Home Theatre is different than Cisco routers in important ways in terms of planned obsolescence but also similar. The differences include: Routers REALLY become overloaded and need to be replaced or supplemented to keep up with the worldwide increase in traffic (vitual traffic, reducing need to conduct literal travel (I, for example, rarely ever need to use my car) and bringing issues to a world-wide audience even that elite public in the suburbs hidden away in their cookie cutter houses and that magnum of isolation: Home Theatre). Whereas, movies are playable without chasing an incredibly wasteful array of constant upgrades (remember LP's were suppose to be completely replaced by CD's and cassettes where doomed about 12 years ago, both are still around and delivering satisfying sound). Home Theatre (HT) also creates a lifestyle, when taken to an extreme that by its very nature, is incredibly isolating (think of it, would you spend tens and tens and tens of thousand dollars on Home Theatre and its associated new floor space (many people actually build small houses around their HT further increasing the expense and magnifying the isolation: an extension of an extension of a suburb escape??) and not burn up hours and hours of your time. Cisco does not need marketers to tell your technology is out of date and you need to upgrade: Reality does. HT does not need to be upgraded in the same way, it is Marketer feed perceptions of a need to upgrade. Computers are not worthless after 2-3 years for most home users unless they buy into the endless cycle of Computer Game (another example of Isolation from the REAL world) Driven mentallity (trying to make games, ironically, more REAL). My work uses Landstat Imagery among other sources of data that really does require 1GB or more of RAM etc but always find uses for my 6 year old 166 and 266 Pentium on a network (does Word Processing just fine and is an excellent backup device and eventually goes to charity for use by a church etc ). I argue that Marketers plan to release additional channels every couple of years, not because they have yet to develop the technology. But that they have too soften up the, primarily, American consumer to the nutty idea of robbing even more living space with an increasing number of speakers, wires, and trashing yet another processor, increasing energy usage, and increasing the American's time (Time, you know, that thing :( dead people :) do not have)"consumed" watching movies. There is much more I could get into here but that will have to do for now. Oh.....sorry......almost forgot. May love and harmony bless your family of friends and neighbors (just in case your neighbors are not friends. maybe you do not know them. maybe invite them over to watch a movie. don't worry you wouldn't have to talk to them. Remember open discussion is a cardinal sin of watching movies. Movies demand and get Total Control of Your Time something music listening does not necessarily and most often does not do. I read, have open engaging discussions with my family and friends, think on a wide range of things (actually think better with it in the background), play with the dogs, work, relax, watch sailboats and birds, etc all while listening to music. Music is a partner in lifes activities. It is not a time and diversity prison.) forever and ever. :)
Movie Software make HT a Waste of Resources?
This may be just me but how often after you seen the "cabon copy" explosion riddled movie trailer and said to yourself "God is this stuff stupid or what" and even worse.
As a music listener how long would we put up with consistently poor quality software that offends our intellect?
Seems to me that the movie industry thinks we are just stupid apes willing to buy anything the Hollywood Marketing guys/gals can regurgitate at us. Seriously, think about this next time you see a totally pointless plot but with your rerun "Take" 865.95 of bombs and flashes.
On the other hand where would Casablanca or Citizen Kane be without that great 7.1 sound :)?
I saw a bumper sticker a few years ago that read: "The more you know the less you need" . In the case of movies, maybe another sticker could read "The more you think the less you are willing spend in front of the screen watching carbon copies". Once in a while it is fun to watch a good boom boom if there is something to fill the space between the boom boomies such as Saving Private Ryan.
I am probably missing something here but why is home theatre worth ten's of thousands of dollars of our discretionary income?
Maybe that old song "In the year 2525 we will not need our minds, will not need our eyes...." was overly kind with respect to the date.
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I think that people should evaluate if they are actually getting something that makes their life better relative to other choices and if in making those choices does it wipe out others. Of those wiped out choices are they not important to loose? I think American's are incredibly susceptible to marketing and not understanding when they are sucked in by "concept" of expanding their individualism versus substance. Even worse, they often buy in to some of the most destructive patterns without even considering the consequences that are very hard, if not impossible, to reverse. A really great example: Urban sprawl (that is a major one, with your grocery store in one part of town, your clothing stores scattered all over outlying malls, your hardware store in another, your job in another area, etc) forcing everyone to travel great distances just to get anything done. Community is destroyed, inner city becomes blight riden while suburbs become almost surreal, elite hide-aways of a primarily white public interested to get away from "other" people. The suburbanites interests become increasingly not those of people of the inner city. Couple that with the fact suburbanites have the booty to better fund elections they set policy that maximizes the differences between people's opportunities for quality of life in a wide array of ways. The increased disconnection and opportunities for inner city youth has been directly related to increases in crime and insane increase in prison building (in Wisconsin, prison budget is bigger than the entire University of Wisconsin Education System: which includes UW-Madison and many satellite universities scattered throughout the state), outrageous amounts of time is lost forever, perceptions of the lost community and time wasted are not even evaluated by those born into this non-sense (they have no point of reference, like some distant society in some futuristic sci-fi movies you might see on your Home Theatre), pollution goes up dramatically with all the driving around (e.g., Atlanta is so incredibly polluted that heat built up caused by the pollution is readily and dramatically seen from heat detecting, satellite landstat photography: Atlantan's are not just crapping in their Living Room, it is worse, its like crapping on their own dinner plates (check out the links on this page at underlines)). |
Are you making an argument for music or against HT? I don't think you'll find anybody here who argues with you on your points about music - I listen to music more or less constantly, usually in the background, and can't imagine life without it. When you read, do you allow for people to have open discussion with you? You're correct that when I'm watching a movie, I don't want people talking to me, but the same holds for reading as well as many other past-times. You're correct, though, that I don't mind it a bit when I'm listening to music. I don't agree with your assessment that computers don't need to be upgraded but HT hardware does. Somebody who bought a Pro Logic receiver 8 years ago can still use it to their satisfaction today just the same as somebody running Windows 3.1 on a 486 can. I'd suggest that probably more so - it's easier to find software today that is compatible with the receiver than that computer. Or, somebody who bought the first DD 5.1 receiver in the late 90's can use it for many many years to come. It's at least as useful as a Pentium 166. Why do you believe Cisco routers REALLY need to be upgraded? If we would all just accept communications as acceptable at today's level of service, we wouldn't need better routers - they'd mechanically last for years. They REALLY need to be upgraded because people want more, for mainly the same reasons you give for HT upgrades - the promise of something better. They're not being upgraded for email - they're being upgraded for streaming video (for movies on demand, amongst others). And by having this infrastructure constantly improved, there are any number of undesireable side effects. I would agree that there are many more positive side effects to the upgrading of the nation's communication infrastructure than there is with the onward march of HT hardware, but the negatives seem undeniable as well. I'd ask again if there is a suggestion as to what we as an interested community should do in response to the concerns you express. I've never watched a movie in anything more exotic than DD 5.1, so I can hardly be accused of chasing the never ending formats. That's also my advice to anybody who wants to "try" HT - set it on DD 5.1 and forget about all that other stuff. Your posts are interesting, Nanderson. I find many people who have interesting thoughts and points of view, with an especially dense population of that type of person on Audiogon. Have a great week! -Kirk |
HT is the target. You made several of my points for me. Thanks! :) HT does not need to be upgraded (as I stated before) if people would think about it. Congratulations on your apparent ability not to buy into the marketeting propaganda. But since apparently most Americans live their lives on Marketing Autopilot, the Marketers drag them by the ring through their collective noses. Hard evidence: The market place puts next to no value on the used processors. If people really valued the equipment they would get a buck or two for their used stuff. You almost can not give the stuff away. The HT market is based on trashing equipment constantly and that is very seriously bad for the pocketbooks of the consumer and the environment (you know....The Environment, that place that SUV commercials say you travel to in your SUV rather than the place where you live. Since you travel to it in the SUV way-of-thinking you can afford to mess it up. The Environment is where you live regardless of what the Ford Expedition commercials say). And maybe more importantly, the HT wasteful cycle is a horrible consumer model to be teaching our children. HT is a one-way street with hollywood as the traffic cop of ideas if we allow it to consume time that we could dedicate to expanding our collective awareness. Not believing improvements in communication, even with its downsides, as not needed is not a option. So routers are a necessary evil. HT as a prisoner of our time and wasteful consumer model is not. The response I am looking for is like the one I think the citizens of Atlanta (see above) wish they would have had. Question the assumptions and think about the consequences (examples are littered throughout this thread)of anything we do as a society before the options are gone. So that I can also win a few votes: I think that Audiogon members contain the greatest concentration of this worlds last hope for a tomorrow that have ever walked the face of this planet or all the collective planets of at least our 3 nearest galaxies. We have to be pretty smart to afford all this stuff. Right. Well, ok....maybe some of us are just sneaky Least I forget, here is the good-will saying for this hour: May all things wonderful and blissful carry you and everyone you touch for the rest of your life!:) |
Is there a point to this? Nanderson, you seem to shift topics everytime someone tries to pin you down. The common part of this thread, as I see it, is that you want to think your keen intellect has forced another cave-dweller into the light of self-introspection. It hasn't and it won't. In fairness, I will admit that the readability of the thread was not enhanced by the fact that, due presumably to some quirk of people's election to go with in-line HTML or whatever, the fonts seemed to get larger and more colorful with each successive reply. Its hard to read when only two words fit on a line. Esp. when they are violet. I think your original point was that most modern movies are bad/unwatchable. As with anything, there's a lot of drivel targeted at the lowest common denominator and some good quality stuff around the edges. I like the escapism of movies (even some of the drivel), and find that movies--like books or music--can generate some interesting conversation among friends. Do I need the latest greatest HT to enjoy movies? No. Does HT enhance my enjoyment of movies? Sure. You then morph into the argument that HT is bad b/c of changing standards/planned obsolesence. Audio has its "flavor of the day" aspects too--CD, HDCD, DVD-A, SACD, MP3 and various sub-religions in component design. Why single out HT for criticism? Given that these marketing tricks also produce design advances, is the purist thing to do to listen to wax impressions on a gramophone or something? No thanks. I'll skip the stuff about routers. Don't know, don't care. Then, if I track correctly, the argument seems to go to the "unexamined life not being worth living" with some paranoid conspiracy theory stuff thrown in to boot. The defect seems to be you've lumped A'gon users into a class of people whose lives consist of slaving away for the man to buy the next fix in HT equipment, while blithely ignoring the world's real problems, in order to isolate/insulate ourselves. Bollocks. I remember an A'gon threat where people talked about their other interests--there are every variety of people here, from artists to race car drivers, to kayakers, to parents, etc. In other words, don't stereotype me or us. I happen to like my HT and some movies made after Citizen Kane. As to the rest of my life, my compromises are different than yours. I'll go as far as saying I think mine are a *better* balance than yours, without knowing or caring what yours are. Guess you think yours are a better balance than mine, without knowing or caring what mine are. So? Next topic please. Really. |
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