Yes, but that was my question - how do we establish what attributes should be paid for - you might value after sales more than I, I might give weight to something else - the RRP factors in so many attributes. And like you said, stats are very low. So with the information system broken, there is no way to establish value (unless one has heard it and compared, everything else is just an attempt to mitigate the inefficiency of a proper valuation). The best you can do is go to a well distributed well reviewed brand to the max you can pay, and hope it sounds good.
I do that for movies. I take the maximum star ratings, and watch the films, hoping they will be good. If the movie is not good I walk out in 45 mins, sometimes it is good and I stay. By focusing on ratings, I am increasing the probablity of a good hit. And the movie market is much more efficient. Hifi shopping is more similar to restaurant shopping, unfortunately.
Hey Bonzo,
I think this blurs the lines more than it does clarify things, especially in terms of length of time a given experience is expected to produce results.
And despite the fact that movies, restaurant meals and hifi components all require a vision from their (co)creators to come into existence, and all are subject to reviews from various pundits, there’s too little crossover to be meaningful.
Once a movie is released it is almost never re-created. There may be a director’s cut, an extended version, or a re-release in which it is digitally remastered either for posterity and/or a new format, but the consumer is only ever asked to give two or three hours of their time in investment relative to whatever price they paid. That is, it’s a relatively hermetic experience, in which the consumer has pretty much zero say on how the product is produced and consumed - whatever makes it to the theatre or Blu-ray is final. No matter what you thought of the movie, it’s not going to be changing anytime soon. There are no come backs, but then again, you don’t have to ever watch it again either.
A dish served by a restaurant is constantly re-created from scratch. The variables inherent in cuisine are much, much more volatile, not limited to quality of produce, skill of the chefs and time to table. The dish you raved about last year that sucked last night? That’s fine-dining for you. Where this differs from the movie experience is that you’re given a real-time level of interaction with the process. Didn’t like it? Say something to the maître d’. Ask for your dish to be re-created again. Still didn’t like it? Maybe the scallops weren’t plentiful this year because a weird algae took out half the population. It’s vary rare for any fine-dining establishment to want to serve sub-standard food, especially if they have a reputation to uphold, and especially if that reputation is gilded with Michelin stars. Get to the end of the night and you’re still unhappy? Chances are you won’t be paying full price, and hey, there are plenty of other restaurants vying for your attention. It was just one meal, you need never go back, and you can write a snarky hate-filled review on TripAdvisor to make yourself feel better.
In this regard, both the above are ultimately subjugated to the taste of the consumer, and as ephemeral experiences that are soon over tend not to be valued in the same way as consumer goods.
A hifi component is infinitely more complicated than either of the above two experience because not only is a not an ephemeral event in the way a movie or a meal is, it’s subjected to variables completely outside its creator's control (music choice and system/room) and its ultimate performance "modified" by the user's taste/skills in system integration. And because it’s an electro-mechanical component requiring a level of long-term investment, ownership - not listening - becomes the defining variable. I first heard about the Tenor 75 via Mike’s system thread on Audiogon maybe 10 years ago (maybe longer). It took all of three years of being an interested bystander to conclude I would not be seeking them out for myself. Because of the sound? Because of the price? No, because of the reported ownership experience.
I can walk out of a movie or turn it off and it costs me whatever I paid to watch it (or simply my time if streaming on Netflix); I can walk out of a restaurant having negotiated the price of my meal and simply go to McDonalds for something more consistent. Hey, it was only one night, right?
But with a piece of hifi gear the expectation is one of longer-term value. Duration of experience comes into play. Sound is only one and possibly the most easily misleading variable to consider. It’s one thing to go from room to room and hear component X in system Y and decide it’s amazing - it’s entirely another thing to own component X in system Z - especially when system Z is your system and component X was purchased using your money. And when it starts to misbehave as electro-mechanical things are sometimes want to do irrespective of their providence (or simply doesn’t perform relative to expectation) how amazing it sounded in system Y is really irrelevant. So you experiment with footers and cables and racks and jars filled with pebbles. The investment of time in optimising component X for your particular system costs time, effort and often, further expenditure. Skin in the game really kicks in. Of all the factors involved in selecting a hifi component, personally, for me, length of time results can be consistently reproduced is probably one of the more important, if not the most.
Nassim Taleb has a heuristic in that he only ever consumes beverages over a thousand years old - wine, water and coffee. Why? Because history has intricately detailed the long-term effects of over-consumption (and a thousand years is a long time and a lot of lifetimes). So while ratings in-and-of-themselves may help determine sonic choices relative to preference, they almost never shed light on longer-term effects, in the same way the fact that Red Bull gives you wings but doesn’t shed light on the longer-term effects of drinking it every day. (It’s probably agonising death, but that’s a guess.)