Are some or all hifi dealers, equipment manufacturers, cable companys, or retailers conning us with over priced under performing products. Are they fooling us into thinking that the latest model/cable/stand/accessory makes a massive improvement or are we fooling ourselves. Do you enjoy your music more because of these products and think they are good value for any improvement they make , do you love the equipment more than the music or just see it as a means to an end 'ie' better more realistic music at home. I would to hear from anyone who has a view on this, including any manufacturers, cable companys, retailers, and hifi magazines/reviewers.
or retailers conning us with over priced under performing products. Well overpriced yes often, but under performing, that is a difficult one. How can one quantify or measure the performance of a 'stand' or a 'plug' etc. Personally I am more than happy, even excited by my own system, containing NO overpriced items. Having said that, the one improvement I would pay almost anything for, is to remove the constantly complaining neighbours !!
Are some or all hifi dealers, equipment manufacturers, cable companys, or retailers conning us with over priced under performing products.
That's a huge question and I suspect the answer is even larger. I've said somewhere before that the arrival of the CD was a watershed. Before that time, the variables inherent in getting vinyl records to play well were vast, and the price you could pay for a top end record player could easily amount to a year's salary. Record players were expensive to manufacture - nobody argued with that - because they contained components, often specially designed, to the very best standards that mechanical engineering could make. This kind of work does not come cheap but a surprising number of high-end record players were sold and the best people at the various points in the distribution chain were making a lot of money. If you were a dealer and you shifted 2 or 3 record decks a week at couple of grand each, you were doing OK.
It became apparent that the arrival of the CD brought a massive wind of change. Players cost a small fraction of the price of a top end record deck and the differences between those players were minute compared to the sound of different record decks with the multitude of choices of arm and cartridge. In short, the big money-makers in the industry had the rug pulled from under them, and a method had to be devised to turn the clock back. The hi-fi industry had become fat, mainly by making and selling fantastical machines in the Victorian tradition, attempting to make the best of a technology that was almost a hundred years old. Once the CD arrived, is it any wonder that those who had invested huge sums into vinyl players as well as those in the industry who supplied them, got well and truly pissed off by the newly arrived upstart?
I'll write some more tomorrow, but do you get a feel for where I'm heading?
I'm surprised that you have not responded to the past couple of messages, but I dearly invite you here to listen to a completely non 'snake oil' experience and discuss the matters you raise. My E-Mail is enabled so please call me, and arrange something, it could be a rewarding experience for both of us.
So here we are in the early eighties and it has become apparent that vinyl is yesterday’s medium with very little time left as the dominant commercial carrier. The relationship between hi-fi magazines and the industry was traditionally symbiotic – each dependent upon the other. At the time the editorial pages were full of debates about how well the newly arrived CD could compete against the gramophone but everybody knew, in their hearts, that such debates were futile. The CD simply had so much going for it that vinyl was to become doomed to the backwaters of obscure niche markets.
How did magazines cope with this? The economics of specialist magazines have a very fine balance between revenues from advertising and those from sale – over-the-counter and subscription. If an edition were suddenly to sell unexpectedly well for some reason (provided that sufficient copies were available), that edition would make a financial loss because the printing and distribution costs became dominant. If circulation improved, advertising rates would be increased but the cover price in no way funded the publication. Hence, in 1980, editorial independence is a very dubious proposition in the world of specialist magazines; a publisher is simply too dependent on his advertisers to ignore their agenda, which is simply to sell stuff. Therefore, there are commercial limits to the extent to which (potential) advertisers can be bad-mouthed by the editorial side of the paper. The frequent solution to this moral dilemma is simply not to publish negative reviews.
How better to achieve this requirement than by making the reviews you publish so wishy-washy, emotional and cuddly that the concept of negativity can be avoided altogether? Once you reduce the science of audio to the level of Laura Ashley fabrics, solid objective (and frequently critical) reviewing goes out of the window, to be replaced with the start of the nonsense waffle that was to become the hallmark of the camp known, kindly, as ‘the subjectivists’. Once most of the science had been safely disposed of, it opened the door to all kinds of snake oil merchants to come onto the scene, happy in the knowledge that they were safe from criticism because the writers who worked to rigorous scientific and engineering principles were no longer getting any work. It appeared to benefit everybody in the industry to open the door to all, and with the right co-operation from the specialist press, it didn’t take long to persuade a largely non-technical readership that strangely expensive cables or green pens to mark your CDs or little bits of wood to lift your equipment off the floor are not only useful – they are necessary if your sound at home is to be any good at all. Another move of sheer brilliance was the use of the ENC effect – Emperor’s New Clothes. A trusted reviewer says he hears something, then another, then another. Before long, anybody who CAN’T hear the something becomes marginalised by peer pressure (“what, can’t you hear the sheer speed of that cable over this one? Are you deaf?”). A simple application of mass hysteria.
One thing that you can always be sure of is that if what you are buying looks as though someone seems to be making an inordinate profit, then they almost certainly are! Whether you are paying a few hundred quid for a length of wire or twenty-five for some small blocks of carved wood or a tenner for a pen that will improve the sound of your CDs, if it looks like snake oil, it probably is.
Is equipment overpriced? Some of it, undoubtedly. I’m not saying it is necessarily bad value for money; if an amplifier chassis is made from a single block of aluminium it has the potential to look fabulous and have a wonderfully expensive feel – with a price to match. But does such construction have any bearing on the sound quality? I doubt it. If the design mission is to build a 100W power amplifier, there are only so many design topologies available and the number isn’t that large. I find it truly difficult to comprehend how anyone could justify such a unit that costs more than, say, a thousand pounds to manufacture, unless it is beautified in some exotic way. What we have now is a sales operation where a unit that costs a thousand to manufacture sells in such small numbers that the importer/distributor probably wants to earn a thousand and the retailer likewise. Hence the punter ends up paying three times the ex-factory cost – the complete opposite of economy of scale. To give an example of the alternate end of the spectrum, here’s my take on how power amplifiers should be made and sold
I seriously wonder if our technology allows us make units that sound significantly better than these beasties sold at £250. Sure, it doesn’t look pretty, but that’s something else.
Red Book CD players that pretend to be anything other than a device designed to reproduce 16 bit quantization sampled at 44.1kHz are another culprit. All the advanced electronics on the planet cannot get over the fact that the Red Book CD is a 16 bit medium, and while modern converter technologies can make a bloody good guess as to what goes on at levels beneath bit 15 – which is most probably noise anyway – is it nothing more than that – a guess. Heaven knows what you are buying in a Red Book player that costs a thousand or more; it's a bit like having a car speedometer that is accurate to six decimal places.
So are we being ripped off? It seems clear to me that an awful lot of the so-called high end does not offer value for money, which is something I expect whether I am paying a hundred pounds or ten thousand. The high end attempts to justify itself in the most extreme and bizarre terms which frequently beggar belief.
I think that value has a lot to do with how desirable something is. For example, a good cd player might have the same manufacturing costs as a bad one, but of course, the good one will nearly always have a higher retail price.
Perhaps the worst offenders are the cable manufactures. I've seen some companies sell interconnect cables for around £30, £50 and £100 despite the fact that the only difference between them is one or two strands of wire.
Sorry but I don't actually understand the problem:- I think that value has a lot to do with how desirable something is. For example, a good CD player might have the same manufacturing costs as a bad one, but of course, the good one will nearly always have a higher retail price., so what is your definition of GOOD ?
And what is your idea of 'higher retail price' I have purchased a CD/DVD player from Tesco at some £17 and that was fine, it sounded OK so what more could I ask for.
Again what is your definition of 'GOOD'
Perhaps the worst offenders are the cable manufactures. I've seen some companies sell interconnect cables for around £30, £50 and £100 despite the fact that the only difference between them is one or two strands of wire.
Yea right so what is your point, are you agreeing that a couple of strands make no difference, or are you saying that this is important.
To my understanding virtually all cables sound exactly the same, all cables measure the same, whatever the cost, particularly interconnects, as unless these are really badly made then they cannot in any way affect the sound.
Have a look at the thread 'mains cables' for some 'in depth' discussions on cables and their effects.
Sorry. What I was trying to say is that the price of hi-fi equipment has more to do with how much we're prepared to pay, than how much it's material worth is.
The DVD player you bought £17 is a good example. As it stands, it's probably worth £17 or maybe more. However, if an upmarket hi-fi company such as Naim, Meridian or Cyrus 'tuned' the sound to make it clearer or more exciting, then it would probably sell for much more, despite the fact that it wouldn't cost any more to make.
Same goes for cables. A strand of wire might cost less that a penny, though adding one or two of them might improve the sound to such a level that the manufacturer could command a much higher price for it. It's not a con, just a bit sneaky :D
OK I get your drift now. But if Naim etc 'tuned' the sound to make it clearer or more exciting,
Then I would probably not want it, after all Hi Fi is about reproducing music the way the original artist intended, not to add ones own preferences to it.
Similarly a Hi Fi system is not a musical instrument, it is the carrier if information. A scientific endeavour, not voodoo or magic.
As it happened the difference between my £17 Tesco DVD/CD and my new £390 Maranz DVD/CD, at least on CD play, very difficult to tell apart, however with the DVD 'upsampling' technology the added detail on DVD is quite astounding.
As for interconnects, I have never heard any difference between any. Having measured a very cheap nickel plated lead at some 99P and found it to have zero distortion, bandwidth to 10MHz - what more can a lead do - leads are not part of the technology, are not capable of generating distortion, and cannot, repeat CANNOT improve a sound, the very worst may alter a frequency response slightly over long lengths, but that is about all?
As for 'burn in', this must be the biggest load of bunkum that the planet has ever heard of, scientifically impossible, highly unlikely, never proven, not measurable - need I go on!
I suppose ,as Matthew says, it always has to come down to how much you are prepared to pay. After an approximate 20 years gap of seriously looking and purchasing for gear I have ended up with a nice Quad system, the electronics anyway, expensive even wth most of the items secondhand from Ebay itself not existing as far as I know two decades ago when buying items across the country would be quite a difficult affair.This brand in particular seems to command sometimes insanely high prices second-hand but this is justified due to the superior support ( at a price, maybe) of Quad or IAG in repairing, re-manufacturing these units.
No, no Neil it does not matter a jot 'what you are prepared to pay'.
Having just cashed in a savings plan and found it to now be worth £39000 then you may understand that cost is not an issue. What is however, is to realise the best reproduction achievable in this day and age. In searching for the ultimate I listened to Quad full range electrostatics at £6000 odd, but was not impressed, I heard a £4000 CD player, but was not impressed, I have heard many expensive amps, but I'm not impressed.
Now that has very little to do with how many £££ one spends/wastes, it is more to do with understanding what may be better and what will bring rewards.
I now have a system that is 'beyond my wildest dreams' but as it happened cost less than £1000, I don't believe that spending ten times that on 'recomended' or 'reviewed' gear would improve my listening pleasure.
Incidentally all cables are rock bottom, Maplin speaker cable 50p a metre, standard IEC mains leads £2.50, average interconnects £5, but major investment in the room and the speakers and of course the class 'T' amp.
I can also state that in 6 months of listening I have never heard any interference, click or pop ever, any background noise, any hiss no nothing except complete silence - apart from the exceptional dynamics of the music itself, could I ask for more.
Matthew.... The DVD player you bought £17 is a good example. As it stands, it's probably worth £17 or maybe more. However, if an upmarket hi-fi company such as Naim, Meridian or Cyrus 'tuned' the sound to make it clearer or more exciting, then it would probably sell for much more, despite the fact that it wouldn't cost any more to make.
I doubt they would even have to that, a simple re-badging operation would be enough for most to part with £hundreds!!!
Hi Guys, have just found this forum and the comments are brilliant.
i was caught up in 80's to find the 'holy grail' in sound reproduction. There was a quartet of us and one guy had his dining room as his own hi-fi listening room and even his wife was barred from entering without him being present and consequently found himself divorced as virtually zero relationship with her. Now 25 years on, the debate (without me) is still going on to find the ideal 'set up'. i am in complete agreement on cost of products,wire and all the rest of the variables of hi-fi bits. The human ear is no where near animal range of senses. Humans are more gullible with hype and media of the western world. i am glad i have seen the light and content with a budget system of reproducing a variety of family oriented individual tastes in music.
Quite right Mal, my interest in the whole Hi Fi issue comes from finding the 'holy grail' of reproduction, but also from a background in measurement and a passionate interest in electronics.
Therefore, for all the claims of cable companies they must be measurable, sorry they are not, the claims of any product must be measurable, for the most part, they are not.
I recently visited the Hi Fi show a Heathrow and heard nothing new, nothing astounding the only one item I saw was a flat panel speaker design by 'Podiumsound' and although it didn't sound that amazing, at least is was different, a new concept.
An amazing outcome having not been to a Hi Fi show for twenty five years, then going to one and finding nothing new, or different, or better, in fact for the most part all were displaying 50-100 year old technology, whereas I personally believe that the CD and class 'D' amps are whey beyond what we had 50 years ago - in every respect.
Am now about to visit Podiumsound next week for a full appraisal, it appears that there are some minor resonance problems in the response, but that can be sorted with DSP, but apart from that they are a radically different design concept and maybe worth having.
Unfortunately I have still not got to hear them, but after a fascinating chat with the main man 'Shelly' I am still keen.
However life has taken a most extraordinary change of path since my last post. The change has been a complete 'direction', 'lifestyle' etc. change, and it has been a very busy time.
Hopefully things will settle down soon and I will book a new visit, will keep you posted.
Hi Dave, just looking back at old mailings. Noticed some interesting threads, now that 'direction' change has been overwhelming, from the time of my last posting.
Electronics has slid into obscurity and property has become an obsession, no week is complete without a viewing and some haggling on price etc. Far more fun than the intricate brain work of design, and far more rewarding in the 'long term'. Still haven't heard the Podiums, still haven't built the new 'T' amp, still haven't got work room back into a usable state, so not yet back on the Hi Fi route.
My answer to the question is fairly simple. As with all specialist industries you get what you pay for. An esoteric market will by it's very nature demand a high premium because there are fewer customers. Someone has to pay for a small company's R&D. No denying there is a risk that particular company will emerge with a load of "snake oil" but we cannot risk killing off genuine innovation. There can be no counterfeit money without the existence of real money...
The final decision ultimately belongs to the End User and he is not constrained to buy anything....
Pluto said :
The CD simply had so much going for it that vinyl was to become doomed to the backwaters of obscure niche markets.
Vinyl sales are significantly up while CD sales are significantly down and dying...
You clearly haven't been keeping up with current events Pluto...CD dealerships closing or resorting to vinyl sales again.
Now Bill exactly what is going on here. I reply to a mail from you, then you reply to a mail from electro, you then go on to reply to a mail from Pluto.
Back to the science here, CD is a designed recording medium, within only years it took over the world, it is a better medium by all accounts, most vinyl was already mastered in digital anyway.
So what exactly are you saying here.
I recently heard a cylinder player circa 1910 and it was truly awful.
Maybe you prefer that sort of distortion, maybe you prefer the distortions of vinyl, maybe you don't actually want Hi Fi, maybe you would rather a cosy memory of the past.
