Hi Falconquest
When I first started my relationship with HEA (late 70’s early 80’s) I was hit with my first blast of "highendism". It’s a language and personality that is a mixer of Electrical Engineering, science, Webster, compulsive RTA & blind fold testing, Male ego, empirical testing, physics, neuroticism, myth making and marketing. I think I said earlier, my friends in the entertainment biz warned me to stay as far away from HEA as I could. It reminded me of the different types of studio engineers, techs, producers and artist. When you take something as cool, and young, as stereo and begin to "tech-no-fy" it I have found that the best way to approach it is, be careful to what you lay claim to (credit for), and be humorist in your private world, while trying not to engage with those who have learned enough to be dangerous but not necessarily accurate. And (and this is an important one) always keep in mind of the folks who aren’t speaking up.
For every one person that is speaking an opinion out in the open there are a 100 not saying anything. In todays info world that may even be more like 1 to 1000, who knows.
HEA has created it’s own paradigm that exist with it’s own unique set of words and rules, that outside of HEA, makes little sense to onlookers. I always say "guys it’s not that hard" but HEA hates that type of simplicity. For example, HEA has sold the myth that these over built, beautiful looking, heavy, expensive, complicated, discrete audio components & speakers are better at reproducing sound. Yet the reality is, they actually play less of the recorded signal than does something with lower mass and simpler build. The writing is now on the wall that HEA’s over built and over priced products are on their way to the dinosaur archives, but the transition is hard to go through for those of us who have bought into our big system comfort zone.
Along with the products themselves going through the transition, the HEA marketing starts to look suspicious. The sales tool of trying to make audio more difficult than it really is, is all part of the paradigm of trying to sell HEA as a more advanced hobby than it really is. The more the listener is mystified the longer he or she hangs on to the hope that one fixed sound is going to be the answer to playback, even though everything about music playing, recording and playback is a variable science. As I and others point out the transition should have taken place back in the 90’s when the reviewers were actually on this path to tuning, but the HEA revenue world didn’t want to let go of it’s new found wealth. It was a paradigm of guilt marketing, greed, incomplete science and eye candy.
Quantum, discrete, isolation, dampening, compression, NASA, EE, inert, first reflection point, transparency, revealing and many more that are a part of the selling of HEA aren’t necessarily being used in the truest sense but have been turned into tools of convincing a certain part of the public of HEA to defend the market. You take a forum like this and throw in a little internet trolling and limited experience and you can see why the transition is taking so long. But the more you have folks like Tjbhuler speaking out, the easier the pill is to swallow.
also I want to throw this in from Geoff
"There is much confusion over what quantum physics is, what audio devices employ quantum physics or operate via quantum mechanics or quantum physics. However, it might be a little bit of an overreaction to condemn all audiophile devices marketed as quantum devices as hoaxes or suggest deception or lack or integrity. For example, the CD laser itself operates quantum mechanically, or any laser; they are “two dimensional quantum wells.”
And one more thing that you guys should think about studying are the "fundamental forces". A lot of audio is easy to figure out if you have taken a course in, or even study on the internet, the interaction of the Earth's forces.
Michael Green
www.michaelgreenaudio.net
