While there is or was probably an acoustic answer, an equally valid answer would be “do you know what raw wood looks like after a lot of handling?”
It’s not pretty. Oily sweat marks are not a great aesthetic.
The thread title should actually be “How could a phonograph be marketed to fetch $12000?”
It’s about what the market will bear.
It was either 2005 or 2006 … Moots Vamoots … all Campy Record.
Figure … more or less like this:
Well Moots are generally perceived as the real deal, but there is a lot of woo and magic smoke in bikes, wine and audio equipment. Hope you got a good deal.
Do not forget yachting
In the world of calculators, there were Hewlett Packard fanatics. Some people actually didn’t realize this was a joke, and tried to order it.
https://www.hpmuseum.org/item/product2.htm
Note the shift keys at the bottom row: HALT CTCH FIRE. (They couldn’t fit the “A” into CATCH.)
Bumping this thread with an object lesson on the risks of being an audiophile. (Gift link.)
He sounds like a peach of a guy.
The speakers look like they sound nice, though.
Great article but depressing as hell.
Yep. My husband’s audiophilia, while of course never reaching those heights, has caused a lot of stress.
I sometimes think how I’D be tolerated, if I decided that collecting square-cut emeralds, or pre-Victorian antique corsets, or anything astronomically expensive was something I just HAD to do. And then got pissy if everyone around me didn’t support me 100% in my quest towards bankruptcy and alienation of friends and family.
That’s how I view audiophilia. And that article hit a nerve.
Companies selling audiophile equipment, particularly the high end kind, are predators. Their prey is people who are essentially conspiracy theorists who believe they’re the only ones who know the truth about what music should really sound like. They’re like preppers building bunkers under their basements.
At least you can unload your emeralds if you ever come to your senses. Good luck finding some other sucker to buy your second-hand solid-gold phonograph or whatever. The audio harmonics are probably only clean for one installation or some similar bullshit.
The story is a character study with the stereo as the McGuffin, but the nerd in me really wanted to know more of the technical details of the system. I found this hour-long 2021 documentary, made just after he got the ALS diagnosis, but before it had set in as much as in the Post’s shorter film.
The friend of the family who helped sell the system after Fritz died started this thread at AVS Forums.
The page for the auction includes links to many other article about the building of the system.
Geez, the “appraised” value of those tower speakers was a quarter million dollars. They sold for ten grand.
That’s all they’re worth unless you buy the special room they were tuned for.
You have my sympathies.
I’m a live music person (174 shows in 2023) so my ear is different. When I listen to music at home, it’s in the background and I’m not paying close attention so I wouldn’t even notice the difference between a good system and a great system. Sonos is fine for me.
That viewpoint is a bit much, especially for those of us who enjoy great sound. What I would say instead is that audio equipment can be classified in three basic tiers of price and quality. In the lower tier, the old adage that you get what you pay for is the primary overriding truth. A pair of reputable well-built $1000 speakers is going to sound immeasurably better than a pair of $100 speakers – not just 10x better, but in fact will provide a qualitatively different experience if driven by a good amplifier and source.
But how about $10,000 speakers? How about $30,000 speakers, like my friend has in his home theater with a massive 4K projection system? Here, you not only get into the realm of diminishing returns, but also the realm of escalating costs, because all your other components have to perform to the same level. That’s the second tier, and it’s a realm occupied by serious hobbyists. I can’t find too much fault with it, though personally, I’m more or less in the $1000 speaker range. Although my current speakers are at least 30 years old, so who knows what they would cost today.
The third tier involves either mindless spending by the incredibly wealthy or mindless fanaticism by hobbyists gone mad, and involves outrageously expensive equipment that makes no actual discernible difference whatsoever. This most notably includes things like super-expensive cables that supposedly work magic, because the conductors are made of a special copper that is oxygen-enriched (or maybe oxygen-free – I forget which is better) and are made from copper obtained from an ancient copper mine in lower Slovenia where the unique copper ore is lovingly extracted by hand with a hammer and chisel and then refined over an open wood fire by the miner’s wife and children as part of an old family tradition.
I should stress here that good cables can be quite important, including the use of heavy-gauge wire for speaker cables, but magic cables are just woo, and so is some of the high-end audiophile business. But that just applies to this lunatic-fringe third tier.
I know this is an old post but since the thread was bumped, I must respond with an objection. As a former sailor and boat owner, I say that yachting is in a different category. The cost of a boat is fully justifiable in terms of the cost of labour and materials. It’s a tangible product where you can clearly see what you’re paying for. The ridiculous amount of money that one spends on the boat and its fittings and maintenance and docking and wintering is insane only when pro-rated in terms of how much time you actually spend on the boat. Considering your available free time, summer vs winter, weather conditions, and other factors, if you divide the total cost of the boat by the number of hours you spend on it every year, you find that it costs you something like $10,000 an hour. I did this arithmetic once, and thereafter sold the boat.
Agreed. It was depressing on multiple levels. The sudden onset of ALS shortly after he’d completed his life’s ambition was very sad, but the obsessive devotion to perfection at the expense of friends and family was also very sad. The fact that it was ultimately not marketable was very unfortunate for his children, but I don’t consider that much of a measure of its worth if it brought him happiness.
Since he spent that much over a lifetime and only stopped due to failing health and dying shortly after, I’ll bet he was never really happy with it.
“It’s not the destination that’s important, it’s the journey.”
It must surely have been the enjoyment of his creation that drove him so passionately to continue to build it.
I think you’re right. I’ve always felt that many of the serious hobbyists are driven by never being fully satisfied with what they have. Like the golfer who is always thinking about the putt they missed, it’s impossible to play a perfect round of golf, there’s always something wrong, something to improve, something they messed up.
This could also be the fact that the people I knew were young men tinkering like mad with their equipment, who probably grew up to be older men who have a great sounding system but no longer spend their days fiddling with it.
You are absolutely about cheapie vs good vs ridiculous. I have Sonos in my house and the speakers and subwoofer are in the several hundred dollar tier. They are much better than a crappy speakers but I can’t tell the difference between mine and my buddies very expensive Morantz speakers. This is similar for lots of things. Almost anyone can tell a $8 bottle of wine from a $50 bottle but not a $50 from $200.
I don’t think it’s fair to say that he didn’t get to enjoy his creation. I think he would get to a certain step and love it and show it off. Then he would come up with an idea to improve it and work on that and enjoy the (perceived) difference. He didn’t have a master plan 30 years prior and spend all of that time building it.
He had a white elephant at the end because it was an otherwise modest house in a modest neighborhood and someone who could afford that system would want it in a mansion in a fancy neighborhood.