What improvements have we seen in high end audio in the last 25 years?
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It is like that in any hobby. It is human nature, and there is nothing wrong with that. Go on car forum and you see what I mean. That is not the problem. The problem is the rejection of objective and empirical methods and data to truly assess audio component, so all we have is subjective opinions running amok. I am afraid the media, is at a major fault here as well, since they do not promote, and in most cases reject the notion that audio equipment value and performance can be evaluated objectively. I am not saying that personal taste should not matter, on the contrary, but when someone is selling you a bunch of parts he put together in a nice shiny box for $200K, some objective tests should be made and the concept should be evaluated from a basic operational parameters. Some of these products, if they were cars or cameras will simply not work. The audio industry is acting now as the luxury industry. Unfortunately, the market to support it as such does not exist.
This statement is incorrect. The market certainly exists, we would not have been in business over 38 years otherwise.
Here in the US and also in Britain, the market does appear to be shrinking. But that is not the way it is worldwide. Go to the Munich show and you will see what I mean. Some markets are just getting started. Its my opinion that the US market is shrinking because the suppliers don't know how to appear relevant to the kids. In our specific case we have a lot of involvement with the local music scene and that seems to have an effect. What has to happen is you have to get the kids to dream about the time when they can have a system like that. Same thing as how it worked back in the 1960s... it still is like that today- else the LP market would not be in resurgence and would not be driven by kids.
I agree with you for the most part, except for the last, underlined, bold (by me) part. The market does exist: It has had a perverse effect on High End Audio as a whole... We are now completely mired in a more expensive = better mentality. A previous darling who doesn't offer a >100 K products risks being marginalized. Price rise for no other reason than keeping upwith the competition.
Thanks Alan, and I likewise agree that the hurdle is on conveying the value of these advances to the 'audiophile' crowd. I can respect preferences and a nostalgia-driven interest in stuff like tubes, turntables and my gosh, even R-2-R ;-)
But I am chagrined when I see the amount of R&D and end user $'s going into low-value, low performance stuff. The high-end should have incredible performance for the dollar given the advances in tech, yet we're not there yet due to market forces.
Imagine being able to buy the equivalent of a Meridian Digital Theater system for a tenth of the price, that's were we could be.
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I'd argue that the audio enthusiast has far more outlets for objective assessment than photography now has. There are far more media outlets still publishing measurements to satisfy objective demands in audio than there are in the field of digital photography today. And that's part of the problem. We live in a world where 'the science bit' is met with an enormous 'huh?' by most people, and the media (all media, not simply the audio media) reflects that. Audio's audience is often old enough to remember a time where objectivity was an understandable goal, and demand the same from today's media. There is little middle-ground here; we either pen reviews that are acceptable to the new audience, in the process writing untenably dumbed-down reviews for the older readers, or write reviews that tick all the objective boxes, but are impossibly impenetrable to an audience in its 40s and younger.
I would also argue that the audio industry is not acting as the luxury industry; it is a luxury industry. The day the Walkman appeared was the day home audio started becoming a luxury-led market. That fate was sealed a generation later when the iPod came about. No-one needs a good stereo in the home now; they have all they need in their pocket and it comes free with every phone. It's a luxury, discretionary purchase now, and the prices of products are reflecting this. In two ways; they are reflecting it by adding extra layers of super- and hyper-high-end audio on an already high-end audio market, and by the relatively moribund middle market. I got out of an audio magazine covering the middle-ground more than five years ago, and I did so because its circulation dropped massively over a three month period when the iPod became a hit, and didn't recover. Magazines that had high-end intentions dropped as well, but proportionally that drop was considerably less.
As to the bunch of parts for $200k, products in this sector seem to be divided between shiny bling for oligarchs, and pinnacle products designed to achieve the best possible performance that the designer always dreamed possible. Traditionally, these latter 'designer's own' products were a combination test-bed/conceptual product that would never make it outside of the designer's own lab, or possibly his home. Like a good concept car at a motor show, these did not go into production, but the technology realised to develop the concept sometimes trickled down into real products. The difference being - as with the motor industry now - if you build a concept car today, there is always someone with enough money to say "I'll take it!" If you can afford it, why not? If you can't afford it, the hope is those who can buy it in sufficient numbers to make the idea of a smaller version viable. So the KEF Muon begets the KEF Blade, which begets the KEF LS50. Isn't that a good thing?
Curious you refer ro Toole. People should read him to understand better what is behind high-end. His opinions about stereo limitations and achievemnts are clear and he is a great supporter of multichannel, that is a predictable system. As he masterly said -stereo is an individual system.
BTW , people should also read his opinions about most room treatments and amateur use of FFT based acoustic tools - they are not rosy!
Yes, of course it is, but you can count on one hand the companies who do that, it is certainly not the norm. Walking around Munich, seeing all these nice shiny boxes with the same ceramic drivers in them, I can’t say I was seeing much real “concept” products anywhere.
Yet Tidals, Evolutions, Kharmas, Lumen Whites, Martens etc do not sound alike. Same goes for those that use SBs or SEAS. Clearly there is more to speaker design than simply choosing drivers.
Yes, and walking around a car show, you see so many supercars using Pirelli P Zeros. I guess all the rest of that concept car is so much hot air.
There's a myth that's promulgated by both extremes in audio - that top-end audio is built with no consideration toward objective development. It's fantasy; belief in the Black Hats of audio looking for rich marks on the one side, belief in the designer as magic audio wizard on the other. This is nonsense on stilts; a company like Focal makes very well engineered, well researched loudspeakers. If it does this at the sub-$1,000 per pair level, why would it suddenly decide to abandon its R&D when making a loudspeaker that costs 200x as much? The same (but without the same bandwidth at the lower end) applies to brands like Kharma, Magico, Marten, MartinLogan, and Wilson.
Why is this a problem? Because cynics cannot differentiate between the products that are made with an eye to R&D and those that are just expensive for their own sake, and just pour scorn on the whole damn thing. And because the foo folk are upset by the idea of potentially dozens of man-years of work on a project, preferring instead the 'it came to me in a dream' fairytale. In both cases, this stops some brands from playing in that sandbox, and everyone suffers. Personally, I'd like to see the likes of B&W follow the likes of KEF and Focal in aiming very high, because the product line throughout improves as a result of the R&D spent in that high-end.
And if you want to know which of these super high-end brands are not very good. Look to the ones that don't get reviews or any other form of coverage anywhere. Ever. The 'no thanks' products that none of us will touch because they are cynical products designed to extract a lot of money from a few whales. The 'your money's no good here' (and not in a nice way) brands that we tell the advertising teams not to bother with, under the 'if you lie down with dogs...' rule.
Agreed, most of the super high-end systems that I see are from people overseas! I think there's a cultural divide there also. The culture in the US is so much different than that of people in the rest of the world. To get kids to dream you have to get them to care. That starts very young - all of my son's have decent systems by US standards for their ages, and audition equipment well beyond what they can afford (more than I can afford for that matter
). However, they have been raised all over the world so they are a little different. I'll even go to say that it's even regional culture specific in the States. A friend of mine had a pair of Klipsch Belles for sale (he finally sold them) and has a nice cane pair of La Scalas. These items are hard to sell in the south - (I also know of some Revels, Linn and TAD speakers that are yet to sell in this region), but sell a boat or some fishing gear, or high-end tools - they're gone! It's what people deem as important.
I believe that the advancement of computer audio with Amarra, Pure Music, and Audirvana on the Mac side, Jriver on the Windows side has been one of the greatest breakthroughs in the last 25 years. Who would have thought of replacing their preamp and or prepro with a PC 25 years ago....I only thought of the possibility about 11 years ago!!!! I believe we will get more people to get involved in the hobby - especially from the PC tweaker's, as they attempt to stretch boundary's that people only thought you could get with buying high dollar gear. I'm just sayin'
Sorry, i have to disagree with you. In fact, I think that you illustrated the problem somewhat. I do not see how you can put Wilson and Marten together with Focal and KEF. You are comparing a real design/engineering and manufacturing (Focal and KEF) with simple integrators. Like I said, if the media does not see the difference, then who will?
I fear that I see one of my favorite brands, MartinLogan falling into this trap. They showed the Neolith at Munich, and rumors are the price is north of $50K.
Now this is for the descendant of the Monolith series (which I have and love), right down to the same panel (new spar spacing, but otherwise, the same thing), and now it has 2 woofers vs the 1. It's a passive design (market forces, not performance dictated that).
So for more than 5x the cost of the last Monolith, they deliver an updated 'flagship' just to be credible with a certain class of buyers.
Well does 26 years ago count?
In 1988 I described a very powerful and extensible solution that was based on the processing power of computers, DSP and software driven systems in a document which I then analyzed and contrasted to what had occurred in the field up till 2009 in this article on my site.
BTW- If you want to know what the next decade or so will bring, I also wrote up a set of predictions in 2009. The first one, vector-encoded audio (aka 3D audio) has already come true.
I'm not personally familiar with Marten, but calling Wilson a "simple" integrator is disingenuous. I guess determining specs and design changes for custom-order drivers mean nothing, and crossover and cabinet design are childs play.
Does the Ariel Atom not count as "real" design/engineering because it uses a Honda engine and an off-the-shelf transmission?
I don't think that is a fair statement at all. Calling Wilson Audio a "simple integrator" is like calling Leonardo da Vinci some guy with a few ideas. Wilson designs/engineers their speaker enclosures and their crossover networks. Wilson manufactures their speaker cabinets unlike KEF who has theirs built in China. Wilson may not manufacture their own drivers, but they are not off-the-shelf drivers either. To say they are a simple integrator infers they do none of their own design, engineering, or manufacturing of their speaker lines. A simple integrator would be someone who outsources the cabinets, outsources the crossover network, buys the drivers, and then installs all of the components into the enclosures after all of the parts arrive.
This line of thinking would mean all that work that went on creating the LS3/5a wasn't 'real' design, because the BBC used existing KEF drive units. I guess it was a bit cheeky calling Kingswood Warren the BBC's 'Research Department, Engineering Division', where it should have been the 'Simple Integrator Department'.
In a company like KEF or B&W or Focal, the engineering team that develops drive units are often not the same engineering team that designs loudspeakers. The two specialisms require different skill-sets. The latter often works with the former in specifying a drive unit for a specific task, but how is that different from an engineer in one company discussing the parameters of a drive unit with an engineer in another company?
I have also dealt with designers in larger companies who have come from smaller companies, who bemoan that they have even less operational control over the nature of the drive units when working in a company that makes its own drivers. They get a fully specified drive-unit from that design team and are simply told to 'get on with it', where before they had greater parametric control, because companies like Scanspeak and SEAS treat their clients like clients, not subordinates.
It's ultimately more important that the end product is properly designed to fit the purpose, than it is to demand it is all made under the one roof. That's my definition of what represents good loudspeaker engineering.
Quoting myself to finish continue my thoughts.
When I think of an "integrator," I think of things like this:
That's a CyberPowerPC gaming PC. Every component in that picture is a standard off-the-shelf part. The designer handled the assembly of the hardware (which is well done, in terms of cabling, etc.) and the configuration of the software. However, when even the exterior case was designed by somebody else and sold on the open market, it's hard to say that you've "engineered" the product. A completely identical PC could easily be built by an enthusiast.
For a speaker manufacturer to be an integrator, they would have to purchase, imo, off-the-self cabinets, drivers and crossovers. Perhaps the crossover could be somewhat adjustable, but the majority of the design would have to be done beforehand. I can't think of a high-end manufacturer that would fit this definition.
Well, no, I could argue that some of the lower-end digital chip amp designs are basically made by integrators. But I can't think of a speaker manufacturer who doesn't actually "engineer" a substantial portion of their product, even if the drivers themselves are ordered straight from the SEAS catalog.
I think most speakers manufacture fit that description. Building a nice shiny box is not that difficult. Most drivers/XO are all available off-the-self. Go on any DIY and look at what people build in their garage (http://www.magazine-audio.com/un-homme-une-femme-une-passion-2/).
Yes, the final “user experience” may be lacking, but performance wise, anyone who set his mind to do that can, with reasonable effort. But you will never be able to build an MBL 101 in your garage. Nor a Magico or a KEF. At least not with a “reasonable effort”.
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