:

But that exactly seems part of what he does.

Talking about Schiit, here is Jason Stoddard from his book "Schiit Happened". It sounds pretty much like Ken Kessler. It is of course up to the individual readers if they agree or not:

The Audio Biz and Loss of Perspective

Okay, let’s get some stuff out of the way. In my opinion, we work in an industry with some profoundly broken corners. I’ve mentioned that Mike *) and I got out of high-end largely because we didn’t want to chase the then-new trend of “superprice audiophilia.” The price escalation for the sake of price escalation, with no new ground broken in terms of technology—that wasn’t for us.

And today, it’s a hundred times worse. People argue over $20k+ DACs. Reviews of $40k preamps are common. There are dozens of speaker models with retail prices over $100k. I was told that a “moderate price” system was $250–500k at a recent show, by a guy who said it with no trace of irony in his voice.

Let’s be clear. This is insanity.

Obsessing over a $250k system is out-and-out nuts, no matter how much you make. Period. Get out. Buy a Ferrari. Get laid. Listen to real music. Start a band. Travel the world. This is what people do when they haven’t lost perspective.

Similarly, producing products that cater to this uber-priced segment is nuts. It just fuels an additional “my price is bigger than your price,” escalation—and this escalation usually doesn’t result in pushing the limits of actual audio performance, except in a handful of cases where implementation is astoundingly challenging (I’m thinking of discrete R2R DACs, and, to a lesser extent, turntable designs.)

Yes, I’m indicting an entire sector of the industry, but that is my honest opinion.

[...]

Traditional two-channel audio has the “Buick disease.” It’s moribund, almost literally. Over 70, you lose 10% of your customers a year. Over 60, 5%. That’s basic actuarial table stuff. And you can’t make up for the loss by increasing your product costs forever. Eventually, the last 200 people who think a $120,000 DAC is a good idea will die off, and you’re done.


__________

*) he refers to the co-owner of Schiit, Mike Moffat of Theta Digital fame, one of the pioneers of digital audio

Click to expand...

Hello Al,

We’ve already been here before, and recently, but as an addendum of sorts: Can we talk “perspective” for a moment?

If my system cost me, say, $10000, I spent more than the GDP of one-hundred and twenty six countries, and greater than the GDP of the poorest nineteen countries combined.

If I paid $2299 for an amp, or a pair of interconnects, or indeed, Schiit’s own Yggdrasil, I spent more than the GDP of the six poorest countries combined.

Kessler finds it hard to understand how manufacturers “have managed, like politicians, to convince themselves -- let alone consumers -- that a length of wire or MC cartridge can have the same price, let alone worth, as an SUV”, does he?

Then perhaps he needs to look wider than the redundant comparison above and ask why a smartphone from Apple or Samsung - the utility value of which is far superior in functionality to most other consumer goods due to its “indispensableness” to modern life and the way we communicate, navigate, organise and document our lives - comes in at so much less in retail price than, say, the Yggdrasil DAC, which only does one thing (convert zeroes and ones to an analogue signal) when a smartphone can already do that for us…?

And why are our smartphones so cheap compared to the Yggdrasil or an interconnect or a low-output MC cart, not to mention “worth more” in utility value?

Because the labour practices, ethics, environmental impact and economic devastation wrought on nations mining the basic materials and assembling the components that go into every smartphone comes at the cost of the world’s poorest (yet mineral rich) countries, in which many of the workers are not only paid between $1 and $2 a day for twelve to twenty-four hour shifts, but an estimated 40000 of them are children (1) (2) (3).

That is, my smartphone is not “worth” $600. Had the material and labour costs of what actually went into my smartphone come from ethical practices and environmentally-sustainable resources in which those who dug the cobalt out of the ground and assembled them in factories no one wants you to take photos of were paid at the US minimum wage, it would be several orders of magnitude more expensive - not because a phone would be considered a “luxury product”, but because it would be a true reflection of a world in which we acknowledge that someone’s time, effort and energy is valuable, deserved compensation that was “fair” and did not come at the expense of their exploitation.

How then should we measure a DAC, or a cartridge, or a pair of interconnect’s “worth”? By the enjoyment they bring us? Seems reasonable. But it’s very easy to enjoy something when I’m blinded to the suffering of someone else whose exploitation affords me that same enjoyment.

What then should be the variables of what constitutes “worth” when considering luxury products of limited utility value, of which our systems surely are? How about whatever it would cost to research, design, test, approve, manufacture, market and sell that product in a way that valued the time, effort and energy of every part of the process and was compensated fairly without the exploitation of those who contributed to its creation and the Earth in which those materials were taken from?

If so, then the very least I can do - given the enormous disparity of wealth I am fortunate to enjoy largely because of my gender, nationality and time of birth - is choose manufacturers whose products adhere to those values as closely as possible, and provide a level of enjoyment that comes not only from their subjective performance, but the knowledge its provenance comes via a process of lessened exploitation. And though it’s possible it may offend the world-view of Mr. Kessler and Mr. Stoddard, in many cases, that will mean paying prices many consider “insane”.

Be well my friend,

853guy


(1) UNICEF estimate, 2012, investigation into child labour practices and cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo, from which over half of all the mined cobalt in the world is extracted.

(2) Amnesty International report, 2016.

(3) BBC report into worker abuses at one of Apple’s Chinese factories and the supply chain for tin mined from the Indonesian island of Bangka.

microstrip said:

Probably they are waiting that those who spend their free time ranting about high prices write down something constructive and credible about complete systems that outperform the extremely high priced ones using those fantastic bargains ...

Click to expand...

Nobody says anything about outperforming.

And surely I disagree with your current favorite guru

Click to expand...

I don't have a guru, my friend.

For me, considering that people who feel differently on this hobby are nuts and have lost perspective is just aggressive market style, intended to please those do not understand what we can get from expensive high end gear when properly used.

Click to expand...

It's pretty obvious when you read the book that it's their honest opinion. There are better ways to justify super-expensive audio gear than to claim that their stance is "just aggressive market style".

853guy said:

If so, then the very least I can do - given the enormous disparity of wealth I am fortunate to enjoy largely because of my gender, nationality and time of birth - is choose manufacturers whose products adhere to those values as closely as possible, and provide a level of enjoyment that comes not only from their subjective performance, but the knowledge its provenance comes via a process of lessened exploitation. And though it’s possible it may offend the world-view of Mr. Kessler and Mr. Stoddard, in many cases, that will mean paying prices many consider “insane”.

Be well my friend,

853guy

Click to expand...

Hello 853guy,

While you make excellent points about exploitation that are worth considering, I don't see how hyper-expensive prices in high-end audio have anything to do with a provenance via a process of lessened exploitation. This justification seems a real stretch. There are better ways to justify some (not all) hyper-expensive high-end products. By the way, Schiit products, including the Yggdrasil, are made in the USA.

Al

PS: in order to preemptively answer a question that will inevitably come up among some readers,
here is Schiit from their website:

Q: Do you seriously make your stuff in the USA?
A: Yep!
Q: But wouldn’t it be cheaper doing it in China?
A: Maybe. But we’re not going to find out.
Q: Well, hell, all your parts are probably Chinese anyway, right?
A: Um, no. The vast majority of our parts, on a total cost basis, come from right here in the USA, from companies manufacturing their products in the USA.

Al M. said:

Nobody says anything about outperforming.

Click to expand...

Ok, consider performing as good as ...

Al M. said:

I don't have a guru, my friend.

It's pretty obvious when you read the book that it's their honest opinion. There are better ways to justify super-expensive audio gear than to claim that their stance is "just aggressive market style".

Click to expand...

Please do not reverse arguments, I never attacked their products or similar. But I deeply disagree with their opinions that you have quoted. Perhaps it is obvious to you and it is their honest opinion, but IMHO expensive gear justifies by its performance, not by mine or other people words. One must experience it to know.

microstrip said:

Please do not reverse arguments, I never attacked their products or similar.

Click to expand...

Nobody claimed that.

But I deeply disagree with their opinions that you have quoted. Perhaps it is obvious to you and it is their honest opinion, but IMHO expensive gear justifies by its performance, not by mine or other people words. One must experience it to know.

Click to expand...

Let me correct this for you:

IMHO some expensive gear justifies by its performance

Al M. said:

(...) Let me correct this for you:

IMHO some expensive gear justifies by its performance

Click to expand...

OK, surely not all, just most , we all know about it! But it does not change anything in the main argument.

microstrip said:

OK, surely not all, just most , we all know about it! But it does not change anything in the main argument.

Click to expand...

Perhaps we can agree on "most of some"

I am with Al.

Folsom said:

These people always forget things like, say, a company such as Schiit make only enough money to have full time employees for the wharehouse and assembly. The guys on top don't make much and only do it part time as a hobby. Fact of the matter is depressed fiat is the enemy, not the people with companies that are running as best they can, making products in markets in which they can sell.

Click to expand...

This is no longer true for Jason Stoddard. He sold his marketing firm and works full-time at Schiit now.

Ken is right - alot of it is bullsh$%.

The Goebel room at Munich was hilarious - the cables alone were almost 300k euros. FOR WIRE.