AudioBanter.com - View Single Post - The problem with Stereophile, in a nutshell

On 17 Jun 2005 12:31:29 -0400, (Scott Dorsey) wrote:

dave weil wrote:
On 17 Jun 2005 11:50:26 -0400, (Scott Dorsey) wrote:
talking about as built radios when you were growing up.

My best friend growing up was such a geek. His room always smelled
like solder. He was always building stuff and was always trying to
teach me about it and I learned a bit about it myself (yes, I built a
couple of kits in my time, mostly through his prodding). Yet, he was
about the only kid I knew who was into breadboarding. If anyone else
was into that sort of thing, it was regarding cars, not amplifiers.

That's the same philosophy, though. Go to your local hotrod shop,
and you'll see a lot of bolt-on gewgaws and not many kids actually
making engine modifications.

That's because the manufacturers have made it either difficult or
unnecessary. Most of the stuff that kids do now is rechipping, chaning
bolt-on exhaust systems, tweaking intake systems and the like. Some
adventurous ones are swapping out cams and boring out cylinders, but
they're in the minority. Engines are already pretty efficient these
days.

It's another symptom of the same disease.

IT'S NOT A DISEASE. It's a reflection on the state of refinement
already present. One would think that you'd be happy about this, since
it's the natural evolution of the work that you guys did in the 50s
and 60s.

For a long time, consumer electronics were expensive, and you could save
money with kits or homebrew gagets. That's no longer the case,

I think you're starting to get it.

and I think that has done a lot to take homebrewing out of the mainstream.
Heathkit sold a lot of kits to a lot of kids and a lot of adults who
were not as serious as your friend, but wanted to build something.

But there's little need now. And yet, people are still going into
engineering and developments are still being made. In the old days,
this breadboarding was the entree into the field. If the industry were
dying because of a lack of interest in the field due to the lack of
exposure to building kits, I'd sympathize with your position. But it
doesn't seem to be the case.

Frankly, and this is an aesthetic consideration, there isn't as much
fascinating about plugging in little black boxes into a socket as
there is building point-to-point wiring with sockets holding glowing
glass bottles. And it's not nearly as lucrative as geeking out in the
computer industry.

From my perspective, it's all the same thing.

Well, not everyone is excited about plugging in little black black
boxes.

And the computer world
is one of the OTHER places where homebrewing used to be popular and
no longer is.

That's because it's not necessary. Even overclocking isn't done very
much these days because commercial machines have made it not so
necessary.

I think that you are feeling nostalgia for your youth, when in
actuality, things are quite different now and the mass market 'zines
have evoloved to meet the needs of the 21st century.

I am not nostalgic, I am peeved. Modern technology has made homebrewing
easier and it has given us a huge set of powerful tools to make sophisticated
electronic systems on a low budget with hardly any infrastructure. If
anything, the DIY phenomenon should be taking off. But it's dying. Why?

Because, the geeks have gone more toward the SOFTWARE side of things.
It's sexier and more lucrative, by a wide margin.

That's true, there is still a large homebrew software community. It's
not as mainstream a thing as it used to be either, though. Today you
buy a Windows machine and it comes with NO programming interface of any
sort. Not even a BASIC interpreter.

Once again, wouldn't you call this progress? Windows XP seems to be
pretty stable and even troubleshooting it is a fading source of
articles in the 'zines. Personally, I'm happy about that. I don't need
lots of 3rd party stuff and I don't have to spend a lot of time with
crashes. Perhaps this isn't good for the computer industry in general
because support programs don't seem to be as necessary, but there are
always needs to be met, and I'm sure that companies will adapt.

Absolutely. That was my point. but I think you're still overestimating
the number of people who were heavily involved in it in the 60s and
70s. I'd say the vast majority of people interested in the hobby were
STILL just end users for all intents and purposes.

That's fine. People building Heathkits are in a very different league
from people designing their own gear with surplus parts from hamfests,
but without one, you won't get the other.

And yet, new and improved gear seems to hit the market all the time.
There doesn't seem to be a surfeit of good engineers. Perhaps they're
designing themselves out of a job though g. They've certainly
engineered the "fun" out of the hobby that you miss though since
they've made it less and less necessary for hobbyists to need the
hands-on stuff.

Hey, it's guys like Ferstler that are probably loving the fact that
everything is black boxes these days. After all, how many of you guys
built toasters when you were growing up?

I made toast on an 833 tube once, does that count?

As much as me toasting a KT99A in one of my Dynaco MK3s.