$9000 speaker Orangutan or speaker + amplifier

"Mapman, photography with a current $500 camera is a LOT better than nearly all high end systems."

The fact that a relatively inexpensive camera these days can take such good pictures is just one reason why I often wonder how much beef there really is in high end audio.

And lets not even get started on the quality of HD TV.

IS it really so much harder and more expensive to reproduce sound well? Gotta wonder....

But there is a lot that goes into "good sound", that's for sure. Both objective and subjective. See the "$10000 power conditioner thread" for more fascinating banter on this topic.

Oh Mapman, you are goading me now with that type of crazy subject!

It really is harder to get good sound than good still images. The still images are static: no transients! Easy! And judging it is easy....it's static!

Movies are just series of stills....the static gets repeated every so often.

Not so simple with the ear, whose bandwidth is high, that is extremely time sensitive (so phase distortion shows greatly), and which no single transducer can effectively satisfy.

Consider this: the ear/brain system is 10 octaves wide!!!!

They eye is less than one octave wide in its frequency spectrum! Ouch, that ear is hard to satisfy.

As for "beef" in high end audio, there is little beef. Lots of guys saying they are from Bell Labs (tall tale from that guy), NASA (almost all of those but one that I know are false), NSA scientist (bogus).....so you are right, lots of experimenting, only a few that have real scientific / physics / engineering chops. The job is harder, the market smaller.

A lot of substance and good points from several folks in this thread, far more than in most.

Kidd,

Not aware of the concept of an octave being applied to light/eyes, so not sure how to digest the comparison to sound/ears, but I'll buy the timing considerations being more difficult part as mattering when it comes to playback of recorded music.

Hi,

Am octave is just a doubling of frequency. The ear can pick up a span of TEN of those doublings! The eye: only a bit less than one doubling. Color perception is a frequency based phenomenon, just as sound is frequency based. Eyes pick up an electromagnetic wave, ears pick up a mechanical wave. But look how much wider the range of our perception is with sound!

I will add that the sensitivity of our ears and in particular the range of intensities that they are capable of detecting (i.e. their dynamic range) is much more impressive than their ability to detect 10 octaves. The dynamic range of the human ear is 130 - 140 dB. If we consider that one dollar represent the intensity of the softest sound that our ears can detect, that the very loud intensities that represent the threshold of pain for our ears are on the order of ten thousand BILLIONs dollars. I am not sure whether we (i.e. humans) are actually able to manufactures microphone with such a wide dynamic range.

With movies and pictures the situation is much simpler. We have cameras that are significantly better than our eyes, plus the quality of a picture is not affected by interaction with ones room.