Absolute Sound is Rubbish

[microstrip]

(...) The truth is much better.

+1

[Phelonious Ponk]

There is a lot about audio you refuse to acknowledge.

No substantive response. Predictable. Rather than name calling why don't you defend your position?

If you know no collusion exits why bring it up? The argument has gone from illusion, to rubbish, to lie. The question was not addressed to you. You did not make the original statement. The points you make just do not hold water.
I saw a letter in Stereophile where a reader did a statistical analysis of the often repeated claim "that Stereophile reviews were tilted toward hideously expensive products. That claim was of course unsupported by the data.
A modest product like the Dynaco St 70 sold 300,000 units. A product like the AR XA turntable remains wildly popular and a good bargain to boot. Bargains abound in the high-end. I see no problem with those who can afford expensive equipment and wish to own the very best. Moreover since they have to integrate it into their living space, there is nothing wrong with making it a fine piece of furniture also.

It remains true that the high-end press was not formed to press a particular opinion. It was formed because no opinion about any product that offended an advertiser would be tolerated by the main stream press. Solid state was embraced early on by the high-end press. Solid state Legends like David Hafler, Harmon/Kardon, Mark Levinson , Keith Johnson and Dan D'Agostino not only enjoyed critical acclaim but financial success and a loyal customer base.

Despite tremendous demand for analog the big boys were able to foster didgital on the market not because of it's superiority (It was superior in some areas), but because of market power. They simply stopped making analog. Unlike ss digital had no competitor. This put audiophiles in a difficult position. An audio manufacturer could make his own ss device or switch to tubes. No such option was available for digital malcontents. Patents and the complexity of the machines made them impossible to make and difficult to modify. It was take it or leave it. Thankfully, many left it.

The notion that measurements were abandoned in favor of "expensive club approved equipment" is not supported by the evidence.. Many inexpensive items were praised and recommended. Where the sound of of equipment could be explained by measurements it was, for the most part. If a harsh high could be explained by a peak in the frequency response it was. Like any field of endeavor some reviewers were better than others. Correlating sound to measurements is not an easy task.



Designers of the day were often interviewed to explain their design philosophies.Some heavyweights Like Richard Heyser were regulars. Moreover white papers were often published to explain general audio principles. You might want to check out the Apt/Holman preamp for example. It was a technical tour de force.

In conclusion it's easy to rewrite (revisionist?) history to suppoort your preconcieved ideas. The truth is much better.

Greg, you'll have to forgive me, but I'm not going to get past your first couple of sentences here. I gave you a substantive response. You asked "what next, conspiracy?" And I said that actually we probably already had plenty of conspiracy theories. I'm sorry you're unable to take yes for an answer. And I've called you no names. I've merely chosen to pass on untangling your prose and your logic. I do that often. I just usually don't say anything about it. Your logic may be perfectly sound. Your prose may be clear. I just can't seem to follow it. Sorry.

Tim

[NorthStar]

---I'm still waiting to jump right back in; can't find an appropriate opening, yet.

* I'm reading it all, and I enjoy a lot of all that's written and exchanges of opinions from various state-of-mind's members.
This is a very good thread, with several great points, and by ALL the members; without any exception.
- Luv the exchanges between Jack & Tim. ...I am advancing for sure in discovering their lines of thought.

_______________________

The Best Sound is from the best electronics, loudspeakers, wires, interconnects, AC power, music sources (hi res audio mediums), and the ROOM.

And that for me is the Absolute indeed; not Perfect but absolute.
... Keep working towards Improving our Sound.
The joy, the euphoria, the internal happiness of the heart & soul; are also part of that Absolute. IMO

[JackD201]

Bill (Whart) makes a good point about the aspirational aspect. The audio bigs bought companies for halo purposes as well. They also launched their own premium lines or have attempted to. How about some examples. HK bought Mark Levinson, Infinity and Lexicon and put up Proceed and Revel. Sony never does much company acquisitions but has ES and took a stab with Qualia. Sony makes high end speakers, the latest of which has been getting attention. Onkyo has Integra which by the way enlisted and co-branded with Balanced Audio Technologies for their earlier amplifiers, sister company Denon has lots of stuff under the Denon name but is sold only in Japan. The other sister Marantz has the Pearl series. Teac has Esoteric. Interesting that the automotive audio division has been mentioned. Let's talk premium options shall we? Mark Levinson is with Lexus, Bang & Olufsen is with Audi, B&W is with Jaguar, Burmester is with Porsche. Oh my. The Car industry is using the tiny insignificant performance audio sector to cast a halo.

How about the Pro companies that joined in? JBL has its premium horns. Crown took a stab with the Macro Reference class A/AB amplifier. dCs started as pro as did EMMLabs. Then there's Weiss. Tim mentioned Bryston. Check. How about companies like Westlake. I'm afraid examples show logic to be in my favor.

[Phelonious Ponk]

Your logic, Jack, is showing that there is extension across markets. Of course. There always has been, in many categories. Companies like Harman sometimes buy forward-thinking boutique companies, like Mark Levinson, for their cachet, or their technology (more cachet, frankly, Harman could develop the technology on its own). Sometimes they develop flagship products under their own brands (Mep's Yammy preamp) to develop ideas, prove a point, build their own cachet instead of buying it. I don't disagree with any of that. But none of that extrapolates to the high end being responsible for the all of the progress of solid state and digital audio since their rough beginnings in the 70s and 80s. Have they made contributions? Sure. Would the technology have been stuck in the 80s if the boutique companies had all stayed with valves and vinyl? Of course not. The DAC in my $99 Airport Express would still sound better, playing compressed files, than most of the very early CD players sounded. Or so I assume, reading reports from audiophiles on the internet. I didn't get my first CD player until the mid 90s.

Tim

[tomelex]

What I did say is that SS and digital would have progressed, and just as fast, without the Audiophile backlash. I stand by that. That's not "deriding" anyone, it's simply facing the fact that the high-end market is tiny. In the consumer electronics category, in which 2-channel audio was dominant in the 70s and 80s, it is not significant. It wasn't then and is even less so now. It doen't have much influence beyond its own insulated little world and it doesn't have a monopoly on music lovers who are willing to pay for quality.

That's all I said,

Tim

I agree. I dont know how but folks who love a hobby begin to think the world revolves around it. Look, the fact is that audio high end companies don't fabricate transistors, tubes, integrated circuits, ad and da convertors or even create standards like RIAA for LP or NAB for tape or CD standards or nothing, nothing. Highe end companies take what some audiophiles refer to as midfi or low fi companies stuff and put it in a fancy box. Heard of Jef Rowland?

Or how about all this class D digital amp stuff...that did not come from the high end, that came from the low end folks. High end, as often the case, is behind the power curve in most things.

Yeah, some high end companies in the world of transducers actually make their own transducers but most buy their speaker from someone else and geuss what, put them in a fancy box.

The high end does not drive the midfi or lowfi, its the other way around.

How about this, so you got a high end amp that has a measured THD (thats all distortions out to atleast the 5th or more) of say 0.05%, well, congratulations, you have a 11bit accuracy system, oh yeah, forgot, cd is 16 bit..thats 0.0015%....now how is high end driving industry?

Actually, the analog and digital world are driven by industry, where specifications and performance, objective performance, are used to differentiate products, and thus we get better and better ad and da convertors , dacs, etc. Not because some small market of users of hand me down components somehow leads the way...(again, I make an exception in the area of transducers)...

hell, high end audio even decries pro audio, and guess what, pro audio always has the better stuff, and pass their degraded source material on down to the consumer via LP or CD or 8-track, compact cassette, etc.
For example, the pro industry is running stuff at 24 bits, and have circuitry to capture that properly, ie 0.000005% or so THD, and the chips they use, for example the LM4562 or the LME49990 are chips audiophiles claim sound "sterile".

I suppose wine drinkers think the world revolves around grapes, and watch afficonados around watch companies, etc. I guess one can lose sight of the forest for the trees.

What high end does, and to this day, is obsess over details, and when they hear for example that a capacitor has a thing called leakage, or that there are more purer types of solder or whatever, they jump on that as an "audible" defect, and then the high end industry now uses this better solder stuff (but not all high enders do this) and so audiophiles start thinking they are driving the buss. No, what they are driving is an obsession for reducing distortions that come to their knowledge, and in that area I agree that in some instances there is leadership, but the stuff is not unkown to industry, for example vibrations control, quantization error, transmission of electrical fields, RFI/EMI, blah blah.

And where was this less quality capacitor, or solder, well, dag nabbit, right there in the latest "reference" gear from the high end, until a light was shown on them..


Tom

[JackD201]

First of all, I said backlash not audiophile backlash. That was Tim's take.

I totally disagree that the mid and lo-fi drive the "high-end". Let's travel back in time folks. Radio, Gramophones (LPs), Television, Compact Cassette, VHS, CD, DVD each started as niche premium products that made it successfully to the mass market. How about some that didn't as successfully so kept their niche status then? Let's try the Phonograph cylinder, Tape, Laser Disc, Betamax, DAT, DCC, DVD-A, Minidisc, SACD. Niche because the market is still small, premium because the small size imposes the higher fixed costs that must be passed on to the consumer.

By the time Tim had migrated to CD, prices had already dropped considerably. I know because I waited for CD prices to drop as a college student on a tight budget in the same time frame. What always happens after a device gains traction (not penetration) is stratification. Here we see Sony and Philips cashing in on the licenses and we see the entry of the different chip makers and transport makers getting on board seeing the potential for growth, each one trying to corner one or more of the strata. The cycle starts all over again because now these OEM suppliers introduce their own halo products, the development of which trickles down to their bread and butter devices or drop down the totem pole as they are superseded by the next halo/ top of the line. Smart since this spreads out the tooling and design costs for that model allowing prices to gradually drop. The hi-end and DIY industries are the takers for the halo chips and transports in this case. It is the same for transistors, drivers, caps, wiring, resistors, connectors etcetera. The clientele is demanding as they should be and typically have no qualms about making their dissatisfaction known. Talk about perfect subjects for an FGD! On a side note, this is where the CE differs in some large degree with the automotive industry. The reliance on third party manufacturers and suppliers for core components. I could go into the Japanese industrialization model and how this differed from the european one but please oh please, it's a nice sunny Saturday.

Pretty hard to connect the dots on all this but I hope I've been able to connect at least a few of them.

[Phelonious Ponk]

It's 4:25 am here. The sun isn't up yet.

Tim

[MylesBAstor]

Isn't it time to put this thread out of its misery? It jumped the shark long ago.

[microstrip]

Isn't it time to put this thread out of its misery? It jumped the shark long ago.

Myles,
Perhaps just starting a new thread with a decent tittle to follow-up this debate would be a good move. Moderators could move the following lines to it.

I find curious that the same people who applause enthusiastically those who claim there was no audible audio improvement in electronics in the last twenty years, except for the audiophile imagination that has been perfecting, are now debating who was really pushing the improvements.

Perhaps if we would first debate on what were the real improvements we would arrive somewhere.

IMHO, the great improvement in audio has been in a successive removing of the euphoric layers, keeping the musicality of sound reproduction. Most of the time, accurate sound resulted in a dry, non involving sound. We have today great equipment that manages to have a good balance between accurate and musical.

One other aspect that that the industry looks is for predictability. Their aim is to create a good sound, but not only in shop showrooms. They want to create a good sound in typical listening conditions of consumers. They want to replicate part of what the high-end people have shown them that is possible to get at a lower cost in a reliable way.

The debate is not easy. Proper research should be carried reading or listening to existing recorded documentation and analyzing it . Unhappily all existing records are a mix of technical achievements and marketing and it is not easy to separate what was cause and what was consequence.