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In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: Audio industry metaphor

Post Subject: Audio industry metaphorPosted by Romy the Cat on: 10/31/2014

Recently I was traveling and spoke with an audio guy. He advised that I need to stop by to listen his playback. I ask why he thinks his playback is worthy to listen. He gave me a long list of expensive and industry-reputed component that formed his installation. In his mind it was some kind of assurance of "audio quality" that he presumably is able to demonstrate. Listening his bombastic recite of his audio investments and without hearing any evidence that he is able to express any sensible or valuable to me audio or musical thoughts I desisted that to visit him does not worth my time. The sad thing in this story is that the pure guy's feeling about himself is very typical in audio community.

Audio is kind of fucked up field with many completely corrupted definitions. For instance I have horrible ski techniques. Not just horrible. I was using skis just a few hours in my life and it was a disaster. As a result I am absolutely not able to ski. However, if I use high-end audio interaction paradigm and willing to ski then I would buy some kind of expensive and prestigieuse slalom skiing equipment and then I would behave like I do dally jumps over Lauberhorn's Hundschopf. The point is that in skiing even a fool understands that sine I have no skiing skills then no amount or quality of sophisticated skiing equipment would be able to rectify it or make me less capable on a slope. Furthermore, since I am absolutely ignorant in skiing I shall not bale able even to recognize or differentiate any bad skiing tools from better skiing tool. I might use a common sense but since I am not practicing skier then my opinion can't be put in use and worth nothing. The very same logic in most of cased would be applicable to most fields of human activity but is NOT something that we see in high-end audio.

In high end audio a presence of expensive toys is almost a self contained target. It is not about a pride of ownership or price per se but rather a need for a typical audio moron to build an association between himself, audio industry and the rest audio Morons using a given peace of audio gear as some kind of bounding devise. So, in a way for most of typical audio simpletons an amplifier, a speaker of the proverbial cable elevation act as some kind of physiological decoy that cures whatever mental, cultural or physiological challenges they have. The audio industry in this direction acts no different than another ugliest industry – the pharmaceutical. As pharmaceutical industry invents new ways to incentivize a consumer to buy their products the audio industry do identically the same. If you look at ALL audio reviews that were written during the last let say 20 years then you will see that they were product centric but not the consumer need-centric. In this environment it is not secret why most of audio products, regardless of price, do not provide any predictable benefits to audio consumers.

So, what happed to my guy above? He is the person who has no-well formed listening objectives. It happens that he did not buy a boating, golfing or any another "hobby" magazine but it was some kind of audio magazine. The person clearly has issuers of self-identification and in his week mind to get $300K audio is one of the ways to deal with self-appraisal. I certainly do not blame him, in the end it is better to brainlessly polish TT platter than shot heroin, drink vodka, beat wife or join Nazi party. However, the pursuit of those people in audio unfortunately is totally irrelevant. Furthermore it is not difficult to evaluate the capacity of 99.9% high-end audio industry that is explicitly structured to satisfy the demands of the people who has irrelevant audio pursuits. What would you exact from high-end ski maker who design equipment for use by a person who not only unable to ski but who even goes for skiing trips ONLY because he loves to remount his snow tires on his BMW? Can we truly care about ski-makers idea about ski profiles if the only thing that ski consumers care in the whole skiing episode is how the consumer's new pneumatic tools help him to mount those winter tires? The metaphor is not as detached from reality as you think....

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