Spot on, Richard - good link! I use single quotes explicitly to mean essentially "inadequate yet necessary", double quotes where it's a form of emphasis, scary as you like to call it!
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The Fallacy of Accuracy
- Thread starter Al M.
- Start date
, In Oz the expression at one stage, at least, was "being jacked" - and no, you're not being, err, punk'd ...
I wish! Sadly, at least over here, that is simply not true. The distributors like myself who handle the expensive lines all have other much larger businesses. The audio is fueled by passion or obsession, sometimes both. It's hard to draw the line most of the time. LOL.
If you really want to get rich, get into a business where the model is enormous volume and small margins and not the other way around. Sigh.
You mean become something totally awful like Walmart? You might get rich but the country bleeds from that model of business.
I don't think anyone gets super rich off of Audiophile anything.
I don't think anyone gets super rich off of Audiophile anything.
The deduction from the observations of relative flashness of the cars wasn't of course a watertight one. Besides the geographical distance (I made the observations in Europe) there's also a temporal one, the timeframe was the mid to late 1990s. A third difference was that these distributors weren't in the very low volume, very high end market but in the mid-volume, mid-to-high market.
i guess it depends on how you define rich. you can make a lot of money selling hi-end (as a retailer) with the margins they get from manufactures. back in the late 90s good hi-end sales guys were making six figures. these days with all the bottom feeders and people buying from manufactures directly it is much harder to make money. but if you have a good client list and good lines you can make good money. and you do what you love ... so there is that. many hi end retailers sell out of their house and have no other overhead so they can sell ~ $17K a month (~ $200K a year) in gross sales and net themselves low six figures. that in one pair of speakers a month! but don't think for one second there isnt money in this industry.
I think big ticket sales people are taught to be flashy in school LOL I see it a lot with bankers, insurance guys, real estate guys, etc, etc. I suppose they have to do what they have to do to look like "peers" to their clientele so they will be taken seriously. Just a random observation though and as you say, it is not watertight.
The fact is high end dealers do not really compete with direct sale companies, it's a totally different market. People who will go buy from dealers generally won't cross-shop the direct sale alternatives. Direct sale goods are limited in price to speakers around $10k, components under $5k and cables under $1500ish. Above that the folks who will go to the effort to maximize their value through buying from direct-sale companies can't afford it.
The fact dealers have gone out of business in the mid market isn't due to direct sales either, it's due to economic conditions... especially after the 2008 depression. The US and some other countries have horrible economic issues, wages have not kept up with the cost of living and the middle class is now not so middle class and the lower class is now living in poverty. But the folks making above a certain amount of money were more or less insulated and now have too much money.
When Henry Ford began production of his cars he had to pay his workers more than was customary at the time so his employees could afford to buy the cars, paraphrasing, he said something like "It's better to have 200 people that can afford to buy a car than one person who can afford to buy 200 cars." Nobody needs 200 cars and the money just sits there doing nothing, helping nobody. Money just sitting there is worthless, and because of interest our economic system encourages it. So about 64 people own half the world's wealth, and you can bet it mostly just sits there, a complete waste. Edit: Well, actually their money is used to buy politicians who will look after their own best interests.
Successful big ticket sales people have an attitude that most can't replicate, they can tell their customers they are complete idiots and this is what you need to do and they will thank them for it. If you can figure out how to teach people this you could make a fortune.
I'm not sure it's being "flashy", it's an attitude and energy they have. I've been in sales and actually was one of the nations top electronics/appliance sales people for Montgomery Ward department stores in the early to mid 90's. One of my current customers is real estate sales director for one of the largest resorts in Cabo, he's not really flashy and is pretty direct, no-nonsense kind of guy. I can't understand how he does it but his closing rates are unbelievably good. I think these people have a special gift for sales. I was good, but not at his level.
well, there are several high end manufactures who sell directly to the end user. at shows for example ... or friend of a friend, etc.
from my perspective the decline in brick and mortar stores is from several reason. the fact that wages for blue collar workers is stagnant (or worse, declining) and white collar lay offs is part of it. the other part is big manufactures consuming smaller esoteric firms and putting them under one roof is another, the fact that most people don't understand the notion of spending $25K + on a pair of speakers that mind you dont even play the rap well is another. and finally, those esoteric brands don't make lower end components is another. i understand this actually ... why make 5 widgets when you can make 1 and net more $. this has in turn bolstered the used market and that also has a negative effect on the B&M stores.
im sure i left things out. but i understand what you are getting at. thanks for the input.
The discussion about the state of the high end, and dealerships is pretty interesting, but what happened to the OP and the topic of accuracy?
Are people more interested in reproducing a signal without distortion or in assembling a system which reminds them of the sound of live acoustic instruments? What is meant my "accuracy"?
Are people more interested in reproducing a signal without distortion or in assembling a system which reminds them of the sound of live acoustic instruments? What is meant my "accuracy"?
I think accuracy is generally termed to the recording, not the actual performance the recording was made from - that's a question of the recording engineers. At least I wouldn't define it any other way. The choices made during recording will be reflected in the playback. We all know many live recordings sound like a live event. But then many albums intentionally don't sound like one because artists like to play around with dubbing, instruments in weird rooms, etc... Why should a stereo be trying to recreate a live experience for one that never existed? Hence no accurate... if you ask me anyways. But plenty of gear has that goal it seems.
The question about money made in the industry was to do with whether companies are trying to make stuff that sounds good, or just trying to make money. Does stuff sound better now than when B&M stores were around, and if so in the dealership category or direct sales? Which one is going for accurate sound, if either?
Sidetrack, sorry.
I tend more towards the latter, and have always believed simpler is better and the fewer components in the system the better. For example the Lotus Audio Grenada, which uses a Feastrex single driver to cover from ~250 Hz on up, is more accurate to the sound of vocals and acoustic instruments vs any other speaker I've heard, but it won't measure nearly as perfectly as a reference 3-way direct radiator.
In a studio for mixing and mastering I can see the need for a technically perfect speaker but for playback I think it's possible to make a more entertaining and realistic sounding speaker by prioritizing other aspects of performance. The Feastrex drivers really are amazing for simpler vocal/acoustic music and leave most multi-ways in the dust, so I think there are some aspects of accuracy that are not easily measured or defined.
Then there's also the aspect of creating an immersive soundstage that many technically perfect speakers seem to have a really hard time with, even if they are set up ideally in their own treated room they can't approach the kind of immersive 3-D experience a good controlled directivity speaker can produce, especially speakers that approach the ideal of a point source horn. They are necessarily going to be a bit more colored than a direct radiator, there's just no way around it... but the presentation is so much more engaging and satisfying that the trade-offs are well worth it to me. IMO, dispersion characteristics and coherency are far more important than a ruler-flat on-axis frequency response. So in my speaker I cover from 400-15000 Hz with a wide-band driver that is designed to be used in a horn/waveguide with a specific gain profile, and requires only a single capacitor for crossover to attenuate the frequencies under the acoustic roll off produced by the horn. This provides a smooth/even frequency response up to 5000 Hz, after that there are some relatively minor deviations in FR that I find acceptable because the alternative is to use another horn/driver to cover from 4kHz on up along with a much more complicated crossover required to implement this as well. So instead I design a shorter, more open horn so the high frequencies are as unmolested as possible. Like any design decision it's a compromise, but one that lets me achieve something very close to a point source horn speaker. The result is the best, most immersive and believable soundstage I have ever experienced.
I'd point to the latest comments in the JBL 4367 thread as proof that some value the presentation more than technical perfection, and that a technically perfect direct radiator system can come off as a bit sterile and less engaging. But that's why there are so many different speaker designs, we all have different priorities.
Both. They are not mutually exclusive, a system without distortion automatically presents the sound of live acoustic instruments correctly, convincingly. Why the latter often doesn't occur is because the former is not yet in place - buying something that claims to be good enough, or that others claim is, doesn't make it so ...
For the objectivist it means vanishingly low THD+N, preferably flat with frequency, ruler flat FR, best possible SNR of individual components. Ignore that it doesn't deliver satisfaction in a system.
For most here, delivering delight to the listener would constitute accuracy I'd hazard.
@Frank - they're often mutually exclusive when 'distortion' means 'THD+N' numbers.
Al? I think he has an accurate system setup. :b
* Accurate means, IMO, recording in - reproduction out that is the closest, as close to the musicians feasible capture as it can possibly be...or live or in the studio with all the machines, effects, atmosphere present @ the time. High end audio gear and loudspeakers and cables should certainly help to achieve that goal, better than cheap gear available to the masses. And LPs are closer to that goal because there is no interruption of the analog waveform.
But this, free open to discussion of course. :b
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What if the recording itself does not capture the sound of live acoustic instruments correctly and convincingly? This is often the case and a system without distortion will simply present the sound of that recording, but not the sound of live acoustic instruments. On another thread I asked how accurately a live mic feed captures the performance in the other room. The engineer who responded said that they are very different. So I would think that a system that replays that capture without distortion also sounds very different.
At AXPONA, I had an opportunity to compare "live" to "recorded." As I report here, http://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/axpona-legacy-audio.438/, there is no resemblance between the two. A recording remains a painting, not a photograph, in some cases as was here, superior to the original.
But how do you know that "This is often the case"? IME, when the level of replay quality is sufficient then the instruments do come through as the genuine article - in spite of what recording engineers have to say about the matter,
! The first time I got 1930's recordings of swing orchestras to work well enough that the raw intensity of the solo instruments came through, subjectively intact, I found it pretty amazing - but I'm used to it now, I expect that to be the norm. As a further example, consider a extremely messy mix of synthesizers and manipulated sounds, and then a true acoustic instrument comes in with a small part - that instrument immediately registers as the real thing, and stands out in nice contrast to all the intricacy, and "feel", of the rest of the mix. I tend to favour pop recordings where a string section climbs on board for a short stretch, as a "measuring tool" - does the sound of the violins and cellos, etc, in that section come across like the real instruments should? Human hearing is much better than what we give it credit for, and the microphones do pick up enough information for the sounds to be unraveled convincingly in the mind - but a sufficient standard of reproduction is needed, or it won't happen, IME.
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