Does anyone still insist on wax cylinders? On magnetic tapes?

Cafe Society
21

Satisficing is hardly a new concept. You can find similar notions from any point in the past century.

There are always trade-offs between competing notions of quality. Price, convenience, features, durability, ease of repair, size, weight, portability, ease of use, ergonomics, greenness. Pure aesthetic features like color and design and “modernness” also factor in.

Beta tape is a classic example. There might have been some picture difference between beta and VHS tape, but VHS could always tape twice as many minutes as beta. That was a far more important bit of quality in the public mind, which always hates competing standards in any case. Quality is the entire package, not an individual characteristic.

Besides, video tape as an industry succeeded until an overall better industry, DVDs, came along. The industry did not lose quality.

Hunter Hawk, I don’t find your examples of industries convincing.

Landlines lack portability. Cell phones have fantastic convenience and now can easily maintain numbers. Wireless phones are also more convenient than landlines and are of equal quality with more features.

I don’t believe this at all. I’ve had both. I wouldn’t trade my LCD for a 100-pound, non-tiltable CRT.

I’ve never been in one, so I’m just assuming you mean they’re low quality, but they haven’t taken over the furniture business. I can find a dozen high quality furniture stores within a short drive of my house.

There are far, far more high quality restaurants around me now than ever in my lifetime. We are in the golden age of fine restaurants for the average person.

If like me you’re old enough to remember what supermarket produce departments were once like, you’d never say this. We get fantastic quality produce from all over the world all through the year, something that used to never be true. Most supermarkets also have large departments of organic produce that are literally farm fresh, and have them in greater variety and quality than they used to. Sure cheaper and less tasty produce exists, but it does not dominate the market to the point where everything else is squeezed out. Quite the contrary: better quality produce is squeezing out the artificially-reddened hard as rock tomato that used to be standard. Upscale stores are booming and a major reason is their exceptional produce.

You can’t point to individual examples of low quality stores. You have to look at the entire range of the industry. The audiophile industry has almost vanished. That’s not true for the high end of any of the other industries you’ve mentioned.

22

Retail. At one point in time, you could go into a store and expect to find employees who knew a great deal about the products they were selling. Then came the chain stores, with their discounted prices, thanks in part to paying their employees low wages. Now, when you go into a chain store, its pretty hit or miss if you’ll get an employee capable of giving you good service, muchless knowing anything about the products they sell. There’s also been a reduction in services provided by the chain stores as compared to the “Mom 'N Pop” shops. Chain auto parts stores won’t (in most cases) rebuild your engine for you. They’ll sell you one that’s been rebuilt by someone else.

With electronics, you have people making the trade-off in improved technology for the loss of being able to service the devices. I can remember as a kid that nearly every store had a vacuum tube tester, so that people could fix their TV or radio themselves. Now, if your TV breaks, you probably just have to throw it out and buy a new one, as that’s cheaper.

The reason why none of the lossless codecs have really taken off is that Apple refuses to support any standard other than their own, and hasn’t open sourced it, or licensed the technology to other companies. With the iPod’s near total dominance of the portable MP3 player market, that means if you want to have a recording which can be played on the widest variety of devices, you have to use the MP3 format, unless you want to deal with the hassles of encoding it in multiple formats and idiots who don’t understand which one they should download.

Nor has the audiophile industry vanished. There’s still plenty of people making stupidly expensive gear that offers, in many cases, (at best) marginal improvement over standard gear. McIntosh is still around, and if you feel like paying nearly $60K for a pair of speakers you can find them. Home Theater systems are another example of audiophile technology (and one that’s gone mainstream, as the prices are pretty cheap, and even computers have sound cards which support Dolby, THX, and 7.1 surround sound).

And much of the audiophile stuff is hugely overrated. Metal coat hangers sound as good as Monster Cables, for example. Then there’s all the “magnetic balancing” crap that people sell, which is really only good for being a paperweight. Not to mention, that digitial recording technology sets a higher “floor” than did the old analog gear. A $30 CD player hooked up to a decent set of speakers is probably going to sound just as good as a $5K model (though it certainly won’t have all the features of the more expensive model).

23

Actually, do you have a cite for this? Admittedly I’m in a reasonably major city, but there are at least half a dozen high-end audio dealers within walking distance of where I live.

24

A couple of thoughts:

  • I would assume that sound quality has leveled out a bit on the net simply as a compromise between file size and sampling accuracy. Add to that the fact that a lot of net-based music is home-studio made and the quality can vary quite a bit.

  • I, too, would be interested in seeing data on whether the audiophile market is shrinking in size. I know a few audio geeks and haven’t seen the interest diminish…

25

Adieu to the true audiophile?

That’s what I’m talking about. Of course there will always be super high end luxury gear, priced so that the thing you brag about is the price rather than the quality. I don’t care about that.

I’m speaking of good high end systems, priced at middle class enthusiasts. That used to be a major industry. That’s what has vanished, or as I keep carefully hedging, *almost *vanished.

26

Okay, what, exactly do I need with a CD player these days? If I’m still attached to CDs, I don’t need a CD player, since my DVD (and/or Blu-Ray) player can play them just fine. Lets face it, the guy who’s plunked down several hundred bucks (or more) for a home theater setup, with 7.1 surround, doesn’t need a seperate CD player, since his DVD/Blu-Ray/X-Box/Playstation unit can also play CDs.

27

Well, it depends on how good your DVD/Blu-Ray player is and what your threshold of “just fine” is. For example, I have what was a midrange DVD player when I got it several years ago, as well as a good Linn CD player, and the Linn playback quality is vastly better than what the DVD player will put out. Would it be a closer comparison if I had a newer midrange DVD player? Possibly, but I doubt that products aimed at the midmarket have good sound quality as a key goal so much as audiophile products do.

Exapno Mapcase, thanks for the link. I think we were talking about different markets.

28

It seems to me that people don’t buy stereo systems, they buy “home theater” systems instead. A lot of stuff now is geared toward working with your TV , not just for playing music.

29

Home theater is a very real possible alternative market. My impression is that it doesn’t have the household penetration that stereo equipment once had, but I can’t find any decent industry statistics one way or the other. I’d be curious if someone can dig up the info.

30

FWIW, even some of the true audiophile companies are developing products for playing ripped/downloaded music. I think they’re seeing which way the wind blows but are still trying to hold on to the idealistic-audiophile audience.

31

Quality mass-market hi-fi equipment disappeared a long time ago. If you are sticking with analog, you can’t beat reel-to-reel tape. That used to be the only choice for serious recording and production work. It was also widely used for science and engineering applications.

I don’t have much hope for higher quality audio distribution formats. Look at how the CD format has been abused by producers and recording engineers. FM broadcast radio has also been destroyed as a medium for high-fidelity audio. Crap sells, and the suits will never let quality get in the way of making a buck.

32

Why? because all CD players are not created equal. If you have high quality recordings on CD you can hear the difference between players. The same applies to the software that rips MP3’s. Some programs do a better job than others depending on the underlying software engine driving them.

Given the better signal to noise ratio of digital music over vinyl and the lack of static pop found on the cleanest of records I can’t imagine why anyone would chose vinyl today. The technology of pressing a record is fixed unless a new format is developed while digital technology will continue to improve. A vinyl record will wear over time as will the needle that decodes it.

33

Landline phones got worse immediately after deregulation opened up the telephone market – long before mobile phones were common. You must remember the first $5 phones on sale at supermarkets and such? They were single-piece handsets that only supported pulse dialing and hung up when you set them down. Phones improved as the market grew, but even the AT&T Trimlines were terrible; the cable between handset and base was always noisy.

34

Any opinion on the mini-fad for using old Playstations (the original models) as CD players? I was doing some random poking around online recently and ran across a few articles claiming that the PS1s were relatively high-quality audio CD players, and better than low to mid-range stuff currently out there…

35

A while back some magazine did a blind test where they compared very expensive stereo equipment to cheap stuff. For the most part nobody could tell which stuff was cheap. For the amps people even preferred the $200 model to the $2000 model.

In my area there is a company that sells stereo tube amps for $2000 and I guess somebody buys them since they have been around over 10 years.

36

Got a cite to a valid, double-blind, replicable test that proves that? Otherwise, I call unconscious bias and wishful thinking.

I think one of the reasons this statement can be made is that by the time vinyl appeared, recording technology had matured to the point where the entire range of human hearing was accomodated. Further developments (tape, CDs, etc) were mostly on the medium, not the message. Once the threshold of “perfect reproduction” has been reached, there’s nothing left to improve, sound quality-wise.

I recall a review of the Heathkit AR15 receiver ca. 1968 by Consumer’s Union, who claimed that it was so well designed that their lab equipment couldn’t detect any signal degradation in some categories; that is, distortion was below measurable values. At that point, what is there to improve other than cost, physical size, features and cosmetics like fancy LED front panel displays?

37

I did a google search and couldn’t find anyone who could present a rational argument for the alleged exceptional audio quality of what happens to be a somewhat rare variant of the PS1. The web site that seems to be the source for this meme is firmly in the “we drank the kool-aid and would like another pitcher” school of audio equipment reviews.

I’m willing to listen to technical arguments based on real physics and engineering. Even better, how about a paper published in a reputable peer-reviewed journal. Instead, we get stuff like this:

http://www.6moons.com/audioreviews/acousticsystem5/liveline.html

38

There are always people who don’t like mass market stuff. It’s part of the “popular = bad” elitism. I once listened to $3000 speakers that sounded great if you were right in front of them, when you moved away they sounded pretty bad. Even the salesman admitted to me they had problems depending on where you sat in the room.

39

**Musicat **- let’s be clear: IANAAudiophile and do NOT believe that vinyl is “the best” - the only point I was trying to make that, pre-digital, there were a number of media for analog, some representing earlier technology (e.g., wax cylinders) and other representing alternate tech that put other features at a premium (e.g., cassette tapes, which were easy to transport and copy). Vinyl is/was a nice big, well-made hardback novel; a cassette is/was a cheap paperback and wax is/was, well, something before big-selling hardbacks. All of that is context which, to me, makes it reasonable that vinyl would end up the media for analog that sticks around. I would argue that when digital books and Kindle-like or iPhone-like tools become ubiquitous, “analog book” fans will probably focus on nice hardbacks as the one analog book media that will endure for the hardcore bibliophiles - (joking but illustrative - look at Capt. Picard on ST:TNG reading books in his Ready Room)…

Having said all that, I do want to make a point: analog recordings sound *different *- not necessarily better, but certainly different. If you listen to, say, Nirvana’s Nevermind in digital and analog, the analog/vinyl recording is noticeably different. In this particular case, I happen to prefer it - the distortion of songs like Territorial Pissings has a 3-D depth and saturation I don’t hear in the digital.

Again, I am NOT trying to argue that one is better than the other - only that they are different. I am struck by a report I heard on NPR about food packaging. There is new tech in how plastic bags are made that keeps certain decomposition chemicals from gathering on fresh fruits and veggies in plastic bags over time - so prepped lettuce or sliced carrots sticks can last much longer in pre-packaged portions. During the article, the person being interviewed pointed out a problem: most consumers have gotten used to the taste of foods that have “partially oxidized” (or whatever phrase they used). He pointed out how fresh orange juice, in particular, tastes very different from OJ that’s been in a regular cartoon for a few days. One is not better than the other - they are just variations of the same stuff - but that consumers have been trained to prefer the current taste and since the fresher-packaged OJ will cost a bit more, it is unclear if they would be willing to switch…

To me, that gets at the difference between analog and digital - at this point, most consumers have had their ears trained for digital…

40

<shrug> And in my area there’s a company that will sell you an amp for $20000. Of course, they’ll also sell you an amp for $200. And they’ve happily directed me to other stores that had better deals on equipment I was looking for.

Despite the conventional wisdom, audiophile companies aren’t always catering to snobs–sometimes it really is about offering good equipment at different market points. You’re probably not going to find “home theatre in a box” kits at places like that, but you can still find reasonable deals for stuff at the lower end of the spectrum.