Schroder sq and the new talea

Dertonarm,

And sorry - no, I do not think that something simply has the value that people put on it.
I still have the naive thinking, that the real contend -i.e.: the inherent quality ( in the very sense of the word ) of a product/something ultimately qualifies its value.

Value comes out of declaration. I am pretty sure that 'inherent quality' is an assigned value also.

Is this the idea that there can be 'quality' regardless of what people think? 'Quality' by itself has no meaning, and meaning is only ascribed by humans, so far...

Not to put too fine a point on it, but my own efforts have been entirely to get as close to the original musical experience as possible. IOW, in service of the music only. Its cost me- for example I built our amps without feedback, because feedback violates a fundamental rule of human hearing. This limits the amps to speakers that are OK with that... if I was really going for 'high end', I would have had feedback so I could sell the amps to more customers.

So I just drew a distinction between serving music vs 'high end'...

Or did I miss something in your comment?

Dertonearm –your comments appear to be trolls. I can’t believe that you’re actually serious. As you expound on your own philosophy however, you are taking crack shots at the work of some brilliant designers I’ve had the opportunity to meet. Only because of this, am I following up. You obviously have much more free time than I do.

I did not say that Occam’s razor is the ONLY valid design approach, but rather that it is A VALID APPROACH, and one that I adhere to. It’s a metaphor for an approach, and nothing more.

Time and again, as I look at audio components, the ones of lasting value are those which are the result of pairing down of unnecessary design elements, unnecessary points of failure, as well as ones that, while they may be based in solid theory, are an utter failure from a perspective of producing a musically involving component. We still don’t know everything we need to measure, and unless you can contribute something to this body of knowledge, you have to deal with it.

With regard to the topic of paring down the “unnecessary” (or what doesn’t work), I’ll give you two examples.

*** NOTE *** while composing this post, I see that Atma-sphere made some parallel comments regarding feedback.

In the development of a phono stage, Mike Sanders of Quicksilver followed the path of regulation. It produced beautiful square waves ... and irritating musical reproduction. Try as he might, with different regulation schemes, he continued to return to an unregulated supply.

Before you go about misinterpreting these comments, I am NOT arguing for or against regulation. This example is about one designer who focussed on a solution based on the skills he brought to the table, with an eye on the final design goal – satisfying musical reproduction. Someone else might solve this problem very nicely with a regulation scheme.

There’s a phono stage (name witheld) which uses 9 small signal tubes to regulate each channel of it’s power supply. Thes tubes in turn have their filament supply regulated by LM317 regulators. Whether this section of the power supply circuit is the reason for the bleached (lacking in tone color) and undynamic, and uninvolving sound, is something that I can’t say for certain, but it is certainly characteristic of a design approach of: “if a little is good, then more must be better”.

I see this (approach of excess) over and over again in our industry – the piling on of extra circuit elements. One designer I know calls it “gratuitous parts selection”. It fits into a pattern that too much hi-fi gear falls into – gear that does everything “right” except satisfy the listener.

In writing the above, I can anticipate your hearty objections – that there must be objective criteria to which the designer is held accountable. Well guess what? We (as an industry) are still trying to figure out what to measure.

I had breakfast with Ron Sutherland (Sutherland Electronics) at the Audiofest. Ron told me the key challenge he faces (from a design discipline perspective) is to know when he’s done – to stop piling unnecessary elements into a design.

Ron revisits his design goal to determine whether he’s achieved it, in the context of the design architecture he laid out. A corralary of this is of course to re-visit the design to see if you inadvertently bypassed your end point, and to strip away the unnecessary components. This was the background to my Mark Twain quote about taking more time to write a shorter letter. It was apparently lost on you.

Lastly, your proclamation that something has only the value that ascribe to it is a bit extreme. The market as whole determines the value of something. You or I may disagree with the market, but we still have to deal with the fact that we are but two individuals with opinions. We can make an individual case for our opinions, and perhaps sway opinion in the process... or not. One thing is clear - we won’t sell our case by proclamation.

Lastly, perhaps you didn’t intend to come off as being arrogant, but this is how I interpret many of your posts. I believe that that English is not your first language, and perhaps this is the source of the communication problem. In any case, I have limited time to walk you through this.

Cheers,
Thom @ Galibier

None of this stuff, no matter how expensive, will ever get me back to that night when I was 17 years old, sitting in a tiny nightclub in New Haven (Connecticut), listening to John Coltrane play and watching him at work, as he was standing about 6 feet from my table. It was snowing hard outside, too dangerous to drive, really. So he and his quartet just kept playing on for many hours in the darkened room, while I tried to pretend I was old enough to be in a bar. But that experience and others like it is why I can enjoy Coltrane on my car radio, and at some level it is why I pursue this arcane parallel art form known as "hi-fi". It's all linked together but all different as well. I would rather not question it, in fact.

Atmasphere, very well put. You can also use Tarskian aproch
in terms of satisfaction conditions: 'x satisfied Fx and Gx'. Dertonarm and I are still 'victims' of our philosophical education with Aristotelian 'essences';the inherent qualitys in the things. Quine made this joke about
the 'essence' (aka ratio) of humans: 'federless biped'. Ie
both desriptions of 'man' are true.
Regards,

Thom_mackris, your last post certainly shows that your spare time can't be all that limited...;-) ...
Value is of course kind of a label and assigned by people. As thus it can never be universal nor objective in any way.
Value in the sense that most people understand it today is only individual.
However - a roman gladius, its blade made from the special alloy produced by a certain celtic tribe in the area of lake Chiemsee in southern Bavaria ( because the soil there was contaminated by millions of fragments from an exploded comet which exploded in the sky above their territory a few hundred years before ) had an inherent quality which by far exceeded (in all critical aspects of "performance" such as hardness, durability, weight etc.) all other swords of its time for 3 centuries and won the roman empire the pre-dominance in Europe.
That is an inherent product quality which has nothing to do with individual point of view, bias or price tag. There are similar examples today ( if few - and even fewer in high-end audio ).

We all have very different biases and what one may call a gifted or ingenious design means nothing or just being mediocre to the other.
Lets just assume that a person is every bit as deep into the design process of preamplifiers, poweramplifiers, turntables and loudspeakers as the persons/designers you think are the most gifted. But he has long progressed from a level which is still thought of as state of the art. But that person has no financial interest anymore and - that is important now! - does not tries to "market" a "product" and thus is no competitor on the market.
It certainly makes little to no sense to discuss here any aspects of philosophy - if I want to do this with an audiophile on Audiogon, I will send a PN to Nandric, as I know he is both willing and able to follow certain paths in philosophy and has enough knowledge, cultural education and background to do so.
So much for my arrogance and yes, you may indeed interpret my posts correctly, but that is a reflection of your own imagination and will tell you something - independent of the quality of my english which indeed in neither my first language nor my only one. But it serves me good enough to follow anything written here and I may have little problem to walk without your guidance - through english and through audio.
You are a dealer and need to support the products you sell and to defend your position - fine with me.