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Law of Accelerated Returns

I think back over the many decades of pursuing high end audio and I realize some of the most inspirational were listening to state of the art systems. Systems I could never dream of affording. I occasionally would get up early and drive the two hours to Phoenix in hopes of finding no one listening to the state of the art system in “the big room” at one of the four or five high end audio stores there in the early ‘90’s.

One such time I was able to spend over an hour with the most amazing system I have ever heard: Wilson WAAM BAMM (or something like that… all Rowland electronics, Transparent interconnects). The system cost about over $.5 million… now, over a million… although I am sure it is even better (I can’t imagine how)..

 

But listening to that system was so mind blowing… so much better than anything I could conceive of, it just completely changed my expectation of what a system could be. It was orders of magnitude better than anything I had heard.

 

Interestingly, as impressed as I was… I did not want “that” sound, as much as I appreciated it. It still expanded my horizon as to what is possible. That is really important, as it is really easy to make judgments on what you have heard and not realize the possibilities… like never having left the small town in Kansas (no offense).

I keep reading these posts about diminishing returns. That isn’t the way it works. I recently read an article by Robert Harley in The Absolute Sound called the Law of Accelerated Returns that captures the concept perfectly. March 2022 issue. The possibilities in high end audio is incredible. Everyone interested in it in any way deserves to hear what is possible. It is mind expanding. 

 

 

ghdprentice
tablejockey
3,890 posts
 

The room acoustics played a huge factor with those setup you perceived as SOTA.

You can get your setup reasonably close with room layout /speaker placement.

tomic601's avatar
tomic601
12,911 posts
 

nice post and thread @ghdprentice :-)

 

noske
783 posts
 

Harley has been promoting this idea for quite some time. In 2014 he wrote this -

Many audiophiles think of an audio system from the perspective of The Law of Diminishing Returns. That’s the idea that each successive dollar you add to your hi-fi budget realizes progressively less sonic improvement. To use an extreme example, there’s undoubtedly a greater sonic difference between a $1000 loudspeaker and a $2000 loudspeaker than there is between a $100,000 loudspeaker and a $101,000 loudspeaker. The additional thousand dollars buy you much less at the top end of the scale.

.....

My experience with state-of-the-art audio suggests that The Law of Diminishing Returns is a fallacy. In fact, I think that an audio system follows The Law of Accelerating Returns.

Is there any means by which I can read the March 2022 version? I can't seem to find anything from March, possibly only for subscribers.

Perhaps he doesn’t contradict himself after thinking about it for a couple years short of a decade.

 

onhwy61's avatar
onhwy61
5,217 posts
 

Expensive systems in well designed listening room do scale type things better.  They can go louder, sound bigger, thunder in the bass and shimmer the highs.  But does that really correlate with listening to music better?  Sometimes yes, sometimes no.  Harley wants you to maintain interest in increasingly expensive equipment so that you will read the magazine that employs him.  He then gets to play with the really expensive stuff while you just read about it.

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