Hi Bob,
Thanks for your kind comments about AudioQuest Music. That was a fun multi-year adventure, though a pretty expensive one. The blues recordings broke even or better thanks to Tower Records (not because of hi-fi stores), the jazz recordings might have broken even after a thousand years. I chartered Joe Harley with creating AudioQuest Music figuring that everybody needs music, and that by offering real top-flight musicians and their music we could break even and gain a priceless PR halo. All in all, I wasn't too far off, having cumulatively lost "only" half a million dollars after AudioQuest Music was sold to Valley Music. Today, Joe is an irreplaceable Sr. VP of AudioQuest who on the side is half of the famous Music Matters label and is involved in many facets of the recording world.
As for me, often Asians think that Bill Low and William Low are brothers. I was once greeted at the Kuala Lumpur airport with "you look just like your brother." However, in the US there's rarely such confusion, "Bill" being the rather boring nickname for William that my parents never imagined would dominate, whether the individual approves or not, so I accept both.
Richard "Dick" Hardesty was a very, very strong willed individual with zero patience for either those who purposefully obscure the truth, or for those who reach "definitive" conclusions based on an inadequate subset of the necessary data and evidence. In his store, and later in his publication, Dick's was a zero-tolerance zone for BS. As seen from the outside, Dick's was not an easy existence, though in a tautological sense, he lived the only life he knew how to live, trying to honestly guide every consumer and every reader one person at a time.
Humans are often too quick to ascribe intent where there is none. Most drivers who make mistakes or cut one off, are doing the best they can. No matter how much we don't like the way they drive, there is no mal-intent in their actions -- to take insult is a weakness in the observer. In this manner, many designers are doing their best, and truly believe in something questionable or wrong, but they are trying to act on and tell the truth the best that they can perceive it. It is a rare audio designer who doesn't actually believe the sometimes impossibly silly things that they posit are the fundamentals of audio, or of their products.
Where most of the BS comes in is with less audio-competent marketing types. The engineers at some chemical company that designed a fiber optic, and the product development department at an audio manufacture that chose to use that fiber, might be people we would wholeheartedly approve of. The brass ferule on a Toslink connector might be honestly specified to have gold plating, a gold "flash", because the tiny cost will more than be paid back by the incrementally better sales due to gold's attractiveness -- but when that product gets put in a package with the bullet point "gold-plated connectors", I think the line dividing expedient and unacceptable BS has been crossed. The gold plating is on a ferule, not on a connector, and has no bearing on the performance of the cable. A survey of Toslink cable packaging reveals a surprising number of claims to higher performance through gold-plating -- such claims almost always being made by commodity level companies who I believe (based on the performance of the cables) never actually did their job -- to be professional industrial level consumers, choosing the best fiber for inclusion in their final assembly.
The James Randi's foundation's Las Vegas show of challenging the efficacy of AudioQuest Ethernet cables, as reported by arstechnica.com (
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015...ile-ethernet-cables-to-the-test-in-las-vegas/), was a show-biz farce. As with some of Trump's most definitive enemies being other Republicans, so too was the Randi foundation's methodology so bad that even those who are certain that Ethernet cables are all the same also condemned the silly bit of showmanship. The question as to the efficacy of AudioQuest Ethernet cables is a proper credible question -- such a false-science pursuit of the truth was not credible.
A not surprising example of irrational human tribalism, as with condemning movies one hasn't seen, etc., many cable naysayers love to mock AudioQuest's claim that all drawn metal is directional by citing how (to their and our knowledge) the signal can't possibly be directional. How convenient it is for these people to have never read our literature, advertising or box copy, to have never noticed that I have never claimed that an audio signal, analog or digital, is directional. I used to make a point of using directionality as a prime example of the need to honor empirical evidence regardless of lack of understanding. If a cable sounds better one way than the other, why would I ignore such a thing when using the cable in the better sounding direction is free?
Now, thanks to the brilliant Garth Powell having joined AudioQuest from Furman, we believe we have a very clear understanding of the mechanism which explains directionality -- which is that at radio frequencies, the directional eccentricities at the surface of drawn metal causes a tiny difference in impedance in one direction vs. the other. In as much as the laws of physics dictate that energy must follow the past of least resistance, by controlling directionality, one can make noise provoked distortion mechanisms better or worse depending on in which direction the picked-up noise is directed.
Civilization is possible thanks to astonishing human diversity, and the ability of civilization as a whole to harness the insights of people who by themselves couldn't survive and would never cooperate. In this way, even the idiots contribute, if only to make stupidity visible to those intent on finding the truth. Sorting through all that noise in order to arrive at a rational approach to optimizing the performance of one's audio system is more or less impossible -- and unnecessary. No audio system sounds real, no audio system is so good that it guarantees audio nirvana, and almost no system is so bad that when one is in the mood, listening to music one likes, that one can't get just as high on the music as through a "great" system. We don't enjoy music more as we (ideally) progress through life to ever better components and systems -- we just get more spoiled, and maybe more snobbish about our connoisseurship.
This doesn't mean that there isn't real benefit and enjoyment in having good audio gear (I'm very fortunate to have some of the best), but it does mean that it's not about absolute audio quality -- it's about our personal relationship to the music, as made possible through the system. From this perspective, the voicing of the components, and the placement of the speakers in the room (the room often being THE most critical component in the system), is 99% of the process.
I advocate that cables can be chosen for their lack of voice (simple bypass testing that almost no one ever does), but that for almost every other part of a system, components must be chosen for their voice -- to pretend that amps or speakers or a turntable don't have a voice is sheer blindness. The difference between good and bad hi-fi is how long it takes before one gets tired, not whether you can count 75 or 76 people in the chorus. Successful emotional stimulation over time is the result of minimal misinformation, not maximum information -- it is the misinformation (distortion, the moving of energy to the wrong frequency and/or time) which interferes with why we listen to music, not a lack of information.
The digital HiRes initiative is further confusing this issue. While high-resolution files can offer significant audio advantages, the most important thing they offer is that when properly processed, there are less audio band artifacts, less misinformation to corrupt our music. Unfortunately, higher speed processors are noisier, so a 24/192 file sometimes sounds better when processed at 24/96.
Does that kind of knowledge make it easier to buy good hi-fi gear? I think not -- but that doesn't mean that the chase, pursued in this manner, can't be rewarding and fun. However, for most people, the more they think that they understand the gear, the more likely they are to focus on the gear's inevitable flaws, and the harder it is to let go and immerse in the music.
May you enjoy the quest for the most efficacious audio gear, and then may you forget what the pieces are as your spirit soars on the inventiveness of your favorite composers and artists.
Sincerely, WEL/William/Bill
