Dawgbyte,
With due respect to you & to others on this forum - I do not wish to offend anyone as there is no need to. So, all that I write further is merely for purposes of discussion. I'd like to get that straight first of all.
I think that you might have missed the point in Sean's original post? I personally did not conclude him to be a Mr. Know-it-all. Rather, I found his post to express his extreme/emphatic frustration at the present trends in multi thousand dollar speakers. I found him to exclaim that designers of these multi thousand dollar speakers were NOT keeping in mind the fundamentals of speaker design. Rather they were just blindly feeding the consumer whatever he/she asked for. Now, one could say that "the customer is king" so the manuf. should make whatever the customer likes. True to a point. What if the customer goes hay-wire & makes an inordinate request? An inordiante request would one that degenerates the audio hobby. What is the manuf. to do? 2 things as I see it: (1) be true to the hobby & gently coerce the customer to see his flaw & (2) forget about the inordinate demand and simply consider revenue - to the hell w/ the audio hobby! REMEMBER, we are talking about multi thousand dollar speakers ONLY! Not the ones affordable many of us w/ our reasonable ranges of incomes.
What Sean has expressed is his frustration at seeing the manuf. choosing option (2), which in his mind (& to many others including myself) is not right for the greater well-being of the hobby.
If you look at History, look at Senior management, the President's office, leaders manufacturing, in sevices, etc. What do expect of them? We expect them to be true to their respective causes. We expect them to reformists to some extent where they will preserve the original mission statement.
We expect the same from audio manuf. esp. those of noteable reputation. We expect them to lead the speaker design & manuf. wave-front & to excel it to new heights.
I don't know why you got into this hobby (we never discussed it, I mean) but I got into it to reproduce live music into my listening room as best I could & with the limited budget I had. I know that it is only a dream but a well thought out system can be very convincing! If I am to remain true to this objective, these multi thousand dollar speakers are a totally failure!!! From their measurements, they are very likely to sound anything but real. Yes, measurements are NOT the be-all & end-all of speaker design BUT it is quite correct to say that flawed measured results do produce flawed performance. If one cannot hear it, it's because one's ear needs better training or one's electronics is flawed or one's room is untreated or one has an hidden agenda.
Many of us feel that charging multi thousand dollars for speakers that have very mediocre to bad performance w.r.t. reproducing live music in one's room as best one could is a serious blow to the long-term stability of the audio hobby. We feel let down by manuf. that should have been leaders in this art & science. They have razed the bar rather than raising it.
Would you accept sub-standard NEW products from leaders like Pfizer, Mercedes Benz, Rolls Royce, Rolex, General Electric, SAP or any other leader for which they charged you a PREMIUM price?
If the answer is "no" then WHY are you going to accept a sub-standard product from a speaker manuf that is SUPPOSED to be SOTA??? REMEMBER, we are talking about multi thousand dollar speakers ONLY!
There is a market for speakers that alters the music signal. People buy these speakers. Nothing wrong w/ that at all. If it floats your boat, please buy it.
However, if you are going to charge multi thousand $ for a speaker, call it SOTA & then have it perform mediocre to bad, what do you think you SHOULD get from the customer base??? Accolades? I think NOT! However, this is what we are giving them!
This might be a hobby for you & me but anyone in the business of making audio gear should be judged by business standards & not by hobby standards. It's not a hobby for these manuf. they are in it for real & not casually.
Maybe we don't push the manuf. harder to perform better 'cuz we, the audio hobby group, don't know what music should like in the home environment? Maybe our ears are not trained to register timbral accuracy of instruments & voices? I have made an observation over time that all those audiophiles who attend lots of live concerts of any sort mostly do NOT have any of the commercially know speaker brand names! Can you think why this is? See if you can come to the same conclusion yourself (or if you can refute my emperical conclusion). The speakers they have are either of esoteric brands or are DIY or are from real mom & pop speaker manuf. that seem to still hold the course of accurate, real music reproduction.
Anyway, I've rambled on long enough. Hope that this dissertation was useful to you & that you can see things in another light. I HOPE that you will find less reason to be contentious.
Of course, just my view-point. FWIW.
With due respect to you & to others on this forum - I do not wish to offend anyone as there is no need to. So, all that I write further is merely for purposes of discussion. I'd like to get that straight first of all.
I think that you might have missed the point in Sean's original post? I personally did not conclude him to be a Mr. Know-it-all. Rather, I found his post to express his extreme/emphatic frustration at the present trends in multi thousand dollar speakers. I found him to exclaim that designers of these multi thousand dollar speakers were NOT keeping in mind the fundamentals of speaker design. Rather they were just blindly feeding the consumer whatever he/she asked for. Now, one could say that "the customer is king" so the manuf. should make whatever the customer likes. True to a point. What if the customer goes hay-wire & makes an inordinate request? An inordiante request would one that degenerates the audio hobby. What is the manuf. to do? 2 things as I see it: (1) be true to the hobby & gently coerce the customer to see his flaw & (2) forget about the inordinate demand and simply consider revenue - to the hell w/ the audio hobby! REMEMBER, we are talking about multi thousand dollar speakers ONLY! Not the ones affordable many of us w/ our reasonable ranges of incomes.
What Sean has expressed is his frustration at seeing the manuf. choosing option (2), which in his mind (& to many others including myself) is not right for the greater well-being of the hobby.
If you look at History, look at Senior management, the President's office, leaders manufacturing, in sevices, etc. What do expect of them? We expect them to be true to their respective causes. We expect them to reformists to some extent where they will preserve the original mission statement.
We expect the same from audio manuf. esp. those of noteable reputation. We expect them to lead the speaker design & manuf. wave-front & to excel it to new heights.
I don't know why you got into this hobby (we never discussed it, I mean) but I got into it to reproduce live music into my listening room as best I could & with the limited budget I had. I know that it is only a dream but a well thought out system can be very convincing! If I am to remain true to this objective, these multi thousand dollar speakers are a totally failure!!! From their measurements, they are very likely to sound anything but real. Yes, measurements are NOT the be-all & end-all of speaker design BUT it is quite correct to say that flawed measured results do produce flawed performance. If one cannot hear it, it's because one's ear needs better training or one's electronics is flawed or one's room is untreated or one has an hidden agenda.
Many of us feel that charging multi thousand dollars for speakers that have very mediocre to bad performance w.r.t. reproducing live music in one's room as best one could is a serious blow to the long-term stability of the audio hobby. We feel let down by manuf. that should have been leaders in this art & science. They have razed the bar rather than raising it.
Would you accept sub-standard NEW products from leaders like Pfizer, Mercedes Benz, Rolls Royce, Rolex, General Electric, SAP or any other leader for which they charged you a PREMIUM price?
If the answer is "no" then WHY are you going to accept a sub-standard product from a speaker manuf that is SUPPOSED to be SOTA??? REMEMBER, we are talking about multi thousand dollar speakers ONLY!
There is a market for speakers that alters the music signal. People buy these speakers. Nothing wrong w/ that at all. If it floats your boat, please buy it.
However, if you are going to charge multi thousand $ for a speaker, call it SOTA & then have it perform mediocre to bad, what do you think you SHOULD get from the customer base??? Accolades? I think NOT! However, this is what we are giving them!
This might be a hobby for you & me but anyone in the business of making audio gear should be judged by business standards & not by hobby standards. It's not a hobby for these manuf. they are in it for real & not casually.
Maybe we don't push the manuf. harder to perform better 'cuz we, the audio hobby group, don't know what music should like in the home environment? Maybe our ears are not trained to register timbral accuracy of instruments & voices? I have made an observation over time that all those audiophiles who attend lots of live concerts of any sort mostly do NOT have any of the commercially know speaker brand names! Can you think why this is? See if you can come to the same conclusion yourself (or if you can refute my emperical conclusion). The speakers they have are either of esoteric brands or are DIY or are from real mom & pop speaker manuf. that seem to still hold the course of accurate, real music reproduction.
Anyway, I've rambled on long enough. Hope that this dissertation was useful to you & that you can see things in another light. I HOPE that you will find less reason to be contentious.
Of course, just my view-point. FWIW.