The past meets the future

@sns

+1

To me the real key to longevity is performance. Sure, there is nostalgia, or cachet. Take for instance the wrist watch. As a child… young adult… adult I saw the Rolex the mark of a successful man. I had lusted after one since a kid. So ten or fifteen years ago I was in a work position that it would have been appropriate to wear such a accoutrement. My experience with luxury stuff was that in addition to being a work of art… they were functionally far superior… I mean… high end, fountain pens, audio gear, cars.. etc. You get superior performance AND great aesthetics. My Lexus was a tremendous surprise, it exceeded my expectations in performance in every way… it was a bargain. That is the definition of luxury stuff to me… expensive, but a bargain. 

So I bought a Tag Heuer as a tip toe in before I spent $10- 15K on a Rolex. I was shocked at its poor time keeping performance. Plus or minus a couple seconds a day. I got it fixed by the manufacturer to keep time to a second a day. That is good for a mechanical Rolex or Tag. I was practically living in Japan. There can be two trains within 1 minute… you need to know the exact time… not some generality. I don’t want to be spending all sorts of tie fiddling with my $15K watch. How is that luxury? I was really disappointed and disillusioned.I want back to the drawing board.

So after lots of research I found the Seiko Astron for a few thousand. Beautiful, but accurate within 1/10,000 of a second for 10,000 years, solar powered, and automatically changed time zones where you walked off the plane. Absolutely no question I was getting on the right train. Now, that is a luxury good! It doesn’t have the gold and recognition… but it is superior in performance and looks great.

My point is that when a good looses its performance edge… it’s appeal becomes all nostalgic… which will appeal to a hugely smaller population. so, as digital gets the sonic edge in all cost categories the renaissance will be over. Sure, there will be folks that continue to love it… but the audience will drop to tiny.

i sure wish i could listen past surface noise. but my brain won't let me. 

Yes, utility is a good thing.

I am just going through the process of Packing a PTP Solid Nine TT to be taken for a demonstration at a friends tomorrow, where it will be sitting along side a SP10 R, and used to demonstrate Platter Mats and Spindle Weights/Clamps for their effect on each TT.

It is at a time like this when the fragility of the TT and attached ancillaries become a very strong focus, and the thought process is almost as a delicate a operation as a hand cue. 

Would I swap the fragility for a permanent alternative, not yet, it is where my Heritage with music replays are the with the most history.

There are some interesting responses above that made me think of other areas in audio that might suffer the same fate - the first was loudspeakers and, if they become a thing of the past won’t large mono-block amplifiiers suffer the same fate?

With the advent of Atmos, even small speaker systems can sound "very effective", and by "effective" I do not necessarily mean good.

• Atmos wow’s people, but it does not replicate the recorded sound verbatum.
• So are the large expensive speakers the next dinosaur?
• and once large speakers become extinct, won’t the large Mono-blocks be next?

From my own personal experience, I downsized my home theatre system to a Bluesound Sound bar + subwoofer

• gone are all the additional speakers and associated cables
• gone is the Blueray player that streaming made redundent

As @ghdprentice noted

when a good looses its performance edge… it’s appeal becomes all nostalgic…

And as new devices, supported by the convenience that "Alexa:" provides, come to the market, then is that the demise of high end audio altogether?

I think we now live in a era of "convenience"

• streaming - we no longer need to buy music/movies, we just rent it
• voice control - much easier to say "Alexa, next track please"
• size - the new speakers may not have the same abilities as the big towers, but they are getting better with every year that passes.
  • and they do not require cables or a lot of space

Two channel systems started a revolution way back in time when it was realized that it added dimension to the music.

Will Atmos (and other forms of sound manipulation approaches) see the end of stereo recordings?

I think that high-end systems will be around for the next little while, but perhaps more as "Audio Bling".

But the move to those invisible home automation systems that incorporates audio reproduction will probably see the end of the magnificent two channel systems that adorn our homes today - not just the humble turntable.

But that brings me to the opening scene of "I, Robot",

• where Will Smith gets out of bed, picks up a remote and activates an old CD player,
• which springs into life playing "Superstition" by SteveiWonder
• pure nostalgia !

I Robot - Première Scène - Bing video

Something to think about 😎

Regards - Steve